Catch-22 - Heller, Joseph [31]
‘I didn’t even realize we weren’t serving enough prunes,’ he had admitted that first day. ‘I suppose it’s because I’m still so new. I’ll raise the question with my first chef.’ Yossarian eyed him sharply. ‘What first chef?’ he demanded. ‘You don’t have a first chef.’
‘Corporal Snark,’ Milo explained, looking away a little guiltily. ‘He’s the only chef I have, so he really is my first chef, although I hope to move him over to the administrative side. Corporal Snark tends to be a little too creative, I feel. He thinks being a mess sergeant is some sort of art form and is always complaining about having to prostitute his talents. Nobody is asking him to do any such thing! Incidentally, do you happen to know why he was busted to private and is only a corporal now?’
‘Yes,’ said Yossarian. ‘He poisoned the squadron.’ Milo went pale again. ‘He did what?’
‘He mashed hundreds of cakes of GI soap into the sweet potatoes just to show that people have the taste of Philistines and don’t know the difference between good and bad. Every man in the squadron was sick. Missions were canceled.’
‘Well!’ Milo exclaimed, with thin-upped disapproval. ‘He certainly found out how wrong he was, didn’t he?’
‘On the contrary,’ Yossarian corrected. ‘He found out how right he was. We packed it away by the plateful and clamored for more. We all knew we were sick, but we had no idea we’d been poisoned.’ Milo sniffed in consternation twice, like a shaggy brown hare. ‘In that case, I certainly do want to get him over to the administrative side. I don’t want anything like that happening while I’m in charge. You see,’ he confided earnestly, ‘what I hope to do is give the men in this squadron the best meals in the whole world. That’s really something to shoot at, isn’t it? If a mess officer aims at anything less, it seems to me, he has no right being mess officer. Don’t you agree?’ Yossarian turned slowly to gaze at Milo with probing distrust. He saw a simple, sincere face that was incapable of subtlety or guile, an honest, frank face with disunited large eyes, rusty hair, black eyebrows and an unfortunate reddish-brown mustache. Milo had a long, thin nose with sniffing, damp nostrils heading sharply off to the right, always pointing away from where the rest of him was looking. It was the face of a man of hardened integrity who could no more consciously violate the moral principles on which his virtue rested than he could transform himself into a despicable toad. One of these moral principles was that it was never a sin to charge as much as the traffic would bear. He was capable of mighty paroxysms of righteous indignation, and he was indignant as could be when he learned that a C.I.D. man was in the area looking for him.
‘He’s not looking for you,’ Yossarian said, trying to placate him. ‘He’s looking for someone up in the hospital who’s been signing Washington Irving’s name to the letters he’s been censoring.’
‘I never signed Washington Irving’s name to any letters,’ Milo declared.
‘Of course not.’
‘But that’s just a trick to get me to confess I’ve been making money in the black market.’ Milo hauled violently at a disheveled hunk of his off-colored mustache. ‘I don’t like guys like that. Always snooping around people like us. Why doesn’t the government get after ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen, if it wants to do some good? He’s got no respect for rules and regulations and keeps cutting prices on me.’ Milo ’s mustache was unfortunate because the separated halves never matched. They were like Milo ’s disunited eyes, which never looked at the same thing at the same time. Milo could see more things than most people, but he could see none of them too distinctly. In contrast to his reaction to news of the C.I.D. man, he learned with calm courage from Yossarian that Colonel Cathcart had raised the number of missions to fifty-five.
‘We’re at war,’ he said. ‘And there’s no use complaining