Catch-22 - Heller, Joseph [89]
‘Maybe that’s where the dead man is.’
‘What dead man?’
‘I’ve got a dead man in my tent that nobody can throw out. His name is Mudd.’ Nurse Cramer’s face blanched and she turned to Dunbar desperately for aid. ‘Make him stop saying things like that,’ she begged.
‘Maybe there’s no one inside,’ Dunbar suggested helpfully. ‘Maybe they just sent the bandages here for a joke.’ She stepped away from Dunbar in alarm. ‘You’re crazy,’ she cried, glancing about imploringly. ‘You’re both crazy.’ Nurse Duckett showed up then and chased them all back to their own beds while Nurse Cramer changed the stoppered jars for the soldier in white. Changing the jars for the soldier in white was no trouble at all, since the same clear fluid was dripped back inside him over and over again with no apparent loss. When the jar feeding the inside of his elbow was just about empty, the jar on the floor was just about full, and the two were simply uncoupled from their respective hoses and reversed quickly so that the liquid could be dripped right back into him. Changing the jars was no trouble to anyone but the men who watched them changed every hour or so and were baffled by the procedure.
‘Why can’t they hook the two jars up to each other and eliminate the middleman?’ the artillery captain with whom Yossarian had stopped playing chess inquired. ‘What the hell do they need him for?’
‘I wonder what he did to deserve it,’ the warrant officer with malaria and a mosquito bite on his ass lamented after Nurse Cramer had read her thermometer and discovered that the soldier in white was dead.
‘He went to war,’ the fighter pilot with the golden mustache surmised.
‘We all went to war,’ Dunbar countered.
‘That’s what I mean,’ the warrant officer with malaria continued. ‘Why him? There just doesn’t seem to be any logic to this system of rewards and punishment. Look what happened to me. If I had gotten syphilis or a dose of clap for my five minutes of passion on the beach instead of this damned mosquito bite, I could see justice. But malaria? Malaria? Who can explain malaria as a consequence of fornication?’ The warrant officer shook his head in numb astonishment.
‘What about me?’ Yossarian said. ‘I stepped out of my tent in Marrakech one night to get a bar of candy and caught your dose of clap when that Wac I never even saw before kissed me into the bushes. All I really wanted was a bar of candy, but who could turn it down?’
‘That sounds like my dose of clap, all right,’ the warrant officer agreed. ‘But I’ve still got somebody else’s malaria. Just for once I’d like to see all these things sort of straightened out, with each person getting exactly what he deserves. It might give me some confidence in this universe.’
‘I’ve got somebody else’s three hundred thousand dollars,’ the dashing young fighter captain with the golden mustache admitted. ‘I’ve been goofing off since the day I was born. I cheated my way through prep school and college, and just about all I’ve been doing ever since is shacking up with pretty girls who think I’d make a good husband. I’ve got no ambition at all. The only thing I want to do after the war is marry some girl who’s got more money than I have and shack up with lots more pretty girls. The three hundred thousand bucks was left to me before I was born by a grandfather who made a fortune selling on an international scale. I know I don’t deserve it, but I’ll be damned if I give it back. I wonder who it really belongs to.’
‘Maybe it belongs to my father,’ Dunbar conjectured. ‘He spent a lifetime at hard work and never could make enough money to even send my sister and me through college. He’s dead now, so you might as well keep it.’
‘Now, if we can just find out who my malaria belongs to we’d be all set. It’s not that I’ve got anything against malaria. I’d just as soon goldbrick with malaria as with anything else. It’s only that I feel an injustice has been committed. Why should I have somebody else’s malaria and you have my dose of clap?’
‘I’ve got more than your dose