Catch-22 - Heller, Joseph [9]
‘Why?’ Orr pounced. ‘Why what?’ Yossarian shook his head, smiling, and refused to say.
‘It’s a funny thing about this valve,’ Orr mused aloud.
‘What is?’ Yossarian asked.
‘Because I wanted—’ Yossarian knew. ‘Jesus Christ! Why did you want—’
‘—apple cheeks.’
‘—apple cheeks?’ Yossarian demanded.
‘I wanted apple cheeks,’ Orr repeated. ‘Even when I was a kid I wanted apple cheeks someday, and I decided to work at it until I got them, and by God, I did work at it until I got them, and that’s how I did it, with crab apples in my cheeks all day long.’ He giggled again. ‘One in each cheek.’
‘Why did you want apple cheeks?’
‘I didn’t want apple cheeks,’ Orr said. ‘I wanted big cheeks. I didn’t care about the color so much, but I wanted them big. I worked at it just like one of those crazy guys you read about who go around squeezing rubber balls all day long just to strengthen their hands. In fact, I was one of those crazy guys. I used to walk around all day with rubber balls in my hands, too.’
‘Why?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why did you walk around all day with rubber balls in your hands?’
‘Because rubber balls—’ said Orr.
‘—are better than crab apples?’ Orr sniggered as he shook his head. ‘I did it to protect my good reputation in case anyone ever caught me walking around with crab apples in my cheeks. With rubber balls in my hands I could deny there were crab apples in my cheeks. Every time someone asked me why I was walking around with crab apples in my cheeks, I’d just open my hands and show them it was rubber balls I was walking around with, not crab apples, and that they were in my hands, not my cheeks. It was a good story. But I never knew if it got across or not, since it’s pretty tough to make people understand you when you’re talking to them with two crab apples in your cheeks.’ Yossarian found it pretty tough to understand him then, and he wondered once again if Orr wasn’t talking to him with the tip of his tongue in one of his apple cheeks.
Yossarian decided not to utter another word. It would be futile. He knew Orr, and he knew there was not a chance in hell of finding out from him then why he had wanted big cheeks. It would do no more good to ask than it had done to ask him why that whore had kept beating him over the head with her shoe that morning in Rome in the cramped vestibule outside the open door of Nately’s whore’s kid sister’s room. She was a tall, strapping girl with long hair and incandescent blue veins converging populously beneath her cocoa-colored skin where the flesh was most tender, and she kept cursing and shrieking and jumping high up into the air on her bare feet to keep right on hitting him on the top of his head with the spiked heel of her shoe. They were both naked, and raising a rumpus that brought everyone in the apartment into the hall to watch, each couple in a bedroom doorway, all of them naked except the aproned and sweatered old woman, who clucked reprovingly, and the lecherous, dissipated old man, who cackled aloud hilariously through the whole episode with a kind of avid and superior glee. The girl shrieked and Orr giggled. Each time she landed with the heel of her shoe, Orr giggled louder, infuriating her still further so that she flew up still higher into the air for another shot at his noodle, her wondrously full breasts soaring all over the place like billowing pennants in a strong wind and her buttocks and strong thighs shim-sham-shimmying this way and that way like some horrifying bonanza. She shrieked and Orr giggled right up to the time she shrieked and knocked him cold with a good solid crack on the temple that made him stop giggling and sent him off to the hospital in a stretcher with a hole in his head that wasn’t very deep and a very mild concussion that kept him out of combat only twelve days.
Nobody could find out what had happened, not even the cackling old man and clucking old woman, who were in a position to find out everything that happened in that vast and endless brothel with its multitudinous bedrooms on facing sides of the narrow hallways