‘I suppose you just don’t care if you kill yourself, do you?’
‘It’s my self,’ he reminded her.
‘I suppose you just don’t care if you lose your leg, do you?’
‘It’s my leg.’
‘It certainly is not your leg!’ Nurse Cramer retorted.
‘That leg belongs to the U. S. government.
It’s no different than a gear or a bedpan.
The Army has invested a lot of money to make you an airplane pilot, and you’ve no right to disobey the doctor’s orders.’
Yossarian was not sure he liked being invested in.
Nurse Cramer was still standing directly in front of him so that he could not pass.
His head was aching.
Nurse Cramer shouted at him some question he could not understand.
He jerked his thumb over his shoulder and said,
‘Screw.’
Nurse Cramer cracked him in the face so hard she almost knocked him down.
Yossarian drew back his fist to punch her in the jaw just as his leg buckled and he began to fall.
Nurse Duckett strode up in time to catch him.
She addressed them both firmly. ‘Just what’s going on here?’
‘He won’t get back into his bed,’ Nurse Cramer reported zealously in an injured tone.
‘Sue Ann, he said something absolutely horrible to me.
Oh, I can’t even make myself repeat it!’
‘She called me a gear,’ Yossarian muttered.
Nurse Duckett was not sympathetic.
‘Will you get back into bed,’ she said, ‘or must I take you by your ear and put you there?’
‘Take me by my ear and put me there,’ Yossarian dared her.
Nurse Duckett took him by his ear and put him back in bed.
Nurse Duckett Nurse Sue Ann Duckett was a tall, spare, mature, straight-backed woman with a prominent, well-rounded ass, small breasts and angular ascetic New England features that came equally close to being very lovely and very plain.
Her skin was white and pink, her eyes small, her nose and chin slender and sharp.
She was able, prompt, strict and intelligent. She welcomed responsibility and kept her head in every crisis.
She was adult and self-reliant, and there was nothing she needed from anyone.
Yossarian took pity and decided to help her.
Next morning while she was standing bent over smoothing the sheets at the foot of his bed, he slipped his hand stealthily into the narrow space between her knees and, all at once, brought it up swiftly under her dress as far as it would go.
Nurse Duckett shrieked and jumped into the air a mile, but it wasn’t high enough, and she squirmed and vaulted and seesawed back and forth on her divine fulcrum for almost a full fifteen seconds before she wiggled free finally and retreated frantically into the aisle with an ashen, trembling face.
She backed away too far, and Dunbar, who had watched from the beginning, sprang forward on his bed without warning and flung both arms around her bosom from behind.
Nurse Duckett let out another scream and twisted away, fleeing far enough from Dunbar for Yossarian to lunge forward and grab her by the snatch again.
Nurse Duckett bounced out across the aisle once more like a ping-pong ball with legs.
Dunbar was waiting vigilantly, ready to pounce. She remembered him just in time and leaped aside.
Dunbar missed completely and sailed by her over the bed to the floor, landing on his skull with a soggy, crunching thud that knocked him cold.
He woke up on the floor with a bleeding nose and exactly the same distressful head symptoms he had been feigning all along.
The ward was in a chaotic uproar.
Nurse Duckett was in tears, and Yossarian was consoling her apologetically as he sat beside her on the edge of a bed.
The commanding colonel was wroth and shouting at Yossarian that he would not permit his patients to take indecent liberties with his nurses.
‘What do you want from him?’ Dunbar asked plaintively from the floor, wincing at the vibrating pains in his temples that his voice set up.
‘He didn’t do anything.’
‘I’m talking about you!’ the thin, dignified colonel bellowed as loudly as he could.
‘You’re going to be punished for what you did.’
‘What do you want from him?’ Yossarian called out.
‘All he did was fall on his head.’
‘And I’m talking about you too!’ the colonel declared, whirling to rage at Yossarian.
‘You’re going to be good and sorry you grabbed Nurse Duckett by the bosom.’