The crawlway was Yossarian’s lifeline to outside from a plane about to fall, but Yossarian swore at it with seething antagonism, reviled it as an obstacle put there by providence as part of the plot that would destroy him.
There was room for an additional escape hatch right there in the nose of a B-25, but there was no escape hatch.
Instead there was the crawlway, and since the mess on the mission over Avignon he had learned to detest every mammoth inch of it, for it slung him seconds and seconds away from his parachute, which was too bulky to be taken up front with him, and seconds and seconds more after that away from the escape hatch on the floor between the rear of the elevated flight deck and the feet of the faceless top turret gunner mounted high above.
Yossarian longed to be where Aarfy could be once Yossarian had chased him back from the nose; Yossarian longed to sit on the floor in a huddled ball right on top of the escape hatch inside a sheltering igloo of extra flak suits that he would have been happy to carry along with him, his parachute already hooked to his harness where it belonged, one fist clenching the red-handled rip cord, one fist gripping the emergency hatch release that would spill him earthward into the air at the first dreadful squeal of destruction.
That was where he wanted to be if he had to be there at all, instead of hung out there in front like some goddam cantilevered goldfish in some goddam cantilevered goldfish bowl while the goddam foul black tiers of flak were bursting and booming and billowing all around and above and below him in a climbing, cracking, staggered, banging, phantasmagorical, cosmological wickedness that jarred and tossed and shivered, clattered and pierced, and threatened to annihilate them all in one splinter of a second in one vast flash of fire.
Aarfy had been no use to Yossarian as a navigator or as anything else, and Yossarian drove him back from the nose vehemently each time so that they would not clutter up each other’s way if they had to scramble suddenly for safety.
Once Yossarian had driven him back from the nose, Aarfy was free to cower on the floor where Yossarian longed to cower, but he stood bolt upright instead with his stumpy arms resting comfortably on the backs of the pilot’s and co-pilot’s seats, pipe in hand, making affable small talk to McWatt and whoever happened to be co-pilot and pointing out amusing trivia in the sky to the two men, who were too busy to be interested. McWatt was too busy responding at the controls to Yossarian’s strident instructions as Yossarian slipped the plane in on the bomb run and then whipped them all away violently around the ravenous pillars of exploding shells with curt, shrill, obscene commands to McWatt that were much like the anguished, entreating nightmare yelpings of Hungry Joe in the dark.
Aarfy would puff reflectively on his pipe throughout the whole chaotic clash, gazing with unruffled curiosity at the war through McWatt’s window as though it were a remote disturbance that could not affect him.
Aarfy was a dedicated fraternity man who loved cheerleading and class reunions and did not have brains enough to be afraid.
Yossarian did have brains enough and was, and the only thing that stopped him from abandoning his post under fire and scurrying back through the crawlway like a yellow-bellied rat was his unwillingness to entrust the evasive action out of the target area to anybody else.
There was nobody else in the world he would honor with so great a responsibility. There was nobody else he knew who was as big a coward.
Yossarian was the best man in the group at evasive action, but had no idea why.
There was no established procedure for evasive action.
All you needed was fear, and Yossarian had plenty of that, more fear than Orr or Hungry Joe, more fear than Dunbar, who had resigned himself submissively to the idea that he must die someday.
Yossarian had not resigned himself to that idea, and he bolted for his life wildly on each mission the instant his bombs were away, hollering,
‘Hard, hard, hard, hard, you bastard, hard!’ at McWatt and hating McWatt viciously all the time as though McWatt were to blame for their being up there at all to be rubbed out by strangers, and everybody else in the plane kept off the intercom, except for the pitiful time of the mess on the mission to Avignon when Dobbs went crazy in mid-air and began weeping pathetically for help.
‘Help him, help him,’ Dobbs sobbed.
‘Help him, help him.’
‘Help who?
Help who?’ called back Yossarian, once he had plugged his headset back into the intercom system, after it had been jerked out when Dobbs wrested the controls away from Huple and hurled them all down suddenly into the deafening, paralyzing, horrifying dive which had plastered Yossarian helplessly to the ceiling of the plane by the top of his head and from which Huple had rescued them just in time by seizing the controls back from Dobbs and leveling the ship out almost as suddenly right back in the middle of the buffeting layer of cacophonous flak from which they had escaped successfully only a moment before.
Oh, God! Oh, God, oh, God, Yossarian had been pleading wordlessly as he dangled from the ceiling of the nose of the ship by the top of his head, unable to move.
‘The bombardier, the bombardier,’ Dobbs answered in a cry when Yossarian spoke.
‘He doesn’t answer, he doesn’t answer.
Help the bombardier, help the bombardier.’
‘I’m the bombardier,’ Yossarian cried back at him.
‘I’m the bombardier.
I’m all right.
I’m all right.’
‘Then help him, help him,’ Dobbs begged.
‘Help him, help him.’
And Snowden lay dying in back.
Hungry Joe Hungry Joe did have fifty missions, but they were no help.
He had his bags packed and was waiting again to go home.
At night he had eerie, ear-splitting nightmares that kept everyone in the squadron awake but Huple, the fifteen-year-old pilot who had lied about his age to get into the Army and lived with his pet cat in the same tent with Hungry Joe.
Huple was a light sleeper, but claimed he never heard Hungry Joe scream.
Hungry Joe was sick.
‘So what?’ Doc Daneeka snarled resentfully.
‘I had it made, I tell you. Fifty grand a year I was knocking down, and almost all of it tax-free, since I made my customers pay me in cash.
I had the strongest trade association in the world backing me up.
And look what happened.
Just when I was all set to really start stashing it away, they had to manufacture fascism and start a war horrible enough to affect even me.
I gotta laugh when I hear someone like Hungry Joe screaming his brains out every night.
I really gotta laugh.
He’s sick?
How does he think I feel?’
Hungry Joe was too firmly embedded in calamities of his own to care how Doc Daneeka felt.
There were the noises, for instance.
Small ones enraged him and he hollered himself hoarse at Aarfy for the wet, sucking sounds he made puffing on his pipe, at Orr for tinkering, at McWatt for the explosive snap he gave each card he turned over when he dealt at blackjack or poker, at Dobbs for letting his teeth chatter as he went blundering clumsily about bumping into things.
Hungry Joe was a throbbing, ragged mass of motile irritability.
The steady ticking of a watch in a quiet room crashed like torture against his unshielded brain.