‘I’m not joking,’ Clevinger persisted.
‘They’re trying to kill me,’ Yossarian told him calmly.
‘No one’s trying to kill you,’ Clevinger cried.
‘Then why are they shooting at me?’ Yossarian asked.
‘They’re shooting at everyone,’ Clevinger answered.
‘They’re trying to kill everyone.’
‘And what difference does that make?’
Clevinger was already on the way, half out of his chair with emotion, his eyes moist and his lips quivering and pale.
As always occurred when he quarreled over principles in which he believed passionately, he would end up gasping furiously for air and blinking back bitter tears of conviction.
There were many principles in which Clevinger believed passionately.
He was crazy.
‘Who’s they?’ he wanted to know.
‘Who, specifically, do you think is trying to murder you?’
‘Every one of them,’ Yossarian told him.
‘Every one of whom?’
‘Every one of whom do you think?’
‘I haven’t any idea.’
‘Then how do you know they aren’t?’
‘Because…’ Clevinger sputtered, and turned speechless with frustration.
Clevinger really thought he was right, but Yossarian had proof, because strangers he didn’t know shot at him with cannons every time he flew up into the air to drop bombs on them, and it wasn’t funny at all.
And if that wasn’t funny, there were lots of things that weren’t even funnier.
There was nothing funny about living like a bum in a tent in Pianosa between fat mountains behind him and a placid blue sea in front that could gulp down a person with a cramp in the twinkling of an eye and ship him back to shore three days later, all charges paid, bloated, blue and putrescent, water draining out through both cold nostrils.
The tent he lived in stood right smack up against the wall of the shallow, dull-colored forest separating his own squadron from Dunbar ’s.
Immediately alongside was the abandoned railroad ditch that carried the pipe that carried the aviation gasoline down to the fuel trucks at the airfield.
Thanks to Orr, his roommate, it was the most luxurious tent in the squadron.
Each time Yossarian returned from one of his holidays in the hospital or rest leaves in Rome, he was surprised by some new comfort Orr had installed in his absence—running water, wood-burning fireplace, cement floor.
Yossarian had chosen the site, and he and Orr had raised the tent together.
Orr, who was a grinning pygmy with pilot’s wings and thick, wavy brown hair parted in the middle, furnished all the knowledge, while Yossarian, who was taller, stronger, broader and faster, did most of the work.
Just the two of them lived there, although the tent was big enough for six.
When summer came, Orr rolled up the side flaps to allow a breeze that never blew to flush away the air baking inside.
Immediately next door to Yossarian was Havermeyer, who liked peanut brittle and lived all by himself in the two-man tent in which he shot tiny field mice every night with huge bullets from the.45 he had stolen from the dead man in Yossarian’s tent.
On the other side of Havermeyer stood the tent McWatt no longer shared with Clevinger, who had still not returned when Yossarian came out of the hospital. McWatt shared his tent now with Nately, who was away in Rome courting the sleepy whore he had fallen so deeply in love with there who was bored with her work and bored with him too. McWatt was crazy.
He was a pilot and flew his plane as low as he dared over Yossarian’s tent as often as he could, just to see how much he could frighten him, and loved to go buzzing with a wild, close roar over the wooden raft floating on empty oil drums out past the sand bar at the immaculate white beach where the men went swimming naked.
Sharing a tent with a man who was crazy wasn’t easy, but Nately didn’t care.
He was crazy, too, and had gone every free day to work on the officers’ club that Yossarian had not helped build.
Actually, there were many officers’ clubs that Yossarian had not helped build, but he was proudest of the one on Pianosa.
It was a sturdy and complex monument to his powers of determination.
Yossarian never went there to help until it was finished; then he went there often, so pleased was he with the large, fine, rambling, shingled building.
It was truly a splendid structure, and Yossarian throbbed with a mighty sense of accomplishment each time he gazed at it and reflected that none of the work that had gone into it was his.
There were four of them seated together at a table in the officers’ club the last time he and Clevinger had called each other crazy.
They were seated in back near the crap table on which Appleby always managed to win.
Appleby was as good at shooting crap as he was at playing ping-pong, and he was as good at playing ping-pong as he was at everything else.
Everything Appleby did, he did well.
Appleby was a fair-haired boy from Iowa who believed in God, Motherhood and the American Way of Life, without ever thinking about any of them, and everybody who knew him liked him.
‘I hate that son of a bitch,’ Yossarian growled.
The argument with Clevinger had begun a few minutes earlier when Yossarian had been unable to find a machine gun.
It was a busy night.
The bar was busy, the crap table was busy, the ping-gong table was busy.
The people Yossarian wanted to machine-gun were busy at the bar singing sentimental old favorites that nobody else ever tired of.
Instead of machine-gunning them, he brought his heel down hard on the ping-pong ball that came rolling toward him off the paddle of one of the two officers playing.