A large chunk of flak had ripped up from the floor through Aarfy’s colossal jumble of maps and had ripped out through the ceiling inches away from their heads.
Aarfy’s joy was sublime.
‘Will you look at this?’ he murmured, waggling two of his stubby fingers playfully into Yossarian’s face through the hole in one of his maps.
‘Will you look at this?’
Yossarian was dumbfounded by his state of rapturous contentment.
Aarfy was like an eerie ogre in a dream, incapable of being bruised or evaded, and Yossarian dreaded him for a complex of reasons he was too petrified to untangle.
Wind whistling up through the jagged gash in the floor kept the myriad bits of paper circulating like alabaster particles in a paperweight and contributed to a sensation of lacquered, waterlogged unreality.
Everything seemed strange, so tawdry and grotesque.
His head was throbbing from a shrill clamor that drilled relentlessly into both ears. It was McWatt, begging for directions in an incoherent frenzy.
Yossarian continued staring in tormented fascination at Aarfy’s spherical countenance beaming at him so serenely and vacantly through the drifting whorls of white paper bits and concluded that he was a raving lunatic just as eight bursts of flak broke open successively at eye level off to the right, then eight more, and then eight more, the last group pulled over toward the left so that they were almost directly in front.
‘Turn left hard!’ he hollered to McWatt, as Aarfy kept grinning, and McWatt did turn left hard, but the flak turned left hard with them, catching up fast, and Yossarian hollered, ‘I said hard, hard, hard, hard, you bastard, hard!’
And McWatt bent the plane around even harder still, and suddenly, miraculously, they were out of range.
The flak ended.
The guns stopped booming at them. And they were alive.
Behind him, men were dying.
Strung out for miles in a stricken, tortuous, squirming line, the other flights of planes were making the same hazardous journey over the target, threading their swift way through the swollen masses of new and old bursts of flak like rats racing in a pack through their own droppings.
One was on fire, and flapped lamely off by itself, billowing gigantically like a monstrous blood-red star.
As Yossarian watched, the burning plane floated over on its side and began spiraling down slowly in wide, tremulous, narrowing circles, its huge flaming burden blazing orange and flaring out in back like a long, swirling cape of fire and smoke.
There were parachutes, one, two, three… four, and then the plane gyrated into a spin and fell the rest of the way to the ground, fluttering insensibly inside its vivid pyre like a shred of colored tissue paper.
One whole flight of planes from another squadron had been blasted apart.
Yossarian sighed barrenly, his day’s work done.
He was listless and sticky.
The engines crooned mellifluously as McWatt throttled back to loiter and allow the rest of the planes in his flight to catch up.
The abrupt stillness seemed alien and artificial, a little insidious.
Yossarian unsnapped his flak suit and took off his helmet. He sighed again, restlessly, and closed his eyes and tried to relax.
‘Where’s Orr?’ someone asked suddenly over his intercom.
Yossarian bounded up with a one-syllable cry that crackled with anxiety and provided the only rational explanation for the whole mysterious phenomenon of the flak at Bologna: Orr!
He lunged forward over the bombsight to search downward through the plexiglass for some reassuring sign of Orr, who drew flak like a magnet and who had undoubtedly attracted the crack batteries of the whole Hermann Goering Division to Bologna overnight from wherever the hell they had been stationed the day before when Orr was still in Rome.
Aarfy launched himself forward an instant later and cracked Yossarian on the bridge of the nose with the sharp rim of his flak helmet.
Yossarian cursed him as his eyes flooded with tears.
‘There he is,’ Aarfy orated funereally, pointing down dramatically at a hay wagon and two horses standing before the barn of a gray stone farmhouse.
‘Smashed to bits.
I guess their numbers were all up.’
Yossarian swore at Aarfy again and continued searching intently, cold with a compassionate kind of fear now for the little bouncy and bizarre buck-toothed tentmate who had smashed Appleby’s forehead open with a ping-pong racket and who was scaring the daylights out of Yossarian once again.
At last Yossarian spotted the two-engined, twin-ruddered plane as it flew out of the green background of the forests over a field of yellow farmland.
One of the propellers was feathered and perfectly still, but the plane was maintaining altitude and holding a proper course.
Yossarian muttered an unconscious prayer of thankfulness and then flared up at Orr savagely in a ranting fusion of resentment and relief.
‘That bastard!’ he began.
‘That goddam stunted, red-faced, big-cheeked, curly-headed, buck-toothed rat bastard son of a bitch!’
‘What?’ said Aarfy.
‘That dirty goddam midget-assed, apple-cheeked, goggle-eyed, undersized, buck-toothed, grinning, crazy sonofabitchin-bastard!’ Yossarian sputtered.
‘What?’
‘Never mind!’
‘I still can’t hear you,’ Aarfy answered.
Yossarian swung himself around methodically to face Aarfy.
‘You prick,’ he began.
‘Me?’
‘You pompous, rotund, neighborly, vacuous, complacent…’ Aarfy was unperturbed. Calmly he struck a wooden match and sucked noisily at his pipe with an eloquent air of benign and magnanimous forgiveness.
He smiled sociably and opened his mouth to speak.
Yossarian put his hand over Aarfy’s mouth and pushed him away wearily.