Free Catch-22 by Joseph Heller Page A

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.

Catch-22
    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.
       ‘Listen, kid,’ he explained harshly to Huple very late one
evening, ‘if you want to live in this tent, you’ve got to do like I do. You’ve
got to roll your wrist watch up in a pair of wool socks every night and keep it
on the bottom of your foot locker on the other side of the room.’ Huple thrust
his jaw out defiantly to let Hungry Joe know he couldn’t be pushed around and
then did exactly as he had been told.
       Hungry Joe was a jumpy, emaciated wretch with a fleshless
face of dingy skin and bone and twitching veins squirming subcutaneously in the
blackened hollows behind his eyes like severed sections of snake. It was a
desolate, cratered face, sooty with care like an abandoned mining town. Hungry
Joe ate voraciously, gnawed incessantly at the tips of his fingers, stammered,
choked, itched, sweated, salivated, and sprang from spot to spot fanatically
with an intricate black camera with which he was always trying to take pictures
of naked girls. They never came out. He was always forgetting to put film in
the camera or turn on lights or remove the cover from the lens opening. It
wasn’t easy persuading naked girls to pose, but Hungry Joe had the knack.
       ‘Me big man,’ he would shout. ‘Me big photographer from Life
magazine. Big picture on heap big cover. Si, si, si! Hollywood star. Multi
dinero. Multi divorces. Multi ficky-fick all day long.’ Few women anywhere
could resist such wily cajolery, and prostitutes would spring to their feet
eagerly and hurl themselves into whatever fantastic poses he requested for
them. Women killed Hungry Joe. His response to them as sexual beings was one of
frenzied worship and idolatry. They were lovely, satisfying, maddening
manifestations of the miraculous, instruments of pleasure too powerful to be
measured, too keen to be endured, and too exquisite to be intended for
employment by base, unworthy man. He could interpret their naked presence in
his hands only as a cosmic oversight destined to be rectified speedily, and he
was driven always to make what