'Once more?'
'When I'm not around. You're a happy imbecile and you don't know what it means to feel the way I do. Things happen to me when you work over small things that I can't even begin to explain. I find out that I can't stand you. I start to hate you, and I'm soon thinking seriously about busting this bottle down on your head or stabbing you in the neck with that hunting knife there. Do you understand?' Orr nodded very intelligently. 'I won't take the valve apart now,' he said, and began taking it apart, working with slow, tireless, interminable precision, his rustic, ungainly face bent very close to the floor, picking painstakingly at the minute mechanism in his fingers with such limitless, plodding concentration that he seemed scarcely to be thinking of it at all.
Yossarian cursed him silently and made up his mind to ignore him. 'What the hell's your hurry with that stove, anyway?' he barked out a moment later in spite of himself. 'It's still hot out. We're probably going swimming later. What are you worried about the cold for.'
'The days are getting shorter,' Orr observed philosophically. 'I'd like to get this all finished for you while there's still time. You'll have the best stove in the squadron when I'm through. It will burn all night with this feed control I'm fixing, and these metal plates will radiate the heat all over the tent. If you leave a helmet full of water on this thing when you go to sleep, you'll have warm water to wash with all ready for you when you wake up. Won't that be nice? If you want to cook eggs or soup, all you'll have to do is set the pot down here and turn the fire up.'
'What do you mean, me?' Yossarian wanted to know. 'Where are you going to be?' Orr's stunted torso shook suddenly with a muffled spasm of amusement. 'I don't know,' he exclaimed, and a weird, wavering giggle gushed out suddenly through his chattering buck teeth like an exploding jet of emotion. He was still laughing when he continued, and his voice was clogged with saliva. 'If they keep on shooting me down this way, I don't know where I'm going to be.' Yossarian was moved. 'Why don't you try to stop flying, Orr? You've got an excuse.'
'I've only got eighteen missions.'
'But you've been shot down on almost every one. You're either ditching or crash-landing every time you go up.'
'Oh, I don't mind flying missions. I guess they're lots of fun. You ought to try flying a few with me when you're not flying lead. Just for laughs. Tee-hee.' Orr gazed up at Yossarian through the corners of his eyes with a look of pointed mirth.
Yossarian avoided his stare. 'They've got me flying lead again.'
'When you're not flying lead. If you had any brains, do you know what you'd do? You'd go right to Piltchard and Wren and tell them you want to fly with me.'
'And get shot down with you every time you go up? What's the fun in that?'
'That's just why you ought to do it,' Orr insisted. 'I guess I'm just about the best pilot around now when it comes to ditching or making crash landings. It would be good practice for you.'
'Good practice for what?'
'Good practice in case you ever have to ditch or make a crash landing. Tee-hee-hee.'
'Have you got another bottle of beer for me?' Yossarian asked morosely.
'Do you want to bust it down on my head?' This time Yossarian did laugh. 'Like that whore in that apartment in Rome?' Orr sniggered lewdly, his bulging crab apple cheeks blowing outward with pleasure. 'Do you really want to know why she was hitting me over the head with her shoe?' he teased.
'I do know,' Yossarian teased back. 'Nately's whore told me.' Orr grinned like a gargoyle. 'No she didn't.' Yossarian felt sorry for Orr. Orr was so small and ugly. Who would protect him if he lived? Who would protect a warm-hearted, simple-minded gnome like Orr from rowdies and cliques and from expert athletes like Appleby who had flies in their eyes and would walk right over him with swaggering conceit and self-assurance every chance they got? Yossarian worried frequently about Orr. Who would shield him against animosity and deceit, against people with ambition and the embittered snobbery of the big shot's wife, against the squalid, corrupting indignities of the profit motive and the friendly neighborhood butcher with inferior meat? Orr was a happy and unsuspecting simpleton with a thick mass of wavy polychromatic hair parted down the center. He would be mere child's play for them. They would take his money, screw his wife and show no kindness to his children. Yossarian felt a flood of compassion sweep over him.
Orr was an eccentric midget, a freakish, likable dwarf with a smutty mind and a thousand valuable skills that would keep him in a low income group all his life. He could use a soldering iron and hammer two boards together so that the wood did not split and the nails did not bend. He could drill holes. He had built a good deal more in the tent while Yossarian was away in the hospital. He had filed or chiseled a perfect channel in the cement so that the slender gasoline line was flush with the floor as it ran to the stove from the tank he had built outside on an elevated platform. He had constructed andirons for the fireplace out of excess bomb parts and had filled them with stout silver logs, and he had framed with stained wood the photographs of girls with big breasts he had torn out of cheesecake magazines and hung over the mantelpiece. Orr could open a can of paint. He could mix paint, thin paint, remove paint. He could chop wood and measure things with a ruler. He knew how to build fires. He could dig holes, and he had a real gift for bringing water for them both in cans and canteens from the tanks near the mess hall. He could engross himself in an inconsequential task for hours without growing restless or bored, as oblivious to fatigue as the stump of a tree, and almost as taciturn. He had an uncanny knowledge of wildlife and was not afraid of dogs or cats or beetles or moths, or of foods like scrod or tripe.
Yossarian sighed drearily and began brooding about the rumored mission to Bologna. The valve Orr was dismantling was about the size of a thumb and contained thirty-seven separate parts, excluding the casing, many of them so minute that Orr was required to pinch them tightly between the tips of his fingernails as he placed them carefully on the floor in orderly, catalogued rows, never quickening his movements or slowing them down, never tiring, never pausing in his relentless, methodical, monotonous procedure unless it was to leer at Yossarian with maniacal mischief. Yossarian tried not to watch him. He counted the parts and thought he would go clear out of his mind. He turned away, shutting his eyes, but that was even worse, for now he had only the sounds, the tiny maddening, indefatigable, distinct clicks and rustles of hands and weightless parts. Orr was breathing rhythmically with a noise that was stertorous and repulsive. Yossarian clenched his fists and looked at the long bone-handled hunting knife hanging in a holster over the cot of the dead man in the tent. As soon as he thought of stabbing Orr, his tension eased. The idea of murdering Orr was so ridiculous that he began to consider it seriously with queer whimsy and fascination. He searched the nape of Orr's neck for the probable site of the medulla oblongata. Just the daintiest stick there would kill him and solve so many serious, agonizing problems for them both.
'Does it hurt?' Orr asked at precisely that moment, as though by protective instinct.
Yossarian eyed him closely. 'Does what hurt?'
'Your leg,' said Orr with a strange, mysterious laugh. 'You still limp a little.'
'It's just a habit, I guess,' said Yossarian, breathing again with relief. 'I'll probably get over it soon.' Orr rolled over sideways to the floor and came up on one knee, facing toward Yossarian. 'Do you remember,' he drawled reflectively, with an air of labored recollection, 'that girl who was hitting me on the head that day in Rome?' He chuckled at Yossarian's involuntary exclamation of tricked annoyance. 'I'll make a deal with you about that girl. I'll tell you why that girl was hitting me on the head with her shoe that day if you answer one question.'
'What's the question?'
'Did you ever screw Nately's girl?' Yossarian laughed with surprise. 'Me? No. Now tell me why that girl hit you with her shoe.'
'That wasn't the question,' Orr informed him with victorious delight. 'That was just conversation. She acts like you screwed her.'
'Well, I didn't. How does she act?'
'She acts like she don't like you.'
'She doesn't like anyone.'
'She likes Captain Black,' Orr reminded.