a little over a year when they came walking into my office without an appointment. You should have seen her. She was so sweet and young and pretty. She even blushed when I asked about her periods. I don’t think I’ll ever stop loving that girl. She was built like a dream and wore a chain around her neck with a medal of Saint Anthony hanging down inside the most beautiful bosom I never saw. 'It must be a terrible temptation for Saint Anthony,' I joked— just to put her at ease, you know. 'Saint Anthony?' her husband said. 'Who’s Saint Anthony?' 'Ask your wife,' I told him. 'She can tell you who Saint Anthony is.' 'Who is Saint Anthony?' he asked her. 'Who?' she wanted to know. 'Saint Anthony,' he told her. 'Saint Anthony?' she said. 'Who’s Saint Anthony?' When I got a good look at her inside my examination room I found she was still a virgin. I spoke to her husband alone while she was pulling her girdle back on and hooking it onto her stockings. 'Every night,' he boasted. A real wise guy, you know. 'I never miss a night,' he boasted. He meant it, too. 'I even been puttin’ it to her mornings before the breakfasts she makes me before we go to work,' he boasted. There was only one explanation. When I had them both together again I gave them a demonstration of intercourse with the rubber models I’ve got in my office. I’ve got these rubber models in my office with all the reproductive organs of both sexes that I keep locked up in separate cabinets to avoid a scandal. I mean I used to have them. I don’t have anything any more, not even a practice. The only thing I have now is this low temperature that I’m really starting to worry about. Those two kids I’ve got working for me in the medical tent aren’t worth a damn as diagnosticians. All they know how to do is complain. They think they’ve got troubles? What about me? They should have been in my office that day with those two newlyweds looking at me as though I were telling them something nobody’d ever heard of before. You never saw anybody so interested. 'You mean like this?' he asked me, and worked the models for himself awhile. You know, I can see where a certain type of person might get a big kick out of doing just that. 'That’s it,' I told him. 'Now, you go home and try it my way for a few months and see what happens. Okay?' 'Okay,' they said, and paid me in cash without any argument. 'Have a good time,' I told them, and they thanked me and walked out together. He had his arm around her waist as though he couldn’t wait to get her home and put it to her again. A few days later he came back all by himself and told my nurse he had to see me right away. As soon as we were alone, he punched me in the nose.’
‘He did what?’
‘He called me a wise guy and punched me in the nose. 'What are you, a wise guy?' he said, and knocked me flat on my ass. Pow! Just like that. I’m not kidding.’
‘I know you’re not kidding,’ Yossarian said. ‘But why did he do it?’
‘How should I know why he did it?’ Doc Daneeka retorted with annoyance.
‘Maybe it had something to do with Saint Anthony?’ Doc Daneeka looked at Yossarian blankly. ‘Saint Anthony?’ he asked with astonishment. ‘Who’s Saint Anthony?’
‘How should I know?’ answered Chief White Halfoat, staggering inside the tent just then with a bottle of whiskey cradled in his arm and sitting himself down pugnaciously between the two of them.
Doc Daneeka rose without a word and moved his chair outside the tent, his back bowed by the compact kit of injustices that was his perpetual burden. He could not bear the company of his roommate.
Chief White Halfoat thought he was crazy. ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with that guy,’ he observed reproachfully. ‘He’s got no brains, that’s what’s the matter with him. If he had any brains he’d grab a shovel and start digging. Right here in the tent, he’d start digging, right under my cot. He’d strike oil in no time. Don’t he know how that enlisted man struck oil with a shovel back in the States? Didn’t he ever hear what happened to that kid— what was the name of that rotten rat bastard pimp of a snotnose back in Colorado?’
‘Wintergreen.’
‘Wintergreen.’
‘He’s afraid,’ Yossarian explained.
‘Oh, no. Not Wintergreen.’ Chief White Halfoat shook his head with undisguised admiration. ‘That stinking little punk wise-guy son of a bitch ain’t afraid of nobody.’
‘Doc Daneeka’s afraid. That’s what’s the matter with him.’
‘What’s he afraid of?’
‘He’s afraid of you,’ Yossarian said. ‘He’s afraid you’re going to die of pneumonia.’
‘He’d better be afraid,’ Chief White Halfoat said. A deep, low laugh rumbled through his massive chest. ‘I will, too, the first chance I get. You just wait and see.’ Chief White Halfoat was a handsome, swarthy Indian from Oklahoma with a heavy, hard-boned face and tousled black hair, a half-blooded Cree from Enid who, for occult reasons of his own, had made up his mind to die of pneumonia. He was a glowering, vengeful, disillusioned Indian who hated foreigners with names like Cathcart, Korn, Black and Havermeyer and wished they’d all go back to where their lousy ancestors had come from.
‘You wouldn’t believe it, Yossarian,’ he ruminated, raising his voice deliberately to bait Doc Daneeka, ‘but this used to be a pretty good country to live in before they loused it up with their goddam piety.’ Chief White Halfoat was out to revenge himself upon the white man. He could barely read or write and had been assigned to Captain Black as assistant intelligence officer.
‘How could I learn to read or write?’ Chief White Halfoat demanded with simulated belligerence, raising his voice again so that Doc Daneeka would hear. ‘Every place we pitched our tent, they sank an oil well. Every time they sank a well, they hit oil. And every time they hit oil, they made us pack up our tent and go someplace else. We were human divining rods. Our whole family had a natural affinity for petroleum deposits, and soon every oil company in the world had technicians chasing us around. We were always on the move. It was one hell of a way to bring a child up, I can tell you. I don’t think I ever spent more than a week in one place.’ His earliest memory was of a geologist.
‘Every time another White Halfoat was born,’ he continued, ‘the stock market turned bullish. Soon whole drilling crews were following us around with all their equipment just to get the jump on each other. Companies began to merge just so they could cut down on the number of people they had to assign to us. But the crowd in back of us kept growing. We never got a good night’s sleep. When we stopped, they stopped. When we moved, they moved, chuckwagons, bulldozers, derricks, generators. We were a walking business boom, and we began to receive invitations from some of the best hotels just for the amount of business we would drag into town with us. Some of those invitations were mighty generous, but we couldn’t accept any because we were Indians and all the best hotels that were inviting us wouldn’t accept Indians as guests. Racial prejudice is a terrible thing, Yossarian. It really is. It’s a terrible thing to treat a decent, loyal Indian like a nigger, kike, wop or spic.’ Chief White Halfoat nodded slowly with conviction.
‘Then, Yossarian, it finally happened—the beginning of the end. They began to follow us around from in front. They would try to guess where we were going to stop next and would begin drilling before we even got there, so we couldn’t stop. As soon as we’d begin to unroll our blankets, they would kick us off. They had confidence in us. They wouldn’t even wait to strike oil before they kicked us off. We were so tired we almost didn’t care the day our time ran out. One morning we found ourselves completely surrounded by oilmen waiting for us to come their way so they could kick us off. Everywhere you looked there was an oilman on a ridge, waiting there like Indians getting ready to attack. It was the end. We couldn’t stay where we were because we had just been kicked off. And there was no place left for us to go. Only the Army saved me. Luckily, the war broke out just in the nick of time, and a draft board picked me right up out of the middle and put me down safely in Lowery Field, Colorado. I was the only survivor.’ Yossarian knew he was lying, but did not interrupt as Chief White Halfoat went on to claim that he had never heard from his parents again. That didn’t bother him too much, though, for he had only their word for it that they were his parents, and since they had lied to him about so many other things, they could just as well have been lying to him about that too. He was much better acquainted with the fate of a tribe of first cousins who had wandered away north in a diversionary movement and pushed inadvertently into Canada. When they tried to return, they were stopped at the border by American immigration authorities who would not let them back into the country. They could not come back in because they were red.
It was a horrible joke, but Doc Daneeka didn’t laugh until Yossarian came to him one mission later and pleaded again, without any real expectation of success, to be grounded. Doc Daneeka snickered once and was soon immersed in problems of his own, which included Chief White Halfoat, who had been challenging him all that morning to Indian wrestle, and Yossarian, who decided right then and there to go crazy.
‘You’re wasting your time,’ Doc Daneeka was forced to tell him.
‘Can’t you ground someone who’s crazy?’
‘Oh, sure. I have to. There’s a rule saying I have to ground anyone who’s crazy.’
‘Then why don’t you ground me? I’m crazy. Ask Clevinger.’
