'I don't want to wear a uniform any more.' Doc Daneeka accepted the explanation and put away his hypodermic syringe. 'Are you sure you feel all right?'
'I feel fine. I'm just a little logy from all those pills and shots you've been giving me.' Yossarian went about his business with no clothes on all the rest of that day and was still naked late the next morning when Milo, after hunting everywhere else, finally found him sitting up a tree a small distance in back of the quaint little military cemetery at which Snowden was being buried. Milo was dressed in his customary business attire--olive-drab trousers, a fresh olive-drab shirt and tie, with one silver first lieutenant's bar gleaming on the collar, and a regulation dress cap with a stiff leather bill.
'I've been looking all over for you,' Milo called up to Yossarian from the ground reproachfully.
'You should have looked for me in this tree,' Yossarian answered. 'I've been up here all morning.'
'Come on down and taste this and tell me if it's good. It's very important.' Yossarian shook his head. He sat nude on the lowest limb of the tree and balanced himself with both hands grasping the bough directly above. He refused to budge, and Milo had no choice but to stretch both arms about the trunk in a distasteful hug and start climbing. He struggled upward clumsily with loud grunts and wheezes, and his clothes were squashed and crooked by the time he pulled himself up high enough to hook a leg over the limb and pause for breath. His dress cap was askew and in danger of falling. Milo caught it just in time when it began slipping. Globules of perspiration glistened like transparent pearls around his mustache and swelled like opaque blisters under his eyes. Yossarian watched him impassively. Cautiously Milo worked himself around in a half circle so that he could face Yossarian. He unwrapped tissue paper from something soft, round and brown and handed it to Yossarian.
'Please taste this and let me know what you think. I'd like to serve it to the men.'
'What is it?' asked Yossarian, and took a big bite.
'Chocolate-covered cotton.' Yossarian gagged convulsively and sprayed his big mouthful of chocolate-covered cotton right into Milo's face. 'Here, take it back!' he spouted angrily. 'Jesus Christ! Have you gone crazy? You didn't even take the goddam seeds out.'
'Give it a chance, will you?' Milo begged. 'It can't be that bad. Is it really that bad?'
'It's even worse.'
'But I've got to make the mess halls feed it to the men.'
'They'll never be able to swallow it.'
'They've got to swallow it,' Milo ordained with dictatorial grandeur, and almost broke his neck when he let go with one arm to wave a righteous finger in the air.
'Come on out here,' Yossarian invited him. 'You'll be much safer, and you can see everything.' Gripping the bough above with both hands, Milo began inching his way out on the limb sideways with utmost care and apprehension. His face was rigid with tension, and he sighed with relief when he found himself seated securely beside Yossarian. He stroked the tree affectionately. 'This is a pretty good tree,' he observed admiringly with proprietary gratitude.
'It's the tree of life,' Yossarian answered, waggling his toes, 'and of knowledge of good and evil, too.' Milo squinted closely at the bark and branches. 'No it isn't,' he replied. 'It's a chestnut tree. I ought to know. I sell chestnuts.'
'Have it your way.' They sat in the tree without talking for several seconds, their legs dangling and their hands almost straight up on the bough above, the one completely nude but for a pair of crepe-soled sandals, the other completely dressed in a coarse olive-drab woolen uniform with his tie knotted tight. Milo studied Yossarian diffidently through the corner of his eye, hesitating tactfully.
'I want to ask you something,' he said at last. 'You don't have any clothes on. I don't want to butt in or anything, but I just want to know. Why aren't you wearing your uniform?'
'I don't want to.' Milo nodded rapidly like a sparrow pecking. 'I see, I see,' he stated quickly with a look of vivid confusion. 'I understand perfectly. I heard Appleby and Captain Black say you had gone crazy, and I just wanted to find out.' He hesitated politely again, weighing his next question. 'Aren't you ever going to put your uniform on again?'
'I don't think so.' Milo nodded with spurious vim to indicate he still understood and then sat silent, ruminating gravely with troubled misgiving. A scarlet-crested bird shot by below, brushing sure dark wings against a quivering bush. Yossarian and Milo were covered in their bower by tissue-thin tiers of sloping green and largely surrounded by other gray chestnut trees and a silver spruce. The sun was high overhead in a vast sapphire-blue sky beaded with low, isolated, puffy clouds of dry and immaculate white. There was no breeze, and the leaves about them hung motionless. The shade was feathery. Everything was at peace but Milo, who straightened suddenly with a muffled cry and began pointing excitedly.
'Look at that!' he exclaimed in alarm. 'Look at that! That's a funeral going on down there. That looks like the cemetery. Isn't it?' Yossarian answered him slowly in a level voice. 'They're burying that kid who got killed in my plane over Avignon the other day. Snowden.'
'What happened to him?' Milo asked in a voice deadened with awe.
'He got killed.'
'That's terrible,' Milo grieved, and his large brown eyes filled with tears. 'That poor kid. It really is terrible.' He bit his trembling lip hard, and his voice rose with emotion when he continued. 'And it will get even worse if the mess halls don't agree to buy my cotton. Yossarian, what's the matter with them? Don't they realize it's their syndicate? Don't they know they've all got a share?'
'Did the dead man in my tent have a share?' Yossarian demanded caustically.
'Of course he did,' Milo assured him lavishly. 'Everybody in the squadron has a share.'
'He was killed before he even got into the squadron.' Milo made a deft grimace of tribulation and turned away. 'I wish you'd stop picking on me about that dead man in your tent,' he pleaded peevishly. 'I told you I didn't have anything to do with killing him. Is it my fault that I saw this great opportunity to corner the market on Egyptian cotton and got us into all this trouble? Was I supposed to know there was going to be a glut? I didn't even know what a glut was in those days. An opportunity to corner a market doesn't come along very often, and I was pretty shrewd to grab the chance when I had it.' Milo gulped back a moan as he saw six uniformed pallbearers lift the plain pine coffin from the ambulance and set it gently down on the ground beside the yawning gash of the freshly dug grave. 'And now I can't get rid of a single penny's worth,' he mourned.
Yossarian was unmoved by the fustian charade of the burial ceremony, and by Milo's crushing bereavement. The chaplain's voice floated up to him through the distance tenuously in an unintelligible, almost inaudible monotone, like a gaseous murmur. Yossarian could make out Major Major by his towering and lanky aloofness and thought he recognized Major Danby mopping his brow with a handkerchief. Major Danby had not stopped shaking since his run-in with General Dreedle. There were strands of enlisted men molded in a curve around the three officers, as inflexible as lumps of wood, and four idle gravediggers in streaked fatigues lounging indifferently on spades near the shocking, incongruous heap of loose copperred earth. As Yossarian stared, the chaplain elevated his gaze toward Yossarian beatifically, pressed his fingers down over his eyeballs in a manner of affliction, peered upward again toward Yossarian searchingly, and bowed his head, concluding what Yossarian took to be a climactic part of the funeral rite. The four men in fatigues lifted the coffin on slings and lowered it into the grave. Milo shuddered violently.
'I can't watch it,' he cried, turning away in anguish. 'I just can't sit here and watch while those mess halls let my syndicate die.' He gnashed his teeth and sho
ok his head with bitter woe and resentment. 'If they had any loyalty, they would buy my cotton till it hurts so that they can keep right on buying my cotton till it hurts them some more. They would build fires and burn up their underwear and summer uniforms just to create bigger demand. But they won't do a thing. Yossarian, try eating the rest of this chocolate-covered cotton for me. Maybe it will taste delicious now.' Yossarian pushed his hand away. 'Give up, Milo. People can't eat cotton.' Milo's face narrowed cunningly. 'It isn't really cotton,' he coaxed. 'I was joking. It's really cotton candy, delicious cotton candy. Try it and see.'
'Now you're lying.'