John Irving - The Cider House Rules

'Jesus, Homer,' said Wally. 'That's a fine thing to ask.'

'Yes, we've done it-had sex,' Candy said, still looking straight ahead.

'I hope you were careful,' Homer said, to both of them. 'I hope you took some precautions.'

'Jesus, Homer!' Wally said.

'Yes, we were careful,' Candy said. Now she stared at him, her look as neutral as possible.

'Well, I'm glad you were careful,' Homer said, speaking directly to Candy. 'You should be careful-having sex with someone who's about to fly over Burma.'

'Burma?' Candy turned to Wally. 'You didn't say where you were going,' she said. 'Is it Burma?'

'I don't know where I'm going,' Wally said irritably. 'Jesus, Homer, what's the matter with you?'

'I love you both,' said Homer Wells. 'If I love you, I've got a right to ask anything I want-I've got a right to know anything I want to know.'

It was, as they say in Maine, a real conversation stopper. They rode almost all the way to Boston in silence, except that Wally said-trying to be funny-'I don't know about you, Homer. You're becoming very philosophical.'

It was a rough good-bye. I love you both, too-you know,' Wally said, in parting.

'I know you do,' Homer said.

On the way home, Candy said to Homer Wells: 'I {473} wouldn't say “philosophical”; I would say eccentric. You're becoming very eccentric, in my opinion. And you don't have a right to know everything about me, whether you love me or not.'

'All you've got to know is, do you really love him?' Homer said. 'Do you love Wally?'

'I've grown up loving Wally,' Candy said. 'I have always loved Wally, and I always will.'

'Fine,' Homer said. That's all there is to it, then.'

'But I don't even know Wally, anymore,' Candy said. 'I know you better, and I love you, too.'

Homer Wells sighed. So we're in for more waiting and seeing, he thought. His feelings were hurt: Wally hadn't once asked him about his heart. What would he have answered, anyway?

Wilbur Larch, who knew that there was absolutely nothing wrong with Homer's heart, wondered where Homer's heart was. Not in St. Cloud's, he feared.

And Wally went to Victorville, California-advanced flying school. U.S. ARMY AIR FORCES-that is what his stationery said. Wally spent several months in Victorville -all the pruning months, as Homer Wells would remember them. Shortly after apple blossom time, when Ira Titcomb's bees had spread their marvelous life energies through the orchards of Ocean View, Wally was sent to India.

The Japanese held Mandalay. Wally dropped his first bombs on the railroad bridge in Myitnge. Tracks and the embankment of the south approach were badly smashed, and the south span of the bridge was destroyed. All aircraft and crews returned safely. Wally also dropped his bombs on the industrial area of Myingyan, but heavy clouds prevented adequate observation of the destruction. In that summer, when Homer Wells was painting the cider house white again, Wally bombed the jetty at Akyab and the Shweli bridge in northern Burma; later he hit the railroad yards at Prome. He contributed to the ten tons of bombs that were dropped on the railroad {474} yards at Shwebo, and to the fires that were left burning in the warehouses at Kawlin and Thanbyuzayat. The most spectacular hits he would remember were in the oil fields in Yenangyat-the sight of those oil derricks ablaze would stay with Wally on his return flight, across the jungles, across the mountains. All aircraft and crews returned safely.

They made him a captain and gave him what he called 'easy work.'

'Always be suspicious of easy work,' Dr. Wilbur Larch once said to Homer Wells.

Wally had won the best-name-for-a plane competition at Fort Meade; now he finally got to use it; he got to name his own plane Opportunity Knocks, he called it. The painted fist under the inscription looked very authoritative. It would later puzzle Candy and Homer Wells that thename was not Knocks Once (or Twice), but just Knocks.

He flew the India-China route, over the Himalayas- over Burma. He carried gasoline and bombs and artillery and rifles and ammunition and clothing and aircraft engines and spare parts and food to China; he brought military personnel back to India. It was a seven-hour, round-trip flight-about five hundred miles. For six of the hours he wore an oxygen mask-they had to fly so high. Over the mountains they flew high because of the mountains; over the jungles they flew high because of the Japanese. The Himalayas have the most vicious air currents in the world.

When he left Assam, the temperature was a hundred and ten degrees, Fahrenheit. It was like Texas, Wally would think. They wore just their shorts and socks.

The heavily loaded transports needed to climb to fifteen thousand feet in thirty-five minutes; that was when they reached the first mountain pass.

At nine thousand feet, Wally put on his pants. At fourteen thousand, he put on the fleece-lined suit. It was twenty degrees below zero up there. In the monsoon weather, they flew mostly on instruments. {475}

They called that aerial route 'the lifeline'; they called it flying 'over the hump.'

Here were the headlines on the Fourth of July:

YANKS WRECK RAIL BRIDGE IN BURMA

CHINESE ROUT JAPS IN HUPEH PROVINCE

Here is what Wally wrote to Candy, and to Homer. Wally was getting lazy; he sent the same limerick to both:

There was a young man of Bombay

Who fashioned a cunt out of clay,

But the heat of his prick

Turned it into a brick,

And chafed all his foreskin away.

That summer of 194- the public interest in keeping use of the shore lights to a minimum forced the temporary closing of the Cape Kenneth Drive-In Theater, which Homer Wells did not feel as a tragic loss. Since he would have had no choice but to attend the movies with Candy and Debra Pettigrew, he was grateful to the war effort for sparing him that awkwardness.

Mr. Rose informed Olive that he would be unable to provide a worthwhile picking crew for the harvest. 'Considering the men who are gone,' he wrote. 'And the travel. I mean the gas rationing.'

'Then we've spruced up the cider house for nothing,' Homer said to Olive.

'Nothing is ever improved for nothing, Homer,' she said. The Yankee justification for hard work in the summer months is both desperate and undone by the rare pleasure of that fleeting season.

Homer Wells-nurses' aide and orchardman-was mowing in the rows between the trees when the news came to him. On a sweltering June day, he was driving the International Harvester and he had his eye on the sickle bar; he didn't want to snag a stump or a fallen branch; for that reason he didn't see the green van, {476} which was trying to head him off. He almost ran into it. Because the tractor was running-and the mower blades, too-he didn't hear what Candy was yelling when she jumped out of the van and ran to him. Olive was driving, her face a stone.

'Shot down!' Candy was screaming, when Homer finally shut off the ignition. 'He was shot down-over Burma!'

'Over Burma,' said Homer Wells. He dismounted from the tractor and held the sobbing girl in his arms. The tractor was shut off but the engine still knocked, and then shuddered, and then throbbed; its heat made the air shimmer. Maybe, thought Homer Wells, the air is always shimmering over Burma. {477}

Two weeks after Wally's plane was shot down, Captain Worthington and the crew of Opportunity Knocks were still listed as missing. A plane making the same run had noted that approximately one square mile of the Burmese jungle, roughly halfway between India and China, had been consumed by fire-presumably caused by the exploding plane; the cargo was identified as jeep engines, spare parts, and gasoline. There was no evidence of the crew; the jungle was dense in that area and believed to be unpopulated.