John Irving - The Cider House Rules

'Right,'Homer said.

'And you know a better way than my way?' she asked. {482}

'Not that much better,' he said. 'It's a complete D and C, and the doctor is a gentleman.'

'A gentleman,' Nurse Caroline said doubtfully.

'What's the gentleman cost?'

'He's free,' Homer said.

'I'm free, too,' Nurse Caroline said.

'He asks you to make a donation to the orphanage, if you can afford it,' said Homer Wells.

'Why hasn't he been caught?' Nurse Caroline asked.

'I don't know,' Homer said. 'Maybe people are grateful.'

'People are people,' Nurse Caroline said, in her socialist voice. 'You took a stupid chance, telling me. And a more stupid chance telling that woman-you don't even know her.'

'Yes,' Homer agreed.

'Your doctor isn't going to last if you keep that up,' Nurse Caroline said.

'Right,' Homer said.

Dr. Harlow found them all in the dispensary; only Candy looked guilty, and therefore he stared at her.

'What are these two experts telling you?' Dr. Harlow asked. He spent a lot of time looking at Candy when he thought no one saw him, but Homer Wells saw him and Nurse Caroline was very sensitive to the longings other women inspired. Candy was tongue-tied, which made her seem more guilty, and Dr. Harlow turned to Nurse Caroline. 'You got rid of the hysteric?' he asked her.

'No problem,' Nurse Caroline said.

I know that you disapprove,' Dr. Harlow told her, 'but rules exist for reasons.'

'Rules exist for reasons,' said Homer Wells, uncontrollably; it was such a stupid thing to say, he felt compelled to repeat it. Dr. Harlow stared at him.

'No doubt you're an abortion expert, too, Wells,' Dr. Harlow said.

'It's not very hard to be an abortion expert,' Homer {483} Wells said. 'It's a pretty easy thing to do.'

'You think so?' Dr. Harlow asked aggressively.

'Well, what do I know?' Homer Wells said, shrugging.

'Yes, what do you know?' Dr. Harlow said.

'Not much,' Nurse Caroline said gruffly; even Dr. Harlow appreciated this. Even Candy smiled. Homer Wells smiled sheepishly, too. You see? I'm getting smarter! That is what he smiled to Nurse Caroline, who viewed him with an expression of condescension that was proper for nurses to exhibit only to nurses' aides. Dr. Harlow seemed to feel that the pecking order he revered was being treated with the reverence that was mandatory from them all. A kind of glaze appeared to coat his face, a texture composed of righteousness and adrenaline. Homer Wells gave himself a brief sensation of pleasure by imagining something that could wake up Dr. Harlow, and humble him. Mr. Rose's knife work might have that effect on Dr. Harlow-Homer imagined Mr. Rose undressing Dr. Harlow with his knife; eveiy article of clothing would be gathered around the doctor's ankles, in strips and tatters, yet on the doctor's naked body there wouldn't be a scratch.

A month after Wally's plane was shot down, they heard from the crew of Opportunity Knocks.

'We were halfway to China,' the co-pilot wrote,' when the Nips took some potshots. Captain Worthington ordered the crew to bail out.'

The crew chief and the radioman jumped close together; the co-pilot jumped third. The roof of the jungle was so dense that when the first man crashed through it, he could not see the other parachutes. The jungle itself was so thick that the crew had to search for the others -it took him seven hours to find the radioman. The rain was so heavy-it made such a din against the broad palm leaves-none of the men heard the plane explode. The atmosphere was so rich with its own scents that the smell of the burning gasoline and the smoke from the fire {484} never reached them. They wondered if the plane had not miraculously recovered itself and flown on. When they looked up, they could not see through the treetops (which everywhere glittered with bright green pigeons).

In seven hours, the crew chief contacted thirteen leeches of various sizes-which the radioman thoughtfully removed; the crew chief plucked fifteen leeches off the radioman. They found that the best way to remove the leeches was to touch the lighted end of a cigarette to their posterior ends; that way, they would release their contact with the flesh. If you just pulled them, they kept breaking; their strong sucking mouths would remain attached.

The radioman and the crew chief ate nothing for five days. When it rained-which it did, most of the time- they drank the rainwater that gathered in puddles in the big palm leaves. They were afraid to drink the other water they encountered. In some of the water they thought they saw crocodiles. Because the radioman was afraid of snakes, the crew chief did not point out the snakes he saw; the crew chief was afraid of tigers, and he thought he saw one, once, but the radioman maintained that they only heard a tiger, or several tigers-or the same tiger, several times. The crew chief said that the same tiger followed them for five days.

The leeches tired them out, they said. Although the roof of the jungle made the pelting rain louder, it did keep the rain from falling directly on the two men; yet the jungle was so saturated that the rain almost constantly dripped on them-and when, for brief intervals, the rain stopped, the roof of the jungle allowed no sunlight to penetrate to the jungle floor, and the raucous birds, silent in the rain, were louder than the rain when they had their opportunities to protest the monsoon.

The radioman and the crew chief had no idea where Wally and the co-pilot were. On the fifth day they met up with the co-pilot, who reached a native village only a day ahead of them. He was quite badly drained by the {485} leeches-since he'd been traveling alone, he'd had no one to burn off the leeches he couldn't reach. In the middle of his back, there had been quite a gathering of them, which the natives were skillful at removing. They used a lighted stalk of bamboo, like a cigar. The natives were Burmese, and friendly; although they spoke no English, they made it clear that they had no fondness for the Japanese invasion, and also that they knew the way to China.

But where was Wally? The co-pilot had landed in a grove of ironwood; and the canes of bamboo that he had to hack his way through were as stout as a man's thigh. The edge of his machete was as dull and round as the back of the blade.

The Burmese let them know they were not safe to stay and wait for Wally where they were; some of the villagers would lead the co-pilot, the crew chief, and the radioman into China. For that trip, they darkened their skin with mashed peepul berries and tied orchids in their hair; they didn't want to look like white men.

The trip took twenty days, walking. They traveled two hundred twenty-five miles. They cooked no food; at the end of the journey, their rice was moldy-there was so much rain. The crew chief claimed he was terminally constipated; the co-pilot claimed he was dying of diarrhea. The radioman shat rabbit pellets and carried a low-grade fever for fifteen of the twenty days; he grew a helmet of ringworm. Each man lost about forty pounds.

When they reached their base in China., they were hospitalized for a week. Then they were flown back to India, where the co-pilot was retained in the hospital for diagnosis and treatment of an amoeba-no one could say what amoeba it was. The crew chief had a colon problem; he was also retained. The radioman (and his ringworm) went back to work. 'They took all our gear when they put us in the hospital in China,' he wrote to Olive. 'When they gave it back to us, it was all lumped together. There was four compasses. There was just three {486} of us, but there was four compasses. One of us jumped out of the plane with Captain Worthington's compass.' In the radioman's opinion, it was better to have crashed with the plane than to have landed in that part of Burma without a compass.