John Irving - The Cider House Rules

'Punkah,' Wally said to the English pilot.

'What's that, lad?' the pilot asked.

'It's so hot,' said Wally, who felt drowsy; they were flying at a very low altitude, and the little plane was an oven. A brief scent of sandal wood came through the stronger garlic in the pilot's sweat.

'Ninety-two degrees, American, when we left Rangoon,' the pilot said. The pilot got a kick out of saying 'American' instead of 'Fahrenheit,' but Wally didn't notice.

'Ninety-two degrees!' Wally said. It felt like the first fact he could hang his hat on, as they say in Maine.

'What happened to the legs?' the Englishman asked casually.

'Japanese B mosquito,' Wally explained. The British pilot looked very grave; he thought that Wally meant a plane-that the Japanese B mosquito was the name of the fighter plane that shot Wally's plane down.

'I don't know that one, lad,' the pilot admitted to Wally. 'Thought I'd seen them all, but you can't trust the Nips.'

The Sinhalese crew had slathered themselves with coconut oil and were wearing sarongs and long, collarless shirts. Two of them were eating something and one of {539} them was screeching into the radio; the pilot said something sharply to the radioman, who instantly lowered his voice.

'Sinhala is an awful language,' the pilot confided to Wally. 'Sounds like cats fucking.' When Wally didn't respond to his humor, the Englishman asked him if he'd ever been to Ceylon.

When Wally didn't answer him-Wally seemed to be daydreaming-the Englishman said, 'We not only planted the first rubber trees and developed their bloody rubber plantations-we taught them how to brew tea. They knew how to grow it, all right, but you couldn't get a decent cup of tea on the whole bloody island. And now they want to be independent,' the Englishman said.

'Ninety-two degrees,' Wally said, smiling.

'Yes, just try to relax, lad,' the pilot said. When Wally burped, he tasted cinnamon; when he shut his eyes, he saw African marigolds come out like stars.

Suddenly the three Sinhalese began to speak at once. First the radio would say something, then the three of them would speak in unison.

'Bloody Buddhists, all of them,' the pilot explained. 'They even pray on the bloody radio. That's Ceylon,' the Englishman said. 'Two thirds tea and one third rubber and prayer.' He yelled something at the Sinhalese, who lowered their voices.

Somewhere over the Indian Ocean, shortly before sighting Ceylon, the pilot was worried about an aircraft in his vicinity. 'Pray now, damn you,' he said to the Sinhalese, who were all asleep. 'That Japanese B mosquito,' the Englishman said to Wally. 'What does it look like?' he asked. 'Or did it get you from behind?'

But all Wally would say was, 'Ninety-two degrees.'

After the war, Ceylon would become an independent nation; twenty-four years after that, the country would change its name to Sri Lanka. But all Wally would remember was how hot it had been. In a way, his parachute had never touched down; in a way, he had remained {540} over Burma for ten months-just floating there. All Wally would remember of his own story would never make as much sense as an ether frolic. And how he would survive the war-sterile, paralyzed, both legs flaccid-had already been dreamed by Big Dot Taft.

It was thirty-four degrees in St. Cloud's when Homer Wells went to the railroad station and dictated a telegram to Olive to the stationmaster. Homer could not have phoned her, and lied to her that directly. And hadn't Olive telegramed them? She must have had her reasons for not wanting to talk on the phone. It was with the almost certain feeling that Bay and Olive knew everything that Homer and Candy were doing that Homer dictated his telegram to Olive-respecting a polite formality as faint as a suspicion. It was a suspicion that could be proven only impolitely, and Homer Wells was polite.

GOD BLESS YOU AND WALLY/STOP

WHEN WILL WE SEE HIM/STOP

CANDY AND I HOME SOON/STOP

I HAVE ADOPTED A BABY BOY/STOP

LOVE HOMER

'You're kind of young to adopt somebody, ain't you?' the stationmaster asked.

'Right,' said Homer Wells.

Candy telephoned her father.

'It's gonna be weeks, or maybe months before they can move him,' Ray told her. 'He's gotta gain some weight before he can travel so far, and there's probably tests they've gotta do-and there's still a war on, don't forget.' At her end of the phone, Candy just cried and cried.

'Tell me how you are, darlin',' Ray Kendall said. That was when she could have told him that she'd just had Homer's baby, but what she said was, 'Homer's adopted one of the orphans.'

After a pause, Raymond Kendall said, 'Just one of them?' {541}

'He's adopted a baby boy,' Candy said. 'Of course, I'll help, too. We've kind of adopted a baby together.'

'You have?' Ray said.

'His name is Angel,' Candy said.

'Bless his heart,' Ray said. 'Bless you both, too.'

Candy cried some more.

'Adopted, huh?' Ray asked his daughter.

'Yes,' said Candy Kendall. 'One of the orphans.'

She quit the breast-feeding, and Nurse Edna introduced her to the device for pumping her breasts. Angel disliked his conversion to formula milk, and for a few days he displayed a cranky temperament. Candy displayed a cranky temperament, too. When Homer observed that her pubic hair would be very nearly grown back by the time she returned to Heart's Haven, she snapped at him.

'For God's sake, who's going to see whether I have pubic hair or not-except you?' Candy asked.

Homer showed signs of strain, too.

He was impatient with Dr. Larch's suggestion that Homer's future lay in the medical profession. Larch insisted on giving Homer a brand new copy of Gray's Anatomy; he also gave him the standard Greenhill's Office Gynecology and the British masterpiece Diseases of Women.

'Jesus Christ,' said Homer Wells. 'I'm a father, and I'm going to be an apple farmer.'

'You have near-perfect obstetrical procedure,' Larch told him. 'You just need a little more of the gynecological -and the pediatric, of course.'

'Maybe I'll end up a lobsterman,' Homer said.

'And I'll send you a subscription to The New England Journal of Medicine,' Dr. Larch said. 'And JAMA, and S, G and O…'

'You're the doctor,' said Homer Wells tiredly.

'How do you feel?' Candy asked Homer.

'Like an orphan,' Homer said. They held each other {542} tightly, but they did not make love. 'How do you feel?' Homer asked.

'I won't know until I see him,' Candy said honestly.

'What will you know then?' Homer asked.

'If I love him, or you, or both of you,' she said. 'Or else I won't know any more than I know now.'

'It's always wait and see, isn't it?' Homer asked.

'You don't expect me to tell him anything when he's still over there, do you?' Candy asked.

'No, of course I don't expect that,' he said softly. She held him tighter; she began to cry again.

'Oh, Homer,' she said. 'How can he weigh only a hundred and five pounds?'

'I'm sure he'll gain some weight,' Homer said, but his entire body shivered suddenly; Wally's body had been so strong. Homer remembered the first time Wally had taken him to the ocean; the surf had been unusually rough, and Wally had warned him about the undertow. Wally had taken him by the hand and shown him how to duck under the waves, and how to ride them. They had; walked along the beach for an hour, undistracted by Candy; she had been tanning.

'I don't understand all this stupid lying down in the sun,' Wally had told Homer, who agreed. 'You're either doing something in the sun and you pick up a little color, or you're doing something else-but you're doing something. That's the main thing.'

They were picking up shells and stones-the beachcombers' search for specimens. Homer was immediately impressed with the smoothness of the stones and the broken pieces of shell-how the water and the sand had softened them.