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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 the name 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 instrument.
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, 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.
9
Over Burma
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.
A spokesman for the U.S. Army Air Forces paid a personal visit to Olive and told her that there was some reason to be optimistic. That the plane obviously had not exploded in the air meant that the crew might have had time to bail out. What would have happened afterward was anyone's guess.
