LOVE OLIVE

'A hundred and five pounds,' said Homer Wells.

'Alive,' Candy whispered.

'Paralyzed,' Nurse Angela said.

'Encephalitis,' said Wilbur Larch.

'How could his temperature be ninety-two degrees, Wilbur?' Nurse Edna asked.

Dr. Larch didn't know; he wouldn't venture a guess. It was another one of those details—the clarification of which would take quite a long time. For Captain Worthington, who had abandoned his plane over Burma — about ten months ago—the clarification of many such details would take years.

It was raining so heavily when he jumped, it seemed to Wally that his parachute had to push against the rain to open. Yet the roar of the plane was so near, Wally was afraid he'd pulled the cord too soon. He was afraid of the bamboo—he'd heard stories of fliers being impaled by it—but he missed the bamboo and landed in a teak tree, a branch of which separated his shoulder. His head may have hit the trunk, or else the pain in his shoulder caused him to lose consciousness. It was dark when he woke up, and since he couldn't see how far below the ground was, he didn't dare to free himself from the chute cords until morning. Then he gave himself too much morphine— for his shoulder—and lost the syringe in the dark.

In his haste to abandon the plane, he'd not had time to locate a machete; in the morning he spent quite a while \'7b531\'7d cutting through the chute cords—rusing only the bayonet in his ankle sheath, and having the use of only one strong arm. He was lowering himself to the ground when his dog tags caught on a vine, and because of his bad shoulder he could neither support all his weight with one arm nor free the tags, and so he lost them; the chain cut his neck when the tags carne off, and he landed on an old teakv/ood log that was hidden under the ferns and the dead palm fronds. The log rolled, and he sprained his ankle. When he realized that in the monsoon weather he would never know east from west, that was when he discovered that his compass was gone. He rubbed some sulfa powder on his cut neck.

Wally had no idea where China was; he picked his way by moving through whatever was the least dense. In this way, after three days, he had the impression that the jungle was either thinning out or that he was getting better at picking his way through it. China was east of Wally, but Wally went south; China was up—over the mountains —but Wally sought the valleys. Where Wally was, the valleys ran southwesterly. He was right about one thing: the jungle was thinning out. It was also getting warmer. Every night he climbed a tree and slept in its crotch. The large, twisted trunks of the peepul tree—as gnarled as giant, wooden cables—made the best crotches for sleeping, but WaJly wasn't the first creature to JFigure this out. One night, at eye level, in the crotch of a peepul tree next to him, a leopard was examining itself for ticks. Wally followed the leopard's example, and discovered several. He gave up trying to remove the leeches.

One day he saw a python—a small one, about fifteen feet. It was lying on a rock, swallowing something the approximate size and shape of a beagle. Wally guessed it was a monkey, although he couldn't remember if he had seen any monkeys. He had seen monkeys, of course, but he'd forgotten them; he had a fever. He tried to take his temperature, but the thermometer in his first-aid kit was broken. \'7b532\'7d

The day he saw a tiger swim across a river was the day he began to notice the mosquitoes; the climate was changing. The river with the tiger in it had produced a broader valley; the forest was changing, too. He caught a fish with his hands and ate its liver raw; he cooked frogs as big as cats, but their legs were fishier than the frog legs he remembered. Perhaps it was the lack of garlic.

He ate something that was the consistency of a mango and had no taste whatsoever; the fruit left a musty aftertaste, and for a whole day he vomited and had chills. Then the river where he'd seen the tiger turned into a bigger river; the monsoon water had a powerful current; Wally was encouraged to build a raft. He remembered the rafts he had engineered for travel on Drinkwater Lake, and he cried to think how much harder it was to build a raft with bamboo and vines than with pitch pine and ropes—and stray boards and nails. And how much heavier the green bamboo was, too. It didn't matter that the raft leaked; it barely floated; and if he needed to portage, he knew he couldn't carry it.

He noticed more mosquitoes, especially when the river broadened and the current slowed down, and he just drifted. He had no idea how many days he drifted, or when he first knew for certain that he had a fever; about the time he saw the rice paddies and the water buffaloes, he would say later. One day he would remember waving to the women in the rice paddies; they looked so surprised to see him.

When Wally saw the rice paddies, he must have known he'd gone the wrong way. He had gone into the heart of Burma, which is shaped like a kite with a long tail; he was much nearer to Mandalay than he was to China, and the Japanese held Mandalay. But Wally had a fever of one hundred four; he just drifted; sometimes, he couldn't tell the river from the rice paddies. It was strange how both the men and women wore long skirts, but only the men covered their hair; they wore what looked like baskets on their heads, and the baskets \'7b533\'7d were wrapped with strips of brightly colored silk. The women's heads were bare, but many of them put: flowers in their hair. Both the men and the women braided their hair. They seemed to be eating all the time, but they were just chewing betel nuts. Their teeth were stained; their lips made them appear as if they'd been drinking blood, but that was just the betel juice.

The shelters they took Wally to were all alike—onestory, thatched houses on bamboo stilts; the families ate outdoors on a porch. They gave him rice and tea and lots of things with curry. When his fever went down, Wally ate panthay khowse (noodles and chicken) and nga sak kin (curried fish balls). Those were the first words that his Burmese rescuers tried to teach him, but Wally misunderstood; he thought nga sak kin was the name of the man who had carried him off the raft and held Wally's head steady while the man's wife fed Wally with her fingers. She was wonderfully small and wore a sheer white blouse; her husband touched the blouse and called it by name, trying to teach Wally more of his language.

'Aingyis,' the man said, and Wally thought that was the wife's name. She smelled like the inside of the thatched houses—she smelled like chintz and lemon rind.

They were such a nice couple, Nga Sak Kin and Aingyis; Wally repeated their names out loud and smiled. They smiled back at him, Mr. Curried Fish Balls and his wife, Mrs. Blouse. She smelled as sticky-sweet as frangipani; she smelled as citrous as bergamot.

With the fever had come the stiffness in his neck and back, but when the fever broke and he stopped vomiting —when the headaches were over and the shaking chills were gone, and he wasn't even nauseous anymore— that was when he noticed the paralysis. At that time, it was a stiff paralysis in both his lower and upper extremities. ('Spasticity,' Wilbur Larch would have called it.) Wally's arms and legs stuck straight out and he couldn't move them; he was delirious for two or three weeks and \'7b534\'7d when he tried to talk, his speech was thick and slow. He had trouble eating because of the tremors in his lips and tongue. He couldn't empty his bladder, and the natives had to catheterize him with a tiny, rough bamboo shoot —in order for him to urinate at all.

And they kept moving him. They always moved him over water. Once he saw elephants; they were dragging logs out of the forests. The surface of the water was forever interrupted with turtles and black snakes and water hyacinths, and betel juice—a darker red than the blood that traced Wally's urine.

'Nga Sak Kin?' Wally asked. 'Aingyis?' he asked. Where had they gone? Although the faces of his rescuers kept changing, they seemed to understand him. Must come from a big family, Wally thought. 'I'm paralyzed, aren't I?' he asked the small, pretty men and women, who always smiled. One of the women washed and combed his hair; her whole family watched Wally's hair drying in the sun—the blond light leaping into it as it dried: how that impressed them!

They gave him a long sheer white blouse to wear. 'Aingyis,' they said. Oh, it's a present from her! he thought. Then they covered his blond hair with a dark wig—it was a waxy pigtail, and they piled it high on top of his head and studded it with flowers. The children giggled. They shaved his face so close his skin burned; they shaved his legs— below the knee, where his legs protruded from the long skirt they made him wear. The game was to make him a woman. The game was to make him safe, to make him blend in. Because his face was so pretty, it was easier for them to make him a woman than a man; the ideal Burmese woman has no breasts.

It is a shame that they weren't more careful when they catheterized him—they were so careful about everything else. The bamboo shoot wasn't always clean; the catheter's roughness hurt him and made him bleed, but it was the dirtiness that would give him the infection. The infection would make him sterile. The epididymis, \'7b535\'7d Wilbur Larch could have informed him, is a single coiled tube in which the sperm mature after leaving the testicle. Epididymitis (an infection of that little tube) prevents sperm from reaching the sperm duct. In Wally's case, the infection would permanently seal his tube.

They were correct to catheterize him—it was only the how that was wrong. He suffered urinary retention, his bladder was distended—they had no choice but to relieve him. At times, Wally would wonder if there wasn't an easier way—or if the bamboo was clean—but what could he say to them? 'Aingyis,' he would say. 'Nga Sak Kin?' he would ask them.

Months later, he would hear bombing. 'Irrawaddy,' they would explain. They were bombing the oil fields along the Irrawaddy. Wally knew where he was. He used to bomb those fields, too. Before he heard the bombing (and, as always, disguised as a woman)., he was taken to a doctor in Mandalay. His eyes were smarting because they'd rubbed a curry paste on his face to make him look brown. But, up close, with those blue eyes and that patrician nose, he couldn't have fooled anyone. He saw many Japanese in Mandalay. The doctor had trouble explaining to Wally what was wrong with him. He said the following in English: 'Japanese B mosquito.'

'I was bitten by a Japanese mosquito?' Wally said. But what's a B mosquito? he wondered. He no longer needed a catheter to pee, but the infection had done its damage.

By the time he heard the bombing of the Irrawaddy, the paralysis had left his upper extremities—he had the full use of his arms, again—and the spasticity had left his legs; although his legs were still paralyzed, it was a flaccid paralysis and not quite symmetrical (his left leg was more dead than his right). His bladder was okay, and except for the effects of curry, his bowels were okay, too; what he could detect of his sexual function felt normal.

'There are no autonomic effects to encephalitis,' \'7b536\'7d Wilbur Larch would explain to Candy and to Homer Wells

'What's that mean?' Candy asked.

'It means that Wally can have a normal sex life,' said Homer Wells, who didn't know about Wally's epididymis. Wally would have a normal sex life, but he wouldn't have an adequate sperm count. He would still have orgasm and ejaculation—since so much of the ejaculate is made in the prostate, which is quite a way downstream. He just could never make his own baby.

At the time, none of them knew Wally had been sterilized; they knew only about the encephalitis.

Wally caught it from the mosquitoes. It was called Japanese B encephalitis, and it was quite common in Asia during the war. 'It is an arthropod-borne virus,' Wilbur Larch explained.

Residual flaccid paralysis of the lower extremities was not a common effect of the disease, but it was well enough known to be documented. There are numerous changes that occur in the tissue of the brain, but the changes in the spinal cord look very much like polio. The incubation period is about a week long and the acute disease process lasts only a week or ten days; the recovery is very slow, with muscular tremors lasting sometimes for months.

'Considering that it comes from birds, it's a big disease,' Wilbur Larch said to Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela. The mosquito picks up the virus from birds and transmits it to men and other large animals.

Wally's face was so pretty, and he'd lost so much weight: that was why they disguised him as a woman. The Japanese were both attracted to and intimidated by the Burmese women—especially the Padaung women with their high brass collars wound in spirals to stretch their necks. That Wally was a woman and an invalid made him an untouchable. That they had made him look Eurasian also made him an outcast.

When the monsoon season ended, in October, they \'7b537\'7d either traveled on the river at nights or they protected him from the sun with an umbrella—and with more curry paste. He got very tired of curried fish balls, but he kept asking for them—or so the Burmese thought; that was all they gave him. And when he was delirious, he said Candy's name. One of the boatmen asked him about it.

'Candy?' the boatman inquired politely. That day they were in a sampan; Wally lay under a roof of mats and watched the boatman sculling.

'Aingyis,' Wally said. He meant, like her—a good woman, a wife.

The boatman nodded. At the next port on the river— Wally didn't know where: it might have been Yandoon —they gave him another sheer white blouse.

'Candy!' the boatman said. Wally thought he meant, give it to Candy. He smiled; he just kept drifting. The sampan's sharp nose seemed to smell the way. It was a country of smells to Wally—it was a fragrant dream.

Wilbur Larch could imagine Wally's journey. It was an ether journey, of course. Elephants and oil fields, rice paddies and bombs falling, dressed up as a woman and paralyzed from the waist down—Larch had been there; he had been everywhere. He had no trouble imagining Rangoon and water buffaloes. Every ether dream has its equivalent of British underground agents smuggling American pilots across the Bay of Bengal. Wally's trip through Burma was a voyage Wilbur Larch had often undertaken. The black-currant odor of petunias was at war with the odor of dung, all the way.

They flew Wally across the Bay of Bengal in a small plane with a British pilot and a Sinhalese crew. Wilbur Larch had taken many such flights.

'Do you speak Sinhala?' the Englishman asked Wally, who sat in the co-pilot seat. The pilot smelled of garlic and turmeric.

'I don't even know what Sinhala is,' Wally said. When he shut his eyes, he could still see the white, waxy \'7b538\'7d flowers of the wild lime bushes; he could still see the jungle.

'Principal language of Ceylon, my boy,' the pilot said. The pilot also smelled like tea.

'We're going to Ceylon?' Wally asked.

'Can't keep a blond in Burma, lad,' the Englishman said. 'Don't you know Burma's full of Nips?' But Wally preferred to remember his native friends. They had taught him to salaam—a low bow with the right hand on the forehead (always the right hand, they'd explained); it was a bow of salutation. And when he was sick, someone had always stirred the punkah for him—a punkah is a large, screen-shaped fan that is moved by a rope (pulled by a servant).

'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 \'7b539\'7d 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 \'7b540\'7d 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

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 645