by John Irving
When Homer's knees started to wobble, Vernon ripped the mask off his face--the head strap raking his ears upward and tangling his hair.
"Got the picture?" Vernon asked.
"Right!" Homer called out, his lungs screaming.
He even liked Herb Fowler. He'd been with Herb less than two minutes when the prophylactic sailed his way and struck him in the forehead. All Meany Hyde had said was, "Hi, Herb, this here is Homer Wells--he's Wally's pal from Saint Cloud's." And Herb had flipped the rubber at Homer.
"Wouldn't be so many orphans if more people put these on their joints," Herb said.
Homer Wells had never seen a prophylactic in a commercial wrapper. The ones that Dr. Larch kept at the hospital, and distributed to many of the women, in handfuls, were sealed in something plain and see-through, like wax paper; no brand names adorned them. Dr. Larch was always complaining that he didn't know where all the rubbers were going, but Homer knew that Melony had helped herself on many occasions. It had been Melony, of course, who had introduced Homer to prophylactics.
Herb Fowler's girlfriend, Louise Tobey, was doubtlessly professional in handling Herb's prophylactics. When Homer touched himself, he thought about Squeeze Louise--he imagined her dexterity with a prophylactic, her fast and nimble fingers, the way she held a paint brush and clenched her teeth, slapping the paint on thick on the apple-mart shelves, blowing a lock of her hair off her forehead with a puff of breath that was bitter with cigarettes.
Homer didn't allow himself to masturbate when Candy was on his mind. He lay not touching himself in Wally's room, with Wally breathing deeply and sleeping peacefully beside him. Whenever Homer did imagine that Candy was sleeping beside him, they were never touching each other intimately--they were just holding tightly to each other in a grip of chaste affection. ("Nothing genital," as Melony used to say.)
Candy smoked, but she was so mannered and exaggerated that she often dropped her cigarette in her lap, jumping up and furiously brushing away the sparks, always laughing.
"Oh, what a clod!" she'd cry. If so, thought Homer Wells, only when you're smoking.
Louise Tobey wolfed in a cigarette; she sucked in a cloud of smoke and blew so little back, Homer wondered where it went. The older apple-mart women were constant smokers (all except Grace Lynch, who had resolved not to part her lips--not for any reason), but Florence and Irene and Big Dot Taft had been smoking so long, they appeared offhanded about it. Only Debra Pettigrew, Dot's kid sister, smoked with Candy's infrequency and awkwardness. Squeeze Louise smoked with a quick, sure violence that Homer imagined must have been inspired by Herb Fowler's rough-and-ready use of rubbers.
In all of Heart's Rock and Heart's Haven--from the briny gurgle of lobstering life to the chlorine security of the Haven Club pool; from the bustle of the making ready in the apple mart to the work in the fields--there was nothing that caused Homer a single, sharp reminder of St. Cloud's, nothing until the first rainy day, when they sent him, with a small crew of scrubbers and painters, to the cider house.
Nothing about the building, from the outside, prepared him. On or in various farm vehicles, he had lumbered past it often--a long, thin, one-story, shed-roofed building in the shape of an arm held at a right angle; in the elbow of the building, where there was a double-door entrance, were the cider mill and the press (the grinder, the pump, the pump engine and the grinder engine, and the thousand-gallon tank).
One wing of the building was studded with refrigeration units; it was a cold-storage room for the cider. In the other wing was a small kitchen, beyond which were extended two long rows of iron hospital-style beds, each with its own blanket and pillow. Mattresses were rolled neatly on each of the more than twenty beds. Sometimes a blanket on wire runners enclosed a bed, or a section of beds, in the semi-privacy that Homer Wells associated with a hospital ward. Unpainted plywood shelves between the beds formed primitive but stable wardrobe closets, which contained those twisted, goose-necked reading lamps wherever there was the occasional electrical outlet. The furniture was shabby but neat, as if rescued or rejected from hospitals and offices where it had been exposed to relentless but considerate use.
This wing of the cider house had the functional economy of a military barracks, but it had too many personal touches to be institutional. There were curtains, for example, and Homer could tell that they would have been adequate, if faded, at the Worthingtons' dining-room windows--which was where they'd come from. Homer also recognized a particularly exaggerated peacefulness in a few of the flowery landscape paintings and animal portraits that were hung on the plasterboard walls--in such unlikely places (at times, too high; at times, too low) that Homer was sure they'd been hung to hide holes. Maybe boot holes, maybe fist holes, perhaps whole-head holes; there seemed to Homer Wells to radiate from the room a kind of dormitory anger and apprehension he recognized from his nearly twenty years in the boys' division at St. Cloud's.
"What is this place?" he asked Meany Hyde, the rain pelting on the tin roof above them.
"The cider house," said Meany.
"But who sleeps here--who stays here? Do people live here?" Homer asked. It was remarkably clean, yet the atmosphere of use was so prevalent, Homer was reminded of the old bunkrooms in St. Cloud's where the woodsmen and sawyers had dreamed out their exhausted lives.
"It's crew quarters, for the pickers," Meany Hyde said. "Durin' the harvest, the pickers stay here--the migrants."
"It's for the colored folks," said Big Dot Taft, plopping down the mops and pails. "Every year, we make it nice for them. We wash everythin' and we give everythin' a fresh coat of paint."
"I gotta wax the press boards," Meany Hyde said, sliding away from what he thought was the women's work--although Homer and Wally would perform it regularly most rainy days of the summer.
"Negroes?" Homer Wells asked. "The pickers are Negroes?"
"Black as night, some of them," said Florence Hyde. "They're okay."
"They're nice!" called Meany Hyde.
"Some of them are nicer than others," said Big Dot Taft.
"Like other people I know," Irene Titcomb said, giggling, hiding her scar.
"They're nice because Mrs. Worthington is nice to them!" Meany Hyde yelled from the spattered vicinity of the cider press.
The building smelled like vinegar--old cider that had turned. It was a strong smell, but there was nothing stifling or unclean about it.
Debra Pettigrew smiled at Homer over the bucket they were sharing; he cautiously returned her smile while wondering where Wally was working today, in the rain, and imagining Ray Kendall at work. Ray would either be out on the choppy sea in his glistening sou'wester or else working on the wiring of the International Harvester in the building called Number Two.
Grace Lynch was scrubbing the linoleum counters in the kitchen of the cider house; Homer marveled that he had not noticed her there before, that he hadn't even known she was part of their crew. Louise Tobey, sucking a cigarette down to its nub and flicking the butt out the picking crew-quarters' door, remarked that her mop wringer was "out of joint."
"It's jammed, or somethin'," Squeeze Louise said crossly.
"Louise's mop wringer is out of joint," Big Dot Taft said mockingly.
"Poor Louise--jammed your mop wringer, huh?" said Florence Hyde, who laughed, which caused Big Dot Taft to roar.
"Oh, cut it out!" Louise said. She kicked her mop wringer.
"What's going on out there?" called Meany Hyde.
"Louise has got an overworked wringer!" said Big Dot Taft. Homer looked at Louise, who was cross; then he looked at Debra Pettigrew, who blushed.
"Are you overusin' your poor wringer, Louise?" Irene Titcomb asked.
"Louise, you must be stickin' too many mops in your wringer, darlin'," said Florence Hyde.
"Be nice, all of you!" cried Meany Hyde.
"Too much of one mop, that's for sure," said Big Dot Taft. Even Louise found that funny. When she looked at Homer Wells, he looked away; Debra Pettigrew was w
atching him, so he looked away from her, too.
When Herb Fowler came by, at the lunch break, he walked into the cider house and said, "Whew! You can smell niggers in here a whole year later."
"I think it's just vinegar," Meany Hyde said.
"You tellin' me you can't smell niggers?" Herb Fowler asked. "You smell 'em?" Herb asked Louise. She shrugged. "How about you?" Herb asked Homer. "Can't you smell 'em?"
"I can smell vinegar, old apples, old cider," Homer said.
He saw the rubber sailing toward him in time to catch it.
"You know what niggers do with those?" Herb asked him. He flipped another rubber to Louise Tobey, who caught it without the slightest effort--she expected prophylactics to be flying in her direction hourly. "Show him what a nigger does with it, Louise," Herb said. The other women were bored; they'd seen this demonstration all their lives; Debra Pettigrew looked nervously at Homer Wells and deliberately away from Louise; Louise herself seemed nervous and bored at the same time. She ripped the rubber out of its wrapper and stuck her index finger in it--her fingernail poked out the rubber, her nail's fine edge next to the nipplelike end.
"One year I told the niggers that they should just stick their joints into these rubbers if they didn't want to be catchin' diseases or havin' any new babies," Herb said. He grabbed Louise's finger in the rubber sheath and held it out for everyone to see. "And the next year, all the niggers told me that the rubbers didn't work. They said they stuck their fingers in there, like I showed 'em, and they still got diseases and new babies every time they turned around!"
No one laughed; no one believed it; it was an old joke to all of them, except to Homer Wells; and the idea of people having babies every time they turned around was not especially funny to Homer.
When Herb Fowler offered to drive them all to the diner on Drinkwater Road for a hot lunch, Homer said he didn't want to go; Mrs. Worthington made his lunch, and Wally's, every morning, and Homer felt obliged to eat his--he always enjoyed it. He also knew the crew was not supposed to leave the orchards for a lunch break, especially not in any of the Ocean View vehicles, and Herb Fowler was driving the green van that Olive used most often. It wasn't a hard rule, but Homer knew that if Wally had been working in the cider house Herb wouldn't have suggested it.
Homer ate his lunch, appropriately, in the cider house kitchen; when he glanced into the long room with the two rows of narrow beds, he thought how much the rolled mattresses and blankets resembled people sleeping there--except the shapes upon the iron beds were too still to be sleepers. They are like bodies waiting to be identified, thought Homer Wells.
Even though it was raining, he went outside to look at the collection of dead cars and junked tractor-and-trailer parts that festooned the dirt driveway in front of the cider house. In the back was a churned-up area of discolored weeds where the mash, or the pomace, was flung after the press. A pig farmer from Waldoboro drove all the way just to have it, Meany Hyde had told Homer; the mash was great for pigs.
Some of the dead cars had South Carolina plates. Homer Wells had never looked at a map of the United States; he had seen a globe, but it was a crude one--the states weren't marked. He knew South Carolina was a long way south; the Negroes came from there in trucks, Meany Hyde had said, or they drove their own cars, but some of their cars were so old and beaten up that they died here; Meany wasn't sure how all the Negroes got back to South Carolina.
"They pick grapefruits down in Florida, I think," Meany said, "and peaches when it's peach time somewhere else, and apples here. They travel around, just pickin' things."
Homer watched a sea gull that was watching him from the roof of the cider house; the gull was so drawn in upon itself that Homer was reminded it was raining and went back inside.
He rolled down one of the mattresses and stretched out on it, placing both the pillow and the blanket under his head. Something invited him to smell the blanket and the pillow, but he could detect nothing more than the aura of vinegar and a scent he categorized as simply old. The blanket and pillow felt more human than they smelled, but the deeper he pushed his face into them, the more human their smell became. He thought about the strain on Louise Tobey's face, and how her finger had stretched itself out in the rubber, and the way her nail had looked ready to slice through. He recalled the mattress in the sawyers' lodge in St. Cloud's, where Melony had introduced him to the way he felt now. He took himself out of his work jeans and masturbated quickly, the springs of the old iron bed creaking sharply. Something in his vision seemed clearer after he had finished. When he sat up on the bed, he spotted the other body that had taken the liberty of resting in the cider house. Even with her body curled so tightly in upon itself--like the gull in the rain or like a fetus or like a woman with cramps--Homer had no trouble recognizing Grace Lynch.
Even if she hadn't been watching him, even if she'd never been turned in his direction, she surely could not have mistaken the rhythm of the old bed springs--or even, Homer thought, the detectable sharpness of the odor of the semen he cupped in his hand. He stepped quietly outdoors and held his hand out in the rain. The sea gull, still huddled on the cider house roof, took a sudden interest in him--there was a history of successful scavenging associated with this place. When Homer went back in the cider house, he saw that Grace Lynch had fixed her mattress the way it had been and was standing by the window with her face pressed into the curtain. You had to look twice to see Grace Lynch; he wouldn't have seen her standing there if he hadn't already known she was in the room.
"I been there," Grace Lynch said softly, without looking at Homer. "Where you come from," she explained. "I been there--I don't know how you managed a night's sleep."
Her thinness was especially sharp, even knifelike in what dead, gray light the rainy day provided at that window; she drew the faded curtain around her narrow shoulders like a shawl. She wouldn't look at Homer Wells, and nothing in her brittle, shivering stance could have been interpreted as beckoning, yet Homer felt himself drawn to her--in the way we are urged, especially in gloomy weather, to seek the familiar. In St. Cloud's, one grew accustomed to victims, and the attitude of a victim shone stronger than reflected sunlight from Grace Lynch. Homer felt such a contradictory glow shining forth from her that he was impelled to go to her and hold her limp, damp hands.
"Funny," she whispered, still not looking at him. "It was so awful there, but I felt real safe." She put her head on his chest and stuck her sharp knee between his legs, twisting her bony hip into him. "Not like here," she whispered. "It's dangerous here." Her thin bony hand slipped into his pants, as skittish as a lizard.
The noisy arrival of the green van containing the escapees--to a hot lunch--saved him. Like a startled cat, Grace sprang crazily away from him. When they all came through the door, she was digging the grit from a seam in the linoleum on the kitchen counter--using a wire brush that Homer hadn't noticed she'd had in her hip pocket. Like so much of Grace Lynch, it had been concealed. But the tension in the look she gave him at quitting time--when he rode back to the apple mart on Big Dot Taft's jolly lap--was enough to tell Homer Wells that whatever was "dangerous" had not deserted Grace Lynch and that he could travel far but never so far that the victims of St. Cloud's would ever desert him.
The night after Grace Lynch attacked him, Homer had his first date with Debra Pettigrew; it was also the first time he went to the drive-in movie with Candy and Wally. They all went in Senior's Cadillac. Homer and Debra Pettigrew sat in the splotched back seat where only a couple of months ago poor Curly Day had lost control of himself; Homer was unaware that the purpose of drive-in movies was, ultimately, for losing control of oneself in the back seats of cars.
"Homer's never been to a drive-in before," Wally announced to Debra Pettigrew when they picked her up. The Pettigrews were a large family who kept dogs--many dogs, mostly chained; some were chained to the bumpers of the several undriven, believed-to-be-dead cars that so permanently occupied the front lawn that the grass grew through the
drive shafts and the axle bearings. As Homer stepped gingerly around the snapping dogs en route to Debra's front door, the dogs lunged against the unbudging cars.
The Pettigrews were a large family in both numbers and in flesh; Debra's fetching chubbiness was but a slight reminder of the family's potential for girth. At the door, Debra's mother greeted Homer massively--she of the monstrous genes responsible for the likes of Debra's sister, Big Dot Taft.
"De-BRA!" shrieked Debra's mother. "It's your BEAU! Hi, sweetie-pie," she said to Homer. "I've heard all about how nice you are, and what good manners you've got--please excuse the mess." Debra, blushing beside her, tried to hurry Homer outside as forcefully as her mother wished to usher him in. He glimpsed several huge people--some with remarkably swollen faces, as if they'd lived half their lives underwater or had survived incredible beatings; all with wide, friendly smiles, which contradicted the untold viciousness of the dogs barking in such a frenzy at Homer's back.
"We have to go, Mom," Debra whined, shoving Homer out the door. "We can't be late."
"Late for what?" someone cackled from the house, which shook with heavy laughter; coughs followed, which were followed by labored sighing before the dogs erupted in such force that Homer thought the noise of them would be sufficient to keep him and Debra from ever reaching the Cadillac.
"Shut UP!" Debra yelled at the dogs. They all stopped, but only for a second.
