The Cider House Rules (48 page)

Wally wasn’t spraying tonight because it was his last night home; he was going back to college in the morning.

“You’ll look after Candy for me, won’t you, Homer?” Wally asked, as they loomed above the rocky coast and Cape Kenneth’s crowded beach; the scarce bonfires from the summer’s-end beach parties winked; the wheel descended.

Candy would finish her senior year at the girls’ academy in Camden; she’d get home most weekends, but Wally would stay in Orono except for Thanksgiving and Christmas and the longer vacations.

“Right,” said Homer Wells.

“If I were flying—in the war,” Wally said. “
If
I joined, and
if
I flew, I mean,
if
I were in a bomber, I’d rather be in the B-24 than the B-25. I’d rather be
strategic
than
tactical,
bomb things not people. And I wouldn’t want to fly a fighter in the war. That’s shooting people, too.”

Homer Wells didn’t know what Wally was talking about; Homer didn’t follow the war—he didn’t know the news. A B-24 was a four-engine, heavy bomber that was used for strategic bombing—bridges, oil refineries, fuel depots, railroad tracks. It hit industry, it didn’t drop its bombs on armies. That was the work of the B-25—a medium, tactical bomber. Wally had studied the war—with more interest than he pursued his botany (or his other courses) at the University of Maine. But the war, which was called—in Maine, in those days—“the war in Europe,” was very far from Homer’s mind. People with families are the people who worry about wars.

Do Bedouins have wars? wondered Homer Wells. And if they do, do they much care?

He was eager for the harvest to start; he was curious about meeting the migrants, about seeing the Negroes. He didn’t know why. Were they like orphans? Did they not quite belong? Were they not quite of sufficient
use
?

Because he loved Wally, he resolved to keep his mind off Candy. It was the kind of bold resolve that his sense of elevation, on the Ferris wheel, enhanced. And this evening there was a plan; Homer Wells—an orphan attached to routine—liked for every evening to have a plan, even if he was not that excited about this one.

He drove Wally, in Senior’s Cadillac, to Kendall’s Lobster Pound, where Candy was waiting. He left Candy and Wally there. Ray would be out spraying for several hours, and Candy and Wally wanted a private good-bye together before Ray came home. Homer would go pick up Debra Pettigrew and take her to the drive-in in Cape Kenneth; it would be their first drive-in without Candy and Wally, and Homer wondered if the touch-this-but-not-that rules would vary when he and Debra were alone. As he navigated an exact path through the Pettigrews’ violent dogs, he was disappointed in himself that he wasn’t dying to find out whether Debra would or wouldn’t. A particularly athletic dog snapped very loudly, near his face, but the chain around the dog’s neck appeared to strangle the beast in midair; it landed solidly on its rib cage, with a sharp groan, and was slow getting to its feet. Why do people want to keep dogs? Homer wondered.

It was a Western movie, from which Homer could only conclude that crossing the country in a wagon train was an exercise in lunacy and sorrow; at the very least, he thought, one should make some arrangements with the Indians before starting out. The film was void of arrangements, and Homer was unable to arrange for the use of Herb Fowler’s rubbers, which he kept in his pocket—“in case.” Debra Pettigrew was substantially freer than she had ever been before, but her ultimate restraint was no less firm.

“No!” she yelled once.

“There’s no need to shout,” said Homer Wells, removing his hand from the forbidden place.

“Well, that’s the second time you did that particular thing,” Debra pointed out—a mathematical certainty (and other certainties) apparent in her voice. In Maine, in 194_, Homer Wells was forced to accept that what they called “necking” was permitted; what they called “making out” was within the rules; but that what he had done with Melony—what Grace Lynch appeared to be offering him, and what Candy and Wally did (or had done, at least once)—to all of that, the answer was “No!”

But how did Candy ever get pregnant? Homer Wells wondered, with Debra Pettigrew’s damp little face pressed to his chest. Her hair tickled his nose, but he could just manage to see over her—he could witness the Indian massacre. With Herb Fowler dispensing prophylactics even faster than Dr. Larch passed them out to the women at St. Cloud’s, how could Wally have let her get pregnant? Wally was so
provided for;
Homer Wells couldn’t understand why Wally was even interested in war. But would an orphan ever worry that he was spoiled, or untested? Is an orphan ever bored, or restless—or are those luxurious states of mind? He remembered that Curly Day had been bored.

“Are you asleep, Homer?” Debra Pettigrew asked him.

“No,” he said, “I was just thinking.”

“Thinking what?” Debra asked.

“How come Wally and Candy do it, and we don’t?” Homer asked her.

Debra Pettigrew appeared to be wary of the question, or at least she was surprised by its bluntness; she was cautious in composing an answer.

“Well,” she began philosophically. “They’re in love—Wally and Candy. Aren’t they?”

“Right,” said Homer Wells.

“Well, you never said you were in love—with me,” Debra added. “And I never said I was—with you.”

“That’s right,” Homer said. “So it’s against the rules to do it if you aren’t in love?”

“Look at it this way,” said Debra Pettigrew; she bit her lower lip. It was absolutely as hard as she had ever thought. “If you’re in love and there’s an accident—if somebody gets pregnant, is what I mean; then
if
you’re in love, you get married. Wally and Candy are in love, and if they have an accident, they’ll get married.”

Maybe, thought Homer Wells, maybe the
next
time. But what he said was, “I see.” What he thought was, So
those
are the rules! It’s about accidents, it’s about getting pregnant and not wanting to have a baby. My God, is everything about that?

He considered taking the rubber out of his pocket and presenting it to Debra Pettigrew. If the argument was that an accidental pregnancy was really the only reason for not doing it, what did she think of the alternative that Herb Fowler so repeatedly presented? But by arguing in this fashion, wouldn’t he be suggesting that all intimacy could be crudely accounted for—or was crude itself? Or was intimacy crude only for him?

In the movie, several human scalps were dangling from a spear; for reasons unfathomable to Homer Wells, the Indians carried on and on about the spear as if such a spear were a treasure. Suddenly a cavalry officer had his hand pinned to a tree by an arrow; the man went to great lengths (using his teeth and his other hand) to free the arrow from the tree, but the arrow still stuck very prominently through his hand. An Indian with a tomahawk approached the cavalry officer; it looked like the end of him, especially since he insisted on trying to cock his pistol with the thumb of the hand that had the arrow stuck through it.

Why doesn’t he use his good hand? Homer Wells wondered. But the thumb worked; the pistol—finally—was cocked. Homer Wells concluded from this demonstration that the arrow had managed to pass through the hand without damaging the branch of the median nerve that goes to the muscles of the thumb. Lucky man, thought Homer Wells, as the cavalry officer shot the approaching Indian in the heart—it must be the heart, thought Homer Wells, because the Indian died instantly. It was funny how he could see the pictures of the hand in
Gray’s Anatomy
more clearly than he could see the movie.

He took Debra home, begging her forgiveness for not offering to walk her to her door; one of the dogs was loose, it had broken its chain, and it pawed furiously at the driver’s-side window (which Homer had rolled up, just in time). It breathed and slobbered and clicked its teeth against the glass, which became so fogged and smeared that Homer had difficulty seeing when he turned the Cadillac around.

“Cut it out, Eddy!” Debra Pettigrew was screaming at the dog as Homer drove away. “Would you just cut it out, Eddy,
please
!” But the dog chased the Cadillac for nearly a mile.

Eddy? thought Homer Wells. Didn’t Nurse Angela name someone Eddy, once? He thought so; but it must have been someone who was adopted quickly—the way it was supposed to be done.

By the time he got to Kendall’s Lobster Pound, Ray was home. He was making tea and warming his deeply lined, cracked hands on the pot—under his ragged nails was the mechanic’s permanent, oil-black grime.

“Well, look who survived the drive-in!” Ray said. “You better sit a while and have some tea with me.” Homer could see that Candy and Wally were out on the dock, huddled together. “Lovebirds don’t feel the cold, I guess,” Ray said to Homer. “It don’t look like they’re finished saying good-bye.”

Homer was happy to have the tea and to sit with Ray; he liked Ray and he knew Ray liked him.

“What’d you learn today?” Ray asked him. Homer was going to say something about the drive-in rules but he guessed that wasn’t what Ray meant.

“Nothing,” said Homer Wells.

“No, I’ll bet you learned somethin’,” Ray said. “You’re a learner. I know, because I was one. Once you see how somethin’ is done, you know how to do it yourself; that’s all I mean.” Ray had taught Homer oil changes and lubrications, plugs and points and engine timing, fuel-line maintenance and front-end alignment; he’d shown the boy how to tighten a clutch, and—to Ray’s astonishment—Homer had remembered. He’d also shown him a valve job and how to replace the universal. In one summer Homer Wells had learned more about mechanics than Wally knew. But it wasn’t just Homer’s manual dexterity that Ray was fond of; Ray respected loneliness, and an orphan, he imagined, had a fair share of that.

“Shoot,” said Ray, “I’ll bet there’s nothing’ you couldn’t learn—nothin’ your hands wouldn’t remember, if your hands ever got to hold it, whatever it was.”

“Right,” said Homer Wells, smiling. He remembered the perfect balance in the set of dilators with the Douglass points; how you could hold one steadily between your thumb and index finger just by resting the shaft against the pad of your middle finger. It would move only and exactly when and where you moved it. And how wonderfully precise it was, Homer thought: that the vaginal speculum comes in more than one size; that there was always a size that was just right. And how sensitive an adjustment could be accomplished by just a half turn of the little thumbscrew, how the duck-billed speculum could hold the lips of the vagina open
exactly
wide enough.

Homer Wells, twenty-one, breathing in the steam from the hot tea, sat waiting for his life to begin.

In the Cadillac with Wally, driving back to Ocean View—the rock-and-water prettiness of Heart’s Haven giving way to the scruffier, more tangled land of Heart’s Rock—Homer said, “I was wondering—but don’t tell me if you’d rather not talk about it—I was just wondering how it happened that Candy got pregnant. I mean, weren’t you using anything?”

“Sure I was,” Wally said. “I was using one of Herb Fowler’s rubbers, but it had a hole in it.”

“It had a hole in it?” said Homer Wells.

“Not a big one,” Wally said, “but I could tell it had a hole—you know, it leaked.”

“Any hole is big enough,” Homer said.

“Sure is,” Wally said. “The way he carries the things around with him, it probably got poked by something in his pocket.”

“I guess you don’t use the rubbers Herb throws at you anymore,” said Homer Wells.

“That’s right,” Wally said.

When Wally was asleep—as peacefully as a prince, as out-to-the-world as a king—Homer Wells slipped out of bed, found his pants, found the rubbers in the pocket, and took one to the bathroom where he filled it up with water from the cold water tap. The hole was tiny but precise—a fine but uninterrupted needle of water streamed out of the end of the rubber. The hole was bigger than a pinprick but not nearly so large as a nail would make; maybe Herb Fowler used a thumbtack, or the point of a compass, thought Homer Wells.

It was a deliberate sort of hole, perfectly placed, dead center. The thought of Herb Fowler making the holes made Homer Wells shiver. He remembered the first fetus he’d seen, on his way back from the incinerator—how it appeared to have fallen from the sky. He recalled the extended arms of the murdered fetus from Three Mile Falls. And the bruise that was green-going-to-yellow on Grace Lynch’s breast. Had Grace’s journey to St. Cloud’s originated with one of Herb Fowler’s prophylactics?

In St. Cloud’s he had seen anguish and the plainer forms of unhappiness—and depression, and destructiveness. He was familiar with mean-spiritedness and with injustice, too. But this is evil, isn’t it? wondered Homer Wells. Have I seen evil before? He thought of the woman with the pony’s penis in her mouth. What do you do when you recognize evil? he wondered.

He looked out Wally’s window—but in the darkness, in his mind’s eye, he saw the eroded, still unplanted hillside behind the hospital and the boys’ division at St. Cloud’s; he saw the thick but damaged, sound-absorbing forest beyond the river that carried away his grief for Fuzzy Stone. If he had known Mrs. Grogan’s prayer, he would have tried it, but the prayer that Homer used to calm himself was the end of Chapter 43 of
David Copperfield.
There being twenty more chapters to go, these words were perhaps too uncertain for a prayer, and Homer spoke them to himself uncertainly—not as if he believed the words were true, but as if he were trying to force them to be true; by repeating and repeating the words he might make the words true for
him,
for Homer Wells:

I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me. They are gone, and I resume the journey of my story.

But all that night he lay awake because the phantoms of those days were
not
gone. Like the tiny, terrible holes in the prophylactics, the phantoms of those days were not easy to detect—and their meaning was unknown—but they were there.