John Irving - The Cider House Rules

'Mine ain't got no middle,' Muddy observed of Candy's bike.

'That make it go faster,' Peaches said. He tried to move Angel's bike forward, as if his feet were paddles.

'You ain't ridin' that thing, you fuckin' it,' one of the men said, and everyone laughed. Black Pan ran up behind Peaches and started pushing him faster.

'Cut that shit out!' Peaches cried, but Black Pan got the bike rolling so fast that he couldn't keep up with it.

'I can't be in no race if someone don't push me, too,' Muddy said, and two of the men got him rolling faster than Peaches, who had disappeared over a hill into the next field (from which the men could hear him screaming).

'Holy shit!' said Muddy, when he was under way. He pedaled so hard that the front wheel rose off the ground, and then the bicycle rode right out from under him. The men were howling now, and Black Pan picked up Muddy's fallen bicycle; he was the next to try it.

'You gonna try it, too?' Mr. Rose asked Homer.

As long as Angel and Candy weren't around to watch him, Homer thought he would. 'Sure,' Homer said. 'I'm next!' he yelled at Black Pan, who was balancing the bicycle in place, his feet slipping off the pedals; he fell over on his side before he could get moving.

'That was no real turn!' Black Pan said. 'I get another try.'

'Are you going to try it?' Homer asked Mr. Rose.

'Not me,' said Mr. Rose.

'The baby's cryin',' someone said.

'Go pick her up,' said someone else.

'I'll take care of that,' said Mr. Rose to all of them. 'I'll watch the baby-you all play.'

Peaches appeared over the hill; he was walking the bicycle beside him, and he was limping.

'It hit a tree,' he explained. 'It went right at the tree like the tree was its enemy.' {679}

'You supposed to steer it,' Muddy told him.

'It steer itself,' Peaches said. 'It don't listen to me.'

Homer supported Black Pan while the cook mounted Candy's bike a second time. 'Here we go,' Black Pan said with determination, but he kept one arm wrapped around Homer's neck; he had only one hand on the handlebars, and he wasn't pedaling.

'You've got to pedal it, to make it go,' Homer told him.

'You got to push me first,' Black Pan said.

'Somethin' burning!' someone shouted.

'Oh shit, my corn bread!' Black Pan said. He lunged to one side, his arm still around Homer's neck so that Homer fell over with him-on top of the bicycle.

'I told you he was gonna burn that bread,' Peaches told Muddy.

'Give me that bike,' Muddy said, taking Angel's bike away from Peaches.

Two of the men were giving Homer a push.

'I got it, I got it,' Homer told them, so they let go. But he didn't have it. He veered sharply in one direction, then he veered back toward the men, who had to run out of his way; then he jackknifed the bike and went tumbling one way-the bike went another.

Everyone was laughing now. Peaches looked at Homer Wells lying on the ground.

'Sometimes, it don't help if you white!' Peaches told Homer, and everyone howled.

'It help, if you white, most of the time,' said Mr. Rose.

He stood in the cider house door, the smoke from the burning corn bread billowing behind him, his daughter's daughter in his arms-the pacifier a seemingly permanent fixture in her mouth. And after Mr. Rose had spoken, he stuck a pacifier in his mouth, too.

In the heart of the valley that was at the bottom of Frying Pan, where the ocean might be a hundred miles away and no breath from the sea ever reached, Rose Rose was stretched out in the dark grass under a Northern Spy that {680} no one had picked yet. Angel Wells was stretched out beside her. She let her arm loll on his waist; he ran his finger very lightly over her face, following the line of her scar down her nose to her lip. When he got to her lip, she held his hand still and kissed his finger.

She had taken off the work shoes and the blue jeans, but she kept Candy's bathing suit and the T-shirt on.

'Wouldn't of had no fun at no beach, anyway,' she said.

'We'll go another day,' Angel said.

'We won't go nowhere,' she said. They kissed each other for a while. Then Rose Rose said, 'Tell me 'bout it again.' Angel Wells began to describe the ocean, but she interrupted him. 'No, not that part,'she said. 'I don't care'bout no ocean. Tell me 'bout the other part-where we all livin' together in the same house. You and me and my baby and your father and Mistuh and Missus Worthington,' Rose Rose said. 'That the part that get to me,' she said, smiling.

And he began again: about how it was possible. He was sure that his father and Wally and Candy wouldn't object.

'You all crazy,' she told Angel. 'But go on,' she said.

There was plenty of room, Angel assured her.

'Ain't nobody gonna mind 'bout the baby?' she asked him; she shut her eyes; with her eyes shut, she could see what Angel was describing a little better.

That was when Angel Wells became a fiction writer, whether he knew it or not. That's when he learned how to make the make-believe matter to him more than real life mattered to him; that's when he learned how to paint a picture that was not real and never would be real, but in order to be believed at all-even on a sunny Indian summer day-it had to be better made and seem more real than real; it had to sound at least possible. Angel talked all day; he just went on and on and on; he would be a novelist before nightfall. In his story, Rose Rose and everyone else got along famously. No one objected to anything anyone else did. All of it, as they say in Maine, worked out.

Sometimes, Rose Rose cried a little; more often, they {681} just kissed. Only a few times did she interrupt him, usually because she wanted him to repeat something that had seemed especially unlikely to her. 'Hold on a minute,' she'd say to Angel. 'Better go over that again, 'cause I must be slow.'

In the late afternoon, the mosquitoes began to bother them, and it crossed Angel's mind how, some evening, Rose Rose could ask Wally to tell her what the rice paddy mosquitoes were like.

'An Ocean View mosquito isn't anything compared to a Japanese B mosquito,' Wally would have told her, but Angel didn't get to tell Rose Rose this part of the fantasy.

She was starting to stand up when an apparent cramp, or the pain from her fall against the bicycle's crossbar, dropped her to her knees as if she'd been kicked, and Angel caught her around her shoulders.

'You hurt yourself on the bicycle, didn't you?' he asked her.

'I was tryin' to,' she said then.

'What?' he asked her.

'I was tryin'to hurt myself,' Rose Rose told him, 'but I don't think I hurt myself enough.'

'Enough for what?' he asked.

'To lose the baby,' she told him.

'You're pregnant?' Angel asked her.

'Again,' she said. 'Again and again, I guess,' she said. 'Somebody must want me to keep havin' babies.'

'Who?' Angel asked her.

'Never mind,' she told him.

'Someone who's not here?' he asked.

'Oh, he here,' Rose Rose said. 'But never mind.'

'The father is here?' Angel asked.

'The father of this one- yeah, he here,' she said, patting her flat stomach.

'Who is he?' Angel asked.

'Never mind who he is,' she told Angel. 'Tell me that part again-only better make it two babies. Now they me and you, and everybody else, and two babies,' she said. 'Won't we all have fun?' {682}

Angel looked as if she'd slapped him; Rose Rose kissed him and hugged him-and she changed her tone of voice.

'You see?' she whispered to him, holding him tight. 'We wouldn't of had no fun at no beach, Angel.'

'Do you want the baby?' he asked her.

'I want the one I got,' she told him. 'I don't want this other one!' She struck herself as hard as she could when she said 'other'; she bent herself over again; she'd knocked the wind out of herself. She lay in the grass in what Angel could not help observing was a fetal position.