John Irving - The Cider House Rules

Homer allowed himself to be distracted from the snake. He looked through a hole in the porch floorboards at some passing debris; a broken branch, perhaps, or a man's boot-maybe a man's leg-was swept by in the river. When he heard a whistling sound, like a whip, he regretted taking his eyes from the snake; he ducked; Melony was still concentrating on the sky. She was swinging the snake around and around her head, yet her attention was entirely on the sky-not on any sign that appeared, there, either, but on a red-shouldered hawk. It hung above the river in that lazy-seeming, spiral soaring of hawks when they are hunting. Melony let the snake sail out over the river, the hawk following it; even before the snake struck the water and started swimming for its life, for shore, the hawk began to dive. The snake didn't fight the current, it raced with it, trying to find the angle that would bring it safely under the eroded bank or into the tangled bracken.

'Watch this, Sunshine,' Melony said. A long ten yards {119} offshore the hawk seized the swimming snake and carried it, writhing and striking, aloft. 'I want to show you something else,' Melony said, already turning her attention from the sky, now that the outcome was clear.

'Right,' said Homer Wells-all eyes, all ears. At first the weight and movement of the snake appeared to make the hawk's rising a struggle, but the higher the hawk rose, the more easily it flew-as if the higher air had different properties from the air down where the snake had flourished.

'Sunshine!' Melony called impatiently. She led him inside the old building and upstairs to one of the darker bunkrooms. The room smelled as if there might be someone in it-possibly, someone alive-but it was too dark to see either the mice-invaded mattresses or a body. Melony forced open a ragged shutter hanging by one hinge and knelt on a mattress against a wall that the open shutter had brought to light. An old photograph was tacked to the wall, in line with what had once been the head of someone's bed; the tack had rusted and had bled a rusty path across the sepia tones of the photograph.

Homer had looked at other photographs, in other rooms, though he had neglected this one. The ones he remembered were baby pictures, and pictures of mothers and fathers, he presumed-the kind of family photographs that are always of interest to orphans.

'Come look at this, Sunshine,' Melony said. She was trying to pick the tack loose with her fingernail, but the tack had been stuck there for years. Homer knelt beside Melony on the rotting mattress. It took awhile for him to grasp the content of the photograph; possibly, he was distracted by his awareness that he had not been as physically close to Melony since he'd la.st been tied to her in the three-legged race.

Once Homer had understood the photograph (at least, he understood its subject, if not its reason for existing), he found it a difficult photograph to go on looking at, especially with Melony so close to him. On the other hand, he {120} suspected he would be accused of cowardice if he looked away. The photograph reflected the cute revisions of reality engineered in many photographic studios at the turn of the century; the picture was edged with fake clouds, with a funereal or reverential mist; the participants in the photograph appeared to be performing their curious act in a very stylish Heaven or Hell.

Homer Wells guessed it was Hell. The participants in the photograph were a leggy young woman and a short pony. The naked woman lay with her long legs spreadeagled on a rug-a wildly confused Persian or Oriental (Homer Wells didn't know the difference)-and the pony, facing the wrong way, straddled her. His head was bent, as if to drink or to graze, just above the woman's extensive patch of pubic hair; the pony's expression was slightly camera-conscious, or ashamed, or possibly just stupid. The pony's penis looked longer and thicker than Homer Wells's arm, yet the athletic-looking young woman had contorted her neck and had sufficient strength in her arms and hands to bend the pony's penis to her mouth. Her cheeks were puffed out, as if she'd held her breath too long; her eyes bulged; yet the woman's expression remained ambiguous-it was impossible to tell if she was going to burst out laughing or if she was choking to death on the pony's penis. As for the pony, his shaggy face was full of faked indifference-the placid pose of strained animal dignity.

'Lucky pony, huh, Sunshine?' Melony asked him, but Homer Wells felt passing through his limbs a shudder that coincided exactly with his sudden vision of the photographer, the evil manipulator of the woman, the pony, the clouds of Heaven or the smoke of Hell. The mists of nowhere on this earth, at least, Homer imagined. Homer saw, briefly, as fast as a tremble, the darkroom genius who had created this spectacle. What lingered with Homer longer was his vision of the man who had slept on this mattress where he now knelt with Melony in worship of the man's treasure. This was the {121} picture some woodsman had chosen to wake up with, the portrait of pony and woman somehow substituting itself for the man's family. This was what caused Homer the sharpest pain, to imagine the tired man in the bunkroom at St. Cloud's, drawn to this woman and this pony because he knew of no friendlier image-no baby pictures, no mother, no father, no wife, no lover, no brother, no friend.

But in spite of the pain it caused him, Homer Wells found himself unable to turn away from the photograph. With a surprisingly girlish delicacy, Melony was still picking at the rusty tack-in such a considerate way that she never blocked Homer's view of the picture.

'If I can get the damn thing off the wall,' she said, 'I'll give it to you.'

'I don't want it,' said Homer Wells, but he wasn't sure.

'Sure you do,' Melony said. 'There's nothing in it for me. I'm not interested in ponies.'

When she finally dug the tack out of the wall, she noticed that she'd broken her nail and torn her cuticle; a fine spatter of her blood newly marred the photograph -quickly drying to a color similar to the streak of rust that ran down the pony's mane, across the woman's thigh. Melony stuck the finger with the broken nail in her mouth and handed the photograph to Homer Wells. Melony allowed her finger to tug a little at her lower lip, pressing it against her lower teeth. 'You get it, don't you, Sunshine?' she asked Homer Wells. 'You see what the woman's doing to the pony, right?'

'Right,' said Homer Wells.

'How'd you like me to do to you what that woman is doing to that pony?' Melony asked him. She stuck her finger all the way into her mouth, then, and closed her lips around it, over the second knuckle joint; in this fashion she waited for his answer, but Homer Wells let the question pass. Melony took her wet finger out of her mouth, then, and touched its tip to Homer's still lips. Homer didn't move; he knew that if he looked at her {122} finger, his eyes would cross. 'If you'd like me to do that to you, Sunshine,' Melony said, 'all you've got to do is get me my file-get me my records.' She pressed her finger against his lips a little too hard.

'Of course, while you're looking up the file on me you can look up yourself-if you're interested,' Melony added. She took her finger away. 'Give me your finger, Sunshine,' she said, but Homer Wells, holding the photograph in both hands, decided to let this request pass. 'Come on,' Melony coaxed. 'I won't hurt you.' He gave her his left hand, keeping the photograph in his right; he actually extended his closed fist to her so that it was necessary for her to open his hand before she could slip his left index finger into her mouth. 'Look at the picture, Sunshine,' she told him; he did as he was told. She tapped his finger against her teeth while she managed to say, 'Just get me the file and you know what you'll get. Just keep the picture and think about it,' Melony said.