"Where's Homer?" Florence Hyde asked Meany. He was staring at Melony.
"He's puttin' out crates in the Frying Pan," said Meany Hyde. Something made him shiver.
"You just come to say hello?" Big Dot asked Melony, whose fingers--Dot noticed--were instinctively opening and closing, making fists and then relaxing.
"I actually come for work," Melony said. "I done a lot of pickin'."
"Homer hires the pickers," Big Dot said. "I guess you're in luck--you bein' old friends."
"It's too early for hirin' pickers," Vernon Lynch said. Something about the way Melony looked at him made him not insist on that point.
"Just go tell Homer there's someone to see him," Big Dot told Vernon. "Homer's the boss."
"The boss?" Melony said.
Irene Titcomb giggled, and turned her burn scar away. "It's actually a kind of secret--who's boss around here," Irene said.
Vernon Lynch gunned the tractor so hard that an oily, black smoke barked out of the exhaust pipe and washed over the women in the mart.
"If you're gonna work here," Big Dot told Melony, "you might as well know it: that guy drivin' the tractor is the number one asshole."
Melony shrugged. "There's just one?" she asked, and Big Dot laughed.
"Oh, my pies!" said Irene Titcomb, who went running off. Florence Hyde sized Melony up, in a friendly way, and Big Dot put her meaty paw on Melony's shoulder as if they were lifelong pals. Irene Titcomb ran back to them and announced that the pies were saved.
"So tell us how you know Homer Wells," Florence Hyde said to Melony.
"From where and since when?" asked Big Dot Taft.
"From Saint Cloud's, since forever," Melony told them. "He was my guy," she told the women, her lips parting, showing the damage done to her teeth.
"You don't say?" said Big Dot Taft.
Homer Wells and his son, Angel, were talking about masturbation--or, rather, Homer was talking. They were taking their lunch break under one of the old trees in the Frying Pan; they'd been putting crates out in the orchards all morning--taking turns driving the tractor and unloading the crates. They'd finished their sandwiches, and Angel had shaken up his soda and squirted his father with it, and Homer had tried to find a casual way to bring up the subject of masturbation. Candy had mentioned to Homer that the evidence on Angel's bedsheets suggested that this might be the time for a father-and-son conversation regarding Angel's obviously emerging sexuality.
"Boy, when I was your age--in Saint Cloud's--it was really tough to beat off with any privacy," Homer had begun (he thought, casually).
They'd been lying on their backs in the tall grass, under the fullest tree in the Frying Pan--the sun couldn't filter through the lush, bent branches and all the heavy apples.
"Really," Angel said indifferently, after a while.
"Yup," Homer said. "You know, I was the oldest--about your age--and I was supposed to be in charge of all the other kids, more or less. I knew they weren't even old enough to have pubic hair, or they didn't even know what to make of their little hard-ons."
Angel laughed. Homer laughed, too.
"So how'd you manage it?" Angel asked his father, after a while.
"I waited until I thought they were all asleep, and then I tried to keep the bed quiet
," Homer said. "But you've got no idea how long it can take twelve or fifteen boys to fall asleep!"
They both laughed some more.
"There was one other kid who was old enough to know about it," Homer confided. "I think he was just beginning to experiment with playing with himself--I think the first time that he actually did it, he didn't have any idea what would happen. And when he actually squirted--when he ejaculated, you know--he thought he'd hurt himself. In the dark, he probably thought he was bleeding!"
This story was a complete fiction, but Angel Wells loved it; he laughed in a very worldly way, which encouraged his father to go on.
"Well, he was so worried--he kept asking me to turn on the light, he said something had broken inside him," Homer said.