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"Yeah!" someone said. Everyone laughed.
"A fuckin' Ferris wheel!" Hero said. "That's pretty good."
One of the men Homer didn't know rolled off the roof. Everyone waited until he was on the ground before they called down to him.
"You all right, asshole?" Black Pan asked.
"Yeah," the man said, and everyone laughed.
When Mr. Rose heard the shower start up again, he knew that his bottle man had found the cigarette and was washing the cider off himself.
"Willy and Hero, you're bottlin' now," said Mr. Rose.
"I bottled last time," Hero said.
"Then you gettin' real good at it," said Mr. Rose.
"I'll press for a while," someone said.
"Jack and Orange are goin' good," Mr. Rose said. "We'll just let them go for a while."
Homer sensed that he should leave the roof with Mr. Rose. They helped each other with the ladder; on the ground Mr. Rose spoke very seriously to Homer.
"You got to understand," Mr. Rose whispered. "They don't want to know what that thing is. What good it do them to know?"
"Okay," said Homer Wells, who stood a long while out of the range of the lights blazing in the mill room. Now that he was more familiar with their dialect, he could occasionally understand the voices from the roof.
"It's stopped again," he heard Branches say.
"Yeah, it takin' on riders!" someone said, and everyone laughed.
"You know, maybe it's an army place," Black Pan said.
"What army?" someone asked.
"We almost at war," Black Pan said. "I heard that."
"Shit," someone said.
"It's somethin' for the airplanes to see," Black Pan said.
"Whose airplanes?" Hero asked.
"There it go again," Branches said.
Homer Wells walked back through the orchards to the Worthington house; he was touched that Mrs. Worthington had left the light over the stairs on for him, and when he saw the light under her bedroom door, he said, quietly, "Good night, Missus Worthington. I'm back."
"Good night, Homer," she said.
He looked out Wally's window for a while. There was no way, at that distance, that he could witness the reaction on the cider house roof when the Ferris wheel in Cape Kenneth was shut off for the night--when all the lights went out with a blink, what did the men on the roof have to say about that? he wondered.
Maybe they thought that the Ferris wheel came from another planet and, when all the lights went out, that it had returned there.
And wouldn't Fuzzy Stone have loved to see it? thought Homer Wells. And Curly Day, and young Copperfield! And it would have been fun to ride it with Melony--just once, to see what she would have said about it. Dr. Larch wouldn't be impressed. Was anything a mystery to Dr. Larch?
In the morning, Mr. Rose chose to rest his magic hands between trees; he came up to Homer, who was working as a checker in the orchard called Frying Pan, counting the one-bushel crates before they were loaded on the flatbed trailer and giving every picker credit for each bushel picked.
"I want you to show me that wheel," Mr. Rose said, smiling.
