From near the back of the hall, a man was brought forward and helped onto the podium by the reverend’s ushers. He moved slowly, though he wasn’t particularly old, and he was extremely thin. His delight at being called up was evident and he reached out to grasp the reverend’s hand in both of his own, pulling it to his breast. The reverend opened his arms and hugged him. The audience, already far from quiet, stirred audibly at the sight. Even I was moved by it; it was hardly something a regular doctor would do. The man was made to lie on a table in the centre of the stage, his head resting on a Bible. The reverend started praying again out loud, something in Latin or what sounded like it. Overhead, the lights dimmed and flickered awhile before steadying. America cast a fearful look at the ceiling. The reverend seemed to sag and then straighten. He moved confidently now. He rolled his sleeves up, took a bottle from a side table and poured something into his cupped palm. He rubbed his hands together as he spoke softly into them, his eyes closed. He opened his eyes again and pulled the man’s clothing aside with one hand to bare his abdomen. Next to me, America hissed under her breath. Under the lights, there seemed hardly anything of the man but stark bony ridges. The reverend started to move his hand as if it were a knife, sawing the side of his palm back and forth in the air, then jabbing downwards with his index finger. He did this a few times, his face intent on the man’s flesh as if staring into the core of him, and then his hand plunged downwards and seemed to disappear into the man’s flesh. There was a gasp from the body of the audience. It filled the room and subsided again. The air felt electrified, like it did before a storm, and for a few seconds it was as if everything slowed down. A faint scent of coconut oil drifted out across the front of the auditorium. Then the hand was out and he was rubbing the man’s belly gently. The reverend held his hand out to the patient. It was stained with blood and clenched around something. He opened his fist, palm up. The audience leaned forward in their seats. The thin man stared at the reverend’s hand and then down at his own belly. The reverend slipped the object into a jar and held it up for everyone to see. It looked like a lump of meat. He dipped his hands into a basin of water on the side table, taking the time to clean them properly with soap. I saw America nod her approval; she was always impressed by hygiene. He asked the patient to stand slowly, carefully, in his own time, stepping forward to help him down from the table. He needn’t have; the man almost leaped down and beaming, pulled his shirt up to show that there was no wound and no visible blood, nothing in fact to indicate that any kind of surgery had taken place. ‘No meat,’ the reverend said to him, wagging his finger like a schoolteacher. ‘No sex, no alcohol, no fizzy drinks and no losing your temper for at least two weeks.’ A surge of laughter filled the auditorium.
The patient stepped down from the stage. I watched him walk back to his seat, into a forest of raised hands as people craned forward now to be healed. The reverend’s ushers moved through the crowd, selecting people, guiding them into a line along the periphery of the hall. One by one, young and old, they climbed or were carried onto the stage. One after the other, bits of flesh, clotted blood, matted hair, worms, stones, shards of glass were displayed like auction lots. The room grew hotter and the doors and windows were flung open. The sound of night traffic and hawkers drifted into the hall, interweaving with the prayers and chants of the reverend and his congregation. The air felt thick and urgent.
I looked at Aunt Mary. She was sitting upright, her hands folded in her lap. She looked composed, contained. She seemed attentive to what was going on, but her expression was closed; she might just as well have been listening to Benny give an account of a basketball match or America recount some kitchen calamity.
I saw Jonah move towards the stage. The sight of him jolted me. I’d been certain none of the jetty boys, my father included, would have been here; the price of the tickets, though not impossibly high, was certainly the kind of money one would think long and hard about spending. I noticed now how lean Jonah was, except for the increasingly conspicuous bulge of his pregnancy. When it was his turn, his belly yielded not the half-expected foetus but a handful of small pebbles the size of beans, which the Reverend trickled slowly into a jar with a sound like rain on an iron roof.
After a while, people started to leave. Here and there across the hall, they rose and moved away like twists of smoke from embers; those who had been healed, those who might only have come to watch and seen enough to assuage their curiosity, those whose children had become fractious or who were distracted by the smells from the food stalls outside. Several times Aunt Mary looked over her shoulder, considering, perhaps, how we might leave unobtrusively from the very front row. When we finally got up I saw that Eddie and his companions had already disappeared.
Outside, the air was pungent and smoky. The barbecue vendors were doing brisk business and, sliding between them, women sold corn on the cob, boiled eggs, coconut cakes from baskets on their heads. In the centre of the schoolyard, a ring of stalls displayed statues of Mary or Jesus, bottles of holy water, votive candles, prayer beads. I saw Johnny Five Course’s cart — a new notice taped to its roof read vegetarian option. Behind her brother, Jaynie parcelled up food without raising her head.
In front of me, Aunt Mary and Benny fell into animated conversation. I thought I heard Aunt Mary say the word cellular. I quickened my step but their voices were swallowed by the noise.
As we came to the edge of the crowd, Dub put his fingers in his mouth and whistled. Ahead of us a line of motorbikes leaned beneath a frangipani tree, slick with light from the school windows. Behind them, a group of men and women sat on a low wall. I recognised Earl.
Dub turned to his mother but before he’d even opened his mouth, she said, ‘Don’t forget Joseph.’ I was disappointed again; I’d hoped to walk back with her and Benny, listening in to their conversation. Benny pushed his hands into his pockets and said sullenly, ‘Joseph rode out with him,’ but Aunt Mary slipped her arm firmly through his. America, tired and impatient now, pursed her lips at the bikes before turning away.
Earl was the first onto his bike. In ones and twos the group pulled out of the school gates, crawling through the traffic and the mass of people spilling out from the sidewalks. We rode in a line to Salinas and then, as we cut through town, one after another the bikes peeled away again until only Earl and Dub rode on together past the edges of Greenhills to rejoin the coast road several kilometres to the south.
Earlier it had taken only minutes to get from the boarding house to the school. And, despite not having wanted to ride with Dub in the first place, as we’d slowed down to turn in at the school gates, I’d suddenly wanted to pick up speed and keep going, leaving the gates, the crowd, the noise and mess of Esperanza behind. Now, as we rode back, the black sea invisible to my right, the wind smoothing my hair away from my face, I felt an overwhelming sense of freedom, and suddenly I understood something so clearly that it surprised me. I understood that for these brief times of being on the road, Dub was not the son of Mary and Captain Bobby Morelos, the product of generations of breeding, in the same way that I too harboured the illusion of leaving my real self behind, far back amid the eddies of road dust, and flying forward to meet a future that was still ripe with possibility.