Mr. Cheung began to play the blues, the real blues, the blues from Europe in the eighteenth century, when men knew how to be passionately sad, and not hysterically frustrated and childish — Corelli’s Concerto Grosso. There was no sheet music for this piece; Mr. Cheung had arranged it as a boy listening to a cassette tape-player when such things still functioned. The people he played this number for were always noncommittal, and he couldn’t reasonably expect them all to be touched and moved. They were hearing only one instrument, while he remembered the interweaving of strings and reeds that culminated in a rush of tears, where the violins followed themselves into a forest of pity and were lost.
He wanted to bring back the other age — just to get a look at it, the great civilization of helicopters and speedboats and dance parties atop buildings five hundred meters tall — but there was nothing he could do but to let that epoch pass, as it already in fact had, and to sit here with his clarinet in his lap, smoking marijuana in a cool Meerschaum pipe until the sun fell and sadness overcame him.
THE PERSON WHO BROUGHT MR. CHEUNG his marijuana was Flying Man, one of the Israelites who lived in their dismantled boats on the Ocean side north of Twicetown. Flying Man never arrived by appointment, but simply appeared at the front door of Mr. Cheung’s house in his savage apparel, a belt of feathers and talismans girding his waist, the long thin braids of his dreadlocks parted to reveal his features, over which passed expressions, alternately hilarious and demented, that had no tie to his feelings. Generally he threw down a handful of dry green buds — he came as a patron, a friend of music, and charged Mr. Cheung nothing — walked uncomfortably around Mr. Cheung’s parlor, poked his head into the kitchen, sat down stiff-backed on the church pew to smoke some with the clarinetist in the Meerschaum pipe, which he revered, and then relaxed, red-eyed and sometimes delirious, to listen to the Manager of The Miami Symphony Orchestra at practice.
Mr. Cheung always felt obligated to fumble through a few numbers for him with fingers that felt like rubbery bladders, while his legs seemed to get away from his body and go walking across the room, because Flying Man always made him smoke too much.
When Flying Man came today, it was the same, only instead of disappearing after a short visit, by some trick he managed to make himself more visible, leaning forward and folding a large hand over each bare knee. “Oxrago playino, lissenup now mon. Go playino depachu.” He licked his lips, and Mr. Cheung expected that he’d now repeat himself a little more distinctly. But Flying Man only scratched his patchy beard.
“Are you trying to say something?” Mr. Cheung asked.
“Didn’ I jus’? This ain’ I say something right now? I say oxrago playino depachu, Man-jah.” Flying Man called forth his hidden energies to start putting more marijuana into the bowl of the pipe.
“Mr. Flying Man. Two things, please. Please no more smoking for me, this is very important, because of my floating sensation.”
In a few seconds, the Israelite said, “Numb’ two?”
“What number two?”
In Mr. Cheung’s thought, the conversation was now trailing away into mist and vagueness. I don’t wish to discuss these things with you because you seem to be made of porcelain. He was about to put this feeling into words when he was moved by a discovery of Flying Man’s breathing presence, the weight of life that filled the room. Suddenly recognizing one another as fellow entities sitting in the same universe, they began to laugh.
“Cosmic laughter,” Mr. Cheung said. “A rich experience.”
Flying Man looked desolate for a minute, then insulted, pensive, and stunned in rapid sequence. Then sunny, and delighted.
Watching the activities of his face was hard work. Mr. Cheung couldn’t help responding with a matching gamut of emotions.
“What I mean, oxra playino depachu, talking later. Jah go come soon soon, late late — Jah go come, that news when res’ with Jah.”
“You have to speak”—Mr. Cheung demonstrated—“very, very, a lot, a lot, slow.”
Flying Man seemed terrified — but then all of a sudden only too happy — to do this. “Okss — rah,” he said.
Mr. Cheung shook his head.
“Hey mon you bond, bond, mon.”
“Band?”
“Bond, a music, oxra.”
“Orchestra!” Mr. Cheung said.
“Go — play — in — o — dee — pah — choo.”
“The orchestra is going to play,” Mr. Cheung said.
“Good good,” Flying Man said, plainly satisfied. He stood up, waved goodbye by clasping his two hands above his head, palms together as in prayer, and made ready to leave. “Thank you. Thank to Jah.”
Mr. Cheung waved back happily as Flying Man left the house, walking as if his shoulders had no knowledge of his feet. “Of course,” he told Flying Man.
In a little while, sitting by himself in the hot parlor with not a drop of sweat anywhere on his body, feeling astral and rarefied, Mr. Cheung blew the breath of life through his clarinet. It wasn’t music that mattered, but sound. Oh, to have these ears, capturing everything into his head! Which would be more miserable — anxiety tightened his chest — if you had to choose, if you had to choose: being blind, or being deaf? “One minute, please,” he said out loud.
“One minute.” Was it possible that a misunderstanding had taken place?
Hadn’t he just agreed to something? Hadn’t he just agreed that the orchestra was going to play? Hadn’t he just agreed that soon soon, late late, the orchestra was going to play in a depachu?
THREE
JIMMY’S BOAT HAD COME IN WITH THE DAWN, with the very first light, which rode the water through the channel from the east, from the horizon, rather than falling through the air from the sun. At that time of day they should have been two or three kilometers out at sea.
Or they should have been coming in late in the day with the sun at their backs, hauling nets of fish. But the nets had been thrown out and then, when the confusion struck, almost immediately brought back into the boat. Now the nets lay empty in wet heaps on the stern while, with nobody there to see it, the Los Desechados came in on a sea almost the same grey color as the sky.
Nobody had to carry the news through the village. The men, minus Jimmy, straggled off the boat, and Leon Sanchez went home, taking the mate from Twicetown with him, and Beer Wilson went home, and the others, too, and Harvard Sanchez, after struggling dramatically with the nets and then giving up his attempt to lay them out on the beach without anybody’s help, went home. The sudden appearance of the crew at the doors of their houses frightened their wives, and the lamps were lit and voices raised, and the neighbors were alarmed and asked what was the trouble; in this way, from house to house through the shanty village, traveled the report of Jimmy Hidalgo’s death.
As the Captain’s wife, it was Towanda Sanchez’s job to tell the widow.
Like bits of paper Belinda Hidalgo’s cries rode the wash of sea air over the tops of coconut and date palms after Towanda had entered her house; and in a minute her two younger children were screaming.
The oldest son, the one who should have been taking care of his mother, wasn’t home.
Fiskadoro was walking along the eastern beach. He’d intended to be back before dawn, but already the sun was up. Its heat came flat-out across the water and warmed him up the left side as he moved parallel to the sea. He met a man on the beach. “Your father is dead.”
Near the pit where sand and flies blew around amid the garbage, two old men, naked except for belts of rag, moved upwind toward him with the secret, evil sorrow of old age on their faces. “Your father is dead,” they told him.