A good joke. People had probably been frightened. The sun fell, the sea went black, and the fires stood up amid the gaiety of people who would never be his friends.
Now, an hour later, he was psychotically dancing; and then suddenly he was tired of being Fiskadoro. He was finished. He was standing inside all this revelry with what he was convinced was a soul that had just died. It happened to him whenever he found himself in a crowd of people. He didn’t know anymore why he came here to West Beach.
He ran off down the shoreline, out of earshot of all the others, a collection of people his age or a little older, most of them from the Army, but many from as far away as Twicetown or even Marathon and, on the edges of the dancing that was just getting wild now after all the Silent Man Beer and Punto Beer, a few black boys and girls from the neighborhood of swamps and lowlands over the dunes — shy, curious, and dazzlingly aloof, the girls dancing with the girls, and the boys dancing with the boys.
Fiskadoro took a blow to the heart each time he caught sight of Loosiana, who was easily picked out even across this distance because of her tall figure and her unique personal decoration, a sky-blue plastic tube like the inner tubes for autocar tires, only this inner tube buckled around the front of her waist over her white shift, resting on her hips and making her look deformed. It was a scavenged device, a thing once intended to bring about weight loss in flabby people. The owner was supposed to fill it up with hot water. Loosiana was aware that it set her apart, and her willingness to be set apart was one of the things that drew everybody to her. She was so wonderful that he’d never spoken to her. He couldn’t guess how she’d found out about his yearning. There were a half dozen others who had the same effect on him.
The tide was going out, and the beach stank and lay there like a shield of smoked glass, upholding rank lengths of seaweed, empty shells, worn stones, dead urchins, skulls of fish, the bits and pieces deposited here for a while by the ocean in its endless rumination over these things it had collected. Under the half-moon’s cold light each object was mated to its blurry reflection. He was half a kilometer upwind of the others, but still he could hear them. He imagined himself going back. He imagined himself taking over the entire situation, riveting everything to himself: striding forth; maybe he was a different color; maybe he’d turned to gold, and was twice as tall, and held balls of fire in his hands and sang his song—“Oh Loosiana / your lose-weight heat-thing / your special eyes glance / we make our friends dance”—he knew it was a silly song. In the real situation, better words expressing greater thoughts and the largeness of his special feeling would come to him. But this was the real situation, wasn’t it? There was nothing here for him tonight. The swamp-girls hadn’t come alone tonight, there would be no chasing them, and Loosiana scorned him.
He saw himself pitied tenderly by future admirers. How Fiskadoro had suffered in the hard time of his youth! Eventually, in the real situation, all the people dancing there across the sand would be remembered as fools.
And his sentiments were so out of control, he felt so sorry for those who would someday feel sorry for him, and so keenly grateful for their future understanding, that even walking around by himself on the dark beach he was embarrassed. He was afraid he might bring his thoughts into a ghost-life right now, and people would have a laugh to see his private dreams parading through the air around his head.
He had nothing to do but wander over to the gathering of other outcasts, the men circled around a wood-fire, absent-mindedly combing sticks out of the sand with their fingers and talking about nothing much. These were the people he had to count himself among, the boys without girls, and the older men who did in fact have women but who now, at an advanced stage of domesticated wisdom, usually tried to keep away from them.
Fiskadoro was shocked to see a new person holding forth before his friends. Everything went away from him except the face of this famous man, the wide flat nose with monstrous nostrils, the African hair and bushy eyebrows made twice as thick by their shadows in the firelight.
“. go out there and catch fish,” the man was saying, “or you can go out there on the sea and catch Allah. Catch the destiny.”
Allah, destiny — it was just what Fiskadoro might have hoped this man would say: something that was real and true and not stupid and not small.
Fiskadoro sat at the circle’s edge, up on his knees to get a clear view of the man over the heads of the others. There were almost a dozen young men here, all listening quietly and pretending not to be totally unnerved.
It was incredible that this personage should appear on West Beach. He was known to be a rich man, somebody connected with the gamblers, a dealer in goods and substances. But he had a crazy side to his nature that made him fail, because of completely irresponsible actions, just as often as he succeeded. Failure made his legend more appealing. He was supposed to be related to A. T. Cheung, but he looked nothing like Fiskadoro’s clarinet teacher.
Dropping his talk, the man stared at Fiskadoro. The others made room, and the boy joined the circle of listeners as if commanded. The man was speaking of the great things he’d done. He was telling them how he’d become a legend.
“Bob Wilson brother, Michael Wilson, he had the power of moving dice, and so the gambling men they kept him in chains. They kept him incognito on the North Deerfield, way up past the contamination. That’s why we had to go. That’s why we lost two men. They were good men. Their business for them that day, it was to die.
“Remember this that if you are a human man, when you scratch your nose you ass gone start itching. Same thing, same way, what Allah say: ‘Every hardship is followed by ease. Every hardship is followed by ease.’ Say it twice that way.
“Something else it say that I thinking about right now, for the women who commit adultery. You know que dice adultery?” He passed his hand undulating over invisible waves in the fire. “Somebody all night long with your wife. Or even in the morning, or the afternoon. It say about a woman like that—” He closed his eyes and sang, with deep feeling and a tense throat, “Confine-them-to-their-houses-till-death-over-takes-them-or-till-Allah-finds-another-way-for-them.”
The mouths dropped open. It was all Fiskadoro could do to contain himself. He crossed his arms tightly to keep his chest from exploding.
“Confine them to the houses,” the great man said. “Maybe I did and maybe I didn’t. Well well, I don’t remember now.
“I am not blind. My wife laying down with James Melroy from the Twelve Shacks below Marathon. Gone all night and all morning. You think I don’t know that so hard right here in my heart? You think I don’t know that until ten-thousand-dollar fine? Fugdat shit.” He looked directly at Fiskadoro. “I am Cheung’s half-brother. Got the Negro blood inside me. My newest name Cassius Clay Sugar Ray,” he said. “The First.” His black kinky hair was so long it was beginning to lie down, and he wore several necklaces. He could easily have been taken for somebody from over the swamps. “But the secret of my being is just that I leave alone the most personal thing,” he said to all of them in general. “I do the thing that’s for my business.