“But one line, two lines, three lines — all over the page I see been Allah’s one message for me: Would you deny these blessings of the Lord? It say that on those pages of the Koran thirty-two times. When Allah make a message, you don’t get no question.
“Now I gone ask to you this,” he said: “What that message mean?”
The men and boys around him knew he’d been carried on uncharted currents over the Ocean and washed up against the rotted pier at Plantation, above Key Marathon, and they knew the story of how he’d been carried in a hammock by the Plantation people into Marathon, a completely transformed individual bearing a book about Allah and news of an Alliance for Trading that would make a storm of business over the following decade, until boredom, laziness, and the easy life among laden fruit trees beside a generous sea made work seem too much trouble for the citizens of the Keys. Only the Gambling Alliance remained in effect — also the legend, always larger — and they knew these things by heart, but they didn’t know what the message meant, Would you deny these blessings of the Lord?
“It mean, Give thanks,” Cassius Clay Sugar Ray explained. “It mean even in the middle of the Ocean, give thanks to Allah. It mean, Dance with your partner. Get it while you can.”
Cassius Clay Sugar Ray sensed they didn’t need to hear the end. “Live in total faith!” he insisted. “Would you deny these blessings of the Lord?” he asked. His own excitement seemed to confuse him to the point that he didn’t know anymore what he was saying. “Every minute of my great deeds I felt the fear. I was tasted puke in the back of my mouth.”
The men and boys were a little embarrassed now, because this last statement had the ring of a thoughtless departure from the usual text. In a moment, however, as everything he’d told them took its shape in their minds, their embarrassment left them. They considered his submission to fate, to what he called Allah; they admired his dangerous flaring honesty in talking about his wife and her lover and about personal fear in the middle of brave deeds; and they felt that he hadn’t lowered himself, exactly, so much as raised them up.
Still, the events of this night, so different from the usual boredom, cheap talk, and staring into flames, were upsetting every stomach, and the men and boys were already trying to forget this encounter even as it came to an end. They’d always been confident that the sea would bring home a warrior, that the sand would whirl into the shape of a President, and that from time to time in their lives people would be met with who would show them the way. But they’d expected to meet these figures only in dreams.
Cassius Clay Sugar Ray’s two bodyguards — Uncle and Sammy, both small men, neither of them very fearsome, almost as well-known on the Keys as their employer — had been watching the dancers, and now they came to get him. Cassius Clay Sugar Ray shook hands all around and got ready to go back, under their protection, to his new home in Marathon.
One of the bodyguards, Sammy, was a white man who wore long pants and even rope sandals, like a big business-owner, and he said to Cassius Clay Sugar Ray, “Shake it, Boss.” Cassius Clay Sugar Ray smiled as if he didn’t understand, and kept on giving out pieces of dried fruit to the others from a bag he carried around his waist. Sammy said, “We got moves to make.” It irritated Fiskadoro that Sammy’s tone of voice seemed tainted with some faint failure of respect.
By the time the visitors had gone it was already three hours past dark — those still on the beach would have to stay together now and pass the night here sleeping or dancing or having adventures with the other sex. Fiskadoro stayed away from them. To have met this great man, to have touched his hand, heard his story, his legend, made Fiskadoro feel crazy. He wandered the shore. The Ocean, so perilous simply because of its size to any who might be faring out onto it tonight, was unagitated. A roll of surf fell at his feet with the hollow exhaustion of a drum calling from far away. Fiskadoro came no closer to it than a couple of meters. He didn’t want to let the Ocean touch him. I am not for you, he insisted in fear. I am not my father Jimmy. Things took him away from his father, stories and dancing carried him off, but every time, he seemed to land at the border of this black country where his father lived. He was afraid he’d find something here at the Ocean’s edge one day, a lump of something he couldn’t make out. He’d go closer and see that it was a man, closer and see that the man was dead, closer and see that the dead man was Jimmy, his father. He didn’t like to think about it. He was frightened even of his own name, Fish-man, Harpooner, because it suggested some prior arrangement with the hungry sea.
Every day he imagined the moment when his father, thinking of nobody, totally cut off from everyone he knew, totally, as if he’d been born swimming for his life and never known anything else, gave up and drew the first breath of water.
The several Blacks from over the swamps — and yet they looked a bit different, their heads caked with mud or he didn’t know what, not like most of the swamp-folks — were heading back over the dunes toward home; he could see them detach from the party-time in a group and straggle off.
Fiskadoro moved along the shore, keeping abreast of them as they made toward the shallowest rise of earth. His neck felt constricted by a rush of desire, and his groin ached. The only two women he’d ever made love to were young girls from over the swamps.
One of the swamp-people lagged farther and farther behind. Fiskadoro moved with a heavy and guilty heart but with quick, light strides to catch her. He could make out the backs of her thighs. She turned when she heard him, and he saw her face, a shadow in which he might read whatever he wanted.
She watched him, half-reclining against the rising slope of the sand dune. Her eyes were wide and white. Fiskadoro took hold of her by the ankle — it was gritty with sand. She slid down toward him with a silky sound. She held him by the thighs and bit his breast softly and licked his belly. But then she got up and began climbing the dune again. They were both out of breath — he could hear her panting with a slight catch of her voice, a whimper, a small cry in every breath.
Fiskadoro felt he was tearing himself away from his life to pursue her into the swamps where he’d never been. But even across this distance some of the firelight caught her, and he saw the tendons of her ankles, the start of her buttocks below her ragged denim skirt, and he chased her. She stayed ahead of him.
As soon as he’d topped the round of the dune and looked over into the darkness where she was disappearing, her skin no longer touched by orange highlights but as empty of them as the hide of an animal in a cave, he had to hesitate. Where was he taking himself? The patchwork of marsh and tangled vegetation down there was covered up with night, but it exuded a thick presence like the sea’s. Two steps into it he felt as if some kind of laughing-gas were licking his shins. She was gone into nothing, but he knew how to follow her steps as certainly as if he carried a map — there wasn’t any way to go but down. Below the level of the dune the wind was stuck. It was like being swallowed alive. The air choked him, and he recognized the odor — it was hers; she smelled like the swamps, like her birthplace and her home. To follow her over the dunes and out of earshot and eyesight of his people, his head spinning and his throat blocked with the honey of tears, was not to know whether he would live or die. Don’t look what I’m doing! he begged the dark sea.
FIVE
THERE WAS SO MUCH VIBRATION UP WHERE the Israelites stayed on the Ocean side north of Twicetown, so many people loitering there, such a big crowd of hangers-out and self-elected interpreters, everybody with a secret opinion or a loud explanation concerning the white boat the Israelites were ceremoniously building, that vendors started dropping around, too, and Bill Banks made it the place for one or two sound-shows.