The vendors quarreled with one another about the positions of their stalls, drumming up excellent reasons, each one, with threatening gestures and a wild face, for having the place nearest the shade, which was the gift of only a few trees here in a region mostly scrub and tall grass. When Bill Banks put up his sound-shows, yesterday’s recording stars roared words in voices that sounded as if they should clear their throats about things nobody understood, while the big rhythm that needed no explanation, crackly and fogged with use and buzzing in Bill Banks’s old speakers, got some people dancing.
But the white boat was what it was all about. It was just like a little ship, with small hand-carved dinghies on it for escape in case of a disaster, and tiny portholes strung along its sides, and numerous decks and two smokestacks, every piece whitewashed, and every piece blessed by Flying Man before it was attached to the vessel. Just the same, it would never float. Everyone could see that. But they all understood that floating wasn’t the point. This wasn’t about sailing anywhere on a ship three meters long: it was about magic, about religion, about Jah. The Israelites were happy to explain the ship and what it was supposed to do, but nobody could make out what they said.
Mr. Cheung went up with Eileen to take a look at the white boat. He was uncomfortable when Flying Man made a big show of welcoming them, because it was all too clear that he hadn’t let go of his idea that The Miami Symphony Orchestra was going to do something or other for the Israelites, probably, Mr. Cheung guessed, something totally embarrassing, and possibly something he would regret forever. But a person wanted to please these immigrants. They were bizarre and unrestrained. So he smiled with a lump in his throat and gave his every attention to Flying Man’s indecipherable speech about this white boat. Once in a while, with the effect of reaching out and touching Mr. Cheung with a bare electric wire, Flying Man said the word “oxra.” Eye contact, Mr. Cheung noted, was also painful. Flying Man occasionally focused his bleary pupils like targets, without mercy. Spittle flecked his lips and beard.
Eileen seemed to take some light from the relentless sun and the glaring water. Her face appeared smoother than usual to Mr. Cheung, her eyes larger and younger, and her features more relaxed. “No Mr. Banks today? No sound-show?” she asked. It wasn’t a secret between them that Eileen liked the sound-shows better than The Miami Symphony Orchestra’s ridiculous efforts.
“He’s left the scaffolds up,” Mr. Cheung said. “He’ll have another soon, and we’ll come.”
Flying Man cupped his hands together and shoved them right and left, as if bailing water. “One day someday Babylon go sink down deadndrownd-oh.” His beard jumped when he talked, moved when he showed his foul teeth. “Dat news when res’ with Jah. Dis — dis — dis — dis—”
Eileen turned her back on him and smiled with blank eyes at the air above the vendors’ stalls. “You don’t make sense so don’t talk wild at me now. What they gonna catch in that boat?” she asked Mr. Cheung. “Little tiny fish?”
“There’s something spiritual going on here,” Mr. Cheung said, “a symbolic thing. But I don’t want to learn what it is. I’m certain of this.”
She laughed. It hit him hard — she almost never laughed these days. “What’s to be afraid of about a little boat that’s just only pretty?”
“I don’t wish to be caught up inside these forces,” he said. “They aren’t my forces.”
But what were his forces, after all? Now, on a pleasant morning that was fairly cool, relatively dry, somewhat brightened by the hope of these lunatic aliens and Eileen’s uncustomary good cheer, he grew concerned about his philosophical stance, and wanted to stop in a patch of shade and consider it. Eileen was saying something about coins — she wanted melon from a vendor. Mr. Cheung held up a finger to request her patience while he asked himself these questions: What are my forces? With what am I aligned? I am not aligned with anything real, only the past. I am against everything.
It was an excellent thought. Against everything! What a beautiful day to be alive, to walk with one’s wife, to see the lonely truth!
Shyly he took Eileen by the hand. “No forces are my forces. I am against everything that is happening,” he said. “I will this. I will this from my heart and mind.”
“Thank you, thank you, Senor Mister Mayor, I already heard this speech until a thousand times.” She picked a slice of melon out of a row of them on a vendor’s collapsible table and backed away, sucking on it loudly and pointing at Mr. Cheung, to whom the young vendor held out his flat palm and said, “What you go give me on that melon now? She already eating it till es gone. I want hunnut dollar now. Es my best one I ever have of a melon since I born.”
Mr. Cheung gave the man a copper penny from his coinpurse. “I see you as a decayed person,” he said as he watched the man’s face. “Electronic machines once managed all the money, did you hear about it? In those electronic times, nobody made a drama from one small piece of melon.”
The vendor’s flat face went cold. He popped the copper coin into his mouth and swallowed it. “Penny ain’t nothing.” He shooed them away with a fluttering hand. “Go, go, you steal my melon, happy days, you welcome, bye-bye, keep touch, I don’t care.” He turned his back on Mr. Cheung, and Eileen made as if to throw the rind at a spot between the vendor’s shoulder blades, laughing.
Mr. Cheung reached out to take another slice of melon. “Two for a penny!”
His hand was shaking. He was astonished at his own anger. “Look who coming now!” Eileen said.
She took her husband by the elbow and pulled him toward the road that emptied onto the beach, where a mist of dust boiled toward them from a crowd of racing urchins — dozens, and most of them too little to wear clothes — followed by ranks of other people in order of advancing age: adolescents, parents and uncles and aunts, weary but smiling old people, and then Bill Banks, distiller and proprietor of the great sound-shows, leading a party of his employees, who happened also to be his family, and a gang of burros pulling two carts full of his sound equipment. The slowest bunch, stumbling behind the carts and breathing all the dust, were the sad old drunks and the wild young drunks, harassed by dogs, confused by rice brandy, paired up to support one another at the finish of this long march from Twicetown. Wherever Bill Banks appeared, these people seemed to hover, not just because he made wine and brandy, but because his appearances meant excitement and dancing — yet Bill Banks himself was a small, skinny person with a face that said he didn’t understand and a posture that claimed he was sorry for everything.
Mr. Cheung was happy for Eileen. “I told you a show would come.”
“Si, and I told you Bill Banks converted now,” Eileen said. “Look, look there at Mother, she right there by the second cart.”
It was true. He hadn’t picked her out — Mother always dressed in ragged pants like a fisherman, and from a distance she might have been anyone. Mother was nobody’s mother; she was the leader of the Church of Fire, a group without a building since their roof had fallen in. She ruffled Bill Banks’s hair, kissed his hand, gave him a hug, and climbed, quite nimbly for a silver-haired old white lady, onto one of the scaffolds for the sound equipment. “They gonna have a microphone up here for me in two minutes,” she shouted. “But I never have done my talking out of a microphone before so I’ll get a start on things right here and now — shoo! Shoo!” she said to the children climbing onto the scaffold. “You’re turning into monkeys. Little monkeys.”