“Hurry up, Larry Wilson,” Eileen muttered, recognizing one of the boys setting up the electric boxes and loudspeakers. “Music time.”
They got the generators going, and the red-and-white police lights on the scaffolds began to whirl behind Mother’s grey head.
“It was predicted in the Bible,” Mother said in a rich, clear voice that carried out to the shore toward the Israelites at work on their tiny white ship, “that the scientists would look down through a telescope of a kind to see the prehistoric beginnings and they’d say, We see monkeys a-crawling at the start of time and turning into humans. And do you know what?” She bent over with a hand on her knee, pointing to the people on her right, “Do you know what?”—pointing to those in front of her, “Do you know what?”—now pointing at the left—“It happened just like the Bible did predict it. Gimme that microphone. I never used one,” she said in a suddenly amplified voice whose ringing blurred into a piercing yowl. She shouted at the black microphone and the yowling got worse until she dropped it onto the scaffold and clapped her hands over her ears and stomped on the instrument with her bare foot. It jumped off the stage and burrowed into the sand. The crowd cheered and clapped and whistled while she screamed, “Wait a minute! Wait a minute! I got something to tell you-all — we’re turning into monkeys! Monkeys is the point of it, backsliding out to the deep-down primitive state where Bob Marley can’t never find us!” She could hardly be heard because the crowd went on applauding, without hostility, but clearly preferring their own noise to hers. Soon the music started, and it caught them by the throats — loud guitars that sounded to Mr. Cheung like someone rhythmically beating the life out of a frog until the singers rasped, “I’m er-reddeh f’love! — Ooh baby I’m er-reddeh f’love.” Mr. Cheung enjoyed trying to make out the words. Feeling a little stupid, he danced with Eileen, merely standing in one spot and bobbing his head. He was delighted to see his wife having such a good time.
When he caught sight of Mother standing, somewhat dazed, beside a loudspeaker, he held up a finger to Eileen and then went over to help the old woman get away from the noise. “Don’t stand beside the speaker,” he told her. “Sometimes it makes vibrations to confuse your thoughts.”
“You’re dead right about that one,” she said, letting him help her across the sand.
Mr. Cheung considered her a part of his neighborhood — though where she lived, he had no idea — because the old Church of Fire stood close to his house and he laid eyes on it every day. “Can I get you a slice of melon, or some yellow fruit?” he asked her.
“No way. My stomach feels all backward.” Clutching his wrist, she settled herself to sit on the beach. “Wild business. I thought they blew all those electric things up,” she said. “They’re just a nuisance — did you hear that thing screech?”
Mr. Cheung hoped she was finished talking, so that he could go away. “I’ll leave you now,” he said.
“Do you know the goodness of Bob Marley?” she asked him.
“I am against the forces that took the machines away,” Mr. Cheung said.
“So is Bob Marley! I mean, not that he gives two shits for all that electric juice — but it’s the forces of destruction and the ways of backsliding down to primitive cave-people, that’s what our father Bob Marley is against.”
“I have to go to my wife,” Mr. Cheung said.
“You are one of those persons,” she said, “who got away with our pews when the Devil sabotaged our roof.”
“Excuse me?”
“Keep it for now. But don’t you own it, you just sit on it. We’ll get us a roof one day — or a whole spang-new church!”
Her enthusiasm made Mr. Cheung uncomfortable. “I treat your pew with kindness,” he assured her.
“I’ll be up on that stage preaching soon as I find my feet. Don’t think I’m daunted. Don’t think it for a second.”
“I’ll leave you now. My wife—” He knew he was being rude. His neck burned with embarrassment as he walked away.
She called after him, “Don’t think I’m daunted! I’ll be up there hollering through that electric snake before too much longer!”
Closer to the sound-show, he collided again with its blathering fusillade as it rocketed out over the sea and disappeared there, like everything else. He stood beside Eileen, who’d stopped dancing and now only swayed in one place as did the others, letting the music pierce her through. This music was good now, this was Dylan, the great poet of the times of hard rain:
You know sometimes
Satan
Comes as a man of peace.
Mr. Cheung tried to fix himself somewhere at the edge of the crowd, to the left, to the right, back ten steps toward the sea, where he might be able to hear the words. But he stopped listening and only wandered over the sand stupidly, like a puppy who’d been smacked on the ear. I suppose, he spoke inside himself, that I’m very much like Mother. But he could hardly make out the tone of his own ruminations inside all this head-hammering rhythm. History, the force of time — he was aware he was obsessed in an unhealthy way with these thoughts — are washing over us like this rocknroll. Some of us are aligned with a slight force, a frail resistance that shapes things for the better — I really believe this: I stand against the forces of destruction, against the forces that took the machines away.
Against the forces that had taken Fiskadoro away, the forces that would also keep hold, forever, of the boy’s clarinet.
“Our father Bob Marley a-coming to take us home!” True to her promise, Mother was back on the scaffold with the microphone, and the music had ceased. She held the instrument carefully and kept her head away from it so it wouldn’t whistle. “But I was a-talking back there about monkeys, which is going to be us, like the science said.” She was still winded; the breath from her nostrils pulsed heavily through the speakers and made it seem she was crying out in the middle of a hurricane. “My cousin was a scientist, and for what I know, my cousin still is a scientist, my cousin’s hiding away down in a hole somewheres still inventing the dynamics to get to the moon. I mean to talk about faith! I’m so full of the Spirit — wait now, let me get the thread of this that I want to tell you.” The crowd of Twicetowners, drunks and dogs excluded, all watched her with the same curious goodwill with which they’d attended Mr. Cheung’s speeches the time he’d run for Mayor. They felt, Mr. Cheung believed, that the person on the stump was watching them: that they were on display, and not the other way around.
He’d lost his place in this sermon; now Mother was calling out, “The scientists said we had a billion stars, and we believed, and we had a billion stars—”
The way Mr. Cheung looked at it, everything that counted was being moved out from under them by these forces. Even, also, the boy Fiskadoro’s clarinet. Fiskadoro had been gone long enough, now, that he would obviously never come back; but Mr. Cheung hadn’t been able to get the mother, and the cousins, and the myriad other relatives, to give up the dead boy’s clarinet. Little by little all the coins, and the books, and the musical instruments, and also the musicians, were sucked down into the rocknroll of destruction. Goodbye!
“—and if we believe, only believe, that we are people, and that Bob Marley a-coming to take us home—” The woman’s eyes were rolling up in her head. The microphone trailed from her hand and dragged, creating thunder, on the wooden planks of the scaffold.