Eileen saw she hadn’t helped by bringing up the Constitution. “Tony, those veins around your eyes are getting big again. Please. Please, you finish worrying now, and get a happy face.”
“Grandmother knows,” he said. He sat down at the table and looked at Grandmother. “Not in her mind any longer, but still she knows inside her heart. But the people don’t think, even the people with minds.”
“I have to take a siesta,” Eileen told him.
Later, when she woke up and came from the bedroom, Eileen smelled something bad in the kitchen and found that Grandmother had fallen asleep in her chair and wet herself.
She went to tell Tony, because she always felt sick when something went wrong with Grandmother. It made her feel better, it made her feel less worried, to tell him about it and let him be the one to worry.
Mr. Park-Smith was in the parlor with Tony, and they were both excited, sitting together on the church pew and talking low.
“Grandmother wet herself,” Eileen told them.
But Tony just said, “Yes, yes, I know,” and then said to Mr. Park-Smith, “Let’s walk,” and together the two men left to go walking through the dusty neighborhood.
Fidelia came back from the neighbors’ and helped Eileen clean Grandmother with a cloth, lifting the black dress and trying not to look.
They ate. Eileen sliced out tiny pieces of melon, and Fidelia pushed them gently between Grandmother’s lips.
“Father coming,” Fidelia said — she always heard people coming when nobody else could hear.
He was without Mr. Park-Smith. Eileen didn’t like the way he looked.
He was pale and shaken, and she felt his fear and tasted something sour in her throat. “Did you go down? Tony? Tony, Tony, did you get a fit?”
He was all balled up in his thoughts again, thoughts that were making him tremble and turning the blood white under the skin of his face.
“Tony?”
“I have to make a trip to Marathon,” he said. “There’s been some news from the Marathon Society for Knowledge. The Twicetown Society is going to have a journey.”
ON THE SAME DAY THAT MR. CHEUNG learned he was going to make a journey — on that morning — as Belinda ate coconut meat off the shell, one of her dog-teeth fell out.
She held the hem of her shift to her gums and cried about it as if this tooth were everything. In her mind she saw the tooth as gigantic, the last tooth in the mouth of an old, old whale who was eating her.
She buried the tooth in the yard and said, “Mwe pa gene para sak pale pu mwe,” although she kept no shrine in her house and had no friends among the gods.
Afterward she found that automatically, when she said something to the baby Mike, she covered her mouth with her right hand to hide the black space. In this life crimes had come against her one by one, as fast as days, and now her husband was dead, her first-born was — not dead, you can’t call a boy dead like they were calling him till you had the dead shell! — but in any case Fiskadoro was gone, and Drake, her second-eldest, had left home, even if he lived only ninety meters away; and where she’d been daubing at her gums with the hem of her shift the cloth was all bloody.
She left the baby crawling around the yard and saying, “Wuf! Wuf!” while she went inside to change her shift. Already it was after noon — where did the moments get away to? In the dark she hefted the shift above her hips and sat on the tick mattress and looked at her knees. Even flexed they showed wrinkles like gouges in a dry wood stump, one more thing to cry about. The wind and the Gulf were dead and there weren’t any sounds on earth but her breathing, and the coals clinking in the stove, and the wet heat pressing in against her mind. She drew the shift over her head and wiped away the sweat from her face, shoulders, armpits, and ran the bunched linen up between her legs and then between her breasts. Pillowing her head with it, she lay back on the bed and felt her nipples. They were as dry and distended as figs now, and sought after and used by nobody. Next to the left nipple she felt, in the meat of her flesh, a hard thing like a pearl that moved around under the probe of her finger. Her breath seized up, and she stared unblinking at the crosshatched palm leaves of the ceiling without a word in her head while the sweat leaked out of her hair and down behind her ears. I got to make a move, she thought, and then, as if somebody were doing it for her, she was raised up, and her legs took her to the doorway. “Mikey,” she said.
Mike was talking in a game and didn’t hear her. His legs weren’t chunky anymore, his belly was smaller, his face was a boy’s, not a baby’s.
Belinda went back inside and found a pair of Jimmy’s old olive Army pants, and with a fish-knife she cut open the crotch and made a skirt. She punched holes in the waist, on either side of the zipper, so that she could tie it around herself with twine. When she’d put the skirt on she said out loud, as if talking to some invisible person who’d wounded her unaccountably, “Now I gone hang my tits and be old.”
Bare-breasted, she stepped into the yard and sat down to watch Mike playing games.
The tide was in. She heard wood knocking and men calling from a place out of sight, downshore. The Los Desechados was making ready to put out, which meant that Towanda Sanchez would be open for a visit soon. Drake sometimes put out with them now, and Belinda’s brother Pressy was one of the permanent crew. No other boat on the Keys would have had him because he was bent left, right, and sideways in the head, but he was the handiest replacement for Harvard Sanchez, who’d been next in line for Captain and who — much to everybody’s surprise, a good boy like Harvard Sanchez — now slept out by the still-house in Twicetown and never let out a breath that didn’t stink of liquor. And these days Drake lived over at his Uncle Pressy’s with Pressy’s cousin, Alfo, who was also Belinda’s cousin. They were three bachelors with big holes in their roof and crinkled aluminum cans lying all over the floor dribbling wine.
I got to eat something, she told herself, and went inside, took three butter-clams from the bucket, and laid them on the stove. But when the shells opened and the leathery black feet came out they looked just like her own nipples. She left them there to fry.
“I gonna go see Towanda. Not too long,” she told Mike. She scraped a circle around him with her heel. “Es you perimeter,” she told him. “Shark gone bite you legs off when you go outa you perimeter. You stay inside you perimeter.”
Mike patted smooth a small mound of sand and put a blade of beach-grass in its center for a flag.
“I can’t fetch you ’long through this compound like a mess of fish. I too old, I too sick. You have kill me.”
As soon as she said it, she heard it: the pearl in her breast was a tumor of the kill-me. Her finger on her breast had already sent this news to her heart, but now her mouth had told it to her brain, and there was nothing left to do but go crazy.
With a metal spoon Belinda dug her last penny out of its hiding-spot among the ashes inside her stove, and then to cool it off she dropped it in the clam bucket. She ran to Towanda’s, past the falling-down shack that Pressy and Alfo and Drake called home, clutching the wet coin in her fist.