The Los Desechados wasn’t half a kilometer out yet, but Towanda was already in the bedroom, a lean-to attached to their quonset hut, rifling her husband’s pants-pockets and hunting in all his hiding places for coins.
“Es a heavy day! ” Belinda said.
“You hanging your tits now like you know your age,” Towanda said.
“My age? My age es dead.” Belinda was crying. “I feel how I got a little dureza of the kill-me in my left one here.”
“When?”
“Today.”
Towanda closed her eyes. “Es a heavy day,” she said. “Nothing to do behind this trouble but drink and cry.”
“I got a penny,” Belinda said, opening her fist.
“Leon got seven penny in this room,” Towanda said. “Help me. Help me.”
Glad to be doing something, Belinda helped her turn over the mattress, felt in the slats of the palm walls, and poked at the thatched ceiling with a broken gaff. Towanda got angry when nothing came of it and turned on Belinda with a burning tongue, as if it were all Belinda’s fault. “From today until forever,” Towanda said, making her eyes tiny with hatred, “I got to have one penny every Sunday. That man es a Cap'n, and I a Cap'n woman, and don’t you know I shame to walk on the world have never no more coin than a little children have? He gone on the sea! What happen if emergency? Leon!” she hollered, “you don't trust with me! You don't faith with me!” Suddenly she seemed very calm. “That mean I got to take it outa his souvenir,” she said. “That’s all. Leon, you gone on the sea and left me only one chance.”
Belinda waited, feeling the breeze across her breasts, while Towanda went into their hut and stole Leon’s souvenir penny. “He come off the first day of when Leon Cap’n on that boat,” she said, “number-one penny of his command. I sorry, Belinda, but es a heavy day and I got to take it.”
“Es true,” Belinda agreed. “You got to, es necessario.” But such a grim feeling was all around her that her voice sounded far away.
They went to Billy Chicago’s place across the compound, near the road. Billy was off somewhere, but his old mother was always home, sitting in her big cane chair just inside the door and looking for somebody’s ear to eat, waving at bugs and neighbors with a big dirty rag. “Morning!”—“Afternoon!”—“Evening!”—Ms. Chicago always called out of the darkness. But people never stopped unless they wanted liquor, or had a medical problem.
“Afternoon!” she said to Belinda and Towanda.
“Como esta?” Towanda said.
“Oh,” Ms. Chicago said, “just yer basic. You hanging you tits now,” she said to Belinda.
Ms. Chicago’s radio said, “Un programa bilingue de Cubaradio empezara dentro de cuarenta y cinco minutos. A bilingual broadcast of Cubaradio will begin in forty-five minutes. Por favor invite a sus camaradas a escucharlo. Please invite your comrades to listen.”
“Be a radio time soon,” Ms. Chicago said with satisfaction. “We got two penny for wine,” Belinda said.
“Miz Chicago,” Towanda said, very worried, “Belinda got a dureza in she left tit. Look like a dureza of the kill-me.”
Ms. Chicago was delighted. She knew all about medicine. “Dureza de vientre, dureza de teta,” she reminded them — a way of saying that if you were a constipated kind of person and hard in the guts, you were bound to find a tumor of the kill-me in your breast one day.
“Who say I dureza de vientre? My reputation all strangle up around here,” Belinda said.
“Reputation ain’t fix the kill-me, girl. You better throw your misery down on your shrine, es the only thing to help it.”
“I never have make a shrine. Es just a lot of foam, that religion.”
Ms. Chicago looked at Belinda out of a face too squashed by the weight of years to show what she was thinking. “Ain’t gone be foam when you lay down all cover up with tumors burning loud as the sun, girl. You gone holler, Kill me! Kill me!”
“Not today,” Belinda said, but she had to sit down in the doorway.
“Tell me the last thing you lost,” Ms. Chicago said, “or the last thing you found.”
“I lost a dog-tooth here,” Belinda said, pointing at the gap in her mouth.
“That’s it. What you see?”
“Nada. Didn’t see nada.”
Ms. Chicago wiped the sweat from between her breasts with her grey rag. “Think now, girl. Don’t you thought some kind of thought when you lost that tooth?”
“Only just a small one,” Belinda said.
“Tell me,” Ms. Chicago insisted.
“I thought about a big whale eat me up, like my dog-tooth es the last tooth in his mouth.”
“Oh!” Ms. Chicago said with a tone of great respect. “That’s good!”
“That’s good, Belinda!” Towanda said.
“How you know es good?” Belinda said. “You just wanna talk like Miz Chicago talk.”
“Gimme that tooth,” Ms. Chicago said.
“Es gone,” Belinda told her.
“Es gone? Who gone it? Devil gone it?”
“No, Senora, the Devil didn’t gone it — es me. I dig it down in the yard.”
“What you said when you dig it down?”
“Nada.”
“Tell me. What you said?”
“What you said?” Towanda asked her. “You said something? ”
Belinda closed her eyes, tipped her head back, breathed deeply. “I say, ‘Mwe pa gene para sak pale pu mwe,’ ” she admitted.
“Oh, yeah!” Ms. Chicago was overjoyed in her crackly, invisible way.
“Que dice — mwe pa hen-yeh — what es?” Towanda said. She looked scared. She wrung her hands. “Don’t say those thing like that, Belinda.”
“Mean, ‘I got no family to speak for me,’ ” Ms. Chicago said. “Es exact proper wording de la Voodoo. Go find me that tooth, Belinda. Maybe go be a loa para tu.”
“I don’t want no loa,” Belinda said.
“Then why,” Towanda asked her, “you go round say magic on a tooth you lost? Oh sweet Saint Mary — Belinda, you have start it now.”
“Girl, that’s right — you have start it now,” Ms. Chicago agreed. “Go bring me that tooth. Then we drink a little potato-buzz.”
Belinda saw there was no way to stop it. “I be back,” she told Towanda and Ms. Chicago.
As she rounded the corner of Towanda and Leon’s, she found Mike wandering sideways on the path with an open mouth and a faraway look, dribbling urine out from between his legs. She hooked an arm around his belly and lugged him home. “What happen if a puppy bite you face?” she said, trying to remember where she’d buried the tooth. “Then you crawl under a leaf and bleed and nobody gone find you. I gotta dig out that tooth now.”
The place where she’d worked the dirt was damp and easy to spot. She sifted the sand through her fingers and found her dog-tooth. The tooth was dry now, nothing more than a pebble that seemed never to have had anything to do with the gap in her mouth.
“Now I gone leave you by the well.” She dragged Mike along by the hand so that his feet hardly scuffed the dirt. “You have make me be see by alia them skags,” she told him angrily.
The crones at the well all had an exclamation to make or some smug thing to say about her new appearance, and they sounded like a mess of shells being beaten with a spoon, but Belinda was just too tired to let it all loose. She dropped Mike down among three or four other children and left without a word. The muscles in her neck and shoulders were so tight they felt cold by the time she got back across the compound to Ms. Chicago and Towanda with the tooth.