“Radio time come in fifteen minute,” Towanda told her.
“Don’t say nothing,” Ms. Chicago said instantly. “I feel you got the tooth. I taste the power of that tooth — es a loa.”
Towanda said, “Go-head find out who es that loa. Please, Miz Chicago, Belinda got to know.”
“I need two penny,” Ms. Chicago told them.
Towanda dropped the two pennies into the lap of Ms. Chicago’s skirt.
“I told you we go get wine from those penny,” Belinda said.
“Psss, psss,” Towanda said, shushing her.
Ms. Chicago grabbed the pennies in one hand and the tooth in the other. She held them so tightly the veins in her arms puffed up.
In no time at all, Ms. Chicago entered a trance and said, “Es a bomb-pilot Major Colonel Overdoze got the power of Atomic Bomb to work for you, get rid of the kill-me and bring everything back but not the dead. If Fish-man not dead he coming back. Major Colonel fix it. If he dead he not come back. Both way you gone know.” She left the trance, and sat with her arms crossed in front of her chest. “Truth go set you fire make you well.”
“Overdoze?” Belinda said.
“Major Colonel Overdoze,” Ms. Chicago said. “Atomic Bomb pilot.”
“Oh — oh — oh,” Towanda said. “That’s the most power of all.”
“You got a power loa,” Ms. Chicago said. “Most power of all.”
Belinda looked at her feet. “We bringed those penny for wine,” she told Ms. Chicago.
“Now ain’t you glad you dug after this tooth?” Ms. Chicago said. “Truth go set you fire make you well.”
“Why you don’t send Major Colonel for a expedition to Fiskadoro?” Towanda said.
“That’s all turn backward,” Ms. Chicago corrected her. “Loa don’t make no expedition on a dead — Saint Expedit send a dead on the expedition to a living.”
“Fiskadoro ain’t dead,” Belinda interrupted, “plus also we bringed those two penny for wine, Miz Chicago. Es a mistake about those two penny. Towanda, why you go buy shit with my penny when I didn’t say you go-head buy shit with my penny? Es a mistake. My mouth gone talk about my penny,” she explained to Ms. Chicago. “Es Towanda mouth talking before.”
“You very turbado,” Ms. Chicago said. “I gone give you two penny of wine because of you upset and I too scared of your loa. That’s a power loa.”
“Deal. I gone live with that,” Belinda said.
Ms. Chicago opened the cabinet with a key she kept belted around her belly on a little chain, and took out a two-penny jug of potato wine.
The three of them stood out front where the air might help keep their heads clear. Belinda watched their shadows, made crooked on the corrugated wall of the quonset hut, hanging their tits and passing the jug.
Before long, Belinda said, “My head just ain’t clear. Potato-buzz ain’t make me happy today.”
The radio inside said, “Un programa bilingue de Cubaradio empezara dentro de un minuto. A bilingual broadcast of Cubaradio will begin in just one minute. Por favor invite a sus camaradas a escucharlo. Please invite your comrades to listen.” They passed the green jug. “This potato-buzz burning up inside my stomach,” Belinda told Ms. Chicago and Towanda. “I don’t want no more.”
“Entre menos burros, mas elotes,” Ms. Chicago said, taking a big swallow — among fewer mules, more corn.
Suddenly she gripped Belinda’s hand, and Belinda thought the old woman had gone weak and needed help to stand, but Ms. Chicago said, “Feel me aqui, girl,” and shoved Belinda’s fingers up tight against one of her shrunken breasts. “You feel that dureza?” Ms. Chicago’s breast felt hotter than Belinda’s hand. In the meat was a tiny pebble. “I felt her time when Billy’s first son come. Now Billy’s son about tall as me, but my loa keep on controlling la dureza.”
The radio inside said, “Es Cubaradio bilingue. This is bilingual Cubaradio. En la proxima hora, le deleitaremos con la popular e inspiridora musica Cubana. For the following hour, we will entertain you with some of Cuba’s popular and inspirational music. Ustedes, los radioescuchas, viven bajo la protection del Gobierno de la Habana. You who are listening live under the protection of the Havana government. Las guerras terminaron, el pueblo es libre y la vida sigue adelante,” the radio said. “The wars are over, the people are free, and life goes on.”
Above the sink in the kitchen Belinda kept a photograph of snow, a very old postcard showing the naked tangles of a bush which, for all she knew, never had any foliage except this white stuff daubing the tips of the twigs like blossoms. Next to the bush stood a black pedestal holding up the black stone figure of a bird. In the picture’s foreground, one icicle dangled from a dark branch.
Belinda had no reason for keeping the photo. It was just there, above the sink, in front of her face, that was how that story went. She spent no small amount of every day in its presence. She’d heard about snow but had no clear understanding of who made snow or what snow was supposed to do.
Tilting slightly and banging her elbow against the sink, she took the picture down from its nail and rested it on a cypress stump in the dank closet where precious or useless things were kept: boxes of her trinkets and some clothes she never wore, a rifle that wouldn’t fire, some bullets that probably wouldn’t explode, some books full of crumbling pages that had somehow escaped being burned in the cold time; and Fiskadoro’s clarinet in the briefcase called Samsonite. She propped the scene of winter upright against the wall and laid before it the supercharged loa, formerly just one of her dog-teeth.
When she opened the briefcase called Samsonite, she found the clarinet in pieces — who made it broken? She stood the pieces in a circle, around the yellow tooth, before the picture of snow. One piece wouldn’t stay upright, and so she laid it out in a position she hoped was pleasing to the loa.
Maybe she didn’t completely believe in these things, but she saw how the loa Major Colonel Overdoze was gracious and kind, putting in her head, whether she believed in him or didn’t, one comforting thought: not today. If she grew the tumors of pain until they held her down to the bed, a hundred kilos of tumors of fire, and she begged in a tiny voice to be killed, it wouldn’t happen today. And today was a big place that held everything inside of it — the Keys, the sea, the sky, and the outer space of stars. Today didn’t close around her throat like all the other days.
I seen three shadows on the dirt, she prayed, shadows out of three us old womens hanging our tits and passing the potato-buzz like they all do, me too. Now I getting bit by religion, she prayed, putting in a shrine and praying on a loa like they all do, me too. Atomic Bomber Major Colonel Overdoze, take out this tumor of kill-me and bring my first-born back.
YOU’LL BE BETTER BEFORE WE GET THERE,” William Park-Smith promised Mr. Cheung, but Mr. Cheung, himself, guessed that he would expire of this bottomless nausea sometime in the next few minutes, and felt certain that at the very least he’d still be quite seasick when the boat reached Marathon. He hardly ever traveled by water. He hardly ever traveled at all. What he liked to do was to stay in his house, whose chief attraction in his mind at this moment was that it never moved. The Catch, the diesel-engine fisher on whose deck he was trying to keep his balance among several other members of Twicetown’s Society for Science, demonstrated a bewildering repertoire of motions: side-to-side, up-and-down, and horizontal — east by northeast, and now dead north — along the Keys toward Marathon. Generally the vessel hugged the shore because a storm threatened and the sea, as Mr. Cheung felt compelled to testify, was rough. They passed along the gap between Summerland Key and Ramrod Key, where two frayed sections of the highway called US 1 had given up reaching across the distance to one another and fallen down asleep in the water. People riding on the ferry-raft between the two islands shouted at the Catch and gestured happily, and one man took off his shirt and waved it around above his head, but their cries of greeting were lost in the wind.