“How do you know it ain’t contaminated, if you didn’t even get to see it?”
“We know because it didn’t come from Miami. It came from here. It was originally the property of this library.” Many were outraged.
Chambers seemed to enjoy shocking everybody with the news that they’d traded so steeply for their own book. “It got stolen a long, long time back,” he said. “Now it’s been returned.”
“What was the source?” several people shouted. “What was the source?”
“It came from a usual type of source,” Roderick Chambers assured them.
What’s the point of all this talk? Mr. Cheung thought. By now he was speechless with tension. He looked neither right nor left, took nothing in, and tried to calm himself by thinking that it had been bound to happen someday. Someday was today. It had to be the kind of book they’d been hoping for.
“I can’t believe,” Chambers said above the noise, “that you-all just mean to sit here slinging this dead issue around when we have the book right here.” He stepped back and pointed dramatically at a book, just lying among the other books, on one of the shelves behind him.
Pressy was bored and sipping at potato brandy as the windy dark came along. The Los Desechados, of whose crew he was the newest and least respected member, hadn’t gone out today because all the gulls had been flying east toward the Ocean side, a good sign there was a storm somewhere out on the Gulf.
Pressy’s cousin Alfo was staying across the compound with his sister, whose roof didn’t leak. Drake was napping inside, but Drake would run home to his mother when the thunder started. Pressy intended to stay here, where he lived, even if he drowned, which was a possibility because the hut’s front section was falling down. Generally this little building wasn’t lived in. Coconut shells, wood to be split, and miscellaneous unwanted things found their way here.
Pressy clicked his tongue at a grey kitten hiding under the house. “Come on, Señor.” Wearing a worried, intelligent expression, the kitten stepped out from under what was left of the steps and uttered a cry.
Pressy took another pull of his brandy. He stuck his finger in the bottle’s mouth and offered the wet finger to the kitten, but the kitten only sniffed the air and turned its back.
When Drake woke up from his siesta among the stacks of kindling in the house and wandered, rubbing his face, out front to sit with him, Pressy felt happier. “Rain gone come down in the roof,” he promised Drake. “Thunder gone smash thisyer casa. Lightning gone burn us alive. Sarge know all about it.” Pressy’s dog Sarge was hiding in a dark corner of the quonset hut, his mind already in pieces, listening to thunder nobody else could hear yet. Drake didn’t say anything. He shivered in the wind and put his arms around himself.
Pressy went inside, came back with half a coconut shell, and poured some potato brandy into it for the kitten. When he set the shell down, the kitten gave it a little sniff, but got no closer than the length of a hand to the source of this aroma. “Ain’t you thirsty?” Pressy said. He got a whole coconut from the house and whacked it with his bolo knife, shaking milk from the cracked brown fruit into the improvised bowl. “Scientifig esperiment,” he explained to Drake. This time the kitten didn’t even come near it.
Drake went inside, and Pressy said, “Where you going?” just to have something to say. Presently Drake came back out wearing a shawl of burlap draped over his head and shoulders.
“In order for this kind of esperiment,” Pressy said, “you go find some milk.”
“Es your esperiment,” Drake said.
Solemnly Pressy told him, “Fiskadoro help me many times, Drake.”
“I not Fiskadoro,” Drake said.
“Oh”—Pressy put his face in his hands-“when you say that it make my heart go dark, talking I ain’t Fiskadoro, talking I ain’t my own brother, talking I don’t believe you scientifig esperiment, Pressy, talking I ain’t you cousin, don’t wanna put out on Los Desechados no more—”
“Si! I wanna put out on Los Desechados!”
“Well why you don’t get me some milk? Make my heart go dark till I don’t never wanna see you face around my boat.” Pressy dumped the shell of its contents and handed it to Drake. “You say Towanda Sanchez, mi madre need it because of her stomach burning up.”
Holding the burlap shawl shut tightly under his chin with one hand, Drake carried the bowl to Leon Sanchez’s and soon came back, walking carefully and watching the milk inside it. Now the evening was dark. The edges of the burlap flapped around his shoulders in the wind.
“She doesn’t like to give me,” he told Pressy. “She goat not making much today.”
“Es important,” Pressy said. He poured some brandy into the milk and clucked for the kitten. The kitten came out from under the house and smelled of the offered mixture, jerked back, approached again, put a paw into the bowl and scratched at the liquid as if trying to scrape aside whatever smelled improper, sniffed the paw, touched it with the tip of its tongue, sneezed, turned away in disgust, walked around awhile, repeated all these moves, and at last took one sip from the bowl and sat back, licking its lips and turning this experience over in its mind. “She gone drink it,” Pressy predicted. He drank some himself, from the bottle, and then marched back and forth with his hands clasped behind his head and his elbows jutting out.
Less and less reluctantly, the kitten sipped the reinforced goat’s milk until the bowl was empty. Drake and Pressy watched without comment. There was a little thunder, faint and low, from far out over the Gulf.
The kitten hopped about at their feet and struck at imaginary small prey, but for the most part behaved as if perfectly sober. Pressy was disappointed. “Why she don’t fall down?” he asked Drake. “Always every time I drink it, I gone fall down.” A louder clap of thunder drove the kitten back under the little house.
“Kitten don’t fall down when she drink brandy,” Drake said.
“That’s right,” Pressy said. “We know that because of we have make a scientifig esperiment.”
They sat on the broken steps, side by side, waiting for the next thing to happen.
“Now que pasa?” Drake asked.
“Now a storm,” Pressy said.
“Nagasaki.” Roderick Chambers took a step backward and then a step to the right, getting closer to the lamp on the wall. “The Forgotten Bomb.”
Ah, God, Mr. Cheung thought.
He would have been able to hear the people breathing around him, if not for the gusts throwing the first raindrops at the boarded-up windows. His own breath was coming too rapidly. A vibration of the storm shook the room’s shadows. This wasn’t a particularly bad squall, certainly not a cataclysmic one. This early in the wet season came rough weather; hurricanes arrived late. By the compelling power of reason, he tried to drive away the fear that merely by reading about this bomb they might wipe themselves off the earth tonight.
Drake helped his mother drag the window-boards out from under the house as the rain came down and Mike howled inside. Belinda said nothing, but managed to convey, by flattening the look of her face and moving with a certain weary, triumphant pomp, that Drake should have accomplished this chore many days ago, that he shouldn’t be out on the Ocean after fish because he was only ten, that he shouldn’t be living with Pressy and Alfo, that he was a demon and a criminal. The boards were slightly mushy and eaten away by salty dampness around the edges. In places their borders were too flimsy to give good purchase to the wooden latches that were supposed to hold them, and by puckering and un-puckering her lips repeatedly as she twisted one of the latches Belinda made it plain that Drake was also somehow responsible for this. Blinded by his sins, he ran a toe painfully against the battery she’d moved from the windowsill to the floor.