The wind was letting up a little as the rain fell harder, but the curtain of beads over the door still chattered against the door-board as they latched it in place, and then the beads scraped back and forth across the wood like something clawing its way in. Now they were reasonably snug against the storm. Mike stopped crying, the candle flames stopped dancing in the glass jars, and the rain stopped sounding like death. “What you want aqui?” Belinda asked Drake, as if just discovering him here.
“I got a sick stomach,” Drake said.
She made motions of unplugging a bottle and tipping it back. “Party on down.”
“Es ain’t a party. Come from I ate until almost ten green coconuts.”
Belinda grabbed Mike and violently washed his face with salt water from the clam bucket, and then wiped her hands back and forth on her new denim skirt while Mike let out with fresh cries.
“I sick. I got to stay here. Es raining,” Drake said.
“Oh!” Belinda said. “Ha! Hm!”
Somebody pounded hard on the door-board.
“You gone break my door, Pressy!” Belinda shouted. She unlatched the door-board and moved it aside.
Pressy was holding his dog Sarge by the scruff of the neck and peering through the bead curtain.
“Ain’t no party aqui,” Belinda said.
“Sarge got those looney toons,” he explained, “that’s why we gone stay here tonight.” The dog pushed his way through to the stove where he tried to hide under his own flattened ears. Pressy hurried in after him.
Within a couple of hours, it looked as if nobody wanted Roderick Chambers to go on. They interrupted his hoarse reading with questions they knew he couldn’t answer: Was this the first bomb? Was this the last bomb? “Why is it talking about Japan?” a fisherman asked, standing up in the back and pounding on the window-board for attention. Thunder answered him. Meanwhile the listeners argued among themselves. Some claimed that the book wasn’t true, that it was only a storybook. While they fidgeted and bickered, Roderick Chambers read silently to himself, until people shouted, “Read! Read!” He picked up at the place he’d reached alone. “Mrs. Yoshiyama was peeling potatoes in her kitchen, and she watched in disbelief as the potato skins flew out the window a second before she was hurled to the floor.” Immediately there were new interruptions as the disbelievers tried to point out that nobody could have known whether this woman, Mrs. Yoshiyama, had been peeling potatoes or oranges: it must be a story. “We traded a boat for this!” someone yelled.
But the talk ceased, only the strokes of rain on the field outside and the occasional thunder competed with Roderick Chambers when he read an account of three men who’d flown an airplane over the city soon after it was bombed:
“Lieutenant Komatsu had never seen anything like it. A huge volcanic eruption with many layers of smoke rising from it. The black cloud ring was churning like a thing alive. The sun coming from behind gave the illusion that the cloud was undergoing instantaneous changes of colors — from red to blue to yellow. ”
Mr. Cheung believed he was dreaming of a previous birth-and-death existence as he visualized what Roderick Chambers recited. Which one was I? he asked himself.
“. he opened the cabin window and stretched his hand out. Quickly, he pulled it back in. Even with a glove on, it was as if he had plunged his hand into live steam. ”
I was there, Mr. Cheung told himself. The locks were blown from the doors. As the bombs fell, already we were forgotten. The bomb said, I will not remember.
“All Nagasaki surely had been destroyed. And he was about to fly into that ominous cloud. Cold perspiration. ”
I was there. My eyes burned up. It was the only thing I felt. I remember.
“I can’t stand it! ” someone shouted suddenly.
My eyes burst into flames. I died.
“That’s just what it says in the book!” Roderick Chambers said. “Look here — you read it: 'I can’t stand it!’ someone shouted suddenly, and when Lieutenant Komatsu turned he saw Chief Petty Officer Umeda vomiting.”
A man in the front turned around to address everyone. “The book is telling us what to say.”
Thunder clapped and a window-board fell in, dangling by a couple of nails. There were screams. “Shut that back up,” Roderick called over the noise.
“But that’s what it says in the book!” the man he’d handed the volume to said. “ ‘Close. the. window,’ he gasped. ‘Close it! Quickly!’ ” The man waved the volume around above his head, and Roderick Chambers snatched it back.
By now Mr. Cheung was so convinced that he was only dreaming that he felt let down and disappointed in the whole experience. It wasn’t real, it was only a dream. His seasickness seemed to be coming back. He had a terrible headache and he felt nauseous.
“. either the fumes or the heat,” Roderick Chambers read above the protests of the hysterical listeners, “had given him a terrible headache and he felt nauseous.”
Because they were all in the house now — her two youngest sons, her baby brother — Belinda felt large and strong: older, but older in a way she liked. She sat on the bed beside Drake and Mike, both of them curled up against the chill. Pressy took it on himself to throw more wood into the stove, trying to show the world that he’d come around here to be a help. The noise of rain grew smaller, then louder. The storm’s eye was passing. “Only one who walk out in a lightning gone be Bruce Lee,” she said, stroking Drake’s hair.
“Es who?” Drake asked, lying on his side and turned away from her, staring slack-mouthed at the sleep that was coming over him.
“Bruce Lee. He was all over letric, with letricity for eyes. He could hear letricity inside you and tell you if you lying or not.”
“Where Bruce Lee come from?” Drake asked.
“Come from China. Down deep in a hole in the world.”
“Mama, you telling me bullshit?”
“Es a story,” she said.
“Es letric inside the batteries,” Pressy told them. He was sitting against the wall, with a view of Sarge in the kitchen, trying not to flinch when the thunder rolled over the Army. The lightning was far away now as the storm’s whipping tail passed east by northeast, up toward Marathon. He listened to Belinda’s stories and kept watch on his dog, willing to wait all night, if it had to be that way, for Sarge to get back his courage.
Mr. Cheung wasn’t alone in thinking that reading about the bomb had brought on a totally destructive storm. The others wept and shouted that the reading must be stopped. “We need a discussion time!” “We’re bombing the Keys!” “That doesn’t make sense,” Roderick Chambers insisted, but he was obviously nervous himself, probably, Mr. Cheung thought, because he faced a wall of panic. “Make sense?” people cried. “Make sense?”
When lightning struck the field outside, its glare through the gaps in window-boards lit up a room full of people whipping their heads down between their knees in unison. “There’s nothing to be afraid of! We’re in the best building! The lowest stone building, the strongest!” Roderick Chambers shouted.
Ah, God, Mr. Cheung thought.
On the trip home the next day, Mr. Cheung didn’t get seasick. He enjoyed the ride, though it went on a little too long, and he had a good time leaning on the rail and sighting at the shoreline so that it seemed to be going by too swiftly to keep track of. The beaches were hard as slate and almost yellow after the heavy rain, imbedded with boards and branches and lacquered with black leaves and red and white oleander petals. The sea was bottle-green. Everything was invisible below its cloudy surface, and so the Catch stayed out in the deeper water.