The reading of the Nagasaki book, the attempt at understanding, the reconciliation of the Twicetown and Marathon Societies, the whole experience had been a failure. Now the confusion was only deeper and more troubling. It would have been easier, Mr. Cheung believed, to have accepted their ignorance about the destruction if only they all hadn’t been aware that sixty years ago, any little child could have told them all about it. “I’m giving up on that kind of history,” he told Maxwell, who had done his turn comforting Bobby Calvino, today’s victim of seasickness.
“I know,” Maxwell said. “I think maybe it just keeps us away from the practical things.”
As they passed Big Pine Key, a tall island given over mostly to rice paddies, they saw naked boys above the water on a low cliff, jumping on the lip of it until the soil that had been undermined by the waves gave out beneath them and they tumbled into the Gulf, laughing at life while their families thought they were at work in the fields. “Is Maxwell,” Mr. Cheung asked, “your first name or your second name?”
“It’s one name.” Apologetically Maxwell added, “It’s very simple that way.” He went down in Mr. Cheung’s esteem for having thrown away part of his name. Later he surprised Mr. Cheung by saying, “I think there’s an alien life-form inhabiting inside my body,” and finally he disgusted the Orchestra Manager completely by telling him in confidence, as they were docking, “Our Society rejects too much. Some of that Voodoo may be a helpful thing, I think so.”
SIX
BECAUSE HE WAS THINKING DEEPLY, Mr. Cheung moved without appreciation of his feet along a route that wasn’t the shortest one. By the time he took a minute to look around, he was over on the east side of town, ten minutes’ walk from the road to the Army, where he’d been headed.
Hardly anyone lived on Twicetown’s eastern edge. Fishermen toured the area in groups to keep the desechados from putting up shelters here, and within a few minutes Mr. Cheung passed one of these informal patrols. They eyed him closely and greeted him—“Buenas!” and “Hey there!”—and he wondered if any of them knew Fiskadoro. The seagoing people, from here to Marathon, all took an interest in one another. Maybe he should have told them the boy had returned.
He came out of an alley and walked alongside One.
The rubble of brick and concrete buildings One had plowed through had been moved back, over the years, to create a kind of stone arena in which it rested impressively, and this clear space of sand and chewed asphalt with an Atomic Bomb laid out in it had become a gathering place for political and religious functions. When a great man died he was brought here. The missile itself was almost as big around as a house. A person could count to six before the fastest runner in Twicetown raced from end to end. Its skin was scorched and welted, in some spots still olive drab, in others stripped of all paint and shiny as glass. The other one, the one called Two, was just a black warhead overgrown with grass in a field north of town. But One was intact, from head to tail. People said it was an American bomb that had gone off course.
Keeping left, Mr. Cheung entered a pocket of industry, passing the bottle factory and the candle factory, both of them closed now and awaiting the time when some flurry of demand would call forth a great man to pry the boards from their windows and take them through the cycle of confused life and premature death generally enjoyed by businesses along the Keys. There were other buildings in the neighborhood that had never hosted any such resurrections and inside of which the machines hulked inscrutably, scaring away the people who might have lived in them. Even Mr. Cheung walked past these places with a dread of something that lurked here hoping to churn people into grease.
William Park-Smith was waiting for him on the road out of Twicetown, resting in the shadow of a brick wall behind which grass grew up through an old foundation. He had one of his combat boots off and his face down in its mouth, apparently inhaling the odor of leather.
He hopped up to join Mr. Cheung, walking along lopsidedly with one bare foot. “Do you think we’ll get the clarinet?” he asked.
“It isn’t about the clarinet,” Mr. Cheung said. “It’s about my pupil Fiskadoro, who’s returned now.”
“Yes, yes. But I thought of the clarinet.”
With nothing to talk about, Park-Smith developed an ear for the enticements of vendors, delaying the whole trip several times only to buy nothing in the end, until the two musicians passed beyond the fringes of town, beyond the vendors and then into the region where the asphalt gave out and the dirt thoroughfare, heavily trafficked with nomads and beggars, cut through a kind of beach jungle interrupted by the rubble of buildings. Park-Smith stopped and took off his other combat boot, then walked along barefoot beside the Orchestra Manager carrying a shoe in either hand.
He wished that Mr. Cheung would chat about a few matters. The walk seemed longer without any conversation to relieve its sameness. The Manager was very preoccupied. He lived too much inside his head. “We’ll require, you know, to spend the night there,” Park-Smith concluded, acknowledging the lateness of the hour — the sun was low in the west. “Won’t tomorrow be soon enough?”
“It’s urgent. The young brother Drake came to me this morning.”
“Yes, yes — you sent him to me.” Immediately Park-Smith was worried. “Don’t you remember?”
In another hour they reached the Army. The fences that once had separated the compound from civilian Florida had long since disappeared, and the coconut and date palms that seemed to gush from every square meter of unpopulated earth overcame the dwellings, so that the habitation blended into the countryside around it. Now it was sunset. Among the trees the shade was no longer shade, but darkness.
Behind Fiskadoro’s house, just offshore, an old fishing boat hovered in a violent, rusty light, attracting villagers. And there was Martin, known lately as Cassius Clay Sugar Ray, standing in water up to his bare knees and resting a hand on the anchor line. The late hour gave to the beach an ineffable wanness. The boat and the people seemed small and far away.
“He has a boat now?” Park-Smith said when he recognized their half-brother.
Mr. Cheung stopped and looked. “We should have guessed,” he said. “They traded a boat for the book.”
“The Nagasaki book!”
“We should have guessed.”
They were only a few meters from Fiskadoro’s door, but they waited to greet Martin — who was waving to them as he marched through the water hefting a sun-bleached canvas duffel bag — because in any situation it was always best to find out, first of all, what Martin’s presence might signify.
“The white bodyguard,” Park-Smith said, seeing that Martin was accompanied.
“Ha! Ha! Ha!” Martin shouted as he and the white man approached. He dropped his duffel bag on the sand and patted Park-Smith’s shoulder and said, “How is our father?” He shook Mr. Cheung’s hand and said, “How is our mother?” It was an old joke; both of these people were dead.
Martin indicated the white man, who rested a rifle across his shoulder. “Sammy Goodman. Tony and Billy are my brothers, good men. Sammy Goodman is a good man. I am called Cassius Clay Sugar Ray. I am a good man.”
Mr. Cheung said, “Your new name has reached me.”
“You traded a boat with the Marathon Society?” Park-Smith asked. Martin only smiled as if he didn’t understand the question, and Park-Smith said, “Perhaps?” But Martin only smiled.