One afternoon, in order to explain themselves a little better, they took Fiskadoro out behind his hut and asked him what he thought he looked like.
He told them he didn’t think he looked like anything.
But down here, they wanted to know, down here where he peed, down here where he was a man? What did he think he looked like down here?
He told them he didn’t know what to tell them.
Zeid wore a denim skirt. He lifted the hem of it and showed Fiskadoro that there was something wrong.
Fiskadoro didn’t know what to say. He felt sorry for Zeid, but there was nothing he could do about whatever had happened to make the old man just as ugly between his legs as he was in his face.
Abu-Lahab talked to Zeid in frustration. Finally Abu-Lahab also lifted the hem of his own skirt. There was something wrong with him, too.
Did Fiskadoro understand what they were getting at?
I see there’s something wrong with you, Fiskadoro said. Your penes are all banged up.
We’re like other men, they told him. And you’re not.
Throughout the rest of the day, until the somber afternoon turned black and Fiskadoro couldn’t see them anymore, Zeid and Abu-Lahab brought other men around who lifted the hems of their skirts or unhooked the flies of their pants, and showed him. Fiskadoro discovered that they were telling the truth. He wasn’t like these other men.
A couple of days after Fiskadoro had recognized this fact about himself, Abu-Lahab came along to Fiskadoro’s hut and sat down beside him. Was he feeling all right? was the first question he asked, and Fiskadoro told the old man that he was feeling fine, but got cold at night. Abu-Lahab was delighted with this answer. Did the boy know that he was the keeper of fires here, and that his name, Abu-Lahab, meant Father of Flames? He promised to start making the fires a lot higher and hotter.
Fiskadoro thanked him, but Abu-Lahab didn’t leave right away. Instead he began clearing his throat and shifting around as if the ground were alive and he’d sat down on it by mistake, and told Fiskadoro that a long time ago there was a village where the young men and women grew restless. People from far away kept visiting their village and spreading all kinds of lies about a place where everyone was always happy, where a party went on day after day without stopping, where everybody danced, ate food, drank liquor, and made love. As soon as they’d had a little time to think about this never-ending party, the young people wanted to go. One morning before anybody else was awake, they all held their breath so they wouldn’t make a sound and left the village together. It took them several days to reach the place, and when they arrived they found out that these lies they’d been hearing were almost true — people were dancing, getting drunk, making love. But nobody knew them there. To gain courage among strange people, the youngsters drank too much wine and one of them got drunk and fell in the sea. The others ran home to their elders. The whole village felt terrible. The youngsters were ashamed because they’d been tricked by lies and had lost a friend. But the trouble with a lie is that it’s easier to believe than the truth. After a while the same young people forgot what had really happened, and one morning they all left again when there was no one awake to stop them. They went back to the party, saw once again that they’d only tricked themselves, saw that they’d always be strangers at this gathering, and started back home. In a little while they noticed that the friend they’d lost was with them, traveling along some distance behind. It was the same person, the same soul, and they recognized him. But a soul has no name and has nothing to say. Forever and ever, a soul is like a baby who hasn’t been born, to whom nothing has happened yet. And so a soul with a new body has a new face and a new name, and remembers new things. Their friend’s soul didn’t remember who it was supposed to be. It began crying and talking the wrong language. To keep it from running away, its friends had to beat its new body with their hands until it was quiet. Then they carried the soul of their good friend, which was now inside a completely different body and remembered completely different things, back to its home. But the soul’s new eyes had never seen its old home, and it never remembered. Still, still, still, Abu-Lahab insisted, it was the same soul.
Fiskadoro said nothing, because he felt only contempt for this idea. There were ghosts everywhere who had the same names, the same memories, and the same friends and relatives that they’d had when living. The kind of soul Abu-Lahab talked about wasn’t any kind of soul at all. Their twisted notions about these things explained why they didn’t see any of the ghosts among them, walking around their village, sitting beside the fires, wandering in the dark. These swamp-people were concerned only with the future, with things that would happen at some later date — Zeid and Abu-Lahab talked about it all the time — a ceremony to be held soon, in which Fiskadoro and some younger boys would be changed until they were like other men.
When he saw the white trader visiting various huts around the village and heard him say, “North Deerfield,” Fiskadoro recognized the words and thought of Ernest Bodine, the horrible white gambler, talking to Cassius Clay Sugar Ray in the North Deerfield. But the trader didn’t look at all like Cassius Clay Sugar Ray’s depiction of a North Deerfield person. He had no fangs, and wasn’t much bigger than Fiskadoro. He wore tall slick boots that kept his feet dry, and a canvas belt with a gun and a canteen hanging off it, but otherwise he looked like anyone.
The villagers didn’t seem to mind that this white man walked around the place bothering everybody. Nobody traded with him, but they were all happy to pass the time and accept his gifts. He ate their food, slept in a hut, went out on the trails with the men looking for two-headed snakes, and generally seemed to be having a friendly visit out here in the muddy swamp. Now and then he rested with his back to the warmth of a fire and watched the people go by, looking for somebody to answer his questions.
Eventually the trader came to ask Fiskadoro the same two questions he asked everyone.
“You like candy, boy? You know where they get them little pills, boy?”
The man said his name but it came out without sound, “_______.” He smiled out of a small and innocent face, hunkering down where Fiskadoro sat against a tree and offering him a red ball of sugar candy.
Fiskadoro took the candy and put it on his tongue. He closed his eyes and floated away on its sweetness.
“Where you get all the stuff goes in the juice? Stuff they dry down to the wafers. Got to come out of some sort of hospital, right?”
Fiskadoro shook his head and shivered.
“Or maybe like a science laboratory, someplace like at.”
The man waited a minute without getting an answer.
“Someplace where it ain’t all bombed out.”
Fiskadoro didn’t know what this man called _______ was trying to say. Fiskadoro himself said nothing because he didn’t talk in this part of the dream.
Later, when they came on one another as they both paced the village with nothing to do, Fiskadoro told the trader, “Cassius Clay Sugar Ray. Cassius Clay Sugar Ray say you take me West Beach.”
The trader looked at him in surprise. “I could take you as far as Key Largo,” he said.
“When?”
_______ unhooked the canteen from his canvas belt and took a swallow. “I could take off about any time after the ceremony,” he told Fiskadoro. “Whenever your business here is done with. How’s at sound?”