“I on fire already sometime,” Belinda told her. “Sometime he run down me like letric, sometime he coming up shoosh, like kerosene.”
“You hurting alia time yet?” Towanda whispered.
“Sometime, not alia time.”
“Es ain’t over yet.”
“Oh, no,” Belinda said. “I got a little time. Nothing gone happen today.”
“But he getting a little worse and a little worse?”
“Oh, yeah,” Belinda said. “He getting worse.” Suddenly the salt tears poured out of her eyes. “He taking me all the way, Towanda!”
“Oh, God, Belinda!” Towanda wiped her eyes and nose with the back of her hand. “We gone have to burn you up!”
“Got to,” Belinda said. Her head shook with weeping.
“Yeah. Got to. Real life,” Towanda agreed.
They passed the can of brandy. Belinda coughed and started laughing, even as she wiped her own tears away. Towanda couldn’t help laughing too.
“Make me feel stupid be laughing,” Belinda said. “I don’t know why I laughing now.” She laughed harder.
“Me too, you know!” Towanda shouted, and they were both taken so relentlessly by laughter that they could hardly draw a breath.
SHE AT FIRST PRAYED and then gave up praying to Atomic Bomber Major Colonel Overdoze, the most powerful loa of all. Fiskadoro didn’t understand, and he didn’t care. He just wanted to be right there with her, seeing whatever she was seeing. She got wild in her talk eventually: Major Colonel Overdoze did what he wanted. Major Colonel Overdoze gave back her son, but all cleaned out inside like a baby. Major Colonel Overdoze wasn’t controlled by shrines — he could set the shrines on fire if he wanted. Major Colonel Overdoze didn’t take away the tumor, he made it bigger, and gave it children, and set them all on fire. The tumors covering her body hurt so much that Belinda was too surprised to yell. She tried to find a comfortable position, but the sensation, which she said sometimes ached and other times seared her bones, kept after her. She twisted and turned to get away from it, covered herself up to hide from it, flung herself around in the bed to shake it off, but it held her like hooks, rolled over her like water, fell down on her like sparks. She said it never stopped. Atomic Bomber Major Colonel Overdoze kept turning it up higher, until she knew she wasn’t feeling it, but seeing him, closer and closer, brighter and brighter, and she couldn’t close her eyes. Major Colonel Overdoze didn’t need a plane to fly, or bombs to burn away the shrines that tried to control him. Without any hands or fingers or eyes, without even a mind, he could turn it up higher and higher until it couldn’t be anything, not darkness, not light — it could only be him.
When the neighbor-ladies started bringing her potions to drink for the hurt, they told Fiskadoro the time was getting near. She didn’t scream or cry about the pain anymore, but she looked out from farther and farther back inside herself every day and didn’t seem to believe any of what she saw.
Fiskadoro kept watch by her bed and held her hand. He didn’t care if he caught it, and sometimes he hoped he would. He was aware he was getting a little crazy about it. People did that in this situation. He cried a lot, and he got mad enough to kill. But the whole time there was something about it, as if he and the woman were going through all this right in the middle of the sun and not being burned. When she died it was the middle of the night; his brothers were asleep, the village was asleep, but the sea was awake and Belinda was awake, and her oldest son was awake, holding her hand as he sat beside her bed.
The sweat began pouring off her. She asked for the pan several times but then discovered she didn’t have to make water. “Jimmy! Jimmy!” she said. She started talking to others who’d gone there first — her mother and father, her older brother. “I don’t hurt no more,” she said. She took a deep breath; and then she died.
SEVEN
ON THE DAY THE ISRAELITES CAME FOR HIM, Mr. Cheung was ready with a hundred objections, and he seriously planned, as soon as he saw them, to start listing the many good reasons why he couldn’t go with them today, or ever.
Flying Man and the two young savage boys flanking him in Mr. Cheung’s doorway were smiling and serene — much, much more calm and contented than he’d imagined possible.
“News come,” Flying Man told him right away.
“I thought so.”
“Dat news when say today.”
“Yes,” Mr. Cheung said, completely terrified. “I thought so.”
“Bear good. Bear bear good.” Flying Man clasped his hands above his head. His goodwill and happiness were overpowering.
In Mr. Cheung’s view the chief obstacle was that his wife Eileen was at the vendors, and he couldn’t leave his aged Grandmother Wright at home alone. “Most of the orchestra can’t come, I’m afraid. But Fiskadoro will be here soon, any minute.” He wrung his hands. “But I don’t think it’s a very good idea. My grandmother is here. She can’t be left alone.” He looked from one man to the next, over and over, in the weak hope of finding a face that shone with some small light of comprehension.
“Oxra,” Flying Man told him. “Yah! News come.”
Beyond them, Mr. Cheung saw several others, all striped with paint and hung with feathers, standing in the dirt street in front of his house.
It wasn’t so much a fear of their wrath as a deep reluctance to make ripples in the pool of their contentment, finally, that kept Mr. Cheung from refusing their wishes.
He’d made no preparations for this day, hadn’t mentioned it to the others of The Miami Symphony Orchestra, hadn’t said a word about it to anybody. The fact that Fiskadoro was coming here today was just a lucky coincidence — it happened to be the boy’s lesson day.
Mr. Cheung hoped there wouldn’t be any kind of tragedy. He profoundly hoped that this ceremony didn’t involve the eating of raw meat, or sexual perversion, or some manner of blood sacrifice.
“I think I would like my grandmother to come along, too,” he said. “Could we carry her?” He demonstrated by joining his hands together as if rocking a baby.
Fiskadoro took the beach route down to Twicetown, clutching the briefcase called Samsonite to his chest. To his left was nothing but the beach and a thin strip of lowland tangled with cypress and brush. Beyond the brush, parallel to his progress and hidden by the growth, was the road to Twicetown. He was late, but he failed to hurry. He walked on the wet sand near the water, and kept turning around to see what his footprints looked like getting smaller and smaller behind him.
Eventually he came to the place where paths led away from the Gulf over crude bridges of heaped rocks through the bog and into Twicetown. He’d walked this road with Mr. Cheung for one of his history lessons. His teacher had told him that the town — and in many ways, although several sections of it were lifeless now, it remained a town — had been known, in the other age, as Key West. But during the End of the World it had been saved twice and had earned itself a new name. A missile blew up like a firecracker, but a dud missile only brought good luck.
Mr. Cheung had explained these things to him, but he hadn’t yet told Fiskadoro where he was — if this was the land of death, a land that came after the land of death, or some other place entirely.
After Twicetown’s more desolate section he passed along the edge of commerce and entered a gauntlet of vendors. They had a lot of things for sale, but Fiskadoro hadn’t been told yet if he was entitled to have any of them.
At one table he recognized a boy named Sanchez, but he couldn’t remember the rest of the name. Before him on his collapsible table Sanchez showed off a pile of valuable items — scuba knives, combat boots, tennis shoes, watches, a set of three kitchen pans, one resting in another in another — waving over them the wand of a geiger counter that obviously had no power and counted nothing. People stayed away from him. Only a few allowed themselves to show interest, slowing down a little but not stopping.