“Well, they ain’t supposed to be here. It’s my job to get ’em out.”
“Oh, come on,” Eric said. “Let ’em stay for another night. You guys are moving on tomorrow, ain’t you?”
Sally said, “Yeah. We were planning to.” She said it grumpily.
“They’re practically locals, Aim. Why you gonna hassle them? They’ll be gone tomorrow. Or, if not, a couple of days after that.”
“I’m doin’ my damned job. I’m supposed to be runnin’ squatters off this place. They ain’t nothin’ but crazy science kids and…stuff. We don’t like that down here. It ain’t right.” He stood straighter, looked around, and shook his head. “Okay, Mr. Jeffers has saved your asses tonight. But if I come back here in a couple of nights and you’re still around, I’m gonna run you in. And you can say thank you to us both now.”
Deena said, “Thank you.”
The others began to move around again. The bear-like young man asked, “Can we put up our shelter again — and eat our dinner?”
Aim gave another grumpy look and turned away. “Hey, Jeffers.”
“What?”
“You wouldn’t be wantin’ to make the next ferry to Gilead…?”
Eric said, “Well, actually…” When he looked back, somehow two of the house walls were again standing. One was the glass wall, no longer broken. While he was looking at it, he heard a snapping of fire. Again the rocks and embers appeared, with their complex racks of roasting fish, their silver skins streaked black and gold.
He could even smell them.
“That is just disgusting — the way they play with reality like that.” Aim shook his head. “I know you don’t want to hang around with these people anymore than you have to. They have no respect — no respect at all. For what is. Come on. Lemme give you a lift back to the Harbor. Cookin’ fish like that! That way, you can get away from these ones here — they stink like goddam Californians.”
Two days later, Eric carried his folding table down the maglev’s station’s brick ramp onto the commons. His tote bag bounced from side to side on his back.
The sky had not lightened fully.
Eric turned the corner into the market, looking east where red sun came past the school’s brick face and through the underpass. He squinted at the foreshortened motto — and the world was covered with the particulate rainbow of dragonfly wings, before he looked away, muttering The gift must move…which he had not seen but knew was what the bronze letters read because he had seen them so often before.
A few of the Tuesday morning vendors were out and already putting things on their own benches. Many more would not be getting there for another hour. The air was cool for September, with now and again a gust of warmer air, a promise of what the later day might hold.
He’d wanted to be there by seven thirty, but his table was out by six forty, and he came back from Maya with the crate from her imported pasta stand, to sit on, as well as the bag of oatmeal-raisin walnut cookies he’d baked the night before. (He’d left a third with Maya.) Ten minutes later, Dona came by with a tray in her hands — and said, “My aunt did this last night. She asked me to bring this over and give it to you, if you were here.”
“That nice.” When the cover came off, it was a ginger cake with coffee icing. “You take a couple of cookies.” Eric said.
“I wish they weren’t so good.” She selected two (clearly looking for smaller ones; Eric smiled), then turned toward Dr. Zaya’s office.
“You thank the doctor for me — and for comin’ out to get Shit taken care of.”
“Well, you know — that’s just Zaya. She’s almost as eccentric as you two.”
All the details that made the market the market — the tools on the benches off to the right, the statue of the winged bronze on its pedestal up at the north end, and the fish stands among the first set up, with Laurel and Arna loading shovelfuls of ice onto their wooden trays (Laurel stopped to wave; Eric grinned and waved back), and, minutes later, the first few women from the big Office, including the one whose name he still hadn’t learned yet, with all the red, matted hair, who held her large cup up in her big, grubby hand, saying, “You know this coffee is so watery, and your cookies is so good — you mind if I take two?”
“Go ahead,” Eric said. “That’s what they’re here for.”
She did. “It’s a shame to waste ’em. But thank you, thank you so much.” And chomping, she wandered away across the grass, with three of her friends trailing. Eric chuckled behind her.
“Mr. Jeffers! Hello…!”
He looked over.
Across the grass, two young black women were coming toward him. Both looked faintly familiar and at the same time, no names leaped into his head to go with them.
Eric called, “Hello…” trying to keep the puzzlement out of his voice.
The shorter girl had a wealth of dreads, like something out of the turn of the century. What was her name? He’d known it yesterday…
The taller one wore work pants, work shoes, and a work jacket, open over her breasts: Deena Havers, the sculptor! “Good morning.” Both had knapsacks, which the taller shrugged from one shoulder to let it swing down and sit it on the grass. “Do you mind if I do some sketching? I was thinking about it the last time I saw you, on the mainland. But then you left. So I didn’t get to ask you.” That day, Deena’s head was shaved. It hadn’t been two days ago.
Eric tried to remember the dark, natural hair that had covered it. “Naw. Naw, go right on ahead.” He felt a surge of pleasure, at seeing Deena and the other girl from the marriage group. “Take a cookie, if you want. Or a piece of cake.” (She was the head of the group marriage. She was writing a book about them. But his mind would not give him back her name…)
“We took the early morning ferry across — when the sun was just coming up. It was…just beautiful out there on the water,” Deena said. She squatted now and pulling back the canvas cover, then glanced up. “With the fog and everything.”
“When we came out,” the one with the dreads explained, “the sky was as red as a piece of hickory-smoked ham — and the clouds were like white fat running all through it. It was really interesting — You live out here? What do you do?”
“Well,” Eric said, moving back on the crate he was using for a chair, “me and my partner, we just do handyman work — sometimes. And sometimes we sit out here and give away cookies and sandwiches to people like you who’re coming through and maybe didn’t have as big a breakfast as they might have liked.”
The woman with the dreads — oh, come on, what was it? — laughed. “I can just…take one?”
“Sure can. They’re free.”
She leaned forward to pick one up, hesitated, and bit. Then she smiled. Deena was already sitting on the grass, cross-legged, and had pulled a sketchpad and a box of pastels free, and was making sweeping gestures across it he couldn’t see. The pad looked twice as big as anything thing that could naturally fit into her sack — which probably meant there was something technological about it, like her sculpture, like the mainland house, which he wouldn’t ever really understand, because he wasn’t an artist or a scientist himself. “Right now,” Eric went on, “I’m just waitin’ for my partner to get back from the hospital. He’s supposed to come in two days, so I’m just killin’ time out here today till he gets home — I mean, it’s comical.” He laughed. “I’m doin’ just the same thing I’d be doin’ if he was here, but I tell you, it feels kind of empty ’cause he ain’t around.” There he was, running off again about what he was feeling, just ’cause it was unusual. “It’s funny — I don’t complain about much, but I sure wish the day after tomorrow would hurry up and get here.” Shut up, he thought to himself. Come on, keep quiet. Listen to them — they’re the interesting ones. (And, of course, they hadn’t said thank you for his intervention with Aim back on the mainland. But that was just kids today…) “But it’s kinda hard waitin’ for him to come — ”