What to say, then, but that those bells mark the intervals of our lives, and nothing more; that those strange sensations of disquiet that we get, "as if something were walking on our graves," are simply what we feel upon being reminded of the obvious fact that life is the one disease for which there is a cure? Aren't those Swiss cows better off not listening? — Well, I learned another clanging lesson when the black-pajama'd driver took D. and me between the green windmills of banana fronds, with cliffs of naked rock and dry jungle above. A pyramid of blue-green rock burst up out of the forest-grown earth-cliffs.
He believe in ghost religion, D. reported. Very funny! They have celebration for ghost. They put something in the floors of their houses. If you have five person, they put five chicken and five meat in the door. If you have five man, you can have the chicken. If you have two woman, you can have the sex change. No, I see. Meat for man, chicken for women.
It was not so very clear. But then D., bless her, was not wildly fluent in English. The boy drove us down a road of trees, into a sun-exploding valley with misty jungle ridges ahead.
After all women playing together, we share chicken, D. translated. All women have some something they put in bamboo in chicken legbone to see their destiny. Then all the women can look inside to tell you. But just now the young people they don't know.
The boy smiled very quickly.
He afraid for ghosts, said D. If they have some fever or diarrhea, they think from ghost.
What color is a ghost? I said.
From his idea, he think ghost is a yellow color.
What about my dead sister? Can she hurt me?
He says impossible. If you do good thing, then she can never hurt you.
But I dream of her skeleton, I explained. (Francis had not been killed yet. His skeleton had not yet joined hers.)
Oh. Yes. That was her ghost. .
Now rusty leaves hung above that road of yellow ocher; when other trucks came the dust was as thick as fog. We turned into a valley between dry brown rice terraces and saw the village. This was where people began to have Chinese faces. Just past a small wooden house, a woman was walking down the steep road, bearing an immense conical basket of twigs on her back. A reddish girl with mud or soot on her temple suckled a child who tranquilly wriggled his dirty toes.
In the rainy season he can't drive, said D. Then ghosts fly all around.
The driver lived in a very long big house behind a barrier of earth. He took us inside, while his young wife sat outside with her knees together and her heels braced far apart, wiping her nose and embroidering red diamonds and borders on white cloth on her black vest with yellow lightning borders which had consanguinity with the red and blue and pink stars on the black sleeves; and so many tiny triangles of color within color; and piglets went all around, chasing chickens; her long black hair fell down to her back.
We saw a pile of dusty pumpkins, pale like apples of dust; we saw a sleeping platform with mosquitoes everywhere. There was dusty sun in the windows. That was his house; that was the dark house.
I wondered: Can a ghost wear a straw hat? Can a ghost smoke a pipe of sugarcane?
In that dark house there was a long wide place, all ash. Baskets and stone lived on the mats. On the wall, a white paper with V-shaped perforations forming a cross.
It's god of Hmong, said D. This ghost. You put table under it and then chicken.
Ask him if the ghost will warn him when it's time for him to die.
He says yes. He say put special something in bamboo in meat legbone to understand his destiny. Then ghost come.
How many ghosts are here now?
Million million.
And what do they say?
The driver came closer, smiled in the thick jacket, looked sadly and searchingly into D.'s eye as she leaned toward him while a fat pullet waddled between them. I stared at a sandy-colored cat licking itself and stretching in the sand. He uttered something with great effort. D. translated: He say, ghosts speak everybody die, die like plant, like grass, like leaf. So soon we die. Ghost say we warn you because we want you afraid. If always afraid for ghost, ghost very happy. Because ghost very jealous already die. Ghost speak like bell, ring ring ring! Because then you can be afraid. If afraid, you same same ghost. Very funny, eh?
EDDY
A man's brown knees flexed steadily above the sea, and then they vanished. He pulled his shirt high above his underpants. His waist vanished. He continued on past three rowboats and began to emerge again. A name waited to be born from his mouth. The ocean was astonishingly hot, shallow and bright in that place behind reefs, and the other fishermen who were rooted in it gleamed and sparkled with this liquid light which now peeled so evenly from his legs as he approached a sandy islet where there was no imperfection. His waist came back to air, then his knees, and finally the very bottoms of his feet shone as he lifted them, walking across the islet to a man in a pink-orange shirt who stood casting in time with the cadence of my sleepy eyelashes as I sat in a shady tree, my tree-leaves green and cool and bobbing like breasts. The man began to laugh with happiness when he reached the one in the pink-orange shirt. He shouted: Eddy!
Eddy, his sack filled with small fish, presently waded back into the hot green morning of yawning puppies where a dingy called Venus lay upturned beside a wall on which a schoolgirl had written MON AMOUR. Another fisherman rode by on his bike, his plastic bag full of minnows; he smiled and called out: Eddy!
Inside the Chinese dry goods store the men shook hands salutl, their faces proudly raised. They cried: Eddy! They sat back down on upended crates, smoking cigarettes, looking out the bright doorway at dark girls in yellow sundresses who rushed past under parasols. The boy with the naked silver mermaid on his jacket smiled dreamily, and Eddy laughed and cuffed him.
A girl in a blue skirt entered silently like cool water. She swung toward the counter to greet the fat old Chinese lady, and her skirt whirled, spilling frilliness down her thighs so that the boy with the silver mermaid could see the mesh of the door right through it. Eddy had been sitting in front of the display case. He stood up at once. The girl in blue smiled at him. The glass pane moved soundlessly in his hand. The girl nodded, and his arm sank into the world of treasures. I remembered how in the hot wet night that smelled like leaves, a man and a woman in a yellow skirt had gone wading in the shallow sea, fishing with lantern and net, and the changing light formed the reverse of shadows on their bodies as they walked almost splashlessly in the knee-deep water, casting their hunter's light between boats. Eddy and the girl in the blue skirt were like that now; for the girl stalked parasols, pointing to every one in turn, and Eddy reached inside the glass and handed them to her, nodding respectfully at every word she murmured while the old Chinese lady behind the counter looked on sleepily, fanning herself with a fan of many colored ideograms. His friends sat drinking the beers that he had bought them, and they gazed out the doorway at the girls walking by in a jingle of morning silver. They did not look at the girl in blue anymore because she would have felt them looking, which would not have been polite. She held the red parasol, then the blue one, then the green one with gold flowers on it. Eddy fished for whatever she wanted. When she decided that the green one was prettiest, he told her how much it was, helped her count out her rupees, took them in hand, and brought them over to the counter for the old lady. The girl in blue thanked him. She stepped back into the day, where it was proper for Eddy's friends to admire her again. They saw her open her new parasol and go in shadeful delight.