Eddy visited the dry goods store every morning and every night. He knew where everything was. He helped the old lady for nothing because he felt so free in that place.
OK, Eddy! laughed his friends. It was already eleven. They sucked the last lukewarm swallows from the bottles whose labels each depicted a phoenix so skinny and jointed that it should have been a spider. The Chinese lady was snoring when they went out. Along the main street people leaned up against hot gratings or sat on bicycles or stood mahogany-footed in sandals (some women in silver anklets), because it was the day of the Tamil procession. Eddy and the boys were on the corner. They sat on railings, tapping cigarettes against scarred hands. Children came out and called: Eddy!
A child cried out, a cry without language. Eddy froze. They could see the Tamils coming, still far away, a crowd of them creeping from beneath the horizon-tree. A policeman headed them; then came the advance men wheeling an altar draped with many cloths, a cave of colors in which something burned in a coconut. A car blooming with yellow pennants shouted religious music, followed by many men in white robes who came clacking purple sticks together. After them came the ones whom everyone waited to see. They too were singing and clapping, bearing altars which expressed the holiest pictures, altars roofed with arches of flowers and bananas; they were the men whose mouths were pierced and hung with chains, whose tongues were penetrated by silver hooks, whose cheeks were perforated just like those of the fishes that Eddy caught; they were the men with spikes sunk into their waists and backs and chests, the men hung with limes, carrying the heavy wooden altars past the old one in sandals who'd scraped the paint of Venus down smooth (a pod shot down into the painted boat with a boom, and he opened his eyes; already the day was half gone). Behind and around were the ladies of each family, dressed in their best saris, anklets and bracelets sharing the jingling swing of their men's silver chains against bellies and lips, the men wearing purple loincloths, carrying the heavy altars like Christs carrying crosses. They gazed straight ahead as they came. They were a part of the world to whom Eddy meant nothing. They recognized their own gods, felt them in their flesh. Across the street stood the girl in the blue skirt, shaded by her new parasol; to her also Eddy was invisible at this moment. She watched the mutilated men with a look of almost pleading concentration. She needed to understand what made them do this thing to themselves, and she could not. Most of the other spectators no longer asked. They had watched this twice each year for as long as they'd lived. It was something to be seen without being understood, just as a husband sees his wife give birth again and yet again so that her pain is too expected to be comprehensible anymore. Now came the priest with the book, attended by singing ladies in parasols, and then the man with so many hooks in his back that he glittered like a scaly trout, then the man with spiked combs in his thighs and a spiked sun of silver in his chest, his altar enriched by peacock tails, leaves and flowers. So they walked the quiet streets of shade-trees and whitewashed walls. The last altar took fourteen days to make. As it came, people clapped and cried: Ohhh!
After the young boy with a single dagger through his cheeks, came the man with the great temple of flowers on his shoulders, his spikes heavy with lemons and limes. The man's feet staggered steadily on shoes of spikes. He was a man pinned full of limes and bells; he lurched along, his temple canted with agony and weariness. One couple laid their sick daughter down in the middle of the street, the mother running ahead to hose it clean. The child was wide-eyed and silent. He, the one with silver spiked shoes hooked into the backs of his calves, he stepped dreamily over her, frothy-mouthed. Again and again they snatched her up and stretched her down before him to be healed. Who was the sacrifice? Once she looked into Eddy's face; but then her eyes swam back to her savior with his bloodless wounds.
Afterwards the Tamils gave juice and water to all, and the brownish-green sea rolled in like sleep.
He went home and his wife ran out, threw her arms around his neck, and laughed: Eddy! — He kissed her. And all afternoon the world greeted him again.
In the evening he sat on the cool sidewalk where his little children ate bowls of rice and milk, uttering his name in transports of pleasure while he smiled lovingly, and two kittens watched the milk, and then a boy came running in with an octopus he'd caught in a coffee can, the dead creature milky-pale in the darkness. The son and daughter babbled to their father, chewing rice, peeking into the coffee can, and the octopus's silence grew louder and louder.
After he stopped by the dry goods store for a Phoenix beer or two, Eddy sat smoking and drinking with his friends on the beach. There were so many stars. Eddy pointed. He knew exactly where the moon would be at ten, where at eleven, and so on through the night. And yet the stars did not address him, the sea did not speak to him. The woman in the yellow skirt was lantern-fishing with her husband. Knee-deep in the salty night, they called to Eddy, but the sea made mysteries of their speech.
SAY IT WITH FLOWERS
In Pat Pong there was a long crowded alley filled with lips on signs and girls, filled with hands on trembling beers, and in that alley there was a bar where the ladies laughed but always went back to doing their receipts, and among those ladies a deaf and dumb girl was making up her face very slowly, bending over a mirror not much larger than a fingernail, with her pigtail almost down to her waist. I did not see her at first. I saw a delicious-buttocked prostitute on a barstool giggling I wuv you to an Australian who had a paunch. I saw two white-teethed barmaids gazing outside, their fingers on the counter. I saw the eyeshine of their intelligence. Where you saleep? the girl was saying to the Australian.
Beside her, an older woman swiveled on the barstool to show me some thigh, I think because I had closed the doors and rung the bell which meant that I'd just bought every girl in the bar a drink.
This was not one of those bars where music's mountainous loudness reared and crashed inside my bones, where lights shot colors round and round, where the theme was gaiters and buttocks and weird lingerie, all the better to flash lust red along those legs and breasts illuminated like roast chickens on a rotisserie. — Nor was it one of those bars that were so dark that you could not see the women's faces, maybe because they were so sad, and the women touched their lips and touched the zipper of your pants and said: OK I smoke you OK? — This bar had neither dancers nor fellators. It was a small, quiet place whose girls wore T-shirts or long formal dresses. Just above the whiskey bottles, small bat-winged fishes swam in bottles of water in which seedlings grew forests of fantastic roots and above which they uttered huge lion-toothed leaves. The fishes flickered, the air conditioner imparted steadiness, and the girls sat as peacefully immobile as basking lizards. It was my favorite bar. If I wanted to, I could sit there and read a newspaper all afternoon and no one would ask me for anything. The Australian was asking to be asked. I was not. That was why the older woman and I carried on a duet of mere politeness. She showed me thigh, as I mentioned, so to compliment her I raised my glass and cried: I pay for you one thousand baht!*
No no I forty-four you thirty-four I like you same son same student! Me ten husband already! I Mama you!