The sun broke over the horizon, flooding the shop with dusty white light. Behind the cashier’s booth there was a closet. In it he found a broom and a feather duster, and he went to work cleaning up. All of the arrowheads, the turquoise and onyx and malachite rings, the cactus-growing kits, the postcards, the stone eggs. All as clean as new.
A couple of hours later he stood, sweaty and grimy, in a clean and orderly curio shop. White dust motes like talcum swirled in the air, made bright and palpable by the low morning sun. He walked outside into the fresh air, which was still cool. Glancing in the café door, he shook his head; he’d have to attend to that later.
Another Greyhound swooped down the circular offramp. He hurried back to the curio-shop door. Maybe somebody would buy something. Nervously he watched as people stepped down from the bus. Some of them walked toward cars that Finn had assumed were wrecks, on the other side of the gravel lot; they drove away to the north, under the freeway and out of sight. But several more, observing him standing in the shop doorway, approached the shop. Finn stepped back inside, to clear the entrance.
One by one they filed past. “Opening the old place up again, eh?” a man said.
“Yes,” Finn replied, and cleared his throat. “I’m going to give it a try.” He stared at the man. In the klieg-light glare of the horizontal sun the man’s blue eyes were quite clearly glass. But that look on his face, that curiosity… Finn blinked and the man blinked too, and Finn saw the film of tears and the tiny red veins. An iris could look like crystal from some angles, he knew that… Eventually Finn shook himself and followed the man in. He couldn’t tell. He didn’t care .
“Oh, look,” a young woman said to her companion, an older woman.
“That would look nice in your room,” the older woman said. Finn could hear the years in her voice, and he was reminded of the old woman on his bus.
“I want this,” the young woman said to Finn. “How much is it?”
She held out one of the stone eggs. He took it from her cool hand. It was smooth and brown, mottled by black cracking deep in the stone. Finn looked around: no cash register.
“Um,” he said, feeling in his pockets for change. “A dollar.”
“Sold,” she said, and laughed. The old woman smiled. While the young woman fumbled in her pocketbook, Finn cleaned the egg one last time with a rag he had found under a counter.
“You have to be careful with these,” he warned her. “They’re lighter than they look. And fragile? They’d break like glass if you dropped one.”
“I’ll remember.” She handed him a dollar. George Washington still on the front, he saw. “Where are you living?”
“Well…“ The men examining the postcards swiveled their heads to hear his answer. “There’s some old foundations over the hill to the east. I’m going to set up out there.”
“We live on the other side of the freeway; you should come visit,”
“I will.”
Then they trailed out of the shop, talking and leaving great swirls in the mote-coned morning air. Finn watched them from the doorway; they all balanced with unnatural carefulness across the gravel. He shrugged. When they were all gone, out of sight under the freeway, he went back inside. He would have to find a cash register, and start the air conditioner up again. He straightened up the postcards. Rearranged the stone eggs. After breakfast he would walk up the narrow road to the north.
Black Air
They sailed out of Lisbon harbor with the flags snapping and the brass culverins gleaming under a high white sun, priests proclaiming in sonorous Latin the blessing of the Pope, soldiers in armor jammed on the castles fore and aft, and sailors spiderlike in the rigging, waving at the citizens of the town who had left their work to come out on the hills and watch the ships crowd out the sunbeaten roads, for this was the Armada, the Most Fortunate Invincible Armada, off to subjugate the heretic English to the will of God. There would never be another departure like it.
Unfortunately, the wind blew out of the northeast for a month after they left without shifting even a point on the compass, and at the end of that month the Armada was no closer to England than Iberia itself. Not only that, but the hard-pressed coopers of Portugal had made many of the Armada’s casks of green wood, and when the ship’s cooks opened them the meat was rotten and the water stank. So they trailed into the port of Corunna, where several hundred soldiers and sailors swam to the shores of Spain and were never seen again. A few hundred more had already died of disease, so from his sickbed on the flagship Don Alonso Perez de Guzman el Bueno, seventh Duke of Medina Sidonia and Admiral of the Armada, interrupted the composition of his daily complaint to Philip the Second, and instructed his soldiers to go out into the countryside and collect peasants to help man the ships.
One squad of these soldiers stopped at a Franciscan monastery on the outskirts of Corunna, to impress all the boys who lived there and helped the monks, waiting to join the order themselves. Although they did not like it the monks could not object to the proposal, and off the boys went to join the fleet.
Among these boys, who were each taken to a different ship, was Manuel Carlos Agadir Tetuan. He was seventeen years old; he had been born in Morocco, the son of West Africans who had been captured and enslaved by Arabs. In his short life he had already lived in the Moroccan coastal town of Tetuan, in Gibraltar, the Balearics, Sicily, and Lisbon. He had worked in fields and cleaned stables, he had helped make rope and later cloth, and he had served food in inns. After his mother died of the pox and his father drowned, he had died of the pox and his father drowned, he had begged in the streets and alleys of Corunna, the last port his father had sailed out of, until in his fifteenth year a Franciscan had tripped over him sleeping in an alley, inquired after him, and taken him to the refuge of the monastery.
Manuel was still weeping when the soldiers took him aboard La Lavia, a Levantine galleon of nearly a thousand tons. The sailing master of the ship, one Laeghr, took him in charge and led him below decks. Laeghr was an Irishman, who had left his country principally to practice his trade, but also out of hatred of the English who ruled Ireland. He was a huge man with a torso like a boar’s, and arms as thick as the yardarms of the ship. When he saw Manuel’s distress he showed that he was not without kindness; clapping a callused hand to the back of Manuel’s neck he said, in accented but fluent Spanish, “Stop your snivelling, boy, we’re off to conquer the damned English, and when we do your fathers at the monastery will make you their abbot. And before that happens a dozen English girls will fall at your feet and ask for the touch of those black hands, no doubt. Come on, stop it. I’ll show you your berth first, and wait till we’re at sea to show you your station. I’m going to put you in the main top, all our blacks are good topmen.”
Laeghr slipped through a door half his height with the ease of a weasel ducking into one of its tiny holes in the earth. A hand half as wide as the doorway reemerged and pulled Manuel into the gloom. The terrified boy nearly fell down a broadstepped ladder, but caught himself before falling onto Laeghr. Far below several soldiers laughed at him. Manuel had never been on anything larger than a Sicilian pataches, and most of his fairly extensive seagoing experience was of coastal carracks, so the broad deck under him, cut by bands of yellow sunlight that flowed in at open ports big as church windows, crowded with barrels and bales of hay and tubs of rope, and a hundred busy men, was a marvel. “Saint Anna save me,” he said, scarcely able to believe he was on a ship. Why, the monastery itself had no room as large as the one he descended into now. “Get down here,” Laeghr said in an encouraging way.