The Atlas

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.

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.