Krik? Krak!

  "You won't put the boy on any lists, will you?" she implored.

  "Please, Lili, no more about the boy. He will not go on the list."

  "Thank you."

  "Tonight I was looking at that balloon in the yard behind the sugar mill," he said. "I have been watching it real close."

  "I know."

  "I have seen the man who owns it," he said. "I've seen him get in it and put it in the sky and go up there like it was some kind of kite and he was the kite master. I see the men who run after it trying to figure out where it will land. Once I was there and I was one of those men who were running and I actually guessed correctly. I picked a spot in the sugarcane fields. I picked the spot from a distance and it actually landed there."

  "Let me say something to you, Guy—

  "Pretend that this is the time of miracles and we believed in them. I watched the owner for a long time, and I think I can fly that balloon. The first time I saw him do it, it looked like a miracle, but the more and more I saw it, the more ordinary it became."

  "You're probably intelligent enough to do it," she said.

  "I am intelligent enough to do it. You're right to say that I can."

  "Don't you think about hurting yourself?"

  "Think like this. Can't you see yourself up there? Up in the clouds somewhere like some kind of bird?"

  "If God wanted people to fly, he would have given us wings on our backs."

  "You're right, Lili, you're right. But look what he gave us instead. He gave us reasons to want to fly. He gave us the air, the birds, our son."

  "I don't understand you," she said.

  "Our son, your son, you do not want him cleaning latrines."

  "He can do other things."

  "Me too. I can do other things too."

  A loud scream came from the corner where the boy was sleeping. Lili and Guy rushed to him and tried to wake him. The boy was trembling when he opened his eyes.

  "What is the matter?" Guy asked.

  "I cannot remember my lines," the boy said.

  Lili tried to string together what she could remember of her son's lines. The words slowly came back to the boy. By the time he fell back to sleep, it was almost dawn.

  The light was slowly coming up behind the trees. Lili could hear the whispers of the market women, their hisses and swearing as their sandals dug into the sharp-edged rocks on the road.

  She turned her back to her husband as she slipped out of her nightgown, quickly putting on her day clothes.

  "Imagine this," Guy said from the mat on the floor. "I have never really seen your entire body in broad daylight."

  Lili shut the door behind her, making her way out to the yard. The empty gasoline containers rested easily on her head as she walked a few miles to the public water fountains. It was harder to keep them steady when the containers were full. The water splashed all over her blouse and rippled down her back.

  The sky was blue as it was most mornings, a dark indigo-shaded turquoise that would get lighter when the sun was fully risen.

  Guy and the boy were standing in the yard waiting for her when she got back.

  "You did not get much sleep, my handsome boy," she said, running her wet fingers over the boy's face.

  "He'll be late for school if we do not go right now," Guy said. "I want to drop him off before I start work."

  "Do we remember our lines this morning?" Lili asked, tucking the boy's shirt down deep into his short pants.

  "We just recited them," Guy said. "Even I know them now."

  Lili watched them walk down the footpath, her eyes following them until they disappeared.

  As soon as they were out of sight, she poured the water she had fetched into a large calabash, letting it stand beside the house.

  She went back into the room and slipped into a dry blouse. It was never too early to start looking around, to scrape together that night's meal.

  "Listen to what happened again today," Lili said when Guy walked through the door that afternoon.

  Guy blotted his face with a dust rag as he prepared to hear the news. After the day he'd had at the factory, he wanted to sit under a tree and have a leisurely smoke, but he did not want to set a bad example for his son by indulging his very small pleasures.

  "You tell him, son," Lili urged the boy, who was quietly sitting in a corner, reading.

  "I've got more lines," the boy announced, springing up to his feet. "Papy, do you want to hear them?"

  "They are giving him more things to say in the play," Lili explained, "because he did such a good job memorizing so fast."

  "My compliments, son. Do you have your new lines memorized too?" Guy asked.

  "Why don't you recite your new lines for your father?" Lili said.

  The boy walked to the middle of the room and prepared to recite. He cleared his throat, raising his eyes towards the ceiling.

  "There is so much sadness in the faces of my people. I have called on their gods, now I call on our gods. I call on our young. I call on our old. I call on our mighty and the weak. I call on everyone and anyone so that we shall all let out one piercing cry that we may either live freely or we should die."

  "I see your new lines have as much drama as the old ones," Guy said. He wiped a tear away, walked over to the chair, and took the boy in his arms. He pressed the boy's body against his chest before lowering him to the ground.

  "Your new lines are wonderful, son. They're every bit as affecting as the old." He tapped the boy's shoulder and walked out of the house.

  "What's the matter with Papy?" the boy asked as the door slammed shut behind Guy.

  "His heart hurts," Lili said.

  After supper, Lili took her son to the field where she knew her husband would be. While the boy ran around, she found her husband sitting in his favorite spot behind the sugar mill.

  "Nothing, Lili," he said. 'Ask me nothing about this day that I have had."

  She sat down on the grass next to him, for once feeling the sharp edges of the grass blades against her ankles.

  "You're really good with that boy," he said, drawing circles with his smallest finger on her elbow. "You will make a performer of him. I know you will. You can see the best in that whole situation. It's because you have those stars in your eyes. That's the first thing I noticed about you when I met you. It was your eyes, Lili, so dark and deep. They drew me like danger draws a fool."

  He turned over on the grass so that he was staring directly at the moon up in the sky. She could tell that he was also watching the hot-air balloon behind the sugar mill fence out of the corner of his eye.

  "Sometimes I know you want to believe in me," he said. "I know you're wishing things for me. You want me to work at the mill. You want me to get a pretty house for us. I know you want these things too, but mostly you want me to feel like a man. That's why you're not one to worry about, Lili. I know you can take things as they come."

  "I don't like it when you talk this way," she said.

  "Listen to this, Lili. I want to tell you a secret. Some-times, I just want to take that big balloon and ride it up in the air. I'd like to sail off somewhere and keep floating until I got to a really nice place with a nice plot of land where I could be something new. I'd build my own house, keep my own garden. Just be something new."

  "I want you to stay away from there."

  "I know you don't think I should take it. That can't keep me from wanting."

  "You could be injured. Do you ever think about that?"

  "Don't you ever want to be something new?"

  "I don't like it," she said.

  "Please don't get angry with me," he said, his voice straining almost like the boy's.

  "If you were to take that balloon and fly away, would you take me and the boy?"

  "First you don't want me to take it and now you want to go?"

  "I just want to know that when you dream, me and the boy, we're always in your dreams."

  He leaned his head on her shoulders and drifted off to sle
ep. Her back ached as she sat there with his face pressed against her collar bone. He drooled and the saliva dripped down to her breasts, soaking her frayed polyester bra. She listened to the crickets while watching her son play, muttering his lines to himself as he went in a circle around the field. The moon was glowing above their heads. Winking at them, as Guy liked to say, on its way to brighter shores.

  Opening his eyes, Guy asked her, "How do you think a man is judged after he's gone?

  How did he expect her to answer something like that?

  "People don't eat riches," she said. "They eat what it can buy."

  "What does that mean, Lili? Don't talk to me in parables. Talk to me honestly."

  "A man is judged by his deeds," she said. "The boy never goes to bed hungry. For as long as he's been with us, he's always been fed."

  Just as if he had heard himself mentioned, the boy came dashing from the other side of the field, crashing in a heap on top of his parents.

  "My new lines," he said. "I have forgotten my new lines."

  "Is this how you will be the day of this play, son?" Guy asked. "When people give you big responsibilities, you have to try to live up to them."

  The boy had relearned his new lines by the time they went to bed.

  That night, Guy watched his wife very closely as she undressed for bed.

  "I would like to be the one to rub that piece of lemon on your knees tonight," he said.

  She handed him the half lemon, then raised her skirt above her knees.

  Her body began to tremble as he rubbed his fingers over her skin.

  "You know that question I asked you before," he said, "how a man is remembered after he's gone? I know the answer now. I know because I remember my father, who was a very poor struggling man all his life. I remember him as a man that I would never want to be."

  Lili got up with the break of dawn the next day. The light came up quickly above the trees. Lili greeted some of the market women as they walked together to the public water fountain.

  On her way back, the sun had already melted a few gray clouds. She found the boy standing alone in the yard with a terrified expression on his face, the old withered mushrooms uprooted at his feet. He ran up to meet her, nearly knocking her off balance.

  "What happened?" she asked. "Have you forgotten your lines?"

  The boy was breathing so heavily that his lips could not form a single word.

  "What is it?" Lili asked, almost shaking him with anxiety.

  "It's Papa," he said finally, raising a stiff finger in the air.

  The boy covered his face as his mother looked up at the sky. A rainbow-colored balloon was floating aimlessly above their heads.

  "It's Papa," the boy said. "He is in it."

  She wanted to look down at her son and tell him that it wasn't his father, but she immediately recognized the spindly arms, in a bright flowered shirt that she had made, gripping the cables.

  From the field behind the sugar mill a group of workers were watching the balloon floating iii the air. Many were clapping and cheering, calling out Guy's name. A few of the women were waving their head rags at the sky, shouting, "Go! Beautiful, go!"

  Lili edged her way to the front of the crowd. Every-one was waiting, watching the balloon drift higher up into the clouds.

  "He seems to be right over our heads," said the factory foreman, a short slender mulatto with large buckteeth.

  Just then, Lili noticed young Assad, his thick black hair sticking to the beads of sweat on his forehead. His face had the crumpled expression of disrupted sleep.

  "He's further away than he seems," said young Assad. "I still don't understand. How did he get up there? You need a whole crew to fly these things."

  "I don't know," the foreman said. "One of my work-ers just came in saying there was a man flying above the factory."

  "But how the hell did he start it?" Young Assad was perplexed.

  "He just did it," the foreman said.

  "Look, he's trying to get out!" someone hollered.

  A chorus of screams broke out among the workers.

  The boy was looking up, trying to see if his father was really trying to jump out of the balloon. Guy was climbing over the side of the basket. Lili pressed her son's face into her skirt.

  Within seconds, Guy was in the air hurtling down towards the crowd. Lili held her breath as she watched him fall. He crashed not far from where Lili and the boy were standing, his blood immediately soaking the landing spot.

  The balloon kept floating free, drifting on its way to brighter shores. Young Assad rushed towards the body. He dropped to his knees and checked the wrist for a pulse, then dropped the arm back to the ground.

  "It's over!" The foreman ordered the workers back to work.

  Lili tried to keep her son's head pressed against her skirt as she moved closer to the body. The boy yanked himself away and raced to the edge of the field where his father's body was lying on the grass. He reached the body as young Assad still knelt examining the corpse. Lili rushed after him.

  "He is mine," she said to young Assad. "He is my family. He belongs to me."

  Young Assad got up and raised his head to search the sky for his aimless balloon, trying to guess where it would land. He took one last glance at Guy's bloody corpse, then raced to his car and sped away.

  The foreman and another worker carried a cot and blanket from the factory.

  Little Guy was breathing quickly as he looked at his father's body on the ground. While the foreman draped a sheet over Guy's corpse, his son began to recite the lines from his play.

  "A wall of fire is rising and in the ashes, I see the bones of my people. Not only those people whose dark hollow faces I see daily in the fields, but all those souls who have gone ahead to haunt my dreams. At night I relive once more the last caress-es from the hand of a loving father, a valiant love, a beloved friend."

  "Let me look at him one last time," Lili said, pulling back the sheet.

  She leaned in very close to get a better look at Guy's face. There was little left of that countenance that she had loved so much. Those lips that curled when he was teasing her. That large flat nose that felt like a feather when rubbed against hers. And those eyes, those night-colored eyes. Though clouded with blood, Guy's eyes were still bulging open. Lili was searching for some kind of sign—a blink, a smile, a wink—something that would remind her of the man that she had married.

  "His eyes aren't closed," the foreman said to Lili. "Do you want to close them, or should I?"

  The boy continued reciting his lines, his voice rising to a man's grieving roar. He kept his eyes closed, his fists balled at his side as he continued with his new-est lines.

  "There is so much sadness in the faces of my people. I have called on their gods, now I call on our gods. I call on our young. I call on our old. I call on our mighty and the weak. I call on everyone and anyone so that we shall all let out one piercing cry that we may either live freely or we should die."

  "Do you want to close the eyes?" the foreman repeat-ed impatiently?

  "No, leave them open," Lili said. "My husband, he likes to look at the sky."

  night

  women

  I cringe from the heat of the night on my face. I feel as bare as open flesh. Tonight I am much older than the twenty-five years that I have lived. The night is the time I dread most in my life. Yet if I am to live, I must depend on it.

  Shadows shrink and spread over the lace curtain as my son slips into bed. I watch as he stretches from a little boy into the broom-size of a man, his height mounting the innocent fabric that splits our one-room house into two spaces, two mats, two worlds.

  For a brief second, I almost mistake him for the ghost of his father, an old lover who disappeared with the night's shadows a long time ago. My son's bed stays nestled against the corner, far from the peeking jalousies. I watch as he digs furrows in the pillow with his head. He shifts his small body carefully so as not to crease his Sun-day clothes. He wraps my
long blood-red scarf around his neck, the one I wear myself during the day to tempt my suitors. I let him have it at night, so that he always has something of mine when my face is out of sight.

  I watch his shadow resting still on the curtain. My eyes are drawn to him, like the stars peeking through the small holes in the roof that none of my suitors will fix for me, because they like to watch a scrap of the sky while lying on their naked backs on my mat.

  A firefly buzzes around the room, finding him and not me. Perhaps it is a mosquito that has learned the gift of lighting itself. He always slaps the mosquitoes dead on his face without even waking. In the morning, he will have tiny blood spots on his forehead, as though he had spent the whole night kissing a woman with wide-open flesh wounds on her face.

  In his sleep he squirms and groans as though he's already discovered that there is pleasure in touching himself. We have never talked about love. What would he need to know? Love is one of those lessons that you grow to learn, the way one learns that one shoe is made to fit a certain foot, lest it cause discomfort.

  There are two kinds of women: day women and night women. I am stuck between the day and night in a golden amber bronze. My eyes are the color of dirt, almost copper if I am standing in the sun. I want to wear my matted tresses in braids as soon as I learn to do my whole head without numbing my arms.

  Most nights, I hear a slight whisper. My body freezes as I wonder how long it would take for him to cross the curtain and find me.

  He says, "Mommy."

  I say, "Darling."

  Somehow in the night, he always calls me in whispers. I hear the buzz of his transistor radio. It is shaped like a can of cola. One of my suitors gave it to him to plug into his ears so he can stay asleep while Mommy works.

  There is a place in Ville Rose where ghost women ride the crests of waves while brushing the stars out of their hair. There they woo strollers and leave the stars on the path for them. There are nights that I believe that those ghost women are with me. As much as I know that there are women who sit up through the night and undo patches of cloth that they have spent the whole day weaving. These women, they destroy their toil so that they will always have more to do. And as long as there's work, they will not have to lie next to the lifeless soul of a man whose scent still lingers in another woman's bed.