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,
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.
