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"Yes what?"
"Yes, I'm hungry."
"That's a good boy," Baron said. "We'll go get something to eat real soon. Get out of this place. It's getting kind of old here."
"Yes."
"Yes what?"
"It's getting kind of old here."
"There you go," Baron said. "That's my little man."
When he crossed back into the bedroom, he saw Napperstick, shirtless, wearing only blue jeans, hunched over the edge of the bed, throwing the I-Ching. He rattled the pennies together and let them fall to the carpet, as intent as a man in a casino. He was sweating. Another porno movie flickered on the screen, spattering him with a tropical light, green and orange. The sound was turned down, but Baron could still hear saxophone music and occasional moaning.
"I've got a better idea," Baron said. "We'll let the boy decide what his future's going to be."
Napperstick turned and stared. "I'm telling you, it's no joke."
"Okay," Baron said. "Let's be fair about it. It's his fate."
"It's all of ours." Napperstick sounded like a minister; the I-Ching was one of the few things he took seriously.
"Yeah, yeah. Go get the kid."
"You're serious. Great, man. That's fantastic. You'll see. It'll tell you the right thing. It always does. You just have to approach it seriously." He held up his tattered green copy as if it were a Bible. "I mean it, I don't know where I'd be without it."
Napperstick unbound the boy and brought him into the bedroom. The boy's gaze landed for a moment on the movie. "Look at him watching that movie." Napperstick laughed. "You ain't never seen any tits like that, have you?" he asked the boy. The boy shook his head.
"Can you believe that?" Napperstick said. "He said no, he'd never seen any tits like that."
Baron shook his head, bemused. He lay down on the bed, crossing his legs, looking up at the paneled ceiling.
"Okay," Napperstick said, giving the boy the three pennies. "Shake these up and throw them down. Just like you were playing Monopoly or something.
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Six times. Ask the I-Ching what we should do with you. Concentrate real hard. Okay? Let's do it."
The boy closed his eyes, as if in prayer, and shook the pennies in both hands, rattling them together for a long time before he let them fall to the carpet.
"All right," Napperstick exclaimed. "That's a good one." The boy smiled, pleased with himself. Napperstick recorded the tosses on a sheet of motel stationery, a series of lines, some full, some broken. His brow was wrinkled, a child concentrating on a drawing, Baron thought. He was whistling, too, a slight hissing sound as he sucked the air inward between his teeth.
Baron kept watch from the bed, drumming his fingers on the night table, smirking as he always did when confronted by someone else's idea of the inevitable.
The boy finished throwing the pennies and knelt on the floor, staring at the television. Napperstick was glancing back and forth between the stationery and the book. He let his pencil drop to the floor. "The Taming Power of the Small," he announced.
"What's the word?" Baron said.
"Dense clouds, no rain from our western region," Napperstick intoned.
"Is that the weather report?" Baron asked.
"That's the Judgement, man. Listen to this Hexagram: 'Wind Blowing Over the Heaven.' You don't fuck with the wind, I know that much. 'By it the Model Man renders his virtuous excellence worthy of admiration.' "
"So what's the verdict?" Baron asked. He was rubbing the small whorl of hairs, baby-fine, that were left at his crown.
"Hold on, listen to this one, in the fourth place. 'Owing to Confidence, bloody and terrible deeds are avoided.' That says it all. We've got to let the kid go. The Chinese didn't fuck with the winds. No way. You can't do it."
"We're not chinks," Baron said. "We're white people."
Napperstick wasn't listening. "You lucked out, little fella," he told the boy, thrusting the stationery with its pencil lines of yin and yang in the boy's face. The boy looked at the lines as if they were hieroglyphics, math problems.
"Take it," Napperstick said. "You'll want to keep this. This is your passport home."
The boy took the prophecy, holding it in front of him with both hands like a choirboy with sheet music. It was Napperstick who watched the movie now.
"What does that book say about our fucking money?" Baron asked. The whole charade had gone too far, had sickened him with scorn. He'd never seen successful people, rich people, peering into sheep guts, consulting palm readers, staking their lives on a coin toss. The only people who tried to figure out the future were people who needed more luck that they were ever going to get.
Napperstick looked up from the movie, startled, wild-eyed. "Hey, I thought
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we were going to score some big bucks. I really did. I never lost hope, no matter what it seemed like. I thought we had a pretty sharp deal going."
"Don't we?" Baron asked.
"We shouldn't be thinking about money," Napperstick was beseeching him, his voice as soothing and intense as a preacher on TV. For him, the matter was settled. "Virtue. I know it sounds weird but we've got to get us some virtue. Virtue is its own reward. That's not just my opinion; that's the universe talking."
"How do I know you understand what that book says? How do I know you can make any more sense out of those squiggles than that boy there?"
"Read it, read it yourself." Baron said. "I can just look outside and see what the weather's like." He gestured at the curtained windows.
"The I-Ching cannot be wrong," Napperstick said.
"We'll see," Baron said. He wasn't sure what he would do.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
That evening, they left the motel and drove into the countryside, the wind gusting from all directions, buffeting the car, bending the pines like limbo dancers, sweet with the scent of approaching rain. The whole green world seemed in motion, flooded with eddies of air. "The winds of heaven," Baron smirked.
"Still hungry?" he asked the boy.
"Yes, I'm hungry," the boy said.
Baron smiled. They pulled into a Dairy Queen where the red umbrellas over the picnic tables had been blown inside out, a row of red canvas tulips.
"You can have anything you want," Baron told the boy.
"I'm getting some french fries," Napperstick said.
The boy ordered a hamburger and a milkshake, and sat between the two men, like a child between his parents. He ate the hamburger with slow precision, wheeling it around, taking tiny, evenly spaced bites. He was still wearing his bathing suit and terry cloth sweater.
They left the Dairy Queen and drove east, the woods swaying and creaking around them like a green ship. The boy sucked on his milkshake, holding the cup to his chest. Fifty miles down the highway, Baron swerved into the parking lot of a Holiday Inn.
"Are we stopping already?" Napperstick asked.
"We're getting a room for the boy," Baron said.
"We'll be rewarded for this, I guarantee you."
"Aren't you going to come say goodbye?" Baron said.
They paid the clerk for a room and took the boy there, Baron leading him by the hand. He unlocked and pushed the door open. The boy stood hesitantly in the doorway, cradling his milkshake. The wind had brought out goosebumps on his legs.
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"Go on in," Baron said to him. "Make yourself at home." Napperstick and Baron followed, Baron tapping the door shut behind them with his foot. Baron flipped on the TV, spinning through the channels until he came to a nature documentary. The scene was Africa, at the edge of the forest. A gold moon hung over the trees, while down on the floor of the savannah, photographed by stealth, were two chimpanzees pounding on a log. The narrator said that they were looking for insects, but why then, Baron wondered, out there on the grass-lands, all by themselves, while the other chimps were sleeping in the trees?
Baron thought of himself and Napperstick, their epic voyages of futility, crisscrossing th
e country, bickering like old maids, killing nothing but time.
The boy had scooted up on one of the beds, and was watching the chimps. Napperstick remained standing by the door, waiting for something to happen.
Baron went into the bathroom, slipped his Smith and Wesson from under his jacket, and clicked open its chambers. He turned the gun upside down and shook the bullets into his palm, where they gleamed golden in the room's fluorescence. He pocketed the bullets and emerged into the bedroom spinning the Smith and Wesson's cylinder.
"Here," he said to Napperstick, handing him the pistol by the barrel. "Russian roulette. Let's see how smart those chinks are." The boy was watching them in the mirror that ran behind the TV. He just sat there, as still as stone.
"Go ahead," Baron gestured toward the boy.
"This is too cruel, man."
"You already said you'd shoot him."
"I would have, you know me."
"If this is his lucky day, you won't stop him from enjoying it. Go ahead. I'm emperor, man. Like you said. Let's see how seriously you take that I-Ching shit."
Napperstick shook his head slowly, mournfully, twirling the cylinder himself and placing the barrel at the base of the boy's skull, just below the V of his haircut. The barrel was blue and cool, about the circumference of a flute. He held the gun there, as lightly as a finger. "Damn," he said. "Damn."
The boy flinched at the touch of the gun, and Baron held him by the shoulder, the way a man would steady a subject for a photograph. Napperstick closed his eyes and pulled the trigger.
Nothing.
"I told you," Napperstick burst out laughing. "I told you." The boy was crying, silently, still facing the TV. "This is your lucky day, little fella," Napperstick said, tousling the boy's hair.
Baron opened up the pistol and said, "Look Mom, no bullets."
"Oh my God," Napperstick howled. "I'm such a fool, I'm such a fool."
They left the boy in the motel room, sitting on the edge of the bed, watching the strange habits of animals in the wild. Baron swung the Mustang westward,
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back toward the clouds, the country they'd been fleeing. The wind was rattling the car, still holding out the promise of a sweet rain. The trees were still dancing.
"It really was his lucky day, after all," Napperstick said. "The I-Ching doesn't lie." The book was sitting in his lap.
"You're full of shit," Baron said, satisfied again with his knowledge of the world, his vision, his command. "That book is full of shit. I rigged the whole deal, you know that. You think this was his lucky day?"
"I do," Napperstick said. "I really do. He was saved by the I-Ching, no matter what you say. We're virtuous men. Our reward will come. I hope it's money."
They drove on into the night, retracing their path, whirling past hamlets they'd never remembered, past fields and dark green woods.
"Well," Baron finally said, the fire rising within him. "I'd just hate to see him have an unlucky day, if you know what I mean."
But Napperstick did not respond. He was slumped back on the seat, mouth open, his head against the window, sleeping the easy sleep of the virtuous, of the true believer.
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Héma, My Héma
by Mathew Chacko
Héma, my beautiful Héma, is determined tonight. I knew it the minute I crawled into our home. I don't mean crawled in a figurative sense. It accurately describes what I did. Our house, you see, is a little on the cozy side; six by six feet to be exact. A perfect little cube it is, made of tin cans that my Héma's late hubbie took apart and flattened into sheets. The result has been quite colorfulwhite Amul milk powder sheets next to yellow Dalda tin sheets, next to rose-red and aquamarine Asian Paints sheets. Of course, rust, like a leprosy of tin, has eaten away most of the color, and the Jai Sena have scrawled their fascist slogans in black paint all across our walls.
Still, it is our house. And a convenient one it is. Since the tin sheets are fastened only to each other, and since our house has no fancy thing as a foundation, it is possible to move from site to site very easily. When the rains come and the water rises waist high in our housebringing with it turds and bloated dogs-cats-ratsHéma and I can simply lift up our house and move it to higher ground. That is if higher ground can be had. Our slum lies in a valley between the Dadar and Mahim roads and in the rainy season the upper slopes become coveted property. As the black and stinking water spreads its skirt higher and higher up the slopes, shacks begin to squeeze upward. Even what narrow paths we have close up. Families wake up and discover they've been interred in their homes and can escape suffocation only by tearing open their roofs. Sometimes, they are not able to do this in time. Last season, a shack whose occupants were all children was boxed in. The neighbors later insisted that they did not hear any shouts or poundings on the wall. The claim is suspect.
The rainy season, you see, reveals the true nature of the slums. It shows up all those fond myths about the generosity and selflessness of the poor It puts rout to stories about starving families cheerfully sharing their last morsel. All through the monsoons, families fight over the smallest inch of dry ground like starving dogs over a scrap of meat. Slum citizens throw boiling water into each other's faces and introduce scorpions among their neighbor's sleeping children. Heads of families end up face down in the slum soup along with the disintegrating dogs-cats-rats. That, in fact, is what happened to Héma's ex-hubbie.
But the rains are at least two months away, and, for now, we have the illusion of a peaceful community and the luxury of a stationary house. Coming home in the evenings, I don't have to risk my weight on the neighbors' flimsy
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roofs or endure their friendly greetings. I can walk along a two-foot-wide path, right up to our door. Although, when I arrive there, I have to get down on my hands and knees. This because our doorcovered by an export quality Basmati rice sackis only three feet high.
Tonight, the first thing I see when my eyes have adjusted to the dark is Héma, my darling Héma, sprawled on the mat in her Rekha outfit. It is an ominous sign. One that I do not even want to acknowledge. I spent the last ten hours waiting patiently at the Public Hospital to interview the Medical Officer about the recent cholera cases in the city. I was there on behalf of the local Marathi newspaper for which I am a free-lancea euphemism for my unemployed status. Superstitions about cholera must have prevented the regulars from taking the case. The wisdom of which I could see as I stood in line with slum parents and their sick children outside the M.O.'s office. The charming presence of cholera was all around me. The corridor was imbued with its characteristic stenchthat of a heavily perfumed corpseand pervaded by the hush the disease unfailingly inspires. From the convulsing limbs and the yellow blossoms that appeared regularly between the legs of the children, most of them were already lost to the disease.
When I finally got to the doctor, he was in no mood for an interview. Fatigue and frustration had pushed him into a state of extreme irritation. I found him standing by his desk, trying, ineffectually, to reattach his broken telephone receiver with a splint of pencils and rubber bands. I asked him, just for the record, if it was cholera out there in the corridor.
''Oh no," he said. "Upset stomachs from too many sweets . . . too many birthday parties."
A certain tone of mockery, you see, is common among the more honest officials of our city.