At sunset a peculiar fellow stood upon the purple promontory beneath a lone datura tree and blew a soulful wind through a conch shell. He looked like an ebony egret in silhouette. Kit watched him, studied him. Scarcely breathing.
"What is it?" Kat asked, mindful of Kit's silence. She had been slogging through his rejected play.
"That man out there. What do you know of him?"
The view from the veranda swept across a crazy quilt of native grasses. An earthen path led into a brief wilderness of coconut palms. The hill beyond climbed through a chaotic growth of hibiscus, gardenia and orchid. Looming above all was the conch-blower's podium.
Holding her hand as sunvisor, Kat replied, "I don't see anyone."
Yet Kit saw the man.
Oversized army fatigues furled like dour bunting about his brambled frame. Bright ribbons, red and orange and green, festooned his graying dreadlocks. Kit could almost smell the salt-caked armpits.
"He's right out there!"
The sticklike creature reminded Kit of an Ethiopian "fuzzy-wuzzy." He had seen one as a lad in his Compton's Encyclopedia. Straight in the saddle with a long carbine in the crook of his arm, a desert tribesman sat poised as sentry. Up against Mussolini's war machine. Prepared to fight to the death for his Ras Tafari, the emperor Haile Selassie. Raw-boned with a shock of hair detonated into a huge dust-mop.
*
At school the nuns loved to give out holy cards. Those showing the Sacred Heart repulsed him. Girded by thorns, it glowed eerily within Jesus' chest. He imagined it beating, pulsing.
On his first day as altar boy evil Terry OMalley explained about the relic.
"Oh yeah. There's a piece of dead guy in there. All consecrated altars have a relic."
Wide-eyed Kit gurgled, "R-r-really?"
"Wha-sa-matta? That bother you? Hey maybe we gotta whole body in there!"
"That's quite enough out of you, O'Malley!" Dominican firebrand Father Javier Gomez thundered.
The priest stepped up to Kit and placed a warm good hand on the boy's shoulder. He said, "A relic is a small thing. A piece of the saint's clothing, a bit of the saint's body. Bone, perhaps."
"Someone dead for a hundred years?"
"Yes, young man. Someone who is close to God. Someone you may pray to."
*
The dream placed him naked upon the cold stone altar. He heard a muffled plea, quite near. How could he hear? He had no ears. His head was but a skull containing thoughts. His tongue wagged in abstentia without language.
An obese priest wearing vestments for Low Mass waddled forth. Into Kit's exposed bowels the priest set down a chalice brimming with wine. Kit's young spirit drifted up and away. He looked down to watch the gruesome proceedings. The gut cavity swarmed with blue-bottle flies. The neck blubber of the priest was sunburned lobster pink.
Again the muffled plea: mama mama mama.
*
For the first time in fifty-odd years he had peed his bed.
There was a divan with plumpy cushions. He moved there and lay there allowing the gentle air to cool his genitals. A snail and two oysters. Then sleeping again he roved among the stars, meeting celestial women and sirens of unspeakable beauty.
The new dream had him shuffling downstairs. A ghastly horde of harridans pursued him. Underfoot each warped board squawked like a plucked mandrake. In the kichen he sat at the table. They grouped around him, a Greek chorus with ugly mouths baying. He looked at his folded hands. To see better he yanked the draw-chain suspended from a ceiling eight miles high. The bulb shown with the instensity of a klieg light. And one by one, most of the women in his life appeared, each citing his failures in love and sex, condemning him to an eternity of disgrace.
Two girls from Saint Patrick's, skirted in green plaid, laughed cruely. One was pubescent sixth-grader Rita Constanza, who had showed him something amazing one afternoon in a deserted handball court. The other was slatternly gorgeous Brigit Casey whose colossal jugs were so full they had begun to sag. She had singled him out from all the hep-cats at the parish sock-hop and whispered she would suck him off for a clandestine beer.
Laughter most unfair.
*
Each day sunset rewarded the earth with a burst of color. A flight of green macaws shot like shuttlecocks into the darkling forrest. In the blink of an eye the drama was over and the indigo curtain fell. Meanwhile, the conch-blower stood atop Spyglass Hill in full Rastafarian regalia. His glory heralded the Flame of Jah, God of Moses' burning bush.
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