Fire and Ian took the East Road, descending through the city as the sun began to rise. The roads were empty at first, but became busier as they left the newer suburbs and their tile-roofed gentility and picked up Mountain View Avenue, which took them past the national stadium, whose parking lot was cracked and filled with weeds. Soon they fell into a convoy of beachgoers in Monteros and Accords, and looped and swayed and dipped and rose with the narrow, rutted road. Fire, shirtless in denim overalls, kept thinking about the letter in his knapsack as they drove through east Kingston, where his father had lived as a boy, a swath of verandahed bungalows with shingled roofs and wide bay windows. Bourgeois forty years ago, it was a ghetto now. A ghetto with blue-collar dreams. From time to time, Fire and Ian would pull themselves away from their thoughts to talk above the sound of the engine and the onrushing wind.

Fire had spent the night in a chair on the terrace, afraid of falling asleep, knowing that he would dream of Sylvia if he slept, aware that this could send him tumbling into the pool of emotion in which he’d nearly drowned when things had ended badly in New York.

Ian had lain awake in bed, worried about their friendship, afraid that he had damaged it beyond repair. Late in the evening he went downstairs to apologize to Fire for the trouble he had caused him and found him writing at the table. Believing it was a poem, he asked if he could see it and Fire told him no—said it sharply without looking up, as if he were a pest. This had pitched Ian down a briared slope of old hurts and jealousies … prickly anxieties about class, and race, and natural gifts and talents.

They followed the convoy along the edge of the harbor past the silos of the cement factory and the flour mill to the flowered roundabout at Harbour View; there the beachgoers tooted and took the peninsula road that leads to the airport and Port Royal, where hired fishing boats would take them to the cays.

Moving into the countryside with greater speed now, Fire and Ian saw fewer cars but more people, especially in the larger towns like Morant Bay and Yallahs, where small groups waited for buses to take them to church, the women in hats and stockings and the boys and girls in suits and frilly dresses. Beyond Yallahs the land became more mountainous, the vegetation wetter, and the towns—with names like Priestman’s River and Poor Man’s Corner—quainter, smaller, and more widely spaced. Over the hood of the dusty truck, the country rushed toward them in rippling waves of pastureland and banana groves and hamlets by the sea.

Fifteen miles outside Port Antonio, about two hours after leaving home, they came upon a fork where the main road cut inland for the next five miles to bypass a ragged line of sheltered coves.