As they slapped each other’s backs in the dark, Fire said to himself, What can I do with this madman but love him?

They left the house for Battery at eleven-thirty, jerking along the main, stopping and starting in the traffic jam that clogged the road like arterial plaque. Fire was wearing black tonight, a linen shirt and baggy jeans. Ian, who’d shaved, and washed and brushed his hair, had dressed himself in white—a ribbed tank top and slim-fit jeans and a pair of vintage tennis shoes. There was a hopeful anxiety between them. Stretched almost to the point of breaking, their love had shown its strength and elasticity, but had given birth to envy, anger, and mistrust. Fire was still resentful that Ian had called him a pussy and meant it. And Ian still burned from the remark about painted fish.

Along the lane that led to town, higglers edged between the cars, hawking gum and cigarettes, which they carried in homemade wooden trays strapped across their shoulders. The night was humid and the thick air trapped engine fumes and the scent of roasted nuts and sweet colognes and sweat. Crashing in waves of echo from the hills and cliffs around them, the music claimed their bodies with its tidal ebb and flow. They began to float along in their own ruminations, so it was with great alarm that Fire saw a young peanut vendor jump in front of his wheels. Slamming on his brakes, he stopped in time, and the youth quickly pointed to the culprit, a racing bike that had almost run him down.

“Pussyhole!” Ian shouted into the night.

“Don’t do that shit!” Fire snapped. “You don’t know who is who!”

“I’m not like you, y’know,” Ian replied. “I can’t be a hypocrite. I have to say what I feel.”

To Fire the reference was clear. “So we’re fishing again,” he countered.

Ian sucked his teeth.

Fire shrugged, noting to himself that this was not the mood in which to discuss the sketch pad.

In town, they parked with the rest of the cars on the common, which had been turned into a temporary parking lot. Picking their way through the thick crowd outside the bar, Fire and Ian pressed knuckles with Mikey Magnum and Trigger Finger, who immediately gave them some big-ups over the microphone. Then they went to help Buju at the stall set up in front of his house, stirring sauce and slicing bread and turning meat in the smoker, an oil drum sliced in two and set on legs. The dance was being held in the yard of the primary school beside Mr. Bartley’s bar, but there was rival entertainment in the theater of the street—people skanking on the sidewalks and telling jokes in the street and whistling at the girls who sauntered by in colored wigs and poompoom shorts. Sometimes a girl would stop, and the town would pause to see how long a man could hold her attention; they would shrug with him if all he got to say was hello, and raise their fists and Guinness bottles if she came out with her number. Later on, a woman caught her man by the park with a sweetheart and beat him with her platform shoes, chased him round the bend by the seawall and came back walking hop-and-drop to cheers of “Nuff respek.”