He was eight years old, on his way with I-nelik to Harry J’s for the first session of what would be Marley’s Natty Dread. They were driving along Molynes Road in the yellow Alfasud that I-nelik had bought before he left dentistry. As usual, they talked about whatever was on I-nelik’s mind. This day it was sex. He wanted to know if Fire had had it. Fire wasn’t sure. “Is that like kissing?”

I-nelik laughed and asked if he’d ever woken up in the night and heard his mother breathing like an asthmatic. Fire told him yes.

“That,” I-nelik said, “is sex.”

“But what if Daddy kill her?”

“Well, in a sense, you daddy kill her every night, but him have a special way of pumping her back to life.”

He thought about his mother’s gasps, and began to really fear for her. What if his father’s pump should fail? Would he, as a male and the only child, be asked to revive her? One time when they went to Walt Disney World—he must’ve been four then—they all slept in the same room and he’d seen how his father held his mother at night … heard the words he breathed into her neck … but didn’t see anything that looked like pumping.

Pumping. For reasons he didn’t understand at the time, the word made him aware of his body, its different parts and their differing capacities for giving and receiving pleasure.

There was a thing he did in private, with what he called his puppy, a secret thing only he knew about, a thing he’d discovered by accident one day while crawling under I-nelik’s house. Sometimes he’d do this thing while a girl from the neighborhood watched.

She’d caught him doing it in a burned-out car in an empty lot behind the primary school, and swore that she would spread the news unless he bought her a pack of Smarties. He didn’t think he was doing something wrong. He thought it was natural but private, like a bowel movement. So for the same reason that he wouldn’t want to be famous for taking a shit in an old car he went to the shop and bribed her.

After she guzzled the box she confessed that she hadn’t come to the car by accident—that she used it for the same purpose. But before he could start a turf war, she told him they should share it. It was nicer when you did it while someone watched, she said. He asked her how she knew this. She said she used to spy on her neighbor, and when he caught her he asked her to watch. Sometimes he would give her a smalls if she helped him.

“Help him how?”

“Help him fingle it.”

“How much?”

“Fifty cents.”

He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. How could anyone do that? he wondered. Nothing would come between him and his puppy, especially another hand. His puppy was the smoothest place on his body. Why should he surrender the pleasure of touching it? The girl’s neighbor was a fool, he thought. He should charge her. Not the other way around.