The least he could do was to give him the kind of funeral he would’ve wanted … or at least the kind he deserved.

Convinced there was a need to reunite him with his family, Fire had tried to persuade Ian’s sisters to go to the funeral in Battery. The first two, sensing that his urgency was greater than theirs, said they couldn’t go because they didn’t have clothes that were suitable for church. Stripping some bills from the wad he’d withdrawn to bribe the detectives, he told them to go and get some. And wha bout de pickney-dem? they asked. It wouldn’t right fe bring dem inna tear-up-batty pants …

Conversations with the rest of them were simpler: Fuck Birdie … when him was alive him nevah know we.

Downstairs in the kitchen Miss Gita was sniffling. Poor woman, Fire thought. She’d returned from seeing where Christ was born to hear her son was dead. No, woman … nuh cry …

Dead, he thought. Dead. The fan was an axe suspended above him. Ian is fucking dead? He lifted his shirt and pinched his skin … placed his palm above his heart.

He breathed in deeply and his belly caved in, touching his spine, it seemed. And he promised to eat at the nine-night, when family and guests would nyam up fish and clap dominoes and dance ole choons and lick white rum and sup black coffee, making noise till way past midnight, speeding the spirit home.

How would he die? he wondered. He really didn’t want to know—tried to fight it—but the thought swelled up like dough.

When he was ten he wanted to die in war … as a pilot … in a dogfight … trailing a scarf and a plume of smoke behind his twirling plane. At twenty he wanted to die in bed, wallowing under a stranger.

Now he wanted to die in his sleep, to go to bed and live within his dreams.

He felt his eyelids drooping, and sat up quickly. Not now, he thought. Not now. He must not fall asleep right now.

He hitched up his pants and went to splash his face with water, then went to the terrace and slouched in a blue Adirondack chair.

The mist was melted away by now and all was green before him—green and wet with dew and life. The low sunlight was dripping off the coffee plants. And the orchard blazed with pulsing color—yellow papayas, orange mangoes, fat magenta plums.

And Charlie Parker was riffing still.

He asked himself what time it was. Around five by the sun, he thought. A crowing rooster confirmed this as an army chopper shot across the sky … thukkering … thukkering … whipping a breeze, bending plants and shaking trees and stirring dust and grit.

He closed his eyes. Fuckers, he thought, dissing the dead like that. His face was wet when he looked again. It must be the wind, he thought. These could not be tears because my heart’s too dry to make them.