THE HEART OF THE AFTERNOON
between them, and the dead bird on the hedge is only a dead bird.
He wanders over and sticks his finger a second in its open beak,
because its eyes are still watching him, but nothing happens. He
might as well have put his finger in his own mouth.
He comes back and picks up the doll and takes it into the house.
The sun is still beating down as it was before, as if it were stuck in
one place in the sky and were never going to move again, .and the
only thing that makes any sense in the world is this relation he has
with his grandmother, which will go on forever.
But as the night is starting he walks with his father to work
and doesn't go home right away, and then he sees something that fills
him with joy.
It is a man cutting a piece of fruit, and it occurs by the shaky
light of a hanging lantern, down on the river-front. The man, who
is swarthy and powerful and carries a long knife like a machete, is
selling off a cargo of watermelons on the deck of his boat. The boy
watches from the wharf while a customer goes down, and a moment
later in the flickering darkness sees the man lift his knife and in three
quick stabs carve a long wedge sharp as a pencil at the end, which
he holds up a few seconds and then silently slips back into place.
It has only taken a minute, and in that light it leaves no trace,
nobody could know from looking at the melon that anything had
happened. But the boy has seen the blood-red triangle of its flesh,
and when the man happens to glance up and catches the elation in
his eyes, for just the barest second the intimation of a smile passes
between them, as if they h.ad been accomplices in a perfect crime.
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