Las Tablas

By noon there was not a boy in Icod carrying anything but a plank.

They went through the market in threes and fours with the boards under their arms the way other people carry bread, and they did not look at the stalls. They looked at the streets. Icod is built on a slope that starts up in the pines and comes down to the sea in one long fall, and on the eve of San Andrés every lane in that town is a hill somebody is going to ride, and the boys spend the whole day walking up and down them with the boards under their arms, deciding which, and changing their minds, and walking back up to look again.

Saga had been coming to this market since she was small enough to ride in on the tarp roll. She had watched the tablas eleven times.

She had never been on one.

The braziers went on at two.

There is a particular way the north does chestnuts and Icod does it harder than anywhere: the castañas come down off the slopes in sacks the size of a person, and the sellers cut a slit in each one with a thumb-knife so it will not burst, and then they go onto the iron over the coals and are turned with a flat stick, over and over, by people who have never once needed to look at what their hands were doing. The smell got into the whole plaza by half past two. It is a smell that goes up into the roof of your mouth and stays there ⁓ sweet and a little scorched, woody, the smell of the mountain being generous with itself ⁓ and it came in under the awnings and over the stalls and mixed with the other smell, which was the wine.

Because the cellars had opened. That is the other thing San Andrés is: the year's malvasía comes up out of the cold dark under the town in demijohns and jugs and one bathtub that nobody explained, and the whole of Icod tastes it on the same evening and tells each other what they think of it, at length, in front of the people who made it.

Above the rooftops to the west stood the Drago.

A thousand years of dragon tree, older than the town under it, older than the island's Spanish name: a green thunderhead balanced on a trunk like braided stone. It had presided over roughly a thousand of these eves. It presided over this one the same way it presided over all the others.

Anna had the corner stall at the top of the market, because she always had the corner stall at the top of the market, because she came down off her mountain about four times a year and the woman who ran the market pitches had decided some while ago that this was one of them.

The candy was already out. Anna laid candy the way other people lay bricks: blackberry taffy in one row, anise drops in the next, miel-de-palma toffees behind them, tuno pastilles, carob-almond bark broken to sizes that matched each other, every row squared off against the row beside it until the whole table looked typeset.

Linnea sat on the crate beside her with a paper cone of chestnuts in her lap, peeling them and handing them over one at a time without being asked and without stopping her end of the conversation.

"You could charge for those," Linnea said, nodding at the toffees.

"I do charge for those."

"You charge one thing and then you give them four."

"That's the business model, mi guaya," said Anna. "Get 'em on the fifth."

Saga came up the market side with the extension cable over her shoulder and Auxi trotting beside her, and Anna saw them coming from a long way off and did not wave, because she was already reaching under the table for the tin she kept under the table, which is a different kind of greeting and everybody there understood it.

"How many for the artist," she said, holding the tin out to Auxi.

Auxi, who was eleven, and who had thought carefully about this exact situation on the walk down from the truck, said: "Two."

"Two," Anna agreed, sounding impressed, and gave her four.

Two stalls down from Anna, the sisters had the onions out.

They had come down from Querencia on the Guagua with four sacks and a crate of ristras ⁓ the long plaited ropes of onions, braided by the stalk, that hang in a kitchen all winter and come down one at a time ⁓ and they had the whole thing standing and priced eleven minutes after they got off, which Saga knew because she had watched them do it while eating a chestnut.

You cannot really watch the Cebolla sisters work. You can only watch the work happen.

None of them ever seemed to ask for anything. A ristra came off the hook and a hand was already open under it. A woman held out coins and a different sister took them without looking, while the first one was still saying the price, and a third put the change into the woman's other hand from the far side of the stall. Nobody said pass me. Nobody said behind you. They did not finish each other's sentences, which people do all the time and which is not impressive. They finished each other's tasks.

It looked less like three women running a stall and more like one woman who happened to be standing in three places.

"¡Chacha!" said the one with the pencil, seeing Saga, and threw an onion at her.

Saga caught it. She had learned to catch things at that stall at about the age of six.

"Angustias." She turned it over. "This is a beautiful onion."

"It is an adequate onion. Your mother gets the beautiful ones and she does not deserve them." Angustias had a flat carpenter's pencil riding behind her ear, sharpened to a point with a knife, and she did not write anything with it at any point that evening, and she had done that for as long as Saga had known her. She was also wearing two different boots. Neither of these things had ever been mentioned by anybody.

The smallest sister was standing on the wet cobbles in her bare feet. It was the twenty-ninth of November.

"Milagros, it's cold."

"Eleven," said Milagros.

"What's eleven?"

But Milagros had gone back to the ristras, and something moved in the left-hand pocket of her waistcoat, and settled again.

The third sister was not at the stall at all. The third sister was forty meters away at the top of the market having a conversation with a camel.

The camel belonged to Garachico, or to Garachico's church, or to nobody ⁓ the question had come up at the Log Ceremony more than once and had never survived contact with the paperwork ⁓ and he came over the hill to Icod for San Andrés every year with two panniers on him and a boy who was in no way in charge of him. He was standing beside a chestnut brazier with his ears back, chewing sideways at nothing, looking at the crowd.

Remedios stood in front of him with her hands folded at her waist.

"Don Manolo," she said. "Buenas tardes."

The camel looked at her.

"Le veo bien." You are looking well. "Le veo, si me permite, algo gordo." You are looking, if you will permit me, somewhat fat.

The camel turned his head away with enormous dignity and then, without any change of expression, leaned down and took the entire top off a paper cone of chestnuts belonging to a man who had not been expecting it.

"Ah," said Remedios, to nobody. "Sí."

She did not look surprised. She did not look like a woman meeting an animal. She looked, for about one second, like somebody reading a very old line in a book she used to keep, and then she went back to the stall and took a rope of onions off a hook that her sister had not yet let go of.

Later, in the gap between the wire act and the show, Saga went past the stall again and the three of them were standing behind it eating an onion.

Not cooked. Not in anything. One raw white onion, passed along the row, a bite each, chewed thoughtfully, passed back.

Angustias took the last bite and put the top of it in her coat pocket.

Nobody at that stall said one word about it, and no customer remarked on it, and the sisters did not appear to think it required any comment of any kind, and Saga ⁓ who had grown up four terraces below these women and had seen them do this perhaps twice a year her whole life ⁓ had never once asked, because there are questions you do not get to ask twice and you want to be sure you are ready for the answer.

Los Magníficos closed the afternoon on the wire, the way they always closed the afternoon.

Ruymán walked out under the rigging with the timple in one hand and did not use the other hand at all, because the other hand was for his mouth. He put two fingers in and whistled, and the whistle was not a whistle, it was a sentence, and half the plaza knew it and went quiet to hear the rest.

He whistled it and then he said it, phrase for phrase, the way it has to be done.

«whistle» SEÑORAS Y SEÑORES. «whistle» Ladies and gentlemen. «whistle» TENEMOS EL ORGULLO DE PRESENTARLES ⁓ we are proud to present to you, tonight ⁓ «whistle» DE GRAN CANARIA.

From Gran Canaria.

And then ten whistles, one for each syllable, laid out clean across the rooftops: LOS-MAG-NÍ-FI-COS-HER-MA-NOS-CHA-CHO. And from four separate places in that market, from behind the fish table and from up on the church steps and from somewhere in the crowd nobody could point at, four silbadores whistled it back.

The brothers came in off the wall at the plaza's north corner, both of them at once, planted their lances and dropped the six meters down into the square in that long slow shepherd's fall that looks, every single time, like something being lowered rather than something falling, and they traded poles in the air on the way past each other because it was a fiesta.

Then they bellowed ¡CHACHO! and three hundred people bellowed it back at them.

They were up on the wire for twenty minutes. Between the tricks they did what they always did, which was insult Tenerife with enormous affection ⁓ the water, the roads, the cheese, the way the north talks, the way the south talks ⁓ and Icod booed them the way you boo family, and a man near the front shouted something about Gran Canaria's potatoes that made Ayoze put a hand over his heart and stagger on the wire, thirty feet up, for four full seconds.

At the finish Ayoze produced the flag.

Nobody has ever worked out where he keeps it. It is not small. It came out of somewhere around the small of his back and went up over his head in one motion, the seven stars and the two blues, and the wire went still under him, and the plaza came apart.

And Echedey, at the other end of the wire, with his hands out flat and his weight on one foot and his brother's flag snapping in the wind eight meters away, did not shout it.

Saga saw him not shout it, from the market side, over the top of a crate of chestnuts.

She did not think about it again until much later, and by then it had been a long time, and by then it meant something else.

An hour before curtain she walked Auxi up past the church to give the sacristan his extension cable back, on the condition it had come with, which was that it be returned before the saint needed it. That was how they came on the terrero.

Icod keeps its sand ring behind the church wall, and on San Andrés eve the ring was working: strung bulbs, raked sand, two villages' worth of people standing around a circle, and in the middle of it, rolling up his trouser legs with great deliberation, somebody Saga knew.

"That's Tomás," she said. "From Gertie's yard."

Tomás of El Fraile, sixty-two, metalsmith, had come north on the Guagua with a crate of forge work for the fiesta and had been recognized inside the hour, because the island keeps its luchadores the way it keeps its saints' days, and there had never been the smallest possibility of him getting out of Icod without an agarrada. The boy across the sand from him was the town's young champion, built like a doorway, and visibly working out how to be respectful and win at the same time, which was going to cost him.

They took their grips on each other's rolled shorts. They went still.

The stillness went on. Lucha is mostly stillness. And then something happened that was too economical to properly see, a shift of one hip and a borrowing of the boy's own strength, and the doorway came off his feet, turned once in the strung-bulb light, and was set down on his back in the sand the way you set down something you intend to keep.

Tomás's hand was out before the sand finished moving. He pulled the boy up. He patted his shoulder clean.

The applause went on a long time and it was not for the winning.

"You put him down soft," Saga said, when he came over to the rope.

"There is no other way to put a person down," Tomás said, and went to find his crate.

On the way back, in the lane below the church, five Icod kids had a football going. Head to knee to head, around the circle, counting out loud, showing off for every single person the fiesta funneled past them.

At thirty-one a header went long. The ball came down the cobbles on the bounce and rolled itself flat against Saga's boot.

The circle looked at her. The lane went quiet the way a plaza goes quiet for a wire act.

Saga picked it up and, because there are laws and everybody her age keeps them, threw it back in properly: two hands, from behind the head, both feet planted, the full ceremony.

The tallest kid took it down on one knee without letting it touch the ground. The count started again from zero.

Auxi, walking backward so as not to miss any of it, said: "Thirty-one is nothing. In Callao we go to fifty."

This was not true, and was exactly the right thing to say.

The tallest kid caught up with them at the top of the market with a board under his arm.

He did not say anything for a second, on account of having run, and then he held it out sideways, the way you hand somebody a tray.

"You threw it in right," he said.

The board was a plank about as long as Saga's leg and half as wide, worn pale on top where people had sat on it and dark underneath where they had not, and there was a rope through two holes at the front, knotted on the underside, gone stiff and shiny with use. She turned it over. The bottom was waxed. It came off on her fingers and smelled like a candle and a little like a garage.

"Tallow," the kid said. "My uncle does it. Don't touch the bottom."

"I touched the bottom."

"Yeah," he said. "Everybody does."

Anna, four meters away behind a table of candy in typeset rows, put her chin on her hand and said, "How do you steer it?"

"You don't," said the kid.

"Huh," said Anna.

Her father arrived the way her father arrives, which is at speed and already talking.

Mateo Reyes had been on this island for twenty years and had spent all twenty of them collecting the things it did, and somewhere between the synth cart and the top of the market he had acquired a board of his own from a person he had never met, by means that were never established.

"Mija." He looked at her board, and then at the street, and then back at her board with the specific happiness of a man who has just found out he is allowed. "You have one."

"I have one."

"Then we are doing this."

"Mateo," Linnea said, from the crate, peeling a chestnut.

"Linn."

Linnea did not look up. "Both of you come back with the same number of teeth."

That was the whole negotiation.

The street they use is the Calle El Plano. It starts up where the houses go tight and it does not stop being steep for two hundred meters. It falls in a straight gray line between two rows of walls with people standing along the tops of them, and it was wet, because it is always wet in Icod in November, and being wet is the point.

At the bottom, right where the slope finally gives up and the lane bends, the town had built the wall.

Tires. Four deep and three high, roped together, the whole width of the street, and behind the tires a bank of mattresses ⁓ real ones, stripped and gray and softened by a great many years of this exact duty ⁓ and behind the mattresses six or seven grown men standing with their arms folded, watching the top of the hill, who were there to catch whatever got through.

Saga sat down on her board at the top with her heels on the stone and her hands through the rope, and found out something nobody tells you, which is that the hard part is before.

Because you can hold yourself there. That is the trouble. Your heels are on the ground and the whole hill is under you doing nothing at all, patiently, and it will go on doing nothing for as long as you like, and every second you sit there the hill gets steeper. Below her the wet stone went down and down and the tires at the end of it looked like something drawn small on purpose.

Somebody up the street said, "¡Venga, la del teatro!" Come on, theater girl.

She lifted her heels.

The noise started before the speed did. That was the strangest part. A board on wet stone makes a sound like an enormous zipper being pulled by somebody in a hurry, and it came up through the wood and into her spine and her back teeth before she had any real sense of moving at all, and then the walls started going past, and then the walls were going past, and the whole world narrowed down to a gray line with people yelling on both edges of it and cold air coming into her eyes so fast she could not do anything about her face.

She did not steer. There is nothing to steer with. You go where the street goes and the street knows where it is going.

Two thirds of the way down the board came off true and slewed sideways, and she went into the tires at an angle, hard, one shoulder and one hip, and the tire wall took it, soft for about six inches and then not.

She lay in the mattresses.

Above her the sky had a chestnut-smoke haze on it and the strung bulbs had come on somewhere while she was not looking and there was somebody's hand under her arm already, one of the folded-arm men, hauling her out of the way with the calm haste of a person who has heard the next zipper coming.

She was still laughing when he set her on her feet. She had not noticed starting.

Her father came down the hill nine seconds later.

He had not sat the way you are meant to sit. He had gone down half on one hip with one leg out, which is not a technique, which is a decision, and he arrived at the tires sideways and largely airborne and went into the mattresses head first with a sound the whole street heard.

For a moment there was nothing.

Then his voice came out of the mattresses, muffled, and it said, in Spanish, at volume: "¡Otra vez!"

Again.

They went up four times. By the fourth the light had gone amber and the strung bulbs were doing real work, and Saga's shoulder had a bruise coming that she would find in the morning and not remember earning, and her hands were black with tallow to the wrist, and her father had lost a shoe on the third run to a nine-year-old who recovered it from under the tires, understood immediately what he was holding, and wanted paying for it.

So Mateo Reyes walked the length of the Icod market in one shoe, in front of everybody, to buy four anise drops off Anna Doherty, and walked back down and bought his own shoe.

Walking the board up the hill the last time, Saga looked over at him.

"You paid for your own shoe."

"I paid for the return of my shoe," said Mateo, with enormous dignity. "It is a completely different transaction."

"Mamá's going to hear about it."

"Your mother," said Mateo, "watched the entire negotiation."

Gertie was standing at the folded stage with her arms crossed and Maisie Ardilla hanging off one hand like a dropped glove when they got back.

She looked at the tallow. She looked at Saga's hair, which had gone into a shape that would have to be dealt with. She looked, longest, at Mateo's shoe.

"You are performers," she said, "in eleven minutes."

"Ten," said Jef, going past with the fog spool.

Behind the curtain the light is different. Everybody who has ever been back there knows it and nobody ever mentions it: the plaza noise comes through the cloth flattened out, like weather heard from indoors, and the whole world shrinks to a strip of boards four meters long with a lamp on it.

"They will not hold still," Auxi said.

She was eleven, and this was her night. Ten green felt finger puppets sat on their rack in two rows of five, googly eyes pointed in every direction googly eyes point, and Auxi had checked their order four times, and Saga, who knew exactly what a fourth check is, said nothing about it.

"They're tadpoles," Saga said instead. "Holding still would be out of character."

"Greta keeps leaning."

"Greta always leans. That's the part. You're not holding puppets, you're holding a family, and the leaning is the whole point of Greta."

Auxi looked at the big tadpole for a long moment.

On the crate by the prop table, Gertie ran Maisie Ardilla through the warm-up she would have denied was a ritual: the little paws worked an invisible magnifying glass, checked an invisible hat, and cracked their felt knuckles, one two three.

Saga put the frog on her right hand and flexed it twice.

The frog is bigger than the tadpoles and heavier than she looks, and she has a wide soft mouth that does most of her acting, and Saga's thumb goes in the jaw. She had made her at the kitchen table at Querencia out of two dishcloths and a green sock in the spring, and had rebuilt the mouth twice since, and there was a repair over the left eye where a dog at Vilaflor had got hold of her.

Ten tadpoles. One tired mother. Same as always.

"Vale," said Mateo from the far side, hands over the keys. "Here we go."

The show began, the way La Tropa shows begin, by not beginning.

Mateo laid the plaza's own afternoon back down underneath the plaza's evening: chestnut smoke, somebody's laugh, the bell of San Marcos ringing once for no reason the bell ever gave. Three hundred people went from talking to listening the way a tide changes, without a single announcement anywhere in it.

Then the curtain opened on a town that does not exist.

From out front, where the people were, this is what there was: a stage the size of a kitchen table, a painted bay going gray into a painted fog, and a crank turning somewhere off to the left so that real muslin came rolling across the boards in slow soft rolls. A bottle moaned. It was a foghorn. Everybody could see it was a bottle and nobody in that plaza was going to be the one to say so.

And into all of that came a small brown squirrel in a coat too big for her and a hat too big for the coat, and she stood in the middle of the fog with her paws behind her back, and the front three rows of Icod made a noise you could have heard from the church.

Behind her, on the arm that held her up, Gertie's face did not move at all.

Then the frog came up the stairs.

She came up slowly, because she was tired and because she had ten children and because Saga had spent two months working out how a frog climbs stairs when she is trying to be dignified about it. She sat down across the desk. She folded her hands. She said her name.

Her name was not a name. It was the sound a kazoo makes when somebody steps on it, and the plaza went up, and out in the dark past the lamps a woman's laugh came in a half-second before everybody else's.

Saga, backstage, with her thumb in a frog's jaw, did not look up and did not need to.

Anna gets there first. Anna always gets there first. She had written most of that frog on the porch at Querencia in the summer with a pencil behind her ear, arguing about the kazoo for two days ⁓ it can't be a noise she makes, mija, it has to be a noise the audience makes ⁓ and she had been laughing early at that line since before there was a stage to laugh at it from.

"Detective Ardilla," said the frog. "They're going to drain my pond."

"Lots of ponds get drained," said Maisie. "Why's yours special?"

"Because my babies are in it. All ten."

They were about a half hour in, deep in the white part, when the island decided to help.

Up at Querencia the fog does not arrive. It is simply there in the morning, sitting in the trees, and you live inside it all day and think nothing of it.

Down here you watch it come for you.

It came in off the water, the way it does on that coast in November: a long low white wall standing out on the sea, coming on steadily with the wind behind it, close enough at the end to see it eat the last of the lights along the shore road one street at a time. The plaza saw it coming for a good two minutes and went on laughing at a puppet.

Then it was on them. It came over the stalls and through the lantern light and in among the audience, and it went up over the little stage and put the whole thing inside itself.

Maisie Ardilla stood in muslin fog up to her felt knees while the real thing curled around the stage's legs.

Three hundred people gasped at exactly the wrong moment for exactly the right reason.

From behind the scenery came the voice of a fourteen-year-old being outdone by an island: "Oh, come on."

"Leave it in," Saga whispered. "It's working for us now."

The beaver is Mateo.

He had been the beaver since August, when Saga read the part out at the kitchen table and her father put his fork down halfway through it, and he had been rehearsing the beaver ever since in a manner the household had asked him more than once to contain. He did the beaver at breakfast. He did the beaver to the goats. Linnea had banned the beaver from the bedroom.

What came out of all that was a voice with no edges anywhere on it: warm, delighted, absolutely certain, and pleased with you. He did it into a mic taped to the synth stand with both hands still going on the keys, and backstage the joy came off him like heat off a stove.

Out front, the beaver came down the dam face like it was a staircase, which he had built it to be.

"You must be the detective! Wonderful. I hoped the town would send someone. Feedback is a gift."

The laugh that went up was not the laugh the frog had got. It was a different animal entirely. It started in four places at once and it had a groan folded into it, and people turned and looked at each other while they did it, and two rows from the front a woman put her face in her hands and her husband patted her twice on the back without either of them saying a word.

Every person in that plaza knew this beaver. Some of them were related to him.

"He is acapallo," Gertie whispered backstage, with Maisie resting on her knee between scenes like a boxer between rounds. "The beaver. This time I have it."

"No," Saga whispered back.

"He is annoying. He does not know that he is annoying. This is the word."

"That's your word."

"Chacha." Gertie did not take her eyes off the gap in the curtain. "What is your word."

"It's the same word."

"What does it mean."

"Something else," said Saga.

Gertie made a low, satisfied sound.

Because that is the whole game and both of them know it. Gertie has been fishing for a definition since the spring, and she gets one word closer every time, and she is never going to get it ⁓ because Saga is thirteen and speaks La Charla the way you speak a language you learned in the street, which is to say completely, and with no ability whatsoever to explain any of it. And because being the one person in that yard who knows what a word means is a kind of property, and Saga is not selling.

"One day," said Gertie, "you will tell me."

"Bet."

Here is what actually happens at a puppet show, which the people out front never find out.

Twenty minutes in, Jef's foghorn went off in the middle of a quiet line. It was not the foghorn's fault, it was a bottle's fault, and Jef's face behind the scenery went the color of a fire bucket ⁓ and Maisie Ardilla stopped dead, and turned her whole felt body out toward the bay, and waited two full seconds.

"Somebody's early," said Maisie.

Three hundred people laughed. Every one of them thought it was written.

Then, in the second half, her father lost it completely at one of his own lines and it came out of the mic as a long delighted wheeze, and Gertie built the rest of the scene on top of it as though the beaver had always laughed like that, and the beaver has laughed like that ever since.

And then Greta came off Auxi's finger.

The tadpoles had been perfect. That was the thing.

Greta leaned. She leaned characterfully, she leaned like a big sister who has decided the family crisis is somebody else's turn this time, and the plaza laughed low and warm at a green sock with two beads on it, and behind the rack Saga watched Auxi's shoulders come down from around her ears in the middle of the scene.

That is a thing you can see from behind. It is the exact moment a job stops being a test and turns into a joy, and it happens in the shoulder blades, and Saga had been waiting for it since Callao.

Which is presumably why, four lines later, with everything going beautifully, Auxi turned her hand too fast and Greta came off and dropped onto the boards.

Saga was one meter away with a frog on her arm and could not reach her. Auxi's whole body went rigid. There is no worse silence in the world than the one inside a puppeteer who has just dropped a character in front of a town.

It lasted about a second and a half.

Then Maisie Ardilla, mid-sentence, stopped.

She looked down. She went over. She got down on her felt knees on the boards, picked up a tadpole in both paws, turned her over, dusted her off with one thumb, and held her up over her head to the top of the stage, and waited there.

Auxi's hand came over the edge. Greta went back onto the finger.

Maisie touched the brim of the too-big hat.

Three hundred people in a plaza in Icod de los Vinos made the noise people make when they believe they have just seen the best-written moment in the show, and they applauded it for eleven seconds, and they were wrong, and nobody has ever told them.

Behind the curtain Gertie's face did not change at all. Her arm was over her head and her wrist was doing the whole job and she was sixty-one years old and she said absolutely nothing about it, then or afterward, ever.

Auxi did not drop anything else for the rest of her career.

It was during the town meeting scene that the boy came up.

He was about seven. He came out of the front rows solemn as an ambassador, with a thing held in both hands, and the show went on over the top of him because the show does. He waited at the edge of the boards until Maisie Ardilla, between lines, looked down.

Then he put one roasted chestnut, still warm off the brazier, on the stage at the puppet's felt feet, and went back to his seat without a word.

The first case. The Mystery of the Missing Chestnut. Somebody's father had told him.

Maisie looked at the chestnut. Maisie looked at the boy. And Gertie found the only correct thing in her wrist without anybody telling her: the puppet picked the chestnut up in both paws, weighed it, bit it once to check it was genuine ⁓ the plaza came apart ⁓ and touched her hat.

Evidence, said Maisie Ardilla, and put it in her coat.

Saga, behind the curtain, wrote nothing down, and has it still.

The beaver is not run out of town at the end. That is the part nobody sees coming. He is aimed at a ravine that floods forty root cellars every December, and he goes off and fixes it, out of pride, and the town gives him back his own feedback forms with all five acorns circled on them until he cannot speak.

"Feedback," said the beaver, when he could talk at all, "is a gift."

And Maisie Ardilla took her hat off, which she does perhaps twice in a career.

"And that's our show!"

The imaginary rain went back to being a watering can. The muslin rolled backward onto its spool with its squeaky crank.

And the island, with a courtesy nobody could have staged, chose those same four minutes to move its own fog on off the town and away up the slope behind it ⁓ so that the two of them left together, the false one and the true one, and Icod came out from underneath into a clear cold November night full of lantern light and chestnut smoke and three hundred people making a lot of noise.

The market broke up warm and slow, the way the good ones do, which is to say it did not break up at all for about an hour.

Nobody left. That is what a good one looks like from behind a curtain: the show ends and the plaza does not empty, it just changes what it is doing. People came up to the folded stage in twos and threes to say things. A man explained to Gertie at some length that his brother-in-law was the beaver. Four separate people asked Saga whether the fog had been on purpose and she told four separate people that it absolutely had.

Striking a show is the least romantic work there is. The muslin goes back on the spool and the spool goes in the crate; the boards come off their hinges in an order that matters; the scenery flats go face to face so the paint does not scuff, and the whole of Acornmouth ends up as four boxes and a rolled bay that two people can carry.

Auxi was retelling Greta's lean to her mother with both hands and getting it slightly bigger each time. By the fourth telling the tadpole had gone over sideways at ninety degrees and hung there.

Jef was coiling muslin and explaining to anybody in range that the real fog had been, basically, his idea.

Mateo was still doing the beaver.

He did it while he coiled cable. He did it to Ruymán, who did not look up from the timple. He offered, in the beaver's voice, to draft a framework for the packing of the crates.

"Mateo."

"Feedback," said the beaver, "is a gift."

"Mateo, I will put you in the truck."

Somebody's mother arrived with a pot of carne fiesta and would not be argued with. Somebody else brought a jug of the new wine and would not be argued with either, and the troupe ate sitting on the folded stage in a rough line with plates on their knees, and Gertie sat Maisie Ardilla on the end of the row facing out at the plaza with one warm chestnut still in the puppet's coat pocket, because taking it out seemed wrong.

Anna came over at some point with an empty tin and sat down on the boards next to Saga with a grunt.

"Sold out?"

"Gave out." Anna leaned back on her hands. "Two hours ago. I've been standing behind an empty table talking to people for two hours, which is the actual product, mija, don't tell anybody."

Up the hill, somebody was on a ladder.

They start putting the light up at about nine.

It comes out of houses all over that town, in coils, out of boxes that live on top of wardrobes for three hundred and sixty-four days a year: LED tape. Rolls of it, the adhesive long dead, the cheap warm white and the cheap cold white and two lengths of blue and one glorious length of red that belongs to a family on the corner and comes out last and is treated with respect.

It is bazar stock. All of it. Every meter of that tape came into this island in a container through Santa Cruz before the ships stopped, and got sold in one of the everything-shops for almost nothing, to people who bought it for a party and put it in a drawer. There is no more of it and there is never going to be any more of it, and every year there is a little less than there was ⁓ a dead section here, a whole roll that comes out of the box and does not light and gets folded away anyhow ⁓ and every year Icod hangs what it has left along both walls of the Calle El Plano at about hip height and runs it off two truck batteries and a bank of salvaged cells, and calls that the night.

The kids on the ladders work down the hill in pairs, wiring it to the shutter rails and the window grilles, and behind them the street comes on in sections.

Saga stood in the plaza with a plate on her knees and watched it happen, and everybody else in that square stopped what they were doing and watched it too, and the noise of the town went down by half.

By twenty past nine the Calle El Plano was two long lines of light running away uphill into the dark, close together at the top, and every wet stone between them had a bit of the color in it.

Somebody said, "Ahí está." There it is.

The night runs belong to the big kids.

Nobody has ever written this rule down and nobody has ever needed to. The afternoon is for everybody, for the little ones on their fathers' laps and the visitors and the woman from Buenavista who does it once a year and screams the entire way. After the light goes up it is sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and the boys who have been riding El Plano since they were nine, and whoever else that particular set of boys has decided is coming.

There is no vote. There is not even a conversation. What happens is that three of them come and find you.

They came and found her at twenty-five past nine, with plates still on knees all around her: the tall one from the football lane and two others, standing over her in a half circle with their boards under their arms, and the tall one jerked his chin up the hill.

"Venga."

Saga looked at her father.

Mateo, who had been about to say something in the voice of a beaver, put his plate down and did not say it. He looked at the three boys, and then at his daughter, and Saga watched him do the arithmetic that a parent does, and watched him decide not to show her any of it.

"Ve," he said. Go.

At night the hill is a different hill, and the difference is not the dark. There is no dark. That is the whole point of the night.

You sit down on your board at the top of two lines of light. They run away from you down the hill on both sides, hip height, close enough together at the far end that they very nearly meet, and the wet road between them holds all of it and gives it back, so that the street is not lit so much as it is filled, and there is warm white and cold white and, two thirds of the way down on the left, that one family's length of red.

And past the tires at the bottom, in the little square where the slope gives up, they had lit the fire.

Pallet wood and vine prunings and the year's dead banana stems, in an iron ring, three meters of orange going straight up into the cold with the whole bottom of the town standing around it in a loose black crowd with cups in their hands. From the top of the Calle El Plano it was the size of a thumbnail. It was the thing you aimed at.

The cold came off the stone and up through the plank into the backs of her legs.

She lifted her heels and the hill took her.

The zipper started under her spine, and then the two lines of light stopped being tape and started being lines, solid, unbroken, streaming past her at hip height on either side, and everything between them smeared into one moving thing ⁓ faces, shutters, a doorway with four people in it, the red bit going by like a struck match ⁓ and the fire at the bottom came up out of a thumbnail into a room-sized thing that filled the whole end of the street.

It was not like the afternoon. In the afternoon it had been a hill and she had gone down it.

This was something else, and she found it out about halfway down with her eyes streaming: she was frightened. Properly frightened, not the useful kind she got before a show, the other kind, the one that arrives behind your knees. And at the same time, in the same body, with no line anywhere between the two of them, she was so happy she could not get her breath to work right.

The last of the light went past. The fire filled everything.

She hit the tires square and went into the mattresses on her back with her arms out.

Above her the sky over Icod had more stars in it than anybody who has only ever seen a city sky is ready for, and the smoke off the bonfire went up through them in a slow orange column and came apart somewhere near the top.

She lay there and looked at all of it and did not get up for a while, and one of the folded-arm men leaned into her view, upside down, and said, "¿Estás?" Are you.

"Estoy," said Saga. I am.

He hauled her out by the arm. The next zipper was already coming.

Her mother was standing at the tires.

Linnea had come down the hill at some point in the last ten minutes, without saying anything to anyone about it, and had taken up a position two meters back from the mattresses with her arms folded and her coat buttoned wrong, and she was not looking at Saga.

She was looking up the hill.

Saga turned around.

There were four figures at the top of the Calle El Plano, standing between the two lines of light where they very nearly meet. One of them was small and appeared to be barefoot. One of them had her hair tied up in a koi-print square and was standing the way a person stands when they have already said no twice.

And one of them was holding a board and taking the pencil out from behind her ear.

Angustias handed the pencil to Remedios without looking at her, and Remedios's hand was there, and it went into the vet's coat pocket, and neither of them said anything about it at all.

Then she sat down on the board in the middle of the street with her two different boots out in front of her.

Down at the tires, one of the folded-arm men said, "Ay."

He said it quietly, to nobody, in the voice of a man who has just seen something arrive out of about thirty years ago. And then he said, "La cabra."

Saga had known that woman her whole life, had carried injured animals up to her door, had eaten at her table, had been told off by her in two languages. She had never in her life heard anybody call her anything but Angustias.

The zipper started.

There was no drama in it whatsoever, and that was the whole thing. She came down the Calle El Plano dead straight, sitting up, hands in the rope, boots off the stone, and she did not wobble once, and she did not do anything you could point at, and she came through the whole length of that lit street on exactly the line she had started on. It looked slow. It was not slow. Anything that looks that easy at that speed is being done by somebody who is very good, and every single person on that street knew it inside two seconds, and the noise they made was not the noise they made for the boys.

She hit the tires square, and was up out of the mattresses and on her feet before the men could get a hand to her, and she took the board back up the hill without looking at anybody.

She had not been on one in thirty years. She did not mention that either.

Anna had said no twice by the time Saga got up there and she was working on a third.

"Absolutely not."

"Sit down."

"Angustias, I am fifty-five years old."

"I am older than you," said Angustias, who may or may not have been. Nobody has ever established the order of those three and all three of them point at each other when asked.

"I have a business."

"You have a table of candy."

"There are three hundred people down there."

Angustias looked at her. It was not an unkind look and it was not a patient one; it was the look of a woman who has spent her working life telling people what to do on a hillside where the alternative to doing it is worse.

"They are not looking at you," she said. "They are looking at the street."

Anna opened her mouth.

"Sit down."

And here is the thing about Angustias Cebolla, which Saga had watched work on grown men, on frightened animals, on her own mother: she does not argue with the objection. She never once addresses it. She simply carries on to the next instruction, in order, at the same speed, until the person is doing the thing.

"Hands in the rope, not on the sides, or the wall will take your fingers. Heels down until you want to go. Then not. Look at the bottom of the hill, not at the front of the board." She crouched, and moved Anna's left hand two inches, and did not comment on the fact that it was shaking. "And do not put your hand down."

"What happens if I put my hand down?"

"You will put your hand down," said Angustias.

She stood up, and stepped back, and folded her arms, and somewhere in the previous ninety seconds Anna Doherty had entirely stopped saying no and had become a woman sitting on a plank at the top of the Calle El Plano with a market's worth of Icod yelling at her from both walls.

"Oh," said Anna, to herself, in Texan, "hell."

And put her heels up.

Saga heard the zipper start.

She saw her come down through the light going far too fast and slightly sideways, with the fire at the bottom throwing her shadow back up the hill ahead of her.

And she put her hand down.

She put it down the way Angustias had said she would, at the exact point in a run where a person's body stops taking instructions and starts having ideas of its own, and the stone took it, and the board came round underneath her and went out from under her about six meters short of the tires.

Anna went over.

She hit the street with her shoulder and then her face and turned over twice and came to rest on her back in the road with her arms out and one shoe in the gutter and her head toward the bottom of the hill.

The street stopped.

Not slowly. All at once, the whole length of it, the way a plaza goes quiet for a wire act ⁓ two hundred people and every one of them silent inside the same half second, and somewhere up on a wall a woman said "¡Ay!" and nobody else said anything at all, and Mateo was already running, and Linnea had gone past Saga so fast that Saga only understood it afterward.

Then, from the road, flat on her back between two lines of cheap warm light with the bonfire going orange on one side of her face and blood coming down out of her hairline in a way that looked a great deal worse than it was:

Anna laughed.

She laughed before anybody in that street had finished deciding what they had just seen. She got there first, the way she gets there first, half a second ahead of three hundred people, exactly the way she had at the frog's name with a kazoo in it ⁓ and Saga, standing at the bottom of the hill with a plank under her arm, knew that laugh the way you know a door in your own house.

Then the whole street laughed, because they had been given permission, and it went up the hill in a wave and out over the rooftops.

Mateo got there first and got an arm under her and Anna laughed up into his face and told him, in the Texan Spanish she has never once apologized for, to quítate, hombre ⁓ get off, man ⁓ she was fine, she was extremely fine, she had never been finer.

Gertie arrived with a handkerchief from somewhere on her person and applied it to Anna's forehead without ceremony.

"You are old," Gertie said.

"I am fifty-five."

"Yes," Gertie said. "Hold this."

The koi-print square had come off and gone into the street water and was gray. Anna's palms were skinned. There was a scrape from her hairline down to her eyebrow that was going to be spectacular in the morning and was already, at that moment, being pointed at admiringly by a delegation of eleven-year-olds.

Angustias arrived at a walk, because Angustias does not run downhill on wet stone, and stood over her with her arms folded.

"You put your hand down."

"I put my hand down."

"Yes," said Angustias.

That was the whole debrief. She reached into her sister's coat pocket without asking, took the pencil back, and put it behind her ear, and for about one second her face was not stern in the slightest.

Then Milagros came out of the crowd barefoot on the wet stone, looked at the woman lying in the road, looked at the tire wall, and said:

"Eleven."

Nobody asked her what she meant. Nobody ever does.

Linnea stood over her with her arms folded and said nothing whatsoever for a long moment.

"Well?" said Anna.

"I'm deciding," said Linnea, "whether to tell you off."

"Take your time, mi guaya."

Linnea crouched down, took Anna's chin, turned her head to the light, looked at the scrape properly, and let her go.

"No," she said. "I don't think I will."

They got her up. She declined, warmly and repeatedly, to be sat down anywhere at all, and she walked back up the hill with one arm through Saga's and the handkerchief held to her head, and about halfway up she said:

"He was right, that kid."

"About what?"

"You don't steer it."

Above the town, uphill of the lanterns, the Drago stood against the stars with its thousand rings of island inside it.

It had watched the Guanches name the mountain. It had watched the ships come, and the ships stop coming. Tonight it had watched three hundred people laugh at a beaver in a vest, and one boy give a squirrel a chestnut, and a woman of fifty-five come down a wet hill on a plank in the dark and get up bleeding and delighted.

The Drago said nothing.