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place in the wattled wall, a place from which I had picked twigs to whittle.
    The best about crashing out the bottom of the osprey nest was that the hole was small and fingered withsharp sticks that scraped my lice bites as I fell past them. I had never had an itching scratched so complete at once. I was in a scratched-itch ecstasy when I splatted deep in the valley of Big Miss Magine’s black bare bosoms. She had caught me square and clapped her arms around me so that I was smothered and obliged to snorkel breaths that flubbered against her skin like a snore. Her own breathing was excited deep and rattly, and when she spoke, my ear pressed to her breast, it was the sound like when you hold your own ears and talk, except you would never say to yourself
You is mine, Fishboy, you is all mine
.
    Help!
I said, as I felt her carry me away, my arms pinned in her embrace, my legs a little free to kick her gut as hard as I was able.
    Help!
I said, and she had a coughy rattling laugh, phlegmy, and I wondered was this the source of blue fog, something dead in her lungs. Smothered as I was against her nakedness, I could not smell her breath, I could only smell fish oil in her sweat and the acrid smell of the bus tires the cratered lake people burned outside their houses at night to smoke away their mosquitoes.
    The valley of her breasts was slick with my squirming and her fish-oil sweat and I slid up a little higher to get my head out of the skin. I turned my head around to see she was taking us into the empty cutting shed. BigMiss Magine nuzzled me and bit into my only earlobe in a way I knew she was blood-hungry, beyond playful, bit in a way I was sure to be eaten alive.
    The weeping man who said
Fuck
came into the cutting shed slopping gasoline across the floor.
Help!
I shouted to him, but I could see that to him I was just a small last finish fish some old nigger woman was about to stun with a lead stick in the darkness of just one more cutting shed he was set on to burn.
Help!
I yelled anyway, as anybody would.
    Hush, Fishboy, I have you now
, said Big Miss Magine and my head was rapped sharply, sharply, so that one of my eyes was knocked a little into orbit and the things I heard and saw went dreamy, the backfire of the purple bus leaving the lot, Lonny’s shouts just outside to get ready to cast off, the way the small ship’s smoke curled into the cutting shed and mixed in spirals with the flames that roamed the buildings and followed the trails of slopping gasoline.
    Big Miss Magine stroked me down on the table, her thumb working into my neck as if to find a good gill place to put in the knife and jig out a fillet.
    When I felt something sharp against my neck I beat and pushed her from me.
    I beat and pushed with my fists, and in one of my fists was my butter-turned knife.
    I pushed from Big Miss Magine with my butter-turned knife until I felt my fingers enter her skin and tick against her heart.
    Her grip on my neck let go and I pitched off the cutting table, stepping into the slippery sluice. The ceiling of rolling smoke came lower as I clambered outside onto the dock. My eyes were unfocused and dreamy, one eye seeing the propeller-churned creek water brown and frothy, the other eye seeing how close the small ship’s bow swung in its turn over my head so that my face was licked by the side-hung tongue of the figureheaded mule. I made a grab at a loop of bowline and saw that one of my arms was bloody to the elbow. I drew my arm back but it was as if the ship was repulsed by what it had seen. As it backed away into the creek I could see myself, the murderous Fishboy, reflected in the dark wheelhouse windows, a small figure framed by the rolling flames, all pumpkin orange and chiminey red.
    Fishboy!
roared the fire around me.
    I tipped forward to the edge of the dock ahead of the fire spilling sizzling tar at my heels. The ship backed and backed across the creek into the other shore, its propeller cutting into the bank so that