He smelled bad. I backed away. The sight of the distant wharf alarmed me. I made a panicked sound and it came out like a whine and he said, “I wish ya could speak ’cos ya must got a sweet voice and come, come, lemme put it on ya, youn’ thin’n.” He fumbled at the top button of my shirt and I pushed his hands away. He yanked down on it. The button snapped and for one second he seemed frozen as he stared at my chest and moaned, “Ah ya angel . . . ya skin . . . ya a beautiful youn’thin’n.” He pulled me down, his grubby face already buried in my chest where my shirt was pushed out like a Y and my bosom hung without a brassiere. “Ah ya smell so nicey . . . lemme smell yah sweet lil’ pot . . . now . . . now . . . doncha be scared . . .” He pulled me down and his rough hand went up under my skirt and I clamped my legs and hit his face with the mermaid comb. The comb’s teeth raked across his stubbled face. He fell back touching his eyes and I stumbled out of the dome, my head hitting the stringed trinkets and they clanked. I waved frantically at a boat coming downriver toward us and I screamed but the sound that left my throat was garbled sound. He grabbed my hair and yanked me back. I swung around, my shirt flying, and felt the breeze on my chest. He dragged me back in. I hit him with my fist, the mermaid comb broke against his head and I hit him again with the other hand and broke the tortoise-shell hair pin too. He threw me down on the floor, his legs bent, planted on both sides of me, and leered down at me. “Ya have a notion of wat ya did?” A corner of his upper lip raised showing his yellowed canine tooth. “Ya ain’t gonna rob me of wat I want, not in did worl’ naw naw . . .” He flung up the bottom of my skirt just as the boat shook. I brought my hands down there, panting, nearly in tears, and he grabbed both of my hands by the wrists and made a strange guttural sound in his throat as he cut his eyes downward at my lower body. I saw a woman at the dome entrance, bent low, peering in. I knew her. The old woman who owned a riverboat. Grandma and I had ferried in her boat when Grandma had to go to Leper Isle to buy herbal pots. The man snapped his head back to see the old woman crouching over him, holding a long oar in her hand. “You dirty old goat,” she said, baring her red-stained teeth from betel chew. He gingerly rose and as he did I slid away from him and stood up. My head hit the ceiling and the brass trinkets tinkled. The woman gestured at me with her hand, “Go out to the stern, dear thing. I’ll bring my boat up.” The man neither looked at me nor the old woman. He just remained on one spot, slouched. I got off the sundry boat. The old woman, rowing her boat toward the wharf, cast a curious glance at me. “You don’t need to tell me anything, dear little one. I can’t understand you anyway. You can tell your grandma, though. Maybe someone can do something about it.” She kept rowing while I tucked in my shirt in and sat pinching the top of it with my fingers. I felt grateful to her, but I couldn’t speak. Like that sundry boat’s owner, the old woman drank too. When she ferried us to the Leper Isle she would wait for Grandma, sometimes with me in her boat, and waiting I’d doze and wake up to a yeasty, faintly sweet smell of rice wine and see her sitting on a reed mat toward the stern, a glass jar being warmed on a brazier. Sometimes coming back Grandma would share with her a cup of rice wine. Along the riverway to Leper Isle there were mangrove groves rising from tangles of roots from the muddy bank, forming a tall stand to bear the storms coming in from the sea. There were mangrove logs paving the steps that led to riverside shanties and sometimes as the boat passed by I would see mudskippers carried in by the tide
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