That be Jerome and me, walking down Pringle Street, a container of gasoline heavy between us, our hands crampy against the damp plastic. Jerome in his t-shirt, sleeves rolled to show off the bulge of his arms, me scrawny and sweating under a low, bare sun that feels like warm honey. We filled up at the Cheap-O. “You boys run out of gas again?” say Eddie, already jumped-up from the stuff he sniff between customers. “Yeah, but we getting lots now,” I say. “That why we doubled up.” He laughed like anything, like it’s the funniest thing he could hear.

The container hold fourteen gallons, which is why Jerome figures he needs my help. You can really do something with fourteen gallons if someone helps you carry it. “You got matches?” Jerome says, casual-like. Like we just talking, on our way nowhere. Like “Want a smoke? Got matches?” Itchy to light up.

“Third time you ask,” I say. “Still the same answer.” I pat the bulge of my pants pocket. The strike-anywheres make a sound like a stack of pick-up sticks collapsing. “Got enough,” I say. Lifted the economy box when Eddie wasn’t looking, when he throw back his head, laughing at his own not-funny joke. Teach him to laugh like that, when Mr. Jack takes inventory and Eddie can’t account for a box of matches. 

I feel bad for Eddie. People are always lifting things from the Cheap-O when Eddie’s on his shift, daydreaming behind the counter. Cans of cola get tucked into pockets, between thighs. I saw one girl stick a family size bag of Mariquita’s plantain chips under her shirt—suddenly she look nine months expecting, rubbing on her belly as she sidled out and Eddie grinning at her, thinking he’ll soon be selling her baby formula. So I asked him for a pack of Camel Blues, which somehow ends up in Jerome’s waistband, and a box of candied orange peel for Alma.

We walking to Alma’s house down a morning street that shimmies with August heat and smells of pig grease and egg shells. Jerome starts to whistle. “This is going to be a good day, yeah?” he says. Then he snickers and bumps me with his hip, like we going to bust into a dance, him whistling the accompaniment as he twirls me.

Alma lives on Lemon Tree. From Pringle me and Jerome turn onto Paradise, then onto Swan. Lemon Tree is gravel and hardpack under a canopy of wild tamarind, more path than street. It winds along the track behind the mission thrift store and the Price-a-Penny, where nothing is priced a penny but most things cost under a dollar and have hot-pink tags that read 28¢! 53¢! 36¢! That exclamation point throws a lot of people, who think it means they’re getting some deal. They don’t bother to figure out that a roll of toilet paper at 53¢! costs more than a dozen rolls for $6 minus the punctuation. The guy who owns the Price-a-Penny drives a powder-blue XJ6, trunk pockmarked with rust, that he has to park facing downhill so the engine will catch when he starts it. “You see?” he says. “You buy here, you save enough money to get yourself something special.” He’s sweet on Alma, or so she says. Grabbed her one night when he was about to close up and she’d run in for a cola.

Grabbed her and stuck his tongue in her startled mouth, swirling it around like she’s an old mason jar with honey at the bottom. Hmm, hmm, he moaned, his tongue wiping the ridges of her palate. Or so she told Jerome,  which peeved him to no end.

“She tell me all that, there no saying what she’s not telling me,” he say. He reaches over and pulls my ear to make sure I get his point.

I shrug away from him. When he tossed the gas container through my kitchen window that morning, I ran out the back door and hid in the shed. There are some strange people on this island. Then I saw Jerome sashay himself up the driveway. “Toly? Where you go to? You somewhere here, I know that. We got a job.”

I figured he means fetching gas for someone who was visiting one of Jerome’s neighbors and found himself stranded after Jerome drained the tank and sold the dregs at half-price. But Jerome’s breath smells of mackerel, no sweet hint of sucked petroleum. So I can’t figure it. It’s too soon for Mr. John to want another fire in his pizza shop, the first two risky enough to set up, what with new-employee Jerome having to drill pinholes into the propane pipe behind the ovens.

But Alma.

At the corner we rest the container on the curb and Jerome stuffs a fistful of Milk Duds into my mouth, his eyes daring me to chew. I swallow one at a time. They go down like bruises.

“That Jerome is some sot,” my mam would say whenever Jerome wandered into her living room. She meant it in the old sense: a fool, because Jerome doesn’t like to drink anything, even water. 

“Aw, mami,” I’d say, to make it sound like a joke, so that Jerome doesn’t take it in his head to rub his fingers along the shelf where my mam keeps her ebony-glass figurines—82¢! at the Price a Penny, scorpions and wasps with stingers thin as ice crystals—so a few fall accidentally to the floor and he steps accidentally on each one.

Sometimes Jerome loses his balance. It’s hard enough for him to see through his one eye, the other being a milky marble since we were twelve, when Eddie found that slingshot near the schoolyard and yelled, “Hey, Jerome.” Just as Jerome looked up, Eddie fired a pebble right over his head. But it hit his right eye. In Jerome’s flat world, his hand is always closing on air. Every morning he goes to the Cheap-O and asks Eddie to pour his coffee and light his one cigarette of the day. Eddie opens on Sunday just for Jerome.

We walk slower now, that container bruising our palms, and I think about taking a market wagon from somebody’s front walk. There are plenty, all with red paint flaking off the dents. Most are empty, a couple have kids sitting in them or empty bottles piled high waiting for redemption like sinners. Jerome is too busy thinking up his action plan to notice. We keep going, When we pass through the gate in front of Alma’s house, Jerome suddenly lets go of the handle he’s holding and my shoulder stretches from its socket. The he sit on the gasoline container while I go up the two porch steps. The house is cinderblock and shingle, with curtains hanging bunched at the windows—none of this overheated air will get into that house. The door rattles under my knock. I imagine myself a big bad wolf, huffing and puffing and sending that door soaring over piggy heads. When Eddie owned the house, the door had an iron grate over it, but Alma took it down the afternoon she moved in. Looks enough like a prison already, she said, doesn’t want the extra bars. Eddie had moved a cot into his storeroom the night before.

Alma comes to the door, her skin patched piggy-pink, her yellow hair corkscrew around bits of rag, her robe open just enough to show the dust of black where her legs meet. She peeks at me, and I turn my head toward Jerome, so she understands the problem.

Jerome stays perched on the container like it’s some toadstool and he’s some mouth-blown glass spider. His shirt is the same grease-streaked red as the container. Alma looks at him. “Ay-yi-yi-yi,” she say, her voice expressionless. For a living, Alma read minds. Whatever she see now in Jerome’s don’t worry her. If anything, she look bored. A man with fire between his legs. She run across this before. Maybe she knew we coming. Maybe she know how it turn out.

“Why’d he bring you?” she ask, on the porch now where the frangipani overhangs it and everything smell of sugar.

“For courage,” I answer, though what I think about is the weight of the gasoline and Jerome’s flat world.

“Nah,” she says. “He brought you so you stop him, yeah.” She snort. “So far, it look like you fail.” I turn toward Jerome, only to hear the door slap against the frame and the lock click into place.

“Hey,” Jerome yells. “You supposed to get her out here.” He’s still sitting on the container, but I have sense of unseen movement, of his muscles winding underneath him.

“We should go,” I say to him. From inside the house comes heavy wailing music and the sound of a toilet flushing. Maybe Alma has company. I put my ear against the door but it is only Alma’s voice I hear, assaying near-keyless high notes.

Jerome glares at me—not mean or anything, just expectant. Wanting me to bang on the door again. Or kick it, because even a bare foot might make that wood give way. Let Alma know that some serious shit could go down in her yard. But I don’t. Everyone says that Alma can throw spells, that she spun Jerome’s head her way with a chant over a pot of yams or cookies baked with mistletoe and vervain. It turn him docile, till that docility make him nervous and aggrieved.

“Alma,” I call. “A-a-l-m-a-a. . . .” I feel my pocket. The match box jiggles against the orange candy. I picture Alma on the other side of the door, pulling the rags from her hair, and my scalp start to itch. She opens the door in her working clothes: a short patchwork dress and bare legs, hair in a halo of braids, on each long finger a silver ring. In her hand she swirls a juice glass of grainy rice, from which she swears she divine patterns and truth.

“Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair,” I sing-song to her.

She looks at me, eyes like the bits of tourmaline that sometimes wash up on the beach. “Why? You want to be my prince?”

I shake my head. “Not me. Jerome wants to shimmy himself up to you.” I want her to think of Jerome doing his shimmy dance at carnival, get a smile from her.

“Ay-yi-yi-yi, you two have to leave,” she says, no smile for either of us. “I got my girl here.” But she says it like an invitation, her eyes right on Jerome. Surely she’s working some new Jerome spell.

Alma’s nipples poke large and full against the dress’s thin material, like someone already been at them. I see Jerome looking at those nipples, wanting them for himself. He slap his palms on his thighs and get up. That thigh-slapping thing is how Jerome signal he mean business, the way a gorilla pounds his chest. He take a step toward Alma, but she is fast, putting up her hand right away to stop him. For a few minutes, we stand around waiting for one of us to decide what to do. I am hoping Jerome forgot the container and what by now I figure he intended, but the smell of gas is all over, its own flower stronger than the jasmine that Alma grow to hide what the wind carries from the rendering plant three streets away. Stronger even than Alma, whose legs enclose a flower more pungent than any Crimson Glory rose in my mam’s garden. I move my eyes to the container, slow so not to startle Jerome. The cap is still tight. I decide the odor Alma’s doing, her way of letting me know to get going.  I wonder what juju she’s preparing to send my way. A swarm of gnats hover around my face and I swat them away, sure they are Alma. 

“Go get yourself some water,” Alma says. Jerome shakes his head, but his eyes stay on her so I sidle over to the hose. I check my pocket again. 

“Wet your shirt, too, Toly. When you do that, the gnats won’t bother you,” Alma whisper as I pass her. I slip the box of orange peels, warm and sticky now from being against my body, into her hand.

To make sure the rubber taste is good and gone, I let the water run onto the jasmine till the soil bubbles. Then I lean down and take my time lapping at the spray, feeling it soak into my shirt, giving Jerome and Alma a chance to lock eyes so that Alma can spread Alma-essence through him. Neither of them pay any attention to me. I twist the nozzle till it sprays a circle of mist that envelopes my head as I bend under it. When I look over at Alma, she finally shows that smile to me.

“Give up, Alma,” Jerome says. She says nothing.

“Give up,” he says again. Alma still says nothing. In the silence, Jerome nods at me and ambles to the street, then slowly down Lemon Tree, so I can catch up before he gets to Pringle. From on the porch, Alma stares at me, her eyes different, darker.

I know what he expects me to do. Open the container and tip it to the ground. Let the gasoline spread till the dirt bubbles into bits of iridescent shell. Flick a match against the cement. Leap through the gate while a great whoosh of flames eats up Alma’s jasmine, her porch, her house. While Alma scream her ay-yi-yi-yi and pull at her hair.