Free On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee Page B

messenger whenever the batteries for the two-ways went out, conveying word of a young man with two fingers crushed and near amputated offering twenty dollars to cut them off cleanly, or a lady with a festering rash covering half her back who will give him a gold wedding band, or an older man with a terrible pain in his side who will leave his pretty daughter for three days in exchange for surgery, four if the “doctor” could also pull a bad tooth, and every once in a while a younger person might be left there, indefinitely, as payment; it went like this all day and every day, Sewey describing it with a much younger child’s innocent delight, the terribly sick and injured queued up beneath the ferocious sun or pelting rain to have Quig take a look and say if he could fix them. Most times he could, which is why so many people were journeying to the Smokes, word of his skills having spread across the region over the last fifteen or so years after Quig had left the big Charter village down south where he once lived.
    Apparently, Quig had not been a physician in his village, but rather a veterinarian with a large, successful practice. With a few partners, he owned an animal hospital and operated a small fleet of house-call vans, the business thriving until that infamous year of the bird and swine flu epidemics that hit in rapid succession and crossed the species barrier to infect and kill dozens of Charters in a village out west. In the ensuing panic across the Charter Association every last home-raised fowl and toy swine was destroyed and soon after all the dogs and even the cats and ornamental birds, with a permanent ban on all nonmarine pets instituted, and soon thereafter even on pet fish, just to be safe. His profession was gone overnight. He and his wife eventually lost their condo to the bank and were living month to month in a trades- and services-people’s dormitory when they were caught in a sting selling animal tranquilizers at a health club. They were arrested, swiftly tried and convicted, their sentence immediate banishment; Quig and his wife had a young daughter and the three of them had to leave behind whatever they couldn’t fit into their car, the very same that Fan rode in the back of that first drenching night. Apparently, his wife and daughter did not last long.
    They got dead like right away, Sewey told her now. And adding as if quoting: How it always goes.
    Fan asked him what happened, but he shook his head.
    Momma won’t say. And she told me to never ask him and to never bring it up. So we shouldn’t.
    They were quiet for a minute, Sewey unfurling his yo-yo up and down, getting it to hover, skitter across the floor, snap back.
    Momma says we got a good thing here, even if B-Mors or Charters would never believe it. Is that why you came out here? To see if it was as awful as people say?
    Fan didn’t answer. While it didn’t matter because the rhetorical was Sewey’s optimal mode, as he got his wind and proceeded to ramble about how sometimes people died before they could be seen by Quig, literally collapsing while waiting, and how if they had come alone it was Sewey’s job to go through their clothes for anything of value before summoning certain of Quig’s men to haul the body away, it strikes us that Fan must have posed his question to herself again. It couldn’t have been just Reg she had gone to search out. She had no real leads as to where he might be, or if he was even alive. So why would any sane person leave our cloister for such uncertainties? He was the impetus, yes, the veritable without which, but not the whole story. One person or thing can never comprise that, no matter how much one is cherished, no matter how much one is loved. A tale, like the universe, they tell us, expands ceaselessly each time you examine it, until there’s finally no telling exactly where it begins, or ends, or where it places you now.

So let us keep our attention on the small. Which means, for the moment,