A Fisherman of the Inland Sea: Stories Read Online Free

almost don’t look human,” she said, very softly so as not to hurt their feelings, if they spoke English, since Jerry
     had stopped the car and flung the doors open and was rummaging out the video camera.
    “Hold this!”
    She held it. Five or six of the tall black-and-white people had sort of turned their way, but they all seemedto be busy with something at the foot of the hill or rock or whatever it was. There were some things that might be tents.
     Nobody came to welcome them or anything, but she was actually just as glad they didn’t.
    “Hold this! Oh for Chrissake what did you do with the—All right, just give it here.”
    “Jerry, I wonder if we should ask them,” she said.
    “Ask who what?” he growled, having trouble with the cassette thing.
    “The people here—if it’s all right to photograph. Remember at Taos they said that when the—”
    “For fuck sake you don’t need fucking
permission
to photograph a bunch of
natives!
God! Did you ever
look
at the fucking
National Geographic?
Shit!
Permission!”
    It really wasn’t any use when he started shouting. And the people didn’t seem to be interested in what he was doing. Although
     it was quite hard to be sure what direction they were actually looking.
    “Aren’t you going to get out of the fucking
car?”
    “It’s so hot,” she said.
    He didn’t really mind it when she was afraid of getting too hot or sunburned or anything, because he liked being stronger
     and tougher. She probably could even have said that she was afraid of the natives, because he liked to be braver than her,
     too; but sometimes he got angry when she was afraid, like the time he made her eat that poisonous fish, or a fish that might
     or might not be poisonous, in Japan, because she said she was afraid to, and she threw up and embarrassed everybody. So she
     just sat in the car and kept the engine on and the air-conditioning on, although the window on her side was open.
    Jerry had his camera up on his shoulder now and was panning the scene—the faraway hot red horizon, the queer rock-hill-thing
     with shiny places in it like glass, the black, burned-looking ground around it, and the people swarming all over. There were
     forty or fifty of them at least. It only dawned on her now that if they were wearing any clothes at all, she didn’t know whichwas clothes and which was skin, because they were so strange-shaped, and painted or colored all in stripes and spots of white
     on black, not like zebras but more complicated, more like skeleton suits but not exactly. And they must be eight feet tall,
     but their arms were short, almost like kangaroos’. And their hair was like black ropes standing up all over their heads. It
     was embarrassing to look at people without clothes on, but you couldn’t really see anything like
that.
In fact she couldn’t tell, actually, if they were men or women.
    They were all busy with their work or ceremony or whatever it was. Some of them were handling some things like big, thin,
     golden leaves, others were doing something with cords or wires. They didn’t seem to be talking, but there was all the time
     in the air a soft, drumming, droning, rising and falling, deep sound, like cats purring or voices far away.
    Jerry started walking towards them.
    “Be careful,” she said faintly. He paid no attention, of course.
    They paid no attention to him either, as far as she could see, and he kept filming, swinging the camera around. When he got
     right up close to a couple of them, they turned towards him. She couldn’t see their eyes at all, but what happened was their
hair
sort of stood up and bent towards Jerry-each thick, black rope about a foot long moving around and bending down exactly as
     if it were peering at him. At that, her own hair tried to stand up, and the blast of the air conditioner ran like ice down
     her sweaty arms. She got out of the car and called his name.
    He kept filming.
    She went towards him as fast as she could on the