Normally such open liquor drinking would have gotten everyone arrested
especially when it involved selling to minors but since some of the
proceeds were going into the public fund on this day it was overlooked.
While the brothers were given a second shot of whiskey again diluted
in cola, new customers came to the woman anxiously. She led them to
her table and sat there with the squalling, squalid child. The baby
was restless on the apron that she wore. Conscious of how a repetition
of her spiel could spell out insincerity and a customer's aversion, she
attempted to wait silently as they debated doing this. She muted the
child with a firm hand pressed against its mouth. Before she could make
the sell she reflexively responded to the smallest degree of wetness on
the apron and let her child urinate away from the sidewalk and her
virility stand. The ground did not eagerly swallow the fetid and sweet
liquid and his recidivist urine came back to the sidewalk with the
insistence of a foul stream. Past shoe salesmen on a sheet, shoe
repairmen, comb and battery salesmen, noodle workers, and lottery
representatives-- unlicensed businesses that abounded everywhere- they
entered the gates of the fair. At kiosks, the three of them threw
darts, shot basketballs in moving hoops, and bounced balls against
walls to knock over bottles for prizes. They continued doing this
until the infancy of night murdered the sun allowing it to slowly die,
languishingly sliding off golden rooftops of temples. When darkness
unfolded around them, they paid to see a woman put her face in a
plastic box of scorpions, elephant trainers whose elephants walked
over them to enter into the crowds where they picked up humans with
their trunks, and oarsmen in the facsimiles of royal barges competing
against each other. The boats had the same body and countenance of
dragons just like the television shows they had seen of the kings'
ancient boats that were housed in the Royal Barge Museum.