Fiskadoro

by Denis Johnson

  Copyright © 1985 by Denis Johnson

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: abkco music inc.: Excerpt from lyrics to “Sweet Virginia” by M. Jagger and K. Richards. © 1972 by ABKCO Music, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission, colgems-emi music inc.: Lyrics from “Torn and Frayed” by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Copyright © 1972 by Cansel Ltd. All rights for the U.S. and Canada controlled by Colgems-EMI Music, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved, island music inc.: Excerpt from lyrics to “Struggling Man” by Jimmy Cliff. © 1972 Island Music, Ltd. All rights for the U.S.A. and Canada controlled by Island Music, Inc. (BMI) All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. normal music: Excerpt from lyrics to “Lo Siento Mi Vida” by Linda and Gilbert Ronstadt, and Kenny Edwards. © 1976 Normal Music, special rider music: Excerpt from lyrics to “Man of Peace” by Bob Dylan. © 1983 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission.

  for Morgan Johnson

  pescador, ra, n. fisherman (-woman),

  fisgador, ra, n. harpooner . . .

  —Appleton’s New Cuyas Dictionary

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A good deal of the inspiration for this story came from the works of Ernest Becker, Bruno Bettelheim, Joseph Campbell, Marcel Griaule, Alfred Metraux, Oliver Sacks, and Victor W. Turner. With the caution that this book doesn’t offer to represent their thinking, I want to acknowledge my debt to these students and teachers of humankind.

  The quotes on pages 45—6 come from All About Dinosaurs by Roy Chapman Andrews (Random House, 1953). Those on pages 152—3 come from Nagasaki: The Forgotten Bomb by Frank W. Chinnock (The World Publishing Company, A New American Library Book, 1969). Phrases from the Koran are quoted from the Penguin Classics edition of the N. J. Dawood translation.

  It is a pleasure to thank the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Arts Council for grants that made this writing possible; and Bill and Nancy Webb for a gift of space and privacy.

  FISKADORO

  ONE

  HERE, AND ALSO SOUTH OF US, THE BEACHES HAVE A YELLOW TINT, but along the Keys of Florida the sand is like shattered ivory. In the shallows the white of it turns the water such an ideal sea-blue that looking at it you think you must be dead, and the rice paddies, in some seasons, are profoundly emerald. The people who inhabit these colors, thanked be the compassion and mercy of Allah, have nothing much to trouble them. It’s true that starting a little ways north of them the bodies still just go on and on, and the Lord, as foretold, has crushed the mountains; but it’s hard to imagine that such things ever went on in the same universe that holds up the Keys of Florida. It strains all belief to think that these are the places the god Quetzalcoatl, the god Bob Marley, the god Jesus, promised to come back to and build their kingdoms. On island after island, except for the fields of cane popping in the wind, everything seems to be asleep.

  In our day sugar is a major crop of the Keys. In Fiskadoro’s time, during the Quarantine, whole islands were given over to the cultivation of rice, while sugar cane was a product only of patient neighborhood gardeners like Mr. Cheung.

  On the day they met, Mr. Cheung happened to be tending his garden. The gritty earth stung his bare knees where he knelt in his underwear behind the house planting two rows of cane parallel to the wall. He put his feet under himself, trying to squat on his haunches, but he was getting such a belly these days it got between him and his knees and unbalanced him onto his rump. Grandmother Wright, in her—very heavy, he’d moved it himself—red plush rocking chair, was making noises deep in her throat. Once she’d been quite a talker, but now she was a hundred years old. She was trying to soak up the heat of the day, to loosen the icy marrow. How could a person sit fully dressed and draped with a black shawl in heat like today’s? Mr. Cheung blotted his face with his denim bag of seeds. Its dust turned the sweat on his forehead into mud.

  In planting his cane, Mr. Cheung found it advisable always to get help from the neighborhood children. They came, all of them who happened to be playing in the road, when his six-year-old daughter Fidelia called them to the cane. But Fidelia didn’t want to help. She sat in Grandmother’s lap sucking on the two middle fingers of her left hand.

  “We’ll put two extra rows of cane,” Mr. Cheung told the children. “Do you see this magic ribbon?” He held out a brief length of pink ribbon that had an unearthly brightness about it. “We’ll make a border of magic ribbon on two rows. You see? I’ve scratched out two rows. We’ll dig two more. Do you know what the magic ribbon does?”

  They jostled one another and smiled speechlessly.

  “It keeps away the little thieves.”

  In confusion they avoided his eyes. One boy crouched behind his younger brother and sighted along the brother’s ear at Grandmother Wright and cast sidelong glances at Mr. Cheung, who staked off the planted rows with bamboo shards and ringed them around with fishing twine, flagging the twine at short intervals with knots of ribbon.

  “Magic ribbon, very precious, very hard to find. And anything that’s growing outside the magic ribbon can be stolen. The magic ribbon won’t protect it from tiny thieves.”

  He started digging a third row, and then a fourth one, for the neighborhood thieves. “I don’t mention any particular people,” he said.

  “How long to grow?”

  “Oh, maybe six months.”

  “How long is six month? Ten years?”

  “Until after the rain is over.”

  “Will there gonna be hurricanes in the rain?”

  “No.”

  “One hurricane?”

  “Okay. One hurricane. Blow the cane down. Blow the water off the rice paddies.”

  “But not the cane with the magic ribbon,” they said. And they stood with their navels offered blatantly to the world by round bellies, their little penises and vaginas loitering incidentally beneath, and the greed shining in their eyes. There were five of them, two girls and three boys. They all lived here in the neighborhood but one, a fellow who looked twelve or thirteen, big enough to wear pants.

  Mr. Cheung knew by the faded military olive of this little boy’s shorts that he’d come from the village of wrecked quonset huts several miles east, a deteriorating shantytown once the dwelling place of sailors, and then marines, and still inhabited mainly by their grandchildren and greatgrandchildren and generally known as the Army. “We’re planting cane,” Mr. Cheung told the boy.

  Like most of them up there in the Army, this one had curly, rusty hair and black eyes. He appeared to be shivering even in the heat.

  “Do you know what cane is?”

  The boy’s mouth came open, but he said not a word, only stood there.

  “A home for the flies.” Mr. Cheung gestured as if to put his finger into the boy’s open mouth. “Cane is the plant that gives sugar. Do you speak English? Are you an American? Cane is the plant that gives sugar.”

  “Sugar es por la candy,” the boy said.

  “What is your name, young Army boy? Are you from the Army?”

  “My name Fiskadoro,” the boy said, “from over the Army. Mi father es Jimmy Hidalgo.”

  “Pescadero? The Fisherman?”

  “Fiskadoro. Fiskadoro es ain’t a fish-man. Fiskadoro es only me.”

  “Help us plant some cane, Mr. Fiskadoro Hidalgo, and then put ribbon for the thieves.”

  But the boy Fiskadoro only rose up and down on the balls of his feet and spanked his thighs nervously, as if his shyness would make him take wing.

  With his seeds Mr. Cheung walked from one child to the next, reaching down into the bag and letting these tiny sparks that would someday flourish into cane fall out of his fist onto each one’s head. “Don’
t let the wind take them!” he said, and they clapped their hands over their heads to save the seeds. “Walk. Keep your toes on either side of the row—see where I’ve dug? Plant it from your hair.” He demonstrated by wagging his head.

  They took careful steps, all five of them, with their hands on top of their heads.

  As they stood above the rows shaking the seeds from their hair onto the earth, Mr. Cheung said, “Don’t let the wind take your cane!”

  He helped them put a blanket of soil over the seeds, and then he stood for a while watching the sand blow across the parking lot beyond his back yard. Someday the sand would rise up and cover the old high school, and then the slowly collapsing church next to it, the Key West Baptist Church of Fire.

  The children stood around, too, waiting hungrily for their seeds to sprout into tall stalks of sugar cane.

  “Little thieves going to come for this cane someday,” Mr. Cheung said to them, “but that’s all right. They won’t take the cane from inside the magic ribbon.”

  “How long till it grow?”

  “I told you. Maybe six months.”

  “Still six month?” Their faces told how they’d been made fools of again by the counting and measuring of things.

  In a minute the children were gone, and in another minute, Mr. Cheung sensed, everything that had just happened to them would be forgotten. Fidelia was climbing too roughly from Grandmother’s lap, and Grandmother complained without quite managing to make words. The parking lot in back of the house lay under a mirage of water on whose other shore the old Key West Baptist Church of Fire blurred and shifted. And the Army boy, Fiskadoro, was still here.

  “Business now,” Fiskadoro told him.

  “Who business?”

  “I got a business for you,” the boy said.

  “A business for me?” Mr. Cheung asked.

  “All you say he like what I say. Why you don’t say what you say?”

  “Excuse me,” Mr. Cheung said. “What I have to say is this: What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Let’s go come on now la street door. I got a business for you, Manager.”

  Mr. Cheung imagined that business must be a thing conducted on the front stoops over there in the Army. “All right,” he told Fiskadoro. He splashed some rainwater on his face from the barrel by the kitchen door. “I’m going for one minute, Grandmother.”

  Grandmother Wright moved a word around on her lips and scowled at the distances before her. Mr. Cheung and Fiskadoro went around to the front of the Cheung house.

  Mr. Cheung commanded the esteem of his neighbors, though like anyone else along the Keys he couldn’t have been called wealthy. His house was one of the fairly new ones here in Twicetown, built a few years before when the group known as the Alliance for Trading, in its brief golden era, had moved freight and revitalized some industrial areas north of the terrifying city.

  The house was set down on a floor of tabletops from the cafeteria of the school across the parking lot and had no foundation. Where a concrete slab might have been poured for a front porch, damp boards of driftwood lay on the ground. On the door were pasted shiny letters saying MIAMI SYMPHONY ORHCESTRA and beneath them letters spelling out his name, A.T. CHEUNG. Under his name a sign of plastic wood affixed to the door said MANAGER.

  Mr. Cheung bent over to examine an old briefcase labeled Samsonite, with a metal clasp and lock on it, which sat upright on one of the boards. The briefcase lacked a handle.

  Fiskadoro reached around him and picked up the briefcase, holding it in both hands. The contents rattled as he moved it.

  The Manager of The Miami Symphony Orchestra knew instantly, just by the sound of it, what was inside. “What do you have there?” he asked Fiskadoro. His mouth was dry, and he felt the tears coming into his eyes.

  Fiskadoro set the briefcase on the ground, squatted before it, and began to fiddle with the clasp.

  “Here, I’ll be the one,” Mr. Cheung said, but the child hunched his shoulders protectively and managed, apparently by sheer force, to undo the clasp. He raised the lid and Mr. Cheung looked at just what he’d expected to see, the five pieces of a disassembled clarinet.

  “Where did you get this?” Mr. Cheung asked, not making a move. “I knew that sound. I knew you had one.”

  “He belong mi father Jimmy Hidalgo. From a long time”—Fiskadoro gestured backward over his shoulder—“grandfather, grandfather, grandfather, like that.”

  “May I see this clarinet?”

  “Let’s talk business,” Fiskadoro said.

  “Is your clarinet for sale?”

  “Never happen no way,” Fiskadoro said. “I gone buy a lesson off you.”

  “You want me to give you lessons?”

  “I gone pay you.”

  “How much?”

  “Ten million,” Fiskadoro said.

  “Ten million?” Mr. Cheung repeated.

  “Ten million es I just said.”

  “I heard you, Mr. Hidalgo. Ten million what?”

  “Ten million. Ten million dollar.”

  Mr. Cheung smiled broadly with understanding. “Paper!”

  “Yeah paper! How could I gone carry ten million change down here aqui to Twicetown, Manager Cheung?”

  “Do you have ten million in change, even if you could carry it?”

  “Not today,” Fiskadoro said.

  Looking at the clarinet, Mr. Cheung felt something like thirst. “I’ll give you a counter-proposal, Senor Fiskadoro Hidalgo. I’ll offer you free lessons—no money, no pay—free lessons if you let me keep your clarinet here in my house, where I’ll know it’s safe.”

  “Never happen no way,” Fiskadoro said. “Chance in hell.”

  “That’s nice and definite,” Mr. Cheung said.

  The boy shut the briefcase and held it to his chest.

  “Ten million?” Mr. Cheung asked.

  “But I don’t go pay you today,” Fiskadoro said. “Later on, maybe tomorrow.”

  “I agree,” Mr. Cheung said without hesitation.

  When the boy had gone, Mr. Cheung went back to collect his seeds and his grandmother from his yard where the dirt still held the heat. He took off his white Jockey shorts and splashed water from the barrel all over himself.

  Grandmother Wright was shifting in her chair with a fragile laboriousness that tugged at his heart. He could remember when she’d been active and impatient and sharp with little children. I would like to be where you are, he thought, to see what you’re seeing. I wish I could remember your memories.

  Mr. Cheung believed in the importance of remembering. He could recite but couldn’t quite explain the texts of several famous speeches and documents. He kept up his repetoire by various mnemonic devices. For instance, although she meant nothing to him anymore and he would never see her again, he generally spent a little time each day remembering his first love, a young girl whom he now thought of as “The Fifty States in Alphabetical Order,” fixing in his mind the blurry image of her face and telling himself, It just went blam! then he saw himself falling on his knees before here, which brought to mind the phrase I'll ask her, and he saw in his mind’s eye the track of her footprints leading into another zone, a region where there loomed a great ark filled with tin cans—and in this way Mr. Cheung recalled four states in their alphabetical order: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas. I’m calling for you (California), she’d been a colored woman (Colorado), but we weren’t a good connection (Connecticut) . . . Metallic fields of wheat, fat thoughtless cows, angular and greasy cities like big machines—he’d seen pictures of these places that had once marched across all the maps. Grandmother Wright had grown up in them . . . Delaware; their own state Florida; Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada—New-Hampshire-New-Jersey-New-Mexico-New-York—North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Te
nnessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia . . . all linked, in his memory, to a series of mental pictures, and each picture joined to the next in a chain of imagined sights and sounds reaching back toward the face of his first love, whom he thought of as “The Fifty States in Alphabetical Order” just to get the half-light of memory moving across the chain, name after name . . . Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming . . . Like almost everybody who’d survived what in those days was called the End of the World, Grandmother Wright had never said much of anything about it. It was Mr. Cheung’s understanding that these people had lived because they’d been too far away from the holocaust to witness it.

  Now that he was middle-aged and felt that he, himself, was composed more of a past than of a future, he wished he’d asked her, when she’d still been able to talk, to tell him whatever she knew about the other age. Grandmother Wright had told him about some of the things they’d possessed in those days—ferris wheels, elevators, boxing matches, mining operations—but they were only things. Now he wanted to hear about the people and places his grandmother had seen, but it was too late: the nearest she came to speech was to form various silences with her lips. She’d fallen asleep, one night, in an inexpensive motel in Key West, and had woken up in a world that had ended, and thenceforth lived her life in the southernmost region of the Quarantine, in a time between civilizations and a place ignored by authority.

  Most of our dramas and plays seem to concern themselves with the place she woke up in, the world north of the Twenty-fourth Parallel during the Quarantine, a place and time that were cut off from us for sixty years. That’s not entirely healthy. Thinking about the past contributes nothing to the present endeavor, and in fact to concern ourselves too greatly with the past is a sin, because it distracts our minds from the real and current blessing showered down us in every heartbeat out of the compassion and mercy and bounty of Allah. But we are human. Can we help it if sometimes we like to tell stories that want, as their holiest purpose, to excite us with pictures of danger and chaos?—the innumerable stories about Anthony Terrence Cheung, a real person, and about his grandmother, a woman who actually did live to become the oldest person on earth, and, of course, about the boy Fiskadoro, the one known to us best of all, the only one who was ready when we came.