Fiskadoro

by Denis Johnson

  Cutthroat—cutthroat—cutthroat—

  You know cain’t nobody else . . .

  over the amplified backing of the bass and rhythm guitarists, two dreadlocked Israelite men who generally spoke to nobody but each other and then only during the numbers, their low voices, as now, like rubble under the current of The Miami Symphony Orchestra’s musical efforts.

  The effort of the moment collapsed around them as William Park-Smith, the Musical Director, catching sight of the Orchestra Manager and his pupil, banged his big stick on the ground. In the relative silence, Hendrix Is’s gasoline-fed generator could be heard thrumming outside the headquarters, formerly a hangar for airplanes.

  Hendrix Is cut the dreamdemonium stage-lights and put on the floodlamps overhead. He held his box of switches and spidery wires in his broad lap—the proud possessor of light and dark.

  All the orchestra members were present. It was an eighteen-piece group, but some of them were only “political” appointees who played simple percussion instruments like the maraca or the tambourine. They relaxed now out of a state of concentration into a daze of heat, while the Musical Director, making haste to greet Mr. Cheung, wrinkled his nose in a polite rejection of everyone else in the room and said apologetically, forlornly, “We must do the blues. We must do the blues, and we must do the Voodoo.”

  Park-Smith was a small black man who bleached his hair a rusty blond and referred to himself as an Australian. He was dressed in a fresh-looking aviator’s flight suit, which must have been very hot for him, and he wore gleaming black combat boots. To demonstrate his goodwill toward the proponents of more popular fare, he began shifting his boots beneath him in a clumsy dance of deferential good humor, the dance of the elderly amusing the young, while Little Sudan, going over part of the song with the two guitarists, sang at half power, demonstrating the rhythm guitarist’s downstroke for him with a chopping motion of her right hand:

  I love you, I love you,

  I love you one hunnut dollar fine . . .

  Fiskadoro carried with him his clarinet in the briefcase called Samsonite, but he had no expectation of playing it anytime soon. Mr. Cheung had arranged for him to be along, as he often did, just to give the boy a taste, a sense of the life.

  The Musical Director and the Manager spoke quietly and, he was sure, inanely with one another now, accomplishing nothing but their little delays. Fiskadoro breathed the opiate heat, wanting only a place to sleep. He knew their game. Each just wanted to tell the other he wasn’t useless.

  “I have heard there was a killing,” Musical Director Park-Smith announced. A silence as of constraint fell around them.

  Little Sudan was no longer singing. One of the musicians began to pick out “By the Rivers of Babylon,” an old Israelite hymn, on his bass guitar. The Musical Director turned his hands up and opened his arms, presenting the room to itself in support of some unstated assertion.

  “You—your face,” Fiskadoro said, “you look . . . a gorilla.”

  “This is your elder,” Mr. Cheung warned him, “and your better. He is our Musical Director.”

  “You were there?” Park-Smith said. “These are your friends? People who can no control themself. Thief—murder—”

  Fiskadoro turned away, his head drifting through a vision of those around him—Little Sudan, the Israelite guitarists, the ever-happy and fat and rich Mrs. Castanette, who played the castanets, the serious turbaned cellist David King Rat, all the others in a smear—and he tried to walk slowly from the place, but he had a sense he was probably running, stripping himself of his pride.

  “The youngsters don’t understand the situation anymore,” Mr. Cheung was trying to explain to Park-Smith.

  “Do you know where the kerosene comes from?” Park-Smith shouted after Fiskadoro. “It’s poison! Live fast! Hah? Die young! Hah?”

  Fiskadoro stepped through the doorway into an assault of silver light, where the old airfield lay smothering under a sheet of sunless sky that shed heat like tin. Park-Smith’s lecture pursued him: “You breathe your death when you burn those fires!”

  Fiskadoro turned away from the field and tried to find some reply. He and his friends burned the kerosene so they could see. It was harmless.

  Smiling sightlessly into the glare of daylight, Mrs. Castanette had come to shut the door in his face. Somewhere behind her Little Sudan was singing, without aid of the P.A. but quite audibly, “He old rule no more rule . . .”

  “Quiet!” Mr. Park-Smith screamed. “The poison is still poison! The poison is for one hundred years!”

  “He old rule no more rule,” Little Sudan sang, as if there had never been any person from the older generation to scream at her:

  She poison no more poison

  I blinking dread

  I blinking generator light

  I blinking oil light

  He old rule no more rule

  She poison no more poison

  Because it was faster Fiskadoro went back to the Army by the road, the dusty road instead of the sandy beach. His perspiration itched his neck and clouds of gnats besieged his eyes and ears, and he felt the dust sticking to the damp soles of his feet.

  Beggars moved along the road ahead of him toward the lowering dusk, people without arms, gangs of pinheads led by their insensate cousins, twisted-up people, the sightless and deaf, and creatures obliged to cover up their faces with rotting burlap, or muslin gone grey, so that nobody would have to see what terrifying portraits the genes could paint. Only the legless immobile ones were put up with in town; all the others had to live in the countryside. He felt like one of them, bent toward the earth and forced by an invisible deformity to walk sideways.

  Fiskadoro stumbled suddenly on the road. He went over and lay down under a tree and slept.

  When he got back to the compound, the boats were in. The nets had come up empty. The merchants had gone. The men were drinking.

  He sat out behind Captain Leon’s house with the crew of the Los Desechados and when Jimmy wasn’t looking, he stole sips of rice brandy from the first mate’s bottle; the first mate was a young man, and he didn’t mind sharing. After his father went home, Fiskadoro drank too much and felt vague and paralyzed.

  In Leon’s yard a man from Twicetown did a silly dance, lifting his heels high in the air behind him, almost kicking himself in the rear. Fiskadoro didn’t know him and wished the man would get hurt or do something to make himself look completely stupid. Maybe he was off a boat, but he seemed unconnected. This man wouldn’t tell anybody his name. Instead he started that stuff they were all doing over in Twicetown these days, putting his face out and saying, “Jake Barnes, private eye!” Fiskadoro wanted to tell this Jake Barnes to leave his father’s Captain’s house, but the person was red-faced and danced in an almost violent way.

  The mate off Jimmy’s boat, whose nickname was Skin, felt the same about this intruder Jake Barnes. “Jake Barnes,” Skin said loudly to his Captain, Leon Sanchez. “I heard all about Jake Barnes, only es another Jake Barnes who put on a woman’s shift and sat on a benches out by la bottle fabrica.”

  “Oh!” Leon said.

  “Could be es the same Jake Barnes,” Skin said, “I don’t know.”

  Leon said, “Huh!” But he didn’t say anything that might be called a word. “Hm!” he said. “Hah!”—entering no alliances.

  “He wearing that blackeye-shadow for the young girls,” Skin said.

  The intruder had stopped his dancing and Stood with his arms crossed over his chest, looking out to sea.

  “When he put his feet up on a bench,” Skin said, “like I mean wearing a woman shift, this Jake Barnes’s old pecker-wood hanging down and the people come outa la bottle fabrica and was laughing and laughing at him. Everybody could see his peckerwood.”

  Skin squatted down on his heels and looked at Jake Barnes, and then at Captain Leon. But Leon seemed to be looking out somewhere beyond the yard and thinking, suddenly, about something more important. The others scratched the
mselves, cleared their throats, drank from the bottle.

  “Well, that’s a long, long time ago now,” Skin found it advisable to say. “Not the last time when la fabrica was going. El time before. Pretty long time ago.”

  “You getting totally personal and insultive against me,” Jake Barnes said.

  Skin jumped up like a fly when Jake Barnes reached for a gaff thrown down beside the house. “I think you must just didn’t understood me there,” Skin said. The gaff’s hook was almost half a meter long.

  “Too late now,” Jake Barnes said, hefting the gaff. The flesh around his eyes was shrinking up tight.

  Skin looked around at all his crewmates. “Hey. Que pasa?”

  None of the others could find an answer to this question. Leon, Leon’s son Harvard, Fiskadoro, Beer Wilson—they all awaited Jake Barnes’s final opinion on things.

  Jake Barnes hefted the gaff.

  Skin said hysterically, looking at the hook, “I just ain’t connect this up in my mind! Attende, attende there now. Don’t make a punto from just nothing.”

  “It is a punto,” Jake Barnes said. “I don’t see any way outa this now.” But the meanness was leaving his face in favor of a blank bewilderment.

  He took a good swing, and the gaff smacked the ground.

  The mate said, “I do! I do! I see a way out, Jake Barnes!”

  “What do you mean?” Jake Barnes’s momentum had swung him around, and he looked embarrassed to be off-balance. “What way out?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. Es gotta be one,” the mate insisted.

  Jake Barnes came around with the gaff again, but it was more of an experiment this time than an actual assault. Then he held up the gaff’s point before his nose and appeared to be inspecting it for flaws.

  “I don’t think that sticker gone be no good, Jake Barnes,” Skin said. “Es inferior.”

  Jake Barnes was still eyeballing it. “That’s right,” he said. “I see that if I look right up close here.”

  “There you go,” the mate said. “If es really me getting all personal because for I wanted to, don’t you guess that stick would fly?”

  “You didn’t want to?” Jake Barnes said.

  “Es what I telling you and telling you.”

  Jake Barnes was quiet and pensive.

  Skin squatted back down onto his heels, bouncing a little, and wrapped his arms around his shins. The others readjusted themselves, too. Nothing was going to happen. Some of them showed their disappointment by frowning and some by smiling.

  Fiskadoro felt weary and ashamed. The men off his father’s boat were the weakest and sickest in the Army. It was as if the boat’s name, Los Desechados, The Rejected, drew that very type.

  THE PARKING LOT BEHIND MR. CHEUNG’S house was perhaps the largest region of unbroken blacktop south of Marathon. It was fifty meters wide and at least twice as long, and had to thank for its preservation the restless white sands that blew over this end of the southernmost Key, continually obscuring and revealing things. Today great patches of asphalt were bare of sand, and the parking lot seemed much larger than usual. Trying to cross the breadth of it in the hard afternoon light, Mr. Cheung experienced himself as a figure of inexplicable motionlessness. There hadn’t been any clouds for three days. The rubber soles of his straw shoes, cut from the treads of car tires, stuck to the gooey pavement and made walking even harder. It was interesting. Probably the act of walking had always been like this in the other age, when the entire world had been paved.

  The other age came naturally to Mr. Cheung’s mind, because he was en route across the asphalt barrens to his history class.

  To find the classroom he didn’t have to go delicately among treacherous hallways; he had only to walk through a big hole in the cinder-block wall of Key West High and pick his way through a disheveled boiler room. Going past the huge machines of the boiler room he ducked his head—it was an act of cringing prayer and supplication not otherwise necessary to a person barely 160 centimeters tall—and stood up straight again as he entered the classroom next door.

  Mr. Cheung greeted Maxwell, who was holding a lighted match to a candle on a wooden shelf by the door. To double its light, Maxwell put a mirror behind the candle. Up high along the opposite wall ran a row of windows through which the bright sky and the cracked green copper lettering on the roofless facade of the Key West Baptist Church of Fire across the road were visible, but the room was gloomy anyway. When they’d reclaimed it from its decay, the Society had washed down its six remaining school-desks and its walls and floor with seawater. It had never quite dried. These days it made a dank breeding ground for all planner of spiders and bugs.

  Now that Mr. Cheung had arrived, all five members of the Society for Science were here. Mrs. Calvino was the only woman, in attendance mainly to keep watch on her husband, Bobby Calvino, who sometimes passed his afternoons at the Banks family’s distillery-house sampling the rice wine and offering suggestions and advice about the potato brandy.

  Bobby sat at the school-desk looking both languid and nerve-wracked, tapping out a funereal rhythm with his fingers. His face seemed swollen and his eyes were bloodshot.

  Mrs. Calvino was chattering away at William Park-Smith, the Society’s President and also the Chairman of every meeting, and she mopped her face with a terrycloth square cut from a towel and ignored her reeking husband in a way that required all of her concentration.

  Mr. Cheung and Maxwell took their seats at the same time. The history class was ready to start. William Park-Smith, at the front of the room, put on a pair of thick glasses that absolutely blinded him, and addressed the class with a shy wave of his hand. He still wore his flight suit, now streaked with dust and spangled with the stains of rice wine, soup, and gasoline. Beside the zipper, above his heart, he sported a radiation-sensitive button, as much as to say, “I am a believer in rationalism and the sciences.” Mr. Cheung could see that the badge was counterfeit. Even those who believed in radiation and ardently feared it made no distinction between the real, original badges and the phony imitations. These days the white cardboard and red cellophane served more to identify than to protect. “The Society for Science will now come to attention,” Park-Smith announced with a brandishing of his sunshine-yellow teeth.

  “Today,” he said, “I hope we would begin a simple one. A short book.” He held before his breast a greenish book with the faded sketch of some kind of cartoon animal on the front. Mr. Cheung leaned forward, squinting at the lettering across its lower border: All About Dinosaurs. “These animals lived in tropical regions like ours. But today they are extinguished and no more.”

  “Extinct,” Mrs. Calvino pronounced with relish.

  “Please wait one moment. I want to go forth with The Sun Also Rises.” Maxwell sounded wounded and alarmed.

  “Ernest Hemingway,” Mrs. Calvino recalled.

  Park-Smith gave Maxwell a stony smile. “We have finished this book last week. Why didn’t you come?”

  “But I think it’s important for an understanding—”

  “Why didn’t you come? You didn’t come.”

  “Those dinosaurs are extinct,” Maxwell told them all, looking around, “that means dead. But today we have—”

  “Extinct! And are you telling to the Society for Science that Paris is not extinct?”

  “Today we have Jake Barnes all over Twicetown—”

  “Okay! Paris is not extinct. Okay,” William Park-Smith said, “we’ll go to Paris now.”

  Maxwell laughed despite himself. “It’s because of our culture has taken this name that I—”

  “Okay, let’s go to Paris now, let’s go to Paris now,” and Park-Smith made as if to escort Mr. Maxwell to Paris, offering him his arm.

  What frustrated Maxwell in this situation was that of the five of them, he was the only one who couldn’t read. “If we’re done with the book,” he humbled himself now to say, “then I never will find out the ending.”

  Park-Smith smiled and patted
his springy orange coiffure like a starlet. “We have done so and finish the Ernest Hemingway.”

  “Then I won’t find out the end.” Maxwell threw up his hands. “Obviously.”

  “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” William Park-Smith laughed almost like a bull being beaten. The others were a little embarrassed.

  Mr. Cheung intervened. “If you come to my house with the book,” he told Maxwell, “we’ll read the ending together.”

  Maxwell saluted him and put his arms across his desk, gripping the far edge, ready to give his complete attention to William Park-Smith in the hope of enlarging his understanding of the extinct race of dinosaurs.

  They passed the book among themselves and read from it aloud, all but Maxwell, who listened carefully.

  Under the onslaught of Bobby Calvino’s voice—joyless, gritty, and raw with drink—Mr. Cheung started feeling thirsty, completely parched inside, as if he himself were the one hung over. Two hundred million, sixty million, seven thousand—“One hundred and forty million years is a long time, and many changes took place,” Bobby strained to recite. With a shock Mr. Cheung saw the truth of his own extinction and it made him dizzy. They were ghosts in a rotten room.

  He dropped the book when Bobby handed it to him, and took a minute, as he hunted for his place, to look at some of the pictures. “I believe page thirteen. I believe page thirteen,” Park-Smith said. But on page forty-one, Cheung found a drawing of a Chinese man holding a long, sharp cutlass: “The expedition always had to watch out for bandits.” He turned the page to find three men gathered around two massive bones on the floor of the world. Behind them, the filmy spirits of dinosaurs hovered in the clouds.