Fiskadoro

by Denis Johnson

  Nobody had to carry the news through the village. The men, minus Jimmy, straggled off the boat, and Leon Sanchez went home, taking the mate from Twicetown with him, and Beer Wilson went home, and the others, too, and Harvard Sanchez, after struggling dramatically with the nets and then giving up his attempt to lay them out on the beach without anybody’s help, went home. The sudden appearance of the crew at the doors of their houses frightened their wives, and the lamps were lit and voices raised, and the neighbors were alarmed and asked what was the trouble; in this way, from house to house through the shanty village, traveled the report of Jimmy Hidalgo’s death.

  As the Captain’s wife, it was Towanda Sanchez’s job to tell the widow.

  Like bits of paper Belinda Hidalgo’s cries rode the wash of sea air over the tops of coconut and date palms after Towanda had entered her house; and in a minute her two younger children were screaming.

  The oldest son, the one who should have been taking care of his mother, wasn’t home.

  Fiskadoro was walking along the eastern beach. He’d intended to be back before dawn, but already the sun was up. Its heat came flat-out across the water and warmed him up the left side as he moved parallel to the sea. He met a man on the beach. “Your father is dead.”

  Near the pit where sand and flies blew around amid the garbage, two old men, naked except for belts of rag, moved upwind toward him with the secret, evil sorrow of old age on their faces. “Your father is dead,” they told him.

  What had he done? He started to hurry. In the dark shade of the Army, among the immense palms, he began running on the paths between the rows of huts. A fat woman with tremendous drooping breasts and a face drained of all happiness squatted in front of her house. She was wiping her mouth with the bunched hem of her skirt, and as he passed, she called, “Your father is dead,” and except for the tiny children who pursued their mindless adventures near the level of the ground, everyone he met had the same news for him. He ran full tilt a long way with no sound but the sobbing of his breath and the smack of his feet on the sand. He saw young girls whose shifts blanched and greyed as they moved in and out of the patches of light among the trees. He saw a trio of young men well known to him; they spoke and then walled him off with their faces. He stopped looking at anyone as he ran in tears beyond the trees toward his house. All of these suddenly unfamiliar people he passed said, “Your father is dead. Your father is dead.” With the sun bleeding its colors into the channel before him, the boy carried his fear to the quonset hut. His brother Drake sat out on the step hanging his head down as he did when he was waiting to be punished. When he saw Fiskadoro he jumped up and ran around behind the house. Fiskadoro parted the curtain of beads at the doorway and went in. Three women stood by his weeping mother at the kitchen sink. Surrounded by their feet, his baby brother Mike sat on the floor, tears shining on his cheeks and his soft lips open, staring up at his mother and now at this adolescent brother who’d been out all night.

  “Real life now!” Belinda cried as soon as she saw him. “Real life!”

  He didn’t know what to do but take her in his arms.

  “This is it,” she sang in misery, “this is it, real life.”

  As long as she didn’t say exactly what it was, he could stand it. He just didn’t want her to say it exactly.

  “Jimmy got drownded off the boat! She current—” She turned to Towanda Sanchez, squinting at her. “What was it about a current? I don’t understand about a current.”

  “She corriente took him somehow,” Towanda Sanchez told Fiskadoro. “Nothing could stop him till he gone.”

  Fiskadoro sat down at the kitchen table and cried as if something had reached down his throat and were pulling him inside-out.

  When he’d calmed down enough to remember that his father was gone, it was like getting the news all over again for the first time.

  Drake had come inside and was standing next to him. Fiskadoro felt terrible for him; he was only nine. They embraced awkwardly, Fiskadoro sitting on the stool and Drake standing up. Belinda stooped down to put her arms around both of them.

  Towanda Sanchez was still there, and her niece Lizabeth, who’d been widowed herself at the start of the hot season. Another neighbor, Anna Wilson, was there, standing behind Belinda and kneading the muscles of her shoulders. A couple of other neighbor-ladies sat on the dislodged car seats in the living room. Fiskadoro could see that for them it was all a great occasion, because they all knew what to do—it wasn’t happening to them, it wasn’t twisting their hearts. He was too exhausted to think about them. But perhaps it was twisting their hearts after all, because the other women were crying now, too.

  In the craziness of Belinda’s sorrow, a smile blasted out of her face as she wept, and then her face slammed shut. “The tiller knock him overboard,” Belinda said. “Did the tiller do it?” she said to Towanda. “Es the tiller, the tiller—”

  Lizabeth took hold of both her hands. “Just know this. Know this,” she said. “He never go come back. Never!” Wailing filled the house.

  Fiskadoro leapt in two strides from the room and onto the broken porch. The village was behind him, and before him was the Gulf, from which he knew—he was certain of it, certain—that his father would somehow return.

  Three men off the boat were coming out of the trees toward the house. They were Towanda’s husband Leon, and her son, and probably the mate, Skin; Fiskadoro couldn’t see clearly because of tears.

  As his father’s Captain, Leon was coming to pay his respects to the new man of the house. He brought the mate because the mate lived over in Twicetown and felt uncomfortable hanging around the Army by himself. And Leon’s son Harvard was along, too—not that Harvard was anybody, but it was time he experienced some of the bad side of a life on the sea.

  Leon Sanchez was wearing a shirt at this special time, a colorful print dulled somewhat because he wore it inside-out to display the label. “Jimmy was a good man. But the tiller come around and kick him over. Come around por nada. No reason. Maybe,” he said, “a ghost. I don’t know what.” His shirt was open, and he kept wiping his hands on the flesh of his belly.

  Harvard, a boy a little older than Fiskadoro, was sweaty in the face and looked sick. He nodded and said, “Hm! Hm!” as he’d seen thoughtful men do. “Jimmy was a good man,” Harvard said.

  The mate, Skin, was quiet. He kept his arms crossed over his chest and looked at the weather above him and the earth beneath, back and forth. He was small and his black curls hung down in his eyes, just as Jimmy’s had. At this moment Fiskadoro hated him without cause.

  Leon Sanchez asked, “Are the women in with you madre, Fish-man?”

  “My name Fiskadoro.” He was aware that mucus flowed from his nostrils, but he felt he would demean himself by wiping it away. “My father is dead.”

  The others nodded. Harvard gouged a depression in the sand with his toes and placed his heel in it.

  “My father is dead!” As soon as he’d said it, Fiskadoro saw he’d made it true again—again for the first time. Did it just go around and around? He began to see that his sorrow wasn’t simple. It wasn’t one thing, but a thousand things carrying him away to the Ocean: the work of a person’s life was to drink it.

  Empty of any words to make things right, the neighbors helplessly baked breads or cakes, or artfully arranged slices of fruit on precious china platters, and carried these offerings across a pink and blue landscape toward Belinda’s house as the sun came up. Even the older women, who generally wore pants or skirts of old burlap and went naked above the waist, this morning donned the white shifts of young women. Most of the men put on shirts, and those who didn’t, considering themselves unpresentable, stayed out in Belinda’s yard. The sun got higher. Sweat appeared on their mahogany faces. Eating and drinking, the mourners and those who would console them passed through patches of time in which Jimmy was completely forgotten, and then suddenly remembered and mourned again, with wails of fresh disbelief. Fiskadoro felt the feeling le
aving him. He was ashamed—he must not care very much for his own father, if he could stand here on the porch and not even remember Jimmy’s face.

  After a while, the other three boats came in from the Gulf. It was only noon; they were early. Westmoreland Wilson banged and banged the gong before his house at solemn two-second intervals, and the children of the village ran around clacking sticks against coconut shells.

  The people of the Army felt ennobled to have to move through their sorrow toward the beach and take up the ropes of the nets. Everyone had to go, even the most miserable.

  When they heard the diesel engines, they knew the catch was heavy.

  At first a handful of men and women stood waist-deep in the shifting waters and pulled on the rope from the El Tigre, two hundred meters out. Then another group waded out into the sea to take the rope-end of the Generalissimo's net, handed them by one of the Delacorte cousins as he jumped off the starboard. The Business still lay some leagues out, but before too long the whole population of the Army, even the tiniest children and the very fragile elderly ones, was divided into three groups, each hauling on a rope from one of the boats.

  Together they dragged the nets closer when the Gulf poured toward them producing one of its tiny waves, and together they resisted the sea’s attempts to take the nets back out in its vague undertow, crying with each straining effort to beach the heavy nets, “Fish-a! Fish-a! Fish-a!” Whenever a couple of meters were won from the tide, the person at the rope’s end dropped it on the sand and walked to the head of the line to take up the stretch that had appeared from the sea, wet and shining in the sun, to reward their labor.

  Even Belinda was among them, smiling shyly through her tears. Fiskadoro watched her, thinking nothing, as she forgot herself and chased ahead to the rope that emerged from the water, raising the hem of her shift and kicking her feet out sideways as she ran pigeon-toed through the knee-high tide. “Fish-a! Fish-a! Fish-a!” The sweat poured from Fiskadoro’s hair; the muscles in his back and down his arms ached at first, and then for a while burned furiously, and then went numb.

  Some of the older people weren’t really pulling. They stood with their hands resting lightly on the thick ropes, sparing their hearts but lending their presence. Now their frail voices took up a song about sadness and love and the moon, an old one learned from the broadcasts of Cubaradio, and other voices aided them:

  Cuando brille la luna

  Yo se que no dormir, ah

  Ni vie, ni you—

  Ah, helgado el triste pasar

  Cuando we are always separado,

  Separado, separado . . .

  For some who had loved Jimmy, and for others who were just suddenly feeling, on this occasion, what it was like to be alive, the grief kept burning even in the midst of their effort.

  As the nets grew visible in the water, coming near, everyone’s excitement got the dogs going, and they bounded into the surf, nearly a dozen little mongrels, and snapped at the fish struggling in the mesh.

  The Business and Generalissimo and El Tigre had brought in hundreds and hundreds of twenty-centimeter silvery fish whose multitudinous flip-flopping, when the nets were beached and opened, made a rainbow of mist in the air and a sound like the variable hiss of rain. In the face of this miracle the villagers behaved as if they’d never seen any fish before, exclaiming at the fact of them, prodding them with their toes, picking them up and peering closely at them. Fiskadoro watched his neighbors jealously and hated them for forgetting Jimmy’s death.

  The men off the three boats moved in a group toward the grove of trees, leaving the nets on the beach to the possibilities of the tide, weeping openly about Jimmy Hidalgo. Fiskadoro walked with them amid a death-stench of seagoing things. He was glad that the new force of their mourning would start his father’s funeral going again.

  Billy Chicago, a roadside merchant who lived on the other side of the village, dug up jugs of sweet and nauseating potato wine his family had kept fermenting under the dirt.

  At first the gathering had no focus, because there wasn’t a dead body to be dressed and cried over and buried at sunset. But the wine caused them to sing more of the sad songs, first raised up in the voices of the men squatting out by the porch, and then in the voices of the women, thickened by wine and full of a sentimental love for the sorrows that made life real.

  Fiskadoro felt as if he were deserting his mother, lurking outside in the company of the older men. But now, under the circumstances, he didn’t know how to be with her. It seemed he had never known. He drank too much wine and everything looked flat in his sight. He clung with one hand to the post by the door, but even that kept moving. The other men out front were the same.

  He took a step off the porch, and suddenly he wanted to keep going. “I gotta get outa here,” he said.

  “You mother inside,” Leon said. “Don’t desert her.”

  Fiskadoro felt these words like hooks in his heart. But he insisted, “I going now.”

  “You deserting you madre,” Leon said.

  Maybe he was saying it for the ears of Towanda, who was standing on the porch now. “What’s he talking about going, Leon?” she said. “His mother inside here dying of the hurt.”

  “I going to Mr. Cheung,” Fiskadoro said.

  The name of Fiskadoro’s clarinet teacher should have stopped their mouths. But Towanda was confused and completely unimpressed. “You gone desert you own mother,” she said blackly.

  “Big organizer!” Fiskadoro shouted. “Es ain’t you home. Es Jimmy's home,” he shouted, and suddenly aware that he could say anything, because his father was dead: “big fat-lady organizer!”

  In walking the several miles to Mr. Cheung’s house he was safest on the beach, away from the road and any people not of his village, but he was already walking through the Army toward the road, and he didn’t know how to turn left or how to turn right on this afternoon of tragedy.

  As he passed from under the trees and out of the compound, its vaguely choking musk of dampness and rotten fruit changed to dust in his mouth. The road was hot out past the shadow of the village palms. A thousand years ago, it seemed, he’d been dancing on West Beach, and he hadn’t slept since then. Purple triangles raced from the borders of his vision toward the center, splashing into invisibility.

  The sun seemed stuck in one place above the glaring road. Fiskadoro sensed with panic that he, too, was staying in one place. He started to run, and once he’d started he couldn’t stop, faster and faster, until he was choking.

  Now he could hardly lift his legs. He felt sick, his hands and feet tingling unpleasantly. When in a few minutes he’d caught his breath, he wept for Jimmy again.

  There were others on the road, shirtless men toting straw baskets full of wrought plastic jewelry or wooden tools or scavenged items to be traded in the afternoon market at Twicetown, and women lugging bundles of vegetables, and the naked children who spent their days going up and down the roads looking for excitement. Here and there he saw hopeful families with straw mats laid out and some of their vegetables or handiwork displayed in ragged piles: potatoes, sugar cane, cucumbers, tomatoes; sandals of woven straw; rolling pins and large spoons and other such kitchen utensils; eye-catching pieces of mirror cut into letters, symbols, or talismans. They ignored Fiskadoro as they ignored all the others who passed them by. But he was on fire with feelings. He couldn’t understand why these people weren’t blinded by him.

  As the road closed on Twicetown the ragged edges of more permanent enterprise began to show, palm-thatched kiosks where women held out bite-size chunks of spiced meat on pointed sticks, and roadside gambling games set up on wooden tables, where a young man like himself might pay a coin to send a marble bouncing down through a maze of nails into one of five slots, but never the winning slot, Fiskadoro had learned painfully, because the nails were rigged to prevent it, and one day he’d lost all his coins. And who had been alive then? He wept, and these things his father would never see again dragged across his
sight like scarves.

  Less than half a kilometer from Twicetown, a copse of banyan trees marked where the swamps put out a long thin tentacle of marsh from the mainland all the way down the Keys and as far as this road. Here, in the shadow of a tree, from one of its branches, hung the corpse of an alligator nearly three meters long or even longer—it was hard to say because its tail curled in the dirt—with its pale grey belly slit from neck to crotch. It was suspended by a short stretch of cable tied to either end of a rusty metal spike driven through its skull and coming out the soft throat. The people of the villages on the lower Keys, walking their careful barefoot walk, crossed the asphalt rubble of the thoroughfare to come near and look at it and see the former contents of its abdomen—a heap of entrails and a stump of wood the size of a person’s arm and a hefty swamp-tortoise in three only slightly masticated pieces—lying on the ground before it. But nobody stopped for any very close examination of the alligator because its slayer, a chanting Black wearing pants that were only khaki rags, stood next to it drooling through dust-covered lips and bleeding from wounds he’d dug in his own bare chest.

  Fiskadoro looked at the tortoise and at the stump of wood, evidently a piece of cypress root. He made himself stay within the radius of the dead reptile’s stench, in the arena of the swamp-man’s crazy gaze, feeling a giddy nausea and the hope that maybe here in the alligator-killer’s rotten breath there was the power to change everything. They fermented things back there in the swamps. They drank the fermented potions and danced inside the fires and were never burned. They had eaten all the white people back there. They had drunk up all the blood.

  He moved on, into the noontime funeral-carnival breath of Twicetown, the stalls and tables crowding either side so that now to leave the road was impossible. The asphalt here was in better shape, pieces of it flat enough to catch the sun and give up an odor of baking tar. He wished he’d left the road before the town had him. There was nothing he wanted here. The atmosphere was one in which something was being smothered in sleep before it could happen. Scavenged bits of cloth, trinkets made of nuts and bolts and pieces broken off of unidentifiable machinery, colorful pens without ink, parts of old cigaret lighters incapable of making any fire—these things were proudly and yet somewhat wearily displayed on the tables by the roadside merchants, most of them old women who fanned themselves with their hands, looking off to the east or west without curiosity.