Fiskadoro

by Denis Johnson

  Not far from Mr. Cheung’s house, Fiskadoro had to stop and get his strength. Where a wall had fallen in, he sat on a heap of stone with his head down on his knees and let the sobs shake him until he thought his ribs would crack.

  This afternoon Mr. Cheung was alone in the kitchen of his house, polishing wood from which he made jewelry, one of his numerous sidelines. His half-brother, the great merchant, something of a pirate—a famous, almost legendary figure on the Keys, one of the founders of the Alliance for Trading—sometimes trafficked Mr. Cheung’s carved charms and talismans up the Coast. Mr. Cheung had developed his woodworking skill out of his attempts to manufacture such wind instruments as clarinets and oboes, attempts which had generally been said to come to nothing.

  His tools and wood cluttered the family dining table next to the enormous black stove. There were pots going on the stove, and the air was unpleasantly hot and damp and dizzying with spices. Mr. Cheung wore white Jockey shorts and a scarlet bandana wrapped around his head to keep the sweat out of his eyes.

  The door banged repeatedly out front, and a young voice bawled, “Manager, Manager, Manager!” The grief in it alarmed him. He left the kitchen and hurried through the dark empty front parlor.

  When he opened the door he found his pupil Fiskadoro standing on the step. But for an instant he didn’t know who it was, because the boy’s face seemed to be falling to pieces. “Mr. Cheung, my father,” Fiskadoro sobbed, “my father, my father, my father! ” Mr. Cheung knew right away, as a person knows whether it’s day or night, that another marinero had been paid to the sea.

  He stepped aside to let Fiskadoro in, and as he did so he held out his hand to the boy, who suddenly grasped it with both his own and bent over to put his forehead in its palm, a gesture neither of them understood. Mr. Cheung removed his red bandana; he wiped the dust and sweat from Fiskadoro’s face. “Manager Cheung, my father Jimmy Hidalgo is dead!”

  Standing in the parlor, Fiskadoro threw back his head and screamed like a blown conch, emptying his lungs with a seamless cry of despair, filling them again, and then reiterating his misery.

  The door to the kitchen struggled weakly in its frame and then opened. Mr. Cheung’s grandmother moved as if under the weight of a great stone into their company. Her hearing wasn’t very sharp, and Mr. Cheung guessed she’d probably mistaken the boy’s howling for the music of clarinets, for which she had a fondness. “Grandmother Wright,” her grandson said to her.

  The sight of her interrupted Fiskadoro’s weeping. He stood still with respect for her unbelievably advanced age, taking ragged breaths, as she happened to be doing also.

  “Grandmother Wright,” Mr. Cheung said to her again, and this time she appeared to hear him, “we aren’t having any lessons today.”

  Grandmother Wright looked at him now, and with a shuddering movement hitched her black shawl more snugly around her shoulders. The long dress she wore was so old that at its hem it was decaying into dust. Although her face looked as if it might belong on one of the heads that some of the black people were believed to shrink down to the size of a fist back in the swamps, Mr. Cheung loved his grandmother more than anyone else alive, and loved her face most of all. From it issued a tone of voice as brittle and fragile as the ancient permanent-press fabric of her dress. “Bremerton, Seattle, Tacoma . . . are blown to shit,” she said.

  When she talked like this, it broke his heart.

  “Is Denver left?” she said.

  “We’ll go into the kitchen,” Mr. Cheung said. He put his arm around Fiskadoro’s shoulders and guided him, slowly so as not to startle Grandmother, toward the kitchen. “We’ll go in the kitchen now, Grandmother Wright.” She turned around with some effort, seeking the door and yet surprised to find it there in back of her, and they all three entered the kitchen. Inside he sat the young boy and the old woman at the table, clearing away bits and shavings of wood to make a space for Grandmother’s hands, because she liked to keep a tight grip on the table’s edge.

  Fiskadoro sat hunched over the table and cried softly, every now and then a sob shaking him like a hand. “They said I desert my mother,” he told his teacher.

  Patiently Mr. Cheung stood beside the stove. When Fiskadoro chose not to keep talking, he opened the gate and threw in a couple of chunks of cypress root. He took the water pot off the woodpile in the corner, stepped to the back door, and called “Fidelia!” into the yard. His young daughter appeared there and he handed her the pot. “Get the deep, good water for us, please,” he asked her.

  “He wash, wash away. He wash away!” Fiskadoro said.

  “He was on the boat?” Mr. Cheung said.

  Fiskadoro nodded. The kitchen was really just a shed attached to the house, and its floor was dirt. When he nodded, his tears fell between his legs and beaded the dust at his feet.

  Mr. Cheung felt terrible for the boy, but everybody had to die. “Do you know that I have some tea?”

  “Tea?”

  “It’s a beverage from long before. From China,” Mr. Cheung said.

  “I know about tea what it is,” Fiskadoro said politely.

  “Fidelia is coming with some of the good, deep water from the well,” Mr. Cheung said. “Then I’ll show you how I make my tea.”

  Grandmother Wright inhaled the odor of strong black tea that sweetened the kitchen’s climate of soy sauce and curry. It wasn’t anything like the tea she remembered, but more like the rotten tea leaves that had filled the garbage pails in the kitchens of her childhood—kitchens where the stoves had spiral-shaped electric burners on them that grew so hot their metal glowed orange. Stoves like that boiled a pot of water in only a few minutes.

  Now she watched the pot for half an eternity, it seemed, while the young boy grew so weary with waiting he started to cry and cry and could hardly stop himself. He called her grandson Anthony Cheung, “Father, Father.”

  Grandmother Wright was half Chinese and by now more than a hundred years old. She had the power to see through walls. It was a quite usual thing for her to bore with the smoldering chill of her vision through the center of the earth and the layered decades and to see clearly the face of Arnold Wright. Arnold Wright was her father. He had been a British importer of some kind. In honor of his memory she’d kept her maiden name all of her life.

  On the day of his death, father and daughter had been living with her mother, Hua-ling Kaung Wright; and the little girl, now a sucked-out old woman with the face of a monkey and the skin of someone who had drowned, had been beautiful and hadn’t been called Grandmother, but Marie. The three of them had lived in Saigon, an Asian city that later took the name of a great Communist leader and then became a cipher in the cataclysm.

  Whenever she imagined, against her will, that triumph of death over the world, the hordes of skeletons dragging the sacks of their skins behind them through the flaming streets, the buildings made out of skulls, the empty uniforms coming inexorably through the fields, the bodies of children stuck full of blast-blown knives and forks—the bottom of everything, the end of the world, a grey blank with nobody to remember it, the vision described, passed on, preserved by no one—it was in that city that she saw it, in the city of her father’s death.

  And it was on the day when her father took his life—shot himself with a shiny automatic pistol no bigger than his hand—that she marked the end of the world as having begun. As a matter of fact, however, only that small war, between the Americans and the Vietnamese Communists, was turning toward its end on the day of her father’s death. Their downstairs neighbor, Mme. Troix, a frail, sleepless Frenchwoman who lived alone, came to their door wearing only a sheer black slip and fanning herself violently against the heat with a little round fan, to drip with sweat and say out of a strained face that more awful rumors, too unthinkable not to be true, were swarming around the American Embassy. This, she insisted, was the finish. They must all get out of the city, take themselves back to Europe, to China, to Britain—to any place that wasn’t falling apart.
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  Marie and her mother, Hua-ling, stood half out in the hallway listening to her complaints. Mme. Troix wore her hair in a bun pulled back tightly from her forehead, and it was there at the borders of her scalp that the perspiration seemed to start, collecting in tiny beads that grew pendulous and then plunged down—it was damp and hot everywhere; you had to move slowly on any errand. Having made herself into a collection of nervous disorders by worrying, Mme. Troix now hoped Hua-ling would assure her that things were fine. But Marie’s mother was far too polite to contradict her. Mme. Troix exclaimed something briefly in French, in the manner of someone dealing with an uncomprehending street vendor, and raced in tears down the stairs. No detail of this was unavailable to Grandmother Marie now, nine-tenths of a century later, even down to the three dull patches of sweat in the hollow of Mme. Troix’s back, along the spine of her nylon slip.

  And next, within a few more minutes, Mme. Troix was back again, ushering up the stairs two policemen in khaki. They moved too quickly for normal people—they were part of this hallucinatory city, driven beyond all limits by the Americans, who ate up the time from under everything. The policeman in the lead held a shiny Baretta pistol on the flat palm of his hand, and he shoved it repeatedly toward her mother as if trying to get her to take it.

  Hua-ling raised her hands above her head. So did Marie. Mme. Troix stopped fanning herself and stood still.

  The policeman spoke in Vietnamese; the mother shook her head, because she couldn’t speak it; he insisted; she grew even more frightened.

  And then he said in English, “This you hesbunt gun?” When she nodded, unable to find reason to deny it, he said, “Why he kill himself? Shot himself?”

  “Who did?” Hua-ling Wright said. “Who shot?”

  The second policeman abruptly turned on Mme. Troix with an intention of inspiring fear, and the fear on his own face was more intimidating than any trumped-up malevolence he might have managed to show her. She dropped her fan as if it were a weapon.

  The first officer put the Baretta in his belt and said to Hua-ling Wright, “You come right away. Now. We get it taking care of, baby.”

  “He’s working,” Hua-ling said. “He’s at work.”

  When Hua-ling came back from identifying her husband’s body she seemed to have acquired the tight-faced, berserk efficiency of the two starched officials. The same darkness of trouble stained her eyes.

  A cremation and funeral were arranged; today, however, in her life in the room off the damp kitchen and the rocking chair in the parlor, Grandmother remembered no cremation or funeral and wasn’t sure she’d attended any kind of ceremony for her father at all. What she remembered, instead, was a vision of him standing in their cramped living room next to the air-conditioning unit with a tumbler of Scotch whiskey and ice in his hand, letting the refrigeration spray over his face, ducking his head and reaching back to lift his collar and let the cool air spill under it onto the pale English flesh of his neck, while simultaneously, not three meters across the room, Hua-ling talked to herself angrily with a swollen and terrified face, ticking off the factors that kept them from joining her brother’s family in Seattle. Clearly Marie’s father was already dead in this picture. It was his ghost standing there in the room.

  “Perhaps you’re saying that a squall took him off the boat,” her grandson Anthony said. There was a cup of tea before her, as motionless as a stump or a rock. If they were on a boat, the sea was calm today.

  The boy was crying as if his own cup of tea were the origin of all the world’s torment. “It was the tiller,” the boy said.

  Captain Minh nodded—he’d grown so old.

  How long had they been on this boat? Hang on! Everything else is nothing. Remember that, remember that.

  But she wasn’t on the boat yet. She was still in Saigon. She was trying to get to America.

  Because Hua-ling’s brother was an American citizen, mother and daughter not unreasonably hoped to be granted visas by that country. Hua-ling managed to reach him in Seattle by telephone, an accomplishment demanding rare energies and a tremendous will; but the sense of dishonor surrounding the world, the troubled nature of anything to do with America, the people and things that wouldn’t behave, the official machinery that was out of synch, the frayed hearts, the broken faces, the ugly rules, all of these things kept them in Saigon when they should have been able to leave for Seattle right away.

  The dry season ended and the rains began, driving the grease up out of the streets and tearing up the surface of any road that wasn’t concrete, and eventually eroding great potholes over which the taxis and personal sedans slammed obliviously. The drivers of mo-peds and Hondas careened among the chasms bearing a relentless faith in their immunity, while the bicyclists shrank themselves against the margin of whatever street and forged straight ahead. The traffic ate up the precious time and the pointless distance, the rain grated and sighed over everything, and in spite of her grief, to Marie Saigon was music.

  Months later Marie saw the policeman again, the one who had pushed her father’s gun on her mother, looking almost the same. He stood in the midst of police barricades around some kind of accident, pointing his finger and shouting orders to a straining crowd of citizens who lurched forward dangerously against the wooden sawhorses, unbalanced by the weight of their curiosity. In a manner intended to startle them and keep them back, the policeman stamped his foot and gestured flagrantly toward the butt of his holstered pistol. It had rained, but it was clearing now, and one of the spectators poked his umbrella out of the group at the barricade like a rifle, and some people laughed hate-filled laughter at the policeman. Behind him an ambulance waited while a stretcher was being loaded through its open rear doors.

  A mo-ped in perfect condition lay on its side near the ambulance. A street boy in khaki shorts, squatting like a monkey, wrestled with one of its saddlebags until another policeman, backing off from the ambulance, noticed and shouted something that drove him away.

  Marie turned to see her father, tall and pale and caressed by a white shirt. He was sipping a cocktail among onlookers in a streetside bar, all of them mildly diverted from their own troubles by this anonymous street tragedy.

  “Daddy!” Remembering the moment these many decades since, she couldn’t tell it from a dream.

  “Daddy!”

  Perhaps it had been only a dream.

  He saw her but pretended not to. Rather than drinking his drink, his drink appeared to be drinking him. Rapidly he was consumed by it until the glass hung in the air and then exploded. A woman in a blue dress sat there instead of her father.

  “Daddy?” she called. The khakied policeman looked up, the man who had held her father’s gun in his hands. He searched for the one who had called to him from the crowd.

  Her mother went to sleep in her face, as a Chinese expression went, at about this time. Marie was surprised and confused to find one day that Hua-ling had produced an armor of lifelessness around herself. She’d transmitted to Marie the faith that to suffer over generations was unremarkable, and now because her husband had killed himself, one man in all this panorama of endlessly masticated hope, she collapsed inward like a dry toadstool and spoke neither yes nor no. She couldn’t think of going to Hong Kong, or even England, but only to her brother in America. Marie had to learn to care for herself and her mother, bargain with merchants, avoid traps, and navigate bureaucracies, while they all invented new ways of delaying her and she passed her sixteenth birthday.

  Much of Hua-ling’s correspondence and many of her transactions regarding their visas, it turned out, had been only imagined or dreamed. While Marie came to appreciate how bad off her mother had been immediately following the suicide, Hua-ling got even worse. She starved herself, took too many pills, passed out, swelled up—kidney problems were evidently killing her, and she could hardly drag her fattened legs beneath herself from one room in the apartment to another. Something happened to her sweat glands and she ceased perspiring, even on the muggiest d
ays when the air conditioner was worthless. The hot weather drove her temperature up to nearly fatal levels, from which she shouted down at imaginary goblins in a fever-world, sometimes finding the crazed strength to move things around the living room, barricading the door or building herself small shelters from private, terrible eventualities. She couldn’t be left alone for more than a few minutes, and even so, one day Marie came back from shopping to find her mother stretched out and looking dead on the sidewalk in front of their building. She was alive, but from that day forward her English, formerly perfect, was so elementary she hardly ever spoke it. All day she smoked Peace, a Japanese brand of cigaret, and coughed with a tearing sound and beslimed hundreds of Kleenex tissues with the congestion from her nameless disease, scattering them like white blossoms over the tabletops. Often she had to take her breaths from a yellow compressed-air tank labeled “O2.”

  As the people of Saigon came to appreciate, against all belief, that they’d be abandoned by the Americans and eaten by the Communists, the city’s atmosphere grew much more crazed and scary. Marie dragged herself among government offices where the Vietnamese employees, some made rabid, others lobotomized by betrayal, failed to help her in the matter of visas. Everything that happened around the American Embassy was taken as a sign of hope or of disaster—a change in gate personnel, the early or late arrival of the gardener—and everyone had a theory or a rumor, but there was never any official news except what everyone knew just couldn’t be true: that nothing of significance had been decided; that things would go on as they had.