Fiskadoro

by Denis Johnson

  The sound of propeller engines was loud through the rear door of the office. There were bursts of small-weapons fire of a type familiar to Marie, the submachine guns of the Saigon police. At this time the Special Forces Lieutenant drew his sidearm and put the barrel of it in the socket of her left eye, against the fluttering eyelid.

  This was nothing to her. It was no more alarming than the over-familiar grip of the strange boy’s hand on her biceps. She kept her other eye wide open and watched the cylinder turn as the Lieutenant drew back the hammer with his thumb. A peace and clarity seized the room. She thought she might fall asleep. “I wanna have all your local money,” the man said. “Captain Minh is gonna take your dollars. Care to make some trouble about it?”

  “Thank you, sir,” she said. Her life was all around her. She could not, in any sense that mattered, be killed.

  The man had an excellent American-style accent. “Cap’n Minh-baby,” he said.

  The boy in the Air Force uniform let go her arm and removed the bundle from her blouse, reaching with surgical detachment between her breasts. When he took her packet of seven one-hundred-dollar bills for himself, she gathered that this was Captain Minh, his middle name become his last, as often happened these days. Captain Minh gave Marie’s packet of Vietnamese money, tens of thousands of piasters, to the Lieutenant, who put it inside his purple beret and replaced the beret on his head. The three other soldiers in the office looked on without any interest.

  Real light broke into the room as the boy Captain pushed through the back door. He invited her with a toss of his head to follow him onto the asphalt of runways.

  The sun was low—the afternoon was half gone. Heat came up miserably from the black tarmac and blew into their faces off the whirling blades of a helicopter skimming the grass between runways a couple of hundred meters west. Backed by the sun, the helicopter looked flat as a shadow in the air, converged on by the tiny figures of desperate people turned bright green by the glare in her eyes. A 707 taxiing out made sound waves and heat waves that blended into a single force she had to turn away from.

  The Special Forces Lieutenant was with them. He drew ahead and led them to a hangar in which a U.S. helicopter the size of a house sat on the flatbed of a six-wheeled transport vehicle that must have been some kind of truck, she imagined, but looked more closely related to a golf cart. The Lieutenant jumped into the truck’s seat—there was only room for one, just a seat, a dashboard, and steering wheel—and began trying to get it started, pushing a button so that the engine yowled and died. For ten seconds he waited with a face of stone, then tormented it again, getting nowhere.

  Standing with Marie in the parallelogram of light that fell through the hangar’s entrance and turned the greasy asphalt so intensely silver that their legs were invisible below the knees, Captain Minh pointed to a DC-3 that was landing. “Danang plane,” he said.

  She didn’t quite grasp what she was seeing; it seemed that shredded humans—arms and legs and half-torsos, the torn-off parts of citizens and even, as the plane landed across their line of sight, even the uniformed parts of dismembered military people—were stuck to the landing gear and dangled from under the wings. Then it was way down the runway, moving far past the terminal building to stop near a group of minuscule figures at the runway’s other end. Jeeps and a luggage cart and people who seemed to come from nowhere, running at top speed, left the terminal area and raced in pursuit of the plane.

  And as soon as the Lieutenant had the helicopter out of the hangar and Captain Minh had positioned himself at the controls, a swarm of weeping, shouting people, most of them wearing military or airport-personnel uniforms, began clambering all over it. The Lieutenant gave Marie a hand on board, making way for her by kicking one man in the chest and then suddenly, when he was unable to dislodge another from the doorway, unholstering his sidearm and shooting him in the face, an incident that would return to her over and over, both waking and dreaming. Yet once the blades began turning and the three of them were on board, neither the pilot nor the Lieutenant paid any heed to the people crushing themselves through the doors. The Lieutenant busied himself replacing the spent bullet in his revolver. Captain Minh concentrated on the levers and dials before him as if closeted alone with certain problems of aviation. Panting and whimpering strangers crammed against their backs, and Marie felt what might have been someone’s mouth on her neck. Complaints of discomfort became screams of terror barely audible in the roar of the blades as the helicopter moved along only half a meter above the runway, pursued by faces, and after a long time rose up trailing strings of humans who clutched one another by the pants, the shirts, the ankles, dragging each other down and falling to the asphalt beneath. Still there must have been more than a dozen people in the helicopter with them, those by the doors still helping aboard the ones who clung by their fingertips to whatever might be clung to—the edges of the open ports, the skis of the landing gear, even the barrels of the machine guns protruding from either port. The load was so great that the helicopter hardly cleared the shacks beyond the airport, but as it gained speed and lurched once, then twice, finally unburdened of people who couldn’t hang on any longer to the skis, it took to the upper air. Captain Minh was a savior shining in his own drugged eyes as he lifted them all above the war, and they left that world behind.

  Whoever was saved that day was saved, though many of them were lost again only a little while later, and all of them were lost now but Marie.

  It seemed to her that she very often had to endure more now, as an old woman, than she’d had to endure then. She dragged herself from bed into the kitchen and toward her grandson’s music through crowds of voices and long streamers of pain. Whatever room she escaped was always a war in itself, a harried landscape that could at any second be blasted out from under her, revealing a world made of memories, most of them more real than these shifting walls.

  And now she was being led out of the hospital at Sangley Point—no, no, toward the red rocking chair in the parlor where she’d been all her life. The Officer’s Club smelled of spilt liquor and re-run smoke. The Rolling Stones made one layer in the layers of voices: “This coat—is torn—and frayed / It’s seen—much bed—der days . . .” Outside the gates of the Sangley Point Naval Base she looked down the road of whorehouses and cheap shops of Cavete City, P.I. Somebody said, “Sige!” and a carabao nearly ran her down in the street, pulling a wooden-wheeled cart at a rate slow as its glazed eyes. In the country of her father’s death they called them water buffalo, giant living barges with dark elephant tusks set on their heads sideways and curved back, and the same impenetrable hide as an elephant . . .

  She was standing here in the road to the Saigon Airport. She had never seen these things before, the deformed offspring of the Rolling Thunder: Napalm’s stumps and Napalm’s obliterated eyes, at least a dozen of them, several so extensively cauterized they had to be pulled along in this cart by this water buffalo walking in its sleep. Others, those who could walk, trailed the cart. A white missionary woman herded them along, very red in her cheeks, huffing and puffing, unbalanced and hopeless. Marie backed out of the way. From a faceless face one black pupil of an eye, like a marble in a puddle of fat, took her measure.

  Captain Minh was screwing together a carbine; he checked its sights, placed the barrel in his mouth—Jagger goes, “Thang you—for your wine—California / Thang you—for your sweed an—bitter fruit”—placed the barrel in his mouth . . . her grandson began to play the oboe. He’d made it himself from bamboo. Even in the simplest melodies, the notes cracked into falsetto like the voice of a sobbing teenage boy.

  Fiskadoro had to stay the night because in darkness the roads were unsafe. Mr. Cheung kept his children out of the parlor and made a place for him. He brought Fiskadoro a folded curtain to use as a pillow or a blanket in the hammock of fishing net. He walked around the room with a leafy twig of oleander, slapping at mosquitoes. “Everybody dies,” he told Fiskadoro.

  “But es wrong for
Jimmy,” Fiskadoro said with bald conviction.

  “I know. I know,” Mr. Cheung said. It was true. The boy’s father had been too young.

  “Do you know about my Grandmother Wright?” Mr. Cheung asked him now, pointing at her across the parlor as if she were far away. Evidently without regret for the past or concern for the coming night, she rocked in her red rocking chair, loudly breathing.

  Fiskadoro shook his head. He was beginning to weep again. His throat would be sore tomorrow.

  “Nobody really knows about Grandmother Wright,” Mr. Cheung said. “It’s not really for us to know. But she was in a war, I know, and she lost her mother and father, my own mother told me that. My mother, Carol Cheung, was her daughter. Carol Cheung told me this: When Grandmother Wright was running away from the war, she was in a helicopter, this is a flying machine with a propeller on the top, not like an airplane. And the helicopter machine fell into the ocean—not our Ocean, and not the Gulf, but the Pacific, the biggest ocean de todos—and the people had to swim, and swim, and swim, and one by one nine people sank down forever. The others went on a small boat that finally came.”

  “Grandmother was on the boat?”

  “She was saved from the Pacific Ocean. She and two others swam for more than two days.”

  Fiskadoro was astonished to think of the old woman floundering indefinitely among the waves, stronger even than Jimmy—and then was more taken aback to realize she must have been young then; once she must have been a girl.

  Mr. Cheung said, “My grandmother went to different countries. First to the Philippines, this is where she met some people in my grandfather’s family, and then eventualmente to America, this is where my grandfather lived.”

  “Aqui,” Fiskadoro said.

  “Aqui, in America, but far away. America is huge,” Mr. Cheung said. “I am an American. You, too. Jimmy was an American.” He was casting about now, trying to remember what it was he’d been wanting to say. “My grandmother went through different wars and different countries. Everything that she lost—it’s really gone, all of it, that’s true. At the same time, look at her! Think about her! She’s more than a century!”

  Fiskadoro nodded and tried to look soothed. He knew that Mr. Cheung was trying to make him feel better, even if Mr. Cheung was failing. But Mr. Cheung had left the room.

  He was back almost instantly. “From my yard, Fiskadoro.” His teacher handed him a stick of sugar cane longer than his hand. “It helps you to have sweet dreams.”

  Her grandson Anthony Cheung helped her from the rocking chair and toward her bedroom off the kitchen.

  Grandmother was sorry to have the concert end. Her grandson’s aimless tootling comforted her by bringing back the vision she’d experienced when surrounded by Muzak only minutes after coming to Seattle from Manila. The first thing her uncle had accomplished when they’d arrived in Chinatown on the bus was to take Marie out of the rain into an American quick-stop store, where the few bedraggled shoppers, most of them also Chinese, looked less actual and permanent than the blinding rows of goods. Her Uncle Kin-lau Kaung was a fine citizen of the Chinese-American community, a round-faced man always wearing a white dress shirt, grey pleated pants, and aqua-blue plastic loafers with tapered toes. He bought her a tube of toothpaste, two bars of bath soap, and some roll-on underarm deodorant, handing her each item to carry as he took it from its place on the shelves. At that moment Marie had no idea she would pass through much more—including a happy marriage, a long widowhood, and even the end of the world—before she reached the afternoon of her death many decades later in Key West, Florida. Here with her uncle in the quick-stop store she felt she’d reached an end, and she experienced a zeroing-in, a hallucination of purposiveness to her suffering, as if she’d lost her father and abandoned her mother, been raked across life after life, in order to stand here in the enamelling brilliance and receive these things.

  Fiskadoro took his sugar cane out in front of the house, where Mr. Cheung’s little children would be less likely to spy it and set up a campaign of outrage. He chewed it, and it made the salt taste of tears in his throat go away. It was unbelievably sweet and delicious. His heart raced with love. As night fell, he stood in the street and watched the light leave the dust. The mosquitoes that came at early twilight raged whining all over the air, but up and down the dirt thoroughfare there was a silence coming. The voices of the neighbors died away. He sucked the sugar cane, letting the sweet syrup comfort his throat. As soon as the dark was thick enough that he couldn’t see the old school building in the neighborhood behind Mr. Cheung’s house, the bugs thinned out. Then the dogs started barking, far and wide. All over the world they barked, numerous as stars. His head rang and his sight whirled. He felt sleepy. The first day of his father’s death was over.

  FOUR

  I NO EAT! I NO SLEEP!” DARKNESS AND SWEAT. “I no brain! Rapto!” Fiskadoro danced in a perimeter of orange light that flashed off the thunderheads of smoke above the fires. He could hardly see the band of Israelite musicians playing their steel drums outside the jerking illumination of the dance-ground, but their banging and clanging rhythm took up all the room available in his head for sound. The sweat-shiny figures around him, crossed out continually by the shadows of smoke and the silhouettes of other dancers against the light of driftwood bonfires and the blazing kettles of radioactive fuel-oil, cried, “Rapto!” and so did Fiskadoro. “Rapto! Rapto!”

  Though he could make out nobody really, Fiskadoro contrived in his heart to believe that everybody—all the others who seemed so oblivious—had an eye on him. He was nearly fourteen. He was changing, but the world stayed the same.

  He was growing, but it wouldn’t make room. And yet in the sight of some people, it seemed, he wasn’t growing fast enough. The young woman known as Loosiana had said that she was too tall for Fiskadoro, or that he was too short—whichever it was, the news of her opinion had come his way as soon as he’d appeared on West Beach tonight. One of the steel-drummers, an Israelite boy who smoked marijuana leaves in a clay pipe and stiffened his hair with salt water so that it shot from his head like the fur of a scared animal, had made a point of mentioning it right away, as Fiskadoro stood apart from the others and waited for the sun to drown in the Gulf before the darkness and the dancing: “Hey, you know the gel Loosiana, mon, she say, ‘Fish-man too small on me!’ ” The young drummer held up his bottle of beer and measured off two centimeters of its neck with thumb and forefinger. He was drinking Silent Man Beer, each green bottle of which bore the hand-painted insignia of a winking human skull.

  Fiskadoro felt the blood shoot into his face and hands. Had Loosiana really called him Fish-man? For weeks he’d been putting it about that his name might also mean Harpooner—and this was the truth, almost. That she’d called him Fish-man was insulting. He burned to know if this Israelite had Loosiana’s words exact, but he was afraid he’d make himself a fool if he asked any more about it or even if he spoke to this Israelite ever in his life again. It was still light yet, and he put his hands on the rim of a kettle of oil and looked at himself in the liquid, finding that he appeared there exactly as he felt—rubbery, dark, his face twisted. One of the bonfires was already burning; he grabbed a flaming brand and tossed it into the kettle, screaming, “Yaaah!” Nothing happened except that the brand was doused in the oleo. He pretended to himself that he’d been joking, hadn’t really wanted a startling explosion, it was too early for a lot of looney toons.

  A good joke. People had probably been frightened. The sun fell, the sea went black, and the fires stood up amid the gaiety of people who would never be his friends.

  Now, an hour later, he was psychotically dancing; and then suddenly he was tired of being Fiskadoro. He was finished. He was standing inside all this revelry with what he was convinced was a soul that had just died. It happened to him whenever he found himself in a crowd of people. He didn’t know anymore why he came here to West Beach.

  He ran off down the shoreline, out of earshot of
all the others, a collection of people his age or a little older, most of them from the Army, but many from as far away as Twicetown or even Marathon and, on the edges of the dancing that was just getting wild now after all the Silent Man Beer and Punto Beer, a few black boys and girls from the neighborhood of swamps and lowlands over the dunes—shy, curious, and dazzlingly aloof, the girls dancing with the girls, and the boys dancing with the boys.

  Fiskadoro took a blow to the heart each time he caught sight of Loosiana, who was easily picked out even across this distance because of her tall figure and her unique personal decoration, a sky-blue plastic tube like the inner tubes for autocar tires, only this inner tube buckled around the front of her waist over her white shift, resting on her hips and making her look deformed. It was a scavenged device, a thing once intended to bring about weight loss in flabby people. The owner was supposed to fill it up with hot water. Loosiana was aware that it set her apart, and her willingness to be set apart was one of the things that drew everybody to her. She was so wonderful that he’d never spoken to her. He couldn’t guess how she’d found out about his yearning. There were a half dozen others who had the same effect on him.

  The tide was going out, and the beach stank and lay there like a shield of smoked glass, upholding rank lengths of seaweed, empty shells, worn stones, dead urchins, skulls of fish, the bits and pieces deposited here for a while by the ocean in its endless rumination over these things it had collected. Under the half-moon’s cold light each object was mated to its blurry reflection. He was half a kilometer upwind of the others, but still he could hear them. He imagined himself going back. He imagined himself taking over the entire situation, riveting everything to himself: striding forth; maybe he was a different color; maybe he’d turned to gold, and was twice as tall, and held balls of fire in his hands and sang his song—“Oh Loosiana / your lose-weight heat-thing / your special eyes glance / we make our friends dance”—he knew it was a silly song. In the real situation, better words expressing greater thoughts and the largeness of his special feeling would come to him. But this was the real situation, wasn’t it? There was nothing here for him tonight. The swamp-girls hadn’t come alone tonight, there would be no chasing them, and Loosiana scorned him.