Fiskadoro

by Denis Johnson

  “Five days and four nights I sailing on, and I ain’t can’t never come about without no mates to help me. I make my best way to go south and west, but time I make east with the corriente, time dead west, sometime the forces turn me around and head me dead up to the Pole Star. Half-liter of water in a bucket disappeared. It rain and I catch a few drops in my hands. A few more drops in the bucket. I going fast. Thirst dry me up flat like a rag. North. South. East. West. A simple person, a little coward, on the Ocean.

  “I tell to the Pole Star, ‘Who making you take me there?’

  “When the boat gone west and the sundown look at me like a big eye, I say, ‘Who are you?’

  “And I go down on my knees on the deck to pray: ‘You there up high! Heavenly Eye watching this trouble! Put your secret message in this book!’ ”

  In the light of flames, Cassius Clay Sugar Ray held out his two hands together, the palms up, like the open pages of the sacred Koran.

  “The line my finger pointed say, Would you deny these blessings of the Lord?

  “I say, ‘Scuse me what? What blessings?’

  “One more line down the page, it said me again, Would you deny these blessings of the Lord?

  “I say, ‘Look at the sea all around! This is me I go drowning! Who talking about any blessings?’

  “But one line, two lines, three lines—all over the page I see been Allah’s one message for me: Would you deny these blessings of the Lord? It say that on those pages of the Koran thirty-two times. When Allah make a message, you don’t get no question.

  “Now I gone ask to you this,” he said: “What that message mean?”

  The men and boys around him knew he’d been carried on uncharted currents over the Ocean and washed up against the rotted pier at Plantation, above Key Marathon, and they knew the story of how he’d been carried in a hammock by the Plantation people into Marathon, a completely transformed individual bearing a book about Allah and news of an Alliance for Trading that would make a storm of business over the following decade, until boredom, laziness, and the easy life among laden fruit trees beside a generous sea made work seem too much trouble for the citizens of the Keys. Only the Gambling Alliance remained in effect—also the legend, always larger—and they knew these things by heart, but they didn’t know what the message meant, Would you deny these blessings of the Lord?

  “It mean, Give thanks,” Cassius Clay Sugar Ray explained. “It mean even in the middle of the Ocean, give thanks to Allah. It mean, Dance with your partner. Get it while you can.”

  Cassius Clay Sugar Ray sensed they didn’t need to hear the end. “Live in total faith!” he insisted. “Would you deny these blessings of the Lord?” he asked. His own excitement seemed to confuse him to the point that he didn’t know anymore what he was saying. “Every minute of my great deeds I felt the fear. I was tasted puke in the back of my mouth.”

  The men and boys were a little embarrassed now, because this last statement had the ring of a thoughtless departure from the usual text. In a moment, however, as everything he’d told them took its shape in their minds, their embarrassment left them. They considered his submission to fate, to what he called Allah; they admired his dangerous flaring honesty in talking about his wife and her lover and about personal fear in the middle of brave deeds; and they felt that he hadn’t lowered himself, exactly, so much as raised them up.

  Still, the events of this night, so different from the usual boredom, cheap talk, and staring into flames, were upsetting every stomach, and the men and boys were already trying to forget this encounter even as it came to an end. They’d always been confident that the sea would bring home a warrior, that the sand would whirl into the shape of a President, and that from time to time in their lives people would be met with who would show them the way. But they’d expected to meet these figures only in dreams.

  Cassius Clay Sugar Ray’s two bodyguards—Uncle and Sammy, both small men, neither of them very fearsome, almost as well-known on the Keys as their employer—had been watching the dancers, and now they came to get him. Cassius Clay Sugar Ray shook hands all around and got ready to go back, under their protection, to his new home in Marathon.

  One of the bodyguards, Sammy, was a white man who wore long pants and even rope sandals, like a big business-owner, and he said to Cassius Clay Sugar Ray, “Shake it, Boss.” Cassius Clay Sugar Ray smiled as if he didn’t understand, and kept on giving out pieces of dried fruit to the others from a bag he carried around his waist. Sammy said, “We got moves to make.” It irritated Fiskadoro that Sammy’s tone of voice seemed tainted with some faint failure of respect.

  By the time the visitors had gone it was already three hours past dark—those still on the beach would have to stay together now and pass the night here sleeping or dancing or having adventures with the other sex. Fiskadoro stayed away from them. To have met this great man, to have touched his hand, heard his story, his legend, made Fiskadoro feel crazy. He wandered the shore. The Ocean, so perilous simply because of its size to any who might be faring out onto it tonight, was unagitated. A roll of surf fell at his feet with the hollow exhaustion of a drum calling from far away. Fiskadoro came no closer to it than a couple of meters. He didn’t want to let the Ocean touch him. I am not for you, he insisted in fear. I am not my father Jimmy. Things took him away from his father, stories and dancing carried him off, but every time, he seemed to land at the border of this black country where his father lived. He was afraid he’d find something here at the Ocean’s edge one day, a lump of something he couldn’t make out. He’d go closer and see that it was a man, closer and see that the man was dead, closer and see that the dead man was Jimmy, his father. He didn’t like to think about it. He was frightened even of his own name, Fish-man, Harpooner, because it suggested some prior arrangement with the hungry sea.

  Every day he imagined the moment when his father, thinking of nobody, totally cut off from everyone he knew, totally, as if he’d been born swimming for his life and never known anything else, gave up and drew the first breath of water.

  The several Blacks from over the swamps—and yet they looked a bit different, their heads caked with mud or he didn’t know what, not like most of the swamp-folks—were heading back over the dunes toward home; he could see them detach from the party-time in a group and straggle off.

  Fiskadoro moved along the shore, keeping abreast of them as they made toward the shallowest rise of earth. His neck felt constricted by a rush of desire, and his groin ached. The only two women he’d ever made love to were young girls from over the swamps.

  One of the swamp-people lagged farther and farther behind. Fiskadoro moved with a heavy and guilty heart but with quick, light strides to catch her. He could make out the backs of her thighs. She turned when she heard him, and he saw her face, a shadow in which he might read whatever he wanted.

  She watched him, half-reclining against the rising slope of the sand dune. Her eyes were wide and white. Fiskadoro took hold of her by the ankle—it was gritty with sand. She slid down toward him with a silky sound. She held him by the thighs and bit his breast softly and licked his belly. But then she got up and began climbing the dune again. They were both out of breath—he could hear her panting with a slight catch of her voice, a whimper, a small cry in every breath.

  Fiskadoro felt he was tearing himself away from his life to pursue her into the swamps where he’d never been. But even across this distance some of the firelight caught her, and he saw the tendons of her ankles, the start of her buttocks below her ragged denim skirt, and he chased her. She stayed ahead of him.

  As soon as he’d topped the round of the dune and looked over into the darkness where she was disappearing, her skin no longer touched by orange highlights but as empty of them as the hide of an animal in a cave, he had to hesitate. Where was he taking himself? The patchwork of marsh and tangled vegetation down there was covered up with night, but it exuded a thick presence like the sea’s. Two steps into it he felt as if some kind of laug
hing-gas were licking his shins. She was gone into nothing, but he knew how to follow her steps as certainly as if he carried a map—there wasn’t any way to go but down. Below the level of the dune the wind was stuck. It was like being swallowed alive. The air choked him, and he recognized the odor—it was hers; she smelled like the swamps, like her birthplace and her home. To follow her over the dunes and out of earshot and eyesight of his people, his head spinning and his throat blocked with the honey of tears, was not to know whether he would live or die. Don’t look what I’m doing! he begged the dark sea.

  FIVE

  THERE WAS SO MUCH VIBRATION UP WHERE the Israelites stayed on the Ocean side north of Twicetown, so many people loitering there, such a big crowd of hangers-out and self-elected interpreters, everybody with a secret opinion or a loud explanation concerning the white boat the Israelites were ceremoniously building, that vendors started dropping around, too, and Bill Banks made it the place for one or two sound-shows.

  The vendors quarreled with one another about the positions of their stalls, drumming up excellent reasons, each one, with threatening gestures and a wild face, for having the place nearest the shade, which was the gift of only a few trees here in a region mostly scrub and tall grass. When Bill Banks put up his sound-shows, yesterday’s recording stars roared words in voices that sounded as if they should clear their throats about things nobody understood, while the big rhythm that needed no explanation, crackly and fogged with use and buzzing in Bill Banks’s old speakers, got some people dancing.

  But the white boat was what it was all about. It was just like a little ship, with small hand-carved dinghies on it for escape in case of a disaster, and tiny portholes strung along its sides, and numerous decks and two smokestacks, every piece whitewashed, and every piece blessed by Flying Man before it was attached to the vessel. Just the same, it would never float. Everyone could see that. But they all understood that floating wasn’t the point. This wasn’t about sailing anywhere on a ship three meters long: it was about magic, about religion, about Jah. The Israelites were happy to explain the ship and what it was supposed to do, but nobody could make out what they said.

  Mr. Cheung went up with Eileen to take a look at the white boat. He was uncomfortable when Flying Man made a big show of welcoming them, because it was all too clear that he hadn’t let go of his idea that The Miami Symphony Orchestra was going to do something or other for the Israelites, probably, Mr. Cheung guessed, something totally embarrassing, and possibly something he would regret forever. But a person wanted to please these immigrants. They were bizarre and unrestrained. So he smiled with a lump in his throat and gave his every attention to Flying Man’s indecipherable speech about this white boat. Once in a while, with the effect of reaching out and touching Mr. Cheung with a bare electric wire, Flying Man said the word “oxra.” Eye contact, Mr. Cheung noted, was also painful. Flying Man occasionally focused his bleary pupils like targets, without mercy. Spittle flecked his lips and beard.

  Eileen seemed to take some light from the relentless sun and the glaring water. Her face appeared smoother than usual to Mr. Cheung, her eyes larger and younger, and her features more relaxed. “No Mr. Banks today? No sound-show?” she asked. It wasn’t a secret between them that Eileen liked the sound-shows better than The Miami Symphony Orchestra’s ridiculous efforts.

  “He’s left the scaffolds up,” Mr. Cheung said. “He’ll have another soon, and we’ll come.”

  Flying Man cupped his hands together and shoved them right and left, as if bailing water. “One day someday Babylon go sink down deadndrownd-oh.” His beard jumped when he talked, moved when he showed his foul teeth. “Dat news when res’ with Jah. Dis—dis—dis—dis—”

  Eileen turned her back on him and smiled with blank eyes at the air above the vendors’ stalls. “You don’t make sense so don’t talk wild at me now. What they gonna catch in that boat?” she asked Mr. Cheung. “Little tiny fish?”

  “There’s something spiritual going on here,” Mr. Cheung said, “a symbolic thing. But I don’t want to learn what it is. I’m certain of this.”

  She laughed. It hit him hard—she almost never laughed these days. “What’s to be afraid of about a little boat that’s just only pretty?”

  “I don’t wish to be caught up inside these forces,” he said. “They aren’t my forces.”

  But what were his forces, after all? Now, on a pleasant morning that was fairly cool, relatively dry, somewhat brightened by the hope of these lunatic aliens and Eileen’s uncustomary good cheer, he grew concerned about his philosophical stance, and wanted to stop in a patch of shade and consider it. Eileen was saying something about coins—she wanted melon from a vendor. Mr. Cheung held up a finger to request her patience while he asked himself these questions: What are my forces? With what am I aligned? I am not aligned with anything real, only the past. I am against everything.

  It was an excellent thought. Against everything! What a beautiful day to be alive, to walk with one’s wife, to see the lonely truth!

  Shyly he took Eileen by the hand. “No forces are my forces. I am against everything that is happening,” he said. “I will this. I will this from my heart and mind.”

  “Thank you, thank you, Senor Mister Mayor, I already heard this speech until a thousand times.” She picked a slice of melon out of a row of them on a vendor’s collapsible table and backed away, sucking on it loudly and pointing at Mr. Cheung, to whom the young vendor held out his flat palm and said, “What you go give me on that melon now? She already eating it till es gone. I want hunnut dollar now. Es my best one I ever have of a melon since I born.”

  Mr. Cheung gave the man a copper penny from his coinpurse. “I see you as a decayed person,” he said as he watched the man’s face. “Electronic machines once managed all the money, did you hear about it? In those electronic times, nobody made a drama from one small piece of melon.”

  The vendor’s flat face went cold. He popped the copper coin into his mouth and swallowed it. “Penny ain’t nothing.” He shooed them away with a fluttering hand. “Go, go, you steal my melon, happy days, you welcome, bye-bye, keep touch, I don’t care.” He turned his back on Mr. Cheung, and Eileen made as if to throw the rind at a spot between the vendor’s shoulder blades, laughing.

  Mr. Cheung reached out to take another slice of melon. “Two for a penny!”

  His hand was shaking. He was astonished at his own anger. “Look who coming now!” Eileen said.

  She took her husband by the elbow and pulled him toward the road that emptied onto the beach, where a mist of dust boiled toward them from a crowd of racing urchins—dozens, and most of them too little to wear clothes—followed by ranks of other people in order of advancing age: adolescents, parents and uncles and aunts, weary but smiling old people, and then Bill Banks, distiller and proprietor of the great sound-shows, leading a party of his employees, who happened also to be his family, and a gang of burros pulling two carts full of his sound equipment. The slowest bunch, stumbling behind the carts and breathing all the dust, were the sad old drunks and the wild young drunks, harassed by dogs, confused by rice brandy, paired up to support one another at the finish of this long march from Twicetown. Wherever Bill Banks appeared, these people seemed to hover, not just because he made wine and brandy, but because his appearances meant excitement and dancing—yet Bill Banks himself was a small, skinny person with a face that said he didn’t understand and a posture that claimed he was sorry for everything.

  Mr. Cheung was happy for Eileen. “I told you a show would come.”

  “Si, and I told you Bill Banks converted now,” Eileen said. “Look, look there at Mother, she right there by the second cart.”

  It was true. He hadn’t picked her out—Mother always dressed in ragged pants like a fisherman, and from a distance she might have been anyone. Mother was nobody’s mother; she was the leader of the Church of Fire, a group without a building since their roof had fallen in. She ruffled Bill Banks’s hair, kissed his han
d, gave him a hug, and climbed, quite nimbly for a silver-haired old white lady, onto one of the scaffolds for the sound equipment. “They gonna have a microphone up here for me in two minutes,” she shouted. “But I never have done my talking out of a microphone before so I’ll get a start on things right here and now—shoo! Shoo!” she said to the children climbing onto the scaffold. “You’re turning into monkeys. Little monkeys.”

  “Hurry up, Larry Wilson,” Eileen muttered, recognizing one of the boys setting up the electric boxes and loudspeakers. “Music time.”

  They got the generators going, and the red-and-white police lights on the scaffolds began to whirl behind Mother’s grey head.

  “It was predicted in the Bible,” Mother said in a rich, clear voice that carried out to the shore toward the Israelites at work on their tiny white ship, “that the scientists would look down through a telescope of a kind to see the prehistoric beginnings and they’d say, We see monkeys a-crawling at the start of time and turning into humans. And do you know what?” She bent over with a hand on her knee, pointing to the people on her right, “Do you know what?”—pointing to those in front of her, “Do you know what?”—now pointing at the left—“It happened just like the Bible did predict it. Gimme that microphone. I never used one,” she said in a suddenly amplified voice whose ringing blurred into a piercing yowl. She shouted at the black microphone and the yowling got worse until she dropped it onto the scaffold and clapped her hands over her ears and stomped on the instrument with her bare foot. It jumped off the stage and burrowed into the sand. The crowd cheered and clapped and whistled while she screamed, “Wait a minute! Wait a minute! I got something to tell you-all—we’re turning into monkeys! Monkeys is the point of it, backsliding out to the deep-down primitive state where Bob Marley can’t never find us!” She could hardly be heard because the crowd went on applauding, without hostility, but clearly preferring their own noise to hers. Soon the music started, and it caught them by the throats—loud guitars that sounded to Mr. Cheung like someone rhythmically beating the life out of a frog until the singers rasped, “I’m er-reddeh f’love!—Ooh baby I’m er-reddeh f’love.” Mr. Cheung enjoyed trying to make out the words. Feeling a little stupid, he danced with Eileen, merely standing in one spot and bobbing his head. He was delighted to see his wife having such a good time.