Fiskadoro

by Denis Johnson

  Mike was talking in a game and didn’t hear her. His legs weren’t chunky anymore, his belly was smaller, his face was a boy’s, not a baby’s.

  Belinda went back inside and found a pair of Jimmy’s old olive Army pants, and with a fish-knife she cut open the crotch and made a skirt. She punched holes in the waist, on either side of the zipper, so that she could tie it around herself with twine. When she’d put the skirt on she said out loud, as if talking to some invisible person who’d wounded her unaccountably, “Now I gone hang my tits and be old.”

  Bare-breasted, she stepped into the yard and sat down to watch Mike playing games.

  The tide was in. She heard wood knocking and men calling from a place out of sight, downshore. The Los Desechados was making ready to put out, which meant that Towanda Sanchez would be open for a visit soon. Drake sometimes put out with them now, and Belinda’s brother Pressy was one of the permanent crew. No other boat on the Keys would have had him because he was bent left, right, and sideways in the head, but he was the handiest replacement for Harvard Sanchez, who’d been next in line for Captain and who—much to everybody’s surprise, a good boy like Harvard Sanchez—now slept out by the still-house in Twicetown and never let out a breath that didn’t stink of liquor. And these days Drake lived over at his Uncle Pressy’s with Pressy’s cousin, Alfo, who was also Belinda’s cousin. They were three bachelors with big holes in their roof and crinkled aluminum cans lying all over the floor dribbling wine.

  I got to eat something, she told herself, and went inside, took three butter-clams from the bucket, and laid them on the stove. But when the shells opened and the leathery black feet came out they looked just like her own nipples. She left them there to fry.

  “I gonna go see Towanda. Not too long,” she told Mike. She scraped a circle around him with her heel. “Es you perimeter,” she told him. “Shark gone bite you legs off when you go outa you perimeter. You stay inside you perimeter.”

  Mike patted smooth a small mound of sand and put a blade of beach-grass in its center for a flag.

  “I can’t fetch you ’long through this compound like a mess of fish. I too old, I too sick. You have kill me.”

  As soon as she said it, she heard it: the pearl in her breast was a tumor of the kill-me. Her finger on her breast had already sent this news to her heart, but now her mouth had told it to her brain, and there was nothing left to do but go crazy.

  With a metal spoon Belinda dug her last penny out of its hiding-spot among the ashes inside her stove, and then to cool it off she dropped it in the clam bucket. She ran to Towanda’s, past the falling-down shack that Pressy and Alfo and Drake called home, clutching the wet coin in her fist.

  The Los Desechados wasn’t half a kilometer out yet, but Towanda was already in the bedroom, a lean-to attached to their quonset hut, rifling her husband’s pants-pockets and hunting in all his hiding places for coins.

  “Es a heavy day! ” Belinda said.

  “You hanging your tits now like you know your age,” Towanda said.

  “My age? My age es dead.” Belinda was crying. “I feel how I got a little dureza of the kill-me in my left one here.”

  “When?”

  “Today.”

  Towanda closed her eyes. “Es a heavy day,” she said. “Nothing to do behind this trouble but drink and cry.”

  “I got a penny,” Belinda said, opening her fist.

  “Leon got seven penny in this room,” Towanda said. “Help me. Help me.”

  Glad to be doing something, Belinda helped her turn over the mattress, felt in the slats of the palm walls, and poked at the thatched ceiling with a broken gaff. Towanda got angry when nothing came of it and turned on Belinda with a burning tongue, as if it were all Belinda’s fault. “From today until forever,” Towanda said, making her eyes tiny with hatred, “I got to have one penny every Sunday. That man es a Cap'n, and I a Cap'n woman, and don’t you know I shame to walk on the world have never no more coin than a little children have? He gone on the sea! What happen if emergency? Leon!” she hollered, “you don't trust with me! You don't faith with me!” Suddenly she seemed very calm. “That mean I got to take it outa his souvenir,” she said. “That’s all. Leon, you gone on the sea and left me only one chance.”

  Belinda waited, feeling the breeze across her breasts, while Towanda went into their hut and stole Leon’s souvenir penny. “He come off the first day of when Leon Cap’n on that boat,” she said, “number-one penny of his command. I sorry, Belinda, but es a heavy day and I got to take it.”

  “Es true,” Belinda agreed. “You got to, es necessario.” But such a grim feeling was all around her that her voice sounded far away.

  They went to Billy Chicago’s place across the compound, near the road. Billy was off somewhere, but his old mother was always home, sitting in her big cane chair just inside the door and looking for somebody’s ear to eat, waving at bugs and neighbors with a big dirty rag. “Morning!”—“Afternoon!”—“Evening!”—Ms. Chicago always called out of the darkness. But people never stopped unless they wanted liquor, or had a medical problem.

  “Afternoon!” she said to Belinda and Towanda.

  “Como esta?” Towanda said.

  “Oh,” Ms. Chicago said, “just yer basic. You hanging you tits now,” she said to Belinda.

  Ms. Chicago’s radio said, “Un programa bilingue de Cubaradio empezara dentro de cuarenta y cinco minutos. A bilingual broadcast of Cubaradio will begin in forty-five minutes. Por favor invite a sus camaradas a escucharlo. Please invite your comrades to listen.”

  “Be a radio time soon,” Ms. Chicago said with satisfaction. “We got two penny for wine,” Belinda said.

  “Miz Chicago,” Towanda said, very worried, “Belinda got a dureza in she left tit. Look like a dureza of the kill-me.”

  Ms. Chicago was delighted. She knew all about medicine. “Dureza de vientre, dureza de teta,” she reminded them—a way of saying that if you were a constipated kind of person and hard in the guts, you were bound to find a tumor of the kill-me in your breast one day.

  “Who say I dureza de vientre? My reputation all strangle up around here,” Belinda said.

  “Reputation ain’t fix the kill-me, girl. You better throw your misery down on your shrine, es the only thing to help it.”

  “I never have make a shrine. Es just a lot of foam, that religion.”

  Ms. Chicago looked at Belinda out of a face too squashed by the weight of years to show what she was thinking. “Ain’t gone be foam when you lay down all cover up with tumors burning loud as the sun, girl. You gone holler, Kill me! Kill me!”

  “Not today,” Belinda said, but she had to sit down in the doorway.

  “Tell me the last thing you lost,” Ms. Chicago said, “or the last thing you found.”

  “I lost a dog-tooth here,” Belinda said, pointing at the gap in her mouth.

  “That’s it. What you see?”

  “Nada. Didn’t see nada.”

  Ms. Chicago wiped the sweat from between her breasts with her grey rag. “Think now, girl. Don’t you thought some kind of thought when you lost that tooth?”

  “Only just a small one,” Belinda said.

  “Tell me,” Ms. Chicago insisted.

  “I thought about a big whale eat me up, like my dog-tooth es the last tooth in his mouth.”

  “Oh!” Ms. Chicago said with a tone of great respect. “That’s good!”

  “That’s good, Belinda!” Towanda said.

  “How you know es good?” Belinda said. “You just wanna talk like Miz Chicago talk.”

  “Gimme that tooth,” Ms. Chicago said.

  “Es gone,” Belinda told her.

  “Es gone? Who gone it? Devil gone it?”

  “No, Senora, the Devil didn’t gone it—es me. I dig it down in the yard.”

  “What you said when you dig it down?”

  “Nada.”

  “Tell me. What you said?”

  “What you said?” Towanda asked he
r. “You said something? ”

  Belinda closed her eyes, tipped her head back, breathed deeply. “I say, ‘Mwe pa gene para sak pale pu mwe,’ ” she admitted.

  “Oh, yeah!” Ms. Chicago was overjoyed in her crackly, invisible way.

  “Que dice—mwe pa hen-yeh—what es?” Towanda said. She looked scared. She wrung her hands. “Don’t say those thing like that, Belinda.”

  “Mean, ‘I got no family to speak for me,’ ” Ms. Chicago said. “Es exact proper wording de la Voodoo. Go find me that tooth, Belinda. Maybe go be a loa para tu.”

  “I don’t want no loa,” Belinda said.

  “Then why,” Towanda asked her, “you go round say magic on a tooth you lost? Oh sweet Saint Mary—Belinda, you have start it now.”

  “Girl, that’s right—you have start it now,” Ms. Chicago agreed. “Go bring me that tooth. Then we drink a little potato-buzz.”

  Belinda saw there was no way to stop it. “I be back,” she told Towanda and Ms. Chicago.

  As she rounded the corner of Towanda and Leon’s, she found Mike wandering sideways on the path with an open mouth and a faraway look, dribbling urine out from between his legs. She hooked an arm around his belly and lugged him home. “What happen if a puppy bite you face?” she said, trying to remember where she’d buried the tooth. “Then you crawl under a leaf and bleed and nobody gone find you. I gotta dig out that tooth now.”

  The place where she’d worked the dirt was damp and easy to spot. She sifted the sand through her fingers and found her dog-tooth. The tooth was dry now, nothing more than a pebble that seemed never to have had anything to do with the gap in her mouth.

  “Now I gone leave you by the well.” She dragged Mike along by the hand so that his feet hardly scuffed the dirt. “You have make me be see by alia them skags,” she told him angrily.

  The crones at the well all had an exclamation to make or some smug thing to say about her new appearance, and they sounded like a mess of shells being beaten with a spoon, but Belinda was just too tired to let it all loose. She dropped Mike down among three or four other children and left without a word. The muscles in her neck and shoulders were so tight they felt cold by the time she got back across the compound to Ms. Chicago and Towanda with the tooth.

  “Radio time come in fifteen minute,” Towanda told her.

  “Don’t say nothing,” Ms. Chicago said instantly. “I feel you got the tooth. I taste the power of that tooth—es a loa.”

  Towanda said, “Go-head find out who es that loa. Please, Miz Chicago, Belinda got to know.”

  “I need two penny,” Ms. Chicago told them.

  Towanda dropped the two pennies into the lap of Ms. Chicago’s skirt.

  “I told you we go get wine from those penny,” Belinda said.

  “Psss, psss,” Towanda said, shushing her.

  Ms. Chicago grabbed the pennies in one hand and the tooth in the other. She held them so tightly the veins in her arms puffed up.

  In no time at all, Ms. Chicago entered a trance and said, “Es a bomb-pilot Major Colonel Overdoze got the power of Atomic Bomb to work for you, get rid of the kill-me and bring everything back but not the dead. If Fish-man not dead he coming back. Major Colonel fix it. If he dead he not come back. Both way you gone know.” She left the trance, and sat with her arms crossed in front of her chest. “Truth go set you fire make you well.”

  “Overdoze?” Belinda said.

  “Major Colonel Overdoze,” Ms. Chicago said. “Atomic Bomb pilot.”

  “Oh—oh—oh,” Towanda said. “That’s the most power of all.”

  “You got a power loa,” Ms. Chicago said. “Most power of all.”

  Belinda looked at her feet. “We bringed those penny for wine,” she told Ms. Chicago.

  “Now ain’t you glad you dug after this tooth?” Ms. Chicago said. “Truth go set you fire make you well.”

  “Why you don’t send Major Colonel for a expedition to Fiskadoro?” Towanda said.

  “That’s all turn backward,” Ms. Chicago corrected her. “Loa don’t make no expedition on a dead—Saint Expedit send a dead on the expedition to a living.”

  “Fiskadoro ain’t dead,” Belinda interrupted, “plus also we bringed those two penny for wine, Miz Chicago. Es a mistake about those two penny. Towanda, why you go buy shit with my penny when I didn’t say you go-head buy shit with my penny? Es a mistake. My mouth gone talk about my penny,” she explained to Ms. Chicago. “Es Towanda mouth talking before.”

  “You very turbado,” Ms. Chicago said. “I gone give you two penny of wine because of you upset and I too scared of your loa. That’s a power loa.”

  “Deal. I gone live with that,” Belinda said.

  Ms. Chicago opened the cabinet with a key she kept belted around her belly on a little chain, and took out a two-penny jug of potato wine.

  The three of them stood out front where the air might help keep their heads clear. Belinda watched their shadows, made crooked on the corrugated wall of the quonset hut, hanging their tits and passing the jug.

  Before long, Belinda said, “My head just ain’t clear. Potato-buzz ain’t make me happy today.”

  The radio inside said, “Un programa bilingue de Cubaradio empezara dentro de un minuto. A bilingual broadcast of Cubaradio will begin in just one minute. Por favor invite a sus camaradas a escucharlo. Please invite your comrades to listen.” They passed the green jug. “This potato-buzz burning up inside my stomach,” Belinda told Ms. Chicago and Towanda. “I don’t want no more.”

  “Entre menos burros, mas elotes,” Ms. Chicago said, taking a big swallow—among fewer mules, more corn.

  Suddenly she gripped Belinda’s hand, and Belinda thought the old woman had gone weak and needed help to stand, but Ms. Chicago said, “Feel me aqui, girl,” and shoved Belinda’s fingers up tight against one of her shrunken breasts. “You feel that dureza?” Ms. Chicago’s breast felt hotter than Belinda’s hand. In the meat was a tiny pebble. “I felt her time when Billy’s first son come. Now Billy’s son about tall as me, but my loa keep on controlling la dureza.”

  The radio inside said, “Es Cubaradio bilingue. This is bilingual Cubaradio. En la proxima hora, le deleitaremos con la popular e inspiridora musica Cubana. For the following hour, we will entertain you with some of Cuba’s popular and inspirational music. Ustedes, los radioescuchas, viven bajo la protection del Gobierno de la Habana. You who are listening live under the protection of the Havana government. Las guerras terminaron, el pueblo es libre y la vida sigue adelante,” the radio said. “The wars are over, the people are free, and life goes on.”

  Above the sink in the kitchen Belinda kept a photograph of snow, a very old postcard showing the naked tangles of a bush which, for all she knew, never had any foliage except this white stuff daubing the tips of the twigs like blossoms. Next to the bush stood a black pedestal holding up the black stone figure of a bird. In the picture’s foreground, one icicle dangled from a dark branch.

  Belinda had no reason for keeping the photo. It was just there, above the sink, in front of her face, that was how that story went. She spent no small amount of every day in its presence. She’d heard about snow but had no clear understanding of who made snow or what snow was supposed to do.

  Tilting slightly and banging her elbow against the sink, she took the picture down from its nail and rested it on a cypress stump in the dank closet where precious or useless things were kept: boxes of her trinkets and some clothes she never wore, a rifle that wouldn’t fire, some bullets that probably wouldn’t explode, some books full of crumbling pages that had somehow escaped being burned in the cold time; and Fiskadoro’s clarinet in the briefcase called Samsonite. She propped the scene of winter upright against the wall and laid before it the supercharged loa, formerly just one of her dog-teeth.

  When she opened the briefcase called Samsonite, she found the clarinet in pieces—who made it broken? She stood the pieces in a circle, around the yellow tooth, before the picture of snow. One piece woul
dn’t stay upright, and so she laid it out in a position she hoped was pleasing to the loa.

  Maybe she didn’t completely believe in these things, but she saw how the loa Major Colonel Overdoze was gracious and kind, putting in her head, whether she believed in him or didn’t, one comforting thought: not today. If she grew the tumors of pain until they held her down to the bed, a hundred kilos of tumors of fire, and she begged in a tiny voice to be killed, it wouldn’t happen today. And today was a big place that held everything inside of it—the Keys, the sea, the sky, and the outer space of stars. Today didn’t close around her throat like all the other days.

  I seen three shadows on the dirt, she prayed, shadows out of three us old womens hanging our tits and passing the potato-buzz like they all do, me too. Now I getting bit by religion, she prayed, putting in a shrine and praying on a loa like they all do, me too. Atomic Bomber Major Colonel Overdoze, take out this tumor of kill-me and bring my first-born back.

  YOU’LL BE BETTER BEFORE WE GET THERE,” William Park-Smith promised Mr. Cheung, but Mr. Cheung, himself, guessed that he would expire of this bottomless nausea sometime in the next few minutes, and felt certain that at the very least he’d still be quite seasick when the boat reached Marathon. He hardly ever traveled by water. He hardly ever traveled at all. What he liked to do was to stay in his house, whose chief attraction in his mind at this moment was that it never moved. The Catch, the diesel-engine fisher on whose deck he was trying to keep his balance among several other members of Twicetown’s Society for Science, demonstrated a bewildering repertoire of motions: side-to-side, up-and-down, and horizontal—east by northeast, and now dead north—along the Keys toward Marathon. Generally the vessel hugged the shore because a storm threatened and the sea, as Mr. Cheung felt compelled to testify, was rough. They passed along the gap between Summerland Key and Ramrod Key, where two frayed sections of the highway called US 1 had given up reaching across the distance to one another and fallen down asleep in the water. People riding on the ferry-raft between the two islands shouted at the Catch and gestured happily, and one man took off his shirt and waved it around above his head, but their cries of greeting were lost in the wind.