Fiskadoro

by Denis Johnson

  THE DAYS WERE COOLER, generally grey or sometimes overhung with tremendous white clouds whose shadows traveled the Gulf, and yet the dust on Towanda’s breasts and shoulders was mapped with perspiration when she came to see Belinda. Towanda carried a penny jug of potato brandy, a crumpled aluminum can faintly bearing a bleached design.

  Belinda didn’t get up from her chair. Her eyes were sunk deep in brown circles, and the rest of her was the color of stale fish-meat.

  Towanda smiled at this sick woman and nodded in an encouraging way. But when Belinda had swallowed some brandy and was passing back the can, her struggle was so great and her movements were so weak that Towanda gave up trying to look happy and just sat there wishing everything would go away.

  Belinda noticed how her neighbor wiped the mouth of the can with her thumb before taking a swallow.

  “You-all gone have to burn me up,” Belinda said.

  Towanda’s face was twisted and her voice came out in whispers and squeaks. “Yeah,” she whispered. “You got it.”

  “I on fire already sometime,” Belinda told her. “Sometime he run down me like letric, sometime he coming up shoosh, like kerosene.”

  “You hurting alia time yet?” Towanda whispered.

  “Sometime, not alia time.”

  “Es ain’t over yet.”

  “Oh, no,” Belinda said. “I got a little time. Nothing gone happen today.”

  “But he getting a little worse and a little worse?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Belinda said. “He getting worse.” Suddenly the salt tears poured out of her eyes. “He taking me all the way, Towanda!”

  “Oh, God, Belinda!” Towanda wiped her eyes and nose with the back of her hand. “We gone have to burn you up!”

  “Got to,” Belinda said. Her head shook with weeping.

  “Yeah. Got to. Real life,” Towanda agreed.

  They passed the can of brandy. Belinda coughed and started laughing, even as she wiped her own tears away. Towanda couldn’t help laughing too.

  “Make me feel stupid be laughing,” Belinda said. “I don’t know why I laughing now.” She laughed harder.

  “Me too, you know!” Towanda shouted, and they were both taken so relentlessly by laughter that they could hardly draw a breath.

  SHE AT FIRST PRAYED and then gave up praying to Atomic Bomber Major Colonel Overdoze, the most powerful loa of all. Fiskadoro didn’t understand, and he didn’t care. He just wanted to be right there with her, seeing whatever she was seeing. She got wild in her talk eventually: Major Colonel Overdoze did what he wanted. Major Colonel Overdoze gave back her son, but all cleaned out inside like a baby. Major Colonel Overdoze wasn’t controlled by shrines—he could set the shrines on fire if he wanted. Major Colonel Overdoze didn’t take away the tumor, he made it bigger, and gave it children, and set them all on fire. The tumors covering her body hurt so much that Belinda was too surprised to yell. She tried to find a comfortable position, but the sensation, which she said sometimes ached and other times seared her bones, kept after her. She twisted and turned to get away from it, covered herself up to hide from it, flung herself around in the bed to shake it off, but it held her like hooks, rolled over her like water, fell down on her like sparks. She said it never stopped. Atomic Bomber Major Colonel Overdoze kept turning it up higher, until she knew she wasn’t feeling it, but seeing him, closer and closer, brighter and brighter, and she couldn’t close her eyes. Major Colonel Overdoze didn’t need a plane to fly, or bombs to burn away the shrines that tried to control him. Without any hands or fingers or eyes, without even a mind, he could turn it up higher and higher until it couldn’t be anything, not darkness, not light—it could only be him.

  When the neighbor-ladies started bringing her potions to drink for the hurt, they told Fiskadoro the time was getting near. She didn’t scream or cry about the pain anymore, but she looked out from farther and farther back inside herself every day and didn’t seem to believe any of what she saw.

  Fiskadoro kept watch by her bed and held her hand. He didn’t care if he caught it, and sometimes he hoped he would. He was aware he was getting a little crazy about it. People did that in this situation. He cried a lot, and he got mad enough to kill. But the whole time there was something about it, as if he and the woman were going through all this right in the middle of the sun and not being burned. When she died it was the middle of the night; his brothers were asleep, the village was asleep, but the sea was awake and Belinda was awake, and her oldest son was awake, holding her hand as he sat beside her bed.

  The sweat began pouring off her. She asked for the pan several times but then discovered she didn’t have to make water. “Jimmy! Jimmy!” she said. She started talking to others who’d gone there first—her mother and father, her older brother. “I don’t hurt no more,” she said. She took a deep breath; and then she died.

  SEVEN

  ON THE DAY THE ISRAELITES CAME FOR HIM, Mr. Cheung was ready with a hundred objections, and he seriously planned, as soon as he saw them, to start listing the many good reasons why he couldn’t go with them today, or ever.

  Flying Man and the two young savage boys flanking him in Mr. Cheung’s doorway were smiling and serene—much, much more calm and contented than he’d imagined possible.

  “News come,” Flying Man told him right away.

  “I thought so.”

  “Dat news when say today.”

  “Yes,” Mr. Cheung said, completely terrified. “I thought so.”

  “Bear good. Bear bear good.” Flying Man clasped his hands above his head. His goodwill and happiness were overpowering.

  In Mr. Cheung’s view the chief obstacle was that his wife Eileen was at the vendors, and he couldn’t leave his aged Grandmother Wright at home alone. “Most of the orchestra can’t come, I’m afraid. But Fiskadoro will be here soon, any minute.” He wrung his hands. “But I don’t think it’s a very good idea. My grandmother is here. She can’t be left alone.” He looked from one man to the next, over and over, in the weak hope of finding a face that shone with some small light of comprehension.

  “Oxra,” Flying Man told him. “Yah! News come.”

  Beyond them, Mr. Cheung saw several others, all striped with paint and hung with feathers, standing in the dirt street in front of his house.

  It wasn’t so much a fear of their wrath as a deep reluctance to make ripples in the pool of their contentment, finally, that kept Mr. Cheung from refusing their wishes.

  He’d made no preparations for this day, hadn’t mentioned it to the others of The Miami Symphony Orchestra, hadn’t said a word about it to anybody. The fact that Fiskadoro was coming here today was just a lucky coincidence—it happened to be the boy’s lesson day.

  Mr. Cheung hoped there wouldn’t be any kind of tragedy. He profoundly hoped that this ceremony didn’t involve the eating of raw meat, or sexual perversion, or some manner of blood sacrifice.

  “I think I would like my grandmother to come along, too,” he said. “Could we carry her?” He demonstrated by joining his hands together as if rocking a baby.

  Fiskadoro took the beach route down to Twicetown, clutching the briefcase called Samsonite to his chest. To his left was nothing but the beach and a thin strip of lowland tangled with cypress and brush. Beyond the brush, parallel to his progress and hidden by the growth, was the road to Twicetown. He was late, but he failed to hurry. He walked on the wet sand near the water, and kept turning around to see what his footprints looked like getting smaller and smaller behind him.

  Eventually he came to the place where paths led away from the Gulf over crude bridges of heaped rocks through the bog and into Twicetown. He’d walked this road with Mr. Cheung for one of his history lessons. His teacher had told him that the town—and in many ways, although several sections of it were lifeless now, it remained a town—had been known, in the other age, as Key West. But during the End of the World it had been saved twice and had earned itself a new name. A missile blew up like a firecracker, but a du
d missile only brought good luck.

  Mr. Cheung had explained these things to him, but he hadn’t yet told Fiskadoro where he was—if this was the land of death, a land that came after the land of death, or some other place entirely.

  After Twicetown’s more desolate section he passed along the edge of commerce and entered a gauntlet of vendors. They had a lot of things for sale, but Fiskadoro hadn’t been told yet if he was entitled to have any of them.

  At one table he recognized a boy named Sanchez, but he couldn’t remember the rest of the name. Before him on his collapsible table Sanchez showed off a pile of valuable items—scuba knives, combat boots, tennis shoes, watches, a set of three kitchen pans, one resting in another in another—waving over them the wand of a geiger counter that obviously had no power and counted nothing. People stayed away from him. Only a few allowed themselves to show interest, slowing down a little but not stopping.

  In this life Fiskadoro had seen Sanchez twice before—once on a morning after a party celebrating a baby’s birth into the Army, when he’d found Sanchez sleeping on the dirt of a path with sand crusted in the corners of his mouth and his nostrils ringed with dried blood; and another time, at the party celebrating Belinda’s burning, when this Sanchez had peed on the fire in front of everybody, and later fell in the sea and had to be pulled out. Sanchez’s mother had cried, and his father had driven him away and told him never to come back to the Army.

  Fiskadoro stood looking down at Sanchez and trying to remember his whole name.

  “Yeah,” Sanchez said, in a slick way that Fiskadoro disliked listening to.

  “You looking better today,” Fiskadoro told him. “Face ain’t dirty.”

  “Es ain’t what I ask you,” Sanchez said. “I ask you what you want, how much, and come on make a move.”

  Fiskadoro freed one hand from the task of holding the briefcase and knocked on the table as at a door. “What’s you name in the real situation?” he demanded.

  Obviously Sanchez recognized him. He was sober now, and a look of apology passed over his features. “My name Harvard Sanchez,” he said, and then, recovering some pride, he added, “relate to Los Desechados Sanchez family, even Leon Sanchez. He my father, Leon.” Harvard Sanchez looked at Fiskadoro, squinting his eyes as if Fiskadoro were down at the end of the street. “I don’t remember you too good,” Harvard confessed.

  “That’s because of I eat something make everybody forget me,” Fiskadoro explained.

  “Es ain’t what I ask you. I got buttons. How many you want?” He was referring to radiation-sensitive badges that made travel possible through the contaminated regions. He waved the wand of his geiger counter over a small pile of them that glittered like so many coins.

  Fiskadoro just didn’t like the way this man talked. He seemed to be issuing some kind of challenge. “I be going in someday. Not today,” Fiskadoro said.

  “Not today," Harvard Sanchez said contemptuously. “Today ’bout the last day. Quarantine end any minute. Bob Marley gone coming, Jah gone coming, everybody coming. Buy now.”

  “I mean it what I say. Soon.” Fiskadoro wished he was going into the contaminated regions tomorrow, so he could show this man just who, out of all these people, was ready for danger. He knew that anyone who saw the City became a great person. “Even tomorrow,” he said suddenly. “I be go tomorrow.”

  “Mañana!” Harvard Sanchez said. “Then you need buttons. How many? Come on. Everybody going la beach now. Big time today. Let’s go. Can’t wait. Buy now.” He gestured at the people going past. Everybody seemed to be headed in the same direction. All along the street the vendors were packing up their tables.

  “I got buttons mi casa. I got buttons,” Fiskadoro said, moving on quickly, almost against his will.

  He felt completely defeated when Harvard Sanchez shouted after him, “Fish-man!” Not least of all because it was his name.

  When Fiskadoro reached his teacher’s house he found a whole lot of Israelites, black people with painted faces and wild shiny black braids of hair—feathered and animal-skinned Israelites who didn’t know how to talk—carrying Mr. Cheung’s grandmother away in her red rocker. Mr. Cheung was directing and encouraging them cautiously. Fiskadoro stood in the street.

  His teacher noticed him and came over. “Fiskadoro,” he said.

  “Si,” Fiskadoro said.

  His teacher clasped his hands together over his belly, and then unclasped them and flung his arms wide. “These Israelites are going to have a ceremony. I’ve agreed that we’ll play some songs for them.”

  “We got the music,” Fiskadoro said.

  “Exactly, exactly. You understand.” Mr. Cheung looked a little ashamed of himself.

  The Israelites moved past them carrying Grandmother Wright in her red chair, three on each side. Grandmother looked straight ahead. Her feet hung down in thick blue socks.

  “We go play para tu,” Fiskadoro told the Israelites. He and Mr. Cheung followed along behind.

  The six Israelites carrying Grandmother Wright in her red chair didn’t seem capable of tiring, but after the group of them had passed beyond Twicetown, with the old woman floating in their midst and Mr. Cheung and Fiskadoro trailing them closely and nearly every vendor following also in a spontaneous parade, the Orchestra Manager found space for his grandmother on a mule-cart, and they put her aboard.

  Grandmother faced out the back of the cart, rocking to and fro with each step of the burro, and she clutched the arms of her chair as she had clutched the side of the bunk on the boat that had saved her from the waves nearly ninety years before, as she had clutched the metal side-rails of the stretcher on which she’d been unloaded from the boat, and as she had clutched the higher railings of the bed she’d failed to sleep in at the naval infirmary at Sangley Point in the Philippine Islands.

  Today was one of her clearer days. She was recalling these things on purpose—flinging herself onto these memories as onto a solid place while wild men followed her onto the beach—because the Ocean’s smell and the sounds of water were too much for her. It was better to recall in her mind a terror that was finished than to face, in some confusion, these salt waves and their very doubtful intentions.

  The Israelites knew the proper place. It was only a few hundred meters downshore from their tiny village, a miscellany of lean-tos surrounding their wrecked vessel. They stepped hard, three or four of them, on the rear of the mule-cart and tipped it toward the sand, taking hold of the rocking chair. They set down Grandmother Wright with a thump before the mud flats some distance from the action of the waves.

  There were more people here than Mr. Cheung had ever seen in one place at one time. Possibly, everyone was here. His wife Eileen had come along with the mob of vendors who’d left their tables behind and hurried here to watch and sell nothing. Eileen gave him a kiss and wandered off. At one point or another he saw every member of The Miami Symphony Orchestra, but they all pretended they didn’t see him. At least two dozen fishing boats sat where the outgoing tide had beached them, all in a row with their anchor lines sprouting from the mud, and most of the Army population seemed to be present. Fiskadoro’s two little brothers were here, the smaller one riding the shoulders of the larger. Mr. Cheung thought he saw Fiskadoro’s mother, but then remembered that she’d passed on. The bodyguards employed by his own half-brother, Martin, appeared and disappeared on the edges of the crowd; and Martin himself, and Park-Smith, also avoiding the two clarinetists, convened and dispersed in various corners of the gathering.

  Only Mr. Cheung and Fiskadoro played for the Israelites. But far from being disappointed in the ensemble’s size, these savage people were all enthralled. They came around and for once stood quietly in one place, tipping their heads, closing their eyes, and listening as if this music came from far away, or as if they were remembering it fondly from a time in their lives more sensible and beautiful than this one.

  The Orchestra Manager and his pupil played improvisations based on the Sidney Bechet exe
rcises. Fiskadoro played better than his teacher: as soon as he tasted the reed with his tongue, he forgot himself and turned into music. The tide lay far out, and their songs flew over the mud flats and died above the small waves. After an hour, as they took a break and Mr. Cheung cleared the spit from his mouthpiece with a bit of cloth, he said to Flying Man, “Tell me, please, what this is all about.”

  Flying Man nodded his head and danced two steps, shaking all his feathers. “Bobbylon all over now. Time nex’ planet now—planet Israh-el!”

  Mr. Cheung saw that Grandmother Wright’s forehead was veiled with perspiration. He wished he could wipe it away, but all he had was the rag he’d already used to clean his mouthpiece. The town behind them was desolate, he was sure not a soul remained there. Still, he felt bad about bringing her here into the elements. He hoped his grandmother would be able to survive this experience.

  Grandmother was remembering the flight from Vietnam, and the crash that ended it.

  When the helicopter crashed into the sea the Lieutenant was the first, of those who surfaced, to go down, because he hadn’t taken his shoes off soon enough—he’d wanted to protect his feet from sharks. He’d exhausted himself trying to stay afloat with his feet in canvas combat boots with heavy soles. By sundown he’d gone under and untied the laces and let them go, willing at that point to lose his shoes, and his feet, if necessary, to live another minute, to draw a few more breaths. But it was too late to get any strength back, and before sundown he’d begun slipping under the waves, coming up coughing, moving his arms and legs around as eventually Marie had done at the end—not to swim, but to find a purchase, the solid place that was certain to be around here somewhere—and going down more and more often, until the new energy of panic was exhausted and he slipped away and didn’t come up. They saw him surface face-down some meters off, and Marie saw the body only as something she might grapple with to help her stay afloat, but she didn’t have the strength to go after it. He’d wasted his energy trying to keep his shoes—but it wasn’t his pair of shoes, or his fear of sharks, that killed him. He died because he wasn’t saved.