Fiskadoro

by Denis Johnson

  When he caught sight of Mother standing, somewhat dazed, beside a loudspeaker, he held up a finger to Eileen and then went over to help the old woman get away from the noise. “Don’t stand beside the speaker,” he told her. “Sometimes it makes vibrations to confuse your thoughts.”

  “You’re dead right about that one,” she said, letting him help her across the sand.

  Mr. Cheung considered her a part of his neighborhood—though where she lived, he had no idea—because the old Church of Fire stood close to his house and he laid eyes on it every day. “Can I get you a slice of melon, or some yellow fruit?” he asked her.

  “No way. My stomach feels all backward.” Clutching his wrist, she settled herself to sit on the beach. “Wild business. I thought they blew all those electric things up,” she said. “They’re just a nuisance—did you hear that thing screech?”

  Mr. Cheung hoped she was finished talking, so that he could go away. “I’ll leave you now,” he said.

  “Do you know the goodness of Bob Marley?” she asked him.

  “I am against the forces that took the machines away,” Mr. Cheung said.

  “So is Bob Marley! I mean, not that he gives two shits for all that electric juice—but it’s the forces of destruction and the ways of backsliding down to primitive cave-people, that’s what our father Bob Marley is against.”

  “I have to go to my wife,” Mr. Cheung said.

  “You are one of those persons,” she said, “who got away with our pews when the Devil sabotaged our roof.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Keep it for now. But don’t you own it, you just sit on it. We’ll get us a roof one day—or a whole spang-new church!”

  Her enthusiasm made Mr. Cheung uncomfortable. “I treat your pew with kindness,” he assured her.

  “I’ll be up on that stage preaching soon as I find my feet. Don’t think I’m daunted. Don’t think it for a second.”

  “I’ll leave you now. My wife—” He knew he was being rude. His neck burned with embarrassment as he walked away.

  She called after him, “Don’t think I’m daunted! I’ll be up there hollering through that electric snake before too much longer!”

  Closer to the sound-show, he collided again with its blathering fusillade as it rocketed out over the sea and disappeared there, like everything else. He stood beside Eileen, who’d stopped dancing and now only swayed in one place as did the others, letting the music pierce her through. This music was good now, this was Dylan, the great poet of the times of hard rain:

  You know sometimes

  Satan

  Comes as a man of peace . . .

  Mr. Cheung tried to fix himself somewhere at the edge of the crowd, to the left, to the right, back ten steps toward the sea, where he might be able to hear the words. But he stopped listening and only wandered over the sand stupidly, like a puppy who’d been smacked on the ear. I suppose, he spoke inside himself, that I’m very much like Mother. But he could hardly make out the tone of his own ruminations inside all this head-hammering rhythm. History, the force of time—he was aware he was obsessed in an unhealthy way with these thoughts—are washing over us like this rocknroll. Some of us are aligned with a slight force, a frail resistance that shapes things for the better—I really believe this: I stand against the forces of destruction, against the forces that took the machines away.

  Against the forces that had taken Fiskadoro away, the forces that would also keep hold, forever, of the boy’s clarinet.

  “Our father Bob Marley a-coming to take us home!” True to her promise, Mother was back on the scaffold with the microphone, and the music had ceased. She held the instrument carefully and kept her head away from it so it wouldn’t whistle. “But I was a-talking back there about monkeys, which is going to be us, like the science said.” She was still winded; the breath from her nostrils pulsed heavily through the speakers and made it seem she was crying out in the middle of a hurricane. “My cousin was a scientist, and for what I know, my cousin still is a scientist, my cousin’s hiding away down in a hole somewheres still inventing the dynamics to get to the moon. I mean to talk about faith! I’m so full of the Spirit—wait now, let me get the thread of this that I want to tell you.” The crowd of Twicetowners, drunks and dogs excluded, all watched her with the same curious goodwill with which they’d attended Mr. Cheung’s speeches the time he’d run for Mayor. They felt, Mr. Cheung believed, that the person on the stump was watching them: that they were on display, and not the other way around.

  He’d lost his place in this sermon; now Mother was calling out, “The scientists said we had a billion stars, and we believed, and we had a billion stars—”

  The way Mr. Cheung looked at it, everything that counted was being moved out from under them by these forces. Even, also, the boy Fiskadoro’s clarinet. Fiskadoro had been gone long enough, now, that he would obviously never come back; but Mr. Cheung hadn’t been able to get the mother, and the cousins, and the myriad other relatives, to give up the dead boy’s clarinet. Little by little all the coins, and the books, and the musical instruments, and also the musicians, were sucked down into the rocknroll of destruction. Goodbye!

  “—and if we believe, only believe, that we are people, and that Bob Marley a-coming to take us home—” The woman’s eyes were rolling up in her head. The microphone trailed from her hand and dragged, creating thunder, on the wooden planks of the scaffold.

  Mr. Cheung hoped that the deranged Israelite boat-builders, to whom his back was resolutely turned, these people who thought they had an agreement with him, were as basically muddled as this old Baptist sorceress. Under the pretext of scratching his shoulder, he threw in the Israelites’ direction a quick glance that gave him no comfort at all. The tide was creeping toward them and the air was full of words, but the dozen or so Israelites at the water’s edge applied themselves to their drill as busily and as certainly as insects.

  Fire had come into Grandmother’s life. For the big stove in the kitchen Mr. Cheung had acquired a new door, one with a glass window in it, so that as the cooler season came on she had something to look at from her station nearest the heat.

  The moments turned back and forth patched with blank spaces, people appeared and disappeared right while she watched them, visits with old friends suddenly became interviews with these mystifying figures who might be her relatives and might be her captors, and her breakfast could easily turn into a pillow of burlap she was supposed to lay her head on for a night’s sleep to be accomplished, by her reckoning, fifteen minutes after daybreak; but in the deep red event behind the stove’s glass window the filament of time was never tangled, nothing had a name or a reason, everything was itself, and the things she would always know, even if you took her head away, even if you killed her, were confirmed: It catches, then burns, then blazes; it rages and sings, it wanes, it shifts and flares, it burns a little longer and then weakens, whatever it is, and goes out. But if you lay the small wood across it in the morning, it all begins again. The little girl came often to sit on Grandmother’s lap, and went away, and then came back grown larger and louder. It was the same thing. Whatever it was, it was happening now, today, all of it, this very moment. This very moment—now, changing and staying the same—was the fire.

  This morning she’d put on her white dress to go to Mass with her father. Pulling on her grey knee-socks, part of the uniform of Ste. Bernadette’s, her French girls’ school, she’d caressed her own thighs and spread her legs, feeling guilty but laughing, and then on these same legs she’d walked six blocks down Dien Tin Street, holding her father’s hand, to the Church of Ste. Therese. They’d entered the cathedral, nodding to old Pere Georges, who stood by the doors recognizing nobody and greeting each one with a glazed friendliness, and suddenly Marie had found herself traveling all alone toward a huge aquarium filled with fire. Now she sat before the kitchen stove and drowned in the wet cement of old age, hardly able to lift her hands to her face. Grief tightened her chest and sh
e expected the tears to flow, but none came. The holes for tears were pinched shut, and her eyes were always as dry as two corks.

  A man and a woman came into the room and tumbled yellow and green fruit onto the table.

  After dropping the melons and yellow fruit onto the table, Mr. Cheung flexed his fingers and then rubbed the back of his neck, “I’m not the one to carry so many melons on such a long hike.”

  “How are you today, Grandmother?” Eileen said.

  The old woman turned her head toward Eileen, seemed not to recall why she’d turned her head, and said nothing.

  It had been fun to go out, hear a sound-show, watch the weird doings of the Israelites, but now Eileen was weary. The day still held too much time to get through and too many things to bother her. “Tony, we can just eat the fruit, okay? My back is too tired and weak to make supper. I figure out the hot sun ate all my strength.”

  Her husband wasn’t listening. He stood by the kitchen door and studied the dirt yard as if it were a book of words. She could see he was deep into his thinking. To bring him back she said, “Tell me the Constitution. Tell me the Declaration Indepension.”

  He took his mind out of the yard and looked at her. “Independence,” he said.

  “Go ’head, say to me.”

  “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation,” he told her.

  Eileen felt better as he settled into all these words. Whenever he told someone the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution it took the lines out of his forehead. Eileen often asked him for one or the other, because he was always thinking too hard. It frightened her, his habit of trying to keep the world in his mind, the whole world, to keep it turning in the space of his brain, from the start of time to the last day—that’s what brought on the terrifying fits—

  “. . . the establishment of an absolute Tyranny, with a capital T, over these States, with a capital S. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world. Period. Dash . . .”

  —explaining and explaining, working it all out in his head, coloring his attitude black, that’s what started the tiny cells in the brain popping and bursting—

  “. . . swarms of Officers, capital O,” he said, “. . . and eat out their substance . . .”

  —four times she’d seen her husband go down, his eyeballs switched off, only the whites shimmering in the sockets, and it had crushed her heart, it had twisted the very life in her, to see his body with the soul gone out of it, jerking like a decked shark. I’m gonna slice some fruit, she thought, and that’s all the supper there is.

  He went on and on without once having to stop and think. “. . . He has plundered our seas, ravaged our capital-C Coasts, burnt our towns . . .” He was coming to her favorite part, the part about the capital-I, capital-S Indian Savages. “. . . and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless capital-I, capital-S Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions . . .” These Indian Savages had eventually warred-out almost everybody.

  “. . . in the most humble terms . . .”

  Pretty soon he would get to the names. Eileen bit into the melon and only then realized how thirsty she was. She’d gotten too much sun. She dropped her slice of melon and covered her ears.

  “. . . FREE AND INDEPENDENT,” he shouted, “STATES.”

  Eileen wished he wouldn’t yell that part. She liked to hear him pull it out of his memory like a long necklace, every pearl the same. The Declaration of Independence was warm in her ears, and it soothed her to listen, just as it seemed a comfort to Grandmother that she could sit in this kitchen and look at the fire, chewing on something when there was nothing in her mouth, not even a tooth.

  “Hancock,” Tony was saying, “Button Gwinnet, Lyman Hall, Geo period Walton, Wum period Hooper . . .”

  But this afternoon the Declaration only seemed to rouse his feeling, and now he wasn’t telling them the Declaration anymore—he was complaining about the names again. “You know Mrs. Castanette in our orchestra? She only calls herself that because she plays the castanets. It is a fact that her name is Margaret Swanson. But her husband now calls himself Swanson-Johnson. They don’t see how they themselves are the ones who—who mangle the way of things.” He moved his hands as if gnarling up a bunch of string. “In the time when it was cold, we, my family, we burned our copy of the Constitution to get the fire going one day. Everybody was in despair, the children were coming out crooked, every tide left dead poison fish, nobody put out the boats, nobody could get together and say, Let’s keep the fires going in our stoves—I remember this, my father told me and I remember a little bit. Our family burned a copy of the Constitution and all the books to stay alive, but first they memorized the Constitution, everyone took two paragraphs, they clung to the ways they knew—they did this, Eileen, because it would keep them going on, step by step. It isn’t good, calling yourself Swanson-Johnson, as if a name is a joke. Next a word will be a joke, and then comes a time when even a thought is a joke.” Worry swelled the tiny veins around his eyes. He sucked short gulps of air.

  Eileen saw she hadn’t helped by bringing up the Constitution. “Tony, those veins around your eyes are getting big again. Please. Please, you finish worrying now, and get a happy face.”

  “Grandmother knows,” he said. He sat down at the table and looked at Grandmother. “Not in her mind any longer, but still she knows inside her heart. But the people don’t think, even the people with minds.”

  “I have to take a siesta,” Eileen told him.

  Later, when she woke up and came from the bedroom, Eileen smelled something bad in the kitchen and found that Grandmother had fallen asleep in her chair and wet herself.

  She went to tell Tony, because she always felt sick when something went wrong with Grandmother. It made her feel better, it made her feel less worried, to tell him about it and let him be the one to worry.

  Mr. Park-Smith was in the parlor with Tony, and they were both excited, sitting together on the church pew and talking low.

  “Grandmother wet herself,” Eileen told them.

  But Tony just said, “Yes, yes, I know,” and then said to Mr. Park-Smith, “Let’s walk,” and together the two men left to go walking through the dusty neighborhood.

  Fidelia came back from the neighbors’ and helped Eileen clean Grandmother with a cloth, lifting the black dress and trying not to look.

  They ate. Eileen sliced out tiny pieces of melon, and Fidelia pushed them gently between Grandmother’s lips.

  “Father coming,” Fidelia said—she always heard people coming when nobody else could hear.

  He was without Mr. Park-Smith. Eileen didn’t like the way he looked.

  He was pale and shaken, and she felt his fear and tasted something sour in her throat. “Did you go down? Tony? Tony, Tony, did you get a fit?”

  He was all balled up in his thoughts again, thoughts that were making him tremble and turning the blood white under the skin of his face.

  “Tony?”

  “I have to make a trip to Marathon,” he said. “There’s been some news from the Marathon Society for Knowledge. The Twicetown Society is going to have a journey.”

  ON THE SAME DAY THAT MR. CHEUNG learned he was going to make a journey—on that morning—as Belinda ate coconut meat off the shell, one of her dog-teeth fell out.

  She held the hem of her shift to her gums and cried about it as if this tooth were everything. In her mind she saw the tooth as gigantic, the last tooth in the mouth of an old, old whale who was eating her.

  She buried the tooth in the yard and said, “Mwe pa gene para sak pale pu mwe,” although
she kept no shrine in her house and had no friends among the gods.

  Afterward she found that automatically, when she said something to the baby Mike, she covered her mouth with her right hand to hide the black space. In this life crimes had come against her one by one, as fast as days, and now her husband was dead, her first-born was—not dead, you can’t call a boy dead like they were calling him till you had the dead shell!—but in any case Fiskadoro was gone, and Drake, her second-eldest, had left home, even if he lived only ninety meters away; and where she’d been daubing at her gums with the hem of her shift the cloth was all bloody.

  She left the baby crawling around the yard and saying, “Wuf! Wuf!” while she went inside to change her shift. Already it was after noon—where did the moments get away to? In the dark she hefted the shift above her hips and sat on the tick mattress and looked at her knees. Even flexed they showed wrinkles like gouges in a dry wood stump, one more thing to cry about. The wind and the Gulf were dead and there weren’t any sounds on earth but her breathing, and the coals clinking in the stove, and the wet heat pressing in against her mind. She drew the shift over her head and wiped away the sweat from her face, shoulders, armpits, and ran the bunched linen up between her legs and then between her breasts. Pillowing her head with it, she lay back on the bed and felt her nipples. They were as dry and distended as figs now, and sought after and used by nobody. Next to the left nipple she felt, in the meat of her flesh, a hard thing like a pearl that moved around under the probe of her finger. Her breath seized up, and she stared unblinking at the crosshatched palm leaves of the ceiling without a word in her head while the sweat leaked out of her hair and down behind her ears. I got to make a move, she thought, and then, as if somebody were doing it for her, she was raised up, and her legs took her to the doorway. “Mikey,” she said.