Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

“Real life now!” Belinda cried as soon as she saw him. “Real life!”

He didn’t know what to do but take her in his arms.

“This is it,” she sang in misery, “this is it, real life.”

As long as she didn’t say exactly what it was, he could stand it. He just didn’t want her to say it exactly.

“Jimmy got drownded off the boat! She current—” She turned to Towanda Sanchez, squinting at her. “What was it about a current? I don’t understand about a current.”

“She corriente took him somehow,” Towanda Sanchez told Fiskadoro. “Nothing could stop him till he gone.”

Fiskadoro sat down at the kitchen table and cried as if something had reached down his throat and were pulling him inside-out.

When he’d calmed down enough to remember that his father was gone, it was like getting the news all over again for the first time.

Drake had come inside and was standing next to him. Fiskadoro felt terrible for him; he was only nine. They embraced awkwardly, Fiskadoro sitting on the stool and Drake standing up. Belinda stooped down to put her arms around both of them.

Towanda Sanchez was still there, and her niece Lizabeth, who’d been widowed herself at the start of the hot season. Another neighbor, Anna Wilson, was there, standing behind Belinda and kneading the muscles of her shoulders. A couple of other neighbor-ladies sat on the dislodged car seats in the living room. Fiskadoro could see that for them it was all a great occasion, because they all knew what to do — it wasn’t happening to them , it wasn’t twisting their hearts. He was too exhausted to think about them. But perhaps it was twisting their hearts after all, because the other women were crying now, too.

In the craziness of Belinda’s sorrow, a smile blasted out of her face as she wept, and then her face slammed shut. “The tiller knock him overboard,” Belinda said. “Did the tiller do it?” she said to Towanda. “Es the tiller, the tiller—”

Lizabeth took hold of both her hands. “Just know this. Know this,” she said. “He never go come back. Never!” Wailing filled the house.

Fiskadoro leapt in two strides from the room and onto the broken porch. The village was behind him, and before him was the Gulf, from which he knew — he was certain of it, certain — that his father would somehow return.

Three men off the boat were coming out of the trees toward the house. They were Towanda’s husband Leon, and her son, and probably the mate, Skin; Fiskadoro couldn’t see clearly because of tears.

As his father’s Captain, Leon was coming to pay his respects to the new man of the house. He brought the mate because the mate lived over in Twicetown and felt uncomfortable hanging around the Army by himself. And Leon’s son Harvard was along, too — not that Harvard was anybody, but it was time he experienced some of the bad side of a life on the sea.

Leon Sanchez was wearing a shirt at this special time, a colorful print dulled somewhat because he wore it inside-out to display the label. “Jimmy was a good man. But the tiller come around and kick him over. Come around por nada. No reason. Maybe,” he said, “a ghost. I don’t know what.” His shirt was open, and he kept wiping his hands on the flesh of his belly.

Harvard, a boy a little older than Fiskadoro, was sweaty in the face and looked sick. He nodded and said, “Hm! Hm!” as he’d seen thoughtful men do. “Jimmy was a good man,” Harvard said.

The mate, Skin, was quiet. He kept his arms crossed over his chest and looked at the weather above him and the earth beneath, back and forth. He was small and his black curls hung down in his eyes, just as Jimmy’s had. At this moment Fiskadoro hated him without cause.

Leon Sanchez asked, “Are the women in with you madre, Fish-man?”

“My name Fiskadoro.” He was aware that mucus flowed from his nostrils, but he felt he would demean himself by wiping it away. “My father is dead.”

The others nodded. Harvard gouged a depression in the sand with his toes and placed his heel in it.

“My father is dead!” As soon as he’d said it, Fiskadoro saw he’d made it true again — again for the first time. Did it just go around and around? He began to see that his sorrow wasn’t simple. It wasn’t one thing, but a thousand things carrying him away to the Ocean: the work of a person’s life was to drink it.

Empty of any words to make things right, the neighbors helplessly baked breads or cakes, or artfully arranged slices of fruit on precious china platters, and carried these offerings across a pink and blue landscape toward Belinda’s house as the sun came up. Even the older women, who generally wore pants or skirts of old burlap and went naked above the waist, this morning donned the white shifts of young women. Most of the men put on shirts, and those who didn’t, considering themselves unpresentable, stayed out in Belinda’s yard. The sun got higher. Sweat appeared on their mahogany faces. Eating and drinking, the mourners and those who would console them passed through patches of time in which Jimmy was completely forgotten, and then suddenly remembered and mourned again, with wails of fresh disbelief. Fiskadoro felt the feeling leaving him. He was ashamed — he must not care very much for his own father, if he could stand here on the porch and not even remember Jimmy’s face.

After a while, the other three boats came in from the Gulf. It was only noon; they were early. Westmoreland Wilson banged and banged the gong before his house at solemn two-second intervals, and the children of the village ran around clacking sticks against coconut shells.

The people of the Army felt ennobled to have to move through their sorrow toward the beach and take up the ropes of the nets. Everyone had to go, even the most miserable.

When they heard the diesel engines, they knew the catch was heavy.

At first a handful of men and women stood waist-deep in the shifting waters and pulled on the rope from the El Tigre, two hundred meters out. Then another group waded out into the sea to take the rope-end of the Generalissimo's net, handed them by one of the Delacorte cousins as he jumped off the starboard. The Business still lay some leagues out, but before too long the whole population of the Army, even the tiniest children and the very fragile elderly ones, was divided into three groups, each hauling on a rope from one of the boats.

Together they dragged the nets closer when the Gulf poured toward them producing one of its tiny waves, and together they resisted the sea’s attempts to take the nets back out in its vague undertow, crying with each straining effort to beach the heavy nets, “Fish- a! Fish- a! Fish- a! ” Whenever a couple of meters were won from the tide, the person at the rope’s end dropped it on the sand and walked to the head of the line to take up the stretch that had appeared from the sea, wet and shining in the sun, to reward their labor.

Even Belinda was among them, smiling shyly through her tears. Fiskadoro watched her, thinking nothing, as she forgot herself and chased ahead to the rope that emerged from the water, raising the hem of her shift and kicking her feet out sideways as she ran pigeon-toed through the knee-high tide. “Fish- a! Fish- a! Fish- a!” The sweat poured from Fiskadoro’s hair; the muscles in his back and down his arms ached at first, and then for a while burned furiously, and then went numb.

Some of the older people weren’t really pulling. They stood with their hands resting lightly on the thick ropes, sparing their hearts but lending their presence. Now their frail voices took up a song about sadness and love and the moon, an old one learned from the broadcasts of Cubaradio, and other voices aided them: