Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

Cuando brille la luna

Yo se que no dormir, ah

Ni vie, ni you —

Ah, helgado el triste pasar

Cuando we are always separado,

Separado, separado.

For some who had loved Jimmy, and for others who were just suddenly feeling, on this occasion, what it was like to be alive, the grief kept burning even in the midst of their effort.

As the nets grew visible in the water, coming near, everyone’s excitement got the dogs going, and they bounded into the surf, nearly a dozen little mongrels, and snapped at the fish struggling in the mesh.

The Business and Generalissimo and El Tigre had brought in hundreds and hundreds of twenty-centimeter silvery fish whose multitudinous flip-flopping, when the nets were beached and opened, made a rainbow of mist in the air and a sound like the variable hiss of rain. In the face of this miracle the villagers behaved as if they’d never seen any fish before, exclaiming at the fact of them, prodding them with their toes, picking them up and peering closely at them. Fiskadoro watched his neighbors jealously and hated them for forgetting Jimmy’s death.

The men off the three boats moved in a group toward the grove of trees, leaving the nets on the beach to the possibilities of the tide, weeping openly about Jimmy Hidalgo. Fiskadoro walked with them amid a death-stench of seagoing things. He was glad that the new force of their mourning would start his father’s funeral going again.

Billy Chicago, a roadside merchant who lived on the other side of the village, dug up jugs of sweet and nauseating potato wine his family had kept fermenting under the dirt.

At first the gathering had no focus, because there wasn’t a dead body to be dressed and cried over and buried at sunset. But the wine caused them to sing more of the sad songs, first raised up in the voices of the men squatting out by the porch, and then in the voices of the women, thickened by wine and full of a sentimental love for the sorrows that made life real.

Fiskadoro felt as if he were deserting his mother, lurking outside in the company of the older men. But now, under the circumstances, he didn’t know how to be with her. It seemed he had never known. He drank too much wine and everything looked flat in his sight. He clung with one hand to the post by the door, but even that kept moving. The other men out front were the same.

He took a step off the porch, and suddenly he wanted to keep going. “I gotta get outa here,” he said.

“You mother inside,” Leon said. “Don’t desert her.”

Fiskadoro felt these words like hooks in his heart. But he insisted, “I going now.”

“You deserting you madre,” Leon said.

Maybe he was saying it for the ears of Towanda, who was standing on the porch now. “What’s he talking about going, Leon?” she said. “His mother inside here dying of the hurt.”

“I going to Mr. Cheung,” Fiskadoro said.

The name of Fiskadoro’s clarinet teacher should have stopped their mouths. But Towanda was confused and completely unimpressed. “You gone desert you own mother,” she said blackly.

“Big organizer!” Fiskadoro shouted. “Es ain’t you home. Es Jimmy's home,” he shouted, and suddenly aware that he could say anything, because his father was dead: “big fat-lady organizer!”

In walking the several miles to Mr. Cheung’s house he was safest on the beach, away from the road and any people not of his village, but he was already walking through the Army toward the road, and he didn’t know how to turn left or how to turn right on this afternoon of tragedy.

As he passed from under the trees and out of the compound, its vaguely choking musk of dampness and rotten fruit changed to dust in his mouth. The road was hot out past the shadow of the village palms. A thousand years ago, it seemed, he’d been dancing on West Beach, and he hadn’t slept since then. Purple triangles raced from the borders of his vision toward the center, splashing into invisibility.

The sun seemed stuck in one place above the glaring road. Fiskadoro sensed with panic that he, too, was staying in one place. He started to run, and once he’d started he couldn’t stop, faster and faster, until he was choking.

Now he could hardly lift his legs. He felt sick, his hands and feet tingling unpleasantly. When in a few minutes he’d caught his breath, he wept for Jimmy again.

There were others on the road, shirtless men toting straw baskets full of wrought plastic jewelry or wooden tools or scavenged items to be traded in the afternoon market at Twicetown, and women lugging bundles of vegetables, and the naked children who spent their days going up and down the roads looking for excitement. Here and there he saw hopeful families with straw mats laid out and some of their vegetables or handiwork displayed in ragged piles: potatoes, sugar cane, cucumbers, tomatoes; sandals of woven straw; rolling pins and large spoons and other such kitchen utensils; eye-catching pieces of mirror cut into letters, symbols, or talismans. They ignored Fiskadoro as they ignored all the others who passed them by. But he was on fire with feelings. He couldn’t understand why these people weren’t blinded by him.

As the road closed on Twicetown the ragged edges of more permanent enterprise began to show, palm-thatched kiosks where women held out bite-size chunks of spiced meat on pointed sticks, and roadside gambling games set up on wooden tables, where a young man like himself might pay a coin to send a marble bouncing down through a maze of nails into one of five slots, but never the winning slot, Fiskadoro had learned painfully, because the nails were rigged to prevent it, and one day he’d lost all his coins. And who had been alive then? He wept, and these things his father would never see again dragged across his sight like scarves.

Less than half a kilometer from Twicetown, a copse of banyan trees marked where the swamps put out a long thin tentacle of marsh from the mainland all the way down the Keys and as far as this road. Here, in the shadow of a tree, from one of its branches, hung the corpse of an alligator nearly three meters long or even longer — it was hard to say because its tail curled in the dirt — with its pale grey belly slit from neck to crotch. It was suspended by a short stretch of cable tied to either end of a rusty metal spike driven through its skull and coming out the soft throat. The people of the villages on the lower Keys, walking their careful barefoot walk, crossed the asphalt rubble of the thoroughfare to come near and look at it and see the former contents of its abdomen — a heap of entrails and a stump of wood the size of a person’s arm and a hefty swamp-tortoise in three only slightly masticated pieces — lying on the ground before it. But nobody stopped for any very close examination of the alligator because its slayer, a chanting Black wearing pants that were only khaki rags, stood next to it drooling through dust-covered lips and bleeding from wounds he’d dug in his own bare chest.

Fiskadoro looked at the tortoise and at the stump of wood, evidently a piece of cypress root. He made himself stay within the radius of the dead reptile’s stench, in the arena of the swamp-man’s crazy gaze, feeling a giddy nausea and the hope that maybe here in the alligator-killer’s rotten breath there was the power to change everything. They fermented things back there in the swamps. They drank the fermented potions and danced inside the fires and were never burned. They had eaten all the white people back there. They had drunk up all the blood.

He moved on, into the noontime funeral-carnival breath of Twicetown, the stalls and tables crowding either side so that now to leave the road was impossible. The asphalt here was in better shape, pieces of it flat enough to catch the sun and give up an odor of baking tar. He wished he’d left the road before the town had him. There was nothing he wanted here. The atmosphere was one in which something was being smothered in sleep before it could happen. Scavenged bits of cloth, trinkets made of nuts and bolts and pieces broken off of unidentifiable machinery, colorful pens without ink, parts of old cigaret lighters incapable of making any fire — these things were proudly and yet somewhat wearily displayed on the tables by the roadside merchants, most of them old women who fanned themselves with their hands, looking off to the east or west without curiosity.