Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

Not far from Mr. Cheung’s house, Fiskadoro had to stop and get his strength. Where a wall had fallen in, he sat on a heap of stone with his head down on his knees and let the sobs shake him until he thought his ribs would crack.

This afternoon Mr. Cheung was alone in the kitchen of his house, polishing wood from which he made jewelry, one of his numerous sidelines. His half-brother, the great merchant, something of a pirate — a famous, almost legendary figure on the Keys, one of the founders of the Alliance for Trading — sometimes trafficked Mr. Cheung’s carved charms and talismans up the Coast. Mr. Cheung had developed his woodworking skill out of his attempts to manufacture such wind instruments as clarinets and oboes, attempts which had generally been said to come to nothing.

His tools and wood cluttered the family dining table next to the enormous black stove. There were pots going on the stove, and the air was unpleasantly hot and damp and dizzying with spices. Mr. Cheung wore white Jockey shorts and a scarlet bandana wrapped around his head to keep the sweat out of his eyes.

The door banged repeatedly out front, and a young voice bawled, “Manager, Manager, Manager!” The grief in it alarmed him. He left the kitchen and hurried through the dark empty front parlor.

When he opened the door he found his pupil Fiskadoro standing on the step. But for an instant he didn’t know who it was, because the boy’s face seemed to be falling to pieces. “Mr. Cheung, my father,” Fiskadoro sobbed, “my father, my father, my father! ” Mr. Cheung knew right away, as a person knows whether it’s day or night, that another marinero had been paid to the sea.

He stepped aside to let Fiskadoro in, and as he did so he held out his hand to the boy, who suddenly grasped it with both his own and bent over to put his forehead in its palm, a gesture neither of them understood. Mr. Cheung removed his red bandana; he wiped the dust and sweat from Fiskadoro’s face. “Manager Cheung, my father Jimmy Hidalgo is dead!”

Standing in the parlor, Fiskadoro threw back his head and screamed like a blown conch, emptying his lungs with a seamless cry of despair, filling them again, and then reiterating his misery.

The door to the kitchen struggled weakly in its frame and then opened. Mr. Cheung’s grandmother moved as if under the weight of a great stone into their company. Her hearing wasn’t very sharp, and Mr. Cheung guessed she’d probably mistaken the boy’s howling for the music of clarinets, for which she had a fondness. “Grandmother Wright,” her grandson said to her.

The sight of her interrupted Fiskadoro’s weeping. He stood still with respect for her unbelievably advanced age, taking ragged breaths, as she happened to be doing also.

“Grandmother Wright,” Mr. Cheung said to her again, and this time she appeared to hear him, “we aren’t having any lessons today.”

Grandmother Wright looked at him now, and with a shuddering movement hitched her black shawl more snugly around her shoulders. The long dress she wore was so old that at its hem it was decaying into dust. Although her face looked as if it might belong on one of the heads that some of the black people were believed to shrink down to the size of a fist back in the swamps, Mr. Cheung loved his grandmother more than anyone else alive, and loved her face most of all. From it issued a tone of voice as brittle and fragile as the ancient permanent-press fabric of her dress. “Bremerton, Seattle, Tacoma. are blown to shit,” she said.

When she talked like this, it broke his heart.

“Is Denver left?” she said.

“We’ll go into the kitchen,” Mr. Cheung said. He put his arm around Fiskadoro’s shoulders and guided him, slowly so as not to startle Grandmother, toward the kitchen. “We’ll go in the kitchen now, Grandmother Wright.” She turned around with some effort, seeking the door and yet surprised to find it there in back of her, and they all three entered the kitchen. Inside he sat the young boy and the old woman at the table, clearing away bits and shavings of wood to make a space for Grandmother’s hands, because she liked to keep a tight grip on the table’s edge.

Fiskadoro sat hunched over the table and cried softly, every now and then a sob shaking him like a hand. “They said I desert my mother,” he told his teacher.

Patiently Mr. Cheung stood beside the stove. When Fiskadoro chose not to keep talking, he opened the gate and threw in a couple of chunks of cypress root. He took the water pot off the woodpile in the corner, stepped to the back door, and called “Fidelia!” into the yard. His young daughter appeared there and he handed her the pot. “Get the deep, good water for us, please,” he asked her.

“He wash, wash away. He wash away!” Fiskadoro said.

“He was on the boat?” Mr. Cheung said.

Fiskadoro nodded. The kitchen was really just a shed attached to the house, and its floor was dirt. When he nodded, his tears fell between his legs and beaded the dust at his feet.

Mr. Cheung felt terrible for the boy, but everybody had to die. “Do you know that I have some tea?”

“Tea?”

“It’s a beverage from long before. From China,” Mr. Cheung said.

“I know about tea what it is,” Fiskadoro said politely.

“Fidelia is coming with some of the good, deep water from the well,” Mr. Cheung said. “Then I’ll show you how I make my tea.”

Grandmother Wright inhaled the odor of strong black tea that sweetened the kitchen’s climate of soy sauce and curry. It wasn’t anything like the tea she remembered, but more like the rotten tea leaves that had filled the garbage pails in the kitchens of her childhood — kitchens where the stoves had spiral-shaped electric burners on them that grew so hot their metal glowed orange. Stoves like that boiled a pot of water in only a few minutes.

Now she watched the pot for half an eternity, it seemed, while the young boy grew so weary with waiting he started to cry and cry and could hardly stop himself. He called her grandson Anthony Cheung, “Father, Father.”

Grandmother Wright was half Chinese and by now more than a hundred years old. She had the power to see through walls. It was a quite usual thing for her to bore with the smoldering chill of her vision through the center of the earth and the layered decades and to see clearly the face of Arnold Wright. Arnold Wright was her father. He had been a British importer of some kind. In honor of his memory she’d kept her maiden name all of her life.

On the day of his death, father and daughter had been living with her mother, Hua-ling Kaung Wright; and the little girl, now a sucked-out old woman with the face of a monkey and the skin of someone who had drowned, had been beautiful and hadn’t been called Grandmother, but Marie. The three of them had lived in Saigon, an Asian city that later took the name of a great Communist leader and then became a cipher in the cataclysm.

Whenever she imagined, against her will, that triumph of death over the world, the hordes of skeletons dragging the sacks of their skins behind them through the flaming streets, the buildings made out of skulls, the empty uniforms coming inexorably through the fields, the bodies of children stuck full of blast-blown knives and forks — the bottom of everything, the end of the world, a grey blank with nobody to remember it, the vision described, passed on, preserved by no one —it was in that city that she saw it, in the city of her father’s death.

And it was on the day when her father took his life — shot himself with a shiny automatic pistol no bigger than his hand — that she marked the end of the world as having begun. As a matter of fact, however, only that small war, between the Americans and the Vietnamese Communists, was turning toward its end on the day of her father’s death. Their downstairs neighbor, Mme. Troix, a frail, sleepless Frenchwoman who lived alone, came to their door wearing only a sheer black slip and fanning herself violently against the heat with a little round fan, to drip with sweat and say out of a strained face that more awful rumors, too unthinkable not to be true, were swarming around the American Embassy. This, she insisted, was the finish. They must all get out of the city, take themselves back to Europe, to China, to Britain — to any place that wasn’t falling apart.