Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

The children stood around, too, waiting hungrily for their seeds to sprout into tall stalks of sugar cane.

“Little thieves going to come for this cane someday,” Mr. Cheung said to them, “but that’s all right. They won’t take the cane from inside the magic ribbon.”

“How long till it grow?”

“I told you. Maybe six months.”

“Still six month?” Their faces told how they’d been made fools of again by the counting and measuring of things.

In a minute the children were gone, and in another minute, Mr. Cheung sensed, everything that had just happened to them would be forgotten. Fidelia was climbing too roughly from Grandmother’s lap, and Grandmother complained without quite managing to make words. The parking lot in back of the house lay under a mirage of water on whose other shore the old Key West Baptist Church of Fire blurred and shifted. And the Army boy, Fiskadoro, was still here.

“Business now,” Fiskadoro told him.

“Who business?”

“I got a business for you,” the boy said.

“A business for me?” Mr. Cheung asked.

“All you say he like what I say. Why you don’t say what you say?”

“Excuse me,” Mr. Cheung said. “What I have to say is this: What the hell are you talking about?”

“Let’s go come on now la street door. I got a business for you, Manager.”

Mr. Cheung imagined that business must be a thing conducted on the front stoops over there in the Army. “All right,” he told Fiskadoro. He splashed some rainwater on his face from the barrel by the kitchen door. “I’m going for one minute, Grandmother.”

Grandmother Wright moved a word around on her lips and scowled at the distances before her. Mr. Cheung and Fiskadoro went around to the front of the Cheung house.

Mr. Cheung commanded the esteem of his neighbors, though like anyone else along the Keys he couldn’t have been called wealthy. His house was one of the fairly new ones here in Twicetown, built a few years before when the group known as the Alliance for Trading, in its brief golden era, had moved freight and revitalized some industrial areas north of the terrifying city.

The house was set down on a floor of tabletops from the cafeteria of the school across the parking lot and had no foundation. Where a concrete slab might have been poured for a front porch, damp boards of driftwood lay on the ground. On the door were pasted shiny letters saying MIAMI SYMPHONY ORHCESTRA and beneath them letters spelling out his name, A.T. CHEUNG. Under his name a sign of plastic wood affixed to the door said MANAGER.

Mr. Cheung bent over to examine an old briefcase labeled Samsonite, with a metal clasp and lock on it, which sat upright on one of the boards. The briefcase lacked a handle.

Fiskadoro reached around him and picked up the briefcase, holding it in both hands. The contents rattled as he moved it.

The Manager of The Miami Symphony Orchestra knew instantly, just by the sound of it, what was inside. “What do you have there?” he asked Fiskadoro. His mouth was dry, and he felt the tears coming into his eyes.

Fiskadoro set the briefcase on the ground, squatted before it, and began to fiddle with the clasp.

“Here, I’ll be the one,” Mr. Cheung said, but the child hunched his shoulders protectively and managed, apparently by sheer force, to undo the clasp. He raised the lid and Mr. Cheung looked at just what he’d expected to see, the five pieces of a disassembled clarinet.

“Where did you get this?” Mr. Cheung asked, not making a move. “I knew that sound. I knew you had one.”

“He belong mi father Jimmy Hidalgo. From a long time”—Fiskadoro gestured backward over his shoulder—“grandfather, grandfather, grandfather, like that.”

“May I see this clarinet?”

“Let’s talk business,” Fiskadoro said.

“Is your clarinet for sale?”

“Never happen no way,” Fiskadoro said. “I gone buy a lesson off you.”

“You want me to give you lessons?”

“I gone pay you.”

“How much?”

“Ten million,” Fiskadoro said.

“Ten million?” Mr. Cheung repeated.

“Ten million es I just said.”

“I heard you, Mr. Hidalgo. Ten million what?”

“Ten million. Ten million dollar .”

Mr. Cheung smiled broadly with understanding. “Paper!”

“Yeah paper! How could I gone carry ten million change down here aqui to Twicetown, Manager Cheung?”

“Do you have ten million in change, even if you could carry it?”

“Not today,” Fiskadoro said.

Looking at the clarinet, Mr. Cheung felt something like thirst. “I’ll give you a counter-proposal, Senor Fiskadoro Hidalgo. I’ll offer you free lessons — no money, no pay — free lessons if you let me keep your clarinet here in my house, where I’ll know it’s safe.”

“Never happen no way,” Fiskadoro said. “Chance in hell.”

“That’s nice and definite,” Mr. Cheung said.

The boy shut the briefcase and held it to his chest.

“Ten million?” Mr. Cheung asked.

“But I don’t go pay you today,” Fiskadoro said. “Later on, maybe tomorrow.”

“I agree,” Mr. Cheung said without hesitation.

When the boy had gone, Mr. Cheung went back to collect his seeds and his grandmother from his yard where the dirt still held the heat. He took off his white Jockey shorts and splashed water from the barrel all over himself.

Grandmother Wright was shifting in her chair with a fragile laboriousness that tugged at his heart. He could remember when she’d been active and impatient and sharp with little children. I would like to be where you are, he thought, to see what you’re seeing. I wish I could remember your memories.

Mr. Cheung believed in the importance of remembering. He could recite but couldn’t quite explain the texts of several famous speeches and documents. He kept up his repetoire by various mnemonic devices. For instance, although she meant nothing to him anymore and he would never see her again, he generally spent a little time each day remembering his first love, a young girl whom he now thought of as “The Fifty States in Alphabetical Order,” fixing in his mind the blurry image of her face and telling himself, It just went blam ! then he saw himself falling on his knees before here, which brought to mind the phrase I'll ask her, and he saw in his mind’s eye the track of her footprints leading into another zone , a region where there loomed a great ark filled with tin cans —and in this way Mr. Cheung recalled four states in their alphabetical order: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas. I’m calling for you (California), she’d been a colored woman (Colorado), but we weren’t a good connection (Connecticut). Metallic fields of wheat, fat thoughtless cows, angular and greasy cities like big machines — he’d seen pictures of these places that had once marched across all the maps. Grandmother Wright had grown up in them. Delaware; their own state Florida; Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada — New-Hampshire-New-Jersey-New-Mexico-New-York — North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia. all linked, in his memory, to a series of mental pictures, and each picture joined to the next in a chain of imagined sights and sounds reaching back toward the face of his first love, whom he thought of as “The Fifty States in Alphabetical Order” just to get the half-light of memory moving across the chain, name after name. Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming. Like almost everybody who’d survived what in those days was called the End of the World, Grandmother Wright had never said much of anything about it. It was Mr. Cheung’s understanding that these people had lived because they’d been too far away from the holocaust to witness it.