Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

Standing with Marie in the parallelogram of light that fell through the hangar’s entrance and turned the greasy asphalt so intensely silver that their legs were invisible below the knees, Captain Minh pointed to a DC-3 that was landing. “Danang plane,” he said.

She didn’t quite grasp what she was seeing; it seemed that shredded humans — arms and legs and half-torsos, the torn-off parts of citizens and even, as the plane landed across their line of sight, even the uniformed parts of dismembered military people — were stuck to the landing gear and dangled from under the wings. Then it was way down the runway, moving far past the terminal building to stop near a group of minuscule figures at the runway’s other end. Jeeps and a luggage cart and people who seemed to come from nowhere, running at top speed, left the terminal area and raced in pursuit of the plane.

And as soon as the Lieutenant had the helicopter out of the hangar and Captain Minh had positioned himself at the controls, a swarm of weeping, shouting people, most of them wearing military or airport-personnel uniforms, began clambering all over it. The Lieutenant gave Marie a hand on board, making way for her by kicking one man in the chest and then suddenly, when he was unable to dislodge another from the doorway, unholstering his sidearm and shooting him in the face, an incident that would return to her over and over, both waking and dreaming. Yet once the blades began turning and the three of them were on board, neither the pilot nor the Lieutenant paid any heed to the people crushing themselves through the doors. The Lieutenant busied himself replacing the spent bullet in his revolver. Captain Minh concentrated on the levers and dials before him as if closeted alone with certain problems of aviation. Panting and whimpering strangers crammed against their backs, and Marie felt what might have been someone’s mouth on her neck. Complaints of discomfort became screams of terror barely audible in the roar of the blades as the helicopter moved along only half a meter above the runway, pursued by faces, and after a long time rose up trailing strings of humans who clutched one another by the pants, the shirts, the ankles, dragging each other down and falling to the asphalt beneath. Still there must have been more than a dozen people in the helicopter with them, those by the doors still helping aboard the ones who clung by their fingertips to whatever might be clung to — the edges of the open ports, the skis of the landing gear, even the barrels of the machine guns protruding from either port. The load was so great that the helicopter hardly cleared the shacks beyond the airport, but as it gained speed and lurched once, then twice, finally unburdened of people who couldn’t hang on any longer to the skis, it took to the upper air. Captain Minh was a savior shining in his own drugged eyes as he lifted them all above the war, and they left that world behind.

Whoever was saved that day was saved, though many of them were lost again only a little while later, and all of them were lost now but Marie.

It seemed to her that she very often had to endure more now, as an old woman, than she’d had to endure then. She dragged herself from bed into the kitchen and toward her grandson’s music through crowds of voices and long streamers of pain. Whatever room she escaped was always a war in itself, a harried landscape that could at any second be blasted out from under her, revealing a world made of memories, most of them more real than these shifting walls.

And now she was being led out of the hospital at Sangley Point — no, no, toward the red rocking chair in the parlor where she’d been all her life. The Officer’s Club smelled of spilt liquor and re-run smoke. The Rolling Stones made one layer in the layers of voices: “ This coat — is torn — and frayed / It’s seen — much bed — der days. ” Outside the gates of the Sangley Point Naval Base she looked down the road of whorehouses and cheap shops of Cavete City, P.I. Somebody said, “Sige!” and a carabao nearly ran her down in the street, pulling a wooden-wheeled cart at a rate slow as its glazed eyes. In the country of her father’s death they called them water buffalo, giant living barges with dark elephant tusks set on their heads sideways and curved back, and the same impenetrable hide as an elephant.

She was standing here in the road to the Saigon Airport. She had never seen these things before, the deformed offspring of the Rolling Thunder: Napalm’s stumps and Napalm’s obliterated eyes, at least a dozen of them, several so extensively cauterized they had to be pulled along in this cart by this water buffalo walking in its sleep. Others, those who could walk, trailed the cart. A white missionary woman herded them along, very red in her cheeks, huffing and puffing, unbalanced and hopeless. Marie backed out of the way. From a faceless face one black pupil of an eye, like a marble in a puddle of fat, took her measure.

Captain Minh was screwing together a carbine; he checked its sights, placed the barrel in his mouth — Jagger goes, “Thang you — for your wine — California / Thang you — for your sweed an — bitter fruit ”—placed the barrel in his mouth. her grandson began to play the oboe. He’d made it himself from bamboo. Even in the simplest melodies, the notes cracked into falsetto like the voice of a sobbing teenage boy.

Fiskadoro had to stay the night because in darkness the roads were unsafe. Mr. Cheung kept his children out of the parlor and made a place for him. He brought Fiskadoro a folded curtain to use as a pillow or a blanket in the hammock of fishing net. He walked around the room with a leafy twig of oleander, slapping at mosquitoes. “Everybody dies,” he told Fiskadoro.

“But es wrong for Jimmy,” Fiskadoro said with bald conviction.

“I know. I know,” Mr. Cheung said. It was true. The boy’s father had been too young.

“Do you know about my Grandmother Wright?” Mr. Cheung asked him now, pointing at her across the parlor as if she were far away. Evidently without regret for the past or concern for the coming night, she rocked in her red rocking chair, loudly breathing.

Fiskadoro shook his head. He was beginning to weep again. His throat would be sore tomorrow.

“Nobody really knows about Grandmother Wright,” Mr. Cheung said. “It’s not really for us to know. But she was in a war, I know, and she lost her mother and father, my own mother told me that. My mother, Carol Cheung, was her daughter. Carol Cheung told me this: When Grandmother Wright was running away from the war, she was in a helicopter, this is a flying machine with a propeller on the top, not like an airplane. And the helicopter machine fell into the ocean — not our Ocean, and not the Gulf, but the Pacific, the biggest ocean de todos — and the people had to swim, and swim, and swim, and one by one nine people sank down forever. The others went on a small boat that finally came.”

“Grandmother was on the boat?”

“She was saved from the Pacific Ocean. She and two others swam for more than two days.”

Fiskadoro was astonished to think of the old woman floundering indefinitely among the waves, stronger even than Jimmy — and then was more taken aback to realize she must have been young then; once she must have been a girl.

Mr. Cheung said, “My grandmother went to different countries. First to the Philippines, this is where she met some people in my grandfather’s family, and then eventualmente to America, this is where my grandfather lived.”

“Aqui,” Fiskadoro said.

“Aqui, in America, but far away. America is huge,” Mr. Cheung said. “I am an American. You, too. Jimmy was an American.” He was casting about now, trying to remember what it was he’d been wanting to say. “My grandmother went through different wars and different countries. Everything that she lost — it’s really gone, all of it, that’s true. At the same time, look at her! Think about her! She’s more than a century!”