Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

Fiskadoro nodded and tried to look soothed. He knew that Mr. Cheung was trying to make him feel better, even if Mr. Cheung was failing. But Mr. Cheung had left the room.

He was back almost instantly. “From my yard, Fiskadoro.” His teacher handed him a stick of sugar cane longer than his hand. “It helps you to have sweet dreams.”

Her grandson Anthony Cheung helped her from the rocking chair and toward her bedroom off the kitchen.

Grandmother was sorry to have the concert end. Her grandson’s aimless tootling comforted her by bringing back the vision she’d experienced when surrounded by Muzak only minutes after coming to Seattle from Manila. The first thing her uncle had accomplished when they’d arrived in Chinatown on the bus was to take Marie out of the rain into an American quick-stop store, where the few bedraggled shoppers, most of them also Chinese, looked less actual and permanent than the blinding rows of goods. Her Uncle Kin-lau Kaung was a fine citizen of the Chinese-American community, a round-faced man always wearing a white dress shirt, grey pleated pants, and aqua-blue plastic loafers with tapered toes. He bought her a tube of toothpaste, two bars of bath soap, and some roll-on underarm deodorant, handing her each item to carry as he took it from its place on the shelves. At that moment Marie had no idea she would pass through much more — including a happy marriage, a long widowhood, and even the end of the world — before she reached the afternoon of her death many decades later in Key West, Florida. Here with her uncle in the quick-stop store she felt she’d reached an end, and she experienced a zeroing-in, a hallucination of purposiveness to her suffering, as if she’d lost her father and abandoned her mother, been raked across life after life, in order to stand here in the enamelling brilliance and receive these things.

Fiskadoro took his sugar cane out in front of the house, where Mr. Cheung’s little children would be less likely to spy it and set up a campaign of outrage. He chewed it, and it made the salt taste of tears in his throat go away. It was unbelievably sweet and delicious. His heart raced with love. As night fell, he stood in the street and watched the light leave the dust. The mosquitoes that came at early twilight raged whining all over the air, but up and down the dirt thoroughfare there was a silence coming. The voices of the neighbors died away. He sucked the sugar cane, letting the sweet syrup comfort his throat. As soon as the dark was thick enough that he couldn’t see the old school building in the neighborhood behind Mr. Cheung’s house, the bugs thinned out. Then the dogs started barking, far and wide. All over the world they barked, numerous as stars. His head rang and his sight whirled. He felt sleepy. The first day of his father’s death was over.

INO EAT! I NO SLEEP!” DARKNESS AND SWEAT. “I no brain! Rapto!” Fiskadoro danced in a perimeter of orange light that flashed off the thunderheads of smoke above the fires. He could hardly see the band of Israelite musicians playing their steel drums outside the jerking illumination of the dance-ground, but their banging and clanging rhythm took up all the room available in his head for sound. The sweat-shiny figures around him, crossed out continually by the shadows of smoke and the silhouettes of other dancers against the light of driftwood bonfires and the blazing kettles of radioactive fuel-oil, cried, “Rapto!” and so did Fiskadoro. “Rapto! Rapto!”

Though he could make out nobody really, Fiskadoro contrived in his heart to believe that everybody — all the others who seemed so oblivious — had an eye on him. He was nearly fourteen. He was changing, but the world stayed the same.

He was growing, but it wouldn’t make room. And yet in the sight of some people, it seemed, he wasn’t growing fast enough. The young woman known as Loosiana had said that she was too tall for Fiskadoro, or that he was too short — whichever it was, the news of her opinion had come his way as soon as he’d appeared on West Beach tonight. One of the steel-drummers, an Israelite boy who smoked marijuana leaves in a clay pipe and stiffened his hair with salt water so that it shot from his head like the fur of a scared animal, had made a point of mentioning it right away, as Fiskadoro stood apart from the others and waited for the sun to drown in the Gulf before the darkness and the dancing: “Hey, you know the gel Loosiana, mon, she say, ‘Fish-man too small on me!’ ” The young drummer held up his bottle of beer and measured off two centimeters of its neck with thumb and forefinger. He was drinking Silent Man Beer, each green bottle of which bore the hand-painted insignia of a winking human skull.

Fiskadoro felt the blood shoot into his face and hands. Had Loosiana really called him Fish-man? For weeks he’d been putting it about that his name might also mean Harpooner — and this was the truth, almost. That she’d called him Fish-man was insulting. He burned to know if this Israelite had Loosiana’s words exact , but he was afraid he’d make himself a fool if he asked any more about it or even if he spoke to this Israelite ever in his life again. It was still light yet, and he put his hands on the rim of a kettle of oil and looked at himself in the liquid, finding that he appeared there exactly as he felt — rubbery, dark, his face twisted. One of the bonfires was already burning; he grabbed a flaming brand and tossed it into the kettle, screaming, “Yaaah!” Nothing happened except that the brand was doused in the oleo. He pretended to himself that he’d been joking, hadn’t really wanted a startling explosion, it was too early for a lot of looney toons.

A good joke. People had probably been frightened. The sun fell, the sea went black, and the fires stood up amid the gaiety of people who would never be his friends.

Now, an hour later, he was psychotically dancing; and then suddenly he was tired of being Fiskadoro. He was finished. He was standing inside all this revelry with what he was convinced was a soul that had just died. It happened to him whenever he found himself in a crowd of people. He didn’t know anymore why he came here to West Beach.

He ran off down the shoreline, out of earshot of all the others, a collection of people his age or a little older, most of them from the Army, but many from as far away as Twicetown or even Marathon and, on the edges of the dancing that was just getting wild now after all the Silent Man Beer and Punto Beer, a few black boys and girls from the neighborhood of swamps and lowlands over the dunes — shy, curious, and dazzlingly aloof, the girls dancing with the girls, and the boys dancing with the boys.

Fiskadoro took a blow to the heart each time he caught sight of Loosiana, who was easily picked out even across this distance because of her tall figure and her unique personal decoration, a sky-blue plastic tube like the inner tubes for autocar tires, only this inner tube buckled around the front of her waist over her white shift, resting on her hips and making her look deformed. It was a scavenged device, a thing once intended to bring about weight loss in flabby people. The owner was supposed to fill it up with hot water. Loosiana was aware that it set her apart, and her willingness to be set apart was one of the things that drew everybody to her. She was so wonderful that he’d never spoken to her. He couldn’t guess how she’d found out about his yearning. There were a half dozen others who had the same effect on him.

The tide was going out, and the beach stank and lay there like a shield of smoked glass, upholding rank lengths of seaweed, empty shells, worn stones, dead urchins, skulls of fish, the bits and pieces deposited here for a while by the ocean in its endless rumination over these things it had collected. Under the half-moon’s cold light each object was mated to its blurry reflection. He was half a kilometer upwind of the others, but still he could hear them. He imagined himself going back. He imagined himself taking over the entire situation, riveting everything to himself: striding forth; maybe he was a different color; maybe he’d turned to gold, and was twice as tall, and held balls of fire in his hands and sang his song— “Oh Loosiana / your lose-weight heat-thing / your special eyes glance / we make our friends dance ”—he knew it was a silly song. In the real situation, better words expressing greater thoughts and the largeness of his special feeling would come to him. But this was the real situation, wasn’t it? There was nothing here for him tonight. The swamp-girls hadn’t come alone tonight, there would be no chasing them, and Loosiana scorned him.