Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

By the time the visitors had gone it was already three hours past dark — those still on the beach would have to stay together now and pass the night here sleeping or dancing or having adventures with the other sex. Fiskadoro stayed away from them. To have met this great man, to have touched his hand, heard his story, his legend, made Fiskadoro feel crazy. He wandered the shore. The Ocean, so perilous simply because of its size to any who might be faring out onto it tonight, was unagitated. A roll of surf fell at his feet with the hollow exhaustion of a drum calling from far away. Fiskadoro came no closer to it than a couple of meters. He didn’t want to let the Ocean touch him. I am not for you, he insisted in fear. I am not my father Jimmy. Things took him away from his father, stories and dancing carried him off, but every time, he seemed to land at the border of this black country where his father lived. He was afraid he’d find something here at the Ocean’s edge one day, a lump of something he couldn’t make out. He’d go closer and see that it was a man, closer and see that the man was dead, closer and see that the dead man was Jimmy, his father. He didn’t like to think about it. He was frightened even of his own name, Fish-man, Harpooner, because it suggested some prior arrangement with the hungry sea.

Every day he imagined the moment when his father, thinking of nobody, totally cut off from everyone he knew, totally, as if he’d been born swimming for his life and never known anything else, gave up and drew the first breath of water.

The several Blacks from over the swamps — and yet they looked a bit different, their heads caked with mud or he didn’t know what, not like most of the swamp-folks — were heading back over the dunes toward home; he could see them detach from the party-time in a group and straggle off.

Fiskadoro moved along the shore, keeping abreast of them as they made toward the shallowest rise of earth. His neck felt constricted by a rush of desire, and his groin ached. The only two women he’d ever made love to were young girls from over the swamps.

One of the swamp-people lagged farther and farther behind. Fiskadoro moved with a heavy and guilty heart but with quick, light strides to catch her. He could make out the backs of her thighs. She turned when she heard him, and he saw her face, a shadow in which he might read whatever he wanted.

She watched him, half-reclining against the rising slope of the sand dune. Her eyes were wide and white. Fiskadoro took hold of her by the ankle — it was gritty with sand. She slid down toward him with a silky sound. She held him by the thighs and bit his breast softly and licked his belly. But then she got up and began climbing the dune again. They were both out of breath — he could hear her panting with a slight catch of her voice, a whimper, a small cry in every breath.

Fiskadoro felt he was tearing himself away from his life to pursue her into the swamps where he’d never been. But even across this distance some of the firelight caught her, and he saw the tendons of her ankles, the start of her buttocks below her ragged denim skirt, and he chased her. She stayed ahead of him.

As soon as he’d topped the round of the dune and looked over into the darkness where she was disappearing, her skin no longer touched by orange highlights but as empty of them as the hide of an animal in a cave, he had to hesitate. Where was he taking himself? The patchwork of marsh and tangled vegetation down there was covered up with night, but it exuded a thick presence like the sea’s. Two steps into it he felt as if some kind of laughing-gas were licking his shins. She was gone into nothing, but he knew how to follow her steps as certainly as if he carried a map — there wasn’t any way to go but down. Below the level of the dune the wind was stuck. It was like being swallowed alive. The air choked him, and he recognized the odor — it was hers; she smelled like the swamps, like her birthplace and her home. To follow her over the dunes and out of earshot and eyesight of his people, his head spinning and his throat blocked with the honey of tears, was not to know whether he would live or die. Don’t look what I’m doing! he begged the dark sea.

THERE WAS SO MUCH VIBRATION UP WHERE the Israelites stayed on the Ocean side north of Twicetown, so many people loitering there, such a big crowd of hangers-out and self-elected interpreters, everybody with a secret opinion or a loud explanation concerning the white boat the Israelites were ceremoniously building, that vendors started dropping around, too, and Bill Banks made it the place for one or two sound-shows.

The vendors quarreled with one another about the positions of their stalls, drumming up excellent reasons, each one, with threatening gestures and a wild face, for having the place nearest the shade, which was the gift of only a few trees here in a region mostly scrub and tall grass. When Bill Banks put up his sound-shows, yesterday’s recording stars roared words in voices that sounded as if they should clear their throats about things nobody understood, while the big rhythm that needed no explanation, crackly and fogged with use and buzzing in Bill Banks’s old speakers, got some people dancing.

But the white boat was what it was all about. It was just like a little ship, with small hand-carved dinghies on it for escape in case of a disaster, and tiny portholes strung along its sides, and numerous decks and two smokestacks, every piece whitewashed, and every piece blessed by Flying Man before it was attached to the vessel. Just the same, it would never float. Everyone could see that. But they all understood that floating wasn’t the point. This wasn’t about sailing anywhere on a ship three meters long: it was about magic, about religion, about Jah. The Israelites were happy to explain the ship and what it was supposed to do, but nobody could make out what they said.

Mr. Cheung went up with Eileen to take a look at the white boat. He was uncomfortable when Flying Man made a big show of welcoming them, because it was all too clear that he hadn’t let go of his idea that The Miami Symphony Orchestra was going to do something or other for the Israelites, probably, Mr. Cheung guessed, something totally embarrassing, and possibly something he would regret forever. But a person wanted to please these immigrants. They were bizarre and unrestrained. So he smiled with a lump in his throat and gave his every attention to Flying Man’s indecipherable speech about this white boat. Once in a while, with the effect of reaching out and touching Mr. Cheung with a bare electric wire, Flying Man said the word “oxra.” Eye contact, Mr. Cheung noted, was also painful. Flying Man occasionally focused his bleary pupils like targets, without mercy. Spittle flecked his lips and beard.

Eileen seemed to take some light from the relentless sun and the glaring water. Her face appeared smoother than usual to Mr. Cheung, her eyes larger and younger, and her features more relaxed. “No Mr. Banks today? No sound-show?” she asked. It wasn’t a secret between them that Eileen liked the sound-shows better than The Miami Symphony Orchestra’s ridiculous efforts.

“He’s left the scaffolds up,” Mr. Cheung said. “He’ll have another soon, and we’ll come.”

Flying Man cupped his hands together and shoved them right and left, as if bailing water. “One day someday Babylon go sink down deadndrownd-oh.” His beard jumped when he talked, moved when he showed his foul teeth. “Dat news when res’ with Jah. Dis — dis — dis — dis—”

Eileen turned her back on him and smiled with blank eyes at the air above the vendors’ stalls. “You don’t make sense so don’t talk wild at me now. What they gonna catch in that boat?” she asked Mr. Cheung. “Little tiny fish?”