Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

“Do you know the goodness of Bob Marley?” she asked him.

“I am against the forces that took the machines away,” Mr. Cheung said.

“So is Bob Marley! I mean, not that he gives two shits for all that electric juice — but it’s the forces of destruction and the ways of backsliding down to primitive cave-people, that’s what our father Bob Marley is against.”

“I have to go to my wife,” Mr. Cheung said.

“You are one of those persons,” she said, “who got away with our pews when the Devil sabotaged our roof.”

“Excuse me?”

“Keep it for now. But don’t you own it, you just sit on it. We’ll get us a roof one day — or a whole spang-new church!”

Her enthusiasm made Mr. Cheung uncomfortable. “I treat your pew with kindness,” he assured her.

“I’ll be up on that stage preaching soon as I find my feet. Don’t think I’m daunted. Don’t think it for a second.”

“I’ll leave you now. My wife—” He knew he was being rude. His neck burned with embarrassment as he walked away.

She called after him, “Don’t think I’m daunted! I’ll be up there hollering through that electric snake before too much longer!”

Closer to the sound-show, he collided again with its blathering fusillade as it rocketed out over the sea and disappeared there, like everything else. He stood beside Eileen, who’d stopped dancing and now only swayed in one place as did the others, letting the music pierce her through. This music was good now, this was Dylan, the great poet of the times of hard rain:

You know sometimes

Satan

Comes as a man of peace.

Mr. Cheung tried to fix himself somewhere at the edge of the crowd, to the left, to the right, back ten steps toward the sea, where he might be able to hear the words. But he stopped listening and only wandered over the sand stupidly, like a puppy who’d been smacked on the ear. I suppose, he spoke inside himself, that I’m very much like Mother. But he could hardly make out the tone of his own ruminations inside all this head-hammering rhythm. History, the force of time — he was aware he was obsessed in an unhealthy way with these thoughts — are washing over us like this rocknroll. Some of us are aligned with a slight force, a frail resistance that shapes things for the better — I really believe this: I stand against the forces of destruction, against the forces that took the machines away.

Against the forces that had taken Fiskadoro away, the forces that would also keep hold, forever, of the boy’s clarinet.

“Our father Bob Marley a-coming to take us home!” True to her promise, Mother was back on the scaffold with the microphone, and the music had ceased. She held the instrument carefully and kept her head away from it so it wouldn’t whistle. “But I was a-talking back there about monkeys, which is going to be us, like the science said.” She was still winded; the breath from her nostrils pulsed heavily through the speakers and made it seem she was crying out in the middle of a hurricane. “My cousin was a scientist, and for what I know, my cousin still is a scientist, my cousin’s hiding away down in a hole somewheres still inventing the dynamics to get to the moon. I mean to talk about faith! I’m so full of the Spirit — wait now, let me get the thread of this that I want to tell you.” The crowd of Twicetowners, drunks and dogs excluded, all watched her with the same curious goodwill with which they’d attended Mr. Cheung’s speeches the time he’d run for Mayor. They felt, Mr. Cheung believed, that the person on the stump was watching them: that they were on display, and not the other way around.

He’d lost his place in this sermon; now Mother was calling out, “The scientists said we had a billion stars, and we believed, and we had a billion stars—”

The way Mr. Cheung looked at it, everything that counted was being moved out from under them by these forces. Even, also, the boy Fiskadoro’s clarinet. Fiskadoro had been gone long enough, now, that he would obviously never come back; but Mr. Cheung hadn’t been able to get the mother, and the cousins, and the myriad other relatives, to give up the dead boy’s clarinet. Little by little all the coins, and the books, and the musical instruments, and also the musicians, were sucked down into the rocknroll of destruction. Goodbye!

“—and if we believe , only believe , that we are people, and that Bob Marley a-coming to take us home —” The woman’s eyes were rolling up in her head. The microphone trailed from her hand and dragged, creating thunder, on the wooden planks of the scaffold.

Mr. Cheung hoped that the deranged Israelite boat-builders, to whom his back was resolutely turned, these people who thought they had an agreement with him, were as basically muddled as this old Baptist sorceress. Under the pretext of scratching his shoulder, he threw in the Israelites’ direction a quick glance that gave him no comfort at all. The tide was creeping toward them and the air was full of words, but the dozen or so Israelites at the water’s edge applied themselves to their drill as busily and as certainly as insects.

Fire had come into Grandmother’s life. For the big stove in the kitchen Mr. Cheung had acquired a new door, one with a glass window in it, so that as the cooler season came on she had something to look at from her station nearest the heat.

The moments turned back and forth patched with blank spaces, people appeared and disappeared right while she watched them, visits with old friends suddenly became interviews with these mystifying figures who might be her relatives and might be her captors, and her breakfast could easily turn into a pillow of burlap she was supposed to lay her head on for a night’s sleep to be accomplished, by her reckoning, fifteen minutes after daybreak; but in the deep red event behind the stove’s glass window the filament of time was never tangled, nothing had a name or a reason, everything was itself, and the things she would always know, even if you took her head away, even if you killed her, were confirmed: It catches, then burns, then blazes; it rages and sings, it wanes, it shifts and flares, it burns a little longer and then weakens, whatever it is, and goes out. But if you lay the small wood across it in the morning, it all begins again. The little girl came often to sit on Grandmother’s lap, and went away, and then came back grown larger and louder. It was the same thing. Whatever it was, it was happening now, today, all of it, this very moment. This very moment— now, changing and staying the same — was the fire.

This morning she’d put on her white dress to go to Mass with her father. Pulling on her grey knee-socks, part of the uniform of Ste. Bernadette’s, her French girls’ school, she’d caressed her own thighs and spread her legs, feeling guilty but laughing, and then on these same legs she’d walked six blocks down Dien Tin Street, holding her father’s hand, to the Church of Ste. Therese. They’d entered the cathedral, nodding to old Pere Georges, who stood by the doors recognizing nobody and greeting each one with a glazed friendliness, and suddenly Marie had found herself traveling all alone toward a huge aquarium filled with fire. Now she sat before the kitchen stove and drowned in the wet cement of old age, hardly able to lift her hands to her face. Grief tightened her chest and she expected the tears to flow, but none came. The holes for tears were pinched shut, and her eyes were always as dry as two corks.

A man and a woman came into the room and tumbled yellow and green fruit onto the table.

After dropping the melons and yellow fruit onto the table, Mr. Cheung flexed his fingers and then rubbed the back of his neck, “I’m not the one to carry so many melons on such a long hike.”