Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

Afterward she found that automatically, when she said something to the baby Mike, she covered her mouth with her right hand to hide the black space. In this life crimes had come against her one by one, as fast as days, and now her husband was dead, her first-born was — not dead, you can’t call a boy dead like they were calling him till you had the dead shell! — but in any case Fiskadoro was gone, and Drake, her second-eldest, had left home, even if he lived only ninety meters away; and where she’d been daubing at her gums with the hem of her shift the cloth was all bloody.

She left the baby crawling around the yard and saying, “Wuf! Wuf!” while she went inside to change her shift. Already it was after noon — where did the moments get away to? In the dark she hefted the shift above her hips and sat on the tick mattress and looked at her knees. Even flexed they showed wrinkles like gouges in a dry wood stump, one more thing to cry about. The wind and the Gulf were dead and there weren’t any sounds on earth but her breathing, and the coals clinking in the stove, and the wet heat pressing in against her mind. She drew the shift over her head and wiped away the sweat from her face, shoulders, armpits, and ran the bunched linen up between her legs and then between her breasts. Pillowing her head with it, she lay back on the bed and felt her nipples. They were as dry and distended as figs now, and sought after and used by nobody. Next to the left nipple she felt, in the meat of her flesh, a hard thing like a pearl that moved around under the probe of her finger. Her breath seized up, and she stared unblinking at the crosshatched palm leaves of the ceiling without a word in her head while the sweat leaked out of her hair and down behind her ears. I got to make a move, she thought, and then, as if somebody were doing it for her, she was raised up, and her legs took her to the doorway. “Mikey,” she said.

Mike was talking in a game and didn’t hear her. His legs weren’t chunky anymore, his belly was smaller, his face was a boy’s, not a baby’s.

Belinda went back inside and found a pair of Jimmy’s old olive Army pants, and with a fish-knife she cut open the crotch and made a skirt. She punched holes in the waist, on either side of the zipper, so that she could tie it around herself with twine. When she’d put the skirt on she said out loud, as if talking to some invisible person who’d wounded her unaccountably, “Now I gone hang my tits and be old.”

Bare-breasted, she stepped into the yard and sat down to watch Mike playing games.

The tide was in. She heard wood knocking and men calling from a place out of sight, downshore. The Los Desechados was making ready to put out, which meant that Towanda Sanchez would be open for a visit soon. Drake sometimes put out with them now, and Belinda’s brother Pressy was one of the permanent crew. No other boat on the Keys would have had him because he was bent left, right, and sideways in the head, but he was the handiest replacement for Harvard Sanchez, who’d been next in line for Captain and who — much to everybody’s surprise, a good boy like Harvard Sanchez — now slept out by the still-house in Twicetown and never let out a breath that didn’t stink of liquor. And these days Drake lived over at his Uncle Pressy’s with Pressy’s cousin, Alfo, who was also Belinda’s cousin. They were three bachelors with big holes in their roof and crinkled aluminum cans lying all over the floor dribbling wine.

I got to eat something, she told herself, and went inside, took three butter-clams from the bucket, and laid them on the stove. But when the shells opened and the leathery black feet came out they looked just like her own nipples. She left them there to fry.

“I gonna go see Towanda. Not too long,” she told Mike. She scraped a circle around him with her heel. “Es you perimeter,” she told him. “Shark gone bite you legs off when you go outa you perimeter. You stay inside you perimeter.”

Mike patted smooth a small mound of sand and put a blade of beach-grass in its center for a flag.

“I can’t fetch you ’long through this compound like a mess of fish. I too old, I too sick. You have kill me.”

As soon as she said it, she heard it: the pearl in her breast was a tumor of the kill-me. Her finger on her breast had already sent this news to her heart, but now her mouth had told it to her brain, and there was nothing left to do but go crazy.

With a metal spoon Belinda dug her last penny out of its hiding-spot among the ashes inside her stove, and then to cool it off she dropped it in the clam bucket. She ran to Towanda’s, past the falling-down shack that Pressy and Alfo and Drake called home, clutching the wet coin in her fist.

The Los Desechados wasn’t half a kilometer out yet, but Towanda was already in the bedroom, a lean-to attached to their quonset hut, rifling her husband’s pants-pockets and hunting in all his hiding places for coins.

“Es a heavy day! ” Belinda said.

“You hanging your tits now like you know your age,” Towanda said.

“My age? My age es dead.” Belinda was crying. “I feel how I got a little dureza of the kill-me in my left one here.”

“When?”

“Today.”

Towanda closed her eyes. “Es a heavy day,” she said. “Nothing to do behind this trouble but drink and cry.”

“I got a penny,” Belinda said, opening her fist.

“Leon got seven penny in this room,” Towanda said. “Help me. Help me.”

Glad to be doing something, Belinda helped her turn over the mattress, felt in the slats of the palm walls, and poked at the thatched ceiling with a broken gaff. Towanda got angry when nothing came of it and turned on Belinda with a burning tongue, as if it were all Belinda’s fault. “From today until forever ,” Towanda said, making her eyes tiny with hatred, “I got to have one penny every Sunday. That man es a Cap'n, and I a Cap'n woman, and don’t you know I shame to walk on the world have never no more coin than a little children have? He gone on the sea! What happen if emergency? Leon! ” she hollered, “you don't trust with me! You don't faith with me! ” Suddenly she seemed very calm. “That mean I got to take it outa his souvenir,” she said. “That’s all. Leon, you gone on the sea and left me only one chance.”

Belinda waited, feeling the breeze across her breasts, while Towanda went into their hut and stole Leon’s souvenir penny. “He come off the first day of when Leon Cap’n on that boat,” she said, “number-one penny of his command. I sorry , Belinda, but es a heavy day and I got to take it.”

“Es true,” Belinda agreed. “You got to, es necessario.” But such a grim feeling was all around her that her voice sounded far away.

They went to Billy Chicago’s place across the compound, near the road. Billy was off somewhere, but his old mother was always home, sitting in her big cane chair just inside the door and looking for somebody’s ear to eat, waving at bugs and neighbors with a big dirty rag. “Morning!”—“Afternoon!”—“Evening!”—Ms. Chicago always called out of the darkness. But people never stopped unless they wanted liquor, or had a medical problem.

“Afternoon!” she said to Belinda and Towanda.

“Como esta?” Towanda said.

“Oh,” Ms. Chicago said, “just yer basic. You hanging you tits now,” she said to Belinda.

Ms. Chicago’s radio said, “Un programa bilingue de Cubaradio empezara dentro de cuarenta y cinco minutos. A bilingual broadcast of Cubaradio will begin in forty-five minutes. Por favor invite a sus camaradas a escucharlo. Please invite your comrades to listen.”

“Be a radio time soon,” Ms. Chicago said with satisfaction. “We got two penny for wine,” Belinda said.