Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

Now that he was middle-aged and felt that he, himself, was composed more of a past than of a future, he wished he’d asked her, when she’d still been able to talk, to tell him whatever she knew about the other age. Grandmother Wright had told him about some of the things they’d possessed in those days — ferris wheels, elevators, boxing matches, mining operations — but they were only things. Now he wanted to hear about the people and places his grandmother had seen, but it was too late: the nearest she came to speech was to form various silences with her lips. She’d fallen asleep, one night, in an inexpensive motel in Key West, and had woken up in a world that had ended, and thenceforth lived her life in the southernmost region of the Quarantine, in a time between civilizations and a place ignored by authority.

Most of our dramas and plays seem to concern themselves with the place she woke up in, the world north of the Twenty-fourth Parallel during the Quarantine, a place and time that were cut off from us for sixty years. That’s not entirely healthy. Thinking about the past contributes nothing to the present endeavor, and in fact to concern ourselves too greatly with the past is a sin, because it distracts our minds from the real and current blessing showered down us in every heartbeat out of the compassion and mercy and bounty of Allah. But we are human. Can we help it if sometimes we like to tell stories that want, as their holiest purpose, to excite us with pictures of danger and chaos? — the innumerable stories about Anthony Terrence Cheung, a real person, and about his grandmother, a woman who actually did live to become the oldest person on earth, and, of course, about the boy Fiskadoro, the one known to us best of all, the only one who was ready when we came.

On this day of his contract with Mr. Cheung, Fiskadoro started toward his home in a frenzy and held onto his briefcase with a sense that it gave out shafts of fire that would blind all his relatives and friends. He would be a member of The Miami Symphony Orchestra. This organization hadn’t yet “grown up.” The orchestra never gave any performances and didn’t get together very often, even for rehearsals. It wasn’t widely known of. Fiskadoro had heard of it only recently himself. Just the same he’d tell everybody in his village about it and then it would be famous.

It was several kilometers to the Army, and he was asleep on his feet by the time he got there. Now the fact that he was getting home crowded out of his mind the fact that he’d been somewhere, and he forgot all about his new status.

The boats were in. When he entered the shadows of coconut and date palms and felt the silence among the corrugated huts, he knew they’d come in and that everyone, even the dogs and cats, would be down at the water. He heard their cries.

When he reached the shore, he saw they’d already landed the nets. The Business and the El Tigre and the Generalissimo lay twenty meters out on the water of the Gulf, and the nets lay on the beach among all the villagers with a mist rising off the piles of mackerel. His father’s boat, the Los Desechados, was there. The catch was heavy. Everybody was happy. He ran to get near the nets, and the salt spray from the fish stung his eyes. He was nearly thirteen, he was growing every day, but he still felt smaller than everyone else.

Their olive rags splashed and dangling, the white shifts of the younger women wet and translucent over their dark bodies, bright scarves around their heads, the heavy-footed older women in olive or khaki skirts, without blouses, their breasts swinging as they made merry over the fish or their mouths open and their faces dull as they caught their breath after the work of hauling in the nets, the people of his village, the six names — Hidalgo, Delacorte, Chicago, Wilson, Sanchez, Revere — attended to the tasks of the moment without any thoughts in their heads.

White fish-merchants from Twicetown and Marathon patrolled the borders of the open nets and kept the naked Army children at bay with threats and hostile gestures, while the children, for their part, harassed the dogs and cats who seemed to be all around them.

Fiskadoro’s younger brother Drake found him and stood breathless right in his face, reaching out his hands to the briefcase called Samsonite. Drake said, “You back from Twicetown.”

“Bueno. Smart man.” Fiskadoro kept the briefcase out of his brother’s reach.

“He teach you on that thing, Fiskadoro? You gone play now?”

“I be go play tomorrow,” Fiskadoro corrected him. “Not today.”

A couple of Billy Chicago’s kids braced Drake on either side and put their arms around his shoulders. “He got the music, Drake? Fish-man got the music?”

“He be go play tomorrow,” Drake told them. “He gone play”—he began singing—“ Let’s seize the time now, let’s seize the time, let’s seize the time ” and pretty soon a lot of kids were singing the old hymn learned only recently from the Israelites who’d suddenly turned up on the Keys, landed out of nowhere in their big boat, half of them dead:

Let’s seize the time now

Let’s seize the time

Let’s make the sys-tem

Pay for its crime .

Fiskadoro could see he was too late. For everybody else, all this happiness was starting to get old. The sun was falling, the merchants had to get back on the road, and the villagers were exhausted. Still trying to keep the party going, the children drummed with professional art on the metal barrels of diesel fuel in the merchants’ mule-carts and climbed all over them until banished by Simpson Delacorte of the Business, who was taking the lead for the villagers in the negotiations. “We want all five oleo barrils. And you gonna bring us five more barrils tomorrow— full-up. Plus also ten million dollar,” he told the white merchants.

When the trading was over, the men paraded about with sheaves of money stuck in their knife-belts and gave bills away to the little children. While the women shoveled the carts full of fish, the merchant families hitched up their burros. In a few minutes the two-wheeled carts began inching off toward the Army paths and the road beyond, leaving the treadmarks of their huge rubber auto tires in the sand.

There were plenty of fish left, many of them still flickering and moving on the nets. The villagers had carried home what they could cook, and their animals sat gnawing fish on the beach.

Drake and Fiskadoro found Pressy, their mother’s youngest brother, and followed him until he sat down under a tree. Pressy was a small, handsome man, much darker than his sister Belinda, and because of his brownness and also because of his general empty-headedness, Belinda claimed he’d gotten more Cuban blood than she had. Drake and Fiskadoro liked to go here and there with Pressy because he talked to them about sex: not the kind between men and women, but the kind between dogs and dogs. Pressy wanted to breed a variety of dog that would catch fish. If he threw a dead mackerel in the water, his dog Sarge would fetch it back, but Pressy’s idea of going after a live fish never got through to Sarge. “He dog ain’t have a big mind,” Pressy said, laying out all the facts for his two nephews. “I can’t gone sit down and explaining it all about fish to a dog. I need one that know. Then I get that pescadero dog breeding up on another dog. That dog be go drop out six puppies — three pescadero puppies, and three just dog puppies.” He held up three fingers of one hand, and three fingers of the other. “Now, comprende, comprende — breed up the three fish-dogs on three just-dogs, I be getting more and more fish-dogs.” Confused and elated by the mathematics of breeding, he drew innumerable lines in the dirt. “He oleo gone dry up outa these Keys tomorrow,” he said, “but when we can’t run the engines no more, we can forget about boats. Don’t talk to me about no boats. Custom special breeded dogs gone bring in them fish.”