Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

“Entre menos burros, mas elotes,” Ms. Chicago said, taking a big swallow — among fewer mules, more corn.

Suddenly she gripped Belinda’s hand, and Belinda thought the old woman had gone weak and needed help to stand, but Ms. Chicago said, “Feel me aqui, girl,” and shoved Belinda’s fingers up tight against one of her shrunken breasts. “You feel that dureza?” Ms. Chicago’s breast felt hotter than Belinda’s hand. In the meat was a tiny pebble. “I felt her time when Billy’s first son come. Now Billy’s son about tall as me, but my loa keep on controlling la dureza.”

The radio inside said, “Es Cubaradio bilingue. This is bilingual Cubaradio. En la proxima hora, le deleitaremos con la popular e inspiridora musica Cubana. For the following hour, we will entertain you with some of Cuba’s popular and inspirational music. Ustedes, los radioescuchas, viven bajo la protection del Gobierno de la Habana. You who are listening live under the protection of the Havana government. Las guerras terminaron, el pueblo es libre y la vida sigue adelante,” the radio said. “The wars are over, the people are free, and life goes on.”

Above the sink in the kitchen Belinda kept a photograph of snow, a very old postcard showing the naked tangles of a bush which, for all she knew, never had any foliage except this white stuff daubing the tips of the twigs like blossoms. Next to the bush stood a black pedestal holding up the black stone figure of a bird. In the picture’s foreground, one icicle dangled from a dark branch.

Belinda had no reason for keeping the photo. It was just there, above the sink, in front of her face, that was how that story went. She spent no small amount of every day in its presence. She’d heard about snow but had no clear understanding of who made snow or what snow was supposed to do.

Tilting slightly and banging her elbow against the sink, she took the picture down from its nail and rested it on a cypress stump in the dank closet where precious or useless things were kept: boxes of her trinkets and some clothes she never wore, a rifle that wouldn’t fire, some bullets that probably wouldn’t explode, some books full of crumbling pages that had somehow escaped being burned in the cold time; and Fiskadoro’s clarinet in the briefcase called Samsonite. She propped the scene of winter upright against the wall and laid before it the supercharged loa, formerly just one of her dog-teeth.

When she opened the briefcase called Samsonite, she found the clarinet in pieces — who made it broken? She stood the pieces in a circle, around the yellow tooth, before the picture of snow. One piece wouldn’t stay upright, and so she laid it out in a position she hoped was pleasing to the loa.

Maybe she didn’t completely believe in these things, but she saw how the loa Major Colonel Overdoze was gracious and kind, putting in her head, whether she believed in him or didn’t, one comforting thought: not today. If she grew the tumors of pain until they held her down to the bed, a hundred kilos of tumors of fire, and she begged in a tiny voice to be killed, it wouldn’t happen today. And today was a big place that held everything inside of it — the Keys, the sea, the sky, and the outer space of stars. Today didn’t close around her throat like all the other days.

I seen three shadows on the dirt, she prayed, shadows out of three us old womens hanging our tits and passing the potato-buzz like they all do, me too. Now I getting bit by religion, she prayed, putting in a shrine and praying on a loa like they all do, me too. Atomic Bomber Major Colonel Overdoze, take out this tumor of kill-me and bring my first-born back.

YOU’LL BE BETTER BEFORE WE GET THERE,” William Park-Smith promised Mr. Cheung, but Mr. Cheung, himself, guessed that he would expire of this bottomless nausea sometime in the next few minutes, and felt certain that at the very least he’d still be quite seasick when the boat reached Marathon. He hardly ever traveled by water. He hardly ever traveled at all. What he liked to do was to stay in his house, whose chief attraction in his mind at this moment was that it never moved. The Catch, the diesel-engine fisher on whose deck he was trying to keep his balance among several other members of Twicetown’s Society for Science, demonstrated a bewildering repertoire of motions: side-to-side, up-and-down, and horizontal — east by northeast, and now dead north — along the Keys toward Marathon. Generally the vessel hugged the shore because a storm threatened and the sea, as Mr. Cheung felt compelled to testify, was rough. They passed along the gap between Summerland Key and Ramrod Key, where two frayed sections of the highway called US 1 had given up reaching across the distance to one another and fallen down asleep in the water. People riding on the ferry-raft between the two islands shouted at the Catch and gestured happily, and one man took off his shirt and waved it around above his head, but their cries of greeting were lost in the wind.

Mr. Cheung estimated abysmally that it would be another two hours to Marathon. Everything he’d been feeling at the start of this journey — excitement, curiosity, an undirected gratitude, great fear — had been emptied out of him with repeated vomiting. His throat ached, and he trembled with weakness. The salt spray and diesel smoke thickened in his lungs as he gripped the rail without strength, looking forward to his death impatiently.

“Try some salty biscuit. Please, one bite,” Park-Smith yelled out amid the wind. A gust jerked the boat’s prow to port — this move was a new one, a kind of half-spin that left Mr. Cheung astonished at the world’s inexhaustible evil. The biscuit Park-Smith was threatening him with like a poisonous nugget was one more thing. Mr. Cheung didn’t want the biscuit and in fact hated the biscuit, but he indicated nothing. He’d found this discomfort to be an incredible teacher, one that had practiced him, right at the start of this trip, not to nod his head or shake it.

The young mate, a white boy, stayed at the bow and peered ahead for uncharted obstacles in this shallow water, while the Captain, also a youthful white, one from the famous Wilson family, responded to his signals with unexpected and excruciating shifts in their course. Mr. Cheung was the only seasick passenger. Other members of the Twicetown Society for Science — lumpy Maxwell, Park-Smith, Bobby Calvino, who would be dangerous without his wife and was already drunk — had been having a good time, and now looked bored. They’d been nearly three hours on the water, and the overcast heavens were getting even darker as night approached.

Below Key Marathon, Captain Wilson took the Catch through a channel and came at the largest town on the Keys from the Ocean side. The water was calmer here today. Mr. Cheung felt his nausea dissipating even before they docked behind the local slaughterhouse. The slaughterhouse had once been a hotel. The stripped, headless carcasses of several dogs and goats were hung from poles laid across the width of the swimming pool. A small man, apparently the only one working at this hour, tightroped across the poles with a bucket, casting spicy salt over the meat. As Park-Smith helped the Orchestra Manager along the pier and toward the streets, Mr. Cheung saw, through the glassless window behind the swimming pool, a dead goat laid out on the bar in the cocktail lounge. “Hold shut your nose, Tony,” Park-Smith warned him, but Mr. Cheung had already stopped breathing. The stink of the slaughterhouse kept everybody away. The buildings on this street housed only drifts of sand and the barnacled supplies of fishing boats.

By the time the four Society members had walked through several shanty collections, where families sat outside their doorways eating suppers of fish and rice and worrying about the weather, and then through a flat neighborhood where old houses had been torn apart and stacked into lumber, Mr. Cheung was completely revived.