Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

“I can’t remember where the library is,” he told the others. “How far?” Now he was excited again. He tried to expect nothing, but they wouldn’t have had the Twicetown Society travel so far, wouldn’t even have condescended to invite them here, if the book weren’t important.

“Two more streets, I think,” said Maxwell, and Park-Smith said, “Two streets.”

According to Park-Smith, the Marathon Society for Knowledge had traded a boat for the book. It must be the one — the history they’d all been looking for long enough that they’d given up hope of finding it — the text that would explain the End of the World.

Thinking about the book put Mr. Cheung into a panic. “It’s dark, they might be starting already.” He picked up his pace. He was willing to leave the others behind if necessary.

The library was a stone building left upright where all the wooden ones had been torn down, and now it stood by itself at the edge of a field. Great steps marched up to its entrance, on either side of which a flagpole jutted from the walls, one dripping a ragged Florida state flag that hopped up fitfully in the wind to broadcast its crimson X, and the other one naked. Even before they reached the steps and passed between these flagpoles, they heard the buzz of voices from inside.

This was an occasion. As they entered, Mr. Cheung could see immediately that a lot more people than the Marathon Society’s thirty members were gathered here. Their bodies stifled the room with heat and breath and everybody was talking at once, at least fifty citizens in various postures on the cool floor of the main room. Most of them were white people from the merchant families, but there were fishermen and layabouts present, too, wearing shirts as at a wedding or a funeral, and there were even some desechados among them: Mr. Cheung saw a young blind man with a humped back, who held himself sideways in a corner and turned a grotesquely large ear toward the speaker at the front. Precious kerosene was being offered up in lanterns to give them light.

The generalized chatter trailed away and then resumed quickly after the Twicetown Society members had made themselves evident, hesitating in the doorway.

Roderick Chambers stood behind the only piece of furniture in the room, a wrecked Xerox device the size of two goats; behind him loomed the metal shelves holding the Marathon Public Library’s several hundred volumes. Backed up against this wall of words, he welcomed the Twicetown Society for Science with a lonely gesture of embrace, which he altered by bringing his hands together as in prayer and pointing at some vacant spots in the front row almost at his feet. People moved their legs for the new arrivals as Park-Smith led the way through those assembled. The ones by the wall made room without squabbling. It was the kind of courtesy Mr. Cheung would have expected during a disaster. He was pressed against a tiny dark woman with scraggly Negro hair who looked evil-tempered, but she smiled at him and wrapped her arms around her knees, giving him as much space as she could, and continued waiting quietly.

Roderick Chambers was responding to some kind of dissatisfaction among the Society members. “And then again,” he was saying, “running through all the possibilities, finding pretty much nothing. We’ve been a long time after a book like this book. We cut the only deal we could.”

“Sounds like no deal at all,” a voice called from the rest,

“We cut the only deal we could.”

“They got a damn boat. And we still don’t know what we got.”

“We got a straight guarantee about the pages — any missing pages, the deal is canceled. But aside from that, what we received is what we received. No more and no less.”

“We need an all-time policy laid down,” somebody said. “We usually look at the Table of Contents, and we better say from now on, always see the Contents.”

“Most of the time we buy by the kilo,” Roderick Chambers said. “We don’t even look—”

“When it’s a regular book, you mean to say. We see Contents on a high-price type, and this —”

“We cut the only deal we could,” Chambers repeated against a volley of comments, shaking his head and closing his eyes, “we cut the only deal we could, we cut the only deal we could—”

“How do you know it ain’t contaminated, if you didn’t even get to see it?”

“We know because it didn’t come from Miami. It came from here. It was originally the property of this library.” Many were outraged.

Chambers seemed to enjoy shocking everybody with the news that they’d traded so steeply for their own book. “It got stolen a long, long time back,” he said. “Now it’s been returned.”

“What was the source?” several people shouted. “What was the source?”

“It came from a usual type of source,” Roderick Chambers assured them.

What’s the point of all this talk? Mr. Cheung thought. By now he was speechless with tension. He looked neither right nor left, took nothing in, and tried to calm himself by thinking that it had been bound to happen someday. Someday was today. It had to be the kind of book they’d been hoping for.

“I can’t believe,” Chambers said above the noise, “that you-all just mean to sit here slinging this dead issue around when we have the book right here.” He stepped back and pointed dramatically at a book, just lying among the other books, on one of the shelves behind him.

Pressy was bored and sipping at potato brandy as the windy dark came along. The Los Desechados, of whose crew he was the newest and least respected member, hadn’t gone out today because all the gulls had been flying east toward the Ocean side, a good sign there was a storm somewhere out on the Gulf.

Pressy’s cousin Alfo was staying across the compound with his sister, whose roof didn’t leak. Drake was napping inside, but Drake would run home to his mother when the thunder started. Pressy intended to stay here, where he lived, even if he drowned, which was a possibility because the hut’s front section was falling down. Generally this little building wasn’t lived in. Coconut shells, wood to be split, and miscellaneous unwanted things found their way here.

Pressy clicked his tongue at a grey kitten hiding under the house. “Come on, Señor.” Wearing a worried, intelligent expression, the kitten stepped out from under what was left of the steps and uttered a cry.

Pressy took another pull of his brandy. He stuck his finger in the bottle’s mouth and offered the wet finger to the kitten, but the kitten only sniffed the air and turned its back.

When Drake woke up from his siesta among the stacks of kindling in the house and wandered, rubbing his face, out front to sit with him, Pressy felt happier. “Rain gone come down in the roof,” he promised Drake. “Thunder gone smash thisyer casa. Lightning gone burn us alive. Sarge know all about it.” Pressy’s dog Sarge was hiding in a dark corner of the quonset hut, his mind already in pieces, listening to thunder nobody else could hear yet. Drake didn’t say anything. He shivered in the wind and put his arms around himself.

Pressy went inside, came back with half a coconut shell, and poured some potato brandy into it for the kitten. When he set the shell down, the kitten gave it a little sniff, but got no closer than the length of a hand to the source of this aroma. “Ain’t you thirsty?” Pressy said. He got a whole coconut from the house and whacked it with his bolo knife, shaking milk from the cracked brown fruit into the improvised bowl. “Scientifig esperiment,” he explained to Drake. This time the kitten didn’t even come near it.

Drake went inside, and Pressy said, “Where you going?” just to have something to say. Presently Drake came back out wearing a shawl of burlap draped over his head and shoulders.