Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

“In order for this kind of esperiment,” Pressy said, “you go find some milk.”

“Es your esperiment,” Drake said.

Solemnly Pressy told him, “Fiskadoro help me many times, Drake.”

“I not Fiskadoro,” Drake said.

“Oh”—Pressy put his face in his hands-“when you say that it make my heart go dark, talking I ain’t Fiskadoro, talking I ain’t my own brother, talking I don’t believe you scientifig esperiment, Pressy, talking I ain’t you cousin, don’t wanna put out on Los Desechados no more—”

“Si! I wanna put out on Los Desechados! ”

“Well why you don’t get me some milk? Make my heart go dark till I don’t never wanna see you face around my boat.” Pressy dumped the shell of its contents and handed it to Drake. “You say Towanda Sanchez, mi madre need it because of her stomach burning up.”

Holding the burlap shawl shut tightly under his chin with one hand, Drake carried the bowl to Leon Sanchez’s and soon came back, walking carefully and watching the milk inside it. Now the evening was dark. The edges of the burlap flapped around his shoulders in the wind.

“She doesn’t like to give me,” he told Pressy. “She goat not making much today.”

“Es important,” Pressy said. He poured some brandy into the milk and clucked for the kitten. The kitten came out from under the house and smelled of the offered mixture, jerked back, approached again, put a paw into the bowl and scratched at the liquid as if trying to scrape aside whatever smelled improper, sniffed the paw, touched it with the tip of its tongue, sneezed, turned away in disgust, walked around awhile, repeated all these moves, and at last took one sip from the bowl and sat back, licking its lips and turning this experience over in its mind. “She gone drink it,” Pressy predicted. He drank some himself, from the bottle, and then marched back and forth with his hands clasped behind his head and his elbows jutting out.

Less and less reluctantly, the kitten sipped the reinforced goat’s milk until the bowl was empty. Drake and Pressy watched without comment. There was a little thunder, faint and low, from far out over the Gulf.

The kitten hopped about at their feet and struck at imaginary small prey, but for the most part behaved as if perfectly sober. Pressy was disappointed. “Why she don’t fall down?” he asked Drake. “Always every time I drink it, I gone fall down.” A louder clap of thunder drove the kitten back under the little house.

“Kitten don’t fall down when she drink brandy,” Drake said.

“That’s right,” Pressy said. “We know that because of we have make a scientifig esperiment.”

They sat on the broken steps, side by side, waiting for the next thing to happen.

“Now que pasa?” Drake asked.

“Now a storm,” Pressy said.

“Nagasaki. ” Roderick Chambers took a step backward and then a step to the right, getting closer to the lamp on the wall. “The Forgotten Bomb.”

Ah, God, Mr. Cheung thought.

He would have been able to hear the people breathing around him, if not for the gusts throwing the first raindrops at the boarded-up windows. His own breath was coming too rapidly. A vibration of the storm shook the room’s shadows. This wasn’t a particularly bad squall, certainly not a cataclysmic one. This early in the wet season came rough weather; hurricanes arrived late. By the compelling power of reason, he tried to drive away the fear that merely by reading about this bomb they might wipe themselves off the earth tonight.

Drake helped his mother drag the window-boards out from under the house as the rain came down and Mike howled inside. Belinda said nothing, but managed to convey, by flattening the look of her face and moving with a certain weary, triumphant pomp, that Drake should have accomplished this chore many days ago, that he shouldn’t be out on the Ocean after fish because he was only ten, that he shouldn’t be living with Pressy and Alfo, that he was a demon and a criminal. The boards were slightly mushy and eaten away by salty dampness around the edges. In places their borders were too flimsy to give good purchase to the wooden latches that were supposed to hold them, and by puckering and un-puckering her lips repeatedly as she twisted one of the latches Belinda made it plain that Drake was also somehow responsible for this. Blinded by his sins, he ran a toe painfully against the battery she’d moved from the windowsill to the floor.

The wind was letting up a little as the rain fell harder, but the curtain of beads over the door still chattered against the door-board as they latched it in place, and then the beads scraped back and forth across the wood like something clawing its way in. Now they were reasonably snug against the storm. Mike stopped crying, the candle flames stopped dancing in the glass jars, and the rain stopped sounding like death. “What you want aqui?” Belinda asked Drake, as if just discovering him here.

“I got a sick stomach,” Drake said.

She made motions of unplugging a bottle and tipping it back. “Party on down.”

“Es ain’t a party. Come from I ate until almost ten green coconuts.”

Belinda grabbed Mike and violently washed his face with salt water from the clam bucket, and then wiped her hands back and forth on her new denim skirt while Mike let out with fresh cries.

“I sick. I got to stay here. Es raining,” Drake said.

“Oh!” Belinda said. “Ha! Hm!”

Somebody pounded hard on the door-board.

“You gone break my door, Pressy!” Belinda shouted. She unlatched the door-board and moved it aside.

Pressy was holding his dog Sarge by the scruff of the neck and peering through the bead curtain.

“Ain’t no party aqui,” Belinda said.

“Sarge got those looney toons,” he explained, “that’s why we gone stay here tonight.” The dog pushed his way through to the stove where he tried to hide under his own flattened ears. Pressy hurried in after him.

Within a couple of hours, it looked as if nobody wanted Roderick Chambers to go on. They interrupted his hoarse reading with questions they knew he couldn’t answer: Was this the first bomb? Was this the last bomb? “Why is it talking about Japan?” a fisherman asked, standing up in the back and pounding on the window-board for attention. Thunder answered him. Meanwhile the listeners argued among themselves. Some claimed that the book wasn’t true, that it was only a storybook. While they fidgeted and bickered, Roderick Chambers read silently to himself, until people shouted, “Read! Read!” He picked up at the place he’d reached alone. “Mrs. Yoshiyama was peeling potatoes in her kitchen, and she watched in disbelief as the potato skins flew out the window a second before she was hurled to the floor.” Immediately there were new interruptions as the disbelievers tried to point out that nobody could have known whether this woman, Mrs. Yoshiyama, had been peeling potatoes or oranges: it must be a story. “We traded a boat for this!” someone yelled.

But the talk ceased, only the strokes of rain on the field outside and the occasional thunder competed with Roderick Chambers when he read an account of three men who’d flown an airplane over the city soon after it was bombed:

“Lieutenant Komatsu had never seen anything like it. A huge volcanic eruption with many layers of smoke rising from it. The black cloud ring was churning like a thing alive. The sun coming from behind gave the illusion that the cloud was undergoing instantaneous changes of colors — from red to blue to yellow . ”

Mr. Cheung believed he was dreaming of a previous birth-and-death existence as he visualized what Roderick Chambers recited. Which one was I? he asked himself.