Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

In fact Pressy’s breeding practices amounted to not much more than a lonelyhearts service for mongrels, and some of the less generous minds — Belinda was among them — referred to him as a silly pimp. But Drake and Fiskadoro were fascinated with certain information Pressy had in his possession about how the talents of one dog got inside another dog and then inside their puppies, things to do with sperm, gene-balls, desechado-molecules, and contamination. “Everything I telling to you es so small you can’t gone see it,” he told them. “Trust me.”

Tonight as the sun disappeared and some of the families got together and built smoky fires in front of their quonset huts to keep away the darkness and cook up a feast of fish, Drake and Fiskadoro waited for Pressy to talk about these microscopic things. He knew what they were waiting for, but he kept quiet and seemed sad. “I get you a fish cooked up, Pressy,” Fiskadoro said, but Pressy wanted them to believe he’d gone deaf. Fiskadoro shoved Drake and said, “Get us three fish cooked up pretty good,” and Drake slid away from his hands, danced around, and sang, “Struggling man, struggling man .” Drake looked hypnotized.

“I gone tell Belinda Drake’s tired,” Fiskadoro said.

“Never happen no way no time tomorrow, shitface boy,” Drake said.

“Then why you don’t get us three fish?” Fiskadoro said, and Drake went over to Nancy Hidalgo’s yard and begged three fish strung on a sword of palm leaf.

But Pressy wouldn’t look at the fish.

Fiskadoro was hungry. “Ain’t you hungry, Pressy? I gone eat the head. Eyeballs. Hungry.” Drake was glad to have his, too, eating it with the same dead face he used to have at Belinda’s breast.

But Pressy was building up a resentful silence around his shoulders. At last he said, “I don’t wanna talk to no fish. They don’t lemme on their boat, and I gone die of it. I gone sink down in the sink-down,” he announced.

“Ain’t you hungry?” Fiskadoro said.

“That’s mi family and I belong on that Los Desechados,” Pressy said. “But instead they won’t never take me out, and now I be gone die —the man, me, who I’m inventing the fish-dogs that saved the Army.”

Mike was asleep; Drake and Fiskadoro were wandering the compound; and Jimmy Hidalgo, sitting with his wife Belinda on the front step, lifted the calf of her leg in his hand and put his lips to her thigh.

“Dirty man,” Belinda said.

Candle flames in the room behind them jerked when a little breeze came off the Gulf. Their quonset hut was close to the water and didn’t get the shade, but they had the sea and its lonely company, and they never had to worry about any coconuts crashing through the roof. On either side of the doorless doorway that silhouetted them, a row of three ornamental auto turn-signals blinked crazily.

“Es time I about ready to make some trouble,” Jimmy said, reaching his hand up under her shift.

“You ready to make some babies, dirty man. Then I gone get alia troubles and you go fish. That’s how Mikey come around.” Mike was their youngest, two years old. But she put her head on Jimmy’s shoulder and opened her legs for him.

They kissed a little, and then they heard the boys arguing as they approached. “Here come Mr. Radar and Assistant Mr. Radar,” Jimmy said sadly.

“Ma,” Fiskadoro said. He had a feeling that maybe whatever he had to say wasn’t important enough. He gripped his brother authoritatively by the shoulder. “Drake tired, Ma.”

“Oh, don’t bother me about Drake,” Belinda said.

Jimmy took Fiskadoro by the back of the neck and gave him a shake so his head jumped. “Brains still messing up the machines in there, Mr. Radar?” He took the two boys into his lap, one on each knee. “Moon gone have you looney toons when we sleeping tonight?”

Sitting on Jimmy’s knee, Fiskadoro was tall enough now to keep his feet on the ground and take the weight off his father’s bones. In the blinking red illumination that turned the moonlight on and off, Fiskadoro looked at the faint whorls of dried sea salt on Jimmy’s cheeks and shoulders. These vague signatures of the Gulf had always been decipherable there. Fiskadoro knew by the clenching of his own stomach that he would never go to sea.

When his father released him, he went inside to the radio. “What’s on today? ” He spun the dial through static and with both hands rattled the auto battery it was hooked up to.

Belinda said, “You know that radio he all lies. Cada palabra de la voz del radio es una mentira,” she told him as she always told him — every word of the voice of the radio is a lie.

He woke up, and the moon was falling down on him. The moon had him looney toons, a few monster things, a few ghosts, a few rrrrrrrrrr tiny psycho cyclers. He heard their howling: “Oh, I like that, I like that. Jimmy, Jimmy.” It was his mother’s voice. Out the window the moon had a rope laid right across the water to the shore. The Gulf was black as grease and the beach wasn’t white; it wasn’t quite blue; it wasn’t grey. The moon had him looney toons. He stood at his parents’ doorway and witnessed a thing in their bed, a monster with four legs in the moonlight. But it wasn’t a crazy kind of thing, it was familiar, it was Jimmy and Belinda. Rrrrrrrrrr behind him the tiny psycho cyclers rode the air into his home, and his father made a noise as if a bad thorn were coming out. The tiny motorcycle maniacs made rrrrrrrrrr boom boom bwa! boom boom bwa! that shot right through Fiskadoro. It wasn’t the crying of tiny engines, it was the radio on the windowsill. The radio was playing Jimi Hendrix.

He trembled to hear the radio in the midnight playing things it never played. “ Purpa haze, all through my BRAIN” —Fiskadoro had heard it a dozen times at sound-shows in Twicetown. Jimi Hendrix on Cubaradio —if his mother talked with a man’s voice, if the fish danced on dancing legs — Jimi Hendrix on Cubaradio. He wanted to play along on his clarinet, but he didn’t know the first thing about it. In the dark he took the briefcase from the closet and fitted the instrument’s pieces together as best he could and hummed through it with a choked voice, leaning close to the radio and hearing the static from its face and the hiss of the Gulf through the window and Belinda crying, “Ow-ow-ow-ow!” in the other room. Before too long the shadow of his father stood in the doorway saying, “Jesus Christ, Radar-head blasting his music-horn out here. Es she moon gotta be have him looney toons.” Fiskadoro sensed the shadow’s astonishment when Hendrix’s guitar buzzed. “Es Hendrix coming out of the Cubaradio tonight,” Fiskadoro told his father proudly.

Belinda came to stand behind her husband. Now that his parents seemed worried, Fiskadoro felt sick. Squatting by the window and leaning on his clarinet, he listened to “Purple Haze” with his mother and father.

The radio started clicking, and Jimi Hendrix said the same thing over and over: “Scuse me — scuse me — scuse me—” “Scuse me,” the radio said. “Guess what, this ain’t the program as usual like you thought it was, this is Junior Staff Sergeant Bud Harmon from Nawtha Nawlins Texas and me and Danny and Rick Ames and the Pork-jumper himself Junior Corporal George Wills caught the typhoon and busted up at I guess approximately thirteen hundred hours on them rocks right down there, I can see ’em from the window, and I can see you too , motherfuckers, and I got rounds left.”

Fiskadoro put down his incorrectly assembled clarinet. “I don’t make nothing outa this radio show.” He gave the radio a shake. “Play those music again.”