Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

Fiskadoro was proud of himself because he was really learning to play the clarinet — Mr. Cheung said that he’d forgotten how not to play. The notes on the page flowed into his eyes and out of the instrument and into the world as music. And he was a much better reader of words now, too. Sometimes, but not all the time, when he read to Mr. Cheung from one of the books the teacher brought around, instead of marks on a page Fiskadoro saw images in his mind.

Sometimes, when his brother Drake came around, Fiskadoro told him about reading and tried to interest him in a book, but Drake was a fisherman. He liked boats, not books. People said Drake looked just like their father. Mike, the youngest brother, didn’t look like anybody yet. He didn’t mind being read to, but he didn’t seem to listen very carefully. He spent most of the time with the neighbors, because Belinda was getting too weak to take care of him. Fiskadoro spent very little time with either of his brothers.

Most of the time he spent healing. Belinda had taken the strings out of his ears, and the holes where they’d been were closed to dots now. His groin was well, but he would always be different from other men.

Being different from other men sometimes sent him walking far down the beach, down among the huge green flies and the stink that rose off the garbage pit and the hooting gulls that never seemed to mind the stink or eat any of the flies. Belinda’s ashes would be thrown away here after her body was burned.

The gulls argued with him as he came too close to their nests in the weedy sand near the pit. They rose in flocks, their shadows whirling all around him on the beach. Farther up-shore he always saw them walking in little groups, ignoring each other, wise and smug, looking at nothing. They reminded him of Mr. Cheung.

More than once he saw others here, also different from other men: ghosts who had appeared out of the sea — from the shipwrecks, from the End of the World, from the plagues, from the cold time, from the kill-me — drowned sailors and frozen children, young maidens bleeding down their legs, sick old men and women and cancer-wasted fishwives who seemed to wander hopelessly near the place of their burning; but all of them were smiling and no longer touched with pain.

THE DAYS WERE COOLER, generally grey or sometimes overhung with tremendous white clouds whose shadows traveled the Gulf, and yet the dust on Towanda’s breasts and shoulders was mapped with perspiration when she came to see Belinda. Towanda carried a penny jug of potato brandy, a crumpled aluminum can faintly bearing a bleached design.

Belinda didn’t get up from her chair. Her eyes were sunk deep in brown circles, and the rest of her was the color of stale fish-meat.

Towanda smiled at this sick woman and nodded in an encouraging way. But when Belinda had swallowed some brandy and was passing back the can, her struggle was so great and her movements were so weak that Towanda gave up trying to look happy and just sat there wishing everything would go away.

Belinda noticed how her neighbor wiped the mouth of the can with her thumb before taking a swallow.

“You-all gone have to burn me up,” Belinda said.

Towanda’s face was twisted and her voice came out in whispers and squeaks. “Yeah,” she whispered. “You got it.”

“I on fire already sometime,” Belinda told her. “Sometime he run down me like letric, sometime he coming up shoosh, like kerosene.”

“You hurting alia time yet?” Towanda whispered.

“Sometime, not alia time.”

“Es ain’t over yet.”

“Oh, no,” Belinda said. “I got a little time. Nothing gone happen today.”

“But he getting a little worse and a little worse?”

“Oh, yeah,” Belinda said. “He getting worse.” Suddenly the salt tears poured out of her eyes. “He taking me all the way, Towanda!”

“Oh, God, Belinda!” Towanda wiped her eyes and nose with the back of her hand. “We gone have to burn you up!”

“Got to,” Belinda said. Her head shook with weeping.

“Yeah. Got to. Real life,” Towanda agreed.

They passed the can of brandy. Belinda coughed and started laughing, even as she wiped her own tears away. Towanda couldn’t help laughing too.

“Make me feel stupid be laughing,” Belinda said. “I don’t know why I laughing now.” She laughed harder.

“Me too, you know!” Towanda shouted, and they were both taken so relentlessly by laughter that they could hardly draw a breath.

SHE AT FIRST PRAYED and then gave up praying to Atomic Bomber Major Colonel Overdoze, the most powerful loa of all. Fiskadoro didn’t understand, and he didn’t care. He just wanted to be right there with her, seeing whatever she was seeing. She got wild in her talk eventually: Major Colonel Overdoze did what he wanted. Major Colonel Overdoze gave back her son, but all cleaned out inside like a baby. Major Colonel Overdoze wasn’t controlled by shrines — he could set the shrines on fire if he wanted. Major Colonel Overdoze didn’t take away the tumor, he made it bigger, and gave it children, and set them all on fire. The tumors covering her body hurt so much that Belinda was too surprised to yell. She tried to find a comfortable position, but the sensation, which she said sometimes ached and other times seared her bones, kept after her. She twisted and turned to get away from it, covered herself up to hide from it, flung herself around in the bed to shake it off, but it held her like hooks, rolled over her like water, fell down on her like sparks. She said it never stopped. Atomic Bomber Major Colonel Overdoze kept turning it up higher, until she knew she wasn’t feeling it, but seeing him, closer and closer, brighter and brighter, and she couldn’t close her eyes. Major Colonel Overdoze didn’t need a plane to fly, or bombs to burn away the shrines that tried to control him. Without any hands or fingers or eyes, without even a mind, he could turn it up higher and higher until it couldn’t be anything, not darkness, not light — it could only be him.

When the neighbor-ladies started bringing her potions to drink for the hurt, they told Fiskadoro the time was getting near. She didn’t scream or cry about the pain anymore, but she looked out from farther and farther back inside herself every day and didn’t seem to believe any of what she saw.

Fiskadoro kept watch by her bed and held her hand. He didn’t care if he caught it, and sometimes he hoped he would. He was aware he was getting a little crazy about it. People did that in this situation. He cried a lot, and he got mad enough to kill. But the whole time there was something about it, as if he and the woman were going through all this right in the middle of the sun and not being burned. When she died it was the middle of the night; his brothers were asleep, the village was asleep, but the sea was awake and Belinda was awake, and her oldest son was awake, holding her hand as he sat beside her bed.

The sweat began pouring off her. She asked for the pan several times but then discovered she didn’t have to make water. “Jimmy! Jimmy!” she said. She started talking to others who’d gone there first — her mother and father, her older brother. “I don’t hurt no more,” she said. She took a deep breath; and then she died.

ON THE DAY THE ISRAELITES CAME FOR HIM, Mr. Cheung was ready with a hundred objections, and he seriously planned, as soon as he saw them, to start listing the many good reasons why he couldn’t go with them today, or ever.

Flying Man and the two young savage boys flanking him in Mr. Cheung’s doorway were smiling and serene — much, much more calm and contented than he’d imagined possible.