Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

“Nawtha Nawlins?” Belinda said.

“I don’t know,” Jimmy said.

“—blah blah,” the white-boy voice was saying, “et cetera”—nothing that made sense. “And we killed six a them and they killed three a us, and I got this radio station and I love Hendrix! So phone in your requests, only the phone here don’t have a number on it, so fuck you. I’m thirty-six years old and I just believe I’ll rock all night! My dad was a Staff Sergeant and he made me one, and he loved Hendrix, and his dad loved Hendrix, and I love Hendrix — nobody never told me I was own die in Cuba, but I really don’t give a shit, if that’s how it is, that’s how it is. Because it feels like once the other boys eat it, you know, and you’re just the last one left, who cares. All I own do is gepback home. But ain’t no way I’m own gepback home. I got this radio station and I got rounds left. Goddamn I have rounds in possession — got two real shiny stainless-steel thirty-round clips and I love Hendrix and I am going to rock till I die! Fuck Cuba!”

“Que pasa?” Belinda said.

“Well, sound like he fighting Cubans,” Jimmy said. “Sound like he stole Cubaradio tonight. I don’t know.”

Belinda and Jimmy and Fiskadoro listened while the man played two more Hendrix songs all the way through: “Red House,” which Fiskadoro knew; and another one, which the man said would be the last one he played before he died, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” one that Fiskadoro knew from other records at the sound-shows but had never heard performed by Jimi Hendrix. And the man asked Belinda and Jimmy and Fiskadoro to remember his name, which they’d already forgotten, and asked them to remember him as the man who attacked Cuba.

After that, Cubaradio went off the air.

Jimmy said nothing, only sucked the air in over his teeth. Fiskadoro said, “What es, Ma? Why he radio coming on at night now?”

“Oh, don’t bother me about that radio,” Belinda said. “You know that radio es a big fat lie. Cada palabra de la voz del radio es una mentira,” she said.

SUGAR CANE RISES UP OUT OF ITS OWN STUBBLE after it is harvested. Mr. Cheung had no need of planting seeds if he wanted another crop, but twice a year he put in a couple of new rows, and each time he brought some of the neighborhood children around to help him lay in the seeds.

Now that Fiskadoro had been his pupil for six months, Mr. Cheung was ready to face the fact that the boy wasn’t talented. He had a feeling for music, but he expected it to come out of the clarinet as out of a radio: turn it on, turn it off. The Orchestra Manager had tried to teach him to read words, too, but beyond learning to sound out phrases painfully, Fiskadoro had picked up nothing. Just the same, Mr. Cheung kept on patiently. You never knew. Maybe inside of the boy, two wires were growing toward each other that would eventually make a connection for power. And there wasn’t much else to do.

While Fiskadoro spent time with his teacher or wandered up one side of the island and down the other, his mother Belinda stayed in the Army and passed her moments with absolutely anybody who came along, even people she didn’t think a lot of, like Lizabeth Sanchez.

Lizabeth Sanchez had been called Lizzie before her husband’s boat was lost, but afterward she was known as Lizabeth. She’d been quiet and shy before, but now she laughed too loudly and she’d put on weight and was known to keep company with hard men. She dropped around to Belinda’s house nearly every morning. It made Belinda tired.

Though round-faced and sleepy-looking, Lizabeth was a nervous type, rocking from side to side on the rolled and pleated Ford Fairmont seat that was Belinda’s most impressive item of furniture, crossing and uncrossing her thick ankles. This morning she was eating fire-dried peanuts one at a time, spitting wet shells into her hand and tossing them out the window. “You keep such a nice house.”

“Oh! This house just a big mess,” Belinda said politely.

“Oh no, Belinda, the decoration and all like that. You keep a nice house.”

“With trying some more, it could be a nice house,” Belinda said. “But right now today — es a horrible mess. Blast-crater.”

“Donde Fiskadoro? He fetching errands for you?”

Belinda suddenly hopped up and went to the door. “Drake?” she called, parting the bead curtain. “Make sure Mikey stay in a yard with you.” When she sat down again, Lizabeth’s question was gone from her mind.

Lizabeth remembered not only the question, however, but the answer also. “I hope you know Fiskadoro he all over these lower Keys,” she told Belinda, “all slick-up with skunk-juice and look like he wanna make a big name outa himself, ever since from when he start on that Negro horn.”

“I don’t mind,” Belinda said. “He in a big orchestra.”

“I don’t think es a orchestra out on that West Beach, Belinda. Too windy,” Lizabeth said.

“Too windy?”

“I mean Fiskadoro he too windy. I mean he giving you la big vente.” Lizabeth imitated a storm for her hostess, fluttering her hands and blowing air from her fat cheeks and inadvertently dropping peanuts.

“Fiskadoro in a orchestra. A big hand with letric generators.”

“In a middle of the night? In a middle of the night, Belinda? In a big band with letric generators in a middle of the night?”

“Miami Symphony Orchestra,” Belinda insisted uncomfortably.

Lizabeth stuck out her tongue and picked a bit of shell from its tip. Since her husband’s death the veins had started to stand out more and more around her eyes.

Belinda saw that Lizabeth’s anger was causing her to eat peanuts all the time and become fat. She would come around for a snack before supper, too, Belinda knew it. It had been months since Lizabeth’s husband had disappeared, but they would finish the day by crying loudly together while the late sun laid out planes of violet light across the beaches.

“Gone be some big problem down over West Beach,” Lizabeth announced.

“Yeah?” Belinda said.

“Already problem down over there. One of them swamp-boys was on the Marathon beach.”

“Yeah? What for was he?”

“For because he was drownded. For because he was swoled up as big as a shark.”

Leaning over toward the windowsill to squint at the numbers on the radio, Belinda began slowly turning the dial. But there was nothing on yet.

“They wasn’t look at him up close till the next day. They all the people just thought es a shark out there.”

Belinda stretched her neck to check on Drake and Mike out the window. She put her hands pertly on her knees and smiled. “Do you remember,” she asked Lizabeth, “when alla them seals come down that time? On the Ocean side?”

For an instant Lizabeth looked angry. Then she made her face into an unrippled curtain of decorum. “You pissing me off,” she said.

“What you getting your eyes so red about?”

“About you only mess on a radio and talk about seals, when I gone tell you something important.”

The weather was funny today, and from where they sat in Belinda’s living room on uprooted car seats, the sky looked like something flat and heavy shoved up against the kitchen window. Belinda felt more stifled because of it. “I just remembering the seals, because for you say a shark.”

“I didn’t say no shark. I say look like a shark.”

“Oh.”

“I say a dead boy.”

“Yes, I know that, Lizabeth. A dead boy, I heard you said so exactly in my goddamn face.”

“Now who getting the red eyes?”

“Me es who,” Belinda told her.