Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

“This boy,” Lizabeth said, “he one of them all-blacks from over the swamps. Got the—” Lizabeth pointed at her crotch. “Got he Johnny all tore up like they do.”

Belinda’s dead father and dead mother, all the dead of her blood and their animals, drew closer in the room. “Oh well,” she said. Her flesh stood out in bumps.

Lizabeth left much earlier than usual because a man off her husband’s old boat was coming to visit her. Belinda stood at the kitchen window and saw herself trapped in its frame, with the girl she had been and the hag she would become occupying the windows on either side of her. She could walk anytime around this compound and see the young Belinda of a few years ago in the contemptuous single girls carrying their butts like sugar candy down the shade of the dirt paths, their faces as empty of sense as little full moons, their eyelids whitened and the lashes darkened with Kiwi shoe polish; and she could see the sun-blackened, fat-assed future Belinda in the gatherings of hopeless fishwives by the well, resting their water jugs on cocked hips while they talked about nothing that mattered, setting the jugs down to talk some more, wobbling the flab under their arms as they gestured, picking the jugs up and holding them some more and talk, talk, talk.

Belinda was thirty-three. She’d nursed three children and lost a brother to the Gulf, but she still affected the youthful modesty of covering up her breasts like a virgin.

She sliced fish, and the blood ran down the drain. The drain emptied out beneath the quonset hut. The boys tossed sand over the mess down there periodically. It was Belinda’s life to clean the fish her husband and sons brought to her, and cook the fish on the wood-stove, and eat the fish and clean the fish and cook the fish. Most people kept their fires outside during the hot months, but Belinda stuck to the old ways. She tended the stove in the kitchen, stirring ashen coals and throwing in pieces of cypress root twice a day. Now and then she fed or punished the baby Mike.

The rest of her time she generally passed on the rotted front stoop, squatting flat on her heels and raking brown shards of coconut across her lower front teeth, scraping the ivory meat from the shell and watching the sea do what the sea always seemed to do, which was to curl its numberless fingers over the land, time after time, and take a little of it away. And the men were out there, combing the sea for fish. And the sea kept some of the men.

She hadn’t seen Fiskadoro since noon the day before. It was breakfast time when he got home. He was standing in the middle of the room before she noticed him. “Where you come from? You bring yourself around here with that lying face, look for you mother gone cook you breakfast?”

“I got some fish for you.”

“I don’t see no fish.”

“Es outside.”

“Well why you don’t get them? You gone leave you head someplace one day.”

“I’m so thirsty,” he said. “I got a taste of sand in my throat please.”

Belinda sat him down at the table. She took the jug and measured him out a few swallows in a shell. “You in the wrong place.”

It was hot and steamy in the little hut because the wood-stove was always going. Fiskadoro let the water touch his lips, meaning to drink slowly, but then gulped it all down in mixed despair and pleasure. Savoring the aftertaste, he became aware of the odors that had always meant mother and home to him but now were beginning to signal something else, a deprivation and powerlessness, a feeling of slight shame — the odor of sweat and the smoke of fires baked into everything, a stench of rotting fruit and baby-puke. The smell of fish on his own hands was revolting.

And the things his mother had chosen to get and keep in her life were beginning to seem pointless to him — halfhearted and stupid. Around him, decorating their home, were many of the accoutrements of the cars of the previous century — emergency signal-lights flashing constantly, the radio emitting a low steady wash of static, these things hooked by cables to an auto battery that rested on a sill and served to hold open a window. Belinda was very fond of steering wheels and had several of them nailed up to these stained walls that lately didn’t seem to give him any space.

“You wanna hear what Lizabeth told me about a dead boy?”

“Fat girl,” Fiskadoro said. “She bout a quart low.”

“A swamp-boy come washed up drownded down over Marathon.”

“I know about it. He wash up big as a whale.” Fiskadoro started dancing in the kitchen, letting his eyes roll up in his head. “People come on la beach there and go, ‘Hi, hello there now — that Lizabeth there? Wake up, Lizabeth!’ Cubaradio!” He danced, but he knew she saw the big circles under his eyes.

Belinda drifted around the stove in her dirty white shift with a wooden face. Fiskadoro sucked an orange and watched her take the fish he’d left outside and go to the sink to clean them, tossing each one down wearily as if it were her martyred heart. He sat on the porch awhile and watched his brothers playing in the yard and listened to the breeze tick sand against the outhouse and cry along the blades of beach-grass that turned in the wind all day long, drawing perfect circles in the sand around themselves, and then he left for his lesson without saying goodbye.

Mr. Cheung was always aware of his pupil’s presence before Fiskadoro could give himself the rare pleasure of knocking on an actual door. Today, as was customary, he ushered the boy in with dignified silence, welcoming him only with his eyes, his Asian face a mask of deference, but not without its impression of good humor, his hair slicked back like someone recently dragged from the sea. He was dressed, as always in the warmest months, in very fine new boxer undershorts and a white tank-top undershirt, with sheer blue dress socks pulled up over his calves, and lustrous, almost smoldering patent-leather dress shoes on his feet. He was a delicate man except for his belly, a big wrinkled thing about the color and texture of a kiwi fruit, which he carried before him as if he prized it highly.

“You’re supposed to be a morning lesson,” he said.

Fiskadoro was shocked and embarrassed. By what foreign arrangements of time and space had he arrived here after noon?

“I happen to be free anyway,” Mr. Cheung said. He stepped back smartly to admit his only pupil, the only other person south of Marathon who had a clarinet.

The front room of the house, which he reserved for the pursuit of the musical arts, was furnished only with a black upright piano and bench, a long church pew of heavy wood, and a red bucket seat — one from a mighty Thunderbird autocar — affixed with wooden rockers and kept for Grandmother’s use.

Now Mr. Cheung sat in his church pew, a straight-backed, bowlegged, and potbellied man with his hands on his widely parted knees, and nodded his protege into the seat beside him. Between them on the pew’s dull wood rested the music books, and the music stand all folded up, and his own clarinet in its case, which was a real clarinet case lined with brown velvet, with a depression to hold each piece.

In his teacher’s presence Fiskadoro found in himself reserves of discipline and forbearance of which he had no awareness on the hot beach or in the vegetating Twicetown or the dreaming Army. In this room the cool damp of evening still held its breath. The windows on the west side were covered with tar paper, and those on the east with white sheets that moved slightly in the scarce breezes while the shadows of a poinsettia bush and a small diamond-shaped talisman against radioactivity, cast on the cloth, stayed in one place. It was just barely light enough here in Mr. A. T. Cheung’s front parlor to see. The teacher put the music stand in front of them and spread open on it their text of late, Sidney Bechet’s Clarinet Method. And he seemed to breathe peace and grace into the room just by saying, as he always did — usually it was his first breaking of the silence before the lesson, a greeting, an affirmation, and a formula — a little shyly: “Book Number One.”