Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

Cutthroat — cutthroat — cutthroat —

You know cain’t nobody else.

over the amplified backing of the bass and rhythm guitarists, two dreadlocked Israelite men who generally spoke to nobody but each other and then only during the numbers, their low voices, as now, like rubble under the current of The Miami Symphony Orchestra’s musical efforts.

The effort of the moment collapsed around them as William Park-Smith, the Musical Director, catching sight of the Orchestra Manager and his pupil, banged his big stick on the ground. In the relative silence, Hendrix Is’s gasoline-fed generator could be heard thrumming outside the headquarters, formerly a hangar for airplanes.

Hendrix Is cut the dreamdemonium stage-lights and put on the floodlamps overhead. He held his box of switches and spidery wires in his broad lap — the proud possessor of light and dark.

All the orchestra members were present. It was an eighteen-piece group, but some of them were only “political” appointees who played simple percussion instruments like the maraca or the tambourine. They relaxed now out of a state of concentration into a daze of heat, while the Musical Director, making haste to greet Mr. Cheung, wrinkled his nose in a polite rejection of everyone else in the room and said apologetically, forlornly, “We must do the blues. We must do the blues, and we must do the Voodoo.”

Park-Smith was a small black man who bleached his hair a rusty blond and referred to himself as an Australian. He was dressed in a fresh-looking aviator’s flight suit, which must have been very hot for him, and he wore gleaming black combat boots. To demonstrate his goodwill toward the proponents of more popular fare, he began shifting his boots beneath him in a clumsy dance of deferential good humor, the dance of the elderly amusing the young, while Little Sudan, going over part of the song with the two guitarists, sang at half power, demonstrating the rhythm guitarist’s downstroke for him with a chopping motion of her right hand:

I love you, I love you,

I love you one hunnut dollar fine.

Fiskadoro carried with him his clarinet in the briefcase called Samsonite, but he had no expectation of playing it anytime soon. Mr. Cheung had arranged for him to be along, as he often did, just to give the boy a taste, a sense of the life.

The Musical Director and the Manager spoke quietly and, he was sure, inanely with one another now, accomplishing nothing but their little delays. Fiskadoro breathed the opiate heat, wanting only a place to sleep. He knew their game. Each just wanted to tell the other he wasn’t useless.

“I have heard there was a killing,” Musical Director Park-Smith announced. A silence as of constraint fell around them.

Little Sudan was no longer singing. One of the musicians began to pick out “By the Rivers of Babylon,” an old Israelite hymn, on his bass guitar. The Musical Director turned his hands up and opened his arms, presenting the room to itself in support of some unstated assertion.

“You — your face,” Fiskadoro said, “you look. a gorilla. ”

“This is your elder,” Mr. Cheung warned him, “and your better. He is our Musical Director.”

“You were there?” Park-Smith said. “These are your friends? People who can no control themself. Thief — murder—”

Fiskadoro turned away, his head drifting through a vision of those around him — Little Sudan, the Israelite guitarists, the ever-happy and fat and rich Mrs. Castanette, who played the castanets, the serious turbaned cellist David King Rat, all the others in a smear — and he tried to walk slowly from the place, but he had a sense he was probably running, stripping himself of his pride.

“The youngsters don’t understand the situation anymore,” Mr. Cheung was trying to explain to Park-Smith.

“Do you know where the kerosene comes from?” Park-Smith shouted after Fiskadoro. “It’s poison! Live fast! Hah? Die young! Hah?”

Fiskadoro stepped through the doorway into an assault of silver light, where the old airfield lay smothering under a sheet of sunless sky that shed heat like tin. Park-Smith’s lecture pursued him: “You breathe your death when you burn those fires!”

Fiskadoro turned away from the field and tried to find some reply. He and his friends burned the kerosene so they could see. It was harmless.

Smiling sightlessly into the glare of daylight, Mrs. Castanette had come to shut the door in his face. Somewhere behind her Little Sudan was singing, without aid of the P.A. but quite audibly, “He old rule no more rule. ”

“Quiet!” Mr. Park-Smith screamed. “The poison is still poison! The poison is for one hundred years!”

“He old rule no more rule, ” Little Sudan sang, as if there had never been any person from the older generation to scream at her:

She poison no more poison

I blinking dread

I blinking generator light

I blinking oil light

He old rule no more rule

She poison no more poison

Because it was faster Fiskadoro went back to the Army by the road, the dusty road instead of the sandy beach. His perspiration itched his neck and clouds of gnats besieged his eyes and ears, and he felt the dust sticking to the damp soles of his feet.

Beggars moved along the road ahead of him toward the lowering dusk, people without arms, gangs of pinheads led by their insensate cousins, twisted-up people, the sightless and deaf, and creatures obliged to cover up their faces with rotting burlap, or muslin gone grey, so that nobody would have to see what terrifying portraits the genes could paint. Only the legless immobile ones were put up with in town; all the others had to live in the countryside. He felt like one of them, bent toward the earth and forced by an invisible deformity to walk sideways.

Fiskadoro stumbled suddenly on the road. He went over and lay down under a tree and slept.

When he got back to the compound, the boats were in. The nets had come up empty. The merchants had gone. The men were drinking.

He sat out behind Captain Leon’s house with the crew of the Los Desechados and when Jimmy wasn’t looking, he stole sips of rice brandy from the first mate’s bottle; the first mate was a young man, and he didn’t mind sharing. After his father went home, Fiskadoro drank too much and felt vague and paralyzed.

In Leon’s yard a man from Twicetown did a silly dance, lifting his heels high in the air behind him, almost kicking himself in the rear. Fiskadoro didn’t know him and wished the man would get hurt or do something to make himself look completely stupid. Maybe he was off a boat, but he seemed unconnected. This man wouldn’t tell anybody his name. Instead he started that stuff they were all doing over in Twicetown these days, putting his face out and saying, “Jake Barnes, private eye!” Fiskadoro wanted to tell this Jake Barnes to leave his father’s Captain’s house, but the person was red-faced and danced in an almost violent way.

The mate off Jimmy’s boat, whose nickname was Skin, felt the same about this intruder Jake Barnes. “Jake Barnes,” Skin said loudly to his Captain, Leon Sanchez. “I heard all about Jake Barnes, only es another Jake Barnes who put on a woman’s shift and sat on a benches out by la bottle fabrica.”

“Oh!” Leon said.

“Could be es the same Jake Barnes,” Skin said, “I don’t know.”

Leon said, “Huh!” But he didn’t say anything that might be called a word. “Hm!” he said. “Hah!”—entering no alliances.

“He wearing that blackeye-shadow for the young girls,” Skin said.

The intruder had stopped his dancing and Stood with his arms crossed over his chest, looking out to sea.