Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

“When he put his feet up on a bench,” Skin said, “like I mean wearing a woman shift, this Jake Barnes’s old pecker-wood hanging down and the people come outa la bottle fabrica and was laughing and laughing at him. Everybody could see his peckerwood.”

Skin squatted down on his heels and looked at Jake Barnes, and then at Captain Leon. But Leon seemed to be looking out somewhere beyond the yard and thinking, suddenly, about something more important. The others scratched themselves, cleared their throats, drank from the bottle.

“Well, that’s a long, long time ago now,” Skin found it advisable to say. “Not the last time when la fabrica was going. El time before. Pretty long time ago.”

“You getting totally personal and insultive against me,” Jake Barnes said.

Skin jumped up like a fly when Jake Barnes reached for a gaff thrown down beside the house. “I think you must just didn’t understood me there,” Skin said. The gaff’s hook was almost half a meter long.

“Too late now,” Jake Barnes said, hefting the gaff. The flesh around his eyes was shrinking up tight.

Skin looked around at all his crewmates. “Hey. Que pasa?”

None of the others could find an answer to this question. Leon, Leon’s son Harvard, Fiskadoro, Beer Wilson — they all awaited Jake Barnes’s final opinion on things.

Jake Barnes hefted the gaff.

Skin said hysterically, looking at the hook, “I just ain’t connect this up in my mind! Attende, attende there now. Don’t make a punto from just nothing.”

“It is a punto,” Jake Barnes said. “I don’t see any way outa this now.” But the meanness was leaving his face in favor of a blank bewilderment.

He took a good swing, and the gaff smacked the ground.

The mate said, “I do! I do! I see a way out, Jake Barnes!”

“What do you mean?” Jake Barnes’s momentum had swung him around, and he looked embarrassed to be off-balance. “What way out?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. Es gotta be one,” the mate insisted.

Jake Barnes came around with the gaff again, but it was more of an experiment this time than an actual assault. Then he held up the gaff’s point before his nose and appeared to be inspecting it for flaws.

“I don’t think that sticker gone be no good, Jake Barnes,” Skin said. “Es inferior.”

Jake Barnes was still eyeballing it. “That’s right,” he said. “I see that if I look right up close here.”

“There you go,” the mate said. “If es really me getting all personal because for I wanted to, don’t you guess that stick would fly?”

“You didn’t want to?” Jake Barnes said.

“Es what I telling you and telling you.”

Jake Barnes was quiet and pensive.

Skin squatted back down onto his heels, bouncing a little, and wrapped his arms around his shins. The others readjusted themselves, too. Nothing was going to happen. Some of them showed their disappointment by frowning and some by smiling.

Fiskadoro felt weary and ashamed. The men off his father’s boat were the weakest and sickest in the Army. It was as if the boat’s name, Los Desechados, The Rejected, drew that very type.

THE PARKING LOT BEHIND MR. CHEUNG’S house was perhaps the largest region of unbroken blacktop south of Marathon. It was fifty meters wide and at least twice as long, and had to thank for its preservation the restless white sands that blew over this end of the southernmost Key, continually obscuring and revealing things. Today great patches of asphalt were bare of sand, and the parking lot seemed much larger than usual. Trying to cross the breadth of it in the hard afternoon light, Mr. Cheung experienced himself as a figure of inexplicable motionlessness. There hadn’t been any clouds for three days. The rubber soles of his straw shoes, cut from the treads of car tires, stuck to the gooey pavement and made walking even harder. It was interesting. Probably the act of walking had always been like this in the other age, when the entire world had been paved.

The other age came naturally to Mr. Cheung’s mind, because he was en route across the asphalt barrens to his history class.

To find the classroom he didn’t have to go delicately among treacherous hallways; he had only to walk through a big hole in the cinder-block wall of Key West High and pick his way through a disheveled boiler room. Going past the huge machines of the boiler room he ducked his head — it was an act of cringing prayer and supplication not otherwise necessary to a person barely 160 centimeters tall — and stood up straight again as he entered the classroom next door.

Mr. Cheung greeted Maxwell, who was holding a lighted match to a candle on a wooden shelf by the door. To double its light, Maxwell put a mirror behind the candle. Up high along the opposite wall ran a row of windows through which the bright sky and the cracked green copper lettering on the roofless facade of the Key West Baptist Church of Fire across the road were visible, but the room was gloomy anyway. When they’d reclaimed it from its decay, the Society had washed down its six remaining school-desks and its walls and floor with seawater. It had never quite dried. These days it made a dank breeding ground for all planner of spiders and bugs.

Now that Mr. Cheung had arrived, all five members of the Society for Science were here. Mrs. Calvino was the only woman, in attendance mainly to keep watch on her husband, Bobby Calvino, who sometimes passed his afternoons at the Banks family’s distillery-house sampling the rice wine and offering suggestions and advice about the potato brandy.

Bobby sat at the school-desk looking both languid and nerve-wracked, tapping out a funereal rhythm with his fingers. His face seemed swollen and his eyes were bloodshot.

Mrs. Calvino was chattering away at William Park-Smith, the Society’s President and also the Chairman of every meeting, and she mopped her face with a terrycloth square cut from a towel and ignored her reeking husband in a way that required all of her concentration.

Mr. Cheung and Maxwell took their seats at the same time. The history class was ready to start. William Park-Smith, at the front of the room, put on a pair of thick glasses that absolutely blinded him, and addressed the class with a shy wave of his hand. He still wore his flight suit, now streaked with dust and spangled with the stains of rice wine, soup, and gasoline. Beside the zipper, above his heart, he sported a radiation-sensitive button, as much as to say, “I am a believer in rationalism and the sciences.” Mr. Cheung could see that the badge was counterfeit. Even those who believed in radiation and ardently feared it made no distinction between the real, original badges and the phony imitations. These days the white cardboard and red cellophane served more to identify than to protect. “The Society for Science will now come to attention,” Park-Smith announced with a brandishing of his sunshine-yellow teeth.

“Today,” he said, “I hope we would begin a simple one. A short book.” He held before his breast a greenish book with the faded sketch of some kind of cartoon animal on the front. Mr. Cheung leaned forward, squinting at the lettering across its lower border: All About Dinosaurs. “These animals lived in tropical regions like ours. But today they are extinguished and no more.”

“Extinct,” Mrs. Calvino pronounced with relish.

“Please wait one moment. I want to go forth with The Sun Also Rises.” Maxwell sounded wounded and alarmed.

“Ernest Hemingway,” Mrs. Calvino recalled.

Park-Smith gave Maxwell a stony smile. “We have finished this book last week. Why didn’t you come?”

“But I think it’s important for an understanding—”