Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson
Mr. Cheung estimated abysmally that it would be another two hours to Marathon. Everything he’d been feeling at the start of this journey—excitement, curiosity, an undirected gratitude, great fear—had been emptied out of him with repeated vomiting. His throat ached, and he trembled with weakness. The salt spray and diesel smoke thickened in his lungs as he gripped the rail without strength, looking forward to his death impatiently.
“Try some salty biscuit. Please, one bite,” Park-Smith yelled out amid the wind. A gust jerked the boat’s prow to port—this move was a new one, a kind of half-spin that left Mr. Cheung astonished at the world’s inexhaustible evil. The biscuit Park-Smith was threatening him with like a poisonous nugget was one more thing. Mr. Cheung didn’t want the biscuit and in fact hated the biscuit, but he indicated nothing. He’d found this discomfort to be an incredible teacher, one that had practiced him, right at the start of this trip, not to nod his head or shake it.
The young mate, a white boy, stayed at the bow and peered ahead for uncharted obstacles in this shallow water, while the Captain, also a youthful white, one from the famous Wilson family, responded to his signals with unexpected and excruciating shifts in their course. Mr. Cheung was the only seasick passenger. Other members of the Twicetown Society for Science—lumpy Maxwell, Park-Smith, Bobby Calvino, who would be dangerous without his wife and was already drunk—had been having a good time, and now looked bored. They’d been nearly three hours on the water, and the overcast heavens were getting even darker as night approached.
Below Key Marathon, Captain Wilson took the Catch through a channel and came at the largest town on the Keys from the Ocean side. The water was calmer here today. Mr. Cheung felt his nausea dissipating even before they docked behind the local slaughterhouse. The slaughterhouse had once been a hotel. The stripped, headless carcasses of several dogs and goats were hung from poles laid across the width of the swimming pool. A small man, apparently the only one working at this hour, tightroped across the poles with a bucket, casting spicy salt over the meat. As Park-Smith helped the Orchestra Manager along the pier and toward the streets, Mr. Cheung saw, through the glassless window behind the swimming pool, a dead goat laid out on the bar in the cocktail lounge. “Hold shut your nose, Tony,” Park-Smith warned him, but Mr. Cheung had already stopped breathing. The stink of the slaughterhouse kept everybody away. The buildings on this street housed only drifts of sand and the barnacled supplies of fishing boats.
By the time the four Society members had walked through several shanty collections, where families sat outside their doorways eating suppers of fish and rice and worrying about the weather, and then through a flat neighborhood where old houses had been torn apart and stacked into lumber, Mr. Cheung was completely revived.
“I can’t remember where the library is,” he told the others. “How far?” Now he was excited again. He tried to expect nothing, but they wouldn’t have had the Twicetown Society travel so far, wouldn’t even have condescended to invite them here, if the book weren’t important.
“Two more streets, I think,” said Maxwell, and Park-Smith said, “Two streets.”
According to Park-Smith, the Marathon Society for Knowledge had traded a boat for the book. It must be the one—the history they’d all been looking for long enough that they’d given up hope of finding it—the text that would explain the End of the World.
Thinking about the book put Mr. Cheung into a panic. “It’s dark, they might be starting already.” He picked up his pace. He was willing to leave the others behind if necessary.
The library was a stone building left upright where all the wooden ones had been torn down, and now it stood by itself at the edge of a field. Great steps marched up to its entrance, on either side of which a flagpole jutted from the walls, one dripping a ragged Florida state flag that hopped up fitfully in the wind to broadcast its crimson X, and the other one naked. Even before they reached the steps and passed between these flagpoles, they heard the buzz of voices from inside.
This was an occasion. As they entered, Mr. Cheung could see immediately that a lot more people than the Marathon Society’s thirty members were gathered here. Their bodies stifled the room with heat and breath and everybody was talking at once, at least fifty citizens in various postures on the cool floor of the main room. Most of them were white people from the merchant families, but there were fishermen and layabouts present, too, wearing shirts as at a wedding or a funeral, and there were even some desechados among them: Mr. Cheung saw a young blind man with a humped back, who held himself sideways in a corner and turned a grotesquely large ear toward the speaker at the front. Precious kerosene was being offered up in lanterns to give them light.
The generalized chatter trailed away and then resumed quickly after the Twicetown Society members had made themselves evident, hesitating in the doorway.
Roderick Chambers stood behind the only piece of furniture in the room, a wrecked Xerox device the size of two goats; behind him loomed the metal shelves holding the Marathon Public Library’s several hundred volumes. Backed up against this wall of words, he welcomed the Twicetown Society for Science with a lonely gesture of embrace, which he altered by bringing his hands together as in prayer and pointing at some vacant spots in the front row almost at his feet. People moved their legs for the new arrivals as Park-Smith led the way through those assembled. The ones by the wall made room without squabbling. It was the kind of courtesy Mr. Cheung would have expected during a disaster. He was pressed against a tiny dark woman with scraggly Negro hair who looked evil-tempered, but she smiled at him and wrapped her arms around her knees, giving him as much space as she could, and continued waiting quietly.
Roderick Chambers was responding to some kind of dissatisfaction among the Society members. “And then again,” he was saying, “running through all the possibilities, finding pretty much nothing. We’ve been a long time after a book like this book. We cut the only deal we could.”
“Sounds like no deal at all,” a voice called from the rest,
“We cut the only deal we could.”
“They got a damn boat. And we still don’t know what we got.”
“We got a straight guarantee about the pages—any missing pages, the deal is canceled. But aside from that, what we received is what we received. No more and no less.”
“We need an all-time policy laid down,” somebody said. “We usually look at the Table of Contents, and we better say from now on, always see the Contents.”
“Most of the time we buy by the kilo,” Roderick Chambers said. “We don’t even look—”
“When it’s a regular book, you mean to say. We see Contents on a high-price type, and this—”
“We cut the only deal we could,” Chambers repeated against a volley of comments, shaking his head and closing his eyes, “we cut the only deal we could, we cut the only deal we could—”
“How do you know it ain’t contaminated, if you didn’t even get to see it?”
“We know because it didn’t come from Miami. It came from here. It was originally the property of this library.” Many were outraged.
Chambers seemed to enjoy shocking everybody with the news that they’d traded so steeply for their own book. “It got stolen a long, long time back,” he said. “Now it’s been returned.”
“What was the source?” several people shouted. “What was the source?”
“It came from a usual type of source,” Roderick Chambers assured them.
What’s the point of all this talk? Mr. Cheung thought. By now he was speechless with tension. He looked neither right nor left, took nothing in, and tried to calm himself by thinking that it had been bound to happen someday. Someday was today. It had to be the kind of book they’d been hoping for.
“I can’t believe,” Chambers said above the noise, “that you-all just mean to sit here slinging this dead issue around when we have the book right here.” He stepped back and pointed dramatically at a book, just lying among the other bo
Pressy was bored and sipping at potato brandy as the windy dark came along. The Los Desechados, of whose crew he was the newest and least respected member, hadn’t gone out today because all the gulls had been flying east toward the Ocean side, a good sign there was a storm somewhere out on the Gulf.
Pressy’s cousin Alfo was staying across the compound with his sister, whose roof didn’t leak. Drake was napping inside, but Drake would run home to his mother when the thunder started. Pressy intended to stay here, where he lived, even if he drowned, which was a possibility because the hut’s front section was falling down. Generally this little building wasn’t lived in. Coconut shells, wood to be split, and miscellaneous unwanted things found their way here.
Pressy clicked his tongue at a grey kitten hiding under the house. “Come on, Señor.” Wearing a worried, intelligent expression, the kitten stepped out from under what was left of the steps and uttered a cry.
Pressy took another pull of his brandy. He stuck his finger in the bottle’s mouth and offered the wet finger to the kitten, but the kitten only sniffed the air and turned its back.
When Drake woke up from his siesta among the stacks of kindling in the house and wandered, rubbing his face, out front to sit with him, Pressy felt happier. “Rain gone come down in the roof,” he promised Drake. “Thunder gone smash thisyer casa. Lightning gone burn us alive. Sarge know all about it.” Pressy’s dog Sarge was hiding in a dark corner of the quonset hut, his mind already in pieces, listening to thunder nobody else could hear yet. Drake didn’t say anything. He shivered in the wind and put his arms around himself.
Pressy went inside, came back with half a coconut shell, and poured some potato brandy into it for the kitten. When he set the shell down, the kitten gave it a little sniff, but got no closer than the length of a hand to the source of this aroma. “Ain’t you thirsty?” Pressy said. He got a whole coconut from the house and whacked it with his bolo knife, shaking milk from the cracked brown fruit into the improvised bowl. “Scientifig esperiment,” he explained to Drake. This time the kitten didn’t even come near it.
Drake went inside, and Pressy said, “Where you going?” just to have something to say. Presently Drake came back out wearing a shawl of burlap draped over his head and shoulders.
“In order for this kind of esperiment,” Pressy said, “you go find some milk.”
“Es your esperiment,” Drake said.
Solemnly Pressy told him, “Fiskadoro help me many times, Drake.”
“I not Fiskadoro,” Drake said.
“Oh”—Pressy put his face in his hands-—“when you say that it make my heart go dark, talking I ain’t Fiskadoro, talking I ain’t my own brother, talking I don’t believe you scientifig esperiment, Pressy, talking I ain’t you cousin, don’t wanna put out on Los Desechados no more—”
“Si! I wanna put out on Los Desechados!”
“Well why you don’t get me some milk? Make my heart go dark till I don’t never wanna see you face around my boat.” Pressy dumped the shell of its contents and handed it to Drake. “You say Towanda Sanchez, mi madre need it because of her stomach burning up.”
Holding the burlap shawl shut tightly under his chin with one hand, Drake carried the bowl to Leon Sanchez’s and soon came back, walking carefully and watching the milk inside it. Now the evening was dark. The edges of the burlap flapped around his shoulders in the wind.
“She doesn’t like to give me,” he told Pressy. “She goat not making much today.”
“Es important,” Pressy said. He poured some brandy into the milk and clucked for the kitten. The kitten came out from under the house and smelled of the offered mixture, jerked back, approached again, put a paw into the bowl and scratched at the liquid as if trying to scrape aside whatever smelled improper, sniffed the paw, touched it with the tip of its tongue, sneezed, turned away in disgust, walked around awhile, repeated all these moves, and at last took one sip from the bowl and sat back, licking its lips and turning this experience over in its mind. “She gone drink it,” Pressy predicted. He drank some himself, from the bottle, and then marched back and forth with his hands clasped behind his head and his elbows jutting out.
Less and less reluctantly, the kitten sipped the reinforced goat’s milk until the bowl was empty. Drake and Pressy watched without comment. There was a little thunder, faint and low, from far out over the Gulf.
The kitten hopped about at their feet and struck at imaginary small prey, but for the most part behaved as if perfectly sober. Pressy was disappointed. “Why she don’t fall down?” he asked Drake. “Always every time I drink it, I gone fall down.” A louder clap of thunder drove the kitten back under the little house.
“Kitten don’t fall down when she drink brandy,” Drake said.
“That’s right,” Pressy said. “We know that because of we have make a scientifig esperiment.”
They sat on the broken steps, side by side, waiting for the next thing to happen.
“Now que pasa?” Drake asked.
“Now a storm,” Pressy said.
“Nagasaki.” Roderick Chambers took a step backward and then a step to the right, getting closer to the lamp on the wall. “The Forgotten Bomb.”
Ah, God, Mr. Cheung thought.
He would have been able to hear the people breathing around him, if not for the gusts throwing the first raindrops at the boarded-up windows. His own breath was coming too rapidly. A vibration of the storm shook the room’s shadows. This wasn’t a particularly bad squall, certainly not a cataclysmic one. This early in the wet season came rough weather; hurricanes arrived late. By the compelling power of reason, he tried to drive away the fear that merely by reading about this bomb they might wipe themselves off the earth tonight.
Drake helped his mother drag the window-boards out from under the house as the rain came down and Mike howled inside. Belinda said nothing, but managed to convey, by flattening the look of her face and moving with a certain weary, triumphant pomp, that Drake should have accomplished this chore many days ago, that he shouldn’t be out on the Ocean after fish because he was only ten, that he shouldn’t be living with Pressy and Alfo, that he was a demon and a criminal. The boards were slightly mushy and eaten away by salty dampness around the edges. In places their borders were too flimsy to give good purchase to the wooden latches that were supposed to hold them, and by puckering and un-puckering her lips repeatedly as she twisted one of the latches Belinda made it plain that Drake was also somehow responsible for this. Blinded by his sins, he ran a toe painfully against the battery she’d moved from the windowsill to the floor.
The wind was letting up a little as the rain fell harder, but the curtain of beads over the door still chattered against the door-board as they latched it in place, and then the beads scraped back and forth across the wood like something clawing its way in. Now they were reasonably snug against the storm. Mike stopped crying, the candle flames stopped dancing in the glass jars, and the rain stopped sounding like death. “What you want aqui?” Belinda asked Drake, as if just discovering him here.
“I got a sick stomach,” Drake said.
She made motions of unplugging a bottle and tipping it back. “Party on down.”
“Es ain’t a party. Come from I ate until almost ten green coconuts.”
Belinda grabbed Mike and violently washed his face with salt water from the clam bucket, and then wiped her hands back and forth on her new denim skirt while Mike let out with fresh cries.
“I sick. I got to stay here. Es raining,” Drake said.
“Oh!” Belinda said. “Ha! Hm!”
Somebody pounded hard on the door-board.
“You gone break my door, Pressy!” Belinda shouted. She unlatched the door-board and moved it aside.
Pressy was holding his dog Sarge by the scruff of the neck and peering through the bead curtain.
“Ain’t no party aqui,” Belinda said.
“Sarge got those looney toons,
Within a couple of hours, it looked as if nobody wanted Roderick Chambers to go on. They interrupted his hoarse reading with questions they knew he couldn’t answer: Was this the first bomb? Was this the last bomb? “Why is it talking about Japan?” a fisherman asked, standing up in the back and pounding on the window-board for attention. Thunder answered him. Meanwhile the listeners argued among themselves. Some claimed that the book wasn’t true, that it was only a storybook. While they fidgeted and bickered, Roderick Chambers read silently to himself, until people shouted, “Read! Read!” He picked up at the place he’d reached alone. “Mrs. Yoshiyama was peeling potatoes in her kitchen, and she watched in disbelief as the potato skins flew out the window a second before she was hurled to the floor.” Immediately there were new interruptions as the disbelievers tried to point out that nobody could have known whether this woman, Mrs. Yoshiyama, had been peeling potatoes or oranges: it must be a story. “We traded a boat for this!” someone yelled.
But the talk ceased, only the strokes of rain on the field outside and the occasional thunder competed with Roderick Chambers when he read an account of three men who’d flown an airplane over the city soon after it was bombed: