Fiskadoro Read online

  On this day of his contract with Mr. Cheung, Fiskadoro started toward his home in a frenzy and held onto his briefcase with a sense that it gave out shafts of fire that would blind all his relatives and friends. He would be a member of The Miami Symphony Orchestra. This organization hadn’t yet “grown up.” The orchestra never gave any performances and didn’t get together very often, even for rehearsals. It wasn’t widely known of. Fiskadoro had heard of it only recently himself. Just the same he’d tell everybody in his village about it and then it would be famous.

  It was several kilometers to the Army, and he was asleep on his feet by the time he got there. Now the fact that he was getting home crowded out of his mind the fact that he’d been somewhere, and he forgot all about his new status.

  The boats were in. When he entered the shadows of coconut and date palms and felt the silence among the corrugated huts, he knew they’d come in and that everyone, even the dogs and cats, would be down at the water. He heard their cries.

  When he reached the shore, he saw they’d already landed the nets. The Business and the El Tigre and the Generalissimo lay twenty meters out on the water of the Gulf, and the nets lay on the beach among all the villagers with a mist rising off the piles of mackerel. His father’s boat, the Los Desechados, was there. The catch was heavy. Everybody was happy. He ran to get near the nets, and the salt spray from the fish stung his eyes. He was nearly thirteen, he was growing every day, but he still felt smaller than everyone else.

  Their olive rags splashed and dangling, the white shifts of the younger women wet and translucent over their dark bodies, bright scarves around their heads, the heavy-footed older women in olive or khaki skirts, without blouses, their breasts swinging as they made merry over the fish or their mouths open and their faces dull as they caught their breath after the work of hauling in the nets, the people of his village, the six names—Hidalgo, Delacorte, Chicago, Wilson, Sanchez, Revere—attended to the tasks of the moment without any thoughts in their heads.

  White fish-merchants from Twicetown and Marathon patrolled the borders of the open nets and kept the naked Army children at bay with threats and hostile gestures, while the children, for their part, harassed the dogs and cats who seemed to be all around them.

  Fiskadoro’s younger brother Drake found him and stood breathless right in his face, reaching out his hands to the briefcase called Samsonite. Drake said, “You back from Twicetown.”

  “Bueno. Smart man.” Fiskadoro kept the briefcase out of his brother’s reach.

  “He teach you on that thing, Fiskadoro? You gone play now?”

  “I be go play tomorrow,” Fiskadoro corrected him. “Not today.”

  A couple of Billy Chicago’s kids braced Drake on either side and put their arms around his shoulders. “He got the music, Drake? Fish-man got the music?”

  “He be go play tomorrow,” Drake told them. “He gone play”—he began singing—“Let’s seize the time now, let’s seize the time, let’s seize the time” and pretty soon a lot of kids were singing the old hymn learned only recently from the Israelites who’d suddenly turned up on the Keys, landed out of nowhere in their big boat, half of them dead:

  Let’s seize the time now

  Let’s seize the time

  Let’s make the sys-tem

  Pay for its crime . . .

  Fiskadoro could see he was too late. For everybody else, all this happiness was starting to get old. The sun was falling, the merchants had to get back on the road, and the villagers were exhausted. Still trying to keep the party going, the children drummed with professional art on the metal barrels of diesel fuel in the merchants’ mule-carts and climbed all over them until banished by Simpson Delacorte of the Business, who was taking the lead for the villagers in the negotiations. “We want all five oleo barrils. And you gonna bring us five more barrils tomorrow—full-up. Plus also ten million dollar,” he told the white merchants.

  When the trading was over, the men paraded about with sheaves of money stuck in their knife-belts and gave bills away to the little children. While the women shoveled the carts full of fish, the merchant families hitched up their burros. In a few minutes the two-wheeled carts began inching off toward the Army paths and the road beyond, leaving the treadmarks of their huge rubber auto tires in the sand.

  There were plenty of fish left, many of them still flickering and moving on the nets. The villagers had carried home what they could cook, and their animals sat gnawing fish on the beach.

  Drake and Fiskadoro found Pressy, their mother’s youngest brother, and followed him until he sat down under a tree. Pressy was a small, handsome man, much darker than his sister Belinda, and because of his brownness and also because of his general empty-headedness, Belinda claimed he’d gotten more Cuban blood than she had. Drake and Fiskadoro liked to go here and there with Pressy because he talked to them about sex: not the kind between men and women, but the kind between dogs and dogs. Pressy wanted to breed a variety of dog that would catch fish. If he threw a dead mackerel in the water, his dog Sarge would fetch it back, but Pressy’s idea of going after a live fish never got through to Sarge. “He dog ain’t have a big mind,” Pressy said, laying out all the facts for his two nephews. “I can’t gone sit down and explaining it all about fish to a dog. I need one that know. Then I get that pescadero dog breeding up on another dog. That dog be go drop out six puppies—three pescadero puppies, and three just dog puppies.” He held up three fingers of one hand, and three fingers of the other. “Now, comprende, comprende—breed up the three fish-dogs on three just-dogs, I be getting more and more fish-dogs.” Confused and elated by the mathematics of breeding, he drew innumerable lines in the dirt. “He oleo gone dry up outa these Keys tomorrow,” he said, “but when we can’t run the engines no more, we can forget about boats. Don’t talk to me about no boats. Custom special breeded dogs gone bring in them fish.”

  In fact Pressy’s breeding practices amounted to not much more than a lonelyhearts service for mongrels, and some of the less generous minds—Belinda was among them—referred to him as a silly pimp. But Drake and Fiskadoro were fascinated with certain information Pressy had in his possession about how the talents of one dog got inside another dog and then inside their puppies, things to do with sperm, gene-balls, desechado-molecules, and contamination. “Everything I telling to you es so small you can’t gone see it,” he told them. “Trust me.”

  Tonight as the sun disappeared and some of the families got together and built smoky fires in front of their quonset huts to keep away the darkness and cook up a feast of fish, Drake and Fiskadoro waited for Pressy to talk about these microscopic things. He knew what they were waiting for, but he kept quiet and seemed sad. “I get you a fish cooked up, Pressy,” Fiskadoro said, but Pressy wanted them to believe he’d gone deaf. Fiskadoro shoved Drake and said, “Get us three fish cooked up pretty good,” and Drake slid away from his hands, danced around, and sang, “Struggling man, struggling man.” Drake looked hypnotized.

  “I gone tell Belinda Drake’s tired,” Fiskadoro said.

  “Never happen no way no time tomorrow, shitface boy,” Drake said.

  “Then why you don’t get us three fish?” Fiskadoro said, and Drake went over to Nancy Hidalgo’s yard and begged three fish strung on a sword of palm leaf.

  But Pressy wouldn’t look at the fish.

  Fiskadoro was hungry. “Ain’t you hungry, Pressy? I gone eat the head. Eyeballs. Hungry.” Drake was glad to have his, too, eating it with the same dead face he used to have at Belinda’s breast.

  But Pressy was building up a resentful silence around his shoulders. At last he said, “I don’t wanna talk to no fish. They don’t lemme on their boat, and I gone die of it. I gone sink down in the sink-down,” he announced.

  “Ain’t you hungry?” Fiskadoro said.

  “That’s mi family and I belong on that Los Desechados,” Pressy said. “But instead they won’t never take me out, and now I be gone die—the man, me, who I’m inventing
the fish-dogs that saved the Army.”

  Mike was asleep; Drake and Fiskadoro were wandering the compound; and Jimmy Hidalgo, sitting with his wife Belinda on the front step, lifted the calf of her leg in his hand and put his lips to her thigh.

  “Dirty man,” Belinda said.

  Candle flames in the room behind them jerked when a little breeze came off the Gulf. Their quonset hut was close to the water and didn’t get the shade, but they had the sea and its lonely company, and they never had to worry about any coconuts crashing through the roof. On either side of the doorless doorway that silhouetted them, a row of three ornamental auto turn-signals blinked crazily.

  “Es time I about ready to make some trouble,” Jimmy said, reaching his hand up under her shift.

  “You ready to make some babies, dirty man. Then I gone get alia troubles and you go fish. That’s how Mikey come around.” Mike was their youngest, two years old. But she put her head on Jimmy’s shoulder and opened her legs for him.

  They kissed a little, and then they heard the boys arguing as they approached. “Here come Mr. Radar and Assistant Mr. Radar,” Jimmy said sadly.

  “Ma,” Fiskadoro said. He had a feeling that maybe whatever he had to say wasn’t important enough. He gripped his brother authoritatively by the shoulder. “Drake tired, Ma.”

  “Oh, don’t bother me about Drake,” Belinda said.

  Jimmy took Fiskadoro by the back of the neck and gave him a shake so his head jumped. “Brains still messing up the machines in there, Mr. Radar?” He took the two boys into his lap, one on each knee. “Moon gone have you looney toons when we sleeping tonight?”

  Sitting on Jimmy’s knee, Fiskadoro was tall enough now to keep his feet on the ground and take the weight off his father’s bones. In the blinking red illumination that turned the moonlight on and off, Fiskadoro looked at the faint whorls of dried sea salt on Jimmy’s cheeks and shoulders. These vague signatures of the Gulf had always been decipherable there. Fiskadoro knew by the clenching of his own stomach that he would never go to sea.

  When his father released him, he went inside to the radio. “What’s on today? ” He spun the dial through static and with both hands rattled the auto battery it was hooked up to.

  Belinda said, “You know that radio he all lies. Cada palabra de la voz del radio es una mentira,” she told him as she always told him—every word of the voice of the radio is a lie.

  He woke up, and the moon was falling down on him. The moon had him looney toons, a few monster things, a few ghosts, a few rrrrrrrrrr tiny psycho cyclers. He heard their howling: “Oh, I like that, I like that. Jimmy, Jimmy.” It was his mother’s voice. Out the window the moon had a rope laid right across the water to the shore. The Gulf was black as grease and the beach wasn’t white; it wasn’t quite blue; it wasn’t grey. The moon had him looney toons. He stood at his parents’ doorway and witnessed a thing in their bed, a monster with four legs in the moonlight. But it wasn’t a crazy kind of thing, it was familiar, it was Jimmy and Belinda. Rrrrrrrrrr behind him the tiny psycho cyclers rode the air into his home, and his father made a noise as if a bad thorn were coming out. The tiny motorcycle maniacs made rrrrrrrrrr boom boom bwa! boom boom bwa! that shot right through Fiskadoro. It wasn’t the crying of tiny engines, it was the radio on the windowsill. The radio was playing Jimi Hendrix.

  He trembled to hear the radio in the midnight playing things it never played. “Purpa haze, all through my BRAIN”—Fiskadoro had heard it a dozen times at sound-shows in Twicetown. Jimi Hendrix on Cubaradio—if his mother talked with a man’s voice, if the fish danced on dancing legs—Jimi Hendrix on Cubaradio. He wanted to play along on his clarinet, but he didn’t know the first thing about it. In the dark he took the briefcase from the closet and fitted the instrument’s pieces together as best he could and hummed through it with a choked voice, leaning close to the radio and hearing the static from its face and the hiss of the Gulf through the window and Belinda crying, “Ow-ow-ow-ow!” in the other room. Before too long the shadow of his father stood in the doorway saying, “Jesus Christ, Radar-head blasting his music-horn out here. Es she moon gotta be have him looney toons.” Fiskadoro sensed the shadow’s astonishment when Hendrix’s guitar buzzed. “Es Hendrix coming out of the Cubaradio tonight,” Fiskadoro told his father proudly.

  Belinda came to stand behind her husband. Now that his parents seemed worried, Fiskadoro felt sick. Squatting by the window and leaning on his clarinet, he listened to “Purple Haze” with his mother and father.

  The radio started clicking, and Jimi Hendrix said the same thing over and over: “Scuse me—scuse me—scuse me—” “Scuse me,” the radio said. “Guess what, this ain’t the program as usual like you thought it was, this is Junior Staff Sergeant Bud Harmon from Nawtha Nawlins Texas and me and Danny and Rick Ames and the Pork-jumper himself Junior Corporal George Wills caught the typhoon and busted up at I guess approximately thirteen hundred hours on them rocks right down there, I can see ’em from the window, and I can see you too, motherfuckers, and I got rounds left.”

  Fiskadoro put down his incorrectly assembled clarinet. “I don’t make nothing outa this radio show.” He gave the radio a shake. “Play those music again.”

  “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.

  TWO

  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 c
onnection 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.