Fiskadoro Read online

  Lizabeth remembered not only the question, however, but the answer also. “I hope you know Fiskadoro he all over these lower Keys,” she told Belinda, “all slick-up with skunk-juice and look like he wanna make a big name outa himself, ever since from when he start on that Negro horn.”

  “I don’t mind,” Belinda said. “He in a big orchestra.”

  “I don’t think es a orchestra out on that West Beach, Belinda. Too windy,” Lizabeth said.

  “Too windy?”

  “I mean Fiskadoro he too windy. I mean he giving you la big vente.” Lizabeth imitated a storm for her hostess, fluttering her hands and blowing air from her fat cheeks and inadvertently dropping peanuts.

  “Fiskadoro in a orchestra. A big hand with letric generators.”

  “In a middle of the night? In a middle of the night, Belinda? In a big band with letric generators in a middle of the night?”

  “Miami Symphony Orchestra,” Belinda insisted uncomfortably.

  Lizabeth stuck out her tongue and picked a bit of shell from its tip. Since her husband’s death the veins had started to stand out more and more around her eyes.

  Belinda saw that Lizabeth’s anger was causing her to eat peanuts all the time and become fat. She would come around for a snack before supper, too, Belinda knew it. It had been months since Lizabeth’s husband had disappeared, but they would finish the day by crying loudly together while the late sun laid out planes of violet light across the beaches.

  “Gone be some big problem down over West Beach,” Lizabeth announced.

  “Yeah?” Belinda said.

  “Already problem down over there. One of them swamp-boys was on the Marathon beach.”

  “Yeah? What for was he?”

  “For because he was drownded. For because he was swoled up as big as a shark.”

  Leaning over toward the windowsill to squint at the numbers on the radio, Belinda began slowly turning the dial. But there was nothing on yet.

  “They wasn’t look at him up close till the next day. They all the people just thought es a shark out there.”

  Belinda stretched her neck to check on Drake and Mike out the window. She put her hands pertly on her knees and smiled. “Do you remember,” she asked Lizabeth, “when alla them seals come down that time? On the Ocean side?”

  For an instant Lizabeth looked angry. Then she made her face into an unrippled curtain of decorum. “You pissing me off,” she said.

  “What you getting your eyes so red about?”

  “About you only mess on a radio and talk about seals, when I gone tell you something important.”

  The weather was funny today, and from where they sat in Belinda’s living room on uprooted car seats, the sky looked like something flat and heavy shoved up against the kitchen window. Belinda felt more stifled because of it. “I just remembering the seals, because for you say a shark.”

  “I didn’t say no shark. I say look like a shark.”

  “Oh.”

  “I say a dead boy.”

  “Yes, I know that, Lizabeth. A dead boy, I heard you said so exactly in my goddamn face.”

  “Now who getting the red eyes?”

  “Me es who,” Belinda told her.

  “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.”

  They assembled their clarinets, and Mr. Cheung picked out a page in the text. In silence the two of them studied the exercise, soaking their reeds in their mouths. They began to p!ay.

  In this sparsely furnished space the melody of the two clarinets echoed forcefully, so that even the little mistakes Fiskadoro made in his fingering had a certain authority. Mr. Cheung stopped playing in the midst of the page, motioning for the pupil to keep on while the instructor listened, his head cocked thoughtfully. Then he stopped Fiskadoro’s playing, asked for the boy’s reed, and gently applied sandpaper to the tender bamboo. When he thought it soft enough, he gave back the reed. They resumed their practice.

  Though Fiskadoro had come to recognize them as melodies, the duet exercises in Sidney Bechet's Clarinet Method weren’t exactly songs—nothing moved inside him when he and Mr. Cheung played them together. When they were no further than halfway through the first one, Fiskadoro was already wondering how many of these exercises Mr. Cheung would insist on mechanically accomplishing today, already impatient to get past them into the later moments, the time of improvisation and song-swapping which constituted, in Fiskadoro’s thinking, the actual lesson; but he had to play the Sidney Bechet exercises to satisfy the requirements of an education in keeping with his future as a clarinetist for The Miami Symphony Orchestra. He played now alongside his teacher while the afternoon outside grew fiery and the still air began to bake and the sweat dropletted their upper lips and foreheads, trying to mine out of his soul, or out of his sex, or his bowels—wherever it lay—the spilt-buttery tone that Mr. Cheung drew from himself through his own clarinet.

  Today was one of those days when Mr. Cheung’s grandmother, as she often did, inched painfully into the front room from the kitchen, bringing with her a damp steam of boiling hearts of palm and assorted unrecognizable spices, and settled into the red leatherette rocking chair with the idea, Fiskadoro supposed, of listening to the clarinets, if she didn’t happen to be completely deaf. She lowered herself toward the rocker’s bucket seat in a gradual and dignified way, but in the end, as always, abandoned herself to gravity and fell the last fifteen centimeters into the chair, one arm outstretched beneath her in a pitiful try at cushioning this descent.

  Out of respect for her, Mr. Cheung signaled for silence while she found her comfort, insofar as this was possible, in her accustomed seat. Then Mr. Cheung and Fiskadoro took up the piece, the Sidney Bechet exercise for two, at the beginning again.

  Fiskadoro had nothing against the grandmother except that the whole time she sat there, every time, she smoked a long cigarillo backward, with the lit end resting in her mouth and the spit dripping down to darken the other end, the end she should have been smoking. Maybe this was how they’d smoked their cigarets in the old days, but it made Fiskadoro weak to see her keeping fire so close to her tongue, her leathery old Chinese monkey face collapsing into her secret deliberations, her jaw slack, her smoky breath audible in the silences between Sidney Bechet exercises, and her black eyes so totally opaque he couldn’t tell if they were sightless, dead, or coldly burning. Mr. Cheung sometimes spoke to her softly and briefly, in Chinese or whatever it was, and Fiskadoro wondered what her dilapidated brain made out of his words.

  She wasn’t always the whole of their audience. Sometimes children came to hear them, never the same ones twice, it seemed to Fiskadoro. He’d look up from a page of music to see them standing by the kitchen door, two or three very small children with black eyes and long straight black hair, staring at him as if they expected him to do something famous. There was no telling what sex these children were because they all wore dirty white shifts that reached their knees: a sign of status, dressing the children, as befitted the Manager of The Miami Symphony Orchestra.

  But there were no children today, only the grandmother slowly rocking while they played. She’d hardly had time to finish her black cheroot and pull the wet stub from her mouth, holding it in her hand absentmindedly, as if she forgot everything as soon as it happened, when Mr. Cheung called an end to the clarinet lesson.

  The time had been long enough for Fiskadoro. His lower lip burned from the reed’s vibrations and he knew he’d made a lot of mistakes.

  “You’re tired,” Mr. Cheung said. “There’s a mark of smoke on your forehead.” He unfastened the clamp that held the reed to his clarinet’s white plastic mouthpiece, and lifted the reed up to a beam of light that came through the cracked tar paper covering the windows, moving his head into the shaft of illumination and winking an eye against it—examining the flimsy bamboo for splits or fraying. “You were down by the fires last night.” Before Fiskadoro could deny this truth, or forge some kind of explanation or trump up an insincere apology, the teacher added, “Like all the young men. But it makes you tired. You need rest before the lessons, Mr. Fiskadoro—because the spirit, the guidance, these are always the first things to fall asleep when you’re tired.”

  Fiskadoro jerked his head from side to side, not knowing how to answer.

  “But your Commandant”
—Mr. Cheung pointed with half a clarinet at the boy’s crotch—“he wakes up all night long.” The teacher laughed suddenly and loudly and then immediately his face was the same old mask. “Up all night planning his battles and wars.”

  Fiskadoro had nothing to say. He kept his glance downcast, and looked at the illustration on a folder of sheet music beside him on the pew. It was a sketchy rendering of a group of musicians, as many as two dozen of them, all seated before their music stands. The folder of music came from the Teaman Music Co., Silver Spring, MD, and this is what the musicians must have looked like at Teaman Music Co., trim youthful gentlemen in the old, very impractical suits they’d worn in those unimaginable times, with hair that appeared to be slicked back in the manner of Mr. Cheung’s, but cut much shorter. Everything about them was thin and sensitive-looking—their unreal hands and blank faces and good posture, even the angularity of their many instruments. Except for their clothing and the absence of any paunches, they weren’t so very different from Mr. Cheung—not surprisingly, since Mr. Cheung did his best to be counted a part of civilization, with an understanding of civilization based on what had come down to him from the last century—but not by any stretch of thinking, not even in the light of the most exaggerated indulgence, did the men of the Teaman Music Co. resemble anyone else in The Miami Symphony Orchestra.

  Fiskadoro’s teacher put not just a sound but a whole personality—insinuation, hysteria, denial, laughter, sobbing—through the black clarinet with the ivory-white plastic mouthpiece, and was regarded by the musicians of The Miami Symphony Orchestra as a player with The Spirit, an artist among them, perhaps a great artist among all the clarinetists who had ever lived. But Fiskadoro, in his youth and fire, most admired a man who called himself Hendrix Is, the greasy, completely white-blooded Soundman who managed the orchestra’s precious electronic equipment. Hendrix Is owned the generator and batteries that lit up their surroundings and shot the power of life—what he called juice, a term he applied in many areas—into the public-address amplifiers for the Israelite singergirl Little Sudan, who, as Mr. Cheung and Fiskadoro entered the orchestra’s headquarters, was shimmering onstage in leopardskin among winking automotive lights, smoky and sexy, her long fake-animal dress slit up the middle and fastened at the crotch, her hair braided in accordance with the tenets of her faith, singing: