Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson

Author:Denis Johnson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: General, Fiction
ISBN: 9780060976095
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 1985-03-31T07:00:00+00:00

Cassius Clay Sugar Ray’s two bodyguards—Uncle and Sammy, both small men, neither of them very fearsome, almost as well-known on the Keys as their employer—had been watching the dancers, and now they came to get him. Cassius Clay Sugar Ray shook hands all around and got ready to go back, under their protection, to his new home in Marathon.

One of the bodyguards, Sammy, was a white man who wore long pants and even rope sandals, like a big business-owner, and he said to Cassius Clay Sugar Ray, “Shake it, Boss.” Cassius Clay Sugar Ray smiled as if he didn’t understand, and kept on giving out pieces of dried fruit to the others from a bag he carried around his waist. Sammy said, “We got moves to make.” It irritated Fiskadoro that Sammy’s tone of voice seemed tainted with some faint failure of respect.

By the time the visitors had gone it was already three hours past dark—those still on the beach would have to stay together now and pass the night here sleeping or dancing or having adventures with the other sex. Fiskadoro stayed away from them. To have met this great man, to have touched his hand, heard his story, his legend, made Fiskadoro feel crazy. He wandered the shore. The Ocean, so perilous simply because of its size to any who might be faring out onto it tonight, was unagitated. A roll of surf fell at his feet with the hollow exhaustion of a drum calling from far away. Fiskadoro came no closer to it than a couple of meters. He didn’t want to let the Ocean touch him. I am not for you, he insisted in fear. I am not my father Jimmy. Things took him away from his father, stories and dancing carried him off, but every time, he seemed to land at the border of this black country where his father lived. He was afraid he’d find something here at the Ocean’s edge one day, a lump of something he couldn’t make out. He’d go closer and see that it was a man, closer and see that the man was dead, closer and see that the dead man was Jimmy, his father. He didn’t like to think about it. He was frightened even of his own name, Fish-man, Harpooner, because it suggested some prior arrangement with the hungry sea.

Every day he imagined the moment when his father, thinking of nobody, totally cut off from everyone he knew, totally, as if he’d been born swimming for his life and never known anything else, gave up and drew the first breath of water.

The several Blacks from over the swamps—and yet they looked a bit different, their heads caked with mud or he didn’t know what, not like most of the swamp-folks—were heading back over the dunes toward home; he could see them detach from the party-time in a group and straggle off.

Fiskadoro moved along the shore, keeping abreast of them as they made toward the shallowest rise of earth.

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