Fiskadoro had to stay the night because in darkness the roads were unsafe. Mr. Cheung kept his children out of the parlor and made a place for him. He brought Fiskadoro a folded curtain to use as a pillow or a blanket in the hammock of fishing net. He walked around the room with a leafy twig of oleander, slapping at mosquitoes. “Everybody dies,” he told Fiskadoro.
“But es wrong for Jimmy,” Fiskadoro said with bald conviction.
“I know. I know,” Mr. Cheung said. It was true. The boy’s father had been too young.
“Do you know about my Grandmother Wright?” Mr. Cheung asked him now, pointing at her across the parlor as if she were far away. Evidently without regret for the past or concern for the coming night, she rocked in her red rocking chair, loudly breathing.
Fiskadoro shook his head. He was beginning to weep again. His throat would be sore tomorrow.
“Nobody really knows about Grandmother Wright,” Mr. Cheung said. “It’s not really for us to know. But she was in a war, I know, and she lost her mother and father, my own mother told me that. My mother, Carol Cheung, was her daughter. Carol Cheung told me this: When Grandmother Wright was running away from the war, she was in a helicopter, this is a flying machine with a propeller on the top, not like an airplane. And the helicopter machine fell into the ocean — not our Ocean, and not the Gulf, but the Pacific, the biggest ocean de todos — and the people had to swim, and swim, and swim, and one by one nine people sank down forever. The others went on a small boat that finally came.”
“Grandmother was on the boat?”
“She was saved from the Pacific Ocean. She and two others swam for more than two days.”
Fiskadoro was astonished to think of the old woman floundering indefinitely among the waves, stronger even than Jimmy — and then was more taken aback to realize she must have been young then; once she must have been a girl.
Mr. Cheung said, “My grandmother went to different countries. First to the Philippines, this is where she met some people in my grandfather’s family, and then eventualmente to America, this is where my grandfather lived.”
“Aqui,” Fiskadoro said.
“Aqui, in America, but far away. America is huge,” Mr. Cheung said. “I am an American. You, too. Jimmy was an American.” He was casting about now, trying to remember what it was he’d been wanting to say. “My grandmother went through different wars and different countries. Everything that she lost — it’s really gone, all of it, that’s true. At the same time, look at her! Think about her! She’s more than a century!”
Fiskadoro nodded and tried to look soothed. He knew that Mr. Cheung was trying to make him feel better, even if Mr. Cheung was failing. But Mr. Cheung had left the room.
He was back almost instantly. “From my yard, Fiskadoro.” His teacher handed him a stick of sugar cane longer than his hand. “It helps you to have sweet dreams.”
Her grandson Anthony Cheung helped her from the rocking chair and toward her bedroom off the kitchen.
Grandmother was sorry to have the concert end. Her grandson’s aimless tootling comforted her by bringing back the vision she’d experienced when surrounded by Muzak only minutes after coming to Seattle from Manila. The first thing her uncle had accomplished when they’d arrived in Chinatown on the bus was to take Marie out of the rain into an American quick-stop store, where the few bedraggled shoppers, most of them also Chinese, looked less actual and permanent than the blinding rows of goods. Her Uncle Kin-lau Kaung was a fine citizen of the Chinese-American community, a round-faced man always wearing a white dress shirt, grey pleated pants, and aqua-blue plastic loafers with tapered toes. He bought her a tube of toothpaste, two bars of bath soap, and some roll-on underarm deodorant, handing her each item to carry as he took it from its place on the shelves. At that moment Marie had no idea she would pass through much more — including a happy marriage, a long widowhood, and even the end of the world — before she reached the afternoon of her death many decades later in Key West, Florida. Here with her uncle in the quick-stop store she felt she’d reached an end, and she experienced a zeroing-in, a hallucination of purposiveness to her suffering, as if she’d lost her father and abandoned her mother, been raked across life after life, in order to stand here in the enamelling brilliance and receive these things.
Fiskadoro took his sugar cane out in front of the house, where Mr. Cheung’s little children would be less likely to spy it and set up a campaign of outrage. He chewed it, and it made the salt taste of tears in his throat go away. It was unbelievably sweet and delicious. His heart raced with love. As night fell, he stood in the street and watched the light leave the dust. The mosquitoes that came at early twilight raged whining all over the air, but up and down the dirt thoroughfare there was a silence coming. The voices of the neighbors died away. He sucked the sugar cane, letting the sweet syrup comfort his throat. As soon as the dark was thick enough that he couldn’t see the old school building in the neighborhood behind Mr. Cheung’s house, the bugs thinned out. Then the dogs started barking, far and wide. All over the world they barked, numerous as stars. His head rang and his sight whirled. He felt sleepy. The first day of his father’s death was over.
FOUR
I NO EAT! I NO SLEEP!” DARKNESS AND SWEAT. “I no brain! Rapto!” Fiskadoro danced in a perimeter of orange light that flashed off the thunderheads of smoke above the fires. He could hardly see the band of Israelite musicians playing their steel drums outside the jerking illumination of the dance-ground, but their banging and clanging rhythm took up all the room available in his head for sound. The sweat-shiny figures around him, crossed out continually by the shadows of smoke and the silhouettes of other dancers against the light of driftwood bonfires and the blazing kettles of radioactive fuel-oil, cried, “Rapto!” and so did Fiskadoro. “Rapto! Rapto!”
Though he could make out nobody really, Fiskadoro contrived in his heart to believe that everybody — all the others who seemed so oblivious — had an eye on him. He was nearly fourteen. He was changing, but the world stayed the same.
He was growing, but it wouldn’t make room. And yet in the sight of some people, it seemed, he wasn’t growing fast enough. The young woman known as Loosiana had said that she was too tall for Fiskadoro, or that he was too short — whichever it was, the news of her opinion had come his way as soon as he’d appeared on West Beach tonight. One of the steel-drummers, an Israelite boy who smoked marijuana leaves in a clay pipe and stiffened his hair with salt water so that it shot from his head like the fur of a scared animal, had made a point of mentioning it right away, as Fiskadoro stood apart from the others and waited for the sun to drown in the Gulf before the darkness and the dancing: “Hey, you know the gel Loosiana, mon, she say, ‘Fish-man too small on me!’ ” The young drummer held up his bottle of beer and measured off two centimeters of its neck with thumb and forefinger. He was drinking Silent Man Beer, each green bottle of which bore the hand-painted insignia of a winking human skull.
Fiskadoro felt the blood shoot into his face and hands. Had Loosiana really called him Fish-man? For weeks he’d been putting it about that his name might also mean Harpooner — and this was the truth, almost. That she’d called him Fish-man was insulting. He burned to know if this Israelite had Loosiana’s words exact, but he was afraid he’d make himself a fool if he asked any more about it or even if he spoke to this Israelite ever in his life again. It was still light yet, and he put his hands on the rim of a kettle of oil and looked at himself in the liquid, finding that he appeared there exactly as he felt — rubbery, dark, his face twisted. One of the bonfires was already burning; he grabbed a flaming brand and tossed it into the kettle, screaming, “Yaaah!” Nothing happened except that the brand was doused in the oleo. He pretended to himself that he’d been joking, hadn’t really wanted a startling explosion, it was too early for a lot of looney toons.