One Big Damn Puzzler

by John Harding

  ‘Just like Superman, eh?’ said William.

  ‘Superman?’ said Managua.

  ‘Forget it,’ said William. ‘I’m just a little groggy.’

  ‘What you is be is late,’ said Managua. ‘You is wait one moment. I is find door.’

  William straightened his clothes while Managua hobbled round the veranda and came into the dining room.

  ‘You is better hurry,’ said Managua. ‘I is need shit.’

  ‘Where’s the toilet?’ William asked. He knew the hotel was unfinished, but he had no idea exactly how unfinished it was.

  ‘No toilet,’ came the reply.

  ‘No toilet?’ said William in disbelief.

  ‘Come,’ said Managua and stomped off through another door beside the bar. William followed him into what had obviously been intended as the men’s room. There was the usual symbol of a forked and unaccommodated man on the door, and inside there were toilet stalls and urinals. The urinals were unconnected; there were no pipes emanating from beneath them. The stalls were empty. Against one wall was a pile of smashed lavatory bowls.

  ‘Is never be finish,’ said Managua. ‘British is come for build hotel plenty year ago. Big ship is go come. Is go bring people for stay in hotel. Then big ship is say is not come. So British is not bother for finish build hotel. Is go away.’ He smiled. ‘Plenty good riddance. British is be plenty stupid. Americans is be evil, but British is be plenty damn stupid.’

  ‘So what do I do for a toilet?’ said William, letting the insult to his countrymen pass because his bowels were rumbling from the spicy stew he’d eaten as Managua’s dinner guest the night before.

  ‘Use beach,’ said Managua. ‘I is show you. But you is must hurry.’

  ‘You use the beach?’ said William. ‘You just, um, shit on the beach?’

  Managua studied him as one might a child who was having difficulty grasping something simple. ‘Listen, in America, you is use this?’ He indicated the pile of smashed lavatories.

  ‘Yes,’ said William.

  ‘Tell me, where shit is go?’

  ‘Well, it goes into a pipe.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Well, I guess then it goes to a treatment plant.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Managua, ‘but after that. Where shit is end up?’

  ‘Um, well, in the sea I guess.’

  Managua shrugged. ‘So what for is need all this? Is be crazy. Is much smarter if you is just shit on beach in first place. Now you is come quick, we is be plenty damn late. Too much talk, not enough shit.’

  William found his shoes and squeezed into them with some difficulty. They were still wet from the sea yesterday. As Managua limped outside, William reached into his suitcase and grabbed a wad of toilet tissue. The gurgling in his stomach told him he could not afford to hang around. The urgency only increased at the thought that not only would he not be able to have it in his own bathroom at home, nor in his temporary residence, the Captain Cook, but would be forced to evacuate himself on an open beach. He consoled himself that at least he would be unmolested by the bacteria that lurked in other people’s bathrooms. That was what mattered.

  Outside Managua was moving faster than the day before and William had to almost run to catch up with him. Managua’s jaw had a purposeful set to it. He looked like a man with a mission.

  ‘Where exactly are we going?’ asked William.

  ‘Shitting beach,’ said Managua. ‘I is take you make shit.’

  The rim of the sun was only just edging above the line where ocean met sky. The light was as yet grey and objects indistinct. They headed along the shore in the direction of the village. Soon William could see the roofs of its huts through the trees. Through the pale light dozens of silhouetted ghosts were visible on the beach.

  ‘We is be here, this is be shitting beach,’ said Managua, heading now across the sand.

  ‘Here?’ said William, appalled. ‘You shit on the beach right next to the village?’

  Managua nodded and limped on.

  ‘B-but how can you do that? How can you pollute your own beach? What happens if you want to swim?’

  Managua stopped walking and turned to him. ‘If you is want swim, you is can walk next beach. If you is need shit, you is want beach near.’

  He turned away and strode on. William hurried after him. The sun was half up now and the ghosts on the beach had fleshed out into real people. There must have been upwards of two hundred men and boys, all squatting with one hand holding their pubic leaf strings away from their bare buttocks.

  As they passed, these hunched fingers lifted their free hands in greeting, smiled and called out, ‘Moning! Moning Managua! Moning gwanga!’

  Managua waved back cheerily and William did his best to smile as he tagged along after the old boy. The beach was so crowded it was practically impossible to see a place where you could squat and not be shitting on somebody. William was beginning to understand Managua’s haste.

  He felt his toe stub against something soft and realized he hadn’t been looking where he was going. He’d stuck his foot into a colossal mound of faeces. He paused and looked around. Everywhere there were similar mountains of the stuff, all steaming in the cool morning air.

  William couldn’t believe that anything smaller than an elephant could pass so much shit in one go. He didn’t know that as a result of their low-fat, high-fibre diet of fruit and vegetables the average islander’s dump was two kilos, compared to an eighth of that for the average Westerner’s bowel movement.

  He was appalled at the way the islanders simply dumped and walked away without cleaning themselves afterwards. He didn’t know that the minimal amounts of fat in their diet (except on the rare occasions when they ate pig) meant their faeces were smooth rather than sticky and simply slipped out without fouling their behinds.

  Managua stopped so abruptly that William almost collided with him. In a bizarre parody of a Westerner looking for a bare patch of sand on which to sunbathe at a resort beach, the old man had been searching for, and at last found, a people-free, shit-free area.

  ‘We is be late this morning,’ he said, squatting with surprising ease for a man with an artificial leg and pulling aside his pubic leaf string. ‘You is take long time for wake up. You is need get here early for find best place. Nevermind, nevermind, this is be OK.’

  William smiled weakly and made to walk on.

  Managua half rose from his squatting position, his face clouded with bewilderment. He seemed hurt. ‘Where you is go?’ he asked. ‘You is not want shit with me?’

  ‘I er, I think I see a bigger space there. Wouldn’t want to crowd you,’ said William. He hurried off before Managua had chance to reply.

  He trudged on until the crowd thinned and found a reasonably private spot, although when he turned he could still see Managua watching him from a hundred yards or so away. He looked at the people around, trying to make sure they were all male.

  He had never before had a dump in front of another human being, not since early childhood, anyhow, and he couldn’t remember that. He could just about manage this, but he knew he couldn’t shit with a woman watching. And he did need to shit.

  Having satisfied himself there were no women present (although you never could tell, the genders here seemed blurred, to say the least. A couple of the girls yesterday had looked butch enough to be guys) he realized the men around him were all looking at him. He recognized one of the squatting figures as the man Purnu from Managua’s hut yesterday. They were all smiling and waving and he returned their greetings in what he hoped was a nonchalant fashion. At the same time he felt embarrassed at other people not only seeing him shit, but also seeing his shit. And he was appalled at them leaving their excrement in the open on the beach. For one thing, with the breeze coming in off the sea, the stench was sickening.

  He decided the civilized thing would be to dig a hole to bury his shit, the way cats did. Still smiling, and staring out to sea as though admiring the view, he began poking around i
n the sand with his right loafer. Soon he had a reasonably sized hole – at least by the standards of what he intended to put in it, although totally inadequate for the islanders’ portions, of course – and dropped his trousers and shorts and squatted over it. This in itself was difficult. It was OK for the islanders, they weren’t hobbled when they were shitting. William was not only not used to squatting, the breeze blowing up his butt, without a lavatory to support him, making him worry that if he could manage a dump in this position he might overbalance and fall back onto it; he was also fearful that he might crap on his clothes.

  He shut his eyes and concentrated. In the background he could hear the fall of the waves and above that a descant of grunts and sighs as men all around him registered successful bowel movements. Eventually, just when he thought his calf muscles were going to give out from the strain, William managed a dump.

  He opened his eyes to find a circle of natives around him, standing looking from him to the hole beneath him that contained his shit. Embarrassed, he reached down, pulled the tissue from his trouser pocket, hurriedly wiped himself and pulled up his clothes.

  He found himself face to face with Purnu who was looking at him suspiciously. ‘What for you is dig hole?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the man next to him. ‘You is go bury you shit, is not be so? What for you is bury you shit?’

  Another man pushed through the throng and peered into the hole where William’s meagre effort lay steaming. He looked from it to William. ‘What you is hide?’ he demanded. ‘What is be wrong with you shit?’

  William found himself edged out of the way as the focus and centre of the throng became not him, but the dump he’d just done. About twenty men were now jostling one another trying to get a look at it. One man came rushing up with a bamboo stick and the crowd parted to let him through. As William fled along the beach in the direction he’d come from, he suffered the indignity of seeing the man poking the stick into the hole while everyone around it chattered excitedly.

  Managua was waiting for him. ‘What all fuss is be about?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ William lied. ‘I think they must have found a dead fish.’

  Managua turned to walk back towards the village.

  ‘Good shit?’ he asked.

  ‘It was OK,’ replied William. ‘I’ve had better.’

  EIGHT

  YOU’D HAVE THOUGHT that after Sandy Beach’s disastrous weekend with the Hardts nobody would be in much of a hurry to repeat the experience. But just the opposite happened. Incredible though it may be, he became a frequent visitor to the Hardts’ shore house.

  The prime mover in this was William’s father who was, as we know, a kindly man. Joe Hardt hadn’t been involved all his life in civil rights cases against major American companies and the US government without getting to know a real prick when he saw one; he had no illusions about Sandy Beach. But his son needed a friend and if Sandy Beach was that boy then Joe would do everything in his power to facilitate the friendship. In this his wife concurred. Such was her sense of guilt at having reared a boy who had difficulty in forming social relationships she was desperate for one pal, any pal, to assuage it.

  That’s all very well, you might say, but then why didn’t William just come clean and tell them he couldn’t stand the little shit? Why did he let them go on thinking he actually liked him and so condemn himself to countless extra hours in Sandy Beach’s company, besides those he already had to endure at school?

  The reason was that William could see the pleasure it gave his old man to do something for his son, especially something that involved so much suffering for Joe himself; he was making a sacrifice to help his son, he was putting up with Sandy Beach! It would have broken William’s heart to disappoint his father. He already felt he’d let his father down by being such a geeky, unpopular child. The least he could do was put up with Sandy Beach for his father so that his father could put up with Sandy Beach for him.

  If the weekends and – misery! – whole vacation weeks Sandy Beach spent with the Hardts were something to be got through, and they were, especially with Ruth’s constant sniping at the visitor on account of the fact that his physical appearance coincided almost exactly with her idea of what a prodigious masturbator would look like, then the reciprocal visits William had to make to the Beaches were worse.

  They lived in a small town upstate. The first visit, Sandy Beach’s father met them at the railroad station and, in the back of the car on the way to the house, Beach whispered to William, ‘There’s uh something I forgot to mention. You might find our house a little um messy. I mean, don’t get me wrong, we like it. We find it kind of relaxed and comfortable, but I guess you might say it’s not exactly to everybody’s taste.’

  Now William’s mother was exceptionally tidy. And she did have something of a thing about germs. These twin aspects of her personality would, in later years, cause William to speculate whether therein might lie the origins – either environmental or genetic – of his OCD and of Ruth’s phobia about spermatozoa. But even allowing for that, even if that hadn’t been the case and his home had been as sloppy and germ-ridden as the next person’s, he would still have almost flatlined from the shock of stepping into Sandy Beach’s.

  William knew the Beaches were not rich, certainly not by the standards of most of the families who had kids at his expensive school. William’s own parents were far from wealthy, because Joe had elected to put helping poor black people above making a buck, and the school was only possible because a rich relative on his mother’s side had left money for the express purpose of sending William there.

  But the Beaches were known to be really poor. Sandy Beach always wore uniform from the school thrift shop, usually stuff that was the cheapest because it was so worn out that no-one else would let their children be seen in it. On top of that his mother made sure he got his wear out of it, by buying it when it was two sizes too big and making Sandy wear it until it was two sizes too small. So his clothes were almost always either too big or too small for him. There was only ever a comparatively brief period during the transition from one to the other when they were just right, and then it didn’t usually happen that they were all just right at the same time; he might have pants that fitted perfectly, but you didn’t really notice that because they were concealed by the blazer that came down to his knees.

  And his parents couldn’t afford to pay for a decent orthodontist, so that, to add to his other problems, Sandy Beach had crooked teeth. The Beaches had no spare money to put into improving Sandy’s appearance, a project that, let’s face it, could have proved a bottomless money pit. They had scrimped and saved every last dime to pay for Sandy’s education. He had so many disadvantages that they realized he had to have at least one plus to get him launched in life and education was going to be it.

  Joe Hardt had a different take on it. ‘Well, you would scrimp and save if you were them,’ he remarked to his wife when she told him all this. ‘Anything to get that kid into a boarding school and away from home. Jesus, I’d rob banks if he was my kid.’

  ‘I can’t imagine you robbing a bank,’ said Mrs Hardt with a smile. ‘You wouldn’t take the risk.’

  ‘There wouldn’t be any risk,’ said Joe. ‘It would be a no-lose situation. You get clear with the money, he goes to boarding school; you get caught you go to jail and only have to see him on visitors’ day. Why wouldn’t you rob banks?’

  Mr Beach parked his beaten-up old Ford in the drive at the side of the house and they went in through the back door where they found Mrs Beach at work in the kitchen.

  At least William thought it was the kitchen. It wasn’t that easy to tell for sure. Whatever the room’s original purpose, it was now given over to the keeping of stuff. Every surface, every counter, every chair, the table – if that’s what was under the central pile – was covered with stuff: piles of old newspapers and magazines, boxes of household equipment, like a cardboard crate of furniture polish concealing itself under a laye
r of dust, tins of food, packets of dried soup, and a tool box that was probably empty in that various tools – a hammer, a chisel, a set of screwdrivers – lay around in different locations in the room, and that was now paying for its keep as the supporter of a laundry basket loaded with dirty washing.

  There were two washing machines, one of them disconnected and in the centre of the room, both piled high with boxes of light bulbs, packets of firelighters, plastic toddlers’ toys (although Sandy was an only child, his parents having wisely stopped after having him. ‘They probably became celibate after him,’ Joe Hardt told his wife. ‘Would you trust any form of birth control if there was the remotest statistical possibility of another kid like that?’), unwashed dishes, washed dishes, rusting saucepans, cardboard boxes full of empty supermarket plastic bags with half-eaten bowls of cat food perched precariously on the very top.

  The drainer by the sink was similarly afflicted with several stacks of books supporting an old TV with a cracked screen. Even the windowsill was occupied by dirty coffee cups and a few browned apple cores.

  ‘Why, hello William,’ said Sandy Beach’s mother. She was a large woman with wild hair that stuck out from her head as though she’d just had an electric shock, which was more than possible, given the disarray that surrounded her. ‘You’ll have to take us as you find us, I’m afraid.’ With a sweep of her hands she alluded to the chaos all around. ‘I didn’t have time to tidy up today.’

  She turned and William saw she was cooking food on something he hadn’t realized was a stove. Only one hot plate was in use, the one on which she had a skillet in which she was pushing something around. The other three were concealed beneath various piles of clutter. ‘If you’ll just excuse me a moment, supper’s almost ready,’ she said. ‘Take a seat.’

  William stood and helplessly surveyed the room. He was trying to work out which of the piles of stuff might have as its foundation a chair.