by Bill Gaston
“Yes beanbag puts in Americain taxi,” Wa insists, getting his shoulder into it.
The driver comes out and around and helps with his cowboy boot. Wa loves his chair. It’s brown, thick and Spanish and expensive and very heavy. The lady said it’s bullfight-killed leather and showed him the sword hole with tape over it to keep the beans in. Wa wants to joke with the driver, Where are Algerians when you need? The driver gives the chair an extra last kick with his heel and gets the door closed. Wa gets in front with the driver, wincing when he sits. The gun has moved in the struggle with the chair and is badly poking his spine, which is of course a huge vein with a bone around it.
“Where to?” The driver has put on a ball cap instead of pulling the windshield visor down, which Wa sees is broken. The sun is badly eye to eye this evening and Wa has to squint. He thinks that in it he can see the weird green from all the corn out there. He has come to learn that his home state exists to grow food for pigs, but he still likes his chosen city. On the driver’s cap is a cartoon wild Indian, mouth wide open in a baseball cheer.
“I move,” Wa says.
The driver steps softly on the brake and the car slows. He doesn’t look at Wa this time when he asks him the same question.
“To here.” Wa passes him the paper he pulls from his pocket.
Reading Wa’s mother’s writing, the driver mumbles, “HomeLite Men’s Shelter,” nods, then touches the brake again and tells Wa he wants to see some money first.
Wa hates the mec now and breathes cont as he gathers all the coins from his coat pockets. It would be easy to skilfully undo the driver’s shirt buttons with his gun. He could knock out one molar. But he feels like un bébé with these coins like this, cupped in both hands. Last night he tried to count it, but he is not used to the small monnaie here.
“Just the quarters,” the driver says, and drives.
Wa didn’t really think his mother would turf him, but she did. He had no idea he had maxed her plastique. In Paris her plastique was immortal. The gun was some hundreds, the chair was some hundreds, then it was only food and DVD rent. But last night she pointed and screamed, “Look at you — it’s not like I’m spending money on food,” which was true because she was going skinny again. She didn’t believe him that he had tried to get jobs a few times, walking into stores and going up to the guy or babe behind the counter and asking, “Job?” and waiting for what happened next. Usually nothing did, but one babe did go get a smiling boss, only then it all sort of fell apart with the test questions, and Wa’s answers that didn’t pass.
Des Moines has become uglier, a part of town Wa doesn’t know. It makes him think of two words he’s learned, “mullet” and “scree.” He understands he’s going down the rungs of success, not up, and that he’s not going to get his hot tub anytime soon, which is a huge, huge drag. But he will get his neck brace — tomorrow he has the doctor’s appointment his mother arranged for him. Wa was surprised to see that you can’t just buy them. But he will get one and it will be excellent. Maybe it alone will complete his dream. He sees himself sitting wonderfully in the men’s shelter, in his beanbag chair, cleaning his gun, watching the DVD Tarte d’Amerique Numero Trois, or any movie, ce n’est pas important. Not important what movie because he is wearing his neck brace. Not important if he gets bored with his gun because he is wearing his neck brace. Wearing his neck brace, he has only to tilt his head but several millimetres and fall so comfortably to sleep. Why do so few Americans wear neck braces?
Here in the taxi, unbraced, Wa’s head pivots to see even more fast food places in this part of Des Moines. He knows the real reason his mother turfed him. It’s not because he drained her plastique, it’s because he is shaping like a pear. He looks enough like her in the face that it scares her to death to look at him and see this shape of her nightmares. He tried joking — J’arrive! Ta poire! — displaying himself with arms up and doing a big round hula, but it failed to stop her horror. Sometimes he caught her staring across the room at the dent — the big dent plus the little gun-dent — his new pear ass had made in the beanbag chair.
Yes, everybody in America is mad at Wa.
“Where put?” Wa points to one corner of the huge room of beds, then to another corner. There is no DVD, or even TV set, to point to. It must be in another huge room.
“Listen to me: No private furniture in common areas.”
The man is right, there is no furniture, which is a perfect reason for Wa to place his chair somewhere. The man is not much older than Wa but bald, and his head shiny with what looks like a coating of aspic. And he is angry. Before him, the taxi driver was angry when Wa spilled so many nickels and pennies onto the seat. Before that, Wa’s mother.
“Where put?” Wa points again, this time at a staircase which might lead somewhere, maybe to a special bedroom for Wa.
“It stays outside.” The man begins to roll the beanbag chair across the floor, past the counter with the thick glass, toward the door Wa had rolled it in. Behind the thick glass, sitting on a desk, is a small TV for the bald man alone. On the TV is Iraq, but not in colour. Sometimes Iraq seemed not in colour even on his mother’s TV, because the soldiers and tanks and sand and buildings were all so excellently coordinated in beige.
“Out?”
“Out.”
Wa stops the chair by stamping his foot in front of it.
“Bullfight kill!” He points to the tape covering the sword hole. If the man knows how great this chair is, it will get a place of importance. The man might want it for himself, but this is the chance Wa takes.
“What?”
“Bullfight kill.” Wa points, stabbing, at the tape. He remembers the lady called it duck tape. “Under duck, là.”
“What?”
Wa pulls his gun from the back of his pants, points it at the tape, makes shooting noises, and explains, “Kill! Kill!”
But the bald man doesn’t understand.
Wa has been in the alley some hours now. From the pink and orange clouds above his head it looks like the sun is lying down. He wants to find another alley because another clochard is using his chair. This one he can smell from some feet away. Wa will have to wash his chair when the clochard moves.
There are no bullets in Wa’s gun (his mother is on the pills again and last week when Wa’s pizza mec knocked on the door she screamed and flushed all sorts of stuff — pills, powders, Wa’s bullets — down the toilet) but the bald Home-Lite man said he was calling the police, so Wa rolled the chair out the door on his own. He wondered why all this excitement over a gun in America. He rolled his heavy chair down the street, then up an alley, where he found a place for it behind a bright yellow Dumpster. He was very tired and felt very fat but didn’t want to breathe this hard because he was sucking in the smell here. It was difficult to find a spot for the chair that wasn’t wet with something. Wa saw a police car zip past the mouth of the alley, then again, the same car. He sat on his chair and soon fell asleep with his head back against the brick wall, not a bad neck brace except in only one direction.
The first clochard woke him with a soft kick to the leg. He asked if Wa had anything to drink. The man was dark and at first Wa thought he was a towel-head, but then he saw that he was just dirty, and also very pale, the colour of champignons. Another man came, then another, and a black one, and one who Wa was certain was a red Indian, and some of them came with something to drink — Wa tried a tiny sip, which burned his throat and then made him want to puke — and he learned that these men came here each evening to wait for the Home-Lite Shelter to open its door. They asked one another, many times, what they thought the soup and sandwich would be, and Wa understood that the menu changed every night.
But it is three dirty men who have now taken and used his chair. It is communistique. When Paris had a communiste mayor Wa’s mother wanted to move to Luxembourg. She hates communists more than anything — though she would hate these American clochard communists less because none of them are fat. They are exactl
y not fat — their thinness is almost like hers. (Though his mother is confused, lately, about fat Americans. At first she smiled and said, “They make me feel so thin and they are everywhere.” And then, staring with eyes of hate at Wa himself, she said, “They are disgusting and there are more of them every day.”) She once told Wa that communists are exactly why she’s not rich, and that once they sprayed chicken blood on her furs during a show, and trying to kick one in the face from her catwalk she ruined her ankle for la saison. Here in this alley, this particular communist stinks and won’t get out of Wa’s chair.
“Please, up?” Wa asks the communist thief, nudging the man’s foot with his own.
“You one funny dude, know tha’?” a black clochard tells him again. The nigre smiles and smiles and has him by the inner elbow and is squeezing. His teeth aren’t as white as in the movies and neither are his eyes, they are full of café au lait, and one eye aims itself the wrong way, off into nothing.
Wa goes to piss where the others go to piss, ten steps away. When he returns he sees that the sleeping clochard American communist has puked. None has hit the leather, but the thin pool on the cement is trying to find a direction and it looks like it wants to go to the chair. Once at a wild zoo near Versailles, Wa was near a turkey when it shit and this pool of vomit smells exactement comme la même.
“Up!” Wa pokes the communist in the forehead with his sudden gun.
All around him the communists yell Jesus shit and holy cow and easy. The sick communist’s eyes finally open, then open wide, and now his hands are in the sky like a western.
“Allez!”
The clochard rolls off the chair and crawls away on his hands and knees. Wa looks and sees that the alley is now empty.
He shoves his gun down the front of his pants — with no bullets, veins are pas important — and rolls the chair away from the puke. He keeps rolling it, down the alley to another alley, because the communists might be phoning the police. He rolls it past the back door of a small boîte with country music banging out, past a dry cleaners with its breath of poison, past brick wall after brick wall, and finally past the steamed windows and wonderful smell of a bakery, where he stops, inhaling deeply.
Catching his breath, Wa imagines the soup and sandwiches he could have had at the shelter, pictures the communists stuffing their greedy faces with free food, laughing about the fool Wa who has nothing. The thing with America is, when you eat a lot of burgers, you begin to need a lot of burgers. It has been two days since Wa has had a burger, or anything at all. He sits in his chair to think. He is instantly comfortable, it is an excellent chair. He truly does not wish to sell it, though all day that thought has been hiding in the trees of his brain like the limping monster in a black-and-white. He shifts his ass at the discomfort of this idea and he hears the rattle of beans. No, his stomach hears the beans, and a funny idea comes — he is sitting on a vachement bag of food. Even the bag is food — if you soaked and cooked his chair you would have a cassoulet for one hundred people!
Amidst Wa’s sad chuckles he suffers another vision of the free sandwiches. Then recalls, in a glorious burst of hope, another place: the restaurants across the street from each other, their signs shouting free fries. Wa almost faints.
It has taken him maybe three hours to find the street. He rolled his chair kilometres, mostly in alleys, before finding enough cardboard, and several branches from sidewalk trees, to cover and hide it. Wa is exhausted, but feels even more sorry for the chair, which is white around the side from being scraped on so much pavement.
Wa is more than hungry when he rounds the corner and there they are — the two restaurants. He goes to them as fast as he can. He is limping now, he is the monster coming out of the trees. Perhaps some water will be free too. And ketchup. And vinegre. And salt, and pepper, and of course the glorious fat the perfect potatoes are cooked in. Wa almost faints again.
He is under the sign of the first restaurant. There is the “free” and the “fries.” Wa pushes the door and his wrists buckle when it doesn’t open. Wa sees the darkness inside, the café is closed. He is already turning away, one hand out in the direction of the other café, when he registers his face in the glass door — his is the dark face of not only a towel-head, but also the dirty face of a clochard communist thief.
Wa stumbles across the street to the music of three honking horns. He is smiling because he has read on the other sign not just the “free” and the “fries,” but also the words “all” and “nite.” And its windows glow like an inn for hobbits.
The door opens to his push. Inside, in chairs, sit Americans of all shapes — round, pear, or bony. It is not a rich place, and some are nearly clochards. Wa walks as near as he can to the smell of food itself, to a long counter with stools. Wa chooses the stool in the middle of no people. He knows that now he, too, smells. How huge his smell he does not know, but he knows he never smelled this way in Paris. It has been a major surprise: in America, you must work so hard.
The waitress comes smiling with a pad and pen, her eyebrows up. She is plump and knows nothing of fashion. Wa finds her beautiful because she is unlike his mother in every way. She is beautiful because she will bring him food.
“Fry.” Non. “Fry–zzz.” In Americain, Wa always forgets the s sound. He flaps his hand in the direction of the sign outside, to make sure she understands.
“Large? Small?”
“Big,” says Wa, surprised that he is allowed a choice. He gives her a joke with an eager smile: “Very, very, big!”
“And what else?” the waitress asks. “Anything?”
Wa doesn’t know what to say. The waitress helps him.
“Some gravy with the fries?”
“Yes!”
“Anything else?”
“Water?”
“Certainly.”
“Ketchup?” Wa lifts the ketchup bottle beside the salt and pepper. He raises his eyebrows in question.
The waitress spins away laughing. To her back he asks “Vinegre?” but feels greedy for it.
Because he can smell the kitchen, waiting is magical. Because he sits in front of the window ledge onto which the chefs place hot platters of food, the waiting is Fellini. He sees burgers, he sees a steak frites, he sees pastas with red sauce and with white. Baskets of garlic toast, an omelette heaped with champignons. Finally, in front of him, clunked down by the beautiful waitress, his fries, the large plate centred by a demi-tasse of gravy, thick jus. All of it steams under Wa’s head, the heat and smell releasing the flesh of his face. Wa groans, eats.
And he finishes. He cannot really remember eating it, but he knows that what just happened was superb. The waitress has refilled his water twice. Wa has licked the gravy glass clean. Not a speck of potato remains. He sits on his stool, head in one hand, sighing, wishing he had some food remaining in his mouth, to suck and fondle with his tongue.
But Wa rises, catches the waitress’s eye, calls “tankyouvelly-much,” and makes to leave.
“Sir? You have to pay?” The waitress waves a small yellow paper at him. She is smiling.
“No!” Wa smiles too. He points a finger in the direction of the sign outside. “Gratis? Fry flee. Flies. Fries.”
“Beg pardon, sir?”
“Fries.”
“That’s right. You have to pay for them.”
Wa shakes his head, smiling instructively, pointing at the sign. “Mais, non!”
The waitress turns her head, says, “Tommy.” A big chef comes out. He stands at her side and she whispers to him. Both of them watch Wa. Wa, trying to look friendly, shrugs for them. He is tired, he is vachement fatigué. He hears mumbles from either side of him. Someone shouts, “Pay the lady.” He thinks he hears the word “towel-head.” A few chairs scrape on the floor, two or three people stand. One man is fat, but fat like the Hells Angels always called Tiny.
The chef asks him, “You got a problem?”
Yes. He is very tired. He might not be able to find his beanbag chair i
n the dark, this chair that he would now sell, would gladly give them to pay for his fries. They have lied to him, things are not free in America. He wants to cry like a bébé. He wants to go pound on his mother’s door. He thinks his pear-shape is almost gone from today’s work alone and maybe she will let him in. She will say, Arrête tes conneries toi, and hug him.
He thinks of words he needs. Trade? Swap?
“Swat,” he tells the chef and the waitress.
“What?”
“Tray.”
“What?”
Wa pulls his gun from the front of his pants. It is worth one hundred or one million plates of frites and they can have it and he only wants to go. He hardly gets the gun up to show its huge value when one side of the room explodes and hits him. The other side of the room explodes too, he is knocked two ways. Now he is on the floor staring at the ceiling and he is deaf. At his stomach he puts his hand to a fire, here, and here, and when he sees his hand it is so red with the greasiest blood. The room is full of smoke that stinks and chokes — he had no clue how gunshots would take over a room and conquer everything like this.
Faces appear above him. He sees mouths working hard but most just stare. The fiery pain is somewhere distant. He is deaf but it is at the same time a roaring. He feels the deep-hose and the draining — it is a surprise but exactement the kind he knew it would be. He works his mouth like a fish that’s alive and being cleaned in the rudest kitchen. Some faces drop closer. Maybe he should tell them he is Americain, in case they’ve not understood, but there’s no easy way to say this. He could tell them, “Roy,” but that is not his name. He wants to say, “Roi,” but his tongue won’t roll. It has drained.
“Wa,” he says. He has nothing to tell them that’s important.
A WORK-IN-PROGRESS
Anthony Ott was in town tonight, said the poster. He would be reading from his latest work.
Theo studied the somewhat famous face. Stark black and white, the photocopy shouted Ott’s hollows and crags. His eyes were inscrutable blots. It was more a Rorschach than a face.
