Fatboy Fall Down

by Rabindranath Maharaj

  His father, too, gradually seemed slightly more interested in what was happening around him. Orbits’ mother revealed that his father had sold the dental lab because everyone was now going to licensed dentists. “Is a good thing too,” she said. “Because he was making the wrong size teeth and sometimes forgetting appointments. “For some, he make little pointed rat teeth and for others, long teeth like that man . . . what is his name again?”

  “Mr. Rabbit.”

  She chuckled. “Is a good thing Papoose home now. You too.” Her eyes clouded for a moment and she added, “He don’t talk much again. You remember when he used to describe all the dentures he make for his customers? None of that again. Something eating him up from the inside.”

  On weekends, Orbits tried to engage his father in conversations about his old job and his former clients, and the older man nodded and rubbed his fingers along a nearby object; during one conversation, Orbits felt his father was trying to assure himself he could still touch and feel. One weekend he brought out his father’s shoes from beneath his bed. “We going for a little walk.”

  Throughout the walk to the junction, his father’s steps short and faltering, Orbits pointed out all the familiar buildings: the wooden house hidden by bougainvillaea in which a beekeeper lived by himself, the old concrete flat owned by a retired surveyor and next to that an oil-stained yard littered with vehicle parts. “That is where Joe the mechanic and his madam live,” he said. “And look at the parlour where Miss Bango used to sell her sugar cakes and tamarind balls. You remember when people use to say she would grind up the sugar cake with her teeth? Over there is the rumshop where the sergeant spend most of his time. Maybe he retired now.” They walked past the junction where his father usually got his taxi to a stretch of cane land. “The cane growing wild now. The sugar factory closed a little while ago.”

  His father asked in a distressed voice, “It closed? Why it closed?”

  He recalled a conversation with Wally and said, “Everybody connect cane with slavery and bondage. Sugar have a bad name.”

  His father giggled, and Orbits remembered that Sugars was the name of his father’s former client. “Sugars don’t pay.”

  “Yes, yes, that is true.” Orbits smiled, thinking it funny.

  On the way back, he told his father, “The money didn’t reach this village as yet. Everything is the same. But all over the island people building big houses right on top their old ones and all kind of new cars making accidents every day. Everything topsy-turvy.”

  “Really?” His father stopped.

  “Yes, is true. All over mud and concrete and steel beams scatter about like if is a war zone.”

  “A war zone?”

  “And workers going around in a circle like crazy ants.”

  His father giggled.

  When they returned, Orbits’ mother told him, “It look like Papoose enjoy the walk. He perk up a little bit. He need to go outside more often instead of chook up in the house all day interfering with everything in sight.”

  That week at work, Orbits told Wally, “I thinking of buying a little jalopy.”

  Wally responded immediately as if he had been waiting for this revelation. “I know just the place.” The taxi drove out of the capital and into a street where every house had been converted into a car business depot. The yards were packed with cars, and from the porches and upper windows, bumpers, fenders, rims and windscreens were suspended from cables. An hour later, both men sat at a nearby shop, waiting for their order of chicken roti to be brought over. “One year ago, all the houses on this street were shacks. Then one fella get into this foreign-used business and he tell his cousin next door and his cousin tell his uncle and so it spread. Muslim people. They help out each other like that. So you see anything you like?”

  “I have to see some more to make a comparison.”

  “That make sense, yes.”

  But the prices of the cars were far more than Orbits had expected. Each place they visited, Wally asked him, “So you see anything that you like?”

  And Orbits’ reply always was, “I want to make a comparison.” This went on for close to half a year, and Wally never seemed displeased or disappointed. During each trip, they visited some nearby restaurant or a little shop serving Indian food, and after the initial conversation about the suitability of a vehicle had been put aside, they chatted about the job and the oil boom and about Wally’s family in Canada.

  One afternoon while they were in a rumshop munching on cutters — gizzard and cracker — Wally told him, “The family up in the cold always telling me I should forget this place and join them, and I always say that I happy here and I will die here. But you notice how much crime it have now? This is what money does do. Criminals from near and far flooding to this place. Once, you could have recognized a criminal from a distance because he was always weighed down with gold chains and had a scar across half his face. Now it could be the little nashy boy with a gun hiding in his pocket. Coward tax. That is what all these big people paying the elders to safeguard they businesses and children.” Orbits was surprised; he had assumed that these community elders were wise old men with flowing beards and gentle eyes, but Wally explained they were gang leaders given respectability because of their access to politicians. Both men finished the nip and ordered another. “Is four years now they planning to move us to the new building and we didn’t move an inch. Still operating from cardboard boxes. This place going downhill and uphill at the same time. Spinning top in mud.”

  Orbits was dismayed, but he guessed that Wally’s talk of leaving was simply a way of continuing the conversation, of matching Orbits’ complaints about the brief and curt telephone conversations he had had with his wife. “You believe that is months since I didn’t see the daughter face?” he asked.

  That was a lie because he had not visited since he had moved out. During those initial months, he considered dropping by but was always stopped by the image of his reproachful in-laws and by the memory of his wife that last night looking up at him with a focused hatred. He had called a few times, hoping he would hear something in his wife’s voice that suggested longing or guilt or even pity, but each time he heard on the receiver, “Dee, that man want to talk to you. You want to talk to that man?” His last call had been about three months earlier, and his mother-in-law had answered. “The girl is busy with her common entrance.” Then she had hung up.

  The day of the examination, he hovered around the phone in the office, and he even dialled his wife’s number before he hung up. At midday, he called the school and a teacher told him that the students were still writing the exam and he should not call again. “Sure, sure. I understand,” he said, but when he got home, he told his mother, “These blasted people don’t want me to talk to my own daughter.”

  “I never trusted them,” his mother replied, misunderstanding whom he was referring to. “I never trust anybody who eat with knife and fork.” He didn’t bother to correct her, and he was pleased when she continued about how all their ambitiousness had dried them out into thin marasme people. “Thank god you escape,” she said. “Look how nice and plump you get back.”

  But my daughter didn’t escape, he thought. Maybe I should go to the school and ask her to come with me. But what if the mother already turned her mind against me? In that case, I could prove that everything the mother said was a lie. But will she believe me? In that mood of indecision, Orbits finally bought a vehicle. Not a foreign-used, but an old Kingswood from Joe the mechanic just six houses away. He had seen Joe halfway inside the hood during a walk with his father. The mechanic, a black, bald man with a protruding belly that looked hard as rock came to the road to chat with his father, who asked about the car he was repairing. “Australian brand,” Joe said. “Build for the outbacks.” He led them to the car, and Orbits’ father walked around trailing his finger along the hood and the trunk and the shiny chrome bumpers. “Nice eh
? Once I get the alternator running I will have she purring like a cyat.” His father stepped inside and ran his palms on the dashboard. “A fella give me to fix it up and like he forget about it. I sure he already buy some foreign-used that will break down in one year time.”

  “So these new imported vehicles not good?” Orbits asked.

  “Don’t talk to me about them cars,” Joe said. “They good for nothing. Nice and pretty and well behaved like a girlfriend before you put ring on finger. But after that . . .”

  “Yes, yes,” Orbits said.

  “But not this Kingswood here. The more you run, the tougher she will get. She build for durability. This is wife material.”

  At the end of the conversation, an agreement was reached: Orbits would buy the vehicle for twelve thousand, five hundred dollars. “We could drive it home now?” the father asked.

  “No, Uncle, not yet. I have to repair the alternator and clean the brake lines and the plugs. Might have to get another battery too.”

  “All that?” Orbits asked anxiously.

  “Listen man, the strongest mule wouldn’t go anywhere unless you feed it properly. Is just some minor preps.”

  The next day Orbits withdrew five thousand, the extent of his savings, from the bank and made a down payment. Joe counted the money slowly and told him, “Man, is a good thing you make this payment because a fella was passing on the road and he see the car and decide there and then it was for him. He beg me not to sell she to anybody else, but as they say in primary school, the early bird get the car.”

  “So when I will get she?”

  “Just some minor preps, man.”

  It was five weeks before Orbits was able to collect the car. He outlined his frustrations to Wally, who, initially disappointed that Orbits had made a decision on his own and had bought an old model instead of a foreign-used, recovered to lament the profusion of small-time schemers in the island. “This place have more smartmen per square inch than any other place in the world. The only difference between a sagaboy and a thief is that a sagaboy didn’t get catch as yet. Thank god you didn’t make a down payment.”

  “That is the thing. I make a little one. A small tiny deposit,” he lied. “But is the principle of the thing that have me upset.”

  As they grew tipsier, Wally told him, “Let me tell you what does upset me. Everybody have a nice plaster for this skulduggery business. If you ask me, it started way back with slavery. Small man against big man and everybody rightfully supporting small man.”

  “So far back?”

  “It had a purpose then, but the thing is it never stop! So now, every manjack have some scheme in they back pocket. If I was you I would forget the deposit and move on.”

  In his drunken bravado, Orbits told him, “Never happen! Is the principle of the thing. I will haul his mangy ass straight to the courthouse. He don’t know who he playing with.”

  The next morning, sobered up and on his way to the junction, Orbits would ask Joe, “So when I getting the car, Joe?”

  “Don’t rush the brush, man. How you will feel if I give you a defective car?”

  “I will feel bad.”

  “Exactly.”

  And that afternoon, Orbits would continue his tirade, “He getting frighten. I could see it in his eyes. He didn’t know who he was messing with. Ay-ay-yai.”

  His bravado lasted as long as his tipsiness. He was embarrassed by his weakness and frightened by Joe’s growing insolence. One evening Wally was called to a meeting and Orbits returned from work early. He noticed that the mechanic was now working on another car and that the Kingswood was covered with a tarpaulin. “I notice you hiding the car,” he told Joe.

  “From the dew. Dew does look like a little simple thing, but it could destroy a piece of metal in no time. Worse than acid, if you ask me.”

  “So when I getting the car?”

  Joe looked up and wiped a spanner against his dirty pants. “I tell you already, man, that I don’t want to give you a defective car. We is neighbours so how it will look?” He resumed his knocking at an engine block.

  “Listen, Joe, I have a friend who giving me some strange advice. A lawyer fella. Portagee. High-class Portagee from the town. He saying I should bring you up.”

  The knocking stopped. “Tell that high-class Portagee he could kiss my oily ass. Bring me up! When next you meet him tell him that Mister Joe fight his way out of all kind of battle.” He knocked the spanner against his solid belly. “Tell him that Mister Joe nearly kill a man for spoiling his good name.”

  Orbits, thoroughly frightened by then, regretted his provocation of the mechanic. He eyed the distance to the road. He would have to jump over a drain and run for five minutes before he got to the junction. By then Joe would be bludgeoning him with his spanner.

  Then the mechanic began to cry. “Poor people have no place in this world. Corbeau pee on we head. We worse than dog. Worse even than cyat.” At the end of the episode, an agreement was reached: Orbits would pay the balance by the weekend and collect the car. He took a loan from the bank, and Wally agreed to stand as security.

  “So when you getting the vehicle?” his friend asked over a meal.

  “This weekend.”

  “You will drive it home? You know with all the crime in the place nowadays, it make sense getting a vehicle, never mind the type and the age.”

  “These newer models like a high-maintenance girlfriend.”

  “I not living too far from this work here, so I never see the need for a car or a driving license. But for a country boy like you it make plenty sense.” As Wally continued in his optimistic manner about restaurants in remote areas they could now visit in the vehicle, Orbits was reminded that he had never driven a car and had no idea how to operate a vehicle. Also, he did not have a driving permit.

  That weekend the car had to be pushed onto the road from the mechanic’s place to Orbits’ yard. “I tell you that she needed some prepping. This is what happen to people who harden and don’t listen.”

  “I don’t know what my Portagee lawyer friend will say about this,” Orbits replied, wiping the sweat from his face.

  “I think is the battery. I will take one out from another car and drop it this evening.” He kept his word and for three months, every morning Orbits drove the car from the yard to the road and back into the yard. His parents watched expectantly from the porch. One day he told Wally, “You know in the excitement about buying a car, I clean forget about driving permit.”

  “I know somebody,” Wally told him.

  The somebody was a businessman who, tired of being robbed, had applied for a gun license. He had been told he needed to be registered as a farmer before one could be issued, and Wally had facilitated his registration. Wally and Orbits met the man in a rumshop not far from the street of foreign-used vehicles. The businessman boasted openly about getting most of those vehicles licensed by substituting their registration numbers with crashed and written-off vehicles. Orbits paid the man two hundred dollars, and the following week, the two met at a licensing office, where his photograph was taken and a license issued.

  ***

  At the age of thirty-three, Orbits began to drive. During his first few trips to the grocery just half a mile away, he recalled his journey along that route on his way to primary school, when he had emphasized his new nickname by pointing to and gazing at the sky. Those daily trips had been agonizing, and after a while, he stopped telling his parents he no longer wanted to go to school because of the bullying. They had laughed away his complaints because like everyone else on the island, they could not understand the idea of abuse. Children were either strong and resilient or weak and disappointing. He hoped his daughter took after her mother instead of him. Off and on, he took his mother to the local market, but he never ventured out of the village. During these trips she was thrilled and talked about visiting relatives he h
ad never heard about and who lived in the opposite ends of the island.

  Every morning while he was on the bus, he would look at the cars speeding by, cutting in and out of the traffic recklessly. And each evening his mother reminded him about the journeys he had promised her. “It will be good for Papoose too. Whole day he chook up in the house.”

  Ever since he got the vehicle, Orbits had fantasized about paying an unexpected visit to his daughter and taking her in his Kingswood to ice cream parlours and fast food outlets and to the cinema. But his first trip out of the village was with his parents. He drove through backtraces and dirt roads to avoid the highway, but his parents did not seem to mind. His mother in the back seat commented on the fruit trees, the bridges and the newly paved roads. Eventually they came to the primary school on the hill and the green bungalow opposite. Orbits stopped and parked the car. “What you think?”

  “I think I went to that school.”

  “Hush you mouth, Papoose. That was never your school.” She chuckled and added, “You Papoose always making up things. This is where your daughter going, boy?”

  “No. That is about half an hour away. She write her exam and waiting for the result. It will get published in the papers any day now.”

  Orbits’ second trip out of the village was to his daughter’s school. Two weeks after his trip with his parents, he saw her name listed in the newspapers; she had passed for one of the prestige colleges in the town. He felt a surge of pride and called the school. His daughter was in a class, he was told, but there would be a farewell function for the successful students on Friday. He told Wally he would be away and mentioned the reason. In the evening, he went to a department store. The clerk pushed aside the trousers and shirt he had chosen and brought over another pair. “The biggest mistake fat people make is to buy tight-tight clothes,” the clerk explained. “And stop pulling in your belly. Is nothing to be ashamed about. Is your genes.”