“That is true. Is genes.” But for the first time since his childhood, Orbits felt anxious about his weight. What would his daughter think? What would the teachers? And his former wife?
“I don’t care one shit about that,” he muttered the following morning as he put on the new shirt and pants. He glanced at himself in the mirror. His belly was hidden by the oversized clothes, but he saw a round stuffed animal wrapped in a blanket. “That blasted, scheming no-good clerk,” he grumbled all the way to the car. “He add a good hundred pounds to me.”
By the time he got to the school, he was sweating from the thick fabric, and the shirt, drenched with sweat, followed all the contours of his belly. The place was already filled with parents, and he sat at the back looking for a sign of his wife and his daughter. He saw his daughter first, sitting on the stage, and she seemed so pretty and poised he wanted to get up and call out to her so that everyone would know he was the father. He noticed his daughter waving and he did the same, but she was looking elsewhere. He followed her gaze and saw his wife. She was in the front row sitting next to another teacher. He couldn’t see her face, but he noticed all the familiar gestures: twirling her hair, leaning as the teacher whispered into her ear, her shoulder shaking with suppressed laughter. She had done all of this during their courtship and the first few years of their marriage. He wished he could see the face of the teacher, and he hoped that he was pock-faced and ugly.
The principal got on the stage and spoke about the sacrifices the students and their parents had made, and he saw Dee looking at her mother and nodding. When it was Dee’s turn to receive her congratulatory handshake, her mother and the other teacher got up to applaud and Orbits saw his face. He resembled Starboy, in a way, with the same insolent expression and long hair, but he was well-dressed and appeared confident. At the end of the ceremony, they both walked to the front, and as he bent forward to pat Dee, her mother brushed his shoulder lightly.
Orbits left without meeting his daughter. When he reached home, he flung away his soaking shirt and pants. “Terylene, my ass.”
The next day Wally asked him, “How was the function with the family?”
“Good, good, man. The daughter get a nice certificate. Real proud of her.”
“You know, Orbits, it good to have a family around. I know that you and the wife working out your problems, but the important thing is that you could just drop in or phone if you want. With me, it’s different. The last of a dying breed.”
“Which breed?” He tried to make it a joke. “Alsatian or pothound?”
“What I mean is that I am the only one still here. What if something happen to me? Besides, this job is a dead end. It look we will never move to that other building. This government more interested in relocating their big-pappy friends from the cocktail circuits and putting party supporters in jobs they know nothing about. This oil boom is just like scattering money before a group of children.”
Orbits had heard this sort of talk before, but Wally returned to it almost daily. He was softened by Wally’s references to family, and he called the school several times to talk to his daughter. One day his wife answered. He was so startled, he immediately identified himself. There was a pause before she said she had heard of his calls and wanted to do the same. She wished to discuss a matter and wanted to know if he could arrive at 3:00 when the school day ended. He left immediately, his mind a whirl.
He arrived at 3:30. She was sitting on a bench close to the assembly area, shaded by a spreading samaan tree. He wished the schoolyard were not so big because she would have the opportunity to get a long look at his approach. But when he sat on an adjoining bench, her expression was neutral, as if she did not notice his weight. “Your daughter passed her exams for a very good school,” she told him. “Just a few weeks ago there was a ceremony at the school. It’s going to be expensive sending her to high school. Travel and uniform and books and clubs and everything.”
Orbits noticed a man getting out of a parked car. He was walking towards them with long athletic strides, and Orbits felt he was a PE teacher. Then he saw that it was the teacher who had been sitting with his wife during the ceremony. He heard his wife saying that she wanted him to contribute a monthly sum for his daughter’s maintenance. The sum would be determined by the same lawyer who was handling the divorce. Perhaps it was the presence of the other teacher standing at his side and then sitting next to his wife, holding her hand for support, that made Orbits agree with all the terms.
“I am glad you understand,” his wife said. She got up and walked away with the other teacher. Orbits was relieved they had left before him. He sat on the bench after they drove off. Divorce. He had never thought of this even though they had been living apart for so long. The word sounded so potent and empty at the same time. Dee-vorce. No, it sounded like one of the processes he had studied in the meteorological courses his wife had encouraged him into. Like evaporation or distillation.
He didn’t want to get up. He watched the clouds floating above the samaan, broken into fragments by the leaves so that they looked like a child’s puzzle. Someone was saying something to him. He looked downwards and saw the janitor. “We have to close the gate soon,” the man said.
“That is a good idea. You see those dark clouds in the distance . . . it mean that a storm is on the way.”
Orbits kept his word. Each month he allocated five hundred dollars, a quarter of his salary, to his daughter. Another five hundred went into the payment of the car loan. He went to work, filed the papers in the cardboard boxes, spent an hour or so with Wally in a restaurant and ate alone in the night in the same mood, neither bitter nor relieved. He convinced himself that the distress of one burden was always displaced by the pleasures of some other obligation. He didn’t arrive at this philosophy entirely on his own because each weekend he watched his parents together.
Everything balances out, he told himself. There is no need to struggle. He was thankful that as part of the divorce settlement, he got the opportunity once a month to see his daughter. He met her on the lower floor of the library opposite her high school, and whenever he climbed the front stairs and saw her, he was struck at how different she was from him. She was unmoved by his attempts at bantering, at his childish jokes, and once, she told him in a stern voice, “I am twelve, you know. Next year I will be thirteen.”
He had been trying to perk her attention by talking of clouds and their shifting shapes that could be an animal one minute and the face of a departed person the next. “When I was your age I couldn’t get enough of clouds. How you think I become a top-notch meteorologist?”
“Mom said you are a clerk at the Ministry of Agriculture.”
“Just a temporary measure.” He recalled one of Wally’s statements. “In this country, you have to bend your ambition if you want to survive. Bend it and twist it and roll it in a little ball.”
She tapped her pencil against her chin and said, “I have to leave now. Mom and her boyfriend are taking me to the movies.”
“Really? What movie?”
“Something.” She gathered her books.
Orbits wondered if they were going to the cinema he had visited with his former wife during their courtship. “Bye, Dee.” She waved without looking back, stylishly, as if unscrewing a slack bulb.
During another meeting, she asked why he never came with his car, and he didn’t say that he was afraid to drive in the busy towns and, after a year, still chose the back roads to his destinations. Instead, he blamed the car. “The car have a will of its own. Sometimes I turn the steering wheel left and the car decide to go right.” She mentioned that she would miss the next meeting because her mother was taking her to another island during the Easter vacation. “It’s my gift for coming out second in my last test.”
“Only second?” he joked, and when he saw her annoyance he added, “But it’s still better than me. The last place was always reserve
d for me. So just you and your mummy going?”
She rolled her eyes, a gesture he could not interpret.
During that Easter, Orbits drove to his work for the first time. It took him twice as long as his regular journey on the bus, and because he drove slowly, almost at a crawl, he had to put up with the curses of other drivers.
“You think this is a blasted funeral?” one driver shouted.
Another pushed his head through the window. “Carry that thing to the scrapyard.”
Yet he was relieved and proud when he parked on an empty street not far from the office, and as he headed there, his briefcase stuffed with food his mother had packed, he tried to imagine Wally’s reaction to his conquest of the car and of the roads. Later they drove to a rumshop close to the Savannah, and on the way, Wally mentioned the spaciousness of the vehicle and Orbits told him he could fit an entire cricket team in the back seat. But once in the rumshop, some of their exuberance faded. As usual, Wally brought up his frustration with his job and the entreaties of his family abroad and his loneliness at being the one left behind. “You know, Orbits, I used to tell them they were like rats leaving a ship. Colonials who had no use for the place once it started to treat them just like everybody else. Transients.” As Orbits pondered the meaning of the word, Wally spoke about his relatives’ disillusionment with and desertion of the island and his slow realization that he was no different. “I used to think that all these upper-class people was no better than these long-time absentee plantation owners living high and mighty in France and England while the overseers managed the business. Running away at the first sign of trouble as if this place don’t mean anything to them, but maybe I misjudged them. All this money that flowing through the country will run out one day, and we will have nothing to show for it besides a few stadiums and fancy buildings. Pappyshow only.” As Wally spoke about all the things that had been dismantled in the island, the tramcars in the capital, the trains that once criss-crossed the place, the castles at the Savannah, the century-old buildings, the heritage sites, the samaan-lined promenades, Orbits felt that this new side to his friend was really a conversation with himself, trying to convince himself that he possessed no choice in the matter. “But I try, man. I really try.”
He had always assumed that Wally’s despondent sermonizing was connected with the frustration of his job and — as he knew so well — with the recurring bouts of dissatisfaction associated more with his weight than anything else. Once he had thought of a term — “Fatman Blues” — and he couldn’t recall if it was the name of a song or if he had invented it. But as he listened to Wally talking about neglect and disdain and ingratitude, some of the other man’s mood latched on to him. He thought of his former wife taking her boyfriend to all of the places they had once visited; he thought of his daughter, who seemed so remote during their meetings and who always seemed in a hurry to leave. He revealed for the first time his troubles with Joe the mechanic. Wally countered with the revelation of a robbery across the road from where he lived, a widow living by herself, beaten and tied up. “This could still be a nice place if you look at it, but the people spoil it.”
They drank in this manner, their mood darkening with each new revelation, each feeling the other’s pain; and when they stumbled out of the rumshop, it was already dark and Orbits, realizing he was too drunk to drive to his place, was forced to take a taxi.
The next morning, the car was gone, and when he learned from the rumshop’s proprietor that it had been towed away, he seriously contemplated leaving it there. “I could help you out.” The proprietor was a stout mixed-race man with a hanging lower lip that gave him a both critical and gluttonous look.
“How?” Orbits asked.
“I know somebody.” Orbits, unaware of the little subtleties of bribing, could not understand at first, but the man told him that for ten dollars he would get the car from the police yard. He paid the money and walked to the office. Wally was not there that day, and Orbits guessed he was nursing his hangover. In the evening, he walked across to the rumshop, expecting to see the car parked, but the owner told him, “I had a little problem.”
“So you didn’t get the car?”
“That is the thing. The fella I know wasn’t there and his replacement playing tough. He know full well that the longer a vehicle remain in the yard the more parts that get removed. A man I know once, a country boy like you, collect his car after a week, and when he was driving it home he had a flat. And guess what? When he open the trunk, jack gone, spanner gone, spare tire gone. Speakers too. I tried to talk to him about getting out his car, but he didn’t listen. Country boy. Didn’t know the ropes.”
Orbits gave the man another ten dollars. In the bus, he cursed Joe the mechanic, the driver of the wrecking vehicle, the proprietor of the rumshop and the thieves at the police yard. The following day he dropped in at the rumshop before he got to his work. The proprietor began making excuses. The replacement was acting up. He was asking for additional money because of the size and age of the Kingswood. He believed an attempt had been made to steal the battery. Orbits noticed how his lip dropped with each excuse. “The man playing the fool. He asking for ten more just because he know that it better to get a whole car than a shell. I wouldn’t say he is a scamp but . . .”
He wiped his lips with the back of his palm. The gesture infuriated Orbits. “You wouldn’t say he is a scamp? I wonder why? Is because you is a bigger scamp. A blasted rogue and vagabond. A damn malcontent.”
The proprietor sucked in his lower lip and his mouth bunched into an apelike expression. Then he spat out his lip. “Look man, who you calling a malcontent? I try to help you out and that is how you behaving. This is not the country, you know. It have rules and regulations here.”
“Rules and regulations, my ass. This not finish, you hear me. It not finish at all. I going to write the commissioner of police.”
Suddenly the man began to laugh. “Oh lord. The commissioner? I frighten too bad.” Just as suddenly his laughter stopped. “Look, man, haul you ass from my place, you hear me. And don’t let me see you here again.”
As Orbits rushed away, he stopped in the gap to shout, “And I writing the health inspector too about them gizzard you does be selling that hard like rock. Kidney stones gizzard.” From inside the shop came a burst of rolling laughter. Later in the day, while Orbits and Wally were walking to the police yard, Wally said, “You must be the only person in town who wasn’t aware that the rumshop fella and the owner of the wrecker real tight. They running this scheme for years now. The two of them like Simon and Garfunkel.”
Orbits didn’t understand the reference, but he recalled a teacher from primary school asking him to spell carbuncle, and he sputtered, “A damn sore in truth. A nasty boil. Selling bad gizzard. I already plan the letter.” At the yard he was further infuriated to learn that the cost of releasing the vehicle was just twenty dollars; he had assumed it would have been many times the sum. “Money gone down the drain,” he told Wally. “This car only bring trouble on my head.”
Wally responded with a phrase he had been using recently: “The place not bad. Is just the people.”
From then the car remained parked at his home and he resumed his normal means of transportation. He still took his parents on weekend trips to small villages, mostly places that had been denied the money flowing through the rest of the island. But while his mother commented on the fruit trees and the flower gardens, Orbits began to see something entirely different. Once, while they were driving through a dirt road, Orbits, as was his habit, glanced up at the sky. His mother was saying something about a perfect picture and he told her, “Only the top half.”
His father giggled, and Orbits didn’t bother to explain that if the scene was viewed as a photograph, the top would display a perfect tropical paradise with lazy clouds in a blue sky and palm trees waving next to poui covered with striking orange colours. But beneath would be a stre
et of houses built from galvanize and boxing board laid erratically so that there were gaps in the walls from which the children, if they watched outside, would see the stagnant drain, yellow and oily looking.
“So nice,” his mother said.
But the people spoil it, he thought. People always spoil everything.
“Bring your daughter next time.”
Orbits glanced at his father in the rear-view mirror. He rarely spoke, and Orbits was surprised that he even remembered Dee. “She studying for her exams,” he told the older man. His mother sighed loudly.
His monthly visits with his daughter continued, but now he matched her disinterest and both seemed relieved when the visits came to an end. It was only with Wally that Orbits relaxed and revealed the blankness that seemed to be chipping away at everything. He revealed all that he had formerly kept to himself: his umbrage at his mother’s treatment of his brother and the guilt following his death; the deterioration of his marriage that was so gradual that he could not pick out the defining moment it was dead; his daughter who seemed more a stranger during every visit. One evening he told the other man, “Up until I was an adult, I used to be gazing at the clouds and wishing I could be there instead of down here. I used to imagine that I was floating above everyone. It seemed so peaceful. You know, I try to make everything so unreal that I never name anything. This island, teachers at school, everybody. I always believe that the minute I give something or someone a name, it will make it more real. Was nicknames from a side.” He felt he had gone too far, revealed too much, and added, “That was until I start doing meteorology.”
Wally said in an amused way, “Is a good thing I have a nickname, or you would have written me off too.”
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