Is Fat Bob Dead Yet?: A Novel

by Stephen Dobyns

  As he listens, Didi’s fork is paused halfway to his mouth, while around its several tines are two neatly wrapped strands of spaghetti. He could be a model in a pasta ad. Vaughn, on the other hand, eats his spaghetti strand by strand. He takes one by the tip, holds it over his head and shouts, “Snakes in the kitchen!” Then he lowers it into his mouth. After that the process repeats.

  “A fucking plastic rose,” says Didi.

  Vaughn says, “It’s beyond my apprehension.”

  Eartha and Didi give Vaughn a quick look and decide not to comment. This often happens when Vaughn speaks. They’re unsure whether his confusions of language are intentional or accidental, but they know if they ask, Vaughn will give an explanation that will drag them into his alternative universe. This is a scary place to visit. Eartha and Didi have been there before and beaten a hasty retreat, but like a pervasive smell, their confusion lingers for the rest of the day. So they ignore him.

  “You know Connor’s brother Vasco?” asks Eartha.

  “I’ve met him a few times, but I can’t say I know him.”

  Eartha is eating her salad. “Would he sell information like that?”

  It should be clear that Didi and Vasco have features in common, though Didi is more than fifteen years older. Both are handsome, vain, well dressed, and have distinctive heads of hair. Both are sure of themselves. Both have more answers than questions, meaning they are self-confidently opinionated. And they’re quick to share their opinions with others, meaning they’re pushy.

  But while Didi is a nihilistic optimist, Vasco is a nihilistic cynic. Didi’s belief that someone might eagerly embrace the concept of Orphans from Outer Space derives from his love—perhaps only an affection—for his fellow man. Vasco’s belief that someone might embrace the concept of extraterrestrial orphans only arouses his scorn. The fact that casino patrons are gullible fantasists leads Didi to sympathy and even tenderness. Vasco dismisses them as chumps. Didi looks on Vasco with mild pity; Vasco looks at Didi with energetic disdain. Didi has a sense of humor, though it’s eccentric, while the closest Vasco gets to a sense of humor is sarcasm.

  “You’re not answering my question,” says Eartha. “Would he sell information like that?”

  “Yes,” says Didi. “He would.”

  “Could this mess up our …” She pauses and goes on. “… fund-raising efforts?”

  “I’m certain it will, especially if it attracts attention to Connor.” Didi turns to Vaughn. “What d’you call a plastic rose stuck in a hole in a guy’s forehead?”

  Vaughn doesn’t hesitate. “An optical conclusion.”

  SIXTEEN

  Let’s get back to those folks who say there are no accidents and everything happens for a reason. Vasco calls them suckers; Didi calls them his constituency. In these folks’ analysis of the world, Fate and the extended power digit, or middle-finger salute, of various faith-supported superfigures do a lot of heavy lifting. So they might think the prospect of an overlap between Free Beagles from Nicotine Addiction, Inc. and Prom Queens Anonymous, Inc. isn’t a coincidence but “means something.” It was destined to happen.

  But Didi will say what it means is statistics: that given two hundred prom queens and one thousand beagles within a population of a hundred thousand women, there’s an X percent possibility that Y number of prom queens will own a beagle. In fact, a few former prom queens will find spiritual sustenance only in the embrace of a beagle. Beagles don’t care if you’re no longer beautiful. They don’t care if the great expectations you had as an eighteen-year-old knockout have become spilled jam pots on the dusty roads of life. That’s why we like beagles and other canines: love and loyalty are more important to them than truth. You tell your dog you can walk on water and it will lick your hand. Its only fear is of being left behind, locked up, shut in the doghouse when you go to a fancy-dress ball or simply go shopping. Otherwise you’re gravy.

  Didi’s target prom queens are women between forty-five and sixty-five—women dismayed by the creeping decrepitations to be found on necks, cheeks, foreheads, etc. Didi is the enemy of face-lifts. He doesn’t want these ladies to be beautiful again.

  He wants shattered glass to remain shattered glass. As girls they had great hopes. They were told that golden futures lay ahead. They saw themselves as celebrities in training, as proto–trophy wives. Maybe many also wanted to become doctors, lawyers, and airline pilots, and maybe some were successful. In fact, among family members, friends, and fellow workers, they might be superstars. But they’re no longer beautiful. That’s not to say they are ugly—they are faded.

  Didi, of course, understands that some have made profitable transitions to middle age. For them their brief fame as prom queens is no more than a mildly diverting anecdote about the days when they posed in shining crowns and held bouquets of flowers. And some perhaps never liked their beauty. It was the child they constantly had to care for. They hated being ogled. They celebrated each new wrinkle.

  But others may live in states of perpetual grief. Nothing has worked out as promised. Despite fortunes spent on makeup, their faces are little more than prettified accusations. Of course this isn’t true, but it’s how they feel. Instead of casting aside the delusion of ugliness, they embrace it. And perhaps they see it as the cause of all their failures: they lost their looks.

  These are the customers of Prom Queens Anonymous: groups of older women sitting in church basements over sour cups of coffee and a few stale Oreo cookies discussing how the truths of youth became the falsehoods of age: unawakened Sleeping Beauties, Cinderellas for whom the pumpkin carriages never arrived, graying Rapunzels. As members of Prom Queens Anonymous, they push aside their mirrors’ fabrications and get on with the business of living. They learn to forgive themselves for growing older. The lines and wrinkles of experience become more consequential than the pink and unspoiled surfaces of youth.

  Didi doesn’t know if groups like Prom Queens Anonymous exist, but he’s confident there’s a need. And where there’s a need, he knows he will find women eager to contribute money, especially if they themselves are former prom queens. He has only to seek them out.

  In the past this meant combing through old newspapers and school yearbooks, a laborious task where the game’s hardly worth the candle. But with Vaughn at his side, Didi can sneak into the computers of every high school in a fifty-mile radius. Then, with a few key taps, the girls’ names burst forth on the screen. In fact, Didi’s greatest success has been with high school prom queens, rather than college homecoming queens. Their fantasies are richer and age’s encroachments grimmer, while the intensity of their response suggests they’ve been waiting for his call.

  We haven’t yet said that Angelina Rossi was a prom queen, but we say it here. And we may remember that Vikström found her beautiful “in a dark, southern Italian way.” On the other hand, her black mustache repelled Manny Streeter. Let’s say without further fuss that Angelina has no mustache. We see only a slight, dark shadow on her upper lip, perhaps a little more than a shadow. Manny also imagined thick locks of black pubic hair from her navel to midthigh. Even if this is true, she remains beautiful.

  Angelina sits at her kitchen table smoking a cigarette at about eight o’clock Wednesday evening with her beagle, little Magsie, at her feet, when her cell phone abruptly starts buzzing. Her response is immediate: the world has arrived to pester her again. She clicks on the phone as Magsie begins to growl.

  “Yes?”

  A woman’s low, breathy voice says, “Is it you, is it really you? Is this Angelina Carlotti, the Pumpkin Queen of 1985? Angie?”

  Angelina’s normal response to telephone calls is to cut the connection within two seconds. But tonight she hesitates.

  “Yes?” she repeats. “Who are you? Your voice sounds familiar.”

  “I remember you walking to the center of the stage and everyone applauding and calling your name: Angie! Angie! You looked so beautiful in your pink gown.”

  Angelina, in point of fact,
was crowned queen during the halftime ceremonies of a Friday-evening football game in November. And it wasn’t on a stage. She sat atop a prickly hay bale on a wagon drawn by two undistinguished horses. Also, her gown had been blue. But she doesn’t let these details bother her, because all at once she hears those voices calling, Angie! Angie!

  “What of it?” she says unpleasantly, unwilling to surrender anything as yet.

  “How hard these last years must have been for you. Believe me, I feel the same way. I’ve been betrayed by my body—I gain weight, my face sags. Angie, where did it go? What happened to the beautiful girl with a bright future? I’ve become a stranger to myself!”

  Eartha sits at the dinette table in the Winnebago reading words from a script begun many years ago by other members of Bounty, Inc. and which has been added to and tinkered with ever since. The most recent words were written by Didi, though Eartha at times takes the opportunity to add a few, change a few, cut a few. “Organic stagecraft,” Didi calls it.

  Angelina doesn’t answer. Even though she wants to hurl the phone through the window, she curbs the impulse. She feels a lump in her throat, or maybe she’s getting a cold. It is, for her, an unfamiliar sensation.

  “Isn’t that the night you danced again and again with your husband-to-be, Robert Rossi? When later you both lay naked in the backseat of his car?”

  “Fat Bob, the fat fuck, my ex.”

  Eartha hears her venom and backtracks. This is no time for venom.

  “But he wasn’t like that then. He was handsome and kind and generous—”

  “He said he wanted to fuck me till the cows came home. I should have known then he was greedy.”

  “But there was passion—”

  “He ripped my nice dress!”

  “But you liked it.”

  “I was stupid. I liked anyone who was nice to me.”

  “What were your dreams that night, your dreams for the future?”

  “I was going to be an airline stewardess.”

  “So men could stare at you but couldn’t bother you?”

  “Something like that. Who the fuck are you anyway?”

  “Right now,” said Eartha with a deeper purr, “I’m your best friend. Your sorrows have been my sorrows. Your tears have cut their furrows in my own furrowed cheeks. And what happened to those dreams?”

  “Fat Bob knocked me up. And he kept knocking me up—knocked me up four times, but one of the kids didn’t make it, a girl.”

  “I’m sure they’re beautiful children.”

  “They got fat. They look just like Fat Bob.”

  Eartha keeps thinking she’s heard that name and then realizes she heard it from Connor. “Didn’t Fat Bob transition on a motorcycle the other day?”

  “Transition?”

  “Cross the great divide, go the way of all flesh, cash in his chips …” Eartha struggles to find an inoffensive euphemism.

  Angelina snorts a laugh within which Eartha hears a growl of disenchantment. “No such luck. It was Marco got killed, Bob’s buddy. Bob let him use his bike. That’s why people said the dead guy was Fat Bob.”

  “How awful.”

  “Yeah, if Fat Bob got killed, I’d get the insurance money. I was counting on it. I need it for a face-lift, so I’ve been selling his Fat Bobs to make up for the loss. I sell them cheap, and it drives him crazy. Anyway, what the fuck do you want?”

  Although Eartha hears Angelina’s anger, she knows that Angelina isn’t angry enough to hang up. “I’m like you were: a girl with lots of dates and lots of friends who was elected homecoming queen. They put a crown on my head and shook my hand and kissed my cheek, and hundreds of people clapped and clapped and shouted my name, and I thought my entire life would change and be wonderful. The shadowy future reached toward me with its promised embrace. But it never happened. I was left standing on the darkened stage of life. And it may surprise you to know that there’re lots of us.”

  The lump in Angelina’s throat gets bigger. “What d’you mean ‘lots of us’? Are you a club?”

  “We are Prom Queens Anonymous. We meet and talk about how things used to be and what they became. We work to defeat our disappointment and make our lives joyful again. We try to change ourselves, become part of society, to be useful. We rediscover our beauty as older women, and we set up groups all over the country. It takes time, but mostly it takes money.”

  We haven’t counted the words Eartha has spoken, but they all lead to one larger word: “money.” And Eartha hopes she has set that word in Angelina’s brain as one might set a baby on a feather bed.

  “I like the sound of that,” says Angelina.

  Eartha pumps her fist. Yes, she says to herself. Yes, Yes! “We’ve no wish to rehash the old stories. We move beyond the bad times. We realize our beauty is still within us, and we try to live productive lives. We move forward.”

  This is a fragment, just a taste of Eartha’s script as she speaks faster and becomes more impassioned. She takes Angelina’s bitterness and disappointment and works to soften the sharp edges. She takes her inflexibility and rubs and pummels until it is lenient and forgiving. She speaks until Angelina interrupts her.

  “Wow! What can I do?”

  So Eartha talks about how the group needs books, coffeemakers, and rent money for the meeting places. How the staff needs money for airfare as they fly around the country to start new meetings and to give encouragement to newly formed groups. They need money for babysitters and meeting lists, raffle prizes, posters, and bumper stickers. The list goes on.

  “Of course, once the groups get started, they can pay for themselves with members’ contributions, but we still help with the rent and some other stuff.”

  “You have a group near here? I want to go.” Angelina speaks in a hushed voice, just as one might speak in church or at a funeral home.

  “I’m afraid not. Right now all our groups are on the West Coast. That’s why we’re calling women in your area. We’d like to get busy in New England.”

  There’s a pause. “So you’re after money.”

  “Yes … well, a contribution, just to help us get going.”

  “Fat Bob’s got some extra Harleys. Why not take one of those?”

  “We prefer cash, or a check if necessary.”

  “I hold the titles so the IRS can’t snatch them. Technically they’re my bikes, just like his house. I’ll give you one cheap, and you can triple your money.”

  “No can do.”

  “Maybe I can squeeze a few more bucks from Bob.”

  “Don’t you have money of your own?”

  “He’s the one who fucked me, so he should pay. He stood between me and my destiny. I need every penny I can scrape together. Face-lift, boob job, tummy tuck, liposuction, butt implant, a chemical peel—you name it, I need it.”

  Eartha scans her script for a suitable response. She could say, You can’t let him rent space in your head, or It’s time to live and let live, or You need to turn your life around.

  Instead she says, “Most women who join think that. They blame their ex. They won’t take charge of their own lives. What’s the point of dragging Fat Bob all the way to your grave?”

  Well, the talk goes on. It’s as if Angelina has been dipped in concrete that has hardened to give her a toughened epidermis and a stony heart. Eartha chips away at it, helped by the script prepared by Bounty, Inc.

  After another five minutes, Angelina says, “What about ten bucks?”

  Eartha has an answer for this. “Is this what your disappointment is worth? What your wrecked future is worth?”

  “Okay, twenty. But you’d do better with one of Fat Bob’s Fat Bobs. It would drive him fucking ballistic!”

  Let’s move away from their negotiations. Angelina is stubborn, but Eartha is determined, and if we stay, we’ll be here all night. It should be evident that both Manny Streeter and Angelina are victims of disappointment. But it can also be said that both have allowed themselves to feel disappointed. Manny is
more fortunate, because he has his karaoke box. It may be foolish, but it’s the one place he can go and leave his disappointment at the door. Angelina has nothing like this except her beagle, little Magsie. Her disappointment is a twenty-four-hour job. Most likely the meetings of Prom Queens Anonymous could become her karaoke box. But of course Prom Queens Anonymous doesn’t exist.

  —

  Under the I-95 or Gold Star Memorial Bridge, we find about a mile between the riverbank of the Thames and the abutment where the bridge rejoins the surface of the highway. Five roads pass under the bridge within this mile, but closer to the river, along State Pier Road, are wooded areas, which are fenced off, but a fence is no more than a nuisance to those who are resolute, like Fidget. It’s here he has made his hutch. In fact, he’s made it many times, because it keeps being torn down. But to Fidget it’s home, while nearby is the Homeless Hospitality Center where Fidget sometimes showers and gets a bite to eat.

  The number of people who live under the bridge depends on the season and how often the police roust them out, which in turn depends on the complaints of people living nearby and the conduct of the homeless residents, meaning no fights, no fires, and no drunken parties. And sometimes the chief of police sends cops over to do a little rousting just because she feels the cops need exercise.

  Manny Streeter and Vikström often had this task in their early years before they became detectives, and since then they’ve paid visits if they’re looking for someone in particular, or searching for stolen property, or if a crime has been committed. The drug squad also pops in fairly regularly, as do other city and state agencies. Really, it’s surprising anyone can get a full night’s sleep. Before a good summer rousting, twenty people might be under the bridge: some local bums, some passing through, and others who find the hospitality center claustrophobic or have been kicked out for various infractions. But typically there are fewer than a dozen people under the bridge. On a winter night, we might find only two or three, and every year or so one poor fellow freezes to death down among the bushes.