Is Fat Bob Dead Yet?: A Novel

by Stephen Dobyns

  Jimbo and Joesy look unhappy, which makes them look more thuggish. In their dealings with Connor, Vaughn, and Linda, nothing’s gone as it’s supposed to. The thugs have failed to inspire terror. In the casino parking lot, Connor had struck back at Jimbo, hitting him in the nose. Then Vasco had shot Jimbo in the foot. Next Vaughn had tried to hit them in order to save his yellow pads. Worse, he’d spoken an unintelligible language that gave them headaches. Lastly, this pajama-clad woman with spiky hair treats them with disrespect. Jimbo asks himself, as he’s asked before, Are we getting old? And Joesy thinks, Are we losing our edge? Both imagine walking away, perhaps getting breakfast—pancakes or French toast—and then returning to the casino hotel to take naps. Regrettably, waiting downstairs in the Denali and expecting the imminent arrival—loutishly achieved—of Connor, Vaughn, and Linda, is Chucky. And Chucky, as the thugs know, hates to be kept waiting.

  So Jimbo and Joesy catch their second wind, as it were, on the strength of threatening Vaughn. Joesy grabs Connor. Jimbo pulls Vaughn from underneath his blanket. And the thugs give Linda little pushes toward the door—that is, they give little pushes and jump back before she can kick them, which she tries to do.

  “I bet you dumbos have tiny penises,” she says.

  Jimbo and Joesy hate this sort of talk. They shove her out the door and begin to push all three down the outside staircase.

  Linda shouts, “Call the police! We’re being kidnapped!”

  Joesy claps a hand over her mouth, picks her up, and carries her to the Denali, where Jimbo has Connor and Vaughn. Chucky opens the door, and the three prisoners are thrown inside. Joesy jumps in the driver’s seat, and they roar off.

  They don’t, however, go unnoticed. At least six busybodies stick their heads out of their windows and register each detail. These are the folks who, in a few seconds, will call police headquarters.

  —

  So how did Jimbo and Joesy get Linda’s address? Very simple. Jimbo heard Linda give it to Vikström outside the back door of the Capitol Theatre. Thugs are good at finding addresses. They got Fat Bob’s old address from the casino’s personnel office, and they got his new address when Jimbo asked for it from Angelina. “That son of a bitch,” she’d said. “Sure I’ll give you his address! And tell him to quit calling or else!” The one address they don’t have is Fidget’s, and that troubles them, because Chucky demands it. Chucky is forever thinking of Sal’s gold, which in his fancy has grown larger than the hoard of gold protected by the Rhine maidens in Der Ring des Nibelungen.

  Fidget spends half of each day, sometimes more, lying in his tub. His skin has lost its pinkness and resembles the gray of wet blotting paper. He still has food—beef jerky, Slim Jims, beer nuts, and five packs of Lance peanut butter crackers with “goodness baked in”—and he has enough vodka left for a day or two. What he’ll do when it runs out, he has no idea. “One minute at a time” is his motto. But he is happy, that’s the main thing. And perhaps because his memory has as many holes as the shot-up Winnebago, he can never recall being so happy.

  This particular morning he got up at six, filled his tub, ate some beer nuts, and slid his long, thin body into the water. No soap—he doesn’t use soap. Then he begins to get dressed, as he calls it, meaning he distributes Sal’s gold across his body. With great delicacy he takes the yellow-gold curb-link bracelet from its place on the chair beside the tub and puts it on his wrist. Next, with the same care he might exercise to carry a Ming vase down a flight of stairs, he puts on his five necklaces: two yellow-gold hollow-wheat-chain necklaces; a yellow-gold solid Franco necklace; a white-gold chain with a hundred carats of diamonds, and a gold rope-chain necklace with a gold crucifix pendant. Fidget pauses to catch his breath and then puts on the rings: two yellow-gold nugget rings and a third nugget ring with a diamond cluster. The gold pinkie ring with a large ruby he puts aside for the time being. Then, as he might tiptoe a full tumbler of vodka across a packed dance floor, he slides onto his left wrist the Rolex Oyster Perpetual GMT-Master II with an eighteen-karat yellow-gold case and an eighteen-karat yellow-gold bracelet, plus a sprinkling of diamonds, sapphires, and rubies.

  All that’s left is the Montegrappa St. Moritz Limited Edition Woods eighteen-karat-gold rollerball pen, which at first constituted a problem. Where could he put it? Then Fidget recalled Jack Lemmon playing the reporter Hildy Johnson in the movie The Front Page, and he’d carefully set his Montegrappa pen behind his left ear.

  Lastly Fidget takes the gold pinkie ring with its large ruby and puts it in his belly button. Because Fidget is skinny, he has a shallow navel, and to get the pinkie ring firmly situated takes some pushing. But finally it’s done.

  Here, then, is the gold that drives Chucky mad, just as it drove Sal mad, just as it drives Fidget mad. “Mad,” of course, is an overstatement, yet surely their mental well-being is, and was, at risk. But that’s gold’s job in the world: to upset cerebral equilibrium and encourage cranial entropy. It fucks you up.

  So if we imagine Fidget lying naked in his tub and make the ruby in his navel the very center of a gold fixation, then Chucky, the police, and Fat Bob spiral toward the center of that fixation. The ruby works like a magnet works: stuff creeps closer.

  Chucky knows that Fidget made his recent liquor purchases at a liquor store on Montauk in New London. And he knows that Fat Bob has a boarded-up house on Montauk. It’s like striking a stone against a flint to produce a flame. Chucky strikes and strikes, and eventually a tiny idea begins to flare up. He decides the house on Montauk is worth a look. Afterward he’ll decide what to do with Connor, Linda, and Vaughn. Nothing nice, of course.

  Fat Bob isn’t fixated on the gold, because he doesn’t know about it. This is just as well, because if he knew the gold was lying in his crummy bathtub, his brain would pop. But he wants to avoid Jack Sprat, and he wants to visit his house on Montauk to make sure his last Fat Bob is gone, having been, as Angelina said, “sold to a scam artist,” meaning Didi Lobato. And so Fat Bob zigzags closer to the ruby in Fidget’s navel, as somewhere behind him Jack Sprat moves along as well. But he doesn’t struggle to keep up, because this morning a new circumstance changed the rules of the game. We’ll have to imagine it, because we don’t know exactly how it happened. Be that as it may, Milo Lisowski, owner of the Hog Hurrah, has lent Jack Sprat one of Fat Bob’s Fat Bobs: the red one. In fact, Lisowski’s lending Jack Sprat a bike for a nefarious purpose is like Fat Bob lending Marco Santuzza a bike for a nefarious purpose. Lisowski was friends with Marco, more or less. Marco bought stuff at the Hog Hurrah and rented time in the garage to work on his bike, meaning that Lisowski would prefer Marco alive.

  But it was Angelina, tired of listening to Fat Bob demand his bikes back, who initiated the new circumstance. Despite the restraining order she has against Fat Bob, he keeps calling and sending text messages. He even makes threats. We recollect the quarrels that Henry II of England had with Thomas à Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury, about “criminous clerks,” et cetera, until in a fit of pique the king cried out, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” Accordingly, four knights took their swords and murdered Thomas à Becket at Canterbury Cathedral, on December 29, 1170.

  In such a way did Angelina cry out, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent ex-husband?” Lisowski listened and initiated the chain of events that put Jack Sprat into the saddle of a Fat Bob. But Jack Sprat is a scooter guy and barely fits on the Harley. His feet hardly reach the ground. Worse, when he rides, he wobbles. But what he lacks in skill, he makes up for in determination. So Fat Bob must take care.

  Then there’s Manny Streeter and Benny Vikström. Manny’s still furious, and Vikström’s somewhat contrite, or at least apologetic. “Okay!” he has shouted. “So I won’t sing ‘Hey Jude’! Fuck the Beatles!”

  “You’re not singing shit!” shouts Manny. “You come near my house, I’ll have you locked up!”

  As for the house on Montauk, it would be nice to think Manny and Vikström had a sud
den eureka moment about it, but that’s not the case, even though they also know that Fidget made his purchases at the Montauk liquor store. Luckily, patrol cars keep calling in the Denali’s license plate number. Vikström warns that Chucky and his friends are dangerous and patrol cars shouldn’t get too close. Then, when a patrol car reports that the Denali is on Montauk and has just passed the liquor store, little synapses of understanding light up in the detectives’ brains.

  But that lighting up of synapses should have occurred earlier. This has been the trouble with Manny and Vikström. They quarrel on the job. Instead of focusing on Chucky, they wrangle about “Hey Jude” and the Beatles. Nevertheless, at this moment the small white house on Montauk is only a few blocks away.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Chucky gets there first. Perhaps he’s seen a few patrol cars on his way over, but Chucky, being Chucky, thinks he’s too big to catch. He was one of those ill-fated youngsters who saw King Kong on TV as a kid and bonded. Pushing open the door of the Denali, he steps out and sniffs the air. We might think he smells the gold, but it’s all submerged in Fidget’s tub, except for the Montegrappa pen. It’s a sunny Saturday morning in mid-March, with hints of spring. Mourning doves coo and robins peck the ground, but Chucky and his thugs have no interest in birds apart from fried chicken.

  Connor, Vaughn, and Linda remain in the third-row seat of the Denali. It’s a bench designed for two persons, so they’re cramped. They shift and try to stretch their legs, but it’s no use. Linda feels increasingly irritated. Vaughn, staring at the boarded-up house, says, “It’s closed for altercations.”

  Standing by the Denali, Chucky and his thugs look thoughtfully—relatively speaking—at the heavy sheets of plywood covering the windows and doors. The second-story windows are free of plywood but seem far away.

  Jimbo wears his apple green sport coat and uses a cane because of his wounded foot. Joesy has on a blue New England Patriots hoodie. He may be a thug, but he’s also a fan. Chucky wears a black turtleneck sweater, which makes his oversize head resemble an ugly golf ball with teeth. Oh, yes, Joesy has on black leather-soled loafers. This will be important.

  “Open it up,” says Chucky, jabbing his thumb at the small house.

  Easier said than done, think the thugs. They can’t reach the boarded-up windows unless one sits on another’s shoulders, and even that would be a stretch. They circle the house in the opposite directions and return shaking their heads.

  “Looks pretty tight,” says Jimbo.

  “What the fuck did I say?” barks Chucky. “Open it up!” Chucky is at least six inches taller than his assistants and outweighs each by nearly one hundred pounds. Authority to him is what burgers are for McDonald’s.

  Jimbo and Joesy separate again to check the front and back doors. The sheets of plywood are fixed in place with heavy screws. They pull at the edges but achieve nothing except broken fingernails. Maybe there’s something they can use in the garage. Joesy peers through the glass of the garage’s side door but sees nothing. The thugs look nearby for rocks. When Jimbo finds one of ample size, he returns to the window and smashes it. Then he reaches through the broken window and opens the door.

  Back in the Denali, Linda says, “I’m sick of this. I’m not staying in here.”

  Connor’s impressed and says, “I admire your guts.”

  Possibly joking, Vaughn asks with concern, “Are they showing?”

  The thugs find no tools in the garage, but they find a fourteen-foot aluminum ladder. They carry it out to Chucky and set it against the wall next to the Denali. The ladder stops about four feet beneath the gable window above them. This is the window of the small bathroom where Fidget lies snoozing in the tub. We recall that his snoozing was earlier disturbed by noisy motorcycles circling the house, and now Fidget’s ears are stuffed with cotton. Perhaps he dreams.

  “I can’t climb the ladder,” says Jimbo. “My foot got shot up.”

  Joesy gives his partner a venomous look.

  “Get moving,” says Chucky. Of course there’s no question of Chucky climbing the ladder. His status as boss frees him from the nuts and bolts of being bad.

  Joesy sets a black loafer on the first rung. It’s at this point we recall that he wears leather-soled shoes. His black loafer slips on the aluminum. He grips the rails until his fingers creak.

  The door of the Denali opens, and Linda steps out. “I’m not staying in there any longer. It’s stuffy. I’m walking home.” She turns toward the street.

  Chucky and his thugs are again deeply insulted that their victim refuses to accept her victimizing. They feel she’s seen none of the right movies.

  “Cut the shit!” shouts Chucky. “Get back in the truck!”

  Jimbo grabs the collar of Linda’s coat, stopping her.

  “I promise I’ll start screaming if you don’t let go,” says Linda coolly. Connor and Vaughn also get out of the Denali, but lacking Linda’s moxie, they remain by the door. Connor thinks he should make similar protests but doesn’t.

  “It’s only for a short time,” whispers Jimbo. “I’ll let you sit in the front seat.”

  Linda grudgingly agrees. All three get back into the Denali with Linda in front. Their little labor union has scored a blow against the bosses.

  Now on the eighth rung, Joesy keeps slipping and is unhappy. The sunny, springlike morning means nothing to him. Jimbo and Chucky stare up at him. Jimbo could never imagine being grateful for his wounded foot, but he’s grateful now: he’s not on the ladder.

  It’s clear when Joesy nears the top that he’ll have to stand on the topmost rung and brace himself against the wall to see through the window. He’s reached a metaphysical moment. Should he risk falling and get his bones broken, or should he defy Chucky and get his bones broken? He keeps climbing.

  Joesy moves at the pace of mold on a piece of angel food cake, but at last he’s slipping and sliding on the top rung as he peers through the window.

  “Fidget’s in the tub!” shouts Joesy. “And he’s got the gold!”

  My gold, thinks Chucky. “Tell him to get down here or else!”

  “He’s got cotton stuffed in his ears!”

  “Then break the fucking glass!”

  “With what!”

  “Use your fucking head!”

  Now events speed up. The Denali is in the driveway to the left of the house, while the ladder is between the Denali and the wall. A car is speeding up Montauk. It’s Manny’s Subaru Forester.

  Manny and Vikström are still arguing.

  “What about Bill Haley and the Comets?” says Vikström. “I could sing ‘Rock Around the Clock.’ That’s pre-1960, isn’t it?”

  “I already fucking told you!” shouts Manny. “You ain’t singing fuckin’ squat!”

  “I bet Yvonne would let me. I’ve always been friendly with Yvonne.”

  Driving faster than he should, Manny spins the wheel of the Subaru and turns in to Fat Bob’s driveway. He’s about to shout, No way, José! but slams on the brake instead. Directly ahead squats the fat rear end of the Denali. The brakes squeal, but he hits the Denali with a metallic crunch.

  Inside the Denali, Connor, Linda, and Vaughn are thrown forward. Outside, Joesy trembles at the top of his ladder and clutches at the bathroom window. Chucky, his mouth open, pauses in mid-rage. Jimbo puts a hand over his eyes. Connor, Linda, and Vaughn scramble out of the Denali as Manny and Vikström try to scramble out of the Subaru, but they’re not young anymore. Stiff joints slow them. Manny hurries to inspect the damage to the front of his car. He grows indignant. He’s never seen Chucky before, nor has Chucky seen Manny and Vikström, meaning he doesn’t know they’re cops. This is a problem with Manny driving the Subaru instead of a cop car. Chucky thinks they’re trespassers after his gold.

  But there’s more. A loud motorcycle is approaching, and half a block behind wobbles another motorcycle. Fat Bob wants to make certain his last Fat Bob, the black one, has indeed been stolen from his garage, but as he turns up M
ontauk, Jack Sprat on Fat Bob’s very own red Fat Bob turns after him. This is Fat Bob’s first awareness that Jack Sprat has swapped his red scooter for a red Harley. Angelina did this! he thinks. He cranks up the gas.

  Fat Bob doesn’t spot the Subaru till he turns in to his driveway. He also sees a crowd of people and a man on a ladder. He yanks the handlebars to the right, bumps across the grass, roars along the right side of the house, turns left at his garage, notes the broken window, and turns left again toward the two vehicles and crowd of people, who are as they were when he last saw them: astonished. Jack Sprat on his red Fat Bob wobbles along behind. No telling what he thinks of the two vehicles and crowd of people. It’s difficult enough for him to keep his bike going straight and not fall off without having to think as well. But he has determination.

  Fat Bob takes another swing around the house. He asks himself, was that really Chucky, two thugs, two cops, the guy he had lunch with at the Exchange, and two strangers, one of them cute? What was going on?

  But the scene has changed since he last roared by. Connor, Linda, and Vaughn run across the yard to escape from Chucky. Joesy trembles more actively on his ladder. Chucky pulls something fat and dark from his belt, probably a weapon. Jimbo limps toward him, yelling, “Don’t do it!” Manny shouts angrily at Chucky that he’s caused the accident by parking stupidly in the driveway. And Vikström, with a surer sense of events, runs toward Manny. Police cars approach, their sirens blaring.

  Jack Sprat, though he keeps up with Fat Bob, isn’t gaining. He decides to take a shortcut. So, rounding the back of the house, he cuts between the truck and the wall, meaning between the ladder and the wall, but maybe Jack Sprat hasn’t seen the ladder, so intent is he on not falling off the Fat Bob.

  Events speed toward their climax. Focusing at last on the ladder, Jack Sprat imagines he can pass between the ladder and wall. Perhaps he thinks he rides something small like his scooter. It’s a brave attempt, and he nearly succeeds. But as he rushes after Fat Bob, he clips the edge of the ladder.