Is Fat Bob Dead Yet?

by Stephen Dobyns

  Fidget, we believe, is the most permanent resident. Nobody can say how long he’s been there, and neither can Fidget, for whom the past is only heavy fog. But it feels like forever. And though he’s been rousted many times, he always returns. Even the most modest dwelling can elicit homesickness, and Fidget has a sentimental streak. So in looking for Fidget, Manny and Vikström, on this chilly Wednesday night in March, believe they know where to start.

  We should recall that this was their plan before the arrival of Percy and Hank, the FBI agents, and now they go ahead with their plan simply to get Percy and Hank out of their minds. Manny and Vikström aren’t dummies; they know the arrival of the FBI will save them work, but it’s a blessing they’d prefer to do without. Both detectives admit to strengths and weaknesses, though they differ as to how they’re allocated, each thinking the other has the more flaws, but they don’t want their flaws discussed and their strengths denied by Percy and Hank. Better to have those fellows hit the road than to admit that their assistance is worth a roll of used flypaper.

  But of course they won’t hit the road. We may not see much of Percy and Hank, but they’ll be in the background doing whatever they do. And most of the time, they’ll be around the casinos. As for Manny and Vikström, they drive along State Pier Road to the area by the I-95 bridge as if Percy and Hank never existed. They work to cogitate the FBI agents into nonexistence.

  Manny pulls onto Mill Street under the bridge, parks, and climbs from the car. He finds the place disgusting. “It smells like a fuckin’ latrine,” he says.

  Vikström smells nothing; maybe he has a faulty sense of smell. He doesn’t particularly like the local homeless, or trust them to behave, but he’s got a bit of sympathy. “They’ve all had mothers,” he says in a way guaranteed to make Manny grit his teeth.

  “Yeah, and they all have scabies and fleas. They’re alkies or addicts or nut jobs, or maybe all three.”

  They duck through a hole in the fence and bushwhack through the brush until they see a small fire at the edge of an open space. The ground is littered with bottles and broken glass, rusted bits of metal, wrecked bikes and busted shopping carts, but nothing that can be used, burned, or sold.

  Manny and Vikström walk toward six men gathered near the fire.

  “They’re not supposed to have fires,” says Manny.

  Vikström shrugs. “Forget it.”

  “They make me itch,” says Manny.

  As the detectives approach, the men seem to withdraw into themselves and get smaller. None of them look at Manny and Vikström except out of the corners of their eyes. Maybe they’ve been chatting; now they’re not.

  Vikström asks if they’ve seen Fidget and where he might be found. The men shrug, raise their eyebrows, and make Fidget? Who’s Fidget? gestures.

  “Cut the shit,” says Manny. “Where’s Fidget?”

  One of the men points to a bridge abutment about twenty yards away. He explains that Fidget lives over in that direction. “He’s got a little cardboard shelter.”

  “Or did,” says another man.

  “You guys keeping your noses clean?” asks Manny, to be irritating.

  The men mutter in the affirmative or nod. They want the cops to vanish. If they have bottles or drugs, they’re hidden.

  When we last visited Fidget’s hutch, it was a relatively neat arrangement of two blue poly tarps and two broken shopping carts up against the bridge abutment. Now the carts have been tossed aside and the tarps are among the weeds. Vikström looks at a few large rags that started life as blankets. The contents of several boxes have been scattered: a dented saucepan, a frying pan, some magazines, old newspapers, a torn sweater, and some indefinables. The ground where the floor of the hutch once was has been dug up with a sharp stick or a piece of metal.

  Vikström kicks through the stuff and throws the cardboard around.

  “What’re you looking for?” asks Manny. “You expect to find gold chains?”

  “There’s no spoon. There’s almost always a spoon.”

  “He’s probably got it on him. Who threw this stuff around?” Manny shouts to the men by the fire.

  “Bad guys,” says someone.

  “Are you the bad guys?” asks Vikström as he and Manny walk back toward them.

  “Nope, we’re the good guys.”

  “Don’t get wise with me,” says Manny. “Who took his spoon?”

  The men shake their heads. They’d like to say that they are honest citizens down on their luck, who’d never steal another man’s spoon, but they keep still.

  “When did you last see Fidget?” asks Vikström.

  “He was here a coupla hours ago and left,” says one.

  “He doesn’t keep us informed,” says another lightly.

  “Watchit!” barks Manny.

  “You know any other place he hangs out?” asks Vikström.

  But the men say they’ve no idea. They don’t really know Fidget. He comes and goes. He stays by himself. He’s not a big talker. And he smells.

  “Maybe he’s over at the hospitality center,” says a man.

  Manny tugs Vikström’s sleeve. “Why don’t you tell them he had a mother?” He laughs.

  Vikström ignores him; the detectives walk back to the car. They check the hospitality center, but Fidget hasn’t been seen all day. For half an hour, Manny drives up and down the nearby streets looking for Fidget. “What the fuck does that silly noodle think he can do with that gold?” he asks.

  “Maybe he just likes wearing it. It’s exciting for him.”

  “All dressed up and nowhere to go,” says Manny.

  Other police cars are also looking for Fidget, but no one has seen him.

  “You ever notice,” says Manny, “that when you’re not looking for Fidget, you see him all over the place and when you are looking for Fidget, he’s vanished.”

  “Let’s drive over to Fat Bob’s house and see if there’s any change.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like how many Harleys are there.”

  Fat Bob’s house is dark, but when Manny pulls in to the driveway, the detectives can see that more windows have been smashed.

  “This is a bad sign,” says Manny.

  Vikström digs his fingernail into his palm. The pain has a cleansing effect. He keeps silent.

  They get out their flashlights and walk around to the back of the house. The back door to the kitchen is open again.

  “I don’t like the look of this,” says Manny, changing his modus operandi.

  Vikström keeps quiet. He considers hitting Manny with his flashlight. Of course he’s not going to hit his partner, but he likes imagining it.

  The refrigerator door hangs open and there’s the smell of spoiled food. It’s not bad yet, but it will be worse tomorrow when spoil turns to rot. Glasses, cups, saucers, and plates lie broken on the floor. The window over the sink is smashed.

  “The city has to secure this,” says Vikström. “They got to do it right away.”

  “They don’t like coming out at night.”

  “That’s not my problem,” says Vikström. He goes back outside and walks to the garage. The garage door is open about a foot.

  “I don’t like the look of any of this,” says Manny.

  Vikström again digs his fingernails into his palms. He decides he needs longer fingernails. But he forgets his nails when Manny opens the door. Now there are two Harleys: a dark purple one and a black one.

  Vikström grabs Manny by the arm. “Tell me you don’t like the look of this! I dare you!”

  Manny pulls away. “You ever been told you got a serious behavior problem? You’re lucky I don’t write you up.”

  —

  Connor arrives at Sal Nicoletti’s house around seven—or, since Sal’s dead, maybe it should be called Céline’s house. Connor has called his brother Vasco a dozen times since he ran out of Sal’s office this morning, but Vasco hasn’t picked up. In fact, the phone goes directly to voice mail. At first Conn
or’s messages are simple: “Call me,” he says, or “We need to talk.” But then they grow angrier until he’s shouting, “You fuck, you sold that information about Sal! You told them he was Danny Barbarella!”

  Connor isn’t sure who he means by “them,” just gangsters, mobsters, bad guys. All he knows is that Sal won’t be testifying in Detroit.

  He’s also terrified that Céline will learn he’s the one who blew her husband’s cover and got him killed. It doesn’t matter if it was an accident. It was stupid, and if she learns about it, she’ll never forgive him, or such is his thought. We may say that Connor wants to know Céline better, but he hasn’t told himself what “better” means, nor does he define all the meanings of “know.” She’d been a wife with two kids, and now she’s a grieving widow with two kids, or so he thinks. To Connor any chance of “better” is over. He murdered her husband, and even though he didn’t pull the trigger, it’s still murder.

  Now he stands on her front steps and rings the bell. The porch light is on. He straightens his jacket, fusses with his tie. If she greets him with a shotgun, he won’t be surprised. Connor, of course, doesn’t know she actually had a shotgun that the police took away earlier. There’s lots he doesn’t know. But Connor’s a romantic. Céline’s virtue seems clear to him. Only Vaughn, out of Connor’s acquaintances, wouldn’t find this absurd. She’s a wolf in cheap clothing, he’d say.

  The hall light goes on, and the door opens. Céline stands looking at Connor, and the light makes her black hair shine. Her face gives no indication of thought. The tops of fenceposts are more expressive. But Connor likes what he sees, and his stomach jumps up and down. She pushes open the storm door to let him in and returns to the living room. Connor follows her.

  Glancing around, he sees that everything is beige, plain and uninteresting. He doesn’t know that the house’s furnishings have been rented. Instead he has assumed that since he finds Céline amazing, her house would also be amazing: Oriental rugs and antique furniture, wonderful paintings on the walls. But it’s not.

  Céline wears a purple velour robe buttoned to her neck with gold stitching at collar, cuffs, and hem. She’s Connor’s height, and her full lips are very red. Connor thinks the lipstick is her only makeup, but he’s wrong. Her eyes, cheeks, cheekbones, chin—all have felt the subtle touch of her brush. Her “natural” look has taken an hour of preparation.

  “I’m sorry about Sal,” says Connor. “You must feel terrible.”

  “Yeah, now I’m a grieving widow.” Céline motions to him to sit down; he sits on the couch. She stands with her eyes focused on him. He’s struck by the hardness of her tone, and he sees no sign of the kids but forgets about them when she speaks.

  “One thing about Sal, he always wore gold. He saw it as his trademark. But he didn’t have any when the cops got to his office this morning. They said you’d been there. They described you, and I recognized the description.”

  She says nothing further. After a moment Connor becomes uncomfortable.

  “He wasn’t wearing any when I found him, but I got out as fast as I could.”

  “The cops said a bum had been there before you. They called him ‘Fidget.’ They said he’d taken the gold, but they didn’t know how much.”

  Connor has a quick memory of Fidget, though he didn’t know that was the man’s name till now. Connor bumped into him as he ran out of the building and something fell to the sidewalk. He had no chance to see what it was before Fidget grabbed it and hurriedly zigzagged up the street. Could it have been a gold chain? Maybe.

  “A guy who was maybe a bum came running out of Sal’s building.” No, thinks Connor, of course he was a bum. And he recalls Fidget panhandling the crowd after the accident. Connor had given him a dollar. “How much gold are we talking about?”

  “Not much,” lies Céline. “A couple of chains, a couple of rings. They’re maybe worth about five thousand tops. It’s the sentimental value that’s important.”

  “You must have loved him,” says Connor.

  “Actually, I hated the fuck. Maybe there’s more than a couple of chains and rings. There’s a phony Rolex and a fairly expensive pen. But I want it all. I don’t care about the money. I want something to remind me how much I hated him.”

  Connor feels as if someone has hit him, but there’s no indication of Céline’s hatred in her expressionless face or in the tone of her voice. “Why’d you hate him?”

  Céline thinks. She doesn’t want to say too much or too little, and whatever she says must be something to appeal to Connor’s particular sensibility. “He wasn’t a gentleman,” she says at last. “Will you find those things for me?”

  “I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  Céline gets up from the armchair and walks slowly to Connor until the purple velour brushes his face left and right in a delicate slap. Then she moves back a step. “You’ll find a way,” she says.

  SEVENTEEN

  It is midnight, and we’re in the small white house on Montauk Avenue where Fat Bob moved after Angelina kicked him out. Two rooms and a kitchen are on the first floor; two bedrooms and a bath are on the second. One bedroom contains six U-Haul boxes and a three-legged straight-backed chair that Fat Bob had hoped to fix; the other has a narrow floor-to-ceiling mirror by the window, two bureaus with drawers pulled out and clothes strewn all over, and a queen-size bed covered by a white comforter. The bed has the sort of mattress that adjusts to one’s bumps and bulges while exuding soothing perfumes when one button is pushed and soothing sounds—breaking waves, wind through trees, birdsong, et cetera—when a second is pushed. Fidget knows that if he lies on the mattress, his fears will vanish. They’ll be lulled away, chuckled away. Unhappily, he is lying not on the bed but beneath it as a serious ruckus consisting of shouting and banging rises up from downstairs.

  Fidget is sure the noise is caused by bad guys in pursuit of his bling—gold chains, gold rings, bracelet, gold Rolex watch, and a limited-edition Montegrappa pen. He’s fearful, and he’d check his racing pulse if he could, but the eight inches of space between bed and floor don’t permit such activity. Indeed, if someone jumped on the bed, he’d be crushed faster than a jackboot can crush a cockroach.

  When Fidget was hunting out a fine and private place in which to hide, he’d thought of Fat Bob’s empty house as an entire house and not a thin sliver of space beneath a bed. With him are two half gallons of vodka he bought at a package store on Montauk, but there’s not enough room to lift one to his lips. The pockets of his raincoat are crowded with nips, and in two paper bags he has a supply of liquor store food: beer nuts, peanut butter crackers, beef jerky, and Slim Jims. But in the space at his disposal, these treats are as distant as Mars.

  He’d squeezed beneath the bed when he heard what sounded like a dozen boots tromp into the kitchen, open the refrigerator door, bang the cupboards, tromp into the living room, and then tromp up the stairs to inspect the bedrooms. “Nothing in here!” shouted one pair of boots. “Nothing here either!” shouted another. Then they tromped back down.

  Fidget fears that without food or drink he’ll die beneath the bed like a sailor marooned on a coffin-size atoll. But he needn’t worry. The noise downstairs comes from disgruntled employees of the department of public works as they clean out the refrigerator, gather up the trash, and screw panels of half-inch plywood over the windows and doors. The midnight job, set in motion by Detectives Benny Vikström and Manny Streeter, is to make certain no more ne’er-do-wells take liberties with private property. Now it will require a tank to break into the house, and, as Fidget discovers, it will require a tank to get out.

  Perhaps Fidget slept—he’s not sure. But when he next turns an ear to the ruckus downstairs, it’s gone. Silence reigns, and all is dark. Fidget spends a moment thinking the big boots are hiding in the closet and if he leaves his place of safety, they’ll jump out with shouts and whistles, but then his growing need to pee defeats his fear of the boots and he begins to extricate himself. This is
a detail mostly absent from adventure stories. Was there ever a moment when the Lone Ranger, galloping along after desperadoes, turned to his companion and shouted, “Hold up, Tonto, I’ve gotta take a whiz?” Very unlikely.

  Once free and with his antique bladder accommodated, Fidget celebrates his release with several mouthfuls of vodka and a Slim Jim. He again listens and again hears nothing. He decides to stay put till morning, since the house is dark and if he begins to prowl around, he’ll break a leg. So, after having a mouth-cleansing gargle with more vodka, he crawls into bed and pulls the comforter up to his nose. The bed tweedles birdsong noises. This was what civilization, Fidget thinks, is all about.

  Some might imagine that Fidget will be lonely, marooned as he is in an empty house. But Fidget doesn’t know the meaning of loneliness. Maybe he knew it once, but he’s forgotten. His interactions with people are mostly negative, so he can’t envision seeking out anyone for a chat. Maybe in the distant past it was different, yet when he tries to recall what it was like for him as a kid, he sees only shadows. As far as he can tell, he’s always been as he is tonight: solitary. Does he have a wife? A dog and cat? Children? He won’t deny the possibility, but with shadows in his past and shadows in his future, Fidget thinks the present moment is where he’s meant to be.

  Now, however, life has changed; he’s turned the tables on the world. His rings twinkle in the faint light from the window. He has gold, and his joy is not yet diminished by the worry of its heavy responsibility. Life is good. He settles his head on a pillow and soon falls asleep. Does he dream? Only of rosy clouds at sunset and squawking geese flying south.

  Around two a.m. he’s awakened by the busy putt-putt of a motor scooter, but it takes a minute to determine the source of the sound as it gets louder and softer, louder and softer. Then, when the word “scooter” drifts across his cerebral cortex, the sound is already diminishing down Montauk. Fidget feels a touch of disquiet that someone would ride a motor scooter four times around Fat Bob’s house at two a.m., but as he turns over, he thinks his disquiet can wait until morning.