Fat Man, The

by Gee, Maurice

‘Dad?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Did you have any kids at school that got bullied a lot?’

  ‘Why? Someone bullying you?’

  ‘No, not me.’

  ‘That’s why I taught you the old right cross.’

  ‘They wouldn’t try. I just wondered … Cross-eyed kids? Kids with flea bites?’

  ‘Ha!’

  ‘Fat kids? You know.’

  ‘Anyone can learn to fight,’ his father said. ‘What you got to do is punch first.’

  ‘And ask questions afterwards,’ Colin grinned.

  ‘That’s the ticket. Come on, let’s see what she’s cooked for tea.’

  It was mince stew and mashed potatoes and silver beet. And bread pudding of course. Colin ate his share, and enjoyed it too, but didn’t forget to grumble about the pudding.

  ‘When are we going to Grandma’s again?’

  ‘When we’re asked,’ his mother said. ‘And it’s no use asking for more. This has got to do for breakfast too.’

  ‘Aw, Mum.’ Bread pudding for breakfast was too much.

  She cleared the table and started washing the dishes. Colin played Snap with his father. The kitchen was the living room as well, with two bedrooms opening off and the bathroom and the wash-house sharing a lean-to out the back. They played at the kitchen table, which rocked on the uneven floor as they slapped their cards down. Colin could not beat his father, whose hands were too fast. He soon got tired of losing and said, ‘Let’s do gunfights, Dad.’

  ‘So you want to run me out of town, eh Sheriff?’

  ‘Sure, Black Jack. This town ain’t big enough for you and me.’

  ‘Don’t say ain’t,’ Mrs Potter said. ‘And you know I don’t approve of that game, Laurie.’

  ‘Just a couple of times, Mum.’ Colin ran to the wash-house. He felt in her peg box in the dark, sorted out four pegs, and brought them back to the kitchen, where he jammed them together and made sixshooters. He gave one to his father.

  ‘Okay.’

  They put them in their belts and faced each other across the brown lino of the kitchen, which for Colin became the dusty street of a western town. He set his legs apart. His father, after a grin at Mrs Potter, crooked his right hand over his gun.

  ‘So you think you can beat me to the draw, eh Sheriff?’

  ‘Sure can, Black Jack. I got fifteen notches on my gun.’

  His father turned his head and pretended to spit tobacco juice at the stove.

  ‘Laurie!’ Mrs Potter said.

  ‘Wooman, you jes’ shut yore pretty trap. Okay, Sheriff, make yore play.’

  Colin drew. He always won this game because his father enjoyed falling down dead. On this night he died three times, toppling back on the sofa, then tangling with a chair, and the last time staggering round the kitchen with his hands clasped to his stomach. He grabbed his wife and slid down her body until he was lying at her feet.

  ‘Give me one last kiss, gal. I’m dying.’

  ‘Laurie, that’s enough,’ she said, but she couldn’t help smiling.

  ‘Bury me deep and don’t put no flowers on my grave.’ His mouth fell open. Then he jumped up. ‘One more.’

  ‘No, Laurie.’

  ‘Last time. Promise. It’s only a game, Maise. Watch.’ He opened the cupboard where the food was kept, took the tomato sauce bottle, poured some in his hand, put the bottle back.

  ‘Laurie!’

  He closed his hand, hiding the sauce, picked up his gun and stuck it in his belt. Faced Colin.

  ‘Okay, Sheriff, you’re heading for Boot Hill. I’m going to drill you clean through the heart.’

  They drew. Colin fired first, and Black Jack dropped his gun and clapped his hand to his forehead. Blood ran down his nose and across his cheek. He fell into the dust and flung his arms wide.

  ‘Laurie, you fool,’ Mrs Potter said.

  ‘Beauty, Dad, beauty. That was the best,’ Colin cried.

  ‘Get up at once. Just look, it’s on your shirt. Now I’ll have to soak it. Oh, Laurie!’

  ‘Sauce comes off.’

  ‘And what a waste. We can’t afford that.’

  ‘Sure we can, if it makes us laugh.’

  He unbuttoned his shirt one-handed, winking at Colin, and took it to the wash-house. Mrs Potter followed. Colin heard them quarrelling there; then he heard them laughing. And when he took the pegs out they were kissing. So that was okay. He left the pegs on the kitchen table.

  Later, in bed, he thought of western movies he had seen – shot men falling off their horses, men facing each other in the street and fighting in bars, smashing tables while the women screamed. The sauce on his father’s face had been exactly like blood. He started drifting off to sleep, with gunfights in his mind, but then someone stepped out softly from behind a horse. It was the fat man. He wasn’t wearing western clothes but had his black shoes and grey hat on. The scar in his cheek wriggled like a worm.

  Colin jerked wide awake. The floor creaked. The room was dark. He was afraid to breathe. In the kitchen he heard the kettle singing on the stove; heard his parents’ murmured talk. But here was the fat man, in the room with him. Colin would hear him breathing if the other noises stopped.

  Minute after minute he lay still. A breeze came through the window, making the curtains stir. A door slammed far away, in another house. Cats screamed down by the swamp, and suddenly stopped. Still the fat man waited, breathing soft; until, at last, Colin knew that no one was there. He lifted his blankets back and put his feet on the cold floor. He breathed heavily two or three times and no one came. So he went to the door and opened it. His parents looked up, startled, from the table. They were close together, playing Patience, and Colin could see that they nearly had it out.

  ‘Want a drink of water,’ he mumbled. He ran some in a peanut-butter jar and took it to his room, where he put it on the window sill. Adam’s ale, he thought. Maybe it would help to keep the fat man away.

  He got back into bed. Then he got out again and pulled the window down and fixed the catch. He had a sip of water. Not long afterwards he went to sleep.

  And on that night Herbert Muskie, twelve miles along the road in Auckland, robbed a rich man’s house and got clean away. He made enough money selling the jewels to take a rest from burglary for a good long time. He could have set himself up in a little business.

  But sadly for Colin, men like Herbert Muskie cannot rest.

  The year ended. Christmas came and went, and Colin left standard five behind. For the rest of the summer holiday he did not go near the part of the creek that he knew best but walked down to Cascade Park and did his swimming there. He still took the short-cut through the swamp, but he always hurried past the place where the track forked. The hut, the pool where the fat man had swum, were places that he never wanted to see again. When he had to pass Mrs Muskie’s house, he walked fast. The stained-glass window high in the wall had hardly any colour seen from outside – grey-yellow, grey-green – and the rose looked like a cabbage. It was hard to believe it could shine in the way it had.

  Mrs Muskie still made her daily walk to town. Colin waited to hear about the burglary in her house. Surely she’d look in the chamber pot soon. People always played with their jewels and counted their money. Then she would call the police and the whole of Loomis would hear. They might even get some detectives out from Auckland. But none of that happened. She came out of her house, made her walk in her dopey hat, bought her mince, sat on the station, walked home and locked herself in – never changed. It was spooky. Worse than that, it was sinister. Colin wondered if she had set a trap. He kept away from her and kept away from her part of town.

  ‘Did you know Mrs Muskie when she was young?’ he asked his grandmother. He was sitting in the boarding-house kitchen, eating bread and jam and drinking tea. Upstairs, his grandfather hammered at something – he was always painting, hammering, replacing boards; getting ready, he said, for when good times came back. ‘And when will that be, Harry?’ Grandma a
sked. ‘When pigs can fly?’ ‘There’s no harm,’ he said, ‘no harm …’ but never got further than that. He went away with a hurt look on his face, but soon took up his hammering again. There wasn’t a tap that dripped in Bellevue House (once it had been the Great Western Hotel but it had changed its name when Loomis went dry) or a door that squeaked or a loose board in the floor. ‘Leave him alone, he’s happy,’ Maisie Potter said. Like her mother-in-law she did not believe good times would ever come back.

  ‘Did you?’ Colin asked. ‘Before she got looney the way she is?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say looney. She’s had a hard life.’

  ‘But she’s rich.’

  ‘Who said that?’

  ‘She keeps all her money in her house. People say.’

  ‘Do they now? And have these people ever laid eyes on all this money?’

  ‘Well, no,’ Colin said, although he longed to say, ‘I have. Lots of gold sovereigns.’ Instead he said, ‘What if she got robbed?’

  ‘Robbed of what? She’s poor just like everyone else. Have you finished your tea? Give me your cup.’ She took it to the sink. ‘Why do you want to know about her anyway?’

  ‘No reason.’

  ‘You and your friends haven’t been pestering her?’

  ‘No. Course not. I just sort of see her now and then, crossing the bridge. In her hat.’

  ‘Ah, that hat.’ Colin’s grandma smiled. (She didn’t smile much.) ‘I remember it when it was new – it must have been that one. She wore it to the Empire Day picnic at Cascade Park. With all her daughters round her, pretty girls. And that son. Herbert, I think. That was the day he nearly drowned.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Colin said. He buttered another slice of bread.

  ‘He was swimming out in the deep part of the pool and the other boys dived underneath and hung on his legs. Little hooligans. If some of the men hadn’t seen … They had to pull him out and give him artificial respiration. Poor Mrs Muskie fell off the bank. They had to pull her out too. Her hat went floating away down the creek. It was your father who swam after it. That didn’t save him from a proper tanning though.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘For nearly drowning Herbert Muskie. Oh yes, he was in it. In everything. Harry whipped him for that. Cut a willow stick right there, really made him bawl.’

  ‘Dad wouldn’t bawl.’

  ‘Are you saying I’m a liar, young man?’

  ‘No.’ Colin remembered crying himself when the fat man hit him. ‘A willow stick hurts.’ He knew that from his own hidings, although he didn’t get many.

  ‘Now take your grandpa a cup of tea,’ Grandma said, pouring it. ‘And don’t slop any. I don’t want to be wiping up.’

  Colin finished his bread and carried the cup upstairs. He found his grandfather at the end of a corridor, rehanging a door, and he stood watching the old man – he was fifteen years older than his wife and seemed very ancient to Colin – busy with his drill and screwdriver and screws.

  ‘Grandpa.’

  ‘In a minute, boy.’

  The tea went cold. I wish I could get him a new one, Colin thought. He loved his grandpa, with his skinny throat and hairy ears and knotted hands. But if he took the cold cup back downstairs both of them would get a telling-off. The old man drank it anyway, when he was finished. The door swung beautifully and closed with an oily click. ‘Now I’ll strip that frame down and revarnish it. These bedrooms will be full again one day. Commercial travellers and school inspectors, you wait and see. We got to be ready for that.’

  ‘Have you got any boarders now?’ Colin asked.

  ‘Had one last week. Had two. Man and his wife passing through. They slept in this bed here. It was them what told me this here door was sticking.’

  ‘It must have been fun when it was full.’

  ‘Yeah, your grandma cookin’ and me in the bar. Twelve people sometimes, sittin’ down for tea. Good times, Colin. They’ll come back.’ He swallowed cold tea and his bony Adam’s apple travelled down his throat beneath the skin and up again.

  ‘This must have been the biggest building in Loomis, except the town hall.’

  ‘Still is. I used to come and clear the drains here when they was blocked, before I went in the hotel business. You knew I was a drainlayer, boy?’

  ‘Dad told me.’

  ‘Dug half the drains in Loomis, I did. And there’s not one in town I haven’t unblocked.’

  ‘At the Muskies’ house?’

  ‘That one too. Just because they was nobs, didn’t mean their drains didn’t block.’

  ‘Did you ever go in?’

  ‘In the house? No, boy. Don’t get past the back door, a drainlayer doesn’t. Not in houses like that. And all them girls in frills and frocks lookin’ out the windows, high up like, and holdin’ their noses. Didn’t bother me none. That boy came slimin’ round though, lookin’ for what he could find. Fishin’ in me toolkit. I give ’im what-for.’

  ‘So you didn’t see the coloured glass?’

  ‘Nope. What coloured glass?’ He dug sugar from the bottom of his cup and licked his finger. ‘Better get this back, Colin, or she’ll be raising Cain.’

  ‘Yes,’ Colin said. ‘Goodbye, Gramps.’ He took the cup back to the kitchen. ‘Anything else I can do, Grandma?’ He was hoping for another piece of bread.

  ‘No, get on home now. And come for dinner on Sunday, tell your mum.’

  ‘Lamb, Grandma, lamb? And gravy and mint sauce?’

  ‘Mutton, boy. This isn’t Buckingham Palace.’

  ‘Gravy, though? Gravy?’

  ‘We’ll see. You’ll get nothing if you’re not out of here in two shakes.’

  Colin left. He ran home with the invitation. Mutton, gravy, roast potatoes. Pudding. What would pudding be? ‘What do you reckon, Mum?’

  ‘Bread pudding, probably.’ She was joking. ‘Jelly, I suppose, and stewed fruit.’

  ‘No. Date roll.’

  ‘Don’t you ever think of anything but your stomach?’

  Colin did. He thought of the fat man, who was always there, sitting like a blowfly high up in the corner of a windowpane. He stayed a lot closer to his parents in those months. He stayed home and read a book instead of going out. He helped his father oil the bike and pump the tyres up. On that Sunday when they went to Bellevue House he hoped that they would ride on the bike, all three of them, his father pedalling, his mother on the bar, and him on the back mudguard with his legs sticking out, the way they’d tried it up and down the road, laughing their heads off. But no, Mrs Potter said she wasn’t doing that thank you, not on a Sunday. They walked there, down to the creek, over the bridge, back through town past the station and the shops, and past the churches where people in their best clothes were coming out of eleven o’clock service, and up the steps of Bellevue House.

  They went past the windows that still had beer names printed on them in gold letters, and through the dining room into the kitchen – and there was Grandma Potter at the stove, basting the mutton; and there was the fat man too, sitting at the table drinking tea.

  He looked at Colin and smiled.

  ‘Well, if it isn’t a kid. Hello, kid. You got a name?’

  Chapter 4

  Sunday Dinner at Bellevue House

  Colin nearly fainted. The kitchen tipped sideways for a moment. If his father hadn’t taken him by the shoulders he might have fallen over on the floor. He didn’t notice that the fat man wasn’t interested in him but had switched his smile to Laurie and Maisie. When his father let him go he held the back of a chair.

  The fat man said, ‘It’s a long time, Laurie. Hello, Maisie. Yep, it’s me.’

  ‘Herbie? Is it Herbie?’

  ‘Sure it is. Not in prime condition, maybe.’ He touched his scar with pink fingertips. ‘But it’s me, all right. Aren’t you going to say welcome home?’

  ‘You’ve been gone for …’

  ‘Thirteen years,’ the fat man said, ‘but I’m not superstitious. Nineteen-twenty I left this town and
that’s the best thing I ever did.’ He stood up from the table and held out his hand. Colin’s father stepped forward and shook it, licking his lips and not knowing where to look.

  ‘So you got married, Laurie? You won the race for Maisie Poulter, eh? Shake hands, Maisie?’

  ‘I don’t mind. Hello, Herbie.’ Like her husband, she didn’t know where to look, but she let the fat man shake her hand up and down for a moment.

  ‘It’s a long way from Loomis school. And pulling your pigtails, Maisie. And getting the whacks, Laurie, eh? Itchy Edgar’s strap, remember that?’

  ‘I remember,’ Laurie said. ‘But what are you doing … ?’

  Grandma Potter had watched the meeting from the stove. Even she, usually sure, seemed uncertain now. ‘Herbert is staying here for a few days. With Mrs Muskie and their little girl.’

  ‘Ha!’ the fat man said, seeing their faces. ‘She doesn’t mean my mother, she means my wife. I got married too, Laurie. I left it a bit later than you. Took the plunge last week. Bette and Verna will be down soon, they’re just getting prettied up. I told them, you don’t need to put your war paint on, not for Loomis, but you know women.’

  ‘Yes,’ Laurie said. He did not seem to know what to say.

  ‘And this must be your young shaver? Has he got a name?’

  ‘He’s Colin,’ Mrs Potter said. ‘This man is Herbert Muskie, Colin. We were at school …’ She couldn’t manage to say ‘together’ at the end of it.

  ‘Hello, Colin. Pleased to meet you. Are you a scrapper like your old man?’

  Colin shook his head. He still held on to the chair, and kept his hold even when his mother sat down in it. He could not make his tongue work, or his head. Muskie? Herbert Muskie? Did that mean he was Mrs Muskie’s son? What about her sovereigns though? He had robbed his mother. And then the spit, the razor, the scar, and tying his thumbs; and the man standing here now, in his grandma’s kitchen, talking to his mother and father like an ordinary person. Colin could not bring these things together. His grandma said, ‘Don’t stare, Colin. It’s rude.’

  ‘He’s prob’ly never seen anyone like me. Is it me scar, kid? Or maybe it’s just me manly shape.’

  ‘No,’ Colin whispered.