***
Five years after he began working at Baby Rabbit’s place, there was an actual storm, and just as in Orbits’ fantasy, its approach was missed by all the television meteorologists. Orbits was in his cubicle at the time when the rain began. He grumbled about the water trickling between all the spaces in the cedar planks and the jailhouse slit that served as a window. He put his hands against his ears so he didn’t hear the tinkling growing into a rumble or the shouting of Lilboy outside. It was only when he heard a crash and felt the water raining down and looked up and saw an aluminium sheet flapping as if it were a child holding on to the edge of a cliff that he realized what was happening. He tried to open the door, but it felt like someone was pushing on the other side. He stepped back, kicked it open and rushed outside. The sky, which an hour earlier had been grey and relatively peaceful, was black and angry. Rain was beating down from the left and then from the right. On the periphery of the roundabout, the trees were swaying this way and that, the branches combed by the wind and the leaves flying around like frenzied locusts. An aluminium sheet flew through the air and Orbits wondered where it had come from. There were a few vehicles parked in the yard, but with the torrential downpour, he couldn’t tell if the drivers were inside. Only Lilboy was about, running here and there, and Orbits expected a draft to suddenly pitch him in the air. Orbits hustled back to his cubicle.
Then, just as suddenly as it had appeared, the storm ended. The drivers emerged from their maxis, Baby Rabbit came out of his office, and Orbits peeped from his cubicle. He spotted the owner with Lilboy in tow, inspecting the damage, conferring with the drivers, glancing in his direction. He saw Lilboy jumping up and down and gesturing to him. He briefly considered returning to his desk and pretending he had not noticed anything unusual. Too late. Baby Rabbit and Lilboy were walking in his direction. “You remember the prediction you make this morning?” Baby Rabbit asked.
“You remember?” Lilboy shrieked.
“A average day with temperatures around thirty degrees. That is what you say. Average.”
“And the possibility of isolated showers,” Orbits said timidly. “I believe I also said that.”
“Showers? That was a shower?”
“Shower!” Lilboy echoed.
“Isolated,” Orbits said weakly, wondering how he would get through this.
“Don’t talk up in you ass, man. Look around you.”
Orbits obeyed, and he saw Skullcap approaching. “Even the hifalutin radio weatherman didn’t say anything about it. I always tune my radio to the station every morning,” the maxi driver said. “Not a single word. This storm come like a thief in the night.”
“Matter-ologist.” Baby Rabbit seemed so annoyed that he fumbled with the pronunciation of the word. “Matter-ologist, fatter-ologist.” Then he said something that Orbits had suspected ever since he began working there. “Is a blasted fake profession if you ask me. More bogus than Humphrey Bogus.”
“Humphrey!”
When the pair departed, Skullcap told Orbits, “Well brother, that is it for the day. You want a lift to the taxi stand?”
In the vehicle, Orbits told him, “Thanks, man.”
A few minutes later the driver said, “I didn’t lie. And is no wonder. Look how dry all over here is. Is like the storm only affect a little portion of the place.”
He was right, and Orbits couldn’t decide whether he was relieved that his wife and daughter would not have been in any danger, or disappointed that he was denied a dramatic story of being trapped heroically in a storm. At his in-laws’ place, no one seemed aware of the isolated storm. His father-in-law was reading one of his thick novels at his desk, and he briefly glanced up to notice Orbits’ dripping clothes. His glance travelled down to the mat and back to Orbits. What the ass you looking at? Orbits thought. You never see a make-believe meteorologist who spend his last day in his job? Why you don’t go back to you Pusskins book and stop macoing me?
Orbits turned out for work the next day fully expecting to be summoned to Baby Rabbit’s office and handed his papers. But the boss was not in his office that day, and by the end of the week, he assumed he had been forgiven and the storm forgotten. Still, he worried, and just as he had missed the storm’s approach, he did not see the changes around him and all over the island that would eventually lead to the end of his job.
A month after the storm, he noticed Skullcap driving a new vehicle. “Where you get this from?” he asked.
“A loan, brother. Banks start giving loan from Sarran to Barran. That is why it have so much new vehicles in the places. Foreign used.”
Orbits, caught in his own distress, hadn’t noticed that the roads were now filled with strange new models of cars and vans — sleek, sporty Japanese and American vehicles. He hadn’t noticed, too, that there were fewer maxis parked in the compound each morning. One morning he heard Baby Rabbit grumbling. “Is this blasted oil boom. The government getting all this money and they don’t know what the hell to do with it. But don’t worry about me because I thinking of building a hotel right on this spot.”
Later in the week, Skullcap said, “The government build something call a priority bus route for east-west maxis. I thinking of moving down that side. Some of the other drivers already leave. It will good to be my own boss for a change. What about you?”
And Orbits, who had boasted about applying for jobs with the television station or with the government, was finally honest. “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
The business closed at the end of the month, and for an equal period, Orbits left the house each morning, not telling his wife he was unemployed. He took the government bus to all the towns he had visited with Skullcap and now, sitting with disgruntled passengers rather than with awed tourists, he saw confusion everywhere. Piles of rubble and asphalt and bricks were jammed halfway into the road so he could not determine whether the materials were for the houses or for the road. The newer, faster cars crashed against these barriers and every so often, the bus was caught in traffic because of an accident or a backhoe destroying or building something. Some days, vehicles were diverted because a newly installed telephone pole or cable had been ripped by machinery on its way to an offshore oil rig. The other passengers always seemed irritated with these delays, and Orbits wondered if this sudden wealth had also introduced a new level of impatience in their lives.
Every mile or so he saw little groups of men and women dressed in green, staring solemnly against their forks or spades at a drain or a culvert. When rain fell, the material was washed away, the drains overflowed, and the place was covered with mud. This scene was repeated every week. Everywhere there was dust and mud.
One day on the bus, a man with an explosion of moles on his face, said, “You see all this money? It will run through this country like diarrhoea.”
And in the meantime, Orbits thought, it’s like I have constipation.
“You know how you could tell if somebody working on a road project?” the man across the aisle asked. “Look for the print of the hoe handle on they face or neck. Look! Just as I say.” The bus passed a group resting against the handles of their implements. “You know if I wasn’t so old and so qualified, I would apply for the job myself. Get to work at seven and finish by eight.”
Orbits tried to picture himself in one of the gangs. He imagined the blazing morning sun beating down his back while he walked through broken bottles and all the litter thrown out by passing vehicles. He imagined snakes and scorpions hiding in the grass, watching his approaching feet. The next day he took the bus to the capital. The frames and foundations of the burgeoning office buildings looked like skeletons hovering over the old stone cottages constructed a century ago. Trees had been cut down to make way for pavements, and there were concrete culverts crushing little rows of shrubs. As he walked along the street, he stopped to gaze at men on scaffolds heaving bricks and buckets and at the vendors
directly beneath. He stood there waiting for an accident, and when it began to drizzle, he moved on. Soon he came to a street of dilapidated two-storey offices. The sign on one of the buildings said Ministry of Agriculture. He entered the building and saw piles of cardboard boxes on the desk but no people. “Hello,” he shouted.
A man rose from behind a stack of boxes. “What you want? We moving next month. Come back then.”
Orbits noticed — and was reassured by — the man’s fatness. “Where everybody else?”
“Is two o’clock. Everybody went home.”
“But you still here.”
“Yes, I still here. What is it you want?”
“I am a meteorologist.”
“That nice. It raining outside?”
“I believe so.”
“How long the rain will last?”
It was just a light drizzle, so Orbits said, “An hour for the most.”
“Okay. Come and sit on that empty chair, and if the rain stop before an hour you will get a job.”
Orbits guessed the man was joking but as he was tired from walking around the city, he laughed and sat. Half an hour later, he felt that he had been tricked into listening to the man complain about the other workers, the disruption of the move to a newer building and the relocation of some of his favourite eating places. “By the way, my name is Wally. Short for Walrus. What is yours?”
“Orbits.”
“Short for what?”
“Nothing. Because of my job.”
“Orbits. I like the ring of that. So you really is a meteorologist? What you think of the man with the parrot on his back?”
“I think they use the same film every day.”
“What! You joking right?” Orbits admitted he was, and the man said, “Go to the window of the next room and check if the rain still falling.”
It was still drizzling lightly, but Orbits said, “It stopped.”
“Okay, you just get hired.”
Although Orbits wasn’t sure if the man was serious, he asked, “Field work or office work?”
Wally chuckled and his belly jiggled. He had a big round nose and curly hair that covered his ears. “You see that pile of applications on that box? I want you to file it according to date. And if you see anything more than five years old, pitch it in the dustbin.” While Orbits was completing this task, Wally walked over. “Don’t be surprised if that little drizzle cause a big flood.”
“So you is a meteorologist too?” Orbits asked lightly. Wally pulled a chair next to him and said that the original planners of the city had designed a network of culverts and drains to cater for the water rushing down from the mountain, but all those had been neglected and were now filled with garbage and mud. Orbits was surprised by Wally’s knowledge and planned to casually mention this bit of information to his wife.
When he got home, he told her, “I finally left the job for a position with the government. More security.”
“What is it you have to do?”
He recalled the time when she would have been thrilled with the news. “The Ministry of Agriculture,” he said, not mentioning that he had spent much of his first day listening to Wally and filing papers.
“Did you sign a contract? What’s the salary?”
“No contract as yet. Salary to be negotiated,” he said uneasily. He noticed that his wife had not looked up from her papers, and he turned to his daughter, who was bent over a book. “Hello, Dee. You could tell me if it raining outside? When this rain going to stop? Now? Okay, you hired.”
When he arrived the next morning at the ministry, he walked through the corridor to the row of boxes. Wally was not there, and a thin man with thin lips and a high nose that emphasized his nostrils and revealed the lush growth inside coughed into a kerchief and asked, “Who you is?”
“The new employee. The meteorologist?”
Now a woman who seemed to be in her forties, wearing huge stylish glasses that seemed mismatched with her old jacket and bruised shoes and grey hair, said, “The what?”
“Mr. Wally hired me yesterday.”
“I see,” the man said. His thin, rubbery lips gave him the look of a raconteur, but when he spoke his eyes grew weak and treacherous. “You just walk in and he hired you off the bat.”
Orbits didn’t like his sarcastic trembling nostrils and unstable lips and he said, “That is exactly what happened.”
Just then, Wally walked in. He was sweating and breathing heavily, and his shirt was stained yellow. “I see everybody meet Orbits already. Okay, back to work.” Orbits resumed the task he had been given the previous day, and the two other employees settled behind their own boxes. After an hour, the man disappeared and soon after, the woman.
“Lunch break already?” Orbits asked confused.
“They finish for the day. But is my lunch break.” He took out a bucket of chicken from his knapsack and walked to an adjoining room. The barrack-shaped building had once housed several ministries according to Wally, and all but this had been relocated to newer structures. So that there were abandoned and unlit rooms leaking from the roof and smelling of damp cardboard and rotting paper. In one of these rooms, Wally and Orbits ate.
As Wally tore into and gnawed at the chicken, he kept up a stream of chatter. The Ministry of Agriculture was a neglected department because of the association of fieldwork with the island’s past. This section of the ministry had been tasked with the granting of subsidies to farmers, but there was too much bobol he said, using the local term for corruption. “People who know nothing about farming get acres of land and money to open pig farms. And guess what? Pigs start running wild all over the place.” He related other stories of corruption and mismanagement, about officials requesting hunting permits and of a government minister who had developed a taste for the scarlet ibis, a protected bird. No wonder we couldn’t see any in the swamp, Orbits thought. “These people, the minute they get any power they begin to act like they own the government,” Wally said. “I used to like to hear them talk though. Plenty rhyme but no reason. People don’t care if you making sense or not once you could flap your gum and don’t allow anybody to interrupt you.”
Another day Wally told him that the political leader of one party was reputed to lock herself in her mansion watching Bollywood movies, emerging periodically draped in saris and with a martyred, manic expression, while the leader of the other party, who revelled in his reputation as a bad-john, took his inspiration from Blaxploitation movies. Orbits enjoyed talking with Wally. The other man revealed that he was the only one in his family who had not migrated, and he infused his stories of corruption with snippets of his relatives and of the history of Portuguese people in the island. Orbits, not familiar with the mix of town people and their range of colours, hadn’t even known of his ethnicity when he first met him.
He guessed that Wally did not get along with the two other employees because he waited until they had left at about 11:00 before he pulled out his bucket of chicken. He felt a kinship with the older man, a fat boy again but without the fat or the shame. Wally never seemed unduly angry, impatient, reproachful or petulant. Even his criticisms of the government and the sagaboys had the feeling of distance, as if all of this was to be expected and life would go on and he would live as he always had. His comments could have been directed at some other island and to complete strangers. Orbits could not understand how someone of Wally’s weight carried no discernible baggage. Or, if he did, how he managed to hide it so skilfully. Orbits was unaware of the complexities of town life, so he did not suspect that Wally’s colour, even though it was just a shade lighter than his dead brother’s, had put him a step higher and immunized him from the usual bacchanal, all the rivalries and racial distress. He surmised instead that Wally was wealthy, and he was in the job just because he could roam about the town and into the restaurants and rumshops he talked about.
***
He got his first paycheque six weeks after he had stepped into the building and he was disappointed at the paltry sum even though it was about the same at the depot. He had always heard that government employees got hefty salaries for doing nothing. More than the salary, he was disappointed at the title on the pay stub. Clerk 1. Wally had given him the envelope and at noon he said, “We have to celebrate.”
They went into a little Chinese restaurant where the customers called out to Wally. During the meal, while Wally ploughed through the plates of stewed chicken and roast pork and the bowls of wontons and brûle gueule on bake, Orbits was wondering who would pay for everything. He himself had ordered just a plate of shrimp and chow mein. When the bill came, Wally said, “Big celebration. First paycheque.”
On his way back, Orbits tried to calculate the percentage of his salary he had spent on a single meal. “The big ravenous beast,” he grumbled to himself. “It look like he hire me just to eat me out.” But he found himself going out more frequently with Wally, to a breakfast shed next to the wharf where there were huge plates of baked kingfish and plantain and dasheen, to the street vendors around the Savannah who sold boiled corn and pudding and souse, pickled pig trotters in lime and cucumber from pitch-oil tins, to a host of little parlours that displayed their coconut and cassava cakes behind an array of high stools.
Wally didn’t just eat; he commented on taste and texture and speculated knowledgeably on the ingredients and the types of preparation. He considered himself a gourmet, and gradually Orbits felt the appetite he had tamped down for a third of his life returning. He started off by sampling the fare from the pitch-oil tins, tiny bits that he felt would be harmless, before he graduated to the greasy sandwiches. He came into his own at the breakfast shed, where he discovered that the baked fish and the boiled tubers and fresh vegetables did not bring on the queasiness he recalled so well. He had forgotten the satisfying glow of fullness and solidity that an overloaded belly would bring. One day Wally told him, “Orbits, boy, you becoming a real gourmet. Just like me.” They began to include nips of rum with the meals. “The first one is for the digestion,” Wally explained. “The second one is for pleasure. And any that follow is for vice.”
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