Fatboy Fall Down

by Rabindranath Maharaj

  The yard was huge and the trucks, newly bought, seemed expensive, but the house by comparison seemed tiny and rundown. He honked his horn and a woman watched angrily through a side door. “I tired tell you people not to park in the way of the truck,” she said, wiping her hand on a towel. “It have a big public road for you to park.” She stepped back inside and shouted, “Some customers here to see you.”

  Now a man appeared in a sleeveless vest and a khaki pants that was muddy and cut off at the knees. The clothes did not suit him with his grey hair and sagging belly. He threw away a cigarette. “Come back on Monday. I don’t work on weekends.”

  “Hello, hello.” Again, his father had stepped out. “We come visiting.”

  The man frowned and scratched his stubbles. “Wait a minute . . .”

  The inside of the house was jam-packed with tools and cables on every surface. There was a huge television set, and around it was arrayed more junk. During the half-hour visit, the man described his business. He had started small, bought one used truck, traded it for a newer model, bought another, and had made a down payment on a backhoe. It sounded as if he was complaining. “Now I making more money in one month than it used to take me a year to make. But what I will do with all that money? Go to trips abroad? I tired do that. Buy fancy clothes for me and the madam? We closet stocked with that. Invest? I have to hide from the banks the way they after me.”

  The relative displayed no interest in Orbits’ father, who with each boast, clapped his hand and said, “Good, good, man.” But in the vehicle, he asked, “Who was that fella?”

  His mother laughed; her husband’s forgetfulness on occasion had that effect on her. “That was your cousin, Papoose. Your first cousin.”

  “Good good man,” he told her, drawing a fresh burst of laughter. “We should visit him again and carry this crazy thing for him.” He held up the soursop.

  Five and a half months later, he died. Two months before his death, he had been found wandering in the village and had been brought back by Joe the mechanic. “This man becoming an explorer in his old age,” the mechanic said. “I don’t know what Mr. Christophene Columbo expected to find in that lonely stretch of road.” Then his wife confined him to his room, shutting the front door and listening for the creak of the loose boards on the porch or his footsteps on the front step. The crash she heard was from his room, and she felt he had been trying to climb through the window from the bed and had fallen backward, hitting his head on the bedpost.

  She had found him sprawled on his back with his head hanging on the edge of the bed. His eyes were open and did not seem to be in pain or anything. But he grew even quieter, and frequently while he was before the television set, his body would slip sideways and she had to rush to set him upright. He was okay in the mornings, so Orbits had no real idea of his decline, and his wife, too, looked at that period of relative normalcy and believed he would improve over time as the fall’s effect lessened.

  During this period, he would attempt to engage his father while his mother fed him with a spoon. “You have to get better soon so we could go and collect all the money that people still owing you. Sugars. You remember him?”

  His father nodded slowly, and Orbits did not notice what his mother had observed, that the outer circles of his pupils had grown lighter, each day the circles seeming to spread inwards. And she worried that when it reached the centre and her husband’s eyes were completely clouded, he would be gone, so as she fed him she asked continually, “Let me see your eyes, Papoose.” One morning he mumbled some words, his lips loose and his eyes vacant. “What is that you trying to say, Papoose? The last supper? You have plenty more suppers. Me and you and Orbits.”

  Nineteen years earlier she had been inconsolable for most of Starboy’s wake, but at her husband’s funeral, during all the rituals, she stood at a distance, holding on to a post, her face hard and cold. It was a small affair, and she noted that none of his relatives, not even the cousin he had visited five and a half months earlier, had showed up. Her gaze passed over the meagre crowd, neighbours and loiterers, with no acknowledgement of familiarity, no sign of recognition. But she finally got one of her wishes granted.

  At the end of the cremation ceremony, when the two dozen or so villagers had already dispersed, Orbits was looking at the embers and the smoke as it curled upwards, buffeted by the trade winds. He glanced up and noticed that the clouds, at different elevations, were moving in opposite directions. He tried to recall the name of the phenomena from his course and was surprised to remember the term. Differential advection. He guessed that rain would soon fall and a few moments later, he felt a tiny droplet on his wrist.

  Someone was tapping him on his shoulder. He turned and at first could not recognize the young woman in glasses nor her companion, a fair-skinned young man with features that seemed partially Chinese. “Dee?”

  “Mom heard it on the radio,” she said. “In the obituaries. I am so sorry.”

  “Sorry?” He had no idea why he asked her. She nodded, and he felt he saw concern on her face. His eyes began to water, and he turned away. She misunderstood and told him that everything would be okay. Perhaps she was speaking for the benefit of her companion or simply saying what was expected in this situation, but this expression of concern was so unexpected, her appearance so unanticipated, that Orbits could not control himself. He walked away to the post by which his mother had stood, and he felt his shoulders shuddering. He wiped his eyes suddenly and told his daughter, “Come meet your grandmother.” Dee stood outside the car, her knees straight but leaning forward to talk to her grandmother, and Orbits saw the older woman pulling her closer to kiss her head, and he felt he saw a bit of impatience in his daughter’s stiff posture. Her companion stood some distance away, his hands folded against his chest.

  Now it began to drizzle, and his daughter took two or three steps back and walked away to join her companion. His mother’s hand was still outstretched, and he wanted to go after his daughter and say something to delay her departure, but she was already in the vehicle, a new Japanese car. The drizzle strengthened into a downpour halfway to his home, and one of the wipers flapped against the windscreen with each upward swipe. He glanced at his mother in the back. She looked small and frail. He resolved he would call Dee more often, perhaps invite her to make up for the years apart and to get to know the grandmother to whom she had, at an earlier time, at another funeral, given the courage to carry on. But when he was approaching the house, he watched how the headlight was illuminating the porch with the creaky board, the drizzle transforming and smoothening the weeds, the water from the guttering spilling into the soft mud that would find its way to the yellow drain at the back; when he saw this neglect and he recalled the ordered lives of the family from whom he had separated, imagining that they had no time for grief, his resolve weakened, and by the time he shut the door after his mother, it had broken altogether. His mother told him, “Such a nice child. And I never get to know her.”

  It was a simple statement uttered without reproach. She walked tiredly into her room, and Orbits knew that things would carry on as they always did. Later in the night, he listened to the rain falling violently on the roof and abruptly receding to a sound that seemed to come from far away, a soft metallic chirruping, before it struck once more. It fell in that manner all night, ebbing and strengthening and ebbing once more. He felt helpless in his room, his bereft mother in another room, his father gone, his daughter gone, the storm raging outside. He considered his life from the time he had gazed at his mother fretting over his younger brother and had assumed that his life would be one struggle after another. But he had struggled for nothing, really. The early jobs, the work with Baby Rabbit, at the Ministry of Agriculture, his present job — they had all been handed to him. It was his former wife who had pressed the marriage and who had encouraged him into signing up for the courses. It was this other woman, too, who had instigated the affair. He
had gone along as he had always done. Throughout his life, he had done nothing, made no effort, showed no determination. His mood matched the fickle storm: he felt within minutes guilt and relief, shame and satisfaction. He fell asleep with these conflicting feelings, but when he awoke the following morning, they had merged into something less oppositional: the idea that he had survived. Somehow, he had managed.

  He arrived at his work feeling that the mood of the previous night was a normal reaction to the death of a parent and that he would soon get over it. And in a way, he did; his father had a while ago lost whatever distinctiveness he once had, and it was easy to imagine that he had died a lesser person and that, in fact, his death had rescued him from further devastation. Instead, Orbits turned his attention to his mother. When the other workers were offering their condolences, when Moon called to assure Orbits that his mother would be next as whoever had placed the light on his father would not be satisfied with a single death, when he put the phone off the hook, he was thinking of the life she had lived and what she had surrendered.

  His mother had struggled with her husband’s affliction over the last years, and although she showed flashes of anger at having to repeat some simple instruction or even at his blankness, those moments never stretched out. She had found a way to transform irritation into amusement, and her complaints, too, fell into this mode. At an earlier time, she would ask Orbits over and over when his daughter would visit, but abruptly she stopped as if she knew of his shame. He thought, too, of her coldness during her husband’s cremation, standing apart from almost everyone, retreating into the car as if she were determined not to allow anyone a minuscule glimpse of what she was feeling.

  He had never considered her a strong woman, but she had practically run the house for as long as he could remember. This was a surprise because her demeanour never suggested strength; the greater surprise, though, was the discovery that he had once hated her. He tried to push this belated acknowledgement out of his mind and when he could not, he decided he would try to make her remaining years more comfortable. Over the following weeks, he brought home fruits she liked, pulpy sweet caimite and sapodilla. He tried to engage her in conversations about her day, offered to take her to places she once spoke of, but everything she refused. Weeks passed, and months, and he saw how thin she was becoming, how drawn her face was, how slow her footsteps. He tried to get her out of the slow, dripping lifelessness by talking of his father, but all she would say was, “He with Starboy now. He in a better place.” But she spoke the words looking at the floor with so much regret that Orbits felt she believed none of it. And when he persisted, she grew annoyed, bit her lips, got up and moved away. Sometimes when he returned from work, he would see her in the backyard garden. Occasionally she would pluck a leaf from a vine or a blacksage, crush it between her fingers and taste it. She did this slowly and carefully, like the rituals of a puja.

  One afternoon he told this to Moon, who despite all the promises to himself, he continued to see. “Your mother gone already,” Moon told him. “She walking around as usual and she have the same voice but is not she. Is somebody else. Somebody gone and thief away your mother.”

  Orbits got angry with Moon although he did not say anything, and as she continued, he felt a welling of revulsion, a tiny tendril of disgust both at what she was saying and doing and at himself for not leaving immediately. He left eight minutes later, and on the porch, he turned back to look as if it would be the last time he would see her in that position, reclining lazily on the couch, the ankle of one leg resting on the knee of the other, her clothes hanging on a nearby chair.

  He did not return to the station, and midway to his mother’s place he diverted to the main road that would take him to the highway. The last time he had taken that route was more than a decade ago, but now he was too distracted to be nervous of the drivers cutting in and out. No one cursed him either because he was maintaining a steady pace. Every now and again, he glanced at his watch, and one hour and fifteen minutes after he had left Moon’s place, he parked at the back of a library. Opposite the library was the slight hill that led to his daughter’s school, and he went to a café that from an angle looked abandoned but opened into a spacious rectangle smelling of molasses and coconut and cinnamon. He stationed himself by the window, and when he saw the first students hurrying down the hill, he finished his mauby drink and walked outside. The students, mostly from the early forms, were walking in little groups that got bigger as the older students, their pace more languid, appeared.

  Orbits walked to the edge of the curb because he did not want to miss his daughter, and once or twice, he stopped himself in the nick of time from shouting to someone who resembled her. When he saw Dee with two other girls, she was looking in his direction, so he waved. She continued walking and when she shifted her gaze, he shouted her name. “This blasted traffic,” he grumbled about the rumbling of the trucks and vans. When she was almost opposite him, he called her name again and she looked past him. He wanted to leave, but he recalled the abiding hatred he had felt towards his in-laws on the day of her birth; in the face of their hostility, he had remained silent and rushed to the hospital without explaining the reason for his lateness. He would not allow this to happen again. So he pushed out a hand to signal to the incoming traffic and sprinted across the road. “Dee!” Now she turned, and he was happy that she still responded to the name he had given her. But she appeared irritated, and he wondered if there was something in his appearance that betrayed his earlier encounter with Moon. “Can I talk with you?’

  “Can’t you just call? I am busy.” She glanced fleetingly at her companions.

  “It’s about your grandmother.”

  “Is she okay?” She asked this loudly as if she wanted her friends to hear; and Orbits felt it was an attempt to explain why this stranger, dressed in formal country clothes, white shirt with the cuffs rolled, creased khaki pants above muddy boots, was addressing her with such familiarity.

  “I believe she is grieving over your grandfather.”

  “I am sure she will get over it,” she said quickly, and Orbits felt he detected a twinge of sarcasm or perhaps bitterness. “I have to leave now.”

  One of her friends, a chubby girl with eyebrows that met at a point and gave her an accusatory look, said, “We are going to the library now, mister, to plan the end-of-school celebration.” Dee walked to join her, and as they walked away, she waved without looking back, a habit picked up from her mother.

  The gesture irritated him and he shouted after her, “I will be sure to call you when she dead and bury.” He knew she would not hear above the noise of the traffic, but the statement released some of his anger. He returned to the café and told the man behind the counter, “Give me a coconut tart and a mauby drink.” He tried to engage the server in the manner he and Wally had chatted with the rumshop proprietors in the capital. “First time I drive in this place. And second time I use the highway even though I driving now for eighteen-nineteen years. Came to see my daughter from the school up in the hill. She busy with some after-exam fete. I never even knew she had written her exams already. So is a good thing, when you look at it, that I come today. Just now she might go to university. Maybe I will find out that by guess too.”

  The server, who had an impatient and harassed-looking way of blinking quickly, said, “You want anything else to eat or not?”

  Orbits patted his belly and said in a jovial manner, “That tart already playing with my stomach. How much bucket of sugar you put in it?” But he felt his annoyance returning. He drove recklessly on his way back, weaving in and out of traffic like everyone else. Once he came across an old man hunched close to the steering wheel, and when he passed him, he shouted, “You think this is a funeral?” He was about to tell the other driver to take his vehicle to a scrapyard when he noticed that it was newer than his Kingswood. The observation forced an uneasy laugh from him, but a few minutes later, he was almost pushed
off the road by an overtaking van. He drove carefully to his home.

  When he got there, his mother was looking out from the porch, which encouraged him as he got out of his car to ask her, “You was in the backyard garden?”

  “That garden finish.”

  “You could bring it back and—”

  “Why? Why I must bring it back? Bring it back for who?”

  He was taken aback by her harsh tone as he walked up the three steps. At the doorway, he asked her, “What you looking at?” He tried to follow her gaze, to the hill opposite the house.

  She followed him inside without answering, but an hour later, when the sky was getting grey, she returned to the porch. She had prepared his food as she always had since his return, and it was covered in various bowls on the table. He ate slowly and watched her standing on the porch looking out at the hill where palmiste towered over the bramble beneath, the tangerine and guava trees and blacksage stitched together by vines. He had been in that maze a few times, in primary school, during moments of bullying when he felt he could not face his parents. Sometimes he had surprised ground doves and cuckoos and dozing screech owls, and once he had stumbled over tiny frail bones that he had tried to reassemble. Starboy, too, had disappeared there when Orbits had been working in the swamp and the cave, and whenever his brother emerged, bleary-eyed, with a rolled copy book in his back pocket, his mother would say, “Why you have to go so far, child, when it have a toilet right inside the house?” Beyond the bramble was the community centre where he had been found less than ten years later.

  The next day Orbits brought home a bamboo rocking chair that he placed on the porch. He watched his mother walking out of the house and settling into the chair. She didn’t say anything to him or acknowledge the gift, and her dead manner reminded him of a cat claiming an empty box.