Fatboy Fall Down

by Rabindranath Maharaj

  Whenever Orbits returned from these trips, he considered that it was only a few lucky breaks, one of which had granted him his job, that separated him from this dispiriting fatalism. He could easily have been in a similar situation, living in a piecemeal house, buying goods on trust, borrowing from relatives, dependent on the weather and the price of produce and little subsidies. One night he dreamed he was alone and walking along a road filled with old, ramshackle buildings. He got up in a sweat, trying to recall why he had been alone and what he had been looking for. In the dream, his clothes were patched and ill-fitting, like one of the vagrants he had spotted in the capital, but he could remember nothing else. The old fear of his qualifications strengthened, and he tried to convince himself that there must be some statute of limitations that would prevent him from being fired.

  He fought fear with fear: he might die before he was fired, a crippling disease would purge him of minor anxieties, he would grow into someone like his father with no memory of humiliation or no fear of the future. In the end, it was the contemplation of Cascadoo’s casually fraudulent confession about dying with no one to recall his life that nudged Orbits out of the cycle of suppositions. The recollection of Wally’s talk of duty, too, further eased him into a spurious notion of a mission.

  It may be that some good deeds are not done through a generosity of spirit but because of a desire to rise above weakness and helplessness, a way of lashing at despair, and so Orbits decided to focus on those who were short-changed, scorned, helpless, oppressed, like he had been for much of his life. He began to understand dimly that there were men and women whose situations were worse than his had ever been. “Sometimes I does wonder eef I was like you, with so much book sense, how my life would have been,” became one of Cascadoo’s regular mamaguy.

  Orbits moved beyond this mamaguy. He began to concentrate more on his job. He learned that the farmers’ talk of corruption was not always, as he had assumed, just a pitiful ritual they had wrapped around themselves; during his field trips, he discovered that most of the subsidies were given to shopkeepers, grocers, clerks, postmen, even teachers: men who knew nothing about farming, had never ventured at the fields, but who all had the resources to bribe. One evening he called the two young workers and he hinted darkly that he had written the supervisor about the bribery that was taking place in the field station. The workers had been there for over a year; their sudden fear he attributed to their callowness. During the following weeks, he noted with some satisfaction their sullenness, the manner they slammed their doors when they got to the station, the way they dragged their feet on the road, their impatience as they listened to the farmers, their discomfort plain in the hot sun.

  One midday it occurred to him that they fitted the profile of the bullies who had tormented him throughout his time in school. In this mood of accomplishment, he actually wrote to the supervisor. He mentioned that more than half the money allocated to the station went elsewhere and speculated it was the reason why the country had not progressed in spite of the money rolling around. A month later he received a terse and brief reply that alerted him how far up the chain of bribery went. The supervisor said if he had any evidence, he should take it to the police; in the absence of this, he should either keep quiet or fight elections. The last suggestion was sarcastic, he knew, and as he looked at the official paper and the official envelope, his anger grew. “The bitch,” he said loudly, drawing out the two workers from their office. “Fight elections? Show the police?” Over the following weeks, he began to encourage the farmers to form delegations and associations and to channel their requests through these groups.

  He went to these meetings and returned late in the evenings, the swimming spots in his burning eyes signalling the beginning of a headache. The farmers at first were suspicious of him and of his angle until he explained that he wanted nothing in return. Then their scepticism turned to puzzlement and finally to pity. What kind of man would do something for nothing, would want nothing from something? They actually spoke these words, and Orbits unexpectedly felt a slice of sympathy for his two idle fellow workers. He invited Cascadoo to the meetings that he insisted should be held either at a house or a camp rather than a rumshop, and while he was driving through the country roads, he often felt like turning back and leaving the farmers to their miserable lives. Once, in the middle of a meeting, he was reminded of a painting he had passed every morning at the Ministry of Agriculture. It had hung there for so long that the frame had splintered, cobwebs from the ceiling hung like a gauze over the top half, and the acrylic had chipped off the lower. It seemed so much a part of the neglect of the building that he had never paid much attention, but on the week of his departure, trying to observe what he may have missed during his years at the ministry, he saw that it had been done with attention to detail. The straw hat of the man collecting christophene was as carefully detailed as the mountain in the backdrop and the vines trailing from the trees.

  When he was called upon to speak at the farmers’ gatherings, he simply said, “Sometimes it’s the things that we miss that really count. We must pay attention to little details.” They weren’t sure what he was talking about, but it sounded impressive, so they all nodded thoughtfully and clapped. Orbits didn’t realize they were more struck by his reference to small things — which they interpreted as trivialities — to which they were always attuned.

  The farmers were noisy during these meetings as if in familiar surroundings, among their own, they could unleash whatever false bravado they had strapped around themselves. Then they grew quiet and contemplative before they erupted once more. They tilted from one extreme to the other, and Orbits felt he was going around in a never-ending loop, and these men, in spite of all their protests, wanted nothing different. During one meeting, a man who wore cut-off pants that rode on his knobbed knees said, “Everybody eating apple and grape like if them is born and bred Cyanadian. I wonder what they will do if I stop planting orange and mango.”

  “They will continue to eat apples and grapes,” Orbits told the man.

  “Eh? Is so? You think them gullet design for foreign thing? Just wait till sugar or heart hook them up them, we will see who could eat what.”

  The other farmers nodded in agreement. Another man mentioned a relative who had migrated only to return with a host of health problems. The conversation shifted from gossip to a more philosophical discussion of the horrors of migration. Then there was more gossip. He was frustrated by their lack of interest in the rest of the island and their manner of treating villages just five miles away as if they were in other continents. Someone had actually mentioned this tendency to him, and he couldn’t recall if it had been Wally or Skullcap the maxi driver.

  It was a relief sometimes when he returned to his home and witnessed Mona tending to his mother with so much patience, as if looking after this cantankerous old woman was not an obligation but a joy.

  Everyone have their own duty, he thought one evening on his way to a meeting. He had been thinking that his mission to help men and women who seemed weekly more undeserving of any intervention was useless. That evening, he drove through the usual back roads until he came to the only direction: a big water tank painted red next to a mango tree.

  Too late he saw the house; the mango tree he recalled, but the red tank was new. He hesitated on the road before he noticed the group already gathered beneath the house. The husband of the woman with whom he had the affair was seated in the middle of the group of five farmers. His hands were on his lap and he appeared out of place among these rough men. He seemed so polite that Orbits wondered if he recognized him. The farmers’ association was a good idea, the husband said. It’s easier to take advantage of an individual than a group. The farmers needed to be organized. For too long everyone had been exploiting them because they could get away with it. There was still money in the country, but it was drying up. Time balanced everything, but now time was running out. If nothing was done,
this rape of innocent people would continue.

  He sat down, and Orbits was so flustered that he simply repeated the man’s pleas. When he was about to finish, he saw a pair of legs on the stairs, and Moon soon appeared with a tray on which was a jug and a cylinder of Styrofoam glasses. Orbits felt a confused scatter of excitement that he tried to still by looking at the husband and smiling. The husband, now seated, had his hands on his lap once more and he was studying a crack on the ground, right beneath the hammock. Moon returned up the stairs; the farmers drank and wiped their lips with their hats’ brims. The husband asked Orbits if he wanted to stay for dinner. Orbits told him it was difficult to drive in the night, which was true. The man nodded; he seemed relieved. Moon came down the stairs once more, but now she had a small child. She stood at the landing while Orbits and the husband walked to his car.

  On the way back, Orbits was struck with a familiar mixture of guilt, shame and fear, and once again he wondered why he was getting involved in the lives of men and women who had been living in this manner for generations and who were suspicious of any change, good or bad. During subsequent meetings, petty rivalries stretched out into silly arguments about every trivial issue. Additionally, every proposal was met with scepticism. And Orbits’ headache worsened following each meeting. “These kiss-me-ass people will never improve,” he grumbled to himself. “I don’t know why I wasting my time. I really don’t know.” Sometimes, though, he came close to the truth. “Doing all this just to feel better about myself,” he said in a low voice to his mother one evening while they were waiting on Mona and her father.

  He felt he was going around in circles, and he waited for the circle to end. But the farmers group miraculously persisted, and when there was talk of expanding it into a village council, he suspected it was the husband, quiet but respected, who had prodded them. But it was Cascadoo who had told the farmers, “Eef you ask me, he is just one of these crazy people who does help out for no rhyme and reason.” He amended that later to include, “He have no wife and children. Poor fella.”

  “A big hardback man living by himself? What wrong with him?”

  “Poor fella living with his mother,” Cascadoo elaborated. “Madam pack up and gone.”

  And Orbits, brought down to their level, tainted with uselessness, was now viewed with sympathy rather than mistrust, and his proposals were no longer seen as opportunistic. So, for a few months, outfitted in his dark shades and white long-sleeved shirts, he sat among these farmers and patiently explained how the system worked. He drew from his time at the ministry in the nation’s capital to describe the manner the money was disbursed and how genuine farmers, mostly invisible, were left out of the configuration. They already knew this: it was always part of their comforting beat about neglect and sacrifices and survival, but the force of the actual figures blunted the romance they had built up about their sacrifices. Orbits, propelled more by guilt than by any notion of success, never expected much from these meetings even when the informal gathering was transformed into a group that began to resemble a crude organization. The meetings were rotated at different houses every fortnight, and Orbits, not wanting to face Moon, suggested the relocation to the field station.

  About three months following the first meeting at that location, he received a call from the supervisor. “Is you who giving permission like Lord Lalloo to hold meetings in the station?”

  “It’s only in the nights,” Orbits explained. “When the station is closed.”

  “Yes, closed. You understand the meaning of the word?”

  Orbits felt his temper growing. “Yes, I understand. And I beginning to understand plenty other things in this department.”

  The supervisor, caught off guard by the accusation, grew blustery. “Hello, Mister, you better don’t play up in you ass with me, you hear. I call you to explain a simple government regulation and you hitting me with all this damn nonsense about what you know and don’t know. If I say is no permission, then is no permission. End of text.” As the supervisor sank further in his bluster, Orbits knew he was right; he could give and withhold permission as he pleased.

  From then, the meetings were held at his place, and Cascadoo, during these evenings, fretted noisily and unnecessarily about the arrangement of the chairs in the driveway and the coffee his daughter brought out. He interrupted the meetings to call out to her and complain about the coffee dregs and the amount of sugar or milk. “All this book-busting making she forget the simple things,” he said proudly. “Alzebra and hiss-tree. Jagraphy.”

  Orbits’ mother looked out with interest at the farmers and one day, she said, “All these people sitting in the gap and drinking coffee like if is a wake. Like if they waiting for somebody to dead.”

  “Is a good thing they doing, Grandma.”

  “Good what? Just wasting time and muddying up the yard like fat chicken. Why you don’t go and help them with you big bottom?”

  “Oh lord, Grandma. That so rude.”

  “You rude.” She held her cane before her, twisting her hand.

  One day a small delegation came into Orbits’ office. They were not farmers but businessmen, who got to the point quickly. They had heard news of this village council and all the other nonsense he had been putting into the farmers’ heads. This had to stop. Orbits couldn’t understand the source of their anger until one of the men, who smiled with one side of his mouth, the lips parting and revealing two gold teeth said, “Life is a funny thing when you really get down to it. If we get the money or the farmers get the money, it will end in the same place. In we rumshop self. It will just take longer to reach if the farmers get it. A funny thing as I say.” When the man stopped talking he pushed out his lips, his sunken nose disappearing in his moustache. He wore an engraved bracelet on each wrist.

  Another man, with his belly bulging out of his shirt and his neck threatened by heavy chains, said, “What Halligator say is true. This committee nonsense suit these hifalutin town people, not humble village people. That is knife-and-fork thing. We don’t operate so.”

  “Every man for himself then?”

  “You could say so. Yes, you could say so,” Halligator said with his half-smile. “We know you would understand. Pass by my place any time you want. You like whisky?”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “Eh? You don’t drink? I never hear that sort of thing before. Something wrong with you liver? Kidneys?”

  His friend said, “My hardware have plenty more than drinks. You want to fix up you house? A little renovation? A spare room? Roof work? Check me out.” He spoke in simple snaps like an advertisement. The group walked out talking loudly.

  Orbits had been neutral during the conversation because he was not familiar with the visitors and he wanted to be as polite as possible, but he received a call the following day reminding him of his commitment. Again, he said nothing; he had lately grown a bit too involved with the farmers and had been thinking of a way to step back now that he had initiated the process. He had never really been comfortable with large groups, and he disliked the way these rough men argued about nonsense.

  It’s likely he would have dropped out if the calls from Halligator and the consortium of businessmen didn’t continue, growing more insistent and threatening with each new message. “You opening a big condensed milk tin of worm and cockroach that will turn around and sting you,” Halligator said during one call. “Just remember that a sting worse than a bite.” And two weeks later, another voice he couldn’t recognize: “Sometimes people does go barefoot in the lagoon and these jangee eel does be sucking they toe and they don’t even know because they can’t feel anything. But the jangee sucking all the time. Drawing out blood, little by little.” Orbits couldn’t understand why the man was telling him this until he added, “If this don’t stop right now, we will put you in your proper place.” The tenor of the calls began to remind Orbits of the period when he had been mercilessly bu
llied, and so he began to respond in a manner he had fantasized about during that earlier period. Fatboy fall down! Fat to last months! The cannibals will like that! Eat out every single plum on the floor! You useless, Fatboy! He told them he was not afraid of threats and he would report the matter to the police if the calls continued. The latter drew laughter from the callers; Orbits then lied and said he had contacts higher up the chain. “I have higher than you,” one caller said after a while.

  “Mine still higher than yours,” Orbits replied.

  “Well I will climb higher.”

  “And you will fall harder.”

  These childish exchanges excited Orbits, and he began to look forward to the calls, rehearsing all the lies with which he would surround himself. He placed the phone closer to him and would snatch it the minute he got a call. One afternoon, while he was filing away the accounts, the phone rang. He picked it up hurriedly. “I have a notebook here to take a note of every single thing, so go ahead. Let me hear.”

  But the call was not from a crooked businessman; it was from Mona, who managed to say that his mother had fallen asleep while she was combing her hair and she wouldn’t awaken. He rushed to his car. When he got home, his mother was on the couch, her hands crossed over her chest and her eyes closed. She seemed asleep and her hands, when he felt them, were not cold. He called an ambulance and waited with Mona on the porch. Every two or three minutes or so she would return to the house and he would hear her saying, “You had a good sleep, Grandma? You better wake up now because you getting everybody worried.” Then she would come to the porch and watch the road for the ambulance. It came two hours later. A well-dressed attendant with eyebrows that that met in a disapproving salute asked, “Where the sick?” He waited for the other attendant, who was rummaging around and cursing in the vehicle. Eventually the other man dragged out an oxygen tank. The well-dressed attendant went to Orbits’ mother, felt her wrist and her neck, looked at his watch, opened one of her eyes, looked at his watch once more and said to the other attendant, “Carry back that in the ambulance.” To Orbits he said, “Who was the old lady? Mother? Well, she travelling.”