Is Fat Bob Dead Yet?

by Stephen Dobyns

  Sal turns from the mirror and pauses. Is he ready yet? Not quite. Opening a burgundy leather box on the dresser, he withdraws a yellow-gold curb-link bracelet; two yellow-gold hollow-wheat-chain necklaces, a yellow-gold solid Franco necklace, and, his favorite, a white-gold chain with a hundred one-carat diamonds. Then he adds a gold crucifix pendant with a gold rope-chain necklace, because Sal likes to go to Mass on Christmas and Easter. Is he done? Nope. Sal chooses from the box two yellow-gold nugget rings and a third nugget ring with a round diamond cluster. He is especially fond of nugget rings, because they remind him of brass knuckles. They are his trademark. Next he takes a gold pinkie ring with a large ruby, and then, last of the last, he removes his watch from a green leather box: a Rolex Oyster Perpetual GMT-Master II with an eighteen-karat yellow-gold case and an eighteen-karat yellow-gold bracelet and a sprinkling of diamonds, sapphires, and rubies. It jingles slightly and slips onto his wrist like a caress.

  Again Sal considers himself in the mirror. His jewelry glitters like artificial intelligence. He has rich tastes, which is why he got into trouble in Detroit. Though his position as a revenue audit supervisor came with a decent salary, Sal believed he deserved more, or at least that’s how it appears to us. This is a story we’ve heard a million times. We ask, “What would you like, young man? What would make you happy?” And the answer? “More, much more!”

  Coming down the stairs, Sal meets Céline in the living room. She wears a full-length red silk robe. Her feet are bare. Her black hair is piled up on her head.

  “How do I look?” asks Sal.

  Céline walks slowly around him. “No cuff links?”

  “I don’t feel like cuff links today. Nobody in New London wears cuff links.”

  “Why the ruby pinkie instead of the diamond?”

  “The diamond’s a little flashy. It’s more of a nighttime ring.”

  Céline put a finger to her lips; she’s deep in thought. “I know!” she cries. “You forgot your pen! Where’s your pen?”

  Sal snaps his fingers: a small, petulant gesture. He runs back upstairs. Moments later he returns. In one uplifted hand, he holds a Montegrappa St. Moritz Limited Edition Woods eighteen-karat-gold rollerball pen with which he likes to doodle on his monogrammed stationery in his almost-empty office. The body of the pen depicts skiers, winter trees, and deep snow.

  “Perfect,” says Céline.

  Sal heads for the door, pausing only to grab his black lambskin jacket from the closet. He’s ready to face the world: tallish, thinnish, and bedecked with gold. And where is he going, this paragon of sartorial elegance? Why, he is going to die.

  —

  Around eleven o’clock Connor sits at the stone bar of the Exchange, a bar on Bank Street. He waits for his hamburger with blue cheese, mushrooms, and tomatoes, along with sweet-potato fries. He drinks a Coke. The bar itself is made of gray stone and forms a large rectangle, about twenty feet on the longer sides, with rounded corners. The bartenders serve from within it. Connor sits on a high-backed stool on the right. To his left are large windows looking out onto Bank Street; in the back extends the broad patio facing the train tracks and the Thames.

  For the occasion Connor is dressed in a gray checked suit with a vest, and he wears his Bruno Maglis, because today he represents Bounty, Inc. and he’s making what Didi refers to as “pickup calls,” meaning that Connor drops by the dwellings of folks who are hesitant to trust their donations to Free Beagles from Nicotine Addiction, Inc. to the U.S. Mail. So he collects the money himself. For this he must be spruced up and somewhat elegant; he must be the clinching sentence to an enticing argument. And he must be charming. Of course, his elegance is nothing like Sal Nicoletti’s elegance, but it’s enough. The well-presented appearance of Connor and Sal brings to mind Ben Franklin’s remark: “Don’t judge men’s wealth by their Sunday duds.” But for some elegant illusionists, every day is Sunday.

  Connor pokes at the ice cubes in his Coke with a blue straw and puts a few wrinkles in his brow, connoting disquiet. Through his relatively short life, he could not be described as a worrier, but he worries today. His first worry concerns these pickup calls, about which Didi is maddeningly casual. The reason? They may end with a cop answering the door. That’s because the pickup represents the moment when the generous benefactor is balanced between “Is this a scam or is this not a scam?” As Didi has explained, “It hasn’t happened often, but it’s happened. That’s why you must look your best.” And since Connor at times doubts the veracity of Didi’s remarks, he tries to deconstruct the words “It hasn’t happened often” as he waits for his early lunch. This is one worry.

  Next he worries about Sal Nicoletti. Has Vasco sold the news that Sal is the wanted Dante Barbarella for what Vasco might call “a chunk of change”? We know that Vasco has denied knowing anything about Nicoletti, but just what does it mean when Vasco says, “I know nothing”? What’s his tone of voice? How is he drawing out his vowels and enunciating his consonants? As we’ve said, Connor isn’t a liar, but that’s because he’s a bad liar. Yes, he’s trying to get better. Recently he’s pulled off a few minor lies without blushing or having his eyes get all strange. But he’s a rookie. So his attempts to deconstruct the lies of others tend toward failure.

  His third worry, which may be a subsection of his first, concerns what will happen when the police throw open the door of the incorrectly assumed generous benefactor and Connor must explain that he is the lawfully employed representative of Free Beagles from Nicotine Addiction, Inc. Can he do it without falling to his knees and crying, I’m lying, I’m lying! Connor thinks not.

  This third worry leads to further worries. He worries about his nonrelation with Céline. He worries about how he looks at Eartha’s breasts. He worries about Vaughn’s strange remarks. He worries about paying his taxes or not paying his taxes, which would lead to additional exercises in falsehood. And he worries about his future.

  This is the trouble with worrying. It evolves from a verb to a noun. It morphs into the State of Worry, a location competitive in size with New Jersey, a place where thinking is synonymous with fretting. Worse, the worrier in the State of Worry soon transmogrifies into Worry itself. Just as Manny is Walking Disappointment, so Connor would become Walking Worry. Worry would become the center of his being, obliterating other personality traits and requiring a constant diet of small worries to stay alive, since the alternative to the State of Worry is death or expensive psychoanalysis. And this from Connor, who is generally not a worrier but worries that he will become one: a condition generated by his inability to lie. Compared to this, the weight of the world’s sins on the pope’s shoulders is nothing.

  Mercifully, Connor at this moment receives a slight bump from a man taking a seat on the stool to his right.

  “My fault, my fault!” says the man, eager to confess the obvious. He’s a bulky, dark-haired fellow with a red motorcycle tattooed on his left forearm.

  “No problem.” Connor didn’t see the man come in and realizes he must have entered through the back.

  “Glad to see that snow disappearing,” says the man. “How ’bout you?”

  “Sure am,” says Connor. “It’s nice today.”

  “Sure is.”

  Such introductory exchanges are like dogs sniffing one another on meeting for the first time. Significant content is negligible.

  “Fuckin’ snow makes it hard to ride. Slide all over the place.”

  Connor emits a knowing grunt, while seizing the chance to practice deceit. “I biked over the Rockies a few weeks ago. The easiest part was when the snow came up to the handlebars, because it gave me a cushion when I skidded out.”

  The other man grunts, a sound signifying impressed comprehension. “You bike a lot?”

  “That’s the sad part. Me and a buddy were out shooting pheasant. He hit one, and it bonked me in the head. Now I’ve got double vision. I need a straw to drink or I miss the glass. I tried to jump on my bike and fell to the sidewalk.”
>
  A waitress in a tight black tank top takes his order. At last the man says, “I’ve always liked pheasant.”

  “That’s another thing: the pheasant was full of buckshot. It broke four of my teeth. Now I can only eat soft foods like rare burgers.”

  “I’m a well-done guy myself,” says the man. “I hate blood.”

  The two men work on their cheeseburgers. Connor uses ketchup; the other man doesn’t. Thinking about Céline, Connor reasons that having sex with her is no more impossible than spontaneous human combustion, which means it’s possible.

  “What kind of bikes you ride?” asks the man.

  Knowing little about motorcycles, Connor is somewhat at a loss. “My brother’s a DEA agent. They seized a bunch of Harleys in boxes. He gave me a touring bike, and I put it together in my living room. I’ve got a third-floor walk-up, and I had a bitch of a time getting it downstairs to the street. What do you ride?”

  “I like Dynas myself: the FXDF with the twin-cam engine. Got a lot of them.”

  Often when a person lies, he or she feels scorn for the one who believes: the sucker, the dummy, the goof. But Connor feels an almost tender appreciation. After all, his lies have been accepted. The man has offered his trust.

  “By the way,” says Connor, sticking out his hand, “my name’s Connor.”

  The man offers a fist bump, requiring hurried revision on Connor’s part. Each man’s hand shows off shiny grease spots from their burgers, and a few are passed between them when they touch.

  “The name’s Bob.” He tosses a twenty on the bar. “See you around.” Heading toward the back, he stops to speak to the waitress, who laughs and looks at Connor.

  The biker has a bowlegged walk: vaguely tough-guy, vaguely ape. Moments later comes the sound of a motorcycle being started. The energetic reverberation of its 103-cubic-inch twin-cam ruffles the smooth surface of Connor’s Coke.

  Connor gives the waitress a twenty and asks for change. “I liked that guy. Was he saying something about me?”

  She laughs as she counts out a ten, a five, and five ones. “Fat Bob? Yeah, he said you’re the worst liar he ever met. He said your eyes sort of rotated like. Poor guy wiped out the other day outside on the street, piled his bike into a dump truck. Got cut into lots of pieces. But it was his buddy instead. Right now cops are looking for him. Other guys also. It was nice of him to drop by, all things considered… .”

  THIRTEEN

  Now we again come to one of those troublesome sections, by which we mean requiring special care. Sal Nicoletti, formerly known as Dante Barbarella, has gone downtown after his Wednesday-morning toilette. He runs several errands, but eventually he reaches his small office on Bank Street. He drives the mottled dark cherry Chevrolet Caprice, which has seen better days. At each bump his muffler scrapes the pavement, and there’s a wobble to the right front wheel. Sal hates the car, but it has its advantages. For instance, he sees it as modest, which is a virtue he’s been asked to demonstrate these days: modesty and humility. This is hard work for anyone whose cologne is called Égoïste Platinum.

  Sal’s former car back home was a custom ’51 Mercury—chopped, decked, nosed, frenched, magged, with a Cadillac grille and painted a glossy scarlet with black pin-striping. Regrettably, it was blown up by his former friends, and all he could salvage was the chrome die-cast skull suicide knob with ruby-red eye sockets, which he keeps in his sock drawer in Detroit.

  He parks behind a black Yukon Denali with smoked windows, which, if the world were fair, would be Sal’s car and not belong to an undeserving stranger. He gets out but doesn’t bother to lock the door. If you stole his Caprice, you’d be doing him a favor. He pauses to admire the Denali and then walks quickly to the street door of a two-story brick building, enters, and hurries up the stairs to his office.

  If you guessed that Sal has reached the same building that contains Marco Santuzza’s office, you’d be correct, except that Sal’s office is in the back and he can look out over the river. But views for Sal are just distractions. Put him in a room with drawn shades and he wouldn’t mind a bit. The office’s main disadvantages are the train tracks and, more specifically, the forty trains that go back and forth each day and blast their horns. This is an important detail.

  Sal intends to make some calls and send some e-mails. He’s sick of living in New London and wants to be moved someplace else. He’s sick of Céline, and he’s sick of his rented kids. So every day he calls his handlers to complain. Why can’t they send him to Miami, a civilized place where it’s also warm?

  Now we go back outside. It’s too bad that Sal couldn’t take a closer look at the Denali, but the smoked windows constitute a problem. He assumed that the Denali was empty, but, as with many other of his judgments big and small, he’s wrong.

  All at once the back door opens and a figure gets out. We might know him, or we might not. His face is hidden by his hooded sweatshirt, which is pulled down to his eyebrows. But he is big and tall and quick. He crosses diagonally to the corner of Golden Street, steps into the alcove of an empty store, and waits.

  A minute passes, and then the front passenger door of the Denali opens and a second man gets out. We don’t know him, but along with the rest of his clothing—khakis and a dark jacket—he wears a gray fedora and Ray-Ban sunglasses with thick black frames. Possibly we might recognize the driver, but the front door is open just a second and we see only shadows. In a better world, we might knock on the door and inquire, but we lack the nerve.

  The man in the fedora goes to the door of the two-story building that Sal entered and climbs the stairs. He wears black Adidas Samoa sneakers, and we can’t hear a thing. He makes as much noise as a faint sniffle. He passes Marco Santuzza’s empty office, proceeds down the hall, pauses at Sal’s door, and listens. He hears some traffic from the street, maybe a Harley, but no more. Now the man looks at his watch. Seconds pass. He tilts his head to listen. Ahh, a train is coming. It’s the Acela Express to Boston. The man waits a few more seconds; then he quickly opens Sal’s door and steps inside.

  Sal looks up with an expression of irritation. He means to say, Who the fuck are you? Get the fuck out of here! But between the thought and the articulation of the thought, the man raises a small black pistol—it looks like a Walther PPK—and puts a .32 caliber bullet in the center of Sal’s forehead. It is the same model pistol that Hitler used to commit suicide, though this particular model was made in Maine. We don’t hear the gunshot; the Acela is making a racket as it prepares to stop in New London. For a fellow like our friend in the fedora, planning is everything.

  Sal, or in death maybe he’d like to be called Dante, leans back in his swivel chair, and we see a modest S-curve of blood curl down his forehead. Briefly it gets lost in his thick black eyebrows, then emerges to trickle down his nose, pauses at the tip, and drops onto Sal’s white silk shirt. Most of the damage exists at the back of Sal’s head, but we don’t want to look at that. The red mess splattered on the wall tells us enough.

  As the man in the fedora approaches the desk, he takes a red plastic rose with a short green stem from his jacket pocket, and with a little fiddling he inserts it into the bullet hole in Sal’s forehead. He steps back, tilts his head, and appraises his work. Not quite satisfied, he leans forward and adjusts the flower to create a symmetry of petals on the left and right sides. There, he’s got it. He tucks the small black pistol back into his waistband and walks to the door. Did we say he wears gloves? He wears gloves.

  —

  Now the troublesome section begins. Directly across Bank Street in a second-floor office is a psychotherapist who at the moment leans back in his chair, makes a tent with his fingers, and rests the tent gently in the area above his heart. He’s bored. His patient, or client as they’re sometimes called, sits in a comfortable armchair turned slightly away from the desk and describes an aspect of his peculiar predilection in a monotonous drone. This has taken the first half hour of a two-hour session, and the psychotherapist is not o
nly bored, he’s sleepy. But at least he has a window looking out on the street. Without it his claustrophobia would send him loping from the office. So he has seen Sal Nicoletti park his Chevrolet Caprice behind the Yukon Denali and head for the door to the stairway. The sun is bright, and what is noticeable about Sal is how the light sparkles upon his gold chains and bracelet, also the nugget rings and gold Rolex watch. But the eelskin boots are also of interest, as well as the shiny black hair and his small stature. If one is truly bored, even an ant climbing a wall can become fascinating.

  The psychotherapist has seen this man with the shiny black hair a few times before, and each time the man’s glittering chains and rings have drawn his attention. In fact, the gold is so noticeable it’s as if the gold were carrying the man and not the man carrying the gold. But the boots and hair are competitive, as far as getting noticed is concerned. In fact, the polished heels of the boots are the last the psychotherapist sees of Sal as he disappears through the door.

  The psychotherapist’s name is of no significance. He’ll be with us only a short time. But we know some readers like to write down characters’ names as they hurry along, and so, with them in mind, we reveal that his name is Dr. Hubert Goodenough. He’s forty-five, and over the years when he introduces himself to a stranger, the person will often respond by saying, “And are you?” Meaning, of course, “good enough.” This has happened a hundred times and is followed by laughter, the wiseacre assuming that he or she is the first person to spot the joke. Dr. Goodenough will politely say, “Ha, ha, ha.” And his laughter is laughter in the same way that toothpaste forced through a dirty sock is toothpaste. In fact, he’d like to take the wiseacre by the throat and shout that the name Goodenough was originally Godinot, a Saxon name meaning “first settler,” and that it can be traced back to tenth-century England, which is to say the name’s important and not just a joke for the unimaginative. But Dr. Goodenough’s tormentors could give a flying fuck, as the late Sal Nicoletti might say, while the self-discipline to remain silent despite unpleasant stimuli has taken the doctor years of hard work, for statistics show that many psychotherapists end their careers as mental patients.