by Tim Davys
I chopped a cucumber in silence. A vacuum was growing in my chest, and I still did not understand it, but with each day it got worse and worse. When I ran, I would stumble for no reason, and when I did strength training, my heart started racing. Never before had I had problems with my heart.
The following day, as I was sparring with Rhinoceros, I got so dizzy I was forced to sit down in the ring. Dad interrupted and took me to the dressing room, where he sat me on a bench and got me to hold my head between my knees.
“Competition nerves,” he said. “I know how it feels. I was the same way. There’s no danger. It’s only a matter of not pressuring yourself. You’re working too hard. Your body can’t take it. Take the rest of the day and do something else. Don’t think about boxing.”
“But what if I can’t do better, Dad?”
“Of course you can,” he answered. “You and I both know that.”
“I’ll never be able to handle Roothter.”
“You won’t know that until you’ve tried.”
That made me angry. I was suddenly tired of his clichés, of his tired excuses. He knew just as well as I did that it was pointless. I would never be the boxer he had dreamed of. And whose dream was it anyway? I got up. I was eighteen, and for the first time in my life I felt rebellion awakening.
“But I have tried, Dad! Thince I was twelve!”
“It’s too much right now, Gary. I understand that.”
But he did not understand at all. Why didn’t he say the way it was? I screamed at him. I demanded that he look me in the eyes and admit that I had failed. I wanted to hear him say that all the expectations he’d had came to naught. But he didn’t say anything.
I left him in the dressing room, and ran from Fresco. It was an eighteen-year-deep dam that broke, and it would prove to be hard to repair. Dad came home with food in the evening and thought we would prepare it together. But even then I realized that wrath was easier to give in to than forgiveness. I was still furious, and I let him know it. I ran in and out of the kitchen and screamed and shouted.
“You’re making too big a deal out of this, Gary,” he said.
“Too big a deal?” I screamed. “You pawned the whole apartment! You thold Grandpa’th painting!”
That hit home. Dad fell silent and stared at me. He was standing with a spatula in one paw and a saltshaker in the other.
“Yeth, I know!” I screamed in triumph.
“I only wanted to . . .” he said quietly, “give us every opportunity.”
“Uth?” I exploded.
Then I screamed for almost a quarter of an hour without catching my breath. There were new and old injustices that were just as ridiculous as they were trivial. My dad had never done me harm, and I blush when I think about all I spewed out of myself. At last I ran into my room and closed the door. Not a single time that evening did Dad raise his voice or try to defend himself against all the invented accusations.
I never went to the tournament. The decision crowned my late, pathetic teenage revolt. I had calculated that this would hurt him the most. I stayed away from my first, and only, lottery-drawn match in the district boxing championship in Sors. I sat at a snack bar a few blocks away and felt the anger bubbling in my chest. I was feeling endlessly sorry for myself, I hated Dad for his dishonesty, and for the way he had manipulated me. To think that I hadn’t seen it earlier! He used me to live out his own teenage dream. If he had seen me for who I really was, I reasoned, he would never have signed me up for the district championship. I had no talent at boxing but he refused to accept that. No, it would have to be this way. Dad stood waiting at Fresco in my ring corner, and the tough Conny Rooster won his match, not on a KO but on a WO, a Walk Over.
When I came home in the evening I expected a scolding. That was the least I deserved. But Dad was waiting in the kitchen with my favorite dish on the table, and even before I had hung up my jacket he said that he understood, that I had done the right thing. You should never go into the ring if it doesn’t feel right. Boxing was not a sport you could fake, he said.
“I understand you, Gary, and I feel like a bad father for having driven you too hard. I hope you can forgive me.”
I should forgive him? There he stood, with an apron over his belly, financially ruined after having paid Nick Rhinoceros to match his good-for-nothing son, who didn’t even have spine enough to show up at his only match, even though I knew what it meant to him. And he was asking me for forgiveness?
It was suffocating. It was humiliating beyond the bounds of reasonableness. I could not handle the shame that overwhelmed me, and quickly I pulled on my jacket again and ran from home. The hatred I felt was so intense, so steely, that I could have cut apart any reality whatsoever with it. I had only myself to blame, and that made it even worse. I decided never to return home again, and then my life fell apart. I think of it as being like dominos that fell against each other, impossible to stop—and I’m still living in their rumbling echo.
Domino 1: I run away from home.
Domino 2: I move in with Charlie.
Domino 3: I get a job as a dishwasher at Zeke’s, which turns my day upside down.
Domino 4: I discover the nightlife that introduced me to stuffed animals who Dad would have warned me about.
Domino 5: I move out from Charlie, who only nags about Dad, and move in with a horse who deals.
Domino 6: I drink too much.
Domino 7: To get money for liquor and to get away from the horse, who has fallen in love with me, I start hanging out with Riccardo and the others.
Domino 8: I see Dad at Piazza di Bormio.
I have described the nights in the darkness in the trash rooms, when I lay awake hour after hour without settling down. At last I realized how closely related hatred and love could be. Unfortunately it was too late.
When early one morning I left my sleeping companions and went home to Dad on mold green Rue d’Uzès, I was filled with my own fantasies about how we would fall into each other’s arms, crying and laughing in turn. I could see it so clearly. I was sure that he would accept the apologies. He was perhaps the best stuffed animal who ever existed in Sors.
When I came home—it was late in the afternoon—the apartment was empty and quiet. I did not see the dust bunnies on the floor in the kitchen. I ran straight to Fresco, because I assumed Dad was there, and Charlie stared at me as if I were a ghost. I greeted him happily. It was as if the air in the reception area stopped moving. The stuffed animals stiffened and waited.
Charlie told me.
Two days earlier the Chauffeurs had unexpectedly come and fetched my dad, Harry S. Bulldog, in the middle of the day as he stood on the cricket field instructing his pupils at the school. Dad had not even turned sixty-five, and yet the red pickup came and took him, the way they make old and torn animals make way for new and young ones.
I loved my father. I was the greatest disappointment of his life. But I was also the greatest love of his life. He never had an opportunity to tell me that. And I never had an opportunity to say that he didn’t need to say it; I knew it anyway.
The Arm, continued
If I didn’t want to see Fox Antonio Ortega burn up, be thrown out the window, or cut into pieces and sent back to Dragon Aguado Molina in a couple of crumpled envelopes, it was time for me to intervene. I took a few rapid steps forward to the gangster boss, bowed, and whispered in his ear.
“I know who
he ith. The fathteth runner I’ve theen on the track. Out of hith mind, but fatht. Pleath, let me have him. Jutht a week? Pleath, pleath?”
Octopus Callemaro slowly twisted his head and looked me in the eyes.
“Fast, you say?”
“The fathteth I’ve theen,” I affirmed.
This made Octopus smile. Perhaps because he was amused by my pronunciation of “fast,” or else because he liked the idea of letting Dragon’s emissary work for us.
“Gary Vole thinks he can convert you,” Octopus said to Ortega. “What kind of animal are you under all those clothes?”
“My name is Fox Antonio Ortega,” the fox replied.
“Vole thinks he can use you, Fox.” Callemaro nodded. “Vole, you have a few days. At the same time, the rest of us can think of other possibilities for our failed suitor.”
Once again loud laughter came from the stuffed animals standing and sitting around the octopus, and I nudged the fox hard so that he understood he should leave while there was still time.
You’re theriouth?” I asked.
I had shoved Ortega to the outer rooms, and now we were sitting on the floor close together in front of one of the windows facing west. We spoke quietly, so that no one could hear. Mollisan Town was sparkling and glistening below us; the city seemed to continue all the way to the horizon. It was a view before which you could not tell a lie.
“Beatrice is the most beautiful stuffed animal I’ve ever seen,” Fox answered, looking me deep in the eyes. “I must have her. Can you help me?”
“You’re crazy,” I said. “Did you think that Octoputh would give you an arm? Jutht like that?”
“I don’t know what I thought,” he admitted. “But if you don’t ask, you’ll never know.”
I shook my head. His naiveté was so overwhelming I didn’t know whether I should be furious or teary-eyed.
But I hadn’t lied to Octopus, I knew that Ortega could be of use, and the next evening we took him out with us: me, the tuna, and the ape. The plan was not born until later in the week, but perhaps my subconscious was a step ahead? Competing for an invitation to Octopus’s innermost room was part of our daily life, something we all strove for, just as obviously as we ate when we were hungry and slept when we were tired.
The tuna and the ape complained, of course. We were used to one another, and it was seldom fortunate to expand a trio to a quartet. At the same time I knew something they didn’t.
We specialized in armored-car transports. The vehicles had alarms and guards, but in many places in Sors it was impossible to drive up to the depository. The streets were torn up, the alleys narrow, trash and car bodies were in the way. We attacked when the courier was on his way from the depot back to the vehicle on foot. We had our routine, and it wasn’t particularly sophisticated. The tuna got down on the ground somewhere along the path of the guards, as if he were one of the many down-and-out homeless animals, while the ape and I sneaked up from behind. We shoved the guard, who turned toward us, giving the tuna free rein from the other direction. If we were able to overcome the guard, it was the ape’s task to grab the loot and run away, as neither the tuna nor I was a runner. Three times out of four we failed, either because the security company used two or more guards on foot, which kept us from attacking, or else because the ape got caught when he tried to get away. Then the only thing to do was to let go of the loot and save yourself. But one out of four attempts was good enough to keep us alive and satisfy Callemaro.
With Fox Antonio Ortega on our team, the odds changed. I will always remember the first time the tuna and ape realized what the fox could do. Violet Calle Coleglada was long and winding, and went over high hills and down below intersecting streets. It was bordered by derelict apartment buildings from the sixties and seventies, with boarded-up windows and caved-in roofs, sitting side by side with stone buildings from the previous turn of the century, where far too many stuffed animals often lived in far too little space. We knew exactly where the ambush should take place, and we took our positions. Everything proceeded as usual; we overpowered the guard and tore the bag away from him.
Then we gave it to Ortega.
At the same moment all four of us—the tuna, the ape, and I, but also the overpowered guard—were transformed into an audience that could do nothing but be impressed and amazed by something we had never seen before. Fox Antonio Ortega’s acceleration capacity exceeded our ability to understand.
The ape and tuna stared in bewilderment.
“I’m on his team,” the tuna said at last.
I agreed. His was the only team you wanted to be on.
Fox’s reputation grew quickly in Octopus’s house in the radio tower, and after only a week or two he got to move in and sleep with us in the inner rooms. There was no vacant bed, but the wall-to-wall carpets were more comfortable and cleaner than the best mattresses out there.
By chance Fox chose a place by a window that overlooked South Sors General Grammar School. There he neatly folded up his sleeping blanket during the day, and spread it out over himself at night.
Every evening we stood looking out toward the grammar school we both had attended. I don’t know what Fox was thinking, but for me it was a great experience to stand next to him by the window.
The last years I lived at home, Dad would talk for hours about Fox Antonio Ortega, the pupil who would crush all existing school records. I heard the love in Dad’s voice, but I think there was also an undercurrent of concealed envy. A longing to have had such a talent himself, or at least see some of it in me.
Fox Antonio Ortega had been Dad’s great joy during the last years of his life. If there was a heaven from which Harry S. Bulldog looked down at me, fate had given me a unique opportunity to restore some sort of respect.
After three weeks out on the streets with Fox and the others, I knew how I could help Ortega get his octopus arm. I was no strategist or psychologist, but Callemaro was no complicated personality either. I had already made sure from the start that Fox kept his big, ungainly coat on day and night, because I sensed that his appearance would be our trump card. The Octopus’s vanity was legendary: He was obsessed by everything beautiful, and as long as Fox kept his cap pulled down over his face we had a surprise waiting.
And as I suspected, Fox Antonio Ortega was the one Callemaro invited to dinner in the innermost of the inner rooms in the month to come. No one could compare with the successes Ortega had had.
The evening before the dinner with Octopus Callemaro, I went through the plan with Fox Antonio Ortega. At first he thought no plan was needed. When I succeeded in convincing him of the opposite, it made him nervous. He asked over and over again about the slightest details, and I answered with endless patience. Fox Ortega had, as an attentive reader has already noticed, a limited learning capacity, but I was betting on the power of repetition.
During the appetizer and entrée, I instructed, he should simply listen. I knew what was expected, for even I had on a few occasions been given the honor of dining with Octopus. The ebony-colored gangster boss needed an audience, listeners, and he did not stop talking once he got going. The well-known vanity took various expressions, but the need for affirmation was constant and insatiable.
“Then it’th time,” I said to Ortega. “Do ath we thaid, and you’ll get your arm at latht.”
Fox nodded. The most fascinating thing, I think in retrospect, is that he never, not once, questioned why I was helping him. He took my cour
age and my loyalty for granted, as if his love for Beatrice Cockatoo was everyone’s concern.
Fox was shown into the innermost room and sat down to dinner as the Evening Storm picked up. The mood, Ortega thought, was magical—the stillness, the darkness. A table with a white cloth, heavy silverware, and candles whose flames danced dramatically in the ornate candleholders. Outside the window, high up in the black sky, the moon looked like a white, endless hole. Fox Antonio Ortega nervously placed his napkin on his lap. His filthy coat stood out as even filthier in contrast to the white linen. He kept his cap on, per my instructions.
The boss made his entry along with the appetizer. As usual, he had his elegant dinner jacket on and, in honor of the evening, wore a top hat.
“I’ve heard about you, you joker,” Octopus began, occupying the chair so that it completely disappeared under his eight limbs. “You come up here, make fun of my arms, and I thought about killing you on the spot. But it was lucky I refrained. Nobody runs like you, they say. Nobody, except possibly me. I don’t know if anyone has told you about when I ran from the giraffes? It must have been fifteen, twenty years ago. This is what happened . . .”
And then he was off.
Fox Antonio Ortega followed my advice and listened attentively to Octopus’s bragging while the appetizer was served and taken away, while the entrée was served and taken away, and as the white wine with scallops was replaced by a thicker red wine with the beef filet. Fox did not drink anything, but raised his glass at regular intervals so that Octopus would not harbor suspicions. The gangster boss himself drank without reservation. Dessert was served, vanilla ice cream with warm chocolate sauce, and during one of Octopus’s pauses for breath Ortega stood up unexpectedly.
“Excuse me,” he said, “but it’s extremely warm in here. May I take off my coat?”
Without waiting for an answer, Fox let the large, heavy coat fall to the floor at the same time as he took off the cap. Underneath he had on a white T-shirt and a pair of worn jeans from which his long, bushy tail stuck out. The Octopus fell silent for the first time during dinner. Mute, he stared at the exquisitely stunning fox, who had been hidden so long in his filthy coat. The gold-strewn fur, the eyes of onyx and the shimmering nose, the proud ears and the majestic tail; it was a surprise for which Octopus was unprepared.