Fatboy Fall Down Read online

  High school brought other types of anxieties. He gazed longingly at the pretty girls, noticed how they flirted demurely with the boys, hitching up their skirts and looking up so their eyes appeared rounder, the way their expressions soured whenever he approached, their relief when he walked past them. Even when he transferred to another private school, he imagined the students murmuring among themselves, “Fatboy fall down.” In each new school, he looked around for limpers, lispers, stutterers, other fatties, boys with missing toes, girls with extra fingers, those who were cross-eyed or rabbit-eared — anyone who could take the focus off him. In the aftermath of these moments, struck with guilt and ashamed that he would wish his torment on others, he began to get a whiff of the sly, conniving cowardice of the weak and the picked-upon. He suspected the other misfits had likely felt the same way about him and had held off on any friendship for the same reason: they would just make a bigger target.

  Maybe they, too, were sustained by little fantasies, he thought. One afternoon, a boy everyone called Sixtoe Changoe, who claimed that his extra toes gave him the ability to land on his feet like Beast from the X-Men comics, was seized by a group and dragged to a mango tree that inclined above a shallow muddy ravine. There he was swung like a bag of potatoes by four boys and let loose on the ravine ten feet beneath. He landed on his head, and when the boys saw his limp body floating downstream, they ran away. He reappeared in school two days later with a missing tooth and a deep gash on his cheek where he had hit a rock. For a short while, his disfigurement was forgiven while the boys speculated as to how he had managed to survive. There was even some grudging admiration. One boy said, “Six toes and a mashup face. Maybe he have some kind of catfish gill too.” When Orbits heard the talk, he wondered if he would finally be accepted if he floated down from the school’s roof or one of the telephone poles. But he could never extend this illusion because his fantasy had always been floating from rather than towards everyone.

  Whenever he was struck by this particular thought, he was reminded of the teacher’s comment that his father wished he were far away. He made an effort to please the older man, listening to his dinner table conversation, which was mostly about teeth. Although his father spoke in his usual solemn manner, his mother laughed at all his descriptions, and when she eventually got up to clear the table, his father would still be mumbling about ownway teeth, blocky donkey teeth, pointed guabeen teeth and gums that had hardened into an enamel consistency. One evening Orbits heard him murmuring about a man called Gramophone.

  “Why was he given that name?” Orbits asked.

  His father replied absent-mindedly, “Because he have only one teeth in the middle of his mouth like a gramophone needle. But he don’t want to pull that out so I have to make a denture around it.”

  “You could do that?”

  From the kitchen, his mother said, “Like Orbits following you in the profession. Just now everybody will call him Swallows Junior.”

  Orbits briefly considered the name and decided it was associated too much with eating and weight. “I prefer Orbits,” he said softly.

  His brother came out from his room to say, “Quack and Son. You could put that on the sign outside the office.”

  “Hush, boy,” his mother said, chuckling.

  Two months later, Orbits was apprenticed in the dental lab. He was horrified by the clamps and rusty pliers and little mallets that looked like medieval torture implements, by the clinging odour of resins and crazy glue, by the bawling of the women as his father tugged and grunted and the bloody wads of cotton they spat from their swollen cheeks into the bin. The dentures his father boiled in a big pot resembled frantic crabs, and Orbits imagined them unexpectedly crawling around the mouths of their new owners, pinching and biting. One morning, he saw his father bent over a woman rocked back on the chair, her eyes huge unblinking balls. His father’s foot was between her legs which were twisting in unison with his wrists. “Hand me the pliers, quick-sharp,” he said to Orbits. But Orbits was frozen by the sight of the woman’s legs now flapping with pain and imprisoning his father’s foot. Afterwards, his father told him, “Boy, you have to come down to earth soon. You not good in school and not good in this business. What will happen to you? What is it you really want to do?”

  Orbits briefly considered all the professions he associated with floating, but he recalled the derision of his various teachers when he had mentioned astronaut, pilot and explorer. He thought of a teacher in primary school, a blue-black man with a bald head so smooth it appeared malleable. The teacher had told him in a reflective voice, “An explorer, eh? Take care you don’t land up in some jungle. The cannibals will like that. Fat to last a whole month.” The class had exploded and Orbits, as always, had headed straight to the roadside vendor when the bell rang. The only people who displayed anything other than contempt were the vendors who began slapping their doubles in place whenever he approached. “Tell me when to stop, Fatboy.” The comforting experience of the oily doubles gathering saliva, fluffing out, trailing down his throat and filling his stomach temporarily displaced his shame. He usually asked the vendors to stop after six or seven doubles.

  One day a visitor to his father’s lab, a dark-skin man with a Bermuda hat and a yellow floral shirt, told Orbits, “You have good teeth. You know how I guess that?” Orbits began to smile but the man added, “Your belly tell me that. You must have good teeth to pitch all that material down there.” Later, the visitor mentioned to Orbits’ father a business he was beginning. “Lots of tourists just walking around in short pants and slippers like if they lost. In the meantime, it have all these wonderful sights all over the place.”

  Later that night, the father repeated some of these sights to his family. Botanic gardens brimming with exotic plants. Parks with waterslides and picnic sheds overlooking streams filled with leaping fishes. Bird hiking trails filled with musical surprises. Beaches where the leatherback turtles lumbered like behemoths in the nights to lay their eggs. “The man make me want to see these places with my very own eyes,” the father said.

  “That man just showing off,” Orbits’ brother, who had grown up to be a remarkably critical teenager, said. “Nobody going to waste money to see a place with only rubbish and dead dogs.”

  “I think they keep these places clean for the foreigners,” the mother said. “Just like how they push all these people from the shanty town behind the big wall whenever it have some fancy event.”

  “I would like to work with that man.” Orbits was not sure why he made the bold statement. He was seventeen years and eleven months old and he had no discernible talent. His brother, the former feeder, was the opposite of him in every way. He was forthright, confident, censorious and thin. His mother claimed it was the breast milk, and she doted upon him in a way that made Orbits, who could not recall any similar treatment, wonder if he had been adopted.

  The brother said, “None of these places up in the clouds, you know.”

  “Don’t say these things, Starboy,” the mother said, trying to hide her mirth.

  “The man will be coming next week for his teeth. Five uppers and six lowers. He asked for the two front teeth to be bigger than the others to take the pressure off his jaw. I will talk to him. Rabbit is his name.”

  ***

  And so Orbits became a tour guide. The first week he was sent to the swamp. The boatman said, “Watch all the overhanging branches for snakes. And don’t hang your hand outside the boat. The alligators will like that. We going full steam ahead in search of the fabled pink flamingoes.” Two hours later, he said in a grumbling voice to the passengers, none of whom were tourists, “These birds getting too smart. Is like they playing a cat and mouse game with humans now. Laughing at us. I have a good mind to wring the neck of the next flamingo I see.” By then Orbits and everyone else were scratching the mosquito bumps on their bodies.

  When the riverboat was docked, the boatman asked Orbits, �
��What kind of tour guide you is? You didn’t say one single word for the entire trip.”

  Orbits thought of what he could have said. The sun is hot. The water is muddy. The mosquitoes and bugs must have eaten the flamingoes. The boatman wouldn’t shut up. But as usual, he said nothing.

  On the second trip, he improved to one utterance. “The lady vomiting,” he shouted to the boatman.

  “Lady, please lean over and vomit in the water. Not in my clean boat.”

  “What about the halligators?” the husband asked.

  “Halligator? What is a halligator? I never see one of them in my entire life.” His sarcasm spluttered as the woman issued a stream of green matter. Later, as Orbits was cleaning the boat of vomit and mud, the boatman told him, “Mahatma Gandhi rightly say that human animals far worse than animal humans.” Orbits was certain he had just made that up just as he had invented all the ibises and flamingoes and golden ducks that somehow managed to remain hidden during the trips. When Orbits was finished with his cleaning, the boatman told him, “You have to give these people hope. These people don’t care if they don’t see the thing they come to see once it have a small chance that the thing they come to see is not the thing they didn’t come to see. You understand? Why you shaking you head for? As Mahatma Gandhi rightly say, the two eyes of a doubting man could never meet at the same spot because they forever travelling in opposite direction.”

  “He really say that?”

  “What the hell you asking me? You think I is a liar? Why you don’t go and ask him yourself.”

  “I think he dead,” Orbits said timidly. “A long time ago.”

  The boatman shouted to a group gathering for a trip. “Everybody listen to this. This fatboy here gone and kill Mahatma Gandhi.” They began to laugh, and Orbits felt a familiar shame bubbling through his fat. The mangrove looked like spindly limbed beasts snickering at him.

  During the following trips, he kept his eyes on the clouds. They seemed so soft and malleable and fluffy. He watched as the furry bits joined and became something new and how at the end of the day, a little portion seemed to catch fire. He thought of a big pot hidden behind a curtain and frying all sorts of delicacies. At the end of one trip, the boatman told him in a low voice, “I notice you looking up in the sky whole day and I have to tell you that is not really bird season now. Is mosquito and sandfly season. If you didn’t figure that out, then you is a bigger backside than I first thought. Furthermore, you not doing your job properly. I tired tell you that every time we pass a bend, you must shout out, ‘Ibis ahoy.’ And when people start watching tell them it dive in a hole for no rhyme and reason. Tell them it shy. Tell them it pregnant. Tell them any damn thing you want but tell them something.” The following week, they came across a snake sliding across an overhanging branch. “The fabled swamp cobra,” the boatman said.

  “A cobra? In this place? It don’t have any cobra here. Who put a cobra here?”

  Orbits felt he had to say something because the speaker, a man with drooping whiskers and eyes, was looking at him sleepily. “It look like a horsewhip,” he said softly.

  The boatman glanced darkly at him. At the end of the trip, he threw his cigarette into the swampy water and lit another. “I don’t think you cut out for this job. You is just ballast. How much you weighing? Two hundred? Two fifty?”

  “I don’t know.” Orbits was close to tears and he turned away to clean the opposite end of the boat so the boatman wouldn’t notice.

  Later that evening, he stopped at a street vendor and ordered three doubles. He moved to another vendor and asked for a shark and bake sandwich and a sea moss drink. He topped off the sandwich with a six-inch wedge of pone, a sticky cassava cake. When he was finished, he bought a calabash mango and a bag of governor plums that he ate in the taxi. As always, the fullness in his belly spread throughout his body and displaced the shame and uncertainty. The next morning, he decided to fortify himself by stopping at the street vendors before he arrived in the swamp. An hour later, he felt the undigested food churning with the boat’s rocking. He heard the boatman saying, “That bird over they is the famous Canadian goose. They build for winters.”

  “So what they doing in this hot swamp?” a man with his lower lip hanging over his chin asked. The man’s protruding lower lip made him appear short-tempered and erratic.

  “Vacation,” the boatman said testily.

  “You think maybe one of them tourist leave a pair behind and they breed here?” A short chubby man with his arms clasped tightly around a frightened girl asked.

  “They have wings. They does fly,” the boatman said abruptly as if he wanted to finish the conversation.

  Orbits wished the trip would end. The muddy water and the acrid aroma of the swamp added to his nausea. He heard someone saying, “If you ask me is a ordinary common duck.”

  “Time to go back,” the boatman said. He turned the boat suddenly and Orbits was flung to the side. When he got up, he vomited on an old woman. The woman, who was loaded with gold bracelets and who had been badgered by her husband into making the trip, was gripping the sides of the boat nervously when Orbits’ vomit landed on her head.

  At the end of the trip, the boatman displayed a surprising equanimity. He delivered a rambling account of Mahatma Gandhi’s allergy to salt and his periods of fasting during which he was joined by Richard Attenborough and Ben Kingsley. Orbits had already figured out that following each trip, the boatman drank liberally from a bottle of Puncheon rum, so he listened quietly. His belly was grumbling again and as the boatman added other notables to the fast, Orbits was forced to rush away. The last words he heard from the boatman were a familiar assessment: “You don’t belong here, Fatboy. You useless. Go and learn some fat people trade. Making basket or something. Tailoring. Selling toolum.”

  That evening for the first time, he passed the street vendors straight. And later in the evening, as he stared at the bowls of fried plantain and curried goat and at the aloo pies and other oily delicacies his mother usually cooked for dinner, he felt his queasiness returning. “What happen, Orbits? You not feeling well or what?” his mother asked.

  Orbits continued staring at the food.

  Starboy said, “He probably filled up at one of these nasty doubles place.”

  “I hope you didn’t pick up anything from the swamp. All these mosquitoes could be spreading dengue and Ebola and leper and god knows what else.”

  The father flicked away a piece of gristle caught in his dentures. “This swamp work don’t suit you, boy. I will talk to Mr. Rabbit and tell him to send you some other place.”

  And that was how Orbits landed in the caves after seven months in the swamp. The swamp tours were undertaken mostly by bored couples and men trying to work out their hangovers and people who wanted to escape the bustle of the cities for an hour or so. But the cave tours were filled with schoolchildren whose detour there was part of a trip that involved the soft drink factories and the botanic gardens and the zoo. They were rowdy and rude and Orbits’ job was to meet them at the bus parking area, about a half-mile downhill, and escort them to the caves. They were always accompanied by one or two teachers who constantly shouted to the children about running ahead and who, once they got into the caves, lost control entirely.

  The crystallized limestone caves were filled with slushy water and the chinks and pockets between the jagged stalagmites were teeming with hidden life. The boys and girls scampered around, pelting the bats and oilbirds and squealing when they flew too close. Eventually, the children were forced out not through the bawling of the teachers but because of the bat guano. On their way down to the bus, they were all peaceful and subdued from inhaling the noxious dust. Orbits discovered two serious fears while deep in the caves: first, he was claustrophobic, and second, he was afraid of creatures flapping about in the dark. These phobias grew by the day. But there was another transformation taking place, one that
he had fantasized about all his life. This change had begun on his last day at the swamp when, overcome by the effect of the rocking on the oily street food in his belly, he had vomited on a passenger’s head. That nausea never left him, and it was compounded by the queasiness induced by the bat guano. He realized that street food — greasy, salty, fatty — intensified the feeling while fruits lessened it somewhat. So entirely by accident, he fell into the habit of healthy eating.

  The fat melted and it was quite dramatic. His mother noticed and pestered him about diseases and routinely examined his neck for bat bites. She extended her examination to his hands and shoulders when Starboy said that only vampire bats from movies chose the neck. His father said, “The boy passing through some sort of tabanca, Mamoose. Just now he will get back nice and roly-poly.”

  During the trek to the cave, Orbits felt his body loosening as if the blood vessels, bones and tendons, imprisoned for so long by layers of lard, had sprung free. Once, he had been forced into a wide-legged gunfighter’s walk to prevent chafing on his inner thighs, but now his steps were longer and occasionally he surprised himself by nimbly stepping over a crevice or boulder rather than laboriously navigating his way around. The pimples on his face and neck grew smaller and smaller until he no longer felt the urge to squeeze and pick them.