Is Fat Bob Dead Yet? (20 page)

Connor sees it's the biker he sat next to in the Exchange. Bob, the waitress called him: Fat Bob. This is who the police were looking for, thinks Connor, because of the accident, because the crashed Fat Bob belonged to Fat Bob, and because Marco Santuzza had ridden the Fat Bob's Fat Bob into oblivion.

Fat Bob glances toward Connor and gives him a slow salute. Connor salutes back. Briefly, their eyes lock in a sympathetic exchange, and then Fat Bob continues to poke along down Water Street past the bus station and toward I-95.

Five seconds later, as Connor wonders if the salute had any special import, he hears a high whine. A red scooter zips down Bank Street onto Water Street. The rider wears a dark red coat and a red-and-black mackinaw cap. He is small, red-faced, and his narrow head reminds Connor of a dull ax. The man leans over the handlebars to decrease wind resistance, because the scooter is only fifty cc's and its top speed is maybe thirty-five miles per hour. He looks neither right nor left but focuses straight ahead to where Fat Bob is approaching I-95.

Connor takes two steps into the street. Perhaps he means to pursue the scooter or pursue Fat Bob. But although Connor is a good runner, his action is only symbolic. Not even the fastest runner could catch the scooter, much less Fat Bob. Ahead of Connor, however, are the Greyhound bus station and the police department. Maybe one of these forms his destination, but we'll never know, because at this moment his cell phone makes its summoning tweedle and Connor comes to a stop. He slaps at his various pockets, discovers the phone, and presses it to his ear as he moves to the sidewalk.

It's Didi. “Have you picked up the stuff from the post office?”

“I'm almost there.”

“What's the delay?”

“Traffic.” Connor wonders if Didi can hear the lie.

“No more fooling around. Remember, we have an obligation to history. I've brought you to New England to train you in the business, and someday you'll take my place. Eighty years of Bounty, Inc. stretch behind us. Where're your priorities?”

This is surprising and unsurprising to Connor. He hadn't realized he was being groomed, but nor had he understood why Didi should be so insistent that he come on this long trip. Didi's words clarified his intentions.

“What if I don't want to take your place? What if I don't want to work for Bounty, Inc.?”

“It's your destiny. You're a tugo, I'm a tugo. Now, pick up those checks and get back here.” Then Didi chuckled and his voice changed. “Oh, yes, I wanted to tell you. D'you know what that crazy Vaughn did? He found some black paint and wrote ‘Here lives an orphan from outer space' on the side of the Winnebago. What d'you think of that?” Didi laughs again.

“How're you going to get it off?” Connor began to say it was an irresponsible act, but the term seems inapplicable to Vaughn.

“Why take it off? I like it.” Didi cuts the connection.

As he thinks of what it means to be included in Vaughn's inclusive “we,” Connor has a glimmer of insight as to why he changed his name from Zeco. He hadn't wanted to get enmeshed in Bounty, Inc., and he still didn't. Being Portuguese was no reason to become a con man. Bounty, Inc. was a family business. It was the
family
he wanted to escape, not his family's nationality.

Standing by the train station, Connor shifts from one foot to the other. He can go up State Street to the post office or up Bank Street in search of Fidget. He takes a step toward State Street and then pivots toward Bank. Surely the post office can wait half an hour. He crosses to the head of Bank Street with the East Bank Gift Shop on the corner; its display windows are crowded with mannequins in multicolored, floor-length, faux-swank Indian gowns designed perhaps for faux romance.

Two shops farther along, Connor pauses at the display window of a small travel agency, his eye caught by a poster of the Pena Palace, a gigantic pink-stone confection perched on a mountaintop in Sintra outside Lisbon. He'd once spent a day with his great-aunt exploring its dozens of rooms, as his tongue occupied itself with repeating the word “splendiferous,” the only word that seemed an apt description of what he was seeing. Staring at the poster, he imagines slipping into a small gold-spattered and leather-bound room, maybe a modest library, in one of the palace's high towers, falling back into an armchair, and taking a deep breath.

Connor can't know that his imagined escape duplicates Fidget's retreat to Fat Bob's boarded-up house on Montauk Avenue, but we know it and we share it here. Connor feels packed to his ear tips with opposing obligations, distractions, and anxieties. So for a few seconds, no more than that, he sees himself in a quiet, book-lined room looking out through a narrow leaded window over small white towns with red roofs and rolling summer fields to where a line of white selvage indicates the distant surf of the Atlantic. Oh, blesséd escape.

Then Connor realizes he's not just looking at a travel poster but also into the face of a young woman staring back. If he were chewing a baseball-player wad of bubble gum, he'd swallow it. Such is his surprise. The woman has short, unevenly chopped blond hair with blond highlights and wears wire-rimmed glasses. It's a familiar face.

She comes to the door. “Have you recovered from banging your head on the steering wheel? I don't see any bruises.”

Connor likes to think he isn't someone who blushes, but he feels his face turn red. “No, I'm fine. You saved me from myself.”

“Well, I'm glad beating your head isn't a hobby. Collecting stamps would be better. You must work near here. I've seen you go by.” She stands in the doorway observing him with birdlike attention. She's thin, like a runner, and her blue blouse matches her blue eyes. Perhaps she's four inches shorter than Connor.

“No, I've been looking for someone. Do you stare at everyone who walks by?”

“Just about. My desk is by the window, and I sit around waiting for people who want to take geographic cures. Are you looking for someone who works near here? Maybe I can help. I've been here almost nine months.”

The woman has an oval face with a pointed chin, and she watches Connor with the good humor of someone telling a joke. A strand of hair falls across her right eye, and she flicks it away. Connor likes how easily she talks to him but thinks if she's bored with her job, she must be talking to him out of boredom.

“What's your name?”

“Linda.”

She looks at him inquiringly, expecting him to identify himself. Connor isn't sure whether he should use his regular name or a Portuguese name or some other name that he might like to assume, such as Rex or Woodruff. “Connor,” he says.

“Are you Irish?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Connor's often an Irish name.”

“Then maybe I should change it.”

“No, don't do that. I like it. But you don't seem Irish—your hair's too black.”

“I could be black Irish,” says Connor.

They both smile and look at each other for an extended moment. Then Connor says, “I'm trying to find a homeless man. I'm told his name is Fidget.”

“Oh, I know him,” says Linda brightly. “He often walks around asking for spare change. I've talked to him several times. I like him, but he smells. I think it's his feet. I haven't seen him today, but he might be along the street someplace. Why're you looking for him?”

“Do you always ask so many questions?” Connor, whose work with Bounty, Inc. exists on the shady edge of legality, has what we may call “functional paranoia.” He's often suspicious of people he meets, especially those who ask questions. “I'd just like to talk to him about the accident on Monday.”

Linda tilts her head slightly. She's tempted to ask Connor if he's a reporter, but she doesn't want to ask another question. “I heard the crash, but in the office I'm on the far side of where the motorcycle hit the truck, so I saw nothing, luckily. It must have been awful.”

Connor nods as Linda folds her arms. “Are you getting cold?” he asks. “You should go back inside.”

“I was just going up the street for coffee when I saw you. I'll get my jacket.”

Connor's functional paranoia resurfaces. He considers walking away, but it would be rude. Anyway, he doesn't want to. Linda reappears wearing a half-length dark red jacket with a double row of silver buttons, which, on closer inspection, prove to be plastic. It's the sort of low-cost coat made to look like a high-priced coat.

“No hat?”

“They mess up my hair,” says Linda, whose ragged cut looks professionally messed with one side longer than the other, which gives her diagonal bangs. “Do you think I'm pushy? Really, I was going out for coffee anyway. And Fidget knows me. I give him a silver dollar now and then. I always carry a bunch of them.” She shakes her pocket, and there's a jingling noise.

“To give away?”

“It's much easier than making excuses or pretending I don't see people, though it costs more in the summer. I'm probably getting a reputation.”

Connor can't think of a suitable response. “At least it's generous,” he says.

“More practical than generous. It's like I'm paying for safe passage. But they're friendly enough, for the most part.”

“No one bothers you?”

“Never. Fidget even told me about his tail.”

“Tail?” Connor thinks he isn't sharing in a conversation so much as chasing after one.

“Like a Komodo dragon, or so he says. I've never seen it myself. It shows up when he's coming to from a blackout after drinking Everclear.”

By now they've reached a four-story yellow brick building with the word
HOLLYWOOD
painted over the bolted-shut front door. Above are Palladian windows sealed with gray plywood. On either side of the windows, four brick pilasters, three stories high, resemble Greek columns emerging from the brick wall. A plain, classical frieze runs across the building below the roof.

“This's the Capitol Theatre,” said Linda. “It's been closed for forty years. No sprinkler system, and no one wants to buy it. Supposedly it's very fancy inside. It's probably full of rats.”

“Was it a movie theater?”

“For a while at the end, but it was built in the twenties as a vaudeville theater. It's where George Burns met Gracie Allen—isn't that romantic?”

The names are only vaguely familiar to Connor. “Hmm,” he says. “It'd be nice to see what it's like inside. A bunch of those theaters from the twenties were decorated to look like ancient palaces. Is there a back door?”

“Off a parking lot, but it's shut up like these.”

“There's got to be a functioning door someplace. People must go in and out.”

“Not that I've seen, though that doesn't mean anything. It's just a dead building and probably haunted. Why're you interested?”

“No reason, I guess. Just curiosity. Well, I don't expect to see it in any case.”

Connor and Linda continue up the street.

We should say that Connor is mistaken about never seeing the inside of the Capitol Theatre. It's like those times when a person says, “I'll never break my leg.” The next day he falls down the stairs and breaks his leg. To claim certainty about a future possibility is risky business. Didi would claim that the tradiculous is at work again. For instance, if we brag we never get the flu, we'll get it by the weekend. But such claims rarely work in our favor. If we say we'll win a million dollars, we won't. This is how we know it's an example of the tradiculous, because if it weren't, then the negative and positive would show up fifty-fifty. So with Connor saying he doesn't expect he'll see the inside of the Capitol Theatre. It's a form of tempting fate, especially if the consequences are negative—that is, like awful.

“So if you don't work around here,” says Linda, “what sort of work d'you do?”

Connor stumbles over his feet, which suddenly feel very large. Linda catches his arm. The feel of her touch startles him, as if they shared a metaphysical link, and perhaps this is what leads him to be truthful, or perhaps he's just tired of lying.

“I work for some people who collect money for phantom organizations that support phantom causes.”

Linda has stopped, and they look at one another. Pedestrians divide and pass around them like a stream passing around a rock.

“What sorts of organizations?”

“They change. Right now it's Prom Queens Anonymous, Orphans from Outer Space, and the Holy Sisters of the Blessed Little Feet.”

Linda laughs. She laughs so hard she has to lean against a building. Connor waits. He had expected censorious indignation, not laughter.

“That's wonderful,” says Linda, still laughing. “What do you do with the money?” She wipes her eyes with a tissue. They begin walking again.

“We spend it, though Didi—he's in charge—gives fifteen percent to real organizations if they're vaguely similar to a phantom organization. For instance, we've also been collecting for Free Beagles from Nicotine Addiction, and Didi says some of the money goes to the Humane Society, but I'm not sure I believe him.”

“Why not?” Once more Linda begins to laugh.

“His relationship to the truth is relatively elastic.”

“I guess it'd have to be. Who gets money from Orphans from Outer Space?”

“Well, that specific organization brings in very little, so I assume he puts it in the general fund.” Connor thinks that if he expanded his account of Bounty, Inc. to include the work of Vaughn Monroe and Eartha Kitt, she'd be certain they were nuts.
Maybe we are,
he thinks.
Maybe we're in some kind of alternate universe.

Connor and Linda have reached the corner, and Linda stops. “This is as far as I'm going. I'll get a cup of coffee and take it back to the office. I'm already late.”