Is Fat Bob Dead Yet? (14 page)

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. . . .”

N
ow 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.

—

N
ow 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 only 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.

But now a man in a hooded sweatshirt opens a back door of the Denali, crosses the street, and vanishes somewhere beneath the doctor, who can only bend his head so much before drawing the notice of his patient, who continues with his monotonous drone.

Then, a few minutes later, a man in a gray fedora climbs from the Yukon Denali, looks both ways, and slowly approaches Sal's building. Later, when asked to describe the man, Dr. Goodenough can recall only the fedora; as for the rest, it was “pretty usual,” though the doctor also vaguely recalls dark clothing and sunglasses. In any case, the man's walk was relaxed and purposeful, as if he were on his way to a relatively unexciting appointment, for instance to a dentist for his annual checkup. One might ask if the man with the gold and the man in the fedora are business associates, or at least Dr. Goodenough asks this. Perhaps they are even friends. He thinks about it, while half listening to his patient. Same old, same old, he tells himself bitterly, as the man in the fedora disappears up the stairs.

The patient's name is equally unimportant. We shouldn't have to bother with it. But for those whose pens are raised, his name is George Ledbetter, though he's no relation to the blues singer Leadbelly, has never heard of the blues singer, and isn't African-American. Mr. Ledbetter has been seeing Dr. Goodenough three days a week for three years, and each appointment is a double appointment lasting one hundred minutes. The doctor has only six other patients, and so Mr. Ledbetter is a major source of income at five hundred dollars a pop.

At the start Dr. Goodenough was so fascinated with Mr. Ledbetter's complaint that he was happy to spend three hundred minutes a week with him, month after month, year after year. But now it's torture, and he has come to consider himself a prostitute forced to accept the dark confusion of Mr. Ledbetter's affliction just to pay the bills. And he wouldn't be one of those glamorous and high-priced prostitutes. Oh, no. He's the one who taps on your car window when you pause at a stoplight.

Hardly five minutes pass when the man in the fedora emerges from the building and hurries to the Denali. He no longer appears calm and quickly turns this way and that, even spinning around to see if anyone is behind him before jumping into the SUV and slamming the door. Then tires squeal, and the SUV drives off faster than Dr. Goodenough thinks safe. He sighs and turns back to his patient. “But you again avoided arrest,” he says, stifling a yawn.

Mr. Ledbetter is a squeezer. His compulsion is to visit the bakery aisles of supermarkets to squeeze the loaves of white bread. And sometimes he pleasures himself, sometimes he moans, and sometimes he attracts the attention of customers who may complain. Indeed, Mr. Ledbetter makes no secret of his complaint as he pleasures himself with one white loaf after another, leaving behind a mutilated trail of loaves no longer in neat rectangular blocks but as various as the shapes in a geometry textbook, because Mr. Ledbetter likes to squeeze the loaves until their plastic pops, and then he pulls up his shirt and rubs the remnants against his white belly.

But now Dr. Goodenough has turned again to the window to focus on a thin, ragged fellow in a baseball cap and a filthy raincoat hurrying along the sidewalk. Hardly a minute has passed since the man in the fedora was driven away. The doctor has seen this ragged man often, and observing him has provided hours of relief from Mr. Ledbetter as the man solicits spare change from pedestrians and slaps at an invisible appendage extending from his backside. The man, of course, is Fidget, though the doctor doesn't know his name, and Fidget zigzags up the sidewalk because it's been years since Fidget has walked in a straight line. His destination is the street door leading to the upstairs offices. Fidget grabs the handle, looks slyly in both directions, passes through the doorway, and disappears.

Dr. Goodenough finds this of potential interest, because he knows that the only person in residence upstairs this Wednesday is the man with the gold and the eelskin cowboy boots, but he doubts that Fidget and the man are friends.

Of course, Dr. Goodenough often tells Mr. Ledbetter he can squeeze his loaves of white bread in the privacy of his home, but Mr. Ledbetter likes the variety found in supermarkets. He likes to choose and exercise his free will. He likes to be seen by others and enjoys their startled looks. But Mr. Ledbetter has grown unpopular in his first-choice markets, so his selections have grown farther afield as he seeks out a market that is virginal.

If we could eavesdrop at a convention of supermarket employees, we would find that someone like Mr. Ledbetter is a hot topic. Speaker after speaker would take the stage to describe how Mr. Ledbetter first clutches the middle of the loaf until his fingers touch, then he grasps both ends and twists, and as his excitement grows and his eyes roll to the ceiling in a manner suggestive of rapture, he gently pushes each end of the loaf inward, then pulls outward, then pushes inward again, as if the loaf were an edible concertina. It is here the moaning begins as the plastic pops and Mr. Ledbetter buffs his belly with the bread bits bursting from the bag.

Dr. Goodenough has heard this often, and he no longer offers advice or asks how it makes Mr. Ledbetter feel or if he had an unhappy childhood. Mr. Ledbetter, it's clear, has no interest in getting over his obsession; he wants only to share it with an intelligent person who won't talk. So the doctor's role is simply to endure.

But luckily the doctor has his window, and soon he sees Fidget burst from the street door and fall to the sidewalk. A passerby attempts to help him to his feet, and Fidget shoves him away. His face, as we often read in novels, is a mask of terror. He drops something. It might be a yellow necklace. He grabs it and then performs a zigzag sprint down the street until he disappears from view.

Dr. Goodenough doesn't recall that specific necklace, but he knows where Fidget got it. He's also sure it wasn't a gift, because why should Fidget run and show such terror? No, he must have swiped it, and Dr. Goodenough waits for the man in the eelskin boots to rush through the door in pursuit. But no way will that happen.