The Butt (2 page)

Rousing himself, the old man removed the cloth. Where the butt had burned his scalp, a blister the size of a grape rose midst the pathetic dyed hairs. A beam of light, hard and metallic, probed between the curtains pulled across the tiny window, clearly illuminating the gleet in this cyst.

The old man’s jaw was slack, and turkey wattles shivered beneath it. His hand – which he held out to Tom – was caricatured by arthritis, yet, when he spoke, his voice was surprisingly deep and powerful. ‘Reginald,’ he said. ‘Reginald Lincoln the Third.’

‘Tom.’ Tom took the hand and subjected it to considerate pressure. ‘Brodzinski – the first of the line. Lissen, I can’t tell you how sorry I am about this dumb . . . this dumb thing. Crazy, I don’t know what I was thinking; I mean, I guess I wasn’t thinking at all.’

‘C’mon . . .’ Lincoln released Tom’s hand, and indicated that he should sit beside him on the skimpy bed. ‘We all do dumb things,’ the old man continued. ‘I know I have. It was an accident; don’t be too hard on yourself.’

Lincoln, to Tom’s considerable relief, laughed again, then said: ‘Like I say, we’ve all done dumb things, and I used to be a smoker myself. I only gave it up a couple of years ago. With my blood pressure, it was getting in the way of more important things, if you know what I mean.’

Lincoln’s black hooded eyes were directed to the doorway, where his teenage mistress was standing. Despite his state of contrition, and his gratitude at being so speedily shriven, Tom still felt a stab of sexual jealousy, mingled with an unreasoning hatred, at the sight of the black-skinned sylph, her discoid hairstyle forming a fetching halo around her pretty head.

Tom took a deep breath, and half smelled, half tasted Vaseline and coconut oil. Could it be, he wondered, that my sense of smell is already more acute?

‘You’re not going to believe this’ – Tom addressed them both – ‘but that was my last – my last cigarette. I’m giving up too. I guess that’s why I was . . . I was so, uh, preoccupied. Well,’ he laughed shortly, in what he hoped was a self-deprecating manner, ‘at least if I stick to my resolution, I’ll never be in any danger of doing such a dumb thing ever again.’

‘At my age,’ Lincoln said, levering himself up on one elbow, ‘young man, you learn not to make too many resolutions at all. You just take each day as it comes, and try to be grateful if you’ve hung in there.’

Observing the keen expression on Lincoln’s dissipated face, Tom was thankful for the ‘young man’, which, for once, seemed genuine, not patronizing, and placed him in the same age group as the girl leaning in the doorway.

He got up to depart. ‘If there’s anything, anything at all I can do for you, please don’t hesitate to ask?’ Tom said, turning questioningly to the girl.

‘Sure,’ Lincoln put in. ‘Atalaya will be here, she’ll let you know if there’s anything, but I doubt there will be. It’s a blister – that’s all. I’ll see you at breakfast in the morning. Lemme tellya – they do a good one here.’

When he got back upstairs, Tom found the eight- year-old twins already drooling in front of the riotous, colourful barbarism of the Cartoon Network. His daughter, Dixie, who was thirteen, was sitting at the round table in the dining area of the apartment, threading glass beads on to a leather thong. Tommy Junior was in the small back bedroom, cross-legged on the bed. With his T-shirt as capacious as a robe, his large long-lobed ears and his sagittal crest of greased part-bleached hair, the boy resembled at once the Buddha and an ape. He was fiddling with the toggles of a handheld-computer games console that was hidden in his big hands.

Tom looked at his eldest son, smitten with the shame and rage that were so habitual as to have formed a callus, jibing his heart.

Tommy Junior looked up, grunted, looked down again.

Was he truly retarded – Tom pondered this automatically, as any other man might have yawned – or wilfully fucking stupid? The boy seemed stupid to his father, his obsessions and his obduracies determined by some inner-peasant, rather than visited upon him. It was as if Tommy Junior tried quite concertedly to do everything in his power to upset his father. He grunted his way through meals, he ignored the most fundamental social pleasantries. If Tommy Junior spoke voluntarily with anyone at all, it was only in order to regale them with interminable monologues concerning whichever computer game he was currently fixated on.

Besides, it wasn’t like he was at some special school. He was in the same grade as other kids his age. He got a little extra help, sure, but he could read, he could write.

Martha came into the vestibule where her husband was standing. She was abstracted, withdrawn into the glossy funnel of a magazine which she held beneath her dripping, freshly showered face. A face hosed of expression as well as make-up. Regarding her sharply, Tom had a bizarre insight: Martha had given up smoking five years before, and ever since then she had seemed increasingly exiguous to him. It was as if the smoke that had once wreathed her beautiful face had given it definition.

‘How’d it go?’ she asked.

‘OK, I guess. He’s got a big blister, he’s lying down. The native chippy’s looking after him fine.’

‘Please, Tom–’

‘What? The kids? They can’t hear – they don’t care.’

‘No,’ she snapped back, ‘not the goddamn kids – me, Tom, me.’

‘Anyways,’ Tom continued, eager to put his wife’s sensibilities behind him, ‘it looks like he’s gonna be OK. I smoothed things over.’

Padding away from him, leaving wet footprints on the white tiles, each one like a blister, Martha said over her bare shoulder: ‘Well, that’s something, but then you’re always good in a crisis.’

Crisis. Crisis averted. A crisis that had happened not to one of his kids – which Tom always feared when they were overseas – but only to the old man, Lincoln.

Well into the cicada-chafed, tropical darkness, when he and Martha had finally managed to get all the kids settled – the twins in the bunks, Dixie on a studio bed grudgingly supplied by the management, Tommy Junior in the back bedroom – Tom allowed himself this positive stroke: the old man was OK, he was safe. Martha and the kids were safe too. They had all survived the drive over the Great Dividing Range, the switchback roads, the slithery mud.

They had survived their adventurous vacation, and the day after tomorrow they would fly home, triumphant, the memory cards of their cameras loaded with digital trophies.

Tom rolled towards his wife. She sighed, and hunkered away from him. He took the rebuff in his self-satisfied stride, and soon enough managed to sleep.

But in the deep of the night there came a hammering on the door of the apartment, and swarming through heavy, humid dreams and misapprehensions – which continent am I on? who am I? – Tom swung the door open to find Atalaya, her breasts swinging free in the warm, damp vee of her lacy nightie, while above this curls were plastered against her furrowed brow.

‘He – Reggie, he’s fallen,’ she said without preamble. ‘I can’t lift him. Can you? Can you lift him?’

‘What time is it?’ Tom asked, reaching out for the quotidian.

However, she only reiterated: ‘Can you lift him?’

It was worse than he could have imagined. Tom found the little old man crumpled up on the tiles between the narrow single bed and the closet. It was pathetic: the blister had burst, and the flap of skin had peeled away from his pate, on it a clutch of the shoe-polish-coloured hairs.

Tom hesitated for a moment – perhaps moving Lincoln would be a mistake? – then Atalaya urged him on with a none too gentle shove.

The body was as light as a child’s, the liver-spotted skin unpleasantly scaly to the touch. Holding the old man in his arms, Tom felt Lincoln’s heart fluttering against his hand. He set him down, gingerly, on the bed, as if to wake him would be to disrupt an innocent repose.

Propped up against the pillows, Lincoln breathed in laboured squeaks and nasal squeals. Tom was reminded of a smoker, gasping for breath after an unaccustomed jog.

Atalaya gripped Tom’s elbow. ‘We must get him to the hospital. Now.’

The old man’s eyelids twitched, exposing yellow bloodshot whites. His twisted hands grabbed at the fitted sheet, pulling it back to reveal the mattress, which was garishly patterned with frangipani blossoms.

Out of unusual consideration – or calculated disdain – Martha had let Tom sleep in. He awoke to find the apartment empty, and, staggering from room to room, his damp soles sucking on the tiles, he saw the abandoned chrysalises of sheets and counterpanes on the disordered beds. The fans on the ceiling lazily sculpted the claggy atmosphere. Tom went out on to the balcony, then recoiled from the fanfare of the tropical day: its brassy greens and reds, its hot jazz of sunlight.

The previous few hours came winging in on him: the boxy ambulance, its flashing lights slashing the darkness; the glaring white cube of the hospital; the old man being wheeled in on the gurney; the receptionist – freaky, with coiled braids and projecting, ornamental cones of hair – swiping his credit card. By what means – telepathy? – Tom could not comprehend, but by the time they’d reached the hospital room his Mastercard had secured a gaggle of Atalaya’s tribeswomen were already there. Tall, burly women, with pumped-up parodies of her lissom figure, who chattered loudly as the nurses hitched the unconscious old Anglo to tubes and monitors.

The detachment of the desert tribeswomen, and of Martha, had seemed, to Tom, to be two sides of the same strange coin. For, when he finally returned to the apartment, stripped off his short pants, dragged his sore head through the neck of his T-shirt and clambered on to the bed, she only roused sufficiently to hear the sorry tale in sullen silence, before saying: ‘Look, Tom, right now I couldn’t give a damn how you screwed up this time. The kids’ll be up in an hour, and someone – meaning me – will have to look after them.’

Now, observing a long rivulet of dark red leaf-cutter ants that trickled along a branch, bearing upon its crest-wavering, translucent, sail-shapes of vegetation, Tom was ashamed to catch himself – despite all the stress and anxiety of the previous fifteen hours – searching, automatically, through the pockets of his pants.

Perhaps a crumpled paper tube of tobacco would be nestling in there, offering the prospect of temporary repose. Reclusion in a private cubicle, separated from the rest of the world by comforting, hazy, blue, blue-grey, grey and brown drapes.

Adams, who wore a faded tan seersucker suit and lace-up shoes, and whose button-down collar had trapped a tie embroidered with the insignia of a major institution – university? military formation? corporation? – that Tom half recognized, sat down across from him, offered a hand clasp as cursory as a dog pat, then began withdrawing papers from an old leather briefcase, talking the while.

‘This, ah, Mr Brodzinski, is a retention guarantee, this is a visa-rights waiver, and this is a credit-rating form issued by the Interior Ministry. I’ll need your signature on all three.’

He offered a fountain pen, which Tom, abandoning his syrup-sticky spoon, took. Adams smiled, exposing bleached teeth in his heavily tanned face. He was, Tom supposed, in his late fifties. Wire-wool hair bunched on top of his long equine head. The Consul sported Polaroid lenses in severe, oblong, wire frames, which, even as Tom contemplated them, were becoming clearer, and revealing watery blue eyes caught in a net of laughter lines. Adams’s shirt collar had wing-tips, there was a plastic pen holder in the breast pocket of his jacket, and a heavy gold signet ring on the pinky finger of his left hand.

‘But, why?’ Tom queried. ‘Why have I got to sign them?’

‘Purely a formality,’ Adams snapped. ‘In a case of this, ah, nature, all the relevant departments want to keep their backs covered, just in case you . . . Well, just in case you leave the country.’

‘Leave the country?’ Tom was incredulous. ‘Why in hell would I do such a damn-fool thing?’

Adams sighed. ‘People panic – I’ve seen it plenty of times. They’ve heard . . . things, rumours about the way the justice system works here. They figure it might be, ah, better to get out while the going’s good.’

‘Rumours? Justice system? I dunno what you’re talking about – what’s this got to do with the local authorities? Surely, Mr Lincoln and I, I mean, we’re fellow citizens, can’t all this be sorted out by you, here, right now? And if Mr Lincoln requires some kind of, well, compensation, that can be organized back home.’

Adams didn’t answer this immediately. Instead, he pushed himself back on his chair and, breaking from Tom’s fierce stare, trajected a stream of liquid syllables towards a maid who was clearing away the cereal-crusted bowls.

The maid, whose heavily scarred arms and legs gave her the sinister appearance of having been sewn together out of several other people, barked with laughter, then went to the hot plate and poured out a cup of coffee. This she brought straight over to the Consul.

Tom smelled the bitter odour of the five-times-reheated brown gloop. Adams took a slug – unmitigated by milk or sugar – and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, a gesture at odds with his fastidious manner.

He burbled at the maid once more, and she crossed the room and snapped off the TV. A TV that, until then, Tom hadn’t even been aware was on. Although, now he considered it, at least some of his gloominess was attributable to the news footage he had been subliminally absorbing. Footage of a dirty firefight: half-tracks scuttling like scorpions over stony, nameless bled, their machine guns spitting death venom.

‘Look, Mr Brodzinski,’ Adams resumed, ‘ordinarily, what you say would be the case: two guys overseas, one of them assaults the other . . .’

‘Assaults?’ Tom expostulated, and then heard, issuing from his own lips, the pathetic excuse he had heard so often from those of his children: ‘But it was an accident.’

‘That’s just it.’ Adams remained reasonable. ‘Or, rather, the two things are interrelated. You see, Mr Lincoln is, in point of fact, a dual-citizen.’

‘A dual-citizen?’ Tom feared these repetitions made him seem moronic, exactly the kind of dumb hick, confounded by the exotic, who he himself despised.

‘Not, you understand’ – a little moue flitted across Adams’s mouth – ‘that he has taken on this status voluntarily; such a thing is incompatible with our own laws. It’s simply that by marrying Atalaya Intwennyfortee he automatically assumed her nationality.’

‘But . . . Well . . . I mean, I assumed . . . that he – that she was . . .’

Adams put a stop to Tom’s floundering: ‘No matter what you assumed, they are indeed man and wife. Moreover, as I’m sure you’re aware, there’s a complex, ah, relationship here between the established and codified system of civil and criminal law, and the customary laws of the indigenous peoples. To get to the, ah, point, Mr Brodzinski, Mrs Lincoln is Tayswengo, and, in common with the other desert tribes, the Tayswengo don’t believe in, ah, accidents.’

Adams placed undue emphasis on the word ‘accidents’; and to Tom, who was beginning to feel as if he was descending into a delirium, it seemed for a moment as if the Consul, himself, obtained to the same view.

‘They don’t believe in accidents,’ Tom murmured.

‘That’s right.’ Adams gestured to the unsigned papers that lay beside Tom’s untouched bowl of fruit. ‘Mrs Lincoln, therefore, considers your, ah, flipping of the butt on to her husband’s head to have been, ipso facto, evidence of malicious intent. And, I’m afraid to say, the law backs her up on this. If she were a third-, or even a second-generation Anglo, the situation would’ve been different. If she were an Ibbolit or, even better, a Tugganarong, the legal status of your action would’ve been different again. However, Mrs Lincoln is none of these things; she is Tayswengo, and therefore you will, almost certainly, face a charge of assault and, potentially, one for attempted murder.’

For some time after the Consul had vouchsafed this terrible information, the two men sat in silence. Tom stared at the milk carton on the table in front of him, which bore a state-funded advertisement for a suicide helpline. Away down the walkway that led to the pool area, Tom could hear more of the liquid burbling, interspersed with bursts of laughter. The breakfast room was empty save for the two of them. A rivulet of ants came snaking across the tiled floor – black ones, this time. Peering down closely at them, Tom saw that every third or fourth worker carried on its shiny back the tiny pustule of a Rice Krispie.

‘I don’t know what to say,’ Tom said at last, superfluously.

‘Really’ – Adams, having delivered his body-blow, was almost emollient – ‘the situation is nothing to worry about. So far as I’m aware Mr Lincoln is making a full recovery, no?’

‘When I left him early this morning, in the hospital, he was already sitting up in bed. To be honest, Mr Adams’ – Tom winced, he could hear the note of childish self-exculpation re-entering his voice even as he spoke – ‘I’m not even sure that his collapse has anything to do with the – the butt. I mean, he is very old.’

Adams exhaled through pursed lips, and Tom was reminded of the first, satiated exhalation of the smoking day.

‘Well,’ the Consul said, ‘that’s good. Very good. If he makes a speedy recovery, it will simply be a matter of basic compensation for the Intwennyfortee, and the charges will quietly be dropped.’

‘Meaning?’ Tom thought of his credit cards, the plastic pacemakers on his avaricious heart.

‘I would expect her clan to ask for some new cooking pots, a couple of hunting rifles, maybe ten thousand dollars. These can be very practical people, Mr Brodzinski.’

‘What about Mr Lincoln himself?’ There it was again, the querulous note. ‘Don’t his wishes come into this? Couldn’t I, like, reason with him?’

Again, the smokeless blow: ‘Er, no – not exactly.’ Adams leaned forward, steepling long, aristocratic fingers. ‘Certainly, Mr Lincoln’s goodwill is a desirable thing, but once he’s been harmed by another, he becomes inquivoo – which is to say, inert, passive in the matter. For the desert tribes, all important aspects of their existence are governed by this principle: when to act, and when to remain still. Astande and inquivoo. If–’

Adams was warming to his little anthropology seminar. Tom cut him short: ‘What if Mr Lincoln gets worse – sicker, I mean?’

‘Let’s consider that eventuality if it happens, shall we?’ Adams hadn’t taken kindly to the interruption. He tapped the papers. ‘Sign and date, here, here and here. I need to lodge these papers right away at the Interior Ministry.’

Tom picked up the fountain pen and did as he was told. Then he handed the pen and papers back to the Consul, who took a final slug of his coffee, then unfolded himself from beneath the table. Tom accompanied the long drip-dry streak of neatness out into the parking lot, feeling slobbish and juvenile in his short pants and sandals.

Outside the sun was jackhammering down on whitish concrete, viridian grass, bluish blacktop. A mile or so to the south, the pale blocks of Vance’s civic centre – the big hotels, municipal and corporate offices, the hypodermic spire of the Provincial State Assembly – flapped in the convection, as if they were the sails of an urban clipper, about to cast off from this protracted and alien shore. Beyond them, the green hills of the Great Dividing Range mounted, in a seemingly endless procession of lush dips and heavily forested spurs, to the horizon.

Tom was surprised to discover that, far from driving one of the ubiquitous SUVs which anyone of consequence in Vance – Anglo, Tugganarong or native – owned, Adams had a distinctly battered old Japanese hatchback. He slung his briefcase on to the back seat of this, then took off his seersucker jacket and folded it with precise movements. Before getting into the car, he turned to Tom. ‘Where, may I ask, are your wife and children?’

‘I think they went downtown. We’re scheduled to fly home tomorrow, and the kids wanted to see the terrarium, and . . .’ he said, tripping into despondency, ‘. . . a whole lot of other stuff.’

Adams ignored this remark. ‘Do you have a local cellphone, Mr Brodzinski?’

‘No, and my own can’t use the local networks.’

‘Then I suggest you, ah, rent one; you may be needing it. Also, you need to consider the possibility of a lawyer.’

Clearly, this was Adams’s way of saying that Tom would have to stay behind, while Martha and the kids flew home. As if to emphasize this, the Consul reached into his shirt pocket and came out with a card. ‘You can reach me on my cell at any time,’ he said, ‘or leave a message on the ansaphone. I pick them up regularly.’

Tom took the card with one hand and stretched out the other. Once again, the Consul patted it. Adams got down into the little car. It was going to be an awkward parting. Adams wound down the window, but his gaze was fixed straight ahead, to where sprinkler jets played on the hurting, emerald green of the sports field, with its three anomalous goal posts like keep-fit gibbets. He started the car.

Hating himself for doing it, Tom leaned down and, to prevent Adams from driving away, placed his hands on the car door.

Where has my cool gone? I’m blabbing like a fucking wimp . . . Tom railed at himself, but to the Consul he said: ‘I – I didn’t realize any of this stuff, you know. About, um, customary law. I though this was, like, a developed country – it certainly sells itself that way so it can rake in the tourist bucks.’

The Consul withered up at Tom. It would have been a relief if he’d given another of his bite-sized lectures, pointing out that ignorance of the law was no defence, or perhaps detailing a few more ethnographic facts. Instead, Adams only withered at him for a while longer, then resolutely put the car into shift.

‘Call me later,’ he snapped, ‘or I’ll call you.’ Then he pulled away. The tin-pot Toyota halted at the cross street for a moment, then turned right along Dundas Boulevard, towards the ridiculous white marble pyramid of the casino on the seafront.

Tom stood for a while looking after him, then peered down at the card in his hand. It had the usual heavy weave of government service stationery. Underneath the flag, and the mysteriously armed bird of prey – what could it possibly do with those spears and lightning bolts? – was embossed WINTHROP ADAMS, HONORARY CONSUL; then an address, which Tom, despite his ignorance of Vance, recognized as being residential.

‘Honorary Consul’? Tom mused. Presumably, this meant that Adams wasn’t a full-time government employee, or even that he came under the auspices of the embassy in the capital down south?

Tom was pondering this when a large red SUV swerved into the parking lot and bounced to a halt beside him. He recoiled, then stepped forward, intent on giving the reckless driver a piece of his disordered mind. But before he could, the driver’s window was reeled down to disclose a truly striking visage, while the back door of the SUV burst open, and Tom’s younger children came galumphing out.

The eight-year-old twins, Jeremy and Lucas, leaped at Tom, pummelling his chest, and both piping at once.

‘We saw crocodiles, Dad!’

‘And snakes! Big snakes!’

‘One had eaten, like, a goat!’

‘And you could see hoofs sticking out of its tummy!’

Tom’s daughter, Dixie, put one long leg down from the vehicle, and her father noted, with annoyance, that she had had her blonde hair done up in the discoid coif of a desert tribeswoman. Tom had seen other female Anglo tourists affecting this look, and he’d remarked to Dixie and Martha how unbecoming it was: their hair scraped up and oiled, so that their pink scalps were exposed. He would have forcefully expressed his displeasure right away, were it not for the imposing oddity of the SUV’s driver.