The Butt: A Novel Read online

  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.’

  ‘But a cigarette, Jesus, in this day and age that’s an offensive weapon, even if you don’t, like, hurl it at someone.’

  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, exp
osing 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.

  2

  The Consul – whose name was Adams – found Tom sitting in the breakfast room of the Mimosa, warily contemplating a bowl cluttered with sharp-angled chunks of some strange fruit.

  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?’