from the 'fat man'

The station, a cave of silver machines, was somber and light. Mosaic tile patterned the walls and the light reflected them along the vinyl floors and metal railings surrounding the platform below where people waited to leave.

He wandered while listening to the voices in his ear; a feminine singer, in a chamber, who softly died in the full, sad trembling of her voice. He turned the volume down as a man announced, 'things to sell, things to sell.'

The station's activity had waned in the mid- morning. A few students and elderly people purchased tickets from the silver machines. A Chinese gentleman tapped his cane into the automated entrance and fell forward, up righted himself, taptaptap against the vinyl, his face shriveling in sunken fear as he heard a voice amplified out of a concealed speaker telling the old, blind gentleman to move this way, now that way, yes go forward now and through the gate the Chinese gentleman tapped his cane toward the stairs leading down to the platform. He was led down the stairs and the fat man watched from the railing above as the gentleman was given a seat on the polished bench waiting for the train.

The fat man, too, watched for the train. They came fast, shouting out of the tunnel like a silver umbilical cord. He hummed from his throat. He pushed his belly in and out from the diaphragm as the teachers had said and then got his throat cleared.

Near him he didn't see the young woman, too, looking over the railing and beginning to light a long white cigarette. She threw her head back and put her purse on the railing half-looking from the periphery at the headphones the fat man wore on his ears. It wasn't the headphones but the streamers from them of all colors-the kind of things a kid might stick on the handle bars of his bike. Then she heard what sounded like a voice. She was not preoccupied at the moment but soon enough would be and until that time became fascinated by the fact that the fat man was mumbling to himself or she believed it to be mumbling- a distinct mumble without words or several words hunched together like sexed animals frozen in a voyeurs camera. A small grin crossed her pretty, oval face. It was unpainted and pretty, early exotic but plain too as though she had tried many things but had finally given up out of failure to live up to a fleeting image of herself years before. She dropped an ash on the floor and crushed it with her foot. The fat man could smell the smoke and resisted the urge to turn. The words were forming at his lips hobbling outward as newspapers snapped below along the bench the old blind gentleman sat on.

The fat man took one cup off his ear and bent it in the direction of the tunnel where the train would come at any moment. His eyes shut and he seemed to grip inside himself with a kind of frenetic tension no one could tell unless they looked up closely and for a long time, looking at his neck quiver and bulge.

The woman was waiting for someone to arrive from below. He would come and take her away. But until that time came she listened, even competed to form in her own mind the inarticulate sounds forming at the lips of the fat man and then escaping into the air. They were like mud cakes. And the fingers of her mind bent through the soft tissues and lifted them lower, drawing a long circular design.

Now the sounds became guttural. The sounds of senility. At that moment an old red-faced man sat in the public library on Kittredge Street and played his senility on his old throat, his body shuddering under his inhuman noise. People left him alone. And bent over the map table, looking through the demographic maps and then the aerial maps, he grunted against his will and again and again against his will and yet in a kind of despising song as though he'd been a bullfrog in a former life. He did not leap or jump from behind the table but shuffled away, straw hat on his head and shuffled with all the impunity his grunting conjured.

The fat man was not grunting. He was mumbling with the headphones askew on his head. The woman finished her cigarette and dropped it to the floor and took out of her purse a pair of dark glasses she slid over her hair and onto her ears. The sound in her mind had been shaped into a cone and around the cone a figure cut a spiral trail to the top. She was tapping her foot. The cigarette was crushed. She looked at her watch. The mumbling at her side was a thing now. The mumbling had frozen into a thing- a kind of window on which was drawn a round bare head smiling abstractly ear to ear though there were no ears but pin holes where one could fit a string.

Suddenly, "The...they...they will come soon...and..an...the yellow moon. ..w. ..will ...shimmer over the...hills of...o those hills of ..." It was breath in half-song. He sneezed. "T...those...hills...were brown...trees green...these hills...of long ago."

He had remembered it quite often; how the days after rain provided wild cat tracks and though the cats were never found cows were. Usually they huddled grazing at the bottom of the valley and the three boys followed the fresh prints in the soft muck along winding trails cut into the hills by the constant movement of cattle. Bravely they hooted the cows. And teased the bull who stood dazed along a thick green pond. And who roamed half seriously as the boys chanted together those words not permitted in any other valley; but the dried yellow eyes fixed as flies buzzing dung. So, the boys picked up a grassy stone the size of a fish and onetwothree bounced it off the hide of the bull their brains excited about the prospect of the bull drawing its hooves through the yellowing ground and their hearts beat half- rhymed and soon the valley filled with a melodious chorus of moo's.

They were standing now below him on the platform. A young woman gripped the arm of the blind Chinese gentleman. Before long the train would arrive- a train he'd taken only once and it seemed to him to be only a ride through dark lit tunnels and blue flicking light.

And afterwards he had run into Pickett. This happened the summer before- that summer that had turned into a sweaty beast and by the time he had reached the station his tee-shirt was dry and cool. The station had been cool as a good night and empty except for a young man swinging a little angel between his legs before he swooped her on his shoulders gracefully. The fat man wandered through the station for an hour inspecting it as though it were the ribbed hull of a Viking long ship newly discovered at an excavation site.

When he returned from the train ride he wanted to revive into the fastidious cool air of the BART station and stood for a long while at the colored map by the ticket machine tracing with his finger the steps he had recently made and deciding then and there that the next ride would be under the bay to San Francisco. But after a time he felt a sharp jab in his shoulder and turned around to find himself face to face with a tall, thin man wearing a blue uniform and a name-tag over his breast reading simply, PICKETT.

'What are you up to?'

The man had a long, scarred nose which beaked slightly-at the end and wide-set eyes that appeared to roam.

'Nothing,' the fat man replied. The attendant stood erect, hands held tightly against his hips. His neck grew red.

'It looks like nothin' ...sure looks like nothin'.'

The fat man turned away to the map. He felt the presence of the employee behind him and the hairs along the surface of his skin pricked. Finally, without turning around, the fat man said,

'I'm busy.'

Pickett nodded like men at a dinner table. 'I bet you are. But look here...loitering is a criminal offense...Five hundred dollars fine and six months in the pokey. Now get your...three legs...get' em up the escalator and don't...no, don't stay around here.'

The fat man smiled and turned around. 'I will not loiter.' And he walked over to the railing, ambled to a stop and learned over, humming, until Pickett caught up with him and demanded to know what he was doing. 'I'm serenading the train.'

Pickett took a deep look into the fat man's eyes and he reminded the fat man of a stranger in the street who always asked for a dime or quarter.

He whistled in the accompaniment to the feminine singer who sang in a chamber and who softly died behind the half-sad trembling of her voice. Then a train sped below. He bent over a railing and watched the doors slide open and they opened then closed like the hills of Hamlin.

'What's that?'

The fat man straightened himself and sucked through his nose.

'I am a great composer of music and go by the name of Garabaldi- Sergio Garabaldi ...ever hear of me?'

The attendant held his hands in front of his face and spoke through his fingers. Facetiously he said, 'You're a bum.' Well now, the cows moved on and the boys dipped their glassy jars into the mucky stink and caught the silver pollywogs and kept them home until they were frogs but some of the frogs escaped through a hedge of pyracantha that made the birds drunk and crazy like abandoned planes.

'You don't believe me?' the fat man asked.

The attendant rubbed his chin. 'No, hell, I believe everyone.'

'A concert will be played Friday in this station...'

'It is .a fifty dollar fine for loitering' the attendant said quietly.

'There will be a hundred musicians dressed in white tails all with chrome and wood instruments and I will lead with a baton...'

After a long pause a train came into the station and as it slipped onward the attendant said, 'Well now, you just do the Fat Man's Waltz,' and then he grinned eagerly, 'the Fat Man's Waltz up the escalator.'

The fat man's finger withered in the air.

'Ah, children...everywhere I am stuck with children.'

And then he went away back to the ticket machine to buy a ticket though there was no he thought of going but to spite the book-nosed man and his refusal to 'Waltz' to the man's arrogant tone of voice he bought a ticket and in hand the ticket passed him through the automatic gate and as he stood on the first step in a long series of steps leading to the arrival and departure area he turned his head and said to the observing attendant.

'But you'll have to listen, won't you?'

And then the trip occurred and unexpected things happened which made the fat man wish he had been arrested in fact and thrown one night in the city jail rather than feeling the knives of complete and true strangers ripped his soft, heaving flesh.

Now at the beginning of winter he felt calm and assured as he listened to a new singers voice; a roughish voice that turned the fat man's brows into triggers.

The song was a complaint by a desperate woman and the fat man turned the volume up and he surveyed below him a silver train pulling like umbilical knots into the station.

After the train left he looked around for Pickett. In the information booth two attendants were surrounded by television monitors and neither of them had hooked noses, in fact, one had a nose pushed slightly into his face like an old boxer's nose.

Lowering the headphones his eyes widened and words lit in his brain, 'an air of tempest' and he smiled to himself as if jesting inside with banjo's and swords.

'What can I do for you?' An attendant asked stepping to the oval window cut into the information booth. The man immediately felt in his pocket for cigarettes.

'Just wondering where the man with the...that nose is...is he here?'

'You mean Pickett? Naw, Pickett left months ago to start his own business. Has his own truck and tools now. Calling cards.

The attendant lit a cigarette and wiped a drop of sweat from his forehead. His head turned to the side in a kind of pose.

'You a friend of his?

The fat man shook his head. 'Curious, that's all.'

He put the headphones back on and headed for the stairs. The song was over. A voice announced the accidents of, the past hour.

'ON THE FREEWAY- IN THE BAY- RAIN TODAY AND TOMORROW, CLEARING BY FRIDAY- PATCHY FOG INLAND- GYPSIES SPOTTED ALONG THE SCARPS OF MOUNT DIABLO- WILD FROGS IN BODEGA- NUTATIONS IN AN EQUATORIAL LABORATORY A WORD FROM THE SPONSOR.'

The station was beginning to fill with the noon crowd, wet, buttoned-up, moving from machine to machine.

He moved like a sloth to the top of the stairs and let the light mist settle in his eyebrows. Patches of light alternately obscured and revealed, drifted eastward on clouds and for a moment he felt like a man in a fight rolling on the ground and getting to his feet fears he's on a different planet and everything around animates with wild motion like enthusiastic crowds.

He drew in the orange and gibbous library across the street and waited for the light to change. Then thunder broke and echoed like porcelain jugs and drops of rain came heavier and he lifted his head, opening his mouth wide- ever wider to let the rain fall into his mouth and dissolve on the soft palate like a sweet candy.

The light changed and he half-danced, head up, to Dolly Parton across two lines of windshield wipers cutting clean the faces staring at him as though he were a Modoc Indian; the black tongues of his shoes flapping crazily.

OAKLAND: 1979

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