|
|
|
Votary’s father was very fat.
He lived in the furthest back part of the basement, in moist darkness gathered behind black-painted windows. He watched an antique console television all day and all night. He peed in mason jars that Votary’s mother would take and empty in the toilet, pouring urine into the smooth ceramic bowl in a thin whisky-colored stream.
He was very fat. His body took up all of the old old blue couch, spilling out sideways and over the front. His arms stuck out almost straight, supported by fungus-folded billows of cushiony flesh; his head was like the tiny hard eruption of a huge inflamed boil. He could not wear clothes. When it was cold, or when the basement was damp and water dripped down the walls, mother draped a white king-sized sheet around him. Other times he just sat, white and naked and hairless, his skin striped with shiny pink stretch-marks that made him look as if he’d been whipped, his modesty protected by the puffy half-moon pad of fat that waterfalled down over his knees.
Votary could hide behind parts of him that were outside his field of vision. She could crouch in the misty, musky darkness by his ankles and he would not know she was there, and she could listen to him talking to himself, chewing over the words he heard on the television. He didn’t speak very loud. His voice was hardly distinguishable from the eructations of his vast body; a soft, squishy belch or a deeply muffled fart or the ripple of some huge organ shifting itself deep inside of him could sound exactly the same as a word or a sentence. But Votary always understood what he said.
Sometimes he would get excited, too excited, and the words would become short, like bullets, fragmentary pieces of a slowly-exploding consciousness.
The world would become colder and hotter, and things would speed up and slow down jerkily, like a boat moving through choppy water. Father would begin to grow larger and larger, and she could feel him expanding like a balloon being inflated at a tank, and his eyes would shine with hunger, and his mouth would open wider and wider as words spilled forth, old words, unintelligible words saturating thick-hewn fir beams, seeping up through the floor and down through the concrete and through the old walls, hundreds of years old, stinking and damp...
Then Votary would tickle him on his swollen instep, and he would fall abruptly silent, and the air would stop trembling and time would stop rearranging itself. She would touch him, and he would waken from strangeness, for no matter how huge he got, he always felt every inch of himself.
“Thank you, Votary,” he would say, then.
* * *
Votary’s mother’s name was also Votary. That’s what father called them both. But Votary always knew when her father was talking to her, and when he was talking to her mother. When he spoke to her, there was love and affection in his voice. Father loved Votary.
Every evening after mother got home from work, she would call to Votary and they would climb into the old Chevy Suburban and they would drive to the stores. They would get a half-gallon bottle of Old Crow, a carton of Pall Mall cigarettes, and three-dozen $1 double cheeseburgers. Mom would order Votary a kid’s meal. Mom would drink the soda that came with the kid’s meal, but she never ordered anything for herself. Votary couldn’t remember ever seeing her mother eat.
When they got home, Mom would bring the bags downstairs into the basement. She would open the bourbon and all the packs of cigarettes and all the cheeseburgers and she would pour everything into father’s mouth. His jaw unhinged like a big door opening, a big half-circular door on coiled springs, expanding until he was like a living caldera, bulbous and shapeless below, deep and round above. Then Mom poured everything in, the whiskey first, glug glug glug, then cigarettes (sometimes Votary would help her by unwrapping the individual packages, cellophane sticking to her fingers), smooth white sticks falling piecemeal through her fingers, then hamburgers, round seedy grease-dripping chunks. She threw everything in like someone pouring flour into the huge cauldron-shaped mixing machines Votary had once seen on a field trip to a bread bakery.
Father would slowly close his mouth and chew for a long time, slowly, a smell of tobacco juice and beef fat and alcohol leaking from his pores. He chewed and chewed and chewed, slowly and contemplatively, as he watched a progression of images in pasty black-and-white, reruns and commercials. Dreams that other people dreamed and digested for him.
He’d never gotten up from that couch ever, as far as Votary knew.
She thought he was wonderful.
* * *
One day Mom came home from work early. Votary found her sitting on the porch talking with Mr. Dubeck, the postman. He had his bag next to him, full -- [End of Preview.]