BAPTIZING A 500-POUND MAN by Phillip Meeks

 

 

They tell each other, if James Daniel so much as pokes his head in the window, blow a hole in him.

            You can’t, says the Big Boss.  The hostage.

            No hostage, technically, I remind them, but they ignore me.  I’m nobody to them, anyway.

            Is he violent? they want to know.  Is he capable of hurting anybody?

            I don’t really think so, I say.

            But you don’t know him that well.

            Better than you.

            James Daniel’s voice rings out again, out of the cheap-speaker, FM hum of the open Crown Victoria.

 You don’t have to be afraid of them.  They don’t have the power they think they have.  You’re free.  You’re protected.  Rise up and claim what belongs to you. 

            Blow a hole in that son of a bitch, he shows his face, I hear the Second Boss say, and I wasn’t supposed to hear that.  Neither was anybody else except Number 3.       

            I stare at the little block building, giant FM 92.5 letters bolted to the front, a silver tower in back, like a bony finger pointed to heaven.  Halving the distance between me and the building, seven Crown Vics and Broncos and an S-10 with a blue light stuck in the dash.  Each sports an antenna that’s a tiny shrine to the big, laddered tower out back of the station.

            No, there are no hostages.  Technically.  But Marvin serves the function well.  If Marvin wasn’t in the line of fire, they’d have killed James Daniel by now.

            Anything you can tell us that might help us reach him, the Big Boss says to me.  Something he could have gotten upset over.  A girlfriend who run off.  A lost job.

            Well, there was the meteor.

            The Big Boss is unholstering his sidearm, spinning its cylinder.  He stops in mid-revolve, looks at me.  Just stares a hole in me for a five count.

            A meteor, huh?

            A meteor.

            He slips the silver Colt or Smith or whatever back into its leather nest and with two fingers scratches his moustache.  No, it’s more like he massages his upper lip.

            Now I remember, he says.  He looks again across the tops of the cars with their aerials, to the block building.  So, he’s the one was on the news that time.  What, a year ago?

            Sixteen months.

            The Big Boss loosens his tie and takes several steps away from the curved row of vehicles, back to a wad of privet and honeysuckle at the base of a light pole.  He stands alone there and rubs the back of his head.  At intervals, he looks at FM 92.5 and works his lips, like he’s practicing a speech.

            I go over the story in my mind, the story I know they’ll ask for.

            First, they’ll want to know about me.  Am I from here?  They’ll assume I’m not because of my skin color, but I was born over at the Baptist Hospital and have never lived anywhere else.  Timmy knows that, but the Big Boss and his crew only drive down from Nashville when something like this happens.  Not like this exactly, but kind of like this.  When Arie Tuttle found that woman’s body slumped into the spring on River Road, for example, or when Geneva Hembree accused the Indian owner of the Lankford Inn of making terroristic threats.

            Otherwise, the state boys sit tight in Nashville, in the strip joints and the projects where the dope gets sold and some lowlife gets his guts sliced open from time to time.  They don’t know us.  They think they do, but they don’t.  They aim to kill James Daniel Patton.  They look at him – and at me and at everybody else around here – and they don’t see much worth saving.

            What started this whole incident was the meteor.  That was the first morning James Daniel and I ever spoke a word to each other.

            We’d gotten over a foot of snow the night before, the last big snow we’ve had here since.  I live within walking distance of the office, so I had been the only one to get to work on time.  Most of the other employees of the Housing Authority, including Wallen, our maintenance supervisor, called to say they’d venture out later, once the four-lane had been scraped and the sunshine and salt had melted things down.

            I put on a pot of coffee and heard the door chime just before it finished.

            Gwen Sayers stood in the foyer, her pink tongue playing at the chapped ring around her mouth – Licky Lips, the maintenance crew called her.

            “Becca,” she said, “my hot water heater made a goddam hell of a noise while ago.”

            “Really?”

            “Yeah.  Where’s Wallen?”

            “Hasn’t made it in yet.”

            “Don’t he have four-wheel drive?”

            “Yes.”  I jotted down on a Post-It, Gwen’s water heater making noise.  “I’ll put this on Wallen’s desk.  He’ll be here before long.”

            The point of Gwen’s tongue worked at a loose flake of skin a half-inch under her nose.  “I reckon it was my water heater.  I just heard it once.  It was a loud bang.  Lord, it sounded awful.”  Her tongue made three complete revolutions of her mouth, and then she left.  

            When the door chimed 15 minutes later, as I finished my first cup, I expected to find Gwen in the foyer again.  Instead, though, James Daniel Patton stood there, gnawing on a thumbnail.

Really, I didn’t know his name at the time, but I had seen him around the apartments.  I had him pegged as a little slow.  He was a tall, thin boy, redheaded and white.  I don’t just mean Caucasian.  He had a look about him as if somebody had jabbed a pinhole in his heel and let all the pigment ooze out.

“May I help you?” I asked.

He just kept gnawing away at his thumbnail.

I spoke slower.  “Do you need anything, honey?”

“Something,” he mumbled, “something – came through my apartment.”

“Excuse me?”

“Crashed through the roof.”  He looked up at the tiles and fluorescent lights above us.  “Came through the roof and through the ceiling and bore right down through my bed.  It’s lodged in my floor now.”

I studied him.  He wasn’t an ugly young man, although it would’ve been a stretch to say he was handsome.  The paleness and bad posture and those wide, blank eyes robbed him of a lot of physical attraction.  Even as I made this assessment, I counted the number of steps between me and my purse, where my pepper spray was stashed.

“I hadn’t been out of bed more than ten minutes,” he said.

When Wallen limped in, James Daniel rehashed the story.  More out of a sense of duty than any confidence he’d put in James Daniel, I figured, he told the young man to stay put, and he left to investigate. 

James Daniel leaned against the counter to wait, and in just jeans and t-shirt, he looked like a stray.  I offered coffee, but he curled his upper lip in distaste.  He hugged himself tighter and tighter, so I finally doctored a cup for him with hazelnut creamer and sugar and urged him to sip from it in the name of blood sugar resurrection and warmth.

I swear to God, I saw the slightest tad of color filter into his cheeks, like you’d flipped a lid on top of his head and poured it into him.

“Lord have mercy,” Wallen boomed when he came back.  “Something did fall through the roof.  It’s a hunk of metal big as my fist.”

By day’s end, both CNN and FOX had staged vans and satellites in the parking lot, not to mention the local affiliate out of Chattanooga.  It was an exciting time for our residents.  Several of them darted this way and that all day long, or else hung around the office to gossip and volley for a covert face shot over the reporters’ shoulders.  Licky Lips was in here a lot, too, her tongue spinning in the center of her face like a time-lapsed clock, she was so over-stimulated.

Early on, the sheriff and the news folks speculated that the wad of metal had fallen off a satellite or airplane, but a panel of experts from the University eventually concluded that it was an honest-to-God meteorite.

__________

            To say that Napoleon Bonaparte was an avid coffee drinker would be an understatement.  He said, in one of his letters, “Much strong coffee is what awakens me.  Coffee gives me warmth, waking, an unusual force and a pain that is not without great pleasure.”

            According to at least one account, the French army was relatively well-supplied in June 1815 when facing Wellington near the village of Waterloo.  Well-supplied, that is, except for a certain black beverage that had inexplicably vanished from the cache.  

            Makes you think.

            I learned this during my one semester in grad school, when I studied international marketing.  I researched the world coffee trade for a term paper, and my big plan at the time was to write a thesis on the evolution of the coffee industry, but this happened and that happened, and so I dropped out. 

            But I’m content where I am.

 __________

 

During that snowy morning when I met James Daniel, we went through two pots of coffee.  And it was the good stuff, too – the organic, fair-trade blend I ordered off the Internet.  After the news crews had cleared out and the buzz fizzled down a little, he took to stopping by the office a couple of mornings every week.  I didn’t mind.  I liked him.  Plus, I enjoyed watching him, this young coffee virgin.  Like when you invite a friend to watch your favorite movie and spend the whole time studying them out of the corner of your eye.  You’re dying to know how they’ll react to the plot twist. 

One morning before seven, as we sipped and listened to a lame, early radio show, he said, “Becca, I ain’t been sleepin too good.”

I noticed the smears of red in his eye corners, and some mornings he sported slate-gray halos around them.

“I’ve been thinking about that thing that fell into my apartment,” he said.  This was a good two months since the meteor.

I didn’t say anything in particular. 

“You think it means anything?”

I think I just hummed the syllables to I don’t know:  Mm-mm-mmm.

“Becca, how many people are in the world?”

I set my mug down beside my keyboard and rubbed my temples with my thumbs.  “I don’t know.  I think they’re saying around six billion now.”

He balanced on a stool.  I remember it well.  I can see it in my head like a painted picture – one of those little sidebar moments that stick with you for whatever reason.  He sat on a stool and cradled his coffee with both hands.  He stood and walked over to the filing cabinet, atop which somebody had placed a dusty blue globe – a leftover relic from a years-ago adult education program.  He spun it and watched until it slowed down, and then he spun it again.

“Six billion people,” he said, on the verge of disbelief.  “And it landed on me.”

__________

 

Bean is a misnomer.  Coffee is made from the seed of a cherry-like fruit that grows wild in Ethiopia.  According to the legend, a shepherd noticed that his flock became more alert and playful after they had wandered into a particular valley, and eventually he discovered his herd nibbling the coffee fruit. 

It wasn’t long before these plants were cultivated and processed commercially.  But you can still find them growing wild in Northeastern Africa.  A friend of mine who didn’t drop out of graduate school sends me a package every Christmas.  Inside are figs from Turkey and green Ethiopian coffee beans.

 __________

 

Within a year or so, James Daniel switched to black coffee.  He said it was because he was getting flabby, but I didn’t notice that.  Thinking back, I believe it was more out of a sense of purism or something. 

“You don’t have to give up this kind of creamer,” I explained.  “It doesn’t have any calories in it.”

He insisted, though, to strip coffee down to its most primitive attributes.  By now, he was pitching in what he could afford toward the fair trade blend, and I bought him his own maker at a yard sale, so he could brew a pot at night.  He also – and I admired him for this – experimented with different brewing methods:  French press and “cowboy” style.  And I’ve never seen anybody who could pour boiling water through a filter of grounds as well as James Daniel and end up with such a perfect brew.  I put a stopwatch to him more than once:  four minutes, never varying more than two seconds either way.

His insomnia had matured, had grown predictable, and he had more or less accepted it.  When he found that his sleep-deprived sensibilities failed to tolerate the late-night sitcom reruns and the DVDs he’d already watched a dozen times, I walked him over to the Lankford Public Library one Friday afternoon and showed him how to sign up for a library card and how to use the computer catalog.

He started out during his graveyard shift reading marathons with books on classic cars and big game hunting, but having exhausted the best sources in those genres, he progressed to Louis L’amour novels and then to Elmore Leonard.

To keep his reading up to the pace of his racing, insomniac mind, he eventually developed a taste for a wide range of non-fiction and especially gravitated toward the self-help category. 

            When I think about it now, I can see he was like tap water, and all those long rows of books sitting on the public library shelves were the grounds he poured himself through.      

            Then one night, he called me at two o’clock – not that unusual, because he knew I slept in fits and starts myself.  He sounded depressed – as bad as I’d ever heard him.

“Becca,” he said.  “Why do you think I am where I am?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know – the bottom of the rung.”

I walked into the kitchen and saw that a half cup was still in the pot, so I switched on the heater – not the best thing to do if you really value flavor, I’ll admit, but it’s too expensive to waste, and the microwave is worse.

“You’re not the bottom of the rung,” I said.

“You know what I mean.  I’ve never had the good jobs, the lucky breaks, the friends in high places.”

I searched the cabinet for a mug but didn’t find one I really liked till I swung open the door on the dishwasher.  “Well, it’s like this:  somebody has to be at the bottom in order for somebody else to be on the top.  That’s how the world works.  It’s not a good system.  I’ve been on the short end of it myself.”

“Yeah.”

I tried to interject some positive energy.  “You don’t have to stay there, though.  You can move ahead.  Look at yourself.  You already have, really.”

I listened to James Daniel breathe for ten, fifteen seconds.

“That’s what worries me, if that makes sense.  If I’m destined to do good, I’ll have to fight my way to the top, won’t I?”

I sipped my coffee, and it burned the tip of my tongue.  “Everybody has to, in one way or another.  Except for the ones born into power.”

 James Daniel clicked his tongue.  I had enough time for two more sips before he spoke again.

“You know Marvin Clark?” he asked.

“Mmmm –“

“He’s the preacher that comes to the apartments on Thursday nights.”

“Oh, yeah, yeah.”

“He told me about baptizing a 500-pound man once.  Marvin and another guy lowered the fat man into the creek, and they both just about fell on top of him.  I’m sure people were standing around snickering.  When they stood him back up, the tip-top of his head was bone dry.  You know what they did?”

“They lowered him again?”

“Yeah.”

I topped off my mug with the remnants in the coffee pot.  The tinkling sound made me realize I had to pee.

“The Methodists don’t do that, do they?” he asked.

“You mean dunk them all the way under during baptism?  No.  I’m Methodist.”

“So what’s the difference?”

“Just a doctrine thing, I suppose.”

“The difference is in the value of the fat man’s experience,” he said.  “He was public about it all.  He went through all that humiliation instead of just having a handful of water splashed on his head in a warm room.  He was willing fall in the creek in front of God and everybody.  When the public witnesses what you do, you’re more likely to stay true to it.  Why do you think all the self-help gurus pack auditoriums all around the country?  People could just follow the advice in the books in the quiet of their own living rooms, but it’s not the same.  I think that fat man is closer to heaven on account of that.”

I didn’t give him an answer really.  I just hummed:  mm-mm-mmm.   

__________

 

In the 18^th Century, a common practice was to drop a dollop of butter in one’s coffee.  Of course, that was if you had butter.  My ancestors, confined to involuntary labor in the fields of Virginia, counted themselves lucky to secure a few grounds, fresh or secondhand.  But they drank coffee with just as much gusto as the plantation owners.   

What’s so interesting about coffee is how cross-cultural it is.  Many think the concept of a coffeehouse was born in Seattle or invented by the Beats or some such, but if you traveled back in time, thousands of years, you’d find communal coffee spots in Islamabad or Moscow or Paris. 

Blacks, whites, Muslims, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs – they all appreciate the Bean.

__________

 

My communication with James Daniel dropped off after that.  I’d see him around the apartments, and we’d say hello, but he just withdrew, for the most part.  I went and knocked on his door a couple of times, but I never caught him at home.  I mailed him a mug and a bag of gourmet beans on his birthday, and he called to thank me, but you could tell his mind was someplace else.

And then, Timmy from the sheriff’s office called to say James Daniel had stormed FM 92.5.  That’s the same station where Marvin Clark records a sermon every Friday, the day after he delivers it to our residents.  According to what Timmy could fill me in on, James Daniel had walked in with Marvin just before daylight.  Loud words had been exchanged with the morning deejays, and James Daniel and Marvin had ended up barricaded in the studio.

Timmy can’t tell me anything about guns or other weapons.

So out here at the station, the Big Boss struts back over to me.  At his side is another cop from the city, in a white shirt and tie and one of those clip-on i.d. badges.

Can you tell us everything you know about James Daniel Patton? the Big Boss wants to know.

I go through the whole thing.  The cop with the Big Boss works a little pencil on a notepad the whole time.

I had dreaded telling it, but once it’s over, I feel okay, kind of light-headed.  A little shaky.  But relieved, too. 

When it’s over, the Big Boss grins a little bit.  I want to smash his teeth.

God, they think they know us.  But they don’t know us at all.

I’m there when the van rolls in.  It pulls to the rear of the row of Crown Vics and seven people pile out:  seven residents from the apartments, including Gwen.  Earl Maynard is behind the wheel, and I know there’ll be hell to pay whenever the whys and hows of Earl acquiring the van keys come to the surface.

The seven weave through the police cars.  One officer tries to stop them, but they say something to him, and the officer just smiles and shakes his head and looks toward the Big Boss.

Taking positions near the block station, they sing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” 

The state officers snicker and grin at each other.

The seven sing “When We All Get to Heaven.”

They sing “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

They sing “Raspberry Beret.”

The Big Boss finally has all he can stand.

Get them out of here! he barks. 

Three officers nearest the front of the line corral the seven back to their van.  One of the residents tries to lead the group in a round of “Sweet Child O’ Mine.”

My stomach convulses, the acid seeks something to digest, and I think about biscuits.

That’s why I’m not there when it all happens.

For a long time afterwards, I wonder if I should feel guilty – for going for breakfast while James Daniel was barricaded in the station. 

But I can’t say for sure we were ever friends.  Just two people whose paths were destined to cross.

I heard from Timmy and then read in the papers and then watched on the news how it ended.  The first, mysterious gunshots.  The storming of the station.  The second wave of shots.  The fire.  Then all the usual hubbub on the national news:  police brutality, unnecessary force, conspiracy, Ruby Ridge, Waco.

Two men dead:  James Daniel and Marvin.  A shame, really.

It’ll get a mention on the news, but then it’ll be forgotten.

__________

 

Certain Ethiopian tribes used coffee beans as a form of currency.  The obvious irony of that, though, was that once coffee had value as money, nobody drank it.  They carried it around in goat scrotums or wherever, and never tasted its power again.  Eventually, their greed overcame them, and the only reason those tribes aren’t completely forgotten is because of the tireless work of anthropologists that sometimes goes well into the night.  

  

Phillip Meeks’ fiction has appeared in The Chaffin Journal, JMWW, The Pikeville Review, AppalTalk and is forthcoming in Paradigm.  His non-fiction has been published in Backpacker, American Forests, The Rotarian and other magazines.  He currently resides in Southeastern Kentucky.