Anansi Boys

Coming down the hospital corridor, ignoring the protests of nurses, the stares of patients in pajamas and of their families, was what appeared to be a very small New Orleans jazz band. There was a saxophone and a sousaphone and a trumpet. There was an enormous man with what looked like a double bass strung around his neck. There was a man with a bass drum, which he banged. And at the head of the pack, in a smart checked suit, wearing a fedora hat and lemon yellow gloves, came Fat Charlie’s father. He played no instrument but was doing a soft-shoe-shuffle along the polished linoleum of the hospital floor, lifting his hat to each of the medical staff in turn, shaking hands with anyone who got close enough to talk or to attempt to complain.

Fat Charlie bit his lip, and prayed to anyone who might be listening that the earth would open and swallow him up or, failing that, that he might suffer a brief, merciful and entirely fatal heart attack. No such luck. He remained among the living, the brass band kept coming, his father kept dancing and shaking hands and smiling.

If there is any justice in the world, thought Fat Charlie, my father will keep going down the corridor, and he’ll go straight past us and into the genito-urinary department; however, there was no justice, and his father reached the door of the oncology ward and stopped.

“Fat Charlie,” he said, loudly enough that everyone in the ward—on that floor—in the hospital—was able to comprehend that this was someone who knew Fat Charlie. “Fat Charlie, get out of the way. Your father is here.”

Fat Charlie got out of the way.

The band, led by Fat Charlie’s father, snaked their way through the ward to Fat Charlie’s mother’s bed. She looked up at them as they approached, and she smiled.

“ ‘Yellow Bird,’ ” she said, weakly. “It’s my favorite song.”

“And what kind of man would I be if I forgot that?” asked Fat Charlie’s father.

She shook her head slowly, and she reached out her hand and squeezed his hand in its lemon yellow glove.

“Excuse me,” said a small white woman with a clipboard, “are these people with you?”

“No,” said Fat Charlie, his cheeks heating up. “They’re not. Not really.”

“But that is your mother, isn’t it?” said the woman, with a basilisk glance. “I must ask you to make these people vacate the ward momentarily, and without incurring any further disturbance.”

Fat Charlie muttered.

“What was that?”

“I said, I’m pretty sure I can’t make them do anything,” said Fat Charlie. He was consoling himself that things could not possibly get any worse, when his father took a plastic carrier bag from the drummer and began producing cans of brown ale and handing them out to his band, to the nursing staff, to the patients. Then he lit a cheroot.

“Excuse me,” said the woman with the clipboard, when she saw the smoke, and she launched herself across the room at Fat Charlie’s father like a Scud missile with its watch on upside down.

Fat Charlie took that moment to slip away. It seemed the wisest course of action.

He sat at home that night, waiting for the phone to ring or for a knock on the door, in much the same spirit that a man kneeling at the guillotine might wait for the blade to kiss his neck; still, the doorbell did not ring.

He barely slept, and slunk in to the hospital the following afternoon prepared for the worst.

His mother, in her bed, looked happier and more comfortable than she had looked in months. “He’s gone back,” she told Fat Charlie, when he came in. “He couldn’t stay. I have to say, Charlie, I do wish you hadn’t just gone like that. We wound up having a party here. We had a fine old time.”

Fat Charlie could think of nothing worse than having to attend a party in a cancer ward, thrown by his father with a jazz band. He didn’t say anything.

“He’s not a bad man,” said Fat Charlie’s mother, with a twinkle in her eye. Then she frowned. “Well, that’s not exactly true. He’s certainly not a good man. But he did me a power of good last night,” and she smiled, a real smile and, for just a moment, looked young again.

The woman with the clipboard was standing in the doorway, and she crooked her finger at him. Fat Charlie beetled down the ward toward her, apologizing before she was even properly within earshot. Her look, he realized, as he got closer to her, was no longer that of a basilisk with stomach cramps. Now she looked positively kittenish. “Your father,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” said Fat Charlie. It was what he had always said, growing up, when his father was mentioned.

“No, no, no,” said the former basilisk. “Nothing to apologize for. I was just wondering. Your father. In case we need to get in touch with him—we don’t have a telephone number or an address on file. I should have asked him last night, but it completely got away from me.”