Anansi Boys

“I always wanted a brother,” said Fat Charlie. “Somebody to play with.”

Mrs. Higgler got up. “This place isn’t going to clean itself up,” she said. “I’ve got garbage bags in the car. I figure we’ll need a lot of garbage bags.”

“Yes,” said Fat Charlie.

He stayed in a motel that night. In the morning, he and Mrs. Higgler met, back at his father’s house, and they put garbage into big black garbage bags. They assembled bags of objects to be donated to Goodwill. They also filled a box with things Fat Charlie wanted to hold on to for sentimental reasons, mostly photographs from his childhood and before he was born.

There was an old trunk, like a small pirate’s treasure chest, filled with documents and old papers. Fat Charlie sat on the floor going through them. Mrs. Higgler came in from the bedroom with another black garbage bag filled with moth-eaten clothes.

“It’s your brother give him that trunk,” said Mrs. Higgler, out of the blue. It was the first time she had mentioned any of her fantasies of the previous night.

“I wish I did have a brother,” said Fat Charlie, and he did not realize he had said it aloud until Mrs. Higgler said, “I already told you. You do have a brother.”

“So,” he said. “Where would I find this mythical brother of mine?” Later, he would wonder why he had asked her this. Was he humoring her? Teasing her? Was it just that he had to say something to fill the void? Whatever the reason, he said it. And she was chewing her lower lip, and nodding.

“You got to know. It’s your heritage. It’s your bloodline.” She walked over to him and crooked her finger. Fat Charlie bent down. The old woman’s lips brushed his ear as she whispered, “—need him—tell a—”

“What?”

“I say,” she said, in her normal voice, “if you need him, just tell a spider. He’ll come running.”

“Tell a spider?”

“That’s what I said. You think I just talkin’ for my health? Exercisin’ my lungs? You never hear of talkin’ to the bees? When I was a girl in Saint Andrews, before my folks came here, you would go tell the bees all your good news. Well, this is just like that. Talk to spider. It was how I used to send messages to your father, when he would vanish off.”

“—right.”

“Don’t you say ‘right’ like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like I’m a crazy old lady who don’t know the price of fish. You think I don’t know which way is up?”

“Um. I’m quite sure you do. Honestly.”

Mrs. Higgler was not mollified. She was far from gruntled. She picked up her coffee mug from the table and cradled it, disapprovingly. Fat Charlie had done it now, and Mrs. Higgler was determined to make sure that he knew it.

“I don’t got to do this, you know,” she said. “I don’t got to help you. I’m only doing it because your father, he was special, and because your mother, she was a fine woman. I’m telling you big things. I’m telling you important things. You should listen to me. You should believe me.”

“I do believe you,” said Fat Charlie, as convincingly as he could.

“Now you’re just humoring an old woman.”

“No,” he lied. “I’m not. Honestly I’m not.” His words rang with honesty, sincerity and truth. He was thousands of miles from home, in his late father’s house, with a crazy old woman on the verge of an apoplectic seizure. He would have told her that the moon was just some kind of unusual tropical fruit if it would have calmed her down, and meant it, as best he could.

She sniffed.

“That’s the trouble with you young people,” she said. “You think because you ain’t been here long, you know everything. In my life I already forget more than you ever know. You don’t know nothin’ about your father, you don’t know nothin’ about your family. I tell you your father is a god, you don’t even ask me what god I talking about.”

Fat Charlie tried to remember the names of some gods. “Zeus?” he suggested.

Mrs. Higgler made a noise like a kettle suppressing the urge to boil. Fat Charlie was fairly sure that Zeus had been the wrong answer. “Cupid?”

She made another noise, which began as a sputter and ended in a giggle. “I can just picture your dad wearing nothin’ but one of them fluffy diapers, with a big bow and arrow.” She giggled some more. Then she swallowed some coffee.

“Back when he was a god,” she told him. “Back then, they called him Anansi.”

Now, probably you know some Anansi stories. Probably there’s no one in the whole wide world doesn’t know some Anansi stories.

Anansi was a spider, when the world was young, and all the stories were being told for the first time. He used to get himself into trouble, and he used to get himself out of trouble. The story of the Tar-Baby, the one they tell about Bre’r Rabbit? That was Anansi’s story first. Some people thinks he was a rabbit. But that’s their mistake. He wasn’t a rabbit. He was a spider.