"The Fat Lady Sings" - (Angus Q. Bogus)

"The fat lady sings. The fat lady sings."

Angus Q. Bogus walked back and forth across the cold floor of his tiny cell. In a way he was lucky that they didn't let him have more than a desk and a bed and a lamp and a few reference books. At least he had room to pace. Then from somewhere outside came another gruesome howl.

"The fat lady sings. The fat lady sings," Angus shouted back.

He paced and paced, faster and faster. Urgently. Desperately. Frantically. Repeating over and over and again and again. But the howling contined.

"The fat lady sings. The fat lady sings."

Chanting the mantra was the only way Angus could withstand the agonizing, piercing screeches from below. There was no other way to escape the tortured wails that started down low like a cement mixer in someone's gut and then climbed the scale until they made his hair stand on end and his head throb and his teeth ache.

"The fat lady sings. The fat lady sings," he shouted, pressing his hands against his ears.

Then there was banging on the door. Someone was trying to get in. Angus froze. The howling grew louder, so loud that the room shook. And then with a whoosh and a slam, it was in his room.

He closed his eyes and held out his fingers to make the sign of the cross and waited for the worst. Then he opened his eyes and saw the bespectacled Naomi, his older, know-it-all half-sister, the daughter of the horrendous howler.

"Enough of that, Angus, please. That's no fat lady singing. That's your mom."

"Not when she's singing opera, she's not. I hate opera."

"Shut up, Angus."

Another long Italian moan shot through the room. Even Naomi seemed stunned.

"My God," Angus said under his breath, "somebody put that animal out of its misery. Please!"

"What did you say?"

"Nothing."

"You did, too. I'm warning you, Angus, your sarcasm is going to catch up with you. So, shut up now or I'll tell Mom and she'll keep you in this room for another two weeks."

"You're as bad as her," Angus said. He knew Naomi would tell on him no matter what, so he might as well get his money's worth out of it.

"And," he continued, "you're going to be just as fat."

"Mom is not fat," Naomi said, calmly reaching into her purse to pull out her ever present book of statistics. "Look, Angus, it says right here, a woman of Mom's weight is well under the statistical definition of fat. And anyway, she has to be large if she wants to sing opera. All prima donnas are large."

"You and your stupid statistics," Angus said. "Count them beans, count them beans, that's all you ever do. Everything is just one big statistic to you."

"If you can't measure it, you don't need it."

"Right. Well, measure this," Angus said, shaking his fist in Naomi's face.

Naomi sighed. "Will you never learn?" She put her book of statistics back in her purse, grabbed Angus by the shirt, and flipped him over her back and onto the hardwood floor.

He landed with a thud and lay motionless, staring angrily at the ceiling, more humiliated than hurt. He'd been there before.

"Well?" Naomi said.

"I'm not saying it."

"You will."

"Will not.

Naomi did a flying scream-of-death leap on top of Angus, knocking the wind out of him, pinning his arms beneath her knees. She grabbed a handful of his hair and with a sharp tug said, "Say it, Angus. Say it before I get mad."

"No," he gasped, sucking violently for some oxygen.

Naomi grabbed Angus's nose between her thumb and forefinger and began to squeeze. "You have five seconds," she said, "then it's your gonads. Statistically, you know what that means. You'll be begging me for mercy within 14 seconds. So, save yourself a sigma-five dose of agony and just say it."

Angus shook his head.

"One. Two. Three. . . "

It was hopeless. Angus knew he couldn't win.

"If you can't measure it, you don't need it," he muttered.

"And. . . ."

"And what?"

"Say the whole thing!" She squeezed his nose so hard it stuck together when she finally let go.

"Okay, okay. If you can't measure it, you don't need it. Following your quality guidelines will enable me to do a good job the first time and know that I have done succeeded."

"That's better." Naomi stood up and straightened her dress. She took a mirror out of her purse, smiled at her image, and put it away. Angus knew she wasn't fat, in fact she was quite pretty, considering the womb she came out of. He knew it wasn't beauty Naomi lacked. It was a personality.

She looked at him on the floor and said, "If you quit wasting all your time writing those stupid User's Guides, maybe you wouldn't be such a weenie. Why don't you try doing something manly for a change? Change the oil in Mom's car, lift some weights, break a window, anything?"

"Because Mom won't let me out of the room."

"Well, you can't blame her. Every time she does, you say something stupid about your User's Guides and embarrass the whole family."

Naomi left the room. Someday she'll get hers, Angus thought. And writing User's Guides was no weenie job. Grendel wrote User's Guides. Danny wrote User's Guides. All the Winners wrote User's Guides. What did Naomi know? You couldn't write a good User's Guide with statistics. "4.1 index entries per page," she'd say. "1.2 acronyms. 37% white space. 3.4 defects per million." 3.4 defects per million! Per million what? Picas? Pages? Periods? Pig hairs?

Angus wished he could just laugh in Naomi's face, maybe sneeze on it, too.

That's what Danny would tell him to do. Danny would say he wouldn't take that stuff from Naomi. That's why Danny was President and Honorary Captain of The Winners Club. Of course, Danny was older and taller and probably a good fifty or sixty pounds heavier than Naomi. At least, he would say that he was. But it didn't matter, anyway. Danny was in Colorado somewhere, and who knew where the rest of the Winners were.

Angus had never actually seen Danny, at least he didn't think he had. Danny said he'd been in that sports movie that Angus liked so much, and on the writing show that Angus watched on the rare occasions when Mother Bigger than a Butterfly let him out of his room. But Angus couldn't be sure, because, well, because he'd never actually seen any of the Winners and he wouldn't know the real Danny from a horse. Sure, he'd sent notes to them, and sometimes he got notes back, and he felt like he knew them, because he knew how they wrote and how they thought and how they felt about almost everything from punctuation to dictionaries, but what did that mean? They might not be winners at all, they might not live in all those exotic places they described in their notes, they might not even care which dictionary each other used or whether one of them carelessly used a "which" instead of a "that." For all Angus really knew, they might be nothing more than midgets living in caves.

"Snap out of it," Angus said to himself. "You'll just have to pull yourself together. Why would the Winners tell anything but the truth. They're technical writers, they live for the truth. Long live the Winners." If it wasn't for them, Angus didn't know what he'd do.

He walked to his window and looked out over Whiting, Indiana, at the pale white sky and the grey haze and the dirty buildings and leafless trees and the belching smokestacks of three of the world's biggest steel mills. Even an optimist would have to call Whiting an ugly place, maybe one of the ugliest on earth. And Angus was anything but an optimist; he knew why he was there.

He was there because of his mom, Ria the Rotund, and her ridiculous notion that she was just one lucky break away from singing Madame Ovary at the Met. Angus was in Whiting, Indiana, because Whiting, Indiana, was probably the only place in the world where Ria could sing on stage. And the only reason she could sing there was because Outland Steel sponsored an amateur opera company, and because Ria's third husband, the docile Dr. Rover Rice, was the only child of the owner of Outland Steel.

"Someday I'll show them all," Angus thought, "I'll become the world's greatest technical writer, I'll write the world's greatest user's guide, I'll delight the world, I'll be. . . well, I'll be a real Winner."

Then Naomi the number-cruncher would be sorry, and so would Ria, and even Dr. Rover Rice would have to crack a grin. Angus knew that Dr. Rover Rice's lot wasn't much better than his own, because Ria had two thumbs and Angus was squashed under only one of them. Rover was OK; he'd even encouraged Angus to keep writing. It was Rover who said that "How to Sit in a Corner Quietly" showed great promise. It was Rover who said that "Canine Commands: A Compleat Reference" really deserved to be published. It was Rover who said that "Cleaning Closets: A Primer" was one of the best technical manuals he'd ever seen a child write. It was Rover who would pull the crumpled letters from Angus's real dad out of the garbage, and with a shy smile say, "Here, Angus, it's another note from Grendel, but don't tell your mother I gave it to you."

Then with a crash and a wham, the door opened again and in came the so-big soprano.

"Hi, Mom," Angus said. "You sounded wonderful today, you really did. And that moo-moo you're wearing, it's marvelous. It's you."

"Shut up," she barked.

"But I'm serious."

"Naomi told me everything."

"Oh." Angus knew the routine. It didn't matter what he said.

"You're grounded for another week."

"In addition to the rest?"

"Yes."

"Oh."

Ria turned to walk out, then paused. "Another one of those notes came for you today," she said, "but I have a mind not to give it to you."

"But, Mom, please. Those notes are important to me. You know what the school psychologist said about depriving eighth graders of contact with the outside world."

"Well, he also said it wasn't normal for a boy your age to spend so much time writing User's Guides."

"Mom, please. You know, I really was serious when I said that your singing has improved."

"Really?"

"Yes, really."

"You're being sarcastic again, aren't you."

"I'm not. Your improvement is remarkable. You were nearly defect free."

"Nearly?"

"As near as a mortal can get, Mother."

"Okay. I'm glad to hear you say that. I know you're lying, but at least your insincerity is becoming less noticeable."

"Thank you, Mother."

"Here's your note. But don't expect any dinner."

She left. "What now?" Angus wondered. Time to work on the latest book, "How to Worship Women from Afar"? Angus looked at the note. Probably from one of the Winners. It looked like Danny's printing on the envelope. Probably no food hidden inside, but Angus was sure that Danny would at least write a few pages about all the great food he'd shared with the rest of the Winners. Danny's recaps weren't nutritious, but they were better than nothing.

Angus opened the note, but it wasn't from Danny. It was nothing but four blank pages. It was nothing at all. Angus took a deep breath and tried to hold it in until he turned blue and passed out, but he couldn't. The Winners had probably sent a long letter full of gossip and writing advice and a few dozen nitpicks about Angus's last book, maybe someone was finally coming to visit, maybe it was actually from Grendel. Angus would never know. Ria had probably ripped up the real letter and stuck in four blank pages just for spite. "What a life," Angus sobbed. And the tears poured down his cheeks and soaked the empty pages.

Angus was ready to tear the whole thing to shreds and scream, when he looked down at the paper again. "It must be a joke," he thought. "It must be a cruel joke."

The blank paper was no longer blank. Instead, it had a picture of a big, fat smiling clown. Angus blinked and when he looked again, the clown was smiling. A bubble appeared from its mouth, and inside the bubble it said, "Yo, Angus."

"Yo what?" Angus said. Nothing happened. So, Angus looked on the next page.

The clown face was now attached to the body of a tall, curvaceous woman and in the bubble it said, "Escape with me."

"Wow. How?" Angus wondered. He turned the page again.

"We'll float," it said in the bubble.

"What in the world?" Angus was baffled. Someone must have used reappearing ink. But how could they have known he was stuck in his bedroom? Who in the world could have sent this? He turned to the last page.

"I'm Thistlebottom," it said in the bubble. And then the picture disappeared. The pictures on all the pages disappeared.

Angus laughed. It must have been from Danny. Danny had done everything, all the Winners knew that. And Angus remembered Danny talking about someone named Thistlebottom once. It must have been from Danny.

Suddenly Angus felt faint, and then there was a rumble from within his stomach. Hunger. Starvation. "I've got to eat," he said to the blank paper. "I'm going to escape, I'm going to float right out of here and get something to eat."

He grabbed his thesaurus, turned to page twenty-three, and took the ten-dollar bill he had stashed there for an emergency. Dr. Rover Rice had given it to him last Christmas. It was the only present anyone had given him. Then Angus walked back to the window, opened it, jumped out, and tried to float.

"And your singing stinks," Angus yelled as he made the 6-foot drop to the lawn below his window. "And your singing stinks."

Those were the last words Angus heard Grendel Q. Bogus say.

Ria threw out Grendel years ago, when Angus was only seven. She said Grendel was insensitive, unsupportive of her career, and, Angus remembered her saying most distinctly, exceptionally boring. Ria was sick of nitpicks, she wanted substance. She wanted pizazz, sparks, quakes, shakes, and tingles up and down her spine. The last thing she said to Grendel was, "You have the effervescence of mold. Old mold."

"And your singing stinks," Grendel said as he walked out the door. It was the last time Angus saw Grendel, six years ago. Sure, Grendel would send the occasional postcard from his latest stop in the pursuit of a perfect technical manual. Boca Raton, Raleigh, Austin, Santa Theresa, Poughkeepsie, Kingston. The last card was from Endicott. But other than that, nothing. At least nothing that slipped through Ria's grubby paws.

Still, Angus always felt that Grendel was trying to reach out for him. Maybe Grendel was using The Winners Club as a front. Maybe, just maybe, if Angus could become a good enough technical writer, he'd be able to meet Grendel, and they could have lunch together. Just two technical-writing buddies who happened to be father and son.

"If writing User's Guides was good enough for Dad, it's good enough for me," Angus said to the Greek waitress at the gyro stand.

"No Pepsi, just Coke," she said.

"Fine," Angus said.

Angus closed his eyes and tried to summon up a visual image of his Dad. His Dad, Grendel Q. Bogus, the Technical Writer. "Don't call me an Information Developer," Grendel Q. Bogus would say. "I'm just a Technical Writer and darn proud of it." Angus could see him, hunched over his typewriter, ripping out a page, scratching all over it, tugging at his right ear, and starting all over again.

"Three dollars," the waitress said.

Angus paid up, took his food to the park across the street, gave some to the pigeons, and ate the rest.

"Now where," he asked a pigeon that was sitting in a puddle. "Now where can I go?"

The bird flapped its wings and flew onto a nearby boulder. Someone had drawn a clown face on the boulder, right next to a picture of a curvaceous woman, and just above a slogan that said something that looked like "Float you."

"I wish I could go to Boulder," Angus said. "Danny would know what to do."

Angus started to walk, hoping for some inspiration. He walked out by Wolf Lake and past the Cal Sag Harbor and the paint factory and the oil refinery, past softball games, and bars with old men drinking beer and TVs blaring out the White Sox game.

"It must be getting late," he thought. "Maybe I should go back home."

He looked up in the sky and saw a balloon drifting off in the horizon. For no particular reason he followed it until it suddenly started to drizzle, and the balloon popped. Angus double-checked the sky, and it was drizzling alright, but there wasn't a cloud to be seen and no balloons up there, either.

"Were you looking for one of these?"

Angus could hardly believe his eyes. It was the woman from the note, standing in front of a house. Curvaceous body, clown face, and a whole fistful of balloons.

"I have dozens of colors. Colors you've never seen. Colors no one has ever seen. Would you like one?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"I don't like balloons."

"Oh." The woman let the balloons go and Angus watched them drift away. He looked back at the woman, who was even more curvaceous than before.

"Well, would you like something else?" she asked.

"Like what?"

"Some pizza, perhaps?"

"Who are you?" Angus asked.

"Thistlebottom. I'm a friend."

"I don't have any friends."

"Oh, Angus, don't say that. I'm your friend. Everyone in The Winners Club is your friend.

"But I've never seen any of them."

"Doesn't matter. Look, come on in and have some pizza. We can talk about writing User's Guides."

So, Angus went in. What did he have to lose? He was grounded for the rest of the year, anyway. He walked behind Thistlebottom through what seemed like endless hallways. The house hadn't looked so big from the outside. And although the floors were covered with plush, wall-to-wall carpeting and the walls were covered with awards from various technical-writing competitions, something smelled strange, and it wasn't food.

"You won all these awards?" Angus asked.

"Sure, and you'll win some too, someday," she said. "You have a bright technical-writing career ahead of you."

"That's not what Naomi says. She says I'll never amount to anything unless I get behind her quality movement."

"Naomi doesn't know beans."

"That's what I keep telling her."

"Naomi won't be a problem for you, anymore. Neither will Ria Trudgeway."

Angus almost tripped over his feet. How could Thistlebottom know his mother's maiden name? She hadn't used that name for twenty years and three husbands. None of the Winners would know that, not even Grendel knew that. The only reason Angus knew was because he'd found Ria's birth certificate while scrounging through her drawers...

"Looking for notes. . ." Thistlebottom said.

"You read my mind."

"Most technical writers can read minds," she said. "You'll do it too, someday."

Thistlebottom led him into a large round room. In the middle was a round stage, concentric rows of benches surrounding it.

"I thought we were going to talk about technical writing," Angus said. "I thought we were going to have some pizza."

"Remember these words," Thistlebottom said. "BookMaster."

"That's one word," Angus said. "And it's bicapitalized, the B and the M."

"You're right. And now we'll have our pizza."

>From the darkness behind the stage approached two dark figures, shrouded in hoods.

"Stand on the stage," Thistlebottom said to them. "Take off your hoods."

The room went dark, and Angus couldn't see anything. Then four bright spotlights lit the stage. Standing there was Ria in a floor-length plaid smock, and Naomi holding her book of numbers.

"What are you doing here?" Angus asked. "And where is the pizza?"

"Angus? Is that you? Where are you? We can't see anything."

"Sing!" a voice bellowed. A horrible voice, a booming voice.

"Thistlebottom, where are you?" Angus cried.

"Relax," she whispered. At least, he thought it was her. But he couldn't tell, because he couldn't see anything but the two figures on stage. Ria was now wearing a viking hat, with two big horns sticking out. And she was holding a spear. She looked like that woman who sang in the opera about rings.

Naomi paged through her book at a mile a minute, trying to find the statistic that would explain her way out of this jam. She came to a page that seemed to hold the answer, smiled, and looked into the darkness. She opened her mouth as if to say something, but froze. Then she screamed at the top of her lungs.

"What is it?" Ria shouted.

"It's a monster! A giant bug!"

Angus looked, but he couldn't see anything.

"Eat the boy, eat the boy!" Ria sobbed. "Please, Bug, eat the boy, instead."

Before Ria could utter another word, the horns on her helmet started to grow, and then in an instant that Angus would never forget, the horns changed direction and plunged through her temples. She collapsed in a heap. Naomi reached for her book, but before she could open a page, both she and Ria vanished into thin air, nothing but a pile of ashes and the smell of burnt pizza remaining.

All the lights went out. Angus grabbed his nose to see if he was still alive.

"Thistlebottom? Where are you? What's happening?"

"It's you, Angus, it's you." It was a whisper, but it sounded as if it had come from a giant.

"It's you, Angus. You can bring them back. Or you can make them float. It's you, Angus. You can bring them back or you can make them float. It's you, Angus."

Angus closed his eyes. He could see his own ceiling over his head, he could feel Naomi's knees pressing down on his arms, he could hear Ria shrieking for another high note, and missing it.

"You can bring them back if you want," he thought he heard someone whisper.

Angus opened his eyes and he was back in the park, the pigeon back in the puddle. It appeared to be dead. Angus looked at the boulder. The clown face was gone, and so was the curvaceous woman. The slogan no longer said, "Float you." It said, "Shirt happens."

Angus walked home. When he got there, Dr. Rover Rice was sitting on the couch, his feet propped up on the coffee table. He was eating what looked like a thick slice of gooey, cheese-and-pepperoni pizza. At least, it looked like pepperoni.

"Life is good, eh, Angus?" he said.

"Where are Naomi and Ria?"

"They're gone. Try not to think about it. Want a slice?"

"Where did you get that?" Angus asked.

"I don't know. Someone just delivered it. They said that we'd won some kind of a contest."

"That's strange."

"It's been a strange day," said Dr. Rover Rice. "But go get a plate. This stuff is delicious. And by the way, I think I've found a publisher interested in your books. They want to meet you in Boulder, Colorado. Tomorrow."

Table of Contents - Chapter 1 - Top of Page - Chapter 3 -
Off The Wall - Callahan's Saloon