The Fat Artist and Other Stories (9 page)

“I ain’t slep in twenty-four, twenty-five hours,” said Kelly. “And I ain’t gonna sleep for sum’n like twenty more. I ain’t gonna get to sleep for almost a whole nother day.”

Maggie didn’t say anything.

“ ’Cause I gotta go to work after this, and then I gotta go to work again, so the next time I get to sleep is like, what? a whole goddamn day from now.”

“Please shut up,” said Maggie. “You got a cigarette?”

“We’re outta cigs.”

Kelly had switched from coffee to NoDoz. He’d been popping them like jellybeans all night and now his heart was rattling against his ribs and his hands were shaking like machines that were about to break. He stretched out the fingers on his hand, made a fist, stretched it out, made a fist, just to make sure it’s his, yes, and it’s obeying the commands from his brain, yes, it’s working, yes. They had dropped Gabie off at Kelly’s parents’ house. He handed Gabie to his mom while Maggie waited in the idling truck, and Gabie was squirming in a dirty diaper. He handed her the squiggly little shit-smelling, howling kid and said they were going to see a movie. That’s right, a movie. Date night. Right. Then he went around to the front of the house and borrowed a crowbar and a flashlight from the garage.

Maggie was sitting next to him just a little ways off the trail, on a mound of dirt, on sticks and leaves and rocks. Kelly was holding the crowbar and Maggie was holding the flashlight. They’d been sitting like this for an hour and a half. The night was clear and crisp and warm and they could see a lot of stars. Maggie was playing with the flashlight, clicking it on and off.

“Don’t do that,” said Kelly. She made an ugly face at him and he apologized. “I’m sorry. I mean, they’re gonna see you. Don’t advertise us.”

She stopped playing with the flashlight. They were trying to stay silent, so they could hear them when they approached. Cars and trucks clattered by within earshot along Lookout Road, and occasionally they’d hear the crescendo/diminuendo of a vehicle coming/going up and down the road matched with the movement of the long shadows of trees shifting in the headlights.

Thousands of crickets chirping together made a throbbing rhythm all around them. There must have been a cricket hiding under every leaf. The racket they made was deafening, their incessant
krreepa-krreepa-krreepa
.

A heavy truck rumbled by on the road, quietly at first, slowly gathering volume, then the sound changed pitch as it passed and sped off down the other side of the hill, and the noise quickly faded.

“You know why they do that?” Kelly whispered. The crowbar was slick with sweat and warm in his palms from his handling it.

“Do what?”

“Change sounds when they go by.”

“No.”

“It’s called the Doppler effect. When a car’s comin’ at you, you hear the noise get louder and louder, and when it goes by, the noise changes from goin’ up to goin’ down. It’s got to do with waves. Same reason why you look at a star in a telescope it looks red ’cause it means it’s moving away, which means the universe is constantly expanding.”

They looked up at the stars.

“The universe is constantly expanding and it’s infinite at the same time,” said Kelly.

“Why do you think I’m stupid?” said Maggie.

“I don’t think you’re stupid.”

“Then why you talkin’ to me like ’at, tellin’ me all this mister science shit like you think I’m a fuckin’ kid?”

“Oh fuck off.”

“Don’t tell me to fuck off.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to say that.”

“Quit sayin’ sorry.”

“What the fuck you want me to do?”

“I want you to grow a dick.”

They were silent after that.

Kelly squeezed the crowbar till his knuckles whitened and for a moment he wanted not only to bash Caleb Quinn’s brains out but all the brains of everybody everywhere and then he’d never have to worry about money or other people and he could go to the mountains by himself and just simply live, and maybe catch some fish.

They had been out there long enough that they had become used to the rhythm of the crickets chirping, so they noticed it when the crickets stopped.

There was a piercing flash of light somewhere in the distance, up ahead, in the trees. It was followed by another.

“What’s that?” said Maggie.

“I don’t like it,” said Kelly.

A snake egg started growing in Kelly’s stomach.

There were two more flashes of white light, but they weren’t accompanied by any discernible noise. They were quick, slicing pops of cold, silent light. They were happening pretty far away, maybe two hundred feet into the woods, but it was hard to tell.

Then they heard voices of people coming down the trail. They couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Kelly thought he recognized Jackson Reno’s voice. Kelly gripped the crowbar, loosened his grip, tightened it.

“Get the light ready,” Kelly hissed at Maggie.

Maggie snatched up the flashlight and took a few steps back.

Kelly was hot, weak, hungry, nauseated. The egg in his stomach hatched and a snake came out and started swimming around in his guts.

Two people came around the bend in the trail. One of them was wearing heavy yellow rubber boots. He was in front. Jackson was behind him. The one in the yellow boots saw that someone was there. Maggie clicked on the flashlight.

Caleb Quinn winced in the light.

Kelly stepped onto the trail and hit him with the crowbar as hard as he could in the gut. The sound of it was strangely muted, silent: a dull, flat noise of metal smacking flesh. Caleb doubled over, and Kelly jumped back and hit him in the side of the head, on his temple. Caleb pressed a hand to his head and blood came down his face. Kelly tried to get him in the balls, but missed and hit him in the thigh, and Caleb was covering his head and face with his arms as Kelly hit him in the gut again, and when he moved his arms, he hit him again in the head. Caleb fell down, and then Kelly hit him repeatedly all over his body. Kelly flipped the crowbar around and hit him one more time on the side of the head with the uglier end of it, the end with the hook on it, and there was the noise of something audibly breaking and an enormous amount of blood came out of Caleb’s head.

Kelly didn’t realize that Maggie was screaming until she stopped screaming because Jackson had pinned her arms behind her back and slapped a palm over her mouth.

“Kelly, chill,” said Jackson.

Kelly chilled. He looked at Jackson and Maggie. It was dark. Maggie had dropped the flashlight and the beam was pointing uselessly into the grass. She was struggling.

“Let go of her,” said Kelly.

“Why the fuck did you bring the girl, Kelly?”

“Let go of her.”

“This bitch was screaming her goddamn head off. What the fuck were you thinking bringing the bitch along?”

“Let go of her.” Kelly was the one screaming this time.

Jackson let her go. She ran over to Kelly and punched him in the face.

“Fuck,”
Kelly said, and dropped the crowbar and covered his face with his hands. His nose and cheek where she’d hit him were tingly and hot. “What the fuck you doing?” he shouted.

“You mother
fucker
,” she spat. Jackson had her arms pinned again. “You didn’t have to beat him up
that bad
, you mother
fucker
.”

They all looked down at Caleb Quinn on the ground and the blood spilling out of his head. Nobody said anything for a while. Caleb was still breathing, but his eyes were vacant.

The crickets started chirping again.

•  •  •

Fred screwed the flashbulb onto his 1967 Leica M3, loaded a roll of film, and took a couple of test shots. He sank a fat finger into the button and listened to the precise and delicately mechanical scissor-snip noise of the shutter opening and closing:
Slackit
.
Slackit
.
Slackit
.
Slackit
. He turned off the lights to see what she looked like in the dark. Her body glowed with a glittery silver-blue metallic luster. The thatch of pubic hair in her crotch was a brittle nest of shimmering wires, like tinsel. The way the silver paint looked on her skin reminded Fred of Jack Haley’s Tin Man makeup in
The Wizard of Oz
. Lana opened her eyes, and it was like this wild, haunting effect, these two bright human eyes opening up inside something that didn’t quite look human.

“It feels weird,” said Lana. “I don’t feel naked.”

Fred clacked the shutter,
slackit
, and triggered a sharp splash of white light from the flashbulb.

“How do you feel?” said Fred.

“Good,” she said, stretching, rolling out the muscles and bones that had gone creaky from standing still too long, just like the Tin Man after he’s been oiled up, regaining familiarity with autonomous locomotion. She examined her paint-caked legs, her arms, ran her hands over her body, this exoskeleton of dried paint.

“Do you want anything before we go? Like a towel, a blanket or something?”

Fred gradually struggled into a ratty leather bomber jacket that had fit him before he got fat. His keys tinkled as he fished them out of a pocket of the jacket.

“No,” she said. Her eyes were alarming, surreal-looking in her head. “I don’t need it. I feel like I have two layers of skin.”

They went out the front door, which Fred didn’t bother to lock behind him: Lana first, then Fred, the squeal and bang of the screen door, no neighbors watching, good, they’re all inside, nestled up in their stupid cocoons watching TV, as one can tell from the undersea glow of the walls behind their living room windows. Lana fastidiously picked her steps across the gravel driveway in her bare feet. The sky above was alive with stars. Somebody’s dog half barked in a false alarm, more of a guffaw than a bark, and then it tinkled its chain and settled back down behind its fence. In a nearby yard there was the rearing-rattlesnake noise of a sprinkler dusting off a sunburned patch of grass:
tchitcha-tchitcha-tchitcha-tchitcha-tschhhhhhhhhhhhhh——tcht-tcht-tcht-tcht
. It was a comfortably warm summer night with a hint of a coming autumnal chill in it.

Fred unlocked his battered blue ’93 Honda Civic, passenger-side door first and then the driver’s, and carefully squeezed himself under the steering wheel. Fred had taken out the back seats to maximize storage space, and the back of the car was crammed full of paint buckets, cans, brushes, tins of paint thinner, rags, socks, crumpled fast-food bags, petrified fries, Styrofoam cups, various other detritus, cigarette butts, cassette tapes. It didn’t smell good.

“Why is this car so gross?” said Lana.

“Because I’m a slob,” said Fred.

She rolled down the passenger-side window. Fred rolled his window down too, twisted the key in the ignition, and kicked the gas, and the engine grumbled on, then settled into a phlegmatic pant. A second later the stereo flickered on, a little too loud, and Fred turned down the dial. There was a cassette of Ornette Coleman’s
The Shape of Jazz to Come
in the tape deck. Fred turned on the lights and the car sputtered down the gravel driveway before they turned onto a paved road and Fred shifted into higher gear; the engine sighed in relief and the headlights spat dim yellow light onto the road in front of them as they drove along in the night and Ornette’s sax squeaked and whimpered over the rapid
skisha-skisha-skisha
of the cymbals.

“This is like,
nervous
music,” said Lana.

“I’ve always thought the tension in this tune comes from that jittery energy in the rhythm section mixed with the threnodic sound of the horns,” said Fred, glad to be talking about music again, where he felt conversationally at home. Fred waited for her to ask what “threnodic” meant; she didn’t.

“This is a very important album,” Fred continued, “but really you gotta get into Bird and Miles and Monk and Trane before you can truly begin to appreciate what Ornette’s doing here. All those guys, Miles and Monk especially, they
hated
this guy when he came out with this album. They were like, what the fuck is this lunatic doing?”

Fred slipped back into American-musicology-professor mode and discoursed on the emergence of free jazz all the way to the park. He talked about Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Cecil Taylor, Pharoah Sanders.

“You know what threnodic means?” said Fred finally.

“Yeah. It means like, mournful, right? It’s like a death wail.”

Fred was disappointed.

“Yeah,” he said.

They eased off 227 and onto Lookout Road, went about five minutes up the road and came to the top of a hill, where Fred slowed down to look for the turnoff to get into the park. He found it: There was just one narrow dirt road off the main road that led in and out of the park. The car shuddered over the washboards. They passed a sign nailed to an open gate that read
PARK IS OPEN FROM SUNRISE TO SUNSET
in red block letters above an illegible scramble of fine print.

“Where are we?”

“This is called Centennial Park,” he said. “Colorado is the Centennial State because they were made into a state in 1876, a hundred years after the Declaration of Independence. This is supposedly the site of some battle where the National Guard slaughtered a bunch of Indians or something.”

Fred pulled into the parking lot, dragged the car to a stop, and crunched up the brake lever. There was a massive cannon, dull green with oxidization, next to the parking lot, with a plaque on it. A half-moon showered light on the faces of the mountains heaving up in front of them to the west and tapering off into the distance to the north and south. Below them in the valley, the lights of civilization curled up the sides of the mountains and dispersed into darkness. A thin worm of railroad tracks coiled around the bottom of the hill, which sloped into fields and woods and a grid of dirt roads. Just below the hill there was an artificial lake and a coal-burning power plant: a tangle of power lines and a squat, ugly building with two char-blackened smokestacks towering from the top of it. The power plant glittered with yellow and green lights that were reflected as cleanly as in a mirror in the lake below.