Benjamin Hale - The Fat Artist and Other Stories

“You’re up early,” he said.

She looked at him dully. She was mad. About what?

Kelly had been drinking coffee all night and needed to piss. He dumped his jean jacket in a chair and went to the bathroom. His urine hit the middle of the water with a violent sound, then he remembered Gabriel was asleep right in the other room and he redirected the stream to the side of the bowl to silence it. His piss smelled thickly ammoniac and was cloudy, so dark it was almost orange. Urine infection. Dehydration, too much coffee. Zip up, splash water on hands and face. Soap, scrub some of the newspaper ink from blackened palms, water. The ink from the newspapers spiraled down the drain in marbly black threads. His eyes were murky, ringed with wrinkles of gray skin, the whites dark with blood.

When he came out of the bathroom Maggie was still sitting there on the edge of the couch. She had something stuck up her nose, a twist of toilet paper crammed into one nostril to dam a nosebleed.

Kelly said: “What’s wrong.”

“Caleb Quinn come over when you was at work,” she said.

“Caleb Quinn? What did—”

He could feel the anger coming inside him, starting in his stomach and racing up his throat.

“What did he want?”

She didn’t look at him. She was watching the agitated crackle of static on the TV. It wasn’t quite snow. There was some kind of image buried in it. Silent, fuzzy figures moved like shadows behind a curtain of noise.

Her voice was a decibel above a whisper, and she looked like she was conscious of being watched as she said:

“He raped me.”

After he’d calmed down enough and the baby had quit crying and had gone back to sleep, Kelly sat down with her on the couch.

They sat there together, watching the figures moving behind the static on the TV, not saying anything, Gabriel asleep on Maggie’s lap. Kelly tried to hold her hand, but she didn’t want him to. He tried to put his arm around her, but she flinched, she didn’t want to be touched at all.

At a quarter to seven they heard the dogs barking outside.

Jackson Reno had pulled his car up on the gravel outside, and they heard him sink his palm into the horn of his green Chrysler LeBaron three times, probably guessing that Kelly had fallen asleep. Kelly had to go to work.

• • •

Fred wet the seam of the joint he’d just rolled, double-sealed it with an index finger, and presented it to Lana.

“This,” he said, holding it the way one would hold up an interesting archaeological artifact for schoolchildren to see, “is a joint rolled with the inveterate craftsmanship of a dude who lived through the sixties.”

Lana smiled and accepted it, almost over-casually, Fred thought, like not making too big a deal about this new illicit wickedness between them, as if to say there was nothing wrong with sharing an illegal marijuana cigarette such as this with her uncle, though it was obvious the wrongness of it thrilled her.

“Do not, I repeat, do not, tell your mother about what we’re gonna do here,” he said. “She wouldn’t get it. This is not porn — this is art. I don’t think she would get it. I don’t think she would understand the difference.”

“What is the difference between pornography and art, Fred?”

“That’s a time-old question of aesthetics and the answer has to do with your, uh, philosophical outlook, but what I say to that question is very little actually when it comes down to it. But still. Bottom line, don’t tell your mother.”

“Yeah, no duh,” said Lana. “She wouldn’t get it.”

They were sitting at Fred’s kitchen table under a jittery fluorescent tube full of dead bugs, looking at books of nude photography. Fred had just dropped the needle on an album of Alan Lomax field recordings; the antique recording warbled and crackled with static, and Lead Belly sang:

Brady, Brady, Brady, you know you done wrong

busting in the room when the game was going on

Lana extended her neck out with the joint between her lips and Fred lit it for her with the feeble blue sputter of a Zippo that was running out of fuel, clacked it shut with his thumb, and set it on the table. This is what was on the table: the lighter; some empty beer bottles; two orange Fiestaware plates, on which were forks, knives, and crumbs of toasted hot dog buns and spaghetti; a brown glass ashtray Fred had stolen from a Best Western in Utah, containing the ashes and butts of the cigarettes they’d smoked; several books of art photography they’d been looking at together; some matte prints and proof sheets of Fred’s own photographs. The table itself Fred had made out of tree stumps and a slab of concrete he had painted pink and decorated with Mexican Talavera tiles. Every spring he hauled the bastard thing out to the sidewalk art fairs in Denver, Boulder, Aspen, Durango, Santa Fe, Taos — along with his paintings, framed prints of his art photographs, and the other unwieldy pieces of furniture he’d made and painted with kaleidoscopic patterns, turquoise, green, neon pink, diamonds, suns, crescent moons, lizards, cacti, jaguars, dog-headed snakes, Aztec gods — and he would sit under his designated tent in a lawn chair with a cigarette and a beer and an ice-cream cone and hope for customers, and if none bit he just watched the passersby, which was entertainment enough if the weather had warmed up and all the skirts and flip-flops and bikini tops had finally come out of hibernation. Occasionally he actually sold something. Fred also photographed weddings and did high school yearbook shots, if the parents didn’t take a look at Fred and decide not to drop their kids off with him (which happened), and in the summers he painted houses to supplement his income. Still, Fred Hoffman was perennially broke. He leased (not to own) this aluminum-sided fifties ranch, and had illegally converted the fallout shelter into a darkroom, where he spent a lot of time under red lights, breathing in the noxious miasmata of fixer, developer, and stop bath. Working with paint and photochemicals compounded perhaps with too much acid in the sixties (mostly the seventies, to be honest) had given Fred some nerve damage, and though he felt his wits were still intact, sometimes his words couldn’t quite slide through the electrical conduits from brain to mouth syntactically unscathed — they got bogged down somewhere along the way, always arriving late and in the wrong order. He also found himself talking in a slow, nasal, pained-sounding voice; his lungs straining to push air through a smoke-hoarsened throat. And at some point in the last ten years he’d gotten really fat.

Fred wanted to shoot nudes — atmospheric close-ups of milky hips and legs and torsos and breasts, black-and-white shots with very narrow depths of field, pale dunes of skin sloping into the distance like mystical desert landscapes, or maybe something like David Hamilton, delicate-boned girls splashing around in streams, wringing hair, sighing, perched lithely on logs like forest nymphs out of some titillating Greek myth. He was thinking about starting a Web site, though Fred wasn’t exactly sure what this meant, he only knew that he apparently hadn’t been paying attention at the precise cultural moment when everything suddenly turned into w-w-w-dot-whatever-the-fuck-dot-com. Any technology more cutting edge than the eight-track was as good as voodoo to him. But cell phones, computers… technology was the thing now. Somehow technology was supposed to save us all. The future was promising and bright. It was the summer of 2001.

Fred had met Lana in Troy, New York, at his mother’s funeral, when his scattered and estranged family got back together for the first time since they were kids. At the reception Mom was lying supine in a glittery electric-blue casket with a plush white interior, looking like she had passed out in the backseat of a ’57 Caddy. Fred said they should have buried her facedown so when the Rapture comes and Jesus floats down from heaven to raise the dead she’ll wake up and start digging in the wrong direction and we won’t have to ever see her again, unless she eventually resurfaces somewhere in China with fingers clawed to the knucklebones, hacking up lungfuls of dirt… Fred’s sisters didn’t think it was funny when he said that. Lana had been fourteen years old at the time and had recently gone all mall punk, with a silver bauble flashing on the curl of her nostril and her pretty little head totally befouled with this psychotic haircut, her hair shaved to the skull except for a Kool-Aid — green shock in front that dangled to the corner of her mouth, and she had a disgusting habit of chewing on it. Her mother — one of Fred’s older sisters — said she was “in a difficult phase.” Lana was doing drugs, smoking cigarettes, listening to the Buzzcocks, dressing like a hooker, and mutilating herself with safety pins. Her mother simply didn’t understand. Fred understood.