Benjamin Hale - The Fat Artist and Other Stories

“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.

“It’d be a beautiful view if it weren’t for that fucking power plant,” said Lana, squinting as if she was trying to imagine what the landscape would look like without the smokestacks.

“Yeah,” said Fred. “It’d be dark.”

“I like the dark.”

They stood in the parking lot of the scenic overlook and absorbed the landscape. Fred turned to Lana, who was standing on the gravel with her hands on her hips, her thin, naked, painted body iridescent in the moonlight.

“You cold at all?” he asked.

“No. The paint’s warm. And there’s all the beer and whiskey.”

There was an old white pickup truck with a crack in the windshield parked in the parking lot. Fred pointed at the truck.

“I don’t know if I like that.”