Benjamin Hale - The Fat Artist and Other Stories

“No. Please no, no, no,” said Kelly. “We ain’t got time for that. We gotta get the fuck outta here. I gotta go home and clean up and get to work. I ain’t slep in twenty-five hours. And I ain’t gonna sleep in like twenty more.”

Then they noticed that there was another car in the parking lot. A little blue Honda Civic. Jackson pointed at it.

“The fuck is that all about?” he said. “That little blue piece a shit wasn’t here when we pulled up in Caleb’s van.”

There were needles of fear under Kelly’s skin.

“I don’t like that,” he said.

“I hate you,” said Maggie.

“Ain’t nobody talkin’ to you,” said Jackson.

Kelly threw the crowbar, which was slick with blood, into the bed of the truck and it landed with the hollow clunk of metal against metal.

Maggie was wearing a dark green hoodie with a kangaroo pocket in it, and was hugging herself with her arms in the pocket. She was refusing to look at him. Jackson stood in the parking lot with his arms akimbo, looking at the little blue car and then at the pool cleaning van.

“Let’s just shut up and get the fuck out of here,” said Kelly. “I do not like that there’s another car here.”

“No shit,” said Jackson. “We should bolt.”

They got in the cab of the truck. Maggie said she didn’t want to sit next to Kelly, so she sat on the passenger side, Kelly drove, and Jackson sat in the middle. If they hurried, there would still be enough time to drop Jackson off at his grandma’s house, go home, wash up, swing by Kelly’s mom’s house to pick up Gabie, drop him and Maggie off at home, and then tear back up the highway to report to work. Kelly’s palms were wet. They were getting blood all over the seats. Maggie sat still with her hands in her lap and stared straight ahead out the windshield.

Kelly jingled the keys out of his jacket pocket, inserted them into the ignition, turned them, and prayed. The motor didn’t come on the first time, or the second time or the third or the fourth time. Then, it did. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t. The headlights came on and the engine groaned as Kelly pulsed the accelerator. The radio came on. It was playing “Friends in Low Places.”

I’m not big on social graces

Think I’ll slip on down to the O — asis

Oh, I got friends in low — places.

The song lightened the mood a little. (A little.) Kelly mouthed along to the chorus out of habit.

The truck’s fat, soft tires rocked over the dirt road, bits of gravel popping under the wheels. They crept down the hill toward the stop sign. The red octagon flashed in the headlights and went dark again as they passed it. No cars coming in either direction. Kelly goosed the engine and the truck rolled out onto the main road and died.

The truck died across both lanes of the road, without enough space on either side to drive around it. The first car nearly plowed into them at about fifty miles an hour. Tires screamed, the sulfurous odor of burnt rubber. The driver jammed a fist into the horn. Then another car coming from the other direction did the same thing.

Kelly kept trying the engine, and the engine kept making a chortling noise and then choking off, until it failed to start completely, and then there was just the sound of the starter clicking, and then that stopped too, and now he turned the key in the ignition and absolutely nothing happened.

A line of cars began to stack up around them in both directions. There were four or five cars on either side of them, then six, seven, eight, and then there were two long trails of headlights and winking red brake lights on either side of the truck. Idling motors panted up and down the hill like tired dogs. Horns honked futilely. A few cars peeled out of the line and turned around.

Kelly didn’t want to get out of the truck with all the blood on his clothes. He just kept trying to start the engine. He put the transmission in neutral and tried to coast out of the way, but the truck didn’t move much. It took up a lot of space, and the road here had no shoulder. Jackson and Maggie were talking to him the whole time, but Kelly wasn’t listening to what they were saying. Kelly’s vision seemed almost to be flashing with white light, and all he could hear was a thin, high-pitched, nearly silent whine.

Somebody rolled down a window and shouted, “What the hell’s going on here?”

It was a stupid question, and Kelly didn’t answer it.

Kelly sank his forehead into the wheel and prayed. He silently prayed to God to start his truck. Then he tried the ignition again: silence. The radio came back on, though.

Just wait ’til I finish this glass

Then sweet little lady

I’ll head back to the bar

And you can kiss my ass—

Kelly looked at the lit green displays on the dashboard — radio, heater/AC, speedometer, odometer, check oil light, fuel gauge — and realized what the problem was.

“We’re out of gas,” he said.

Maggie was laughing. Kelly started laughing too.

Jackson slammed a fist into Kelly’s ribs. He wasn’t laughing.

“Ha ha ha ha ,” he said. “You fucked us over, Kelly, but you fucked me over most of all. So figure out how you gonna move this goddamn truck or I’monna fucking kill you. You under stand me, dog ?”

Kelly only kept trying to start the car, hoping that enough gasoline fumes were wafting around in the tank to kick-start the engine, which had happened before. If he could fire up the engine, he could pull out and coast all the way down the hill in neutral to where he knew there was a gas station, or thought there was, maybe. He thought there was a gas station down there.

The red and blue lights of a police cruiser flashed beside them. The police car emitted a truncated hoot from the siren, just a single, short rising-pitch wooop , and they heard a cop get out of his car and shut the door.

The cop’s face materialized in the driver’s-side window. He clicked his knuckles against the driver’s-side door because the window was down.

“Damn thing won’t start,” said Kelly, half laughing, smiling as much as he could. “Hell of a place to break down, in’n it?”

Unsmiling, the cop aimed a flashlight into the car. He was a young cop, his throat thick with dense cords of muscle, eyes taciturn, cheeks scraped smooth. Kelly turned the key in the ignition, listened to the engine not starting, staggered the accelerator with his foot.

Somebody up the hill buried a fist into a horn. Farther down the line there was the snarl of somebody juicing a motorcycle. The cop trained the flashlight on Maggie and Jackson, then at their laps, and saw that all three of them were covered in blood. The cop’s eyes darted to the bed of the truck, where there was the crowbar, and more blood.

Kelly was looking up at the cop, and he could see the exact moment, the slight change of expression on his otherwise emotionless face, when he must have thought something like this: Looks like this is going to be more interesting than I thought.

The cop kept his flashlight on Kelly as he unsnapped his holster and rested his right hand on the handle of his gun.

“Would you please step out of the vehicle, sir.”

Kelly turned to the cop.

“I ain’t slep in twenty-five hours.” Kelly knew it was obvious, it was obvious to everyone from the hideous croak in his voice that he was about to cry. “And I ain’t gonna sleep in twenty more.”

The cop repeated: “Sir, would you please step out of the vehicle.”

• • •

Somebody was screaming. Fred and Lana looked at each other. The screaming stopped. There was a long silence. Everything around them was still and dark. Lana and Fred stood ten paces away from each other, still, listening. There was another scream. It was a woman’s voice, screaming in either fear or fury.