Benjamin Hale - The Fat Artist and Other Stories

Veronica was done with the dishes.

Phil squeezed his wounded and bandaged feet into his boating shoes and put on his yellow all-weather boating jacket and the blue Beneteau cap he received as a prize the time he won the Wednesday-night Galveston Yacht Club Open Regatta, which he always wore when he went sailing, for good luck.

“I can do this by myself, but it’ll be easier if I have another pair of hands,” said Phil.

“I know,” she said. “I want to come.”

Veronica sat on the bottom step of the stairs and began to pull on and zip up the black lizard boots she had left by the front door the night before.

“I’ve got an extra jacket you can wear,” Phil said from the foyer closet, flipping through a rack of coats and jackets. He pulled out another yellow boating jacket.

“Oh,” he said, looking at Veronica. “You can’t wear those boots. The soles’ll scuff up the deck. What size do you wear?”

“Women’s nine.”

“Uh-oh.”

Phil sorted through the white-soled boating shoes in the bottom of the closet.

“Diane’s would be too small for you.” He found the pair that Garrett wore when he was home. “Try these on.”

She took the shoes.

“These are way too big. They’ll be like clown shoes on me. Can I just go barefoot?”

“Mnn,” Phil growled. “Well, you need traction.”

She put her feet in the big shoes and laced them on.

“These are ridiculous on me. Look—” and she pressed down the toes of the shoes with her thumbs. “There’s like two inches of space in the toes.”

“They’ll have to do.”

Veronica rolled her eyes and acquiesced, then put on the yellow jacket, which was also Garrett’s, and also too big for her. The sleeves drooped past her hands.

Phil unhooked the keys to the Silverado from their peg on the cute stupid rack by the door that had a row of pegs to hang car keys on. Diane had bought it at Crate & Barrel, and Phil doubted its necessity.

They went out through the door to the garage and got in the truck. Phil pressed the button on the garage door opener clipped to the driver’s-side sun visor, and the garage door roared to life and rolled open to let the light in. Phil started the engine, put it in reverse, and nudged the gas, and immediately almost backed into the little white car that was parked in the driveway.

“Oop. I forgot about that. Sit tight,” he said to Veronica. “I gotta do something.”

He got out of the cab, snapped off the plastic truck bed cover, hopped into the truck and ripped the tape off the middle of the bundle, whipped open the sheet, dug through the pockets of Julian’s jeans, and fished out his car keys. He got out, walked over to the car, opened the driver’s-side door, and got in. The car was disgusting. There were cups and coke cans and papers and clothes and all kinds of shit all over the floor of the passenger’s side, and a Styrofoam cup in the cup holder between the seats was half-full of old coffee, with a bunch of waterlogged cigarette butts floating in it. The car started, with a little trouble.

“God damn it,” said Phil. “Kid treats his things like shit.” Phil could tell from the raspy sound of the engine that the fucking fan belt in this piece of shit was about to snap, and there was a goddamn idiot light on on the dash, telling him to change the oil. Just to change the goddamn oil —pretty basic stuff.

Phil backed the car out of the driveway and onto the street, then turned back and reparked it on the other side of the driveway. He shut it off, pocketed the keys, got out, hopped back into the truck, haphazardly taped the sheet shut again, hopped out, pounded the plastic cover back onto the truck bed, and got back in the cab.

Veronica was listening to the radio.

• • •

It was a beautiful day. Sunny, with a good warm breeze, but not too gusty. Perfect day for sailing. People were out in the neighborhood, walking their dogs and jogging, on this bright, quiet Sunday morning. It was about eleven by the time they made it to the yacht club and marina. They stopped at a gate with a booth. Phil rolled down the window, and the attendant waved.

“Morning, Phil,” said the attendant.

“Morning. This is my niece, Veronica,” he said. Veronica waved at him across Phil from the passenger seat.

“Howdy,” said the attendant. “Good day for a sail, huh?”

“Yep,” said Phil. “Great day. Hey listen. I got some stuff in the truck I want to put in the boat. You mind if I pull the truck up by the boat? It’s right over there.”

The attendant ducked into the darkness of his booth to look at some paperwork. His cabbage-like head came back into view in the window.

“Sorry, last name?” he said.

“Grassley.”

“That’s right. Sorry.”

The man’s head disappeared again, and then returned to the window.

“Nope,” he said. “That’s all right with me.”

“Thanks,” said Phil.

The attendant waved them through, and Phil guided the Silverado around the palm trees planted on the median of the roundabout by the front entrance to the yacht club, through the parking lot, and onto a little road that stretched along one of the concrete jetties of the marina between a row of warehouses and the docks. He parked the truck between two warehouses and they got out. The riggings of the boats clinked against the mast poles and the languid water slapped against their hulls.

Phil popped open the truck bed cover, dragged the taped-up bundle out of the bed, heaved it into his arms, and slung it over his shoulder. He led Veronica past the warehouses and down a long, bright white floating pier. They passed a couple of people walking in the other direction down the pier, and everyone smiled quickly and waved at each other.

They stopped at Phil’s boat.

“There she is,” said Phil. “My pride and joy.”

And Lord, was it ever a beautiful boat.

“This is a thirty-eight-foot 2005 Lagoon catamaran 380 S2. Twin inboard engine.”

“Wow,” said Veronica.

“Wow is right,” said Phil.

He laid the body down on the pier and gingerly stretched out one foot and then the other onto the surface of the boat. There was a big blue plastic tarp tied to the rings at the edges of the boat, to cover the wooden deck. Phil untied it and thundered it aside, uncloaking the brilliant white body of the catamaran. Phil held out his hand and helped Veronica step aboard. Phil made preparations to sail, then stepped back onto the pier and threw the bundled body into the mesh net strung between the twin hulls of the boat.

• • •

Sailing was one thing Phil loved and loved absolutely, without any complications or equivocations at all. He loved the equipment, for one. He loved the learned skill required to master its complexities, knowing what to touch and how to touch it and by how much to make the craft obey the commands from your hands. He loved the language that went with it; he loved how one can immediately tell a sailor apart from the rest of humanity by his correct usage of all these technical shibboleths, the singsongy jargon for all things nautical, these words whose blunt, silly choppiness denotes their Anglo-Saxon and Germanic roots, and hence their ancientness, which ancientness reminds one that the craft and science of seafaring is intrinsic to every human culture that ever found itself living beside open waters, and thus none ever had the need to filch words from other languages to explain its particulars — no Latin, no Greek, no French terms were ever imported by necessity to delineate its phenomena or to name its things: abaft, abeam, astern, bight, bilge, binnacle, bobstay, boomkin, bowsprit, capstan, coxswain, daggerboard, gollywobbler, gunwale, jib, lazyjack, leeway, mainsail, mizzenmast, portside, rudder, scupper, spinnaker, starboard, topsail, transom, traveler. Phil loved driving out to his boat in the Galveston Marina on a beautiful Sunday morning like this one, finding it bobbing proudly right in its special place between two less expensive and less beautiful boats, waiting to be maneuvered out into the choppy green gulf, waiting for his hands, for his touch. He loved untying and unfurling the dew-dappled blue plastic tarp — the noise it made, ba-boom , like a drum — then carefully rolling it up and placing it in its proper storage compartment. He loved when he got out into the deep water, after he had gently piloted the boat, helped along by the river water draining into Galveston Bay, through the channel between Galveston and Pelican Island and then past Port Bolivar and out past the jetties and the seawalls and the breakwaters and into the gulf, over the line that you could see, you could physically see dividing the light blue from the dark blue water, where the sloping floor of sand below dropped steeply down and the water got deep and the waves got high. He loved the shrieking of the seabirds circling above them. He loved the sound and the feeling of the seawater lapping against the hulls of the boat. He especially loved when it was time to cut the engine and hoist the sails — the pulleys and winches wheeling until the ropes and rigging snapped taut and the sails ballooned into shape — and he tacked the vessel into the wind and felt the force of the rushing air thrust them into serious motion, the newfound silence, the sun, the wind whipping his hair around, the boyish sense of adventure. Out here he felt extraordinarily alive and at peace, out here his mind raced with great thoughts and his heart surged in his chest and he felt like a man feeling like a man was supposed to feel.