Benjamin Hale: The Fat Artist and Other Stories

The fishermen at the docks smelled something funny with him, maybe literally, though Peter figured the general ambient stench of the fish was enough to mask any alcohol on his breath. It was like the fishermen knew there was something too buoyant about him today, too gung ho let’s-do-this. He wasn’t his usual anxious, timid, exhausted self. His usual self? How would they even know? This was only his third day on the job.

There was the usual haul of forty, fifty squid in the bycatch buckets. Back in the truck now, vroom, vroom , tearing ass down the highways back to Cambridge as fast as humanly possible, making up for lost time, working every twitch of horsepower the clunky old truck had in it, doing eighty, ninety, edging up on a hundred miles an hour, which he could do because there were almost no other cars on the road yet, the sun coming up perceptibly later today as it was still quite dark, barely daybreak, though it was hard to tell because the sky was overcast again, a sheet of hammered iron with the newly risen sun a fuzzy white blot in it. And again on the drive back his mind careened back to Gina. Peter thought, in a swirly-headed half-hungover, half-drunk way, about the girl he was supposed to get coffee with later that day, in the afternoon, and figured that today he definitely should leave the building through the back, one, because of the state he was in, and two, because of some sort of like, groom not seeing the bride before the wedding type reason. He would have time to go home, go back to bed, catch a desperately needed chunk of beauty rest before his “coffee date” with Amy. This “coffee date” officially made Amy the first girl who had shown any interest in him at all since Gina dumped him. He would have traded anything to be with Gina again, though of course he had nothing of any value to trade. He again remembered that time in the winter, in December, when those people, the couple, these friends of Gina’s from school, were hanging out with them on a Saturday afternoon, celebrating the end of finals, or something. They played Monopoly on the floor, everybody in socks and hats and draped in blankets with the two space heaters roaring and clinking and water boiling on the stove, and still it was cold. Peter was the ship. Peter was always the ship, because when they were kids, Greg had always gotten to choose first because he was the oldest, and he always chose the top hat, because, duh, it was the coolest piece, and Lindsay had always gotten to choose next because she was a girl, and she always chose the dog for some reason, which left Peter as usual with the leftovers, and he always chose the ship because he thought it was the next-coolest piece after the top hat, and being the ship became a private tradition with him when he played Monopoly. They smoked a couple of bowls and drank hot cider and rum, though they didn’t have all that much rum left, and when that ran out they broke into the beer, and when they ran out of beer they sat for a while around the game board, having crapped out on the game and long ago forgotten whose turn it was, discussing who would brave the elements and death-march it the three long blocks down the street to the store to get more beer. The wind was rattling the sides of the house and the temperature hovered somewhere in the ballpark of zero. Peter volunteered. The guy, the friend of Gina’s from school, offered to go with him, help him carry the beer back, but Peter waved him off, said, Don’t worry, man, I got it. They pooled their cash and Peter crammed the ball of ones, fives, and tens into the pocket of his coat, which he squeezed on over a hoodie, a sweater, and a scarf. Outside, the streets had that desolate, moondust look that very, very cold days sometimes have, puddles fossilized opaque and white into the sidewalk cracks, the wind sifting powdery old snow in wispy waves across the road. He hadn’t worn gloves, and he alternated the hand he was smoking with — when his right became numb he’d stuff it in a pocket and switch to the left, then go back to the right when the left was numb. Instead of going to the store to get more beer, he found himself ringing the bell at Dominick’s place. Dominick lived on the next street over, halfway between their apartment and the store. Looking back on it, Peter supposed that one could call this building a “crack house,” but Peter simply thought of it as Dominick’s place. Then he was inside Dominick’s place, stamping his boots, shaking off the cold, though it was cold inside the house too, colder than Peter and Gina’s apartment. And then Peter was forking over to Dominick all the cash he had just been given.

• • •

And now a cow was standing in the road. Peter saw it, of course, and knew what it was. It was a cow, one of those picturesque black-and-white New England cows, and it was standing in the road, in the middle of the lane that Peter was currently driving in. It might have been that Peter was going so fast that he wouldn’t have had time to stop anyway, but Peter didn’t even brake. The sight of the cow just confused him. The few long fractions of seconds that passed between seeing the cow and hitting the cow with the squid truck were just like, Hey, that’s not supposed to be there. That cow is supposed to be over there , behind the fence with the other cows.

The cow made a hideous noise that was a combination of mooing and being hit by a truck, rolled into the air, and smashed the glass of the windshield. Peter was stomping on the brake and the accelerator at the same time, the truck was on its side now, and now, after maybe blacking out for a moment, Peter was heaving open the driver’s-side door, pushing it against gravity, realizing how drunk he was and wondering how badly he was hurt. His hands were shaking. He crawled out of the wreck as fastidiously as he could. He put a hand to the side of his head, which hurt, and his fingers came back red. It was almost unbearably painful to inhale breath, which maybe meant he had broken a rib or two against the seat belt, and one of his knees seemed to be so fucked up he could hardly walk — one leg of his jeans was dark red and he didn’t even want to look at it. Okay, so. What now?

He saw where the cow was lying in the road, and limped over in that direction. Several hundred gallons of salt water had splashed onto the road, along with a streak of diffusely strewn chunks of metal and the dust and crumbs of blue-green glass blasted scattershot across the asphalt. The cow was alive. It was lying on its side in a pool of blood made thinner by the water. It was wet — its hide was sleek and glossy with blood and water. Blood trickled from its open mouth, and its chest rose and fell like bellows, the air rushing in and out of the mouth and nostrils. Its shiny black eyes were desperate and scared. All around them, draped bizarrely over the cow’s body and lying inert in useless, slimy piles of tentacles, were the squid. The squid, in perhaps a collective dying gesture, had all released their ink sacs, and had covered the whole scene with their ink. The water and the cow’s blood and Peter’s blood mixed with the oily, briny-smelling squid ink. The runny puddles of ink had rainbows swirling in them. It was about seven in the morning.

Peter sat down on the shoulder of the road, and watched the cow dying and the squid dying.

A farmer, presumably, a man who at least looked like a farmer, who looked to be in his fifties maybe, in heavy rubber boots and a Mackinaw, had hopped over the wooden fence by the roadside, the fence that separated what was supposed to be the car space from what was supposed to be the cow space. The glittering stardust of shattered glass crunched under his boots as he approached the scene. With his hands on his hips, he looked at the dying cow, and looked at the squid flopped pell-mell across the road, squirming their tentacles and squirting their ink into the blood and water. He went to Peter, and offered him a hand.