Benjamin Hale - The Fat Artist and Other Stories

They kept walking. A little while later they saw a stray sheep. The sheep was bashing its head against a rock. Over and over. There was a skinny boy who looked about ten years old sitting nearby on a log, watching. He was doodling in the dirt with a stick. They could tell by his face that he was the shepherd’s son. The sheep kept bashing its head into the rock, over and over. Blood ran down the side of the rock and curdled in the sand. A shard of the sheep’s skull had cracked open, like a little door, and a string of brains dangled out of the sheep’s head.

The boy saw Miles and Odelia, and he pointed at the sheep, shrugged his shoulders.

That was before they met Tessa, and before she came to live with them, before the man in the gray suit and the gray hat started following Odelia everywhere she went, before Miles ripped the phone out of the wall and threw it in the fire, and before Abraxas was born.

• • •

The woman in purple was standing outside the lavatory door, with her pearl earrings and her brown hair piled on top of her head like a loaf of bread. She put her hand on Odelia’s arm. Odelia flinched at her touch. The woman said:

“Oh dear. Did you have the fish?”

• • •

Abraxas screamed for the remaining duration of the flight. The airplane dove into Miami-Dade, and as it roared down the runway, Odelia turned to Miles and told him she had to take Abraxas to a hospital.

“He’ll be fine, he’ll be fine,” said Miles. “You can take him to a doctor in Mexico if you want. But he’ll be fine. We can’t lose you. You’re never gonna be able to get back to us.”

“I’m not taking him to a Mexican hospital,” said Odelia. “I want to be in America. I want to be in a place where people understand what I’m saying.”

“You won’t be safer. You’ll get caught. They’ll figure you out.”

“I’m scared to death. Miles, I’m scared to death.”

• • •

Abraxas wasn’t screaming anymore. He was too tired to scream. He’d settled into a persistent tearful whimper. She held him, she tried to make him understand that she was there and that she loved him, but she knew that inside himself he was completely alone.

She kissed the top of his head, blew her warm breath on his skin, and said, incanting it, again and again: “I will keep you from harm. I will keep you from harm. I will keep you from harm.”

Even though she knew he couldn’t understand her, she felt like she was telling a lie.

• • •

It was light out when they descended the airstair onto the tarmac, roughly the same time here in Miami as when they’d boarded the plane in Paris. The air was oozing with humidity. Odelia left Miles and Tessa at the connecting plane. They didn’t kiss good-bye. They didn’t even hug. They just sort of stood there and looked at each other. Odelia was crying. Miles gave her some money. A hundred dollars. She had nothing else with her except for Abraxas. Miles and Tessa got on the plane to Mexico.

• • •

The sky was pink, the air jungly with moisture. The heat was sickening. A row of thick-trunked palm trees skirted the runway and the leaves of their brittle fronds clicked together in a slight breeze that did nothing more refreshing than blow the heat around. The tarmac was chaotic with crisscrossing streams of traffic, pedestrian and vehicular. Men in blue jumpsuits and caps walked around with bright orange batons and drove baggage trains that scuttled like grumbling, beeping caterpillars across the concrete, and all the passengers who had just deplaned from the international flights funneled into the doors of the airport in a blizzard of languages, snapping at their children and grunting miserably under the weight of their luggage. Odelia joined the crush and was carried by the crowd through the doors. With her fingers Odelia smeared tears out of her eyes, which she was sure were bloodshot and swollen-lidded from crying. Inside the airport the crowd tapered into a line that was corralled into a maze of switchbacks cordoned off with red ropes looping through rows of metal stands that looked like silver chess pawns. The floor of the large room was covered with thin gray carpet. Outside the maze of ropes men in green-and-brown military fatigues stood by with German shepherds on leashes. Several of the men in fatigues were sitting in a circle of folding chairs, drinking bottles of Coke and smoking cigarettes and watching a TV that was bolted to the wall in the corner of the ceiling. A lazily revolving metal ceiling fan whipped the rising smoke into a rapidly vanishing eddy. They were watching the commentators bicker back and forth about McGovern dumping Thomas Eagleton from the Democratic ticket. Eagleton had frail nerves. He’d undergone electroshock therapy and had troubles with drinking.

Men and women in crisp airport uniforms trawled along the line, distributing stubby pencils and customs declaration forms.

Odelia had no plan and nowhere to go. There was the question of how she was going to make it through customs, which was coming closer and closer as she shuffled toward the front of the line. There was the question of money, or rather the question of having almost no money. She thought about how she might be able to get back to her parents in Troy, New York. Maybe she could take a train or a bus. It was August 1972. She was twenty-four years old and she hadn’t seen or spoken to her parents in four years. She wanted to see her parents. They did not know they had a grandson. She was going to change her son’s name. A smiling young woman in a blue airport uniform handed her a customs declaration form and a stubby pencil.

“Welcome to the United States,” she chirped, and moved up the line.

The baby whimpered and looked up at her, exhausted, his eyelashes caked with dried tears. Emily looked at the rectangle of starchy white paper the woman had given her. It was a hieroglyphic scramble of small print and dotted lines and boxes. Was she carrying any meats, animals, or animal products? Disease agents, cell cultures, or snails? Awkwardly balancing the baby against her shoulder with her arm and holding the form, she began to try to fill it in with the stubby pencil.

She had no legitimate identification with her. Passport, driver’s license — all of that was gone, and she could not remember if they had been lost or deliberately destroyed. She only had her forged Canadian passport. Her baby did not have a social security number, and she could not even remember hers past the first three digits. She was afraid she was going to cry again. She looked around her for someone to ask for help. The people in front of her were speaking in French and the people behind her were speaking in a language she could not even guess at. Instead of filling in the customs form, she turned the card over and with the stubby pencil wrote on the back:

MY NAME IS EMILY BARROW.

I AM AN AMERICAN.

I AM A WANTED CRIMINAL.

MY CHILD IS SICK.

I AM TURNING MYSELF IN.

I WILL TELL YOU ANYTHING I KNOW

ABOUT ANYONE.

PLEASE HELP ME.

She underlined the last sentence. When she made it to the front of the line she was made to stand and wait until one of the customs officers’ desks opened up. When there was a place for her the uniformed man at the head of the line unhooked a red rope from a stand and allowed her to pass through.

A thin, bored-looking bald man with glasses and a white mustache sitting at one of the high desks beckoned to her. He wore a black suit with a red-and-blue-striped tie and silver cuff links on his wrists. Emily stood in front of the desk and waited for him to speak. He was scratching at something on his desk with a fountain pen. Without looking up from the desk, the man held out a hand for her customs form and passport, and said: