Benjamin Hale - The Fat Artist and Other Stories

She began to wonder if Ezekiel had been visited by aliens. She told this to her son one day over the phone. She read the passage aloud to him, and then told him about her theory that Ezekiel had been witness to some fantastic display of extraterrestrial technology and had (only somewhat) misinterpreted it as a vision of God. Her son tried to change the subject.

Also at around this time she saw a new light in the sky at night. She had been looking in the right place at just the right time. She was standing on her front porch, looking at a spectacular vault of sky above, haunted with ribbons of starsmoke. At first it was only a speck of light. It traveled slowly across the sky in a smooth, shallow arc, gathering gradually in brightness until it became a blazing white flash, and then the bright light, though still moving in the same direction and at the same speed, began to fade away until it disappeared.

Johanna drove to the library and checked out books about astronomy.

Now Johanna spent each night awake until very late, looking through the telescope at the end of the second-story hallway, aimed at the sky through the glass doors to nowhere. She began to see more of these lights in the sky. She recorded their patterns, penciling her documentations in legal pads, with brief descriptions of what she saw, the date, the exact time of its occurrence, and its position in the firmament — its azimuth, its distance from both zenith and nadir.

She became increasingly convinced that these lights in the night sky were of extraterrestrial origin. Johanna spotted at least four of these unexplained lights per week, sometimes more. But the weekly four occurred with religious regularity. Johanna detected a pattern, or perhaps it was a small part of a larger pattern. She hoped it was part of a larger pattern, as there was much that remained a mystery, but she felt she was beginning to piece it together. In her mind the disparate threads were beginning to form a network.

The lights usually happened in the early evening, just after sunset. Every Tuesday the light would arrive at eight o’clock, almost on the dot, appearing directly south, about 30º above the nadir and 150º below the zenith: She would look at the southern sky through her telescope, listen for the subtle ratcheting noise of the grandfather clock rearing itself to strike eight times, and as soon as she heard the first strike of the clock, the light would appear in the sky. The next one came three days later, on Friday at 7:51 P.M., at the exact same altitude but about 10º west of the previous light. The next came the next day, in precisely the same heavenly position, at 7:45 P.M. The final light in the pattern appeared at the same altitude, but 15º east of Saturday’s, on Sunday evening at 7:53. The pattern repeated this way, week after week, without fail or fluctuation.

Every time she saw the light in the sky, she felt something moving inside herself, in her blood, her lungs, her organs, a feeling that was not quite terror and not awe and not humility, and not a feeling that she was catching sight of something of sublime beauty, but a feeling that combined elements of all these, a feeling that must have been something akin to what early human beings felt millions of years ago when they looked up at the spectacular vault of sky above them, haunted with ribbons of starsmoke, and had no idea who they were or where they were or how big was the universe.

Johanna felt she was listening in on something.

• • •

First, foremost, Kelly’s truck: what a dilapidated hunk of shit it was, how it shuddered and moaned and coughed and wheezed and didn’t start half the time.

Kelly Callahan was a friend of mine, and so was Maggie. Caleb Quinn I knew, but I’d never have called him a friend. Jackson Reno I knew only peripherally. We all grew up together; we had all gone to school together. And just by a weird coincidence I knew Fred Hoffman, too. I’d briefly worked for him once, painting houses. Fred sort of fired me or I sort of quit, depending on who you ask, though even now he still calls me up once in a while and asks if I want to subcontract a job for him. His niece, Lana, I never met, but Fred showed me a picture of her once, which I thought was odd at the time, but it makes more sense to me now. That’s how I stand with regard to everyone involved in this story, which is why, although I’m not in it, I’m not in the worst position to tell it.

But the truck.

It was a 1987 Ford F-150 that his father had given him, with a spiderweb crack in the windshield and rust-eaten paint, though it had been white. And as for the vehicle’s problems, its many ailments, its many electrical and mechanical idiosyncrasies: The windshield wipers didn’t work, the headlights went dim if the radio was on, none of the gauges on the dash were reliable, the engine was prone to overheating, and it was furthermore in dire need of new brakes, tires, transmission, air filter, fan belt, spark plugs, and an oil change, and the tank was forever low on gas. This last problem would have been ameliorable enough if not for Kelly’s bigger problem, the real problem, the umbrella problem, the arch-problem from which all other problems germinate: money. Kelly’s lack of it, specifically.

The truck is important because Kelly needed it for work. Kelly was working two jobs at the time. The first, his day job, was doing construction, and he worked with his friend Jackson Reno. Except for the foreman they were the only two white guys on the crew, and this was in Colorado, where nobody’s unionized, and even then Kelly only got the job in the first place because the foreman was a friend of his dad’s. Kelly hooked Jackson up with a job on the crew; Jackson had just gotten out of jail for dealing cocaine and nobody wanted to give him a job. Jackson was still on probation and was trying to save enough money to get out of his grandmother’s basement. Jackson had sky-blue eyes and his face somehow always seemed to have four days’ stubble on it. He dressed every day in ripped-up low-riding cargo shorts that came down to his ankles, a wifebeater, and a Raiders cap he always wore cocked half-sideways on his head, and had arms covered in bad tattoos. On his right bicep he had a tattoo of Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guards the gates of Hell. All the fingers on his right hand were the same length and had no fingernails, from once when he was building one of those kit cabins in the mountains and a log slammed down on his hand and set with the tips of his fingers under it, and once those things set, you can’t move them; the foreman had to shoot him up with morphine and rip his hand out. He once told me it was “cauliflowering” before they even got him in the car.

Kelly’s second job was driving around in the middle of the night delivering newspapers. That was what he really needed the truck for. Kelly got up around eleven at night to go to work. He’d do his paper route and get home at six in the morning, then go out again to his other job. He had to get that second job because his wife had just had the baby and Maggie couldn’t work, and they were desperate for money. He was constantly trying to keep the bank account in the black. It hovered always at just about zero, and if it went under then he’d get zinged with all these Kafkaesque fees for not having any money. Kelly Callahan spent about a third of his income on bank fees. Kelly had red hair, red-red Irishman’s hair, and he’d recently grown a beard. He usually wore cowboy boots and a grubby Colorado Avalanche cap. He was in pretty good shape, but he was thin and small, five foot six or so. Maggie had gotten fat. She had an eyebrow piercing and wore too much makeup, all that dark shit around her eyes making her look like a raccoon. Sometimes I would see Caleb’s car parked outside their trailer when I drove by. I never told Kelly about it. Caleb Quinn and Maggie had dated in high school, if that’s the word for it — they were the sort of high school couple that ditched class to go get high and screw in the bushes behind the tennis courts. They both dropped out of school and moved into an apartment together by the lake behind where the KMart used to be. They were doing a lot of drugs, and I’ve heard (admittedly, like, thirdhand, but I believe it) that Caleb was beating her. She left him, moved back in with her mom, and later got together with Kelly. She got pregnant and they decided to get married. Maggie and Kelly had been married for a little under a year. Gabriel, their kid, was about five months old when all this happened. They were living in that trailer park out by where 50 and 227 come together. Kelly was twenty-one years old and Maggie was twenty. I think Caleb and Jackson were twenty-two and twenty-three, maybe? I can’t remember exactly.