Benjamin Hale: The Fat Artist and Other Stories

Anyway, on the night of August 19, the night before the night in question, Kelly got up at about 11:00 P.M. Maggie was still up watching TV. He kissed her good-bye and left. The truck started and he drove to work.

• • •

Kelly figured if he turned off the engine the probability it would start again was about sixty percent. Every time he turned the key in the ignition he prayed he would hear the sound of the engine catching and vomiting to life and not grurr-rurr-rurr-nglk! — (silence). When he was at work, rubber banding and stacking the newspapers, he’d leave the truck’s engine on while it sat in the parking lot. It leeched gas mileage leaving the truck running, but he couldn’t afford to have it die on him at work, or worse, have it die in the middle of his route while he was getting gas, and he couldn’t afford to have it fixed and he couldn’t afford the time to fix it and sure as fuck couldn’t afford a new car. After taxes, rent, food, gas for the truck, bills, cigarettes for himself and Maggie, diapers for the kid, and other necessary shit, there was pretty much nothing left. It was a good month if he could save more than twenty bucks. It was a bad month if the bank started charging him fees as this paradoxical punishment for not having any goddamn money, and all of a sudden, having done everything right, bills paid, no letters from collection agencies, no letters threatening to turn off the water, no outstanding debts, no drugs, no bounced checks, not much money in-pocket but not quite zero, and hey! — next day we’re a hundred bucks in debt with a week till the next paycheck. Kelly wondered if having a bank account at all was costing them more than if he’d just cash all his paychecks at the liquor store and put all the money in a fucking coffee can but Maggie was against this financial plan, as she found it low-class.

And Kelly was tired. So what do you do every day, Kelly? You wake up at eleven at night and see your wife and kid for fifteen minutes, get in the truck, turn the ignition and pray it starts, if it doesn’t, call work, grovel, tell them you’ll be late, if it does, drive to work, a half hour up 227, pull into the lot of this converted airplane hangar with a concrete floor and corrugated aluminum walls, remember to leave the engine running, clock in, drink coffee, get one of those orange hand trucks, wait for the rig to deliver the papers from the printer, dump a stack of newspapers on the hand truck, wheel it over to the workstation, pull out a newspaper, fold it once horizontally and twice vertically, snap a rubber band on it, slip it in an orange plastic sleeve and repeat, repeat, repeat: Repeat 358 times, load them all back on the hand truck, wheel them out to the truck, put as many as will fit in the cab in the cab and the rest in the bed, all the newspapers in plastic sleeves slipping and sliding around in the truck bed like a bunch of just-caught fish in a net, refill your coffee mug with burnt-ass office coffee one more time, light the first cigarette, and drive around the suburbs of Longmont, Colorado, all night throwing newspapers out the window into people’s driveways, and if you do it fast you can get home at like five thirty, six at the latest, park the truck on the gravel outside the trailer, say a little prayer for the engine and kill it, eat something, peanut butter sandwich, get into bed with your wife and child, don’t wake her up, just lie there next to her and wish you’d slept, worry about money, try not to worry about money, don’t take your shoes off so you don’t fall asleep and miss work, then at six thirty microwave some more coffee, pack a meal in a brown paper bag, shake yourself awake and light another cigarette, watch the rising sun and wait outside on the gravel for Jackson to swing by in his Chrysler LeBaron and pick you up to take you to your other job, where you and Jackson and six Mexican guys build dream homes for people who buy organic produce and do yoga and sit at computers in air-conditioned offices and go to lunch at Chili’s, Applebee’s, at TGI Fridays, and who refer to theirs as “real” jobs, then go home at four thirty, so fucking tired you feel dead on your feet, see your wife and child for as long as you can manage to stay up, watch some TV, have a beer or seven, go to bed, sleep for five hours, and get ready to do it again.

Everything went as usual that night. As usual, Born Again Steve at the workstation next to his tried to give him religious pamphlets. As usual, quotes from the Book of Revelation. As usual, the oceans turned to blood and the sun was blotted out of the sky, and as usual, the riders wore breastplates the color of gleaming fire and the heads of the horses were like lions’ heads and fire and smoke and sulfur issued from their mouths and a third of mankind was killed by the fire and smoke and sulfur issuing from their mouths. As usual, Kelly told Born Again Steve to fuck off. As usual, Born Again Steve clucked his tongue at him like, whatever, it’s your own damnation. As usual, Kelly finished half his route and parked his truck without turning it off at his special spot. His special spot was in the gravel parking lot of Centennial Park, over on top of the hill by the lake and the power plant right off Lookout Road. There’s an old cannon there with a plaque on it commemorating the site of a battle that happened in the 1870s when the National Guard slaughtered a bunch of Indians. Kelly sat on the hood of the truck and lit a cigarette and looked at the stars.

As he was looking at the sky, he saw a tiny object, a glint, like a little moving star, scrolling across the sky. The tiny prick of light traveled in a smooth, shallow arc, gradually gathering in brightness until it became a bright white flash, and then the bright light, though still moving in the same direction and at the same speed, began to fade, until it disappeared from the sky.

What had he seen? A strange light in the night sky, appearing, flashing, disappearing. He wasn’t alarmed. It could be a plane or something, something explainable, something man-made, but Kelly hoped it was a UFO. In the strictest sense, that’s exactly what it was, right? — an Unidentified Flying Object. He imagined a time in human history, a time that wasn’t that long ago, before a third of the stars had been erased from the night, before the sky was crisscrossed with the trajectories of blinking jets, when the night was clear, dark, primeval, and mysterious new lights in it were harbingers of wars and plagues or of the supernatural nativities of prophets, portents of disaster or salvation. It made him think about that ocean of blackness, going on and on and out forever. He thought about the word forever . He thought about the fact that he was going to die. He remembered a thought he had once when he was a child, when he was lying in bed with strep throat, and he was feverish, swollen, sticky with sweat, so sick that for a moment he wished he would die, and in his head he sent a prayer up to God, to make him die. Then he immediately had second thoughts and wanted to take it back and so he sent up another prayer telling Him to ignore the first and hoped He would understand. Because the thought of death had made him think this: If we believe in God and be good and so on when we’re alive, then we get to have eternal life after we die. Now imagine what eternal life would be like. It made him shudder. He determined that the idea of eternal life was much more terrifying than death. He realized that a material, biological death was not necessarily something to be afraid of, but rather, when checked against the terror of infinity, a comfort.

Kelly got back in his truck and finished his paper route. The sunrise as he was driving home was a good one that morning. The sky looked like it had been sprayed with fire and the faces of the mountains were glowing as if lit from within. The road shrieked under his tires as he pulled onto the deserted interstate and far ahead a flurry of birds burst over the highway and farther still the highway tapered out into a thin band of silver on the horizon. He picked up a hitchhiker on his way back. He found him sitting on his backpack on the shoulder of the interstate with his thumb out. A skinny man with a walrus mustache who slurped coffee from a Styrofoam cup. Trinkets of coffee clung to the wires of his mustache every time he took a sip. He said he was traveling because he was wanted for larceny in Wyoming and he was headed to Mexico. Kelly wished him luck, dropped him off on the exit ramp, and went home. He hadn’t put any gas in the tank because the only money he had was some loose change clicking around on the dash and buying $1.36 worth of gas was hardly worth it, and because there’d been a couple of state troopers at the gas station who might have said something about Kelly filling up the tank without cutting the engine. The needle of the fuel gauge jittered right above zero. He parked the truck on the gravel outside the trailer, said a quick prayer for the engine, and turned it off. There was a guy living next door who raised dogs for fighting and kept three pit bulls all chained to the same post outside, and as always, when he pulled up they went crazy barking, scrambling all over each other and looking like one giant crazy dog with three heads. It was almost six in the morning. If the rig from the printer hadn’t been late he would have been home half an hour ago. The door was unlocked. Inside the lights were off and the blinds shut to the sunrise, narrow orange bands of light striped across the room, and Maggie was sitting upright on the couch, in sweatpants and a T-shirt, feet bare, Gabriel asleep in her lap. The TV was on. The sound was muted and the picture was on snow.