The Fat Artist and Other Stories

by Benjamin Hale

  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 ou
t 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.

  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.

  “You’re up early,” he said.

  She looked at him dully. She was mad. About what?

  Kelly had been drinking coffee all night and needed to piss. He dumped his jean jacket in a chair and went to the bathroom. His urine hit the middle of the water with a violent sound, then he remembered Gabriel was asleep right in the other room and he redirected the stream to the side of the bowl to silence it. His piss smelled thickly ammoniac and was cloudy, so dark it was almost orange. Urine infection. Dehydration, too much coffee. Zip up, splash water on hands and face. Soap, scrub some of the newspaper ink from blackened palms, water. The ink from the newspapers spiraled down the drain in marbly black threads. His eyes were murky, ringed with wrinkles of gray skin, the whites dark with blood.