The Fat Artist and Other Stories

by Benjamin Hale

  “Huh,” said Phil.

  They continued to stand over the couch and look down at Julian’s pale, skinny body. Veronica looked back and forth from Julian on the couch to Phil standing a few feet away at the foot of the couch. Phil’s hands were submerged in the pockets of his khaki shorts. Veronica’s eyes were huge and scared and she was biting the knuckle of her forefinger.

  “What should we do?” she whispered.

  Phil didn’t say anything. He was rolling his tongue around in his mouth. He could see in his peripheral vision that Veronica was trying to make eye contact with him. He kept looking at Julian’s pale blue face. Phil had never seen a dead body before, for one thing. He’d made it through all these years without ever actually having seen a real dead body. Well, actually, he’d been to a couple of open-casket funerals, but that didn’t seem to count. He’d never seen his father’s body; it had been cremated by the time he’d made it home. Phil’s mother was ninety-one years old and somehow not dead yet. Thus, Phil had never actually seen a dead body—a raw, unembalmed, un-cleaned-up one—until now. Phil pulled the yellow afghan over Julian’s face.

  “I need some coffee,” said Phil.

  He went into the kitchen, noticed that the floor was sticky from where the wine bottle had broken and spilled last night, replaced yesterday’s soggy filter and grinds with fresh stuff, filled the glass pitcher of the coffeemaker with cold water—not from the tap, but from the spigot in the refrigerator door next to the automatic icemaker, which was filtered and extra cold and made for better-tasting coffee—poured it into the percolator, replaced the pitcher, and flipped the switch, and in a moment a thin brown thread of liquid began to dribble through the hole in the lid of the coffeepot and steam up the sides of it.

  “You want some coffee?” he said.

  “Yeah,” said Veronica from the other room.

  When it was ready he poured the coffee into two mugs. One was a conference-swag mug that said BAIN CAPITAL on it, and the other had a picture on it of Snoopy wearing a scarf and aviator helmet pretending his doghouse was an airplane.

  “Milk or sugar?”

  “Little of both.”

  Phil glooped some two-percent milk into the mugs and shot a few dashes of sugar into each from the sugar dispenser, opened the silverware drawer, selected a spoon, rattled the spoon around in the cups, and watched the ribbons of milk in the black coffee eddy and blur into homogeneous shades of tan.

  The items of the night before—the blender, the limes, the mezcal bottle, the ice bag, the cutting board, the bottle of Scotch, the rolling pin—were still sitting on the kitchen counter. Phil put the two cups of coffee on the kitchen table. Phil and Veronica sat at the table and sipped their coffee. It looked like it was going to be a beautiful day: a sunny, wet, thick-aired, late-summer Texas Gulf Coast kind of day.

  They drank the coffee, and Phil told Veronica everything she needed to know about Julian. When he was done, she said, again:

  “What should we do?”

  “What’s this we stuff,” he said, Tonto to Lone Ranger. “This is my problem. If I were you I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  “I want to help.”

  “That’s sweet.”

  “It was an accident.”

  “Sort of.”

  “It was an accident. There was somebody robbing your house, and you hit the guy and knocked him out. Case closed. It’s not your fault. It’s totally understandable. You have nothing to hide. You have nothing to fear.”

  “Jesus. All this is gonna be a barrel of laughs to try to explain to Diane. For one thing, you weren’t here. Let’s get that straight.”

  Apparently for lack of anywhere else to look besides at Phil, Veronica looked down into her cup of coffee and said nothing.

  “Is that gonna be a problem? Is it? I need you to promise me that, at least. Anybody asks, you weren’t here last night.”

  “Phil. It was an accident. I’m a witness. I saw what happened. I’m the only one who knows it was just an accident.”

  “No. Period. No. How many surprises at once do you want me to spring on Diane when she comes home tomorrow?”

  “I don’t want you to get in trouble. Just call the cops and we’ll tell them what happened.”

  “Look,” said Phil. He pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers, drew a breath, and let it out slowly. Veronica rubbed his arm, which was resting on the kitchen table holding the cup of coffee. After a long time, he said: “None of this had to happen. Why do this to our lives? Why do this to my life? Why drag you into all this? Why put Diane through all this? This didn’t have to happen. Right now, it might as well not have happened. Nobody knew where the hell Julian was for a month, or more. He was totally incommunicado. We still don’t know, actually, and probably never will at this point. Point is, this didn’t have to happen. You see what I mean?”

  Eventually, she saw what he meant.

  A cardinal landed on the birdfeeder outside.

  • • •

  They prepared and ate breakfast. Phil cut two bananas into slimy pale yellow chips and fanned them out on top of two bowls of Wheat Chex. They had orange juice and toast with butter and raspberry jelly, and finished off the pot of coffee.

  Veronica washed the dishes from breakfast and from last night while Phil rooted around in a linen closet—comforters, blankets, fitted sheets, pillows, pillowcases—until he found a ratty old blue bedsheet. They never used it anymore. It was thin and threadbare and washed-out and had a bunch of little moth holes in it. It wouldn’t be missed.

  Phil came back downstairs. From the kitchen, noises of running water and clinking plates. Phil pushed some furniture aside and billowed the sheet out flat on the living room floor. He threw off the yellow afghan, picked up Julian, who had already begun to stiffen, laid him down on the sheet, and rolled him up in it. Then he went out to the garage and found a roll of duct tape. He unpeeled long strips of the tape and wound them around the bundle. He propped open the door to the garage, picked up the taped bundle, heaved it over his shoulder, took it into the garage, and dumped it in the truck bed of his silver Chevy Silverado. He scooted the plastic truck bed cover on top and drummed on it until he felt it snap down into place.

  Veronica was done with the dishes.

  Phil squeezed his wounded and bandaged feet into his boating shoes and put on his yellow all-weather boating jacket and the blue Beneteau cap he received as a prize the time he won the Wednesday-night Galveston Yacht Club Open Regatta, which he always wore when he went sailing, for good luck.

  “I can do this by myself, but it’ll be easier if I have another pair of hands,” said Phil.

  “I know,” she said. “I want to come.”

  Veronica sat on the bottom step of the stairs and began to pull on and zip up the black lizard boots she had left by the front door the night before.

  “I’ve got an extra jacket you can wear,” Phil said from the foyer closet, flipping through a rack of coats and jackets. He pulled out another yellow boating jacket.

  “Oh,” he said, looking at Veronica. “You can’t wear those boots. The soles’ll scuff up the deck. What size do you wear?”

  “Women’s nine.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  Phil sorted through the white-soled boating shoes in the bottom of the closet.

  “Diane’s would be too small for you.” He found the pair that Garrett wore when he was home. “Try these on.”

  She took the shoes.

  “These are way too big. They’ll be like clown shoes on me. Can I just go barefoot?”

  “Mnn,” Phil growled. “Well, you need traction.”

  She put her feet in the big shoes and laced them on.

  “These are ridiculous on me. Look—” and she pressed down the toes of the shoes with her thumbs. “There’s like two inches of space in the toes.”

  “They’ll have to do.”

  Veronica rolled her eyes and acquiesced, then put on the yellow jacket, which was also Garrett’s
, and also too big for her. The sleeves drooped past her hands.

  Phil unhooked the keys to the Silverado from their peg on the cute stupid rack by the door that had a row of pegs to hang car keys on. Diane had bought it at Crate & Barrel, and Phil doubted its necessity.

  They went out through the door to the garage and got in the truck. Phil pressed the button on the garage door opener clipped to the driver’s-side sun visor, and the garage door roared to life and rolled open to let the light in. Phil started the engine, put it in reverse, and nudged the gas, and immediately almost backed into the little white car that was parked in the driveway.

  “Oop. I forgot about that. Sit tight,” he said to Veronica. “I gotta do something.”

  He got out of the cab, snapped off the plastic truck bed cover, hopped into the truck and ripped the tape off the middle of the bundle, whipped open the sheet, dug through the pockets of Julian’s jeans, and fished out his car keys. He got out, walked over to the car, opened the driver’s-side door, and got in. The car was disgusting. There were cups and coke cans and papers and clothes and all kinds of shit all over the floor of the passenger’s side, and a Styrofoam cup in the cup holder between the seats was half-full of old coffee, with a bunch of waterlogged cigarette butts floating in it. The car started, with a little trouble.

  “Goddamnit,” said Phil. “Kid treats his things like shit.” Phil could tell from the raspy sound of the engine that the fucking fan belt in this piece of shit was about to snap, and there was a goddamn idiot light on on the dash, telling him to change the oil. Just to change the goddamn oil—pretty basic stuff.

  Phil backed the car out of the driveway and onto the street, then turned back and reparked it on the other side of the driveway. He shut it off, pocketed the keys, got out, hopped back into the truck, haphazardly taped the sheet shut again, hopped out, pounded the plastic cover back onto the truck bed, and got back in the cab.

  Veronica was listening to the radio.

  • • •

  It was a beautiful day. Sunny, with a good warm breeze, but not too gusty. Perfect day for sailing. People were out in the neighborhood, walking their dogs and jogging, on this bright, quiet Sunday morning. It was about eleven by the time they made it to the yacht club and marina. They stopped at a gate with a booth. Phil rolled down the window, and the attendant waved.

  “Morning, Phil,” said the attendant.

  “Morning. This is my niece, Veronica,” he said. Veronica waved at him across Phil from the passenger seat.

  “Howdy,” said the attendant. “Good day for a sail, huh?”

  “Yep,” said Phil. “Great day. Hey listen. I got some stuff in the truck I want to put in the boat. You mind if I pull the truck up by the boat? It’s right over there.”

  The attendant ducked into the darkness of his booth to look at some paperwork. His cabbage-like head came back into view in the window.

  “Sorry, last name?” he said.

  “Grassley.”

  “That’s right. Sorry.”

  The man’s head disappeared again, and then returned to the window.

  “Nope,” he said. “That’s all right with me.”

  “Thanks,” said Phil.

  The attendant waved them through, and Phil guided the Silverado around the palm trees planted on the median of the roundabout by the front entrance to the yacht club, through the parking lot, and onto a little road that stretched along one of the concrete jetties of the marina between a row of warehouses and the docks. He parked the truck between two warehouses and they got out. The riggings of the boats clinked against the mast poles and the languid water slapped against their hulls.

  Phil popped open the truck bed cover, dragged the taped-up bundle out of the bed, heaved it into his arms, and slung it over his shoulder. He led Veronica past the warehouses and down a long, bright white floating pier. They passed a couple of people walking in the other direction down the pier, and everyone smiled quickly and waved at each other.

  They stopped at Phil’s boat.

  “There she is,” said Phil. “My pride and joy.”

  And Lord, was it ever a beautiful boat.

  “This is a thirty-eight-foot 2005 Lagoon catamaran 380 S2. Twin inboard engine.”

  “Wow,” said Veronica.

  “Wow is right,” said Phil.

  He laid the body down on the pier and gingerly stretched out one foot and then the other onto the surface of the boat. There was a big blue plastic tarp tied to the rings at the edges of the boat, to cover the wooden deck. Phil untied it and thundered it aside, uncloaking the brilliant white body of the catamaran. Phil held out his hand and helped Veronica step aboard. Phil made preparations to sail, then stepped back onto the pier and threw the bundled body into the mesh net strung between the twin hulls of the boat.

  • • •

  Sailing was one thing Phil loved and loved absolutely, without any complications or equivocations at all. He loved the equipment, for one. He loved the learned skill required to master its complexities, knowing what to touch and how to touch it and by how much to make the craft obey the commands from your hands. He loved the language that went with it; he loved how one can immediately tell a sailor apart from the rest of humanity by his correct usage of all these technical shibboleths, the singsongy jargon for all things nautical, these words whose blunt, silly choppiness denotes their Anglo-Saxon and Germanic roots, and hence their ancientness, which ancientness reminds one that the craft and science of seafaring is intrinsic to every human culture that ever found itself living beside open waters, and thus none ever had the need to filch words from other languages to explain its particulars—no Latin, no Greek, no French terms were ever imported by necessity to delineate its phenomena or to name its things: abaft, abeam, astern, bight, bilge, binnacle, bobstay, boomkin, bowsprit, capstan, coxswain, daggerboard, gollywobbler, gunwale, jib, lazyjack, leeway, mainsail, mizzenmast, portside, rudder, scupper, spinnaker, starboard, topsail, transom, traveler. Phil loved driving out to his boat in the Galveston Marina on a beautiful Sunday morning like this one, finding it bobbing proudly right in its special place between two less expensive and less beautiful boats, waiting to be maneuvered out into the choppy green gulf, waiting for his hands, for his touch. He loved untying and unfurling the dew-dappled blue plastic tarp—the noise it made, ba-boom, like a drum—then carefully rolling it up and placing it in its proper storage compartment. He loved when he got out into the deep water, after he had gently piloted the boat, helped along by the river water draining into Galveston Bay, through the channel between Galveston and Pelican Island and then past Port Bolivar and out past the jetties and the seawalls and the breakwaters and into the gulf, over the line that you could see, you could physically see dividing the light blue from the dark blue water, where the sloping floor of sand below dropped steeply down and the water got deep and the waves got high. He loved the shrieking of the seabirds circling above them. He loved the sound and the feeling of the seawater lapping against the hulls of the boat. He especially loved when it was time to cut the engine and hoist the sails—the pulleys and winches wheeling until the ropes and rigging snapped taut and the sails ballooned into shape—and he tacked the vessel into the wind and felt the force of the rushing air thrust them into serious motion, the newfound silence, the sun, the wind whipping his hair around, the boyish sense of adventure. Out here he felt extraordinarily alive and at peace, out here his mind raced with great thoughts and his heart surged in his chest and he felt like a man feeling like a man was supposed to feel.

  Veronica wasn’t a sailor. He could tell that at once. She didn’t have the lust for the wind and the sea in her blood. You can tell that immediately about people. Even if they’ve never sailed before in their lives—and Phil considered the souls of such people to be unknowingly and infelicitously impoverished—you can take them sailing and know instantly whether they’ve got the potential but unused love for it buried inside them. Some people immediately understand the greatness o
f what they’re doing. Other people—and Veronica appeared to be one of them—seem to fear the feeling of the boat’s constant pitching and rolling, its rising up and slapping heavily down again into the water, they are afraid of the sea, they miss the land—they miss the way gravity and the solid properties of the earth cooperate to firmly and comfortably station their bodies in space. Phil could move around aboard the boat quite naturally. Veronica, though, for the most part timidly kept her ass rooted as if nailed down to the semicircular wooden bench set in the bridge deck between the helm and the cabin. Meanwhile Phil stood at the helm, gleefully tilting the wheel of the boat in such and such a direction, now in another direction, cooperating with the wind to take them farther and farther out into the hot, breezy gulf, and the black and green and blue water chopped and frothed all around them for miles.

  And Lord, was it a pretty day. To be honest, Phil didn’t really mind the fact that Veronica didn’t appear to love sailing. He liked that there were still some things, certain experiential preferences, which divided the psychology of men from that of women. The more girlish she acted, the more of a man he felt. More than anything, he liked for her to see him enjoying this.

  Soon they had sailed far enough away from the land that the coast of Texas—Galveston Island, and beyond it, the southern suburbs of Houston where he lived—was now just a flat brown line on the horizon to the north. To the south, the moisture in the air blurred away the line between the sea and sky. Somewhere in that blue-gray blur, the water bent out of sight over the surface of the planet. Although the radius of visibility at sea, on a perfectly clear day, is only twelve miles in any direction, for some reason you grasp the bigness of the world when you’re out on the open water more than you ever can on land. It has something to do with the absence of any references by which the eye might measure the depth of the space, the perfectly unbroken flatness of your field of vision.