The Fat Artist and Other Stories (22 page)

“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.

“God
damn
it,” 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 of 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.

There were now no other boats around anywhere within easy eyeshot.

“She’s in a good place, now,” said Phil. “Come on up here.”

Veronica timidly rose from the wooden bench, groped and picked her way across the deck to the front of the helm.

“All I need you to do is just keep your hands right here,” he said. She put her hands on the spokes of the wheel where Phil’s hands were. Phil stood behind her and wrapped his hands around hers, demonstrating to her the right amount of pressure to apply and the right amount of resistance she should be feeling. Her thick black hair flew into his face and tickled his nose and lips. He breathed in the smell of her skin and hair.

“Just keep her right there.”

“Like this?”

“That’s right. Just like that. You want to feel about this much resistance. That’s it. You want to be pushing on it, but not too hard. Easy does it. Now keep her right there. If all of a sudden she gets too hard or too easy on you, then you know something’s wrong.”

With Veronica positioned at the helm, Phil stepped out onto the back of one of the twin hulls of the boat. He reached out into the net strung between them, where he had put the body. He dragged it toward him, got a good grip on it, and rolled it out of the net into the sea. It dropped into the water. The body floated briefly, and the bedsheet dampened, then it turned over several times, and began to fall under. A gust of wind came and puffed the sails up like fat wings, and took the boat away from the place where the body was falling, sinking from an active secret into a dormant one, a secret that would sleep forever on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico.

Phil came back to the helm and took over from Veronica.

“Good job,” he said.

She hurriedly sat down again.

There were a couple of other loose ends to take care of before Diane would come home tomorrow. Such as, for instance, that shitty little Toyota still parked in front of the house. It would be easy enough for Veronica to follow behind him while he drove it to some far-flung place and parked it there, and then drive him back home. He would ask her to do that when they got back ashore.

He looked at Veronica. She wasn’t looking at him. She was watching the sea. Her head was half turned away from him. Lord, she was beautiful. She was so full of energy and brightness and life. Look at how the light just bounces off that smooth young skin. Her hair blew around behind her like streaks of ink. Phil was, in fact, in love with her. Of course he was in love with her, and of course he assumed this meant she was in love with him, too, and of course she would never tell anybody about all this. This secret was dormant; it would sleep forever. Once again, Phil had just one
active
secret, and Veronica was it.

And then Phil noticed an amazing thing: Up ahead of them, obviously moving very fast, and yet seemingly not moving at all because of the lack of visual references all around them, there were several dolphins—they looked like bottlenoses but he wasn’t sure. Just hopping in and out of the water. There were three or four of them. Their sleek silver bodies were looping in and out of the water in perfect sequence, moving together all at once, as graceful as—what, as ballerinas?—no, ballerinas hobble like gimps next to the dazzling physical grace of these creatures. They were traveling through the water in a perfect wave, each one coming up and going down at the exact same time, their athletic bodies working with the material around them, harmoniously collaborating with the media of the world as they moved through it, constantly accounting for the gravitational difference between air and water, their heads, necks, noses, fins, and tails all working together with physics to make them move, and move beautifully. How the hell do they know how to do that? Where’d they learn that? Who taught them? Why do they all jump out of the water and dive back in again at the same time? Surely there’s a reason for it. Surely there’s a real and important reason. An animal’s body does everything it can to maximize its results by minimizing its entropy, always conserving its energy. Everything like that has some kind of reason. Animals don’t do things without a good reason for it.