The Fat Artist and Other Stories (8 page)

unhappy conclusion
. I have
got
to get rid of this shit ASAP, and I figure if I can’t turn a profit on it I might as well sell it for what I paid for it just to get rid of it, which is a fuckin steal considering the quality of this shit. So. You interested? And then he lets a couple seconds go by, like he’s all busy thinking it over, like he don’t want to make it look like his pussy’s already all wet over it, but I can see in them little pig eyes of his he’s already made his decision. Yeah, he says, yeah, I’m interested. Good, I say. And then we talk details and he says he’ll give me the five hunnerd I say I paid for it, which is the best offer I got for a bunch of coke that don’t even exist. He says today’s my lucky day cause today was payday and he’s got the cash on him right now if I got the shit on me. I say good for you, but I don’t have the shit on me. My whole unfortunate legal situation’s made me
real
paranoid about this kind of shit, and I went and hid it in the woods. He goes, what the fuck? I go, I know, it sounds crazy, dog, but I wanted that shit the fuck out of my house. I put it in a fuckin coffee can and hid it a little ways off a trail in Centennial Park. You know up on that hill off Lookout Road? It’s like five-ten minutes from here? He agrees, says yeah, yeah, says he knows it. So I say, you got wheels? I drove the company van down here after work, he says, cause I got the van till close and they aint got no way of knowing what I do with it after. Okay, good, I say. What? Yeah, yeah, we’re still at the Downer. I dunno, nine? Nine fifteen? Yeah no. Yeah. Now Caleb Quinn’s shithoused, yeah, but I figure he’s a pretty good drunk driver from years of practice so I guess he’s still basically good to drive. We’re only going one way, anyway, I think. So he goes off to piss and I call Kelly on his cell, but it aint on, which kinda scares me a little cause he’s supposed to pick up. What? Yeah, I guess it was like about nine thirty, almost ten at that point. Last time I looked at a clock it was nine, don’t know where the fuck a whole hour went. I start leaving a message for Kelly but then I stop and put down the phone cause I see Caleb come out of the bathroom. Now I’m thinking if Kelly pussies out on me or some shit and it turns out he aint there when we get there what the fuck am I gonna do if we get out there in the bushes and I aint got nothing to show him? That thought makes me start to sweat a little, so now I gotta work out a Plan B if Kelly flakes. Caleb comes back, says, aright, let’s go. First he wants to peace out with Boomsma though, but I don’t want nobody being able to say for sure he saw me leave the bar with Caleb that night, and I tell him so, and he agrees, but he don’t know the real reason why, he just thinks I’m being all paranoid about the coke and shit. So I swear him to secrecy and then I go up to Boomsma and smack him on the back and say, so long, and he aint really paying much attention anyway cause he’s still tryin to chat up the one girl in the bar even though she’s not that hot, and I just get the fuck out of there and go wait outside for Caleb. Five minutes later he comes out, too, but before he does I try calling Kelly’s cell again and again it just rings and rings. I’m thinking if Kelly pussies out on me I guess I’m just gonna have to say, aw, shit, man, it aint here, some little bird must of took it, but I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to act that good to bullshit that bad. We go get in his company van, which is like this pool cleaning van with all these nets and pool equipment and shit on top of it and this picture of a mermaid on the side of it holding a pool net. The mermaid’s got nice tits. We go. I’m sitting there tryin to think, and in my head I’m all like, stay rational, dog, and there’s all this alcohol swimmin around in my brain cause I fucked up a little and wound up drinking a little too much. I try and see what pocket he kept his keys in, cause now I’m thinking if this here company van’s in the parking lot next morning it’s not so good, right? And I’m also thinking if he sees I aint got shit on me and I took his ass all the way outta town for nothing, he’s gonna get
real
suspicious, and I aint got a getaway car or nothing, and don’t get me wrong, I’m plenty confident with just my fists, but this here motherfucker is stacked like a fuckin wall and if he lands a punch on me in the right place it’s gonna mean lights the fuck out for me. So all of a sudden I got a lot a shit on my plate and I’m sittin shotgun in this pool cleaning van and we’re driving around and Caleb’s all swerving around on the road and shit, and that’s when my cell goes off. Who the fuck is at? says Caleb. The fuck is it to you? I say. I say, it’s my gramma. That was a lie. Of course it’s Kelly, calling me back way the fuck too late. I turn down the volume on the phone way way low so Caleb can’t hear and then I answer the cell and I make my voice go up like three registers like I’m talking to my gramma. I go like,
Hi, Gramma!
What the fuck? says Kelly on the other line. Oh
shit
, I’m thinking. How fuckin dumb can you get? And I’m like, oh, I’m just out and about, Gramma. I’m coming home soon, yeah, yeah, yeah. Don’t worry about me. The fuck are you talking about? says Kelly. I aint your gramma. We been sittin here in the goddamn dark waiting for your ass. Good, good, I think. And I say, okay, love you too, Gramma! Be home soon! Remember to take your medicine when you go to bed, OK? OK. Love you too. And I hang up. Then I says to Caleb (and we’re almost at the park now), I turn to Caleb and say, hell, I gotta say it. I love the shit out of my gramma. She practically raised me, cause I was born when my ma was fifteen, and when I was a kid she split and never came back, last thing we heard she was shacked up with some asshole in Tucson. Yeah, yeah, says Caleb, like he’s all chill now. Gramma, he says, aint at the shit. Hells yeah, I say. But in my head now I’m feeling totally chill about one old thing but I’m freaking the fuck out about one new thing. I feel chill now I know Kelly’s gonna be there alright, cause we’re about to be there in about five minutes. But then I’m thinking: The fuck’s he mean,
we
?

•  •  •

She took off her shirt and rolled off her jeans and her underwear, and now she was standing naked on a black plastic bag in the middle of the kitchen floor. Seventy-five years before, a man sat in a small white room and sang songs about sex and death and love and murder and the end of the world, and his voice was imprisoned, copied, and pressed onto a vinyl disc that now revolved on a spindle as the stylus tickled over the grooves and resurrected his voice here in Fred’s house.

John the Revelator, tell me who’s that writing?

John the Revelator wrote the book of the seven seals.

Fred was fiddling with a paint sprayer at the kitchen sink. The paint sprayer was a handheld device with a plastic container for the paint that screwed onto a gun-shaped nozzle with an electric cord coming out of it and a tube with a filter that siphoned the paint out of the container and blew it out the nozzle.

Lana had pale skin and sharp hip bones and a tuft of copper-colored hair in her crotch with a trail of tiny hairs leading up to her navel. Her waist was so thin it looked to Fred like he could fit his hands around it and touch his thumbs and middle fingers together, and her rib cage showed. Her skin had that irretrievable glow and smoothness of youth. She was drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette and snicking the ashes on the floor with her thumbnail.

Fred had bought some special paint for this project, which was kind of expensive and came not in a can but in a big plastic jug. Fred opened the jug of paint, mixed it, and poured it into the smaller container that screwed onto the paint sprayer. He screwed the container onto the nozzle and washed the silver paint off his hands. The wet paint didn’t look like much, just like thin gray mud.

“You got any allergies to certain chemicals or anything I ought to know about before we put this stuff on you?” said Fred. He was inspecting the side of the plastic jug of paint for a list of ingredients.

“I’m allergic to penicillin.”

“Well, they don’t make paint out of penicillin, Little Miss Louis Pasteur. This shit’s latex-based, no oil or anything, so I think it should be fine.”

“Louis Pasteur wasn’t penicillin, Fred. Louis Pasteur was milk. Like pasteurized milk. Some other guy was penicillin. Fleming. Ian Fleming?”

“No, that’s James Bond.”

“Didn’t that girl die when they painted her gold in the James Bond movie?”

“I take it you’re referring to the iconic cinematic moment in
Goldfinger
when the Bond girl’s been murdered in bed by being painted gold and asphyxiated because her pores are clogged or something. That, hon, is a myth. You don’t breathe through your fucking pores. The only way you can asphyxiate somebody with paint is to pour it down their throat.”

Fred opened some windows to ventilate the room and pulled the chain to turn on the ceiling fan. He unwound a yellow outdoor-use extension cord and plugged it in across the room. He gave her a bathing cap that he had also bought specially for this project. She put her hair up and scrunched it inside the cap, and edged it up on her forehead as close to her hairline as possible.

“I’m gonna start at the bottom and work my way up.”

Lana swigged her beer and finished her cigarette and handed them to Fred.

“Here, take these,” she said.

Fred set down the paint sprayer and put the cigarette in the ashtray and the beer on the kitchen table, which had been scooted aside to give them more floor space. Fred wheezed and puffed as he moved around the room, knots of long gray hair falling in his face. Lana stood waiting to be painted, in the middle of the floor on a black garbage bag that crinkled and stuck to her feet.

The song in the next room ended, and in the empty moment between songs there was a brief but oppressive silence in which they could hear the
click-click-click
of the ceiling fan, the pulsing chirrup of crickets outside, and the crinkling sound of the garbage bag under Lana’s feet.

“What do you think?” she said.

“Honey,” said Fred, “I think I’m fat and old and ugly and you’re my sister’s kid.”

The next song started with that stepping down, down, down and then up that all blues songs seem to start with, and Fred pulled the trigger on the paint sprayer. The paint sprayer made a loud whirring noise, as well as the hiss of the paint coming out of the nozzle, and that brief but oppressive silence was thankfully over. Fred had his painting clothes on: shorts, a moth-eaten Denver Broncos T-shirt, pink plastic Kmart flip-flops. His legs were thin and pale. The flesh on his legs looked like the flesh on the underside of a snail and his toenails were long and flaky and the color of tortoiseshell.

Using a paint sprayer is all about maintaining the right rhythm, trigger pressure, and distance from the painted surface to spread the coat evenly. Fred painted her feet and realized he was holding the nozzle too close to her, so he backed away a few inches.

“It tickles,” she said.

He worked his way up her legs and painted her inner thighs and the area between her legs as quickly as possible, and she spread her legs out to facilitate the process. After that Fred began to relax and got absorbed in the work. He went into a trance of narrow concentration, and the more paint he applied to her body, the more of her skin was covered, the more she became an object he was painting, just like a sculpture or a piece of furniture, and he lost himself in the task. She was art, and he was an artist. Fred breathed more evenly, and he forgot himself. He never even touched her.

“Shut your mouth and eyes,” he said.

He painted her face carefully, aiming the spray at such an angle that it wouldn’t get in her nostrils. Her lips quivered. Her eyeballs vibrated under her eyelids.

“Don’t open your eyes or your mouth until the paint is sorta dry,” Fred said.

She consented by nodding.

Fred sprayed on a quick second coat holding the nozzle at a farther distance, covering up the thin spots in the paint. Then he unplugged the extension cord, disassembled the paint sprayer in the kitchen sink, gave everything a quick rinse, and left the parts to soak in a bucket of soapy water. He wound up the extension cord and lit a cigarette. The blades of the ceiling fan chopped up the mist of tobacco smoke and paint particulate hanging in the room. The room was suffused with the heady chemical smell of the wet paint. Lana stood silent and motionless in a Hail Mary pose under the jittery fluorescent kitchen light and the strobing shadows of the fan blades, her head down, tilted, her arms not touching her sides, her legs apart, her fingers not touching, her lips and eyes closed, waiting for the paint to dry. With her eyes closed, Fred could allow himself to look directly at her. In the next room, Robert Johnson was singing about the end of the world.

•  •  •

“Dunno the fuck that was,” said Kelly.

He clacked his cell phone shut. He’d been pacing around trying to find a place where he could get reception. He’d wondered if maybe he hadn’t paid the bill and the phone company had shut it off, or if he had paid the bill and they shut it off anyway. Financial causes and effects were unpredictable to Kelly. The company shut off the phone, or they didn’t shut it off. The bank charged him fees or they didn’t charge him fees. But then he found a place with reception, and there was a message from Jackson wondering why he wasn’t picking up his phone. He called him back and then Jackson said something about his grandma, but Kelly couldn’t quite understand what he was saying, both because the reception was choppy and because what he was saying didn’t make any sense.

“What?” said Maggie.

“He was sayin’ somethin’ about his grandma.”

“He’s probly with Caleb right now and he didn’t want to let him know he was talkin’ to you.”

Kelly felt sick and hot and achy all over his body. He hadn’t slept. Instead he’d fought with Maggie. They both broke some stuff. She cried. The kid cried throughout the duration of the afternoon. The dogs outside were barking.

His stomach was an empty bag twitching with nausea. It was half past ten. The last time he’d slept was about twenty-four hours ago.