“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.
“I ain’t slep in twenty-four, twenty-five hours,” said Kelly. “And I ain’t gonna sleep for sum’n like twenty more. I ain’t gonna get to sleep for almost a whole nother day.”
Maggie didn’t say anything.
“ ’Cause I gotta go to work after this, and then I gotta go to work again, so the next time I get to sleep is like, what? a whole goddamn day from now.”
“Please shut up,” said Maggie. “You got a cigarette?”
“We’re outta cigs.”
Kelly had switched from coffee to NoDoz. He’d been popping them like jellybeans all night and now his heart was rattling against his ribs and his hands were shaking like machines that were about to break. He stretched out the fingers on his hand, made a fist, stretched it out, made a fist, just to make sure it’s his, yes, and it’s obeying the commands from his brain, yes, it’s working, yes. They had dropped Gabie off at Kelly’s parents’ house. He handed Gabie to his mom while Maggie waited in the idling truck, and Gabie was squirming in a dirty diaper. He handed her the squiggly little shit-smelling, howling kid and said they were going to see a movie. That’s right, a movie. Date night. Right. Then he went around to the front of the house and borrowed a crowbar and a flashlight from the garage.
Maggie was sitting next to him just a little ways off the trail, on a mound of dirt, on sticks and leaves and rocks. Kelly was holding the crowbar and Maggie was holding the flashlight. They’d been sitting like this for an hour and a half. The night was clear and crisp and warm and they could see a lot of stars. Maggie was playing with the flashlight, clicking it on and off.
“Don’t do that,” said Kelly. She made an ugly face at him and he apologized. “I’m sorry. I mean, they’re gonna see you. Don’t advertise us.”
She stopped playing with the flashlight. They were trying to stay silent, so they could hear them when they approached. Cars and trucks clattered by within earshot along Lookout Road, and occasionally they’d hear the crescendo/diminuendo of a vehicle coming/going up and down the road matched with the movement of the long shadows of trees shifting in the headlights.
Thousands of crickets chirping together made a throbbing rhythm all around them. There must have been a cricket hiding under every leaf. The racket they made was deafening, their incessant krreepa-krreepa-krreepa.
A heavy truck rumbled by o
n the road, quietly at first, slowly gathering volume, then the sound changed pitch as it passed and sped off down the other side of the hill, and the noise quickly faded.
“You know why they do that?” Kelly whispered. The crowbar was slick with sweat and warm in his palms from his handling it.
“Do what?”
“Change sounds when they go by.”
“No.”
“It’s called the Doppler effect. When a car’s comin’ at you, you hear the noise get louder and louder, and when it goes by, the noise changes from goin’ up to goin’ down. It’s got to do with waves. Same reason why you look at a star in a telescope it looks red ’cause it means it’s moving away, which means the universe is constantly expanding.”
They looked up at the stars.
“The universe is constantly expanding and it’s infinite at the same time,” said Kelly.
“Why do you think I’m stupid?” said Maggie.
“I don’t think you’re stupid.”
“Then why you talkin’ to me like ’at, tellin’ me all this mister science shit like you think I’m a fuckin’ kid?”
“Oh fuck off.”
“Don’t tell me to fuck off.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to say that.”
“Quit sayin’ sorry.”
“What the fuck you want me to do?”
“I want you to grow a dick.”
They were silent after that.
Kelly squeezed the crowbar till his knuckles whitened and for a moment he wanted not only to bash Caleb Quinn’s brains out but all the brains of everybody everywhere and then he’d never have to worry about money or other people and he could go to the mountains by himself and just simply live, and maybe catch some fish.
They had been out there long enough that they had become used to the rhythm of the crickets chirping, so they noticed it when the crickets stopped.
There was a piercing flash of light somewhere in the distance, up ahead, in the trees. It was followed by another.
“What’s that?” said Maggie.
“I don’t like it,” said Kelly.
A snake egg started growing in Kelly’s stomach.
There were two more flashes of white light, but they weren’t accompanied by any discernible noise. They were quick, slicing pops of cold, silent light. They were happening pretty far away, maybe two hundred feet into the woods, but it was hard to tell.
Then they heard voices of people coming down the trail. They couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Kelly thought he recognized Jackson Reno’s voice. Kelly gripped the crowbar, loosened his grip, tightened it.
“Get the light ready,” Kelly hissed at Maggie.
Maggie snatched up the flashlight and took a few steps back.
Kelly was hot, weak, hungry, nauseated. The egg in his stomach hatched and a snake came out and started swimming around in his guts.
Two people came around the bend in the trail. One of them was wearing heavy yellow rubber boots. He was in front. Jackson was behind him. The one in the yellow boots saw that someone was there. Maggie clicked on the flashlight.
Caleb Quinn winced in the light.
Kelly stepped onto the trail and hit him with the crowbar as hard as he could in the gut. The sound of it was strangely muted, silent: a dull, flat noise of metal smacking flesh. Caleb doubled over, and Kelly jumped back and hit him in the side of the head, on his temple. Caleb pressed a hand to his head and blood came down his face. Kelly tried to get him in the balls, but missed and hit him in the thigh, and Caleb was covering his head and face with his arms as Kelly hit him in the gut again, and when he moved his arms, he hit him again in the head. Caleb fell down, and then Kelly hit him repeatedly all over his body. Kelly flipped the crowbar around and hit him one more time on the side of the head with the uglier end of it, the end with the hook on it, and there was the noise of something audibly breaking and an enormous amount of blood came out of Caleb’s head.
Kelly didn’t realize that Maggie was screaming until she stopped screaming because Jackson had pinned her arms behind her back and slapped a palm over her mouth.
“Kelly, chill,” said Jackson.
Kelly chilled. He looked at Jackson and Maggie. It was dark. Maggie had dropped the flashlight and the beam was pointing uselessly into the grass. She was struggling.
“Let go of her,” said Kelly.
“Why the fuck did you bring the girl, Kelly?”
“Let go of her.”
“This bitch was screaming her goddamn head off. What the fuck were you thinking bringing the bitch along?”
“Let go of her.” Kelly was the one screaming this time.
Jackson let her go. She ran over to Kelly and punched him in the face.
“Fuck,” Kelly said, and dropped the crowbar and covered his face with his hands. His nose and cheek where she’d hit him were tingly and hot. “What the fuck you doing?” he shouted.
“You motherfucker,” she spat. Jackson had her arms pinned again. “You didn’t have to beat him up that bad, you motherfucker.”
They all looked down at Caleb Quinn on the ground and the blood spilling out of his head. Nobody said anything for a while. Caleb was still breathing, but his eyes were vacant.
The crickets started chirping again.
• • •
Fred screwed the flashbulb onto his 1967 Leica M3, loaded a roll of film, and took a couple of test shots. He sank a fat finger into the button and listened to the precise and delicately mechanical scissor-snip noise of the shutter opening and closing: Slackit. Slackit. Slackit. Slackit. He turned off the lights to see what she looked like in the dark. Her body glowed with a glittery silver-blue metallic luster. The thatch of pubic hair in her crotch was a brittle nest of shimmering wires, like tinsel. The way the silver paint looked on her skin reminded Fred of Jack Haley’s Tin Man makeup in The Wizard of Oz. Lana opened her eyes, and it was like this wild, haunting effect, these two bright human eyes opening up inside something that didn’t quite look human.
“It feels weird,” said Lana. “I don’t feel naked.”
Fred clacked the shutter, slackit, and triggered a sharp splash of white light from the flashbulb.
“How do you feel?” said Fred.
“Good,” she said, stretching, rolling out the muscles and bones that had gone creaky from standing still too long, just like the Tin Man after he’s been oiled up, regaining familiarity with autonomous locomotion. She examined her paint-caked legs, her arms, ran her hands over her body, this exoskeleton of dried paint.
“Do you want anything before we go? Like a towel, a blanket or something?”
Fred gradually struggled into a ratty leather bomber jacket that had fit him before he got fat. His keys tinkled as he fished them out of a pocket of the jacket.
“No,” she said. Her eyes were alarming, surreal-looking in her head. “I don’t need it. I feel like I have two layers of skin.”
They went out the front door, which Fred didn’t bother to lock behind him: Lana first, then Fred, the squeal and bang of the screen door, no neighbors watching, good, they’re all inside, nestled up in their stupid cocoons watching TV, as one can tell from the undersea glow of the walls behind their living room windows. Lana fastidiously picked her steps across the gravel driveway in her bare feet. The sky above was alive with stars. Somebody’s dog half barked in a false alarm, more of a guffaw than a bark, and then it tinkled its chain and settled back down behind its fence. In a nearby yard there was the rearing-rattlesnake noise of a sprinkler dusting off a sunburned patch of grass: tchitcha-tchitcha-tchitcha-tchitcha-tschhhhhhhhhhhhhh——tcht-tcht-tcht-tcht. It was a comfortably warm summer night with a hint of a coming autumnal chill in it.
Fred unlocked his battered blue ’93 Honda Civic, passenger-side door first and then the driver’s, and carefully squeezed himself under the steering wheel. Fred had taken out the back seats to maximize storage space, and the back of the car was crammed full of paint buckets, cans, brushes, tins
of paint thinner, rags, socks, crumpled fast-food bags, petrified fries, Styrofoam cups, various other detritus, cigarette butts, cassette tapes. It didn’t smell good.
“Why is this car so gross?” said Lana.
“Because I’m a slob,” said Fred.
She rolled down the passenger-side window. Fred rolled his window down too, twisted the key in the ignition, and kicked the gas, and the engine grumbled on, then settled into a phlegmatic pant. A second later the stereo flickered on, a little too loud, and Fred turned down the dial. There was a cassette of Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come in the tape deck. Fred turned on the lights and the car sputtered down the gravel driveway before they turned onto a paved road and Fred shifted into higher gear; the engine sighed in relief and the headlights spat dim yellow light onto the road in front of them as they drove along in the night and Ornette’s sax squeaked and whimpered over the rapid skisha-skisha-skisha of the cymbals.
“This is like, nervous music,” said Lana.
“I’ve always thought the tension in this tune comes from that jittery energy in the rhythm section mixed with the threnodic sound of the horns,” said Fred, glad to be talking about music again, where he felt conversationally at home. Fred waited for her to ask what “threnodic” meant; she didn’t.
“This is a very important album,” Fred continued, “but really you gotta get into Bird and Miles and Monk and Trane before you can truly begin to appreciate what Ornette’s doing here. All those guys, Miles and Monk especially, they hated this guy when he came out with this album. They were like, what the fuck is this lunatic doing?”
Fred slipped back into American-musicology-professor mode and discoursed on the emergence of free jazz all the way to the park. He talked about Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Cecil Taylor, Pharoah Sanders.
“You know what threnodic means?” said Fred finally.
“Yeah. It means like, mournful, right? It’s like a death wail.”
Fred was disappointed.
“Yeah,” he said.
They eased off 227 and onto Lookout Road, went about five minutes up the road and came to the top of a hill, where Fred slowed down to look for the turnoff to get into the park. He found it: There was just one narrow dirt road off the main road that led in and out of the park. The car shuddered over the washboards. They passed a sign nailed to an open gate that read PARK IS OPEN FROM SUNRISE TO SUNSET in red block letters above an illegible scramble of fine print.
The Fat Artist and Other Stories Page 7