The Fat Artist and Other Stories by Benjamin Hale Page A

the flashlight at his watch.
    “Eleven thirty.”
    “Shit. I gotta get to work. I should’ve brung a change of clothes.”
    “We gotta get this motherfucker off the trail,” said Jackson.
    “Get off him, Maggie,” said Kelly.
    “Fuck you,” she said.
    “Get off him or I’m gonna smack the teeth out of your head, bitch,” said Jackson.
    Maggie looked at Kelly. Kelly mumbled something too quiet or unintelligible to hear. Maggie stood up. Her face was wet. She was soaked in Caleb’s blood.
    “Pick up that end of him, I’ll get this end,” said Jackson.
    Jackson picked him up by the legs and Kelly grabbed his limp arms. They were able to pick him up and move him, but he was heavy. It was kind of like moving a couch. They were forced to look at each other. Jackson’s eyes glowed pale blue in the dark. They struggled to carry him off the path and into the woods. They carried him about twenty feet through the grass and into a dirt clearing where the trees around were thick, and dumped him there. In the process Jackson got a lot of blood on him as well. Maggie remained on the trail with the flashlight and refused to follow them, so they had to do it all in the dark. They walked back to the trail with the tall grass thrashing all around them. Up above, the sky swarmed with stars. When they got back to the trail they saw that the place where they’d been was covered in blood.
    “That was some bad shit, Kelly,” said Jackson. “You fucked that dog up real bad. We’re gonna have to lay real low, you understand? I mean I just got done doing time for my drug shit and I’m still on probation, so I can’t be goin’ around being accomplice to no goddamn murder and get sent away till I’m an old man. And you too, dog, you understand?”
    “What do you mean murder? He’s not dead.”
    Jackson snatched the flashlight out of Maggie’s hands like you’d snatch something dangerous out of the hands of a child.
    Maggie was crying again.
    “Kelly, you have got to shut up your bitch, dog. I can not fucking think straight with all this bawling.”
    “Please be quiet, Maggie.”
    “Please be quiet? ‘Please be’? What the fuck kind of shit is that? ‘Please be quiet . ’ If you don’t shut your bitch up I’m gonna have to shut her up.”
    “Don’t you fucking touch her.”
    “Oh, what, so killer here goes all batshit on some motherfucker with a crowbar and now all of a sudden he thinks he can take me? Fuck you. Don’t insult me, dog.”
    Kelly didn’t say anything to that. He reached out to touch Maggie—just to touch her—and she flinched and shivered and flicked her hands like she’d been touched by something so loathsome she’d have to wash herself later, and she walked faster up the trail away from him.
    They made it up the hill and back to the gravel parking lot and scenic overlook at the top of the hill without anyone saying anything to anyone else. Kelly’s truck was parked in the far corner of the parking lot under a tree. A pool cleaning van with a mermaid on it holding a pool net was parked in the opposite corner.
    “Fuckin’ A,” said Jackson. “I gotta go back down there and get his goddamn keys off him and move his van. Should’ve took the money he said he got on him, too.”
    “No. Please no, no, no,” said Kelly. “We ain’t got time for that. We gotta get the fuck outta here. I gotta go home and clean up and get to work. I ain’t slep in twenty-five hours. And I ain’t gonna sleep in like twenty more.”
    Then they noticed that there was another car in the parking lot. A little blue Honda Civic. Jackson pointed at it.
    “The fuck is that all about?” he said. “That little blue piece a shit wasn’t here when we pulled up in Caleb’s van.”
    There were needles of fear under Kelly’s skin.
    “I don’t like that,” he said.
    “I hate you,” said Maggie.
    “Ain’t nobody talkin’ to you,” said Jackson.
    Kelly threw the crowbar, which was slick with blood, into the bed