Peter Heller - The Painter

She stayed for three months. She rescued me. She made me go to AA meetings. She drove me and sat next to me at the open groups. She cooked me food so spicy every meal was some kind of battle. She made love to me again and again until I was sore and gasping like one of those trout, and then she cradled me like a trout and let me catch my breath and then she let me go into sleep.

This is how I healed. Or didn’t. One evening I took her down to the river. We turned off the highway and rattled slowly up the gravel road and into the heart of the canyon. The walls closed in above us, the high blue of the sky deeper, deep and dark like a river is deep. The highest rock at the rim was a strip of fire, holding the last long sun. The old gorge was a vessel and it was filling with shadow, slowly, and with wind. We drove upstream. We drove with the windows down and the wind came down against us bringing a night’s cold and blowing the last rattling leaves off the cottonwoods. They blew into the river and floated slowly in the pools, pushed by the wrinkles of the wind, singly and in sad fleets. I pulled over when we got to the end of the road, where the creek poured in from above. Now we could see the first few stars above the walls, smell the smoke of some fisherman’s fire, someone who had hiked up into my favorite stretch and was unwilling to leave with the thickening darkness. Got out. Tang of smoke and the sweet decay of leaves. I could smell my past.

These were the smells of a devotion and of a history and they carried the touch of my daughter. Her voice. The way she was when she came with me here.

“Did I tell you that she was a better fisherperson than me? Would have been?”

Irmina smiled at me in the dusk, breathed.

Alce was curious, down at water’s edge faster than me, turning over smooth stones, looking for bugs, standing in the wind with her long dark hair blowing around her face and squinting at the hatch, the cloud of mayflies backlit like some blizzard, smiling like that, the pride of knowledge, knowing: that is a mayfly, maybe number 18, that is a stone fly, a gnat. Before I had even tied my shoes she would have decided on a strategy, what she would use and how she would fish it.

Was I speaking this to Irmina or talking to myself or thinking it? Didn’t know.

Now next to Irmina I stood on the high bank and smelled the dusk and watched the white thresh of the rapid pouring over the rocks that spilled out of the mouth of the creek. The thrashing water, the rush like some pounding prayer. Deliver me, Oh God, deliver me, not out of but into, further into what is here . I felt Irmina’s hand slip into mine and she was beside me, up against me but not leaning. Her hand was warm. We stood there. A pair of ducks angled fast out of a luminous sky, just shadows, veered hard last second and dropped into the long pool below. Their wakes silver on the dark water. Years of getting shot at. They waited until very last light and came in fast and turning.

“We fished here together, here most of all.”

“But she stopped fishing?”

“Yes, the last year. Just after she turned fifteen she didn’t fish at all.”

“She got angry?”

“Unh huh. And I don’t know why.”

I knew. I think I knew it was because her mother and I were angry at each other. Alce wanted peace and she couldn’t make it, tried, couldn’t, got mad and surly. She got sick of hearing doors slam. How I blamed myself. Why she disappeared into that crowd, into the drugs, etc. Because I wasn’t big enough to make peace with her mother.

Squeeze. Irmina squeezing my hand now, relaxing. Holding it, warm, almost hot in the chilling air.

She said, “She was a teenager. Every teenager has to do that somehow. It is how you become your own person. And every marriage has those times. You know. Jim?”

I watched the current, the tailwater rolling out of the bottom of the falls, white and fast and pushing through the little haystacking waves and quieting into the darker water of the pool, the smooth stretch where I could see the pair of ducks drifting, dark against the dark silverblue of the reflected sky. That luminous night that is not yet true night. Why couldn’t we be like ducks? Make the decision to be together and be together forever without argument, flying wing to wing into and out of the seasons year after year. Drifting on some slow night current, muttering each to each.

“Jim?”

“Huh.”

“You know. You have to let her be her own person. Before and now.”

I stood and breathed. Grateful for the ice in the air. Frost tonight down here, down in the canyon, maybe already forming.

Her own person. I watched Alce in the dark. As if she were here. I saw her step down to the river and begin to cast. Letting out the line smoothly in longer and longer throws, the loop up high over her head and behind her growing longer, a graceful animal coiling and straightening, lengthening and lancing far downstream, right along the slackwater of the eddy line, fishing a streamer the way I would have. I watched her in the dark, fishing past when we could see as we did so often, the trout able to see the flies on the surface against the lighter sky, I heard us laughing and cursing as we stubbed and stumbled over the rocks of the bank when we had finally given up and were climbing back to the road.

Pop?

Huh?

I got a sixteen incher. A cutbow. I put him back .

You’re fibbing .

She clambering behind me, poked me in the butt with the rim of her net.

Heard rock scrape as she stumbled.

Ow. I wish I had owl eyes. Or was just an owl. We could fly back to the truck .

Why would we need the truck then? I said. We would just fly home .

Carrying all this junk? The rod. We couldn’t fly that far in our waders .

If we were owls we could, we wouldn’t need rods, we could just—Nah .

What? What, Pop?

Owls don’t fish do they? I don’t think they like water much, only snow .

Miss Pettigrew told us that they can sit in a tree and hear mice in a field under a foot of snow. Those ones that turn white .

No shit?

Fifty cents .

Ouch. Shit .

A dollar .

Damn!

A dollar fifty. Pop, if you keep swearing you’ll go broke .

Silence.

If we were osprey, Pop, we could fish and fly back to the truck and fly home because we wouldn’t need any of this crap .

Climbing slowly. On a smoother trail now. Walking with some rhythm, she and I. The scuff of our wading boots, tick of the swinging nets, loud croak and squawk rising from the river below, a heron complaining.

Back to a dollar, you said crap .

Crap is not a bad word .

Are you the bad word dictionary now?

Silence. Knew she was nodding her head.

I painted that. The first and only good picture I made in the year after. She and I over that canyon, ospreys. Carrying our rods, the fish teeming below us.

I stood with Irmina and watched my daughter Alce fish into real dark. Past when we would have ever fished. Watched her fish until even her imagined shadow was swallowed by the night and the rush of water.

Good night beautiful. Fish on.

What got to me was the thought that maybe she did not want to fish on, into the full darkness alone. That she was tired and alone and cold but didn’t know what else to do. That she couldn’t stand for us to leave. That I couldn’t bear.

Felt Irmina’s hand again squeezing.

“She can go wherever she wants now. If she is here it is because love holds her here. Because she loves it.”

“Okay,” I said. The tears were streaming into my beard. We got back in the truck and drove home in silence. The next day Irmina left.