Peter Heller - The Painter

“I don’t think anything,” Sport said. “We’d just like to eliminate you as a suspect.”

“Huh,” I said. “I’ll bet.” Everybody’s gloves off now.

“Why don’t you just tell us what you were doing starting, say, Thursday morning.”

This is going to be fun, I thought. And wished Sofia wasn’t in the next room, just beyond that door, about to hear everything I was going to say.

I was getting good at telling the story, this my third telling in two days, and I told it. A good morning painting. The girl leaving.

Knocking the man into the dirt with my door and running as best I could up the road before the big man could kill the mare. Rolling in the ditch, Siminoe’s nose bleeding— He stopped me.

“You say you were grappling and rolling when you felt his nose break?”

I knew what he was after. The blood on the vest. It was flecked, spattered. Just like if you hit someone on the head, say, with a rock. A bloody nose rolling in a ditch would probably streak and smear, blotch. Well, you do the best you can. What if there were brain matter flecked there too? Well, I’d probably get good at learning how to order grease pencils and watercolor paper from Cañon City or Walsenburg, if they let you do that from max security. There wasn’t, wouldn’t be brains. Right Jim? Right. I’d hit him once with the flat side of a rock, hadn’t like smashed his head in, he probably died of drowning. Same as thwacking a trout: sometimes there’s a spray of blood, but never any brain. Probably because their brain is the size of a pea. Well.

“Yes,” I said.

Sport nodded, writing it down, taking me at my word, nobody lying yet except about when exactly we went fishing.

“The girl?” he said suddenly shifting tack. “In the bedroom? She’s the model you mentioned you were painting Thursday morning before you went fishing? Let’s see.” Began flipping back the pages of his pad.

“Sofia.”

“Sofia, right. Last name?”

“I don’t know.”

He raised an eyebrow, wrote.

“You said she left these premises some time around midday on Thursday, she was modeling for a painting and left, and when did she return?”

“Yesterday morning.”

“You called her?”

“No.”

“She came uninvited?”

“Yes.”

“Is that the painting?”

“Yes.”

“Can I take a look at it?”

“Sure.”

He got up. The young deputy got up. I moved around the counter fast, not sure why, to overtake them. Got to the easel first. Stood beside it like a kid at a judged show waiting for my ribbon. Sport smiled, genuine. His eyes moved over the canvas and I watched the picture overcome him, exactly the way the light that trails a cloud shadow overtakes a hillside. For a moment he was off the job, he was a spectator, an appreciator, he looked years younger. He smiled, said,

“Have a name yet?”

“An Ocean of Women.”

Smile to a big grin.

An Ocean of Women was maybe a great painting. It took the viewer to a lot of different places at once which a great painting can do. The first impulse on seeing the painting was to laugh, but at the same time a queasy feeling rose out of the depths, rose with the big sharks, swimming up to the surface: a tinge of fear: would the man make it? He looked pretty happy swimming but he also looked lost. He looked very far from anything like a boat or a shore, he looked a little like a man taking his very last swim.

The kid stood uneasily before the easel, his hand on his holstered gun, blinking. I could tell he wanted to laugh, maybe the first time he’d seen an original painting ever, one that wasn’t painted by an aunt that had taken a How to Paint a Western Landscape by the Numbers class and hung it in the den next to the flat screen, he glanced at his mentor and relaxed, twitched a smile, studied the painting, dove into it, couldn’t help himself, his eyes roved from woman to woman wondering maybe how many the swimmer could fuck and still tread water. A good picture should do all of that. Invite the viewer in from just wherever he stood, lead him on a different journey than the person standing beside him. I loved that, watching different people watch a painting at the same time. Because that’s what it turned into: in front of a fine painting a viewer stopped looking and started watching, watching is more specific, watching is a hunt for something, a search, the way we watch for a loved one’s boat on the horizon, or an elk in the trees. Before a good painting they started watching for clues to their own life.

Abruptly Sport straightened, sort of shook himself off, took two steps behind me to the wall, bent down and lifted the turned-back canvas. Flipped it around and held it arm extended, nostrils flaring at the fresh paint. The man hunched and digging a grave, four vultures or ravens watching.

“Wow,” he said. “Diverse. When’d you paint this?”

The stark and surprising shock of being violated, as swift and sudden as a hawk stooping out of the sky and strike .

I let go the breath. As if Sport had been gently gyring, wings extended the whole time, lazy circles and siiiiiiiiiiiii—WHAM . A dangerous man. Far more dangerous than I’d thought or given him credit for. No point in lying.

“Yesterday,” I said.

“About what time?”

“Maybe it’s time I get a lawyer.”

He cocked his head and looked at me. The first time level. No BS, squared off, measuring. “That’s your right. Is that something you want to do?”

“I don’t want to do any of this.”

We looked at each other. He nodded.

“Understood,” he said. “Could you ask Sofia to come out and talk to us for a second?”

“No.”

He nodded.

“I think you two better leave,” I said.

He nodded. Took one more long look at the painting, glanced at me again, this one honest and bleak, like: I have just looked into the heart of a murder and it raises the hair on the back of my neck, still—as many of these as I work I still can’t get used to it . Then he set the painting back down, carefully flipped it backside-out, fastidious, the way you do something distasteful and guilty, leaned it so the paint wouldn’t smear.

“I wanted to be an artist growing up,” he said. “Then I got married.”

He said it like he thought maybe he had made the right choice after all.

“Thanks for the coffee,” he said, and went through the door. The big kid followed him, ducked his head at me, didn’t say a word, didn’t know what to say, looked like he’d been hit on the head with a cow.

Sofia flew out of the bedroom. The second they left. It’s a small house. The bedroom is just off the main room with the long counter, the kitchen, their stools weren’t twenty feet from her listening head. The door flew open and she burst out naked.

Most women would have dressed, armored themselves somehow with clothes. She felt stronger I think without them. She came out of the bedroom like a whirlwind, all tossing dark hair, all curves, all huge eyes flashing the five colors, and scents and something like a hum, a breathed song, a sigh, like someone singing to herself.

She wasn’t singing to herself, she was finding her rhythm. She did that when she modeled, very low, didn’t distract me, and she did it now with an urgency. I was rooted to my spot between the painting and the front door.

“You killed that sonofabitch? Last night?”

She stood just more than an arm’s length away.

“When you got up in the middle of the night? I felt you, I went back to sleep. Thought you were peeing. Heard the truck, thought you were gone a long time, too sleepy to wonder about it, figured you might be an insomniac, next thing I felt your arms around me.”