Peter Heller - The Painter

“Take your time.”

He drank from the beer, leaned forward, stared straight ahead. Put his hands on his knees. He was adjusting to the new information, taking his time. He was a fisherman.

“Dell was scum,” he said finally.

“Sounds like it.”

He nodded to himself, glanced up at me again just once, said, “Well let’s ring you up. I bet you want to get the fuck out of here and go fishing.”

I smiled.

“I’ll check on the reel.”

At the register he wouldn’t meet my eye. His hand trembled as he picked up the little matchbook of twist weights, the dropper bottle of silicone, ran the scanner over the bar codes. I looked past him and in back, hanging just back of the doorway to what must have been the shop, I saw a young man in a baseball cap watching us. Jake. Ben said, “Back in Hotchkiss they got a fly shop, too. If you need flies. Raymond’s.”

“This one is pretty good,” I said.

“Well.” He scanned a pair of forceps with handles speckled like a brookie. “Well,” he said again.

“Like I might scare away the other customers?”

He wouldn’t look at me.

“I don’t see any other customers,” I said.

“It gets real busy sometimes,” he snapped defensively, and started putting my gear into a flimsy plastic bag.

The sun had gone over the canyon, the top of the red wall upstream was lit to a strip of fire. The hole gathered the cool dusk. I smelled tamarisk, sweet, heard the ripple of the current against grass banks, the descending slow notes of a canyon wren somewhere across the river.

Behind me the clunk of two car doors closing, chafe of a starter, tires on gravel, all muffled by distance and the thick cottonwoods along the bank. Here, the wide run of slow water reflected the green banks, and all across it, silvering the dark surface, and silent, spread the faint rings of trout rising.

I counted four other fishermen staggered in the mile above me, two on the far side, could see their blue raft nosed into the willows. Plenty of room to be alone with the evening.

I stepped into the water, tested it, thigh deep here and black along the grassy undercut, waded out, soft sand bottom, waded until it firmed to gravel and got shallower, a covered bar. I wanted to cast back from here and fish the edge of the bank.

Before I unhooked the little pheasant tail from the keeper above the cork grip, before I pulled a few feet of line straight off the new reel with a well oiled zing—before I did anything I stood knee deep in the cold water and closed my eyes.

In the silence of the evening I could hear the tiny blips and gulps of fish rising. One behind me, then one to my left, close. A chortle of current. The breeze was lazy upstream and carried somebody’s charcoal. Another fainter tick, this in air. Bats. I knew that when I opened my eyes I would see a bat flitting the dusk over the water. Rising fluttery, the antic turns like a leaf getting blown about. The leathery wings ticking. Bats and trout, everybody having dinner, everybody going after the same bugs. Nobody leaving any wake.

Do you leave a wake?

No. Maybe.

Do you leave anything important? Worthwhile?

A few paintings.

Huh .

I was a father.

But now you’re not .

I still am. I just. She would be here tonight. She would love it.

You are a killer. Now the wake you are leaving is absence and pain .

I stood stock still. I listened to that, the accusation, the way I had been listening to the bats and the fish.

I don’t feel like a killer. I feel pretty good. Now I do. I didn’t like what Ben said at the end, but now I am just standing here listening.

You are a killer twice over. First time you escaped by a few inches. Happenstance. You missed. But. You have the heart of a killer .

I do?

Answer that yourself .

You are myself.

Silence.

I stood knee deep in the cold water, eyes closed, and listened to the end of day over the river. Then I opened my eyes and pulled the line and began making long casts upstream just off the bank. The new rod was light and alive in my hand, it was beautiful, and the line sang out fast and smooth with a whisper like scratching a guitar string. I didn’t mind the sound at all.

In cop shows they always talk about motive and murder weapon and hard evidence and eyewitnesses. I mean, to build a case beyond a reasonable doubt you need to assemble some facts. Facts that are beyond dispute. Like bits of a man’s brains on another man’s clothes. That’s the thing I worried about most. But. I kept telling myself no way. I didn’t puncture Dell’s skull, I cracked it. Didn’t beat it to a pulp. I hit him once, KO, and he fell into the creek and drowned. Crack.

The other stuff seemed under control. Murder weapon? None. One rock in a million like any other in the bed of a stream, already probably gathering algae or the pupa shells of caddisflies. Motive, sure. It sounded like lots of people might have some motive. The mother of his grandkids for one. Hard evidence aside from brains? Sulphur Creek road dust on my truck, patches I hadn’t washed off? My tire treads along the creek, just downstream of the camp?

I fished there almost every day. I had never needed to wash off the dust in the first place. That was an adrenaline move, something you do in the middle of the night when you’re so pumped and you don’t realize it and you do unnecessary and stupid things.

Blood on the vest? What if Stinky said I wasn’t wearing the vest during the fight? Then Dell’s blood came at another time. What if the pattern of spots was deemed in no way consistent with a bloody nose? Stinky could fuck me.

Alibi. I had one. Rock solid, right? What if she got mad at me? What if she turned on me the way she did on the big dumb hippy boyfriend? Maybe that was her MO. Or the other way, what if I left? I was never going to be hostage to an alibi. A spurned woman can do crazy things. What if. What if.

But I didn’t hear from Sport. I figured I’d wait two weeks, not be in too much of a hurry, then drive down to Santa Fe and do Steve’s stupid commission. I figured they’d run the tests on the vest pretty fast since it was a hot case with a suspect at risk of flight, etc. And they had probably interviewed Stinky already, so. I figured if they had any kind of a case they wouldn’t fuck around, they’d nail me. I don’t know why, I felt confident. It’s not like they had to carefully construct a case. They would have only so much material with which to build a prosecution and I figured either they had it or they didn’t.

Sofia went back to the orchard house she shared with Dugar and kicked him out. She told him his poems were moronic and it was time he went to California and became the sea mammal she always knew he could be. He objected with a string of b-buts she said sounded like a machine gun. When she asked about the orchard girl he’d been screwing for months, playing her, Sofia, like a fool, he got sheepish and shut up for a minute.

We were drinking coffee at the counter again, she on a stool, me on the kitchen side, and I was happy that we had fallen back into our old ease. She had brought a baguette, a jar of peach marmalade, a wedge of triple cream Brie, and we were devouring them. She smiled, her eyes all the colors you see on the bottom of some clear creeks, and she said, to me, “You know I hold your nut sack in my strong little fist?”

“I know I know.”

“I don’t want your nuts.” She opened her fist and shook her palm in air. “No matter what you ever do or say to me your nuts are your nuts. I will never change my story.”

I looked at her and I believed her. As much as I could believe anything.