Peter Heller - The Painter

Then she was gone.

That day when she left the studio I went to the cupboard and found the bottle behind cans of turpentine and downed half a pint of Jack and threw the knife that was still in my hand against the wall.

When I finished the painting of the horses on the road it was almost dark. Dusk gathered in the quiet room. I heard in the distance dogs barking and I smelled smoke.

Smoke. A horn blare long and urgent. Yelling. Dogs barking.

I tossed the brush the tools on the counter, stepped outside. A plume of white smoke billowed from behind the hedgerow between me and Willy’s. Twined in the gusting pillar were blowing strands and boils of black.

Oh, fuck. The sonofabitch. The fucker.

I hustle to the truck, overcrank the starter in my hurry, wince at the loud rasp, back up too fast, slide in a damp patch on the gravel, throw the shifter into first and peel out.

It’s a minute to his ranch: I bounce up the steep drive to the county dirt road, sharp right at the top and two hundred yards to his gate which is open. Now I can see it: his bigger barn, the one flush against the line of old elms, is burning. The south side of it. The flames are consuming the tack room. It’s a lower extension of the barn proper, and they are licking at the eaves of the main roof. As I skid to a stop I see Willy, hatless, framed in the main doorway and fighting the haltered head of a huge gelding, a chestnut, who is rearing, eyes rolling back. Willy is hauling with all his weight, taking the hard jerks with his bent right arm.

He gets the horse clear of the door and unclips the lead rope with one thrusting motion under his chin, yells “Yah!” The horse bucks once, throws both rear legs out in a tremendous kick, and bolts for the dirt track to another open gate and the sage hills. Willy whirls, a wild dervish, and disappears back into the maw of the burning barn. I am running. As best I can. I nearly collide with him in the door. He is leading the little mare. She is whinnying, different now than the cries of her beating, this is terror, not the piteous wail at a merciless universe but a cry for help. It breaks my heart open.

“Here!” Willy yells. “Here! Take her!” He thrusts the jerking rope into my hand and spins and dives back in. I back up. Transfixed by the mare who is bellowing now almost like a donkey, transfixed by the flames that are eating the far wall, backing, pulling the rope, and suddenly she lunges for the opening and I am clinging, hanging on, arm about ripped out of its socket, somehow catching up with her and unclipping the lead and watching her bound, unhampered, soundly gaited, watching her with huge relief run for the fields and the still galloping chestnut. Oh God, go. Nothing broken, running like a horse should run.

I wheel around and plunge back into the barn. Willy is in the back, too close to the flames, struggling with the latch on a stall door. The black smoke gusts and rolls upward from the far wall, half obscures him. I can hear the thuds of hooves, breaking barnwood, the terrified kicks. I slide beside him into the searing smoke and grab the door and yank and we almost fall back together into the rushing sparks as the door frees and swings. No thought of safety, of bones, Willy dives into the stall. He yells, thud , a swat I can hear over the roar, and another big brown with a starred forehead bolts, jumps clean over me no shit and I can hear the clatter on concrete and she is out the big door and gone. “That’s it! That’s it! Others already out! Go! Go! Go!” I feel his grip on my upper arm, tearing at my shirt, tugging me after him and we are running. Running down the aisle between stalls as something behind us cracks and thwomp! collapses, running in a blizzard of sparks and sudden heat on polished concrete and my right foot comes down on a thatch of hay, hay slipping on the smooth floor and I am down. Willy’s hands now—can’t see him in the black smoke which is pouring toward the wide opening, sucked toward open air, can’t see him but feel his hands clawing into my armpits, hauling, pulling me again to my feet, a great shove in my lower back and I am spilling, tumbling out into the dirt yard and the night and the heat and wind is at my back and I land flat out on the stones and clods and look straight up into a sky luminous and clear as a spring, into a rash of rising sparks freeing themselves from the smoke and losing themselves in the paler stars.

Two red pumpers, sirens wailing, screamed up the road, jounced into the yard. The volunteers in yellow slicker suits and helmets, six to a truck, were out and swarming the hoses. There within ten minutes of me and two minutes later they had four heavy streams shooting into the flames, the roof of the barn, the part unburned. Willy had his hydrant going and was spraying down the side of his wood and tool sheds with a garden hose. The pillar of smoke on the south side of the barn went black to gray to a violent steaming white that exploded and rolled. It flowered inside out in the blossoming of its own death. A crack of timber like a shot and the roof collapsed on the south end, showering orange sparks straight up into the dark. Within an hour they had it all out. Half the barn stood unharmed. The other half steamed in a blackened ruin that burned the nostrils with acrid and sodden char. Willy stood in the yard. He held the triggered end of a garden hose as if he’d forgotten he held it. He watched the firemen spray down the hot spots, the backup man pulling and hauling the heavy cloth hoses over the yard, the nozzle man bracing and working the bale trigger in bursts, the rush and billow of steam.

I limped over to Willy. My lower back spasmed with shooting pain, trick knee screamed. I had to stop sprinting and rolling in the dirt every other day.

He was standing holding the little hose, his thin hair sprung out, a lick of it sweatstuck to his forehead, his face smirched, shirt torn. He stared at the remains of his barn. I stood next to him.

“I lost my hat,” he said.

I clapped it against my leg and handed it to him. A fraying palm-straw wide brim Resistol stained by sweat and rain.

“It was by the door.”

He looked at me first, straight into my eyes and I shuddered. There was a cold emptiness there I had never seen. Then he shifted down to the hat, no change in expression. He dropped the hose to the dirt and reached out and slowly took the Resistol. Deliberate and slow he set it on his head and snugged it down.

“Thanks.” Then he smiled. It was like the man I had recently come to know had just reinhabited his body.

“I’d say Grant Siminoe chose to mess with the wrong people,” he said. He spat. A spit that hawked up and ejected an entire swatch of the universe.

“But then smarts were never the Siminoes’ most obvious charm.”

As he said it headlights swung across his face. A pulsing blue followed. In that light he looked ill. A squad car pulled in, and the white Crown Vic, unmarked. Sport got out of it. He was wearing the soft shell wind jacket, hiking boots. Before he closed his door he took in the smoldering barn, the firemen, me and Willy. It didn’t seem to surprise him. He looked like a man coming to an event he had on his calendar. Out of the patrol car stood a broad shouldered, white haired officer in a badged green jacket. His face had the bitter not unhappy set of an old war general: the sheriff himself. Must be. He reached back into the car for his hat. Surprised me when I saw in the moving lights it was a hunterorange baseball cap. The sheriff walked over to an unhelmeted and bearded fireman who was talking into a cell phone. Must be the chief. Sport came to us.