Peter Heller - The Painter

“Jim, if anyone deserved an early demise it was that sonofabitch. But you know, we can’t just go around killing each other. Just saying.

“Be good,” he said again, the way he does.

A partial reprieve. It was fifty miles of state highway before I could breathe normally again.

I have never painted in plein air. Never set up on some hillside, on some shore, in a big hat. But I did on the road south of Saguache. I made the right turn off the state highway onto a smaller paved road that went over a swell of grass hills and dropped down to a little creek limned with willows that ran off through open hills and pinewoods. The stream along the road ran dark and clear. It ruffled to white then smoothed almost black again. I slowed the truck, leaned out the window. I watched the creek, the purple stemmed willowbrush, the redwing blackbirds rising out of it, and I had two urges: to fish and to paint. Also, I wanted to shake off the scene with Bob.

As I studied the trout stream, the painting won out.

I turned a corner around a ruddy rock outcrop and saw the creek fan into a plain of willows, beaver dams, tannin dark pools. The pools stepped down the valley and cloud shadows tugged across them and the still water was touched with the quiet rings of feeding trout. In almost every one was a stick lodge. The beaver lodges were covered with a spotty packing of dirt, as if the animals had tossed shovelfuls of mud onto the roofs of their houses. How did they do that? Where did they carry it? I pulled over in a widening of trammeled tire tracks. The bank looked over the braids and pools, the thick low brush. A worn trail cut down to the water. For the first time in maybe my life I didn’t take it. Kinda blinked at myself. Gee, Jim, are you growing up? Or old? Art over life?

I could paint, then fish. There was plenty of daylight and I was in no hurry. Nobody would bother me out here.

But just in case, I set up the easel, swung down and latched the narrow shelf for brushes and stuck the .41 magnum in a hole meant for a jar.

The sheriff hadn’t been taking any chances, either. When I pulled out of my driveway this morning there was the young flattopped deputy who had admired my nudes. He must have been there all night. His beefy face in the open window was blotched with lack of sleep. He waved, very friendly, I waved back, then he started up and followed me down the county road. He followed me through Hotchkiss, past the turnoff to the Pleasure Park, all the way through Delta. We passed the little airport and the salvage yard Black Jacks where I had stopped a month ago to get a side mirror and the proprietress had fed her big Rottweiler watermelon gum-balls. We passed the propane yard, and a mile after that he blasted his siren, one long two shorts, and I crossed the county line. The sign said,

I looked in the mirror and he was pulled over and his arm was out the window and he was waving. I waved back.

Now above the open creek I unwrapped the brushes from their rag, flipped open my folding knife and scored then broke off a rough square of fiberboard. I pulled out a for sale sign and taped it white side up onto the board. I’d use a similar palette to Ocean of Women . A tremor of anxiety and I realized I was thinking about Sofia. She was safe, right? I dug my phone out of my khaki pocket, no reception of course. Grant Siminoe wasn’t going to go after an innocent woman, a bystander. Nah. Well. He did try to burn up a couple of horses. Panic like reflux rose in my throat. She said she was going to Crested Butte. She wouldn’t have thought of it, but the road to the old mining town went right by the Sulphur, the steep turnoff where the bow hunters had their camp. Well. She was going to go in the morning, they’d all be in the woods hunting. Right? Grant didn’t even know I had a girlfriend. Right?

I almost packed up everything right then, almost got back in the truck and turned around. Whoa. Cool off Jim. The sheriff would be all over Siminoe. If he was watching me he was sure as shit staking out the Sulphur road and keeping an eye on who was coming and going. He sure as shit didn’t want Grant burning down any more buildings. Or assaulting girlfriends. Is that what she was? Calm down. Breathe.

Hey, Pop?

Yeah?

Don’t get so excited about everything. That’s what always gets you in so much trouble. Just leaping all the time. Like a chicken. A rooster. Right?

Right.

Always striking at a bug, another rooster, chasing a hen. How do those little hearts handle all that all the time?

Hunh.

Try just sitting still for a sec. Want to?

Okay. You sound like Irmina.

I like Irmina. Okay, meditate .

Sure.

Pop?

Yes, Alce.

You have three speeds, huh? Like that antique station wagon we used to have. With the shifter on the wheel? Remember?

Sure.

That’s you, right? Kinda: crawl, fast, stop. Right?

Right. Laugh.

Maybe you should stop now. For a sec. Paint the picture. Everything will work out .

It will?

Sure .

I stood by the empty easel looking over all those mirrored beaver ponds and thought, That is some advice coming from my girl. My girl who one morning didn’t have a chance. I stood and breathed and then I pulled the jars out of the jointed box and filled them with turps and walked down the steep trail to water’s edge and splashed my face with tea colored water.

I had put five small canvases in the back of the truck with the new paintings. The unused canvases were wrapped and tied in an old piece of rubber tarp. I pulled out a twenty-thirty and set it on the easel and began. I painted what I saw. The braided stream threading the green and red willows like a little delta, the blackbirds flying. Three black birds of life. Not the deathly watchers. Could hear them as I painted, the peculiar exuberant buzzing call like an electric cable. I painted the Cooper’s hawk that circled high, the clouds above him on their own compelled heading. I painted fish jumping out of the water though they weren’t really jumping they were sipping the surface but fuck it, let’s not be too literal, and I refrained from putting in a chicken or any death anywhere. Funny, but it was very freeing just sticking to the landscape. You’d think it would be the opposite. A certain kind of pressure was lifted, one I realized now that I’d always felt in the limitless blank outer space of total freedom. Which is a vacuum of sorts and has its own imploding force.

I thought it was ironic that now, with my assignment in front of me—paint the creek, the whole creek and nothing but the creek—now I felt released. My spirit flew. I painted like a child, without thought, one color to the next, one bush to one pool to the next to the birds to fish to a June bug about as big as a hummingbird who landed on my cap. Fun to paint like this. I mean it wasn’t much different than painting an ocean of women except that I had forbidden myself that kind of license and I hummed and sang and my imagination rested, not frightened at all of any sharks coming up from the deep or any malevolent birds.

I was happy painting and suddenly envied my friends who built houses and cut down trees, the gypo loggers like Pop, the ones in Mora County who were Irmina’s friends, Bob at the station: fix the transmission, change the oil. Or build a foundation, cut down the tree and the one next to it. What Irmina had said: Jim you burn so hot . What felt good was to cool. To paint simply and to feel a cooling, the calmness of craft, of being a journeyman who focuses on the simple task: pin this one corner together and make it fit in an expanding universe.