Peter Heller - The Painter

Well. He left her the store, anyway. Must have, in his reptilian way, forgiven her and understood how much he had asked of the guileless, very young girl he had married, and how much he had damaged her.

“So damn good to see you,” she said, smiling into the sun.

She was genuinely glad, and she grabbed a fingerful of my beard and kissed the side of my face again and let her breast swell against my shoulder.

“Are you back?” she said. “Please say yes.”

“A week or two.”

“Will you call me?”

“Sure.”

“You’re not married again are you?”

“Nah.”

“Steve told me you threatened the last one with a chain saw.”

I laughed.

“Word gets around,” I said. “I told him I felt like it.”

“We all have those feelings, Jim. You don’t know how many times I wanted to shave off Happy’s eyebrows while he was sleeping off one of his binges. That would’ve been tantamount to murder wouldn’t it? He was such a peacock.”

“Ha.”

She was such a sweetheart. I thought she was going to say she wanted to cut his nuts off or put an ice pick through his ear.

“You know,” she said, “you are the best artist in the whole joint. Happy always talked about stealing you away from Steve. He said you were a modern-day Van Gogh, how you are self-taught and all, and kind of have two left hands when you draw, and are such a wild hair half the time, and are a plain old, old fashioned genius.”

She grinned. “So there.”

She blinked at me, at me and the sun. She looked as pleased with herself as a kid who has just tied a bonnet onto her cat’s head. Oh man, I loved her. Right then she had to be the cutest sweetest girl on the planet. What was wrong with me? An ocean of women. Is that what murder does? Some endocrine reaction?

“Call me,” she said, and gave my ear a heartfelt squeeze. She rose out of the water. It poured off of her breasts. It ran its watery hands to her waist and down over the spreading round of her hips and the smooth flat of her lower belly and. Venus on the Half Shell. Celia rose out of the sea of Ten Thousand Waves a glistening magnificent thing, slowly, slowly turned, stepped one long tapered naked leg onto the bench and the deck, did not look back. Grabbed her robe off the peg and shrugged it on as she went. Good God.

“She did that on purpose,” murmured an awed shaved-headed man to my left. “If I weren’t unreconstructed one hundred percent all American gay I would go for that.”

“Whew. Me too. I mean—”

We looked at each other and grinned. He had a bone in his right ear and a snake tattoo running down the side of his neck. “You’re Jim Stegner. Couldn’t help overhearing. Anyway I recognized you. Philippe Sando.” He put out a fist to bump.

“Rocks right? You paint rocks hanging from strings,” I said.

“You got it. You might wanna put that thing away.”

He glanced down through the water. The bath was not sudsy or murky, it was very clear.

“Around here,” he said smiling, “it might get you in trouble.”

We surveyed the deck littered with muscular tanned oiled bodies and we both burst out laughing.

I felt oddly exuberant now and I needed to paint. I did not want to use the usual studio up at Steve’s, the one he kept for me. I did not want to tangle with Steve or the cops. I took an ice cold shower and drove up the mountain past the state park lodge, up away from the creek into the aspen on the backside of Lake Peak and parked at the overlook. I put the straps of the easel over my back and carried the wooden box and a small canvas and a can of turpentine and walked up the old logging road a few hundred yards until the path toward Hobbitville forked off to the southeast. That’s what I called it. They were crude tipi-shaped shelters of dead wood spaced down through the forest like a tribal ruin. They were artfully hidden from the trail. Most were wrecks, skeletons of once proud lodges, but others had been freshly woven with boughs and stuffed with leaves and looked like they might shed water, and they were all haunted with the inaudible vibrations of questionable practice, ceremony and ritual of God knows what. They were creepy. The hills of northern New Mexico are riddled with sects, orders, communes, religious cults of every stripe, so who knew. I liked them. I set up next to the one that felt most dangerous, a tall tightly woven lodge that reeked of recent embers. I stuck the .41 magnum in its cup holder on the easel, unscrewed a can of turps and poured a jar full of spirits for the brushes and began to paint.

I painted mountains. Blue. A disappearing powdery cobalt blue—mixed with alizarin crimson and lightened up with a bit of titanium white—like those I could see through the opening of the trees ahead of me. I painted a dry valley and along it the one river, in some spots just an arroyo riven in the rocks, I painted a trail and two figures toiling. One led on the narrow trail, hunched against the burden he carried in a sack. He turned, reached a hand back for the larger figure who was also having a hard time navigating the rocks. A harder time. The men were in league, the gesture was familiar, familial. They were brothers. It was clear. Clear to the silent woods on the slopes, clear to the clouds that massed and were not friendly. Clear to me. They were close in age and they had been traveling like this their whole lives. They were Dellwood and Grant for certain. Twisted and hunched and making their way together in a hostile country.

I painted like my own life depended on it. Can’t remember when I painted in such a frenzy. The shadows of the big mountains. Where was the sun? Who knew. Where were the birds? There, hidden in the trees, not inclined to show even a little beauty. There was zero compassion in the valley, none anywhere. Traveling like that, season to season. What was it like to lose a brother? A little like losing a daughter.

I had. I had killed a man, someone’s little brother. I stared at the picture coming alive in front of me. How could that be true? I had killed both him and my daughter in some sense. What I felt. Not what Irmina told me, but what it felt like, the certainty I could never talk myself out of. Who the fuck was I?

I stuck the brush in the jar, lay the palette across the open travel box on the ground and walked twenty feet to a lichen covered rock with a view down the valley. Up here the aspen were already starting to go tender with the pale greens that presaged the yellows of death. Some leaves had already fallen.

Sat on the rock. Up here not desert. Up here it was cool. When the wind came through it spun the leaves like a million chimes, they ticked and turned their pale undersides back, so that the wind swept through with a brightening of the canopy, a wave of light that carried the sweet smell of dying leaves. Already some blown down, littering the ground. This time of year. He had beaten a horse nearly to death. The horse. Focus on the horse. The little bleating terrified roan. He was a drunk, who wasn’t. He bluffed and blustered. Who didn’t? His older brother was his partner. Likely his only ally on earth. He loved him somehow. Who knew what tribulations growing up, the two of them, what threats Grant had protected him from. What vicious fights. Maybe Grant’s only true project on earth, to protect his little brother. Well. He had failed. We knew about that.

I needed a drink. Alce, I need a drink. Little one. I can taste it in the back of my mouth.

Silence. Wind.

What are we here for? Surely not to purge others who have no clue either. There would be no one left. Urge rose up like bile to drive straight down to the police station next to the courthouse and confess everything. It choked me. I swallowed it back.