Peter Heller - The Painter

I dug out a cigarillo from the foil pouch and stood out on the ramada. Cool wind now pouring down off the mountain, smelling of ozone and juniper. The way the clouds were. That’s how I felt. The mountain formed a long ridge, higher peak swooping to lower, left to right, east to west.

The clouds massed in from the south, dark bellied and brooding. They hung against the ridge like a herd of deer afraid to cross a fence. How I felt. I lit and sucked on the stogie. If the anger I felt now—if I let it cross some line, let it spill, I probably wouldn’t have a gallery.

The cigars are little rough-ended cheroots, made to look hand rolled like the stubs Clint chewed in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly . Vanilla flavored and irresistible. Limit myself to two packs of eight a day. The wind tore away the smoke. Maybe too windy now to fish the creek, I didn’t care, I’d go up anyway and get the fly into the water. I could always fish a weighted wooly bugger, let it drift down on the current and strip it back up like a wounded minnow. The thing was to get in the water, feel the cold press against my knees, smell the current.

Steve, the fucker. I hated this part. Just when I am moving on something good and true he throws out some bullshit like a commission for two panfaced little girls in polka dots. And makes it clear that unless I spend a full agonizing week on the thing the guy writing the check won’t feel he’s getting his thirty grand worth. Thinks it’s okay because I have full creative freedom to throw in a chicken. Fuck. Fuck that. If I finish in a day they can take it or leave it.

The Ocean of Women painting was the first big piece I had made it halfway through since I’d come up here four months ago. I’d made a bunch of smaller paintings, but it took so much energy in just figuring out who to pay for the water bill, etc., where to buy the cigars, find a model. Sofia was a good one, a great one. She didn’t need much direction, she was creative, she knew what painting was and she allowed for departure, the kind we had this morning, where eventually she disappeared. I loved that.

I smoked and breathed. I was standing there. The floor of the outdoor ramada was rough sandstone flags, inexpertly laid by the poet probably, with sand between. Basic. The stones were reddish, ruddy to ochre. The roof just shade, latilla poles covered with a rush of young willows, haphazardly piled, tied down with cord. The simplicity. Something about the sincerity of this partial shelter. I was standing there and I thought of Alce, my daughter. That she would be eighteen, that she would be a better fisherperson than me now. Very damn good at fifteen. When I could get her to go out, get her away from that crowd. That she could have come with me this afternoon, fished with me up into the night, the rain. Relax, Dad, she’d say. Steve is a pain but he loves you. I know, I know, she’d insist, the commercial part of your painting, what a pain in the ass, but relax. Everybody’s gotta serve somebody, right? Sometimes we just pay the piper. Get our meal ticket.

She loved using a string of clichés, making them go where she wanted. Just one week, she’d tell me now. Finish this beautiful one you’re working on, then go down there. Go grateful. Grateful you have a job, doing what you love. Right, Pop? Uncanny wisdom for a fifteen year old who had been so tied to her own tugging needs.

Right, Alce.

Her flashing smile, dark eyed like her mom, Cristine—the high cheeks, my fine hair. Not too tall, no longer gangly, filled out, long legged. Always graceful. Moved like an animal I thought. Moving upstream away from me to fish ahead, the next bend. Moving upstream away, away. You went around the turn of the gravel bar looked back once, raised your chin. And gone. Gone. Alce.

I have an iPhone and now Steve can get to me. I don’t text, don’t get email or sports news on the fucker. It is little, too small for my hands, I’m always pushing the wrong button, losing the call, calling the wrong person. Steve made me get it so I can take photos of my new paintings—he showed me how—and then I message him the image. That’s why he got it for me, he said.

With the phone I get to talk to people I might not have talked to again before I died. Some upside. I don’t read the thing while I’m driving like I see so many do, even around here. Or teens, walking down the sidewalk together, each one on a phone, working their thumbs. Probably messaging each other, one foot away. Leads to an evolutionary loss of the vocal cords. Alce didn’t do that, she didn’t have a phone. I know she wanted one.

The last time we spent together, just the two of us, was the summer before the fall she started getting into trouble. Cristine’s sister Danika was dying of lymphoma up in Mora County outside of Las Vegas, NM, and Cristine went up for two weeks to be with her. It was summer and Alce and I took a couple of flannel sleeping bags and some meat loaf sandwiches and cans of Hawaiian Punch and fished her favorite pool below the falls at dusk. We both caught a couple of browns, nothing big, and then she made a small twig fire on the gravel bar the way I had taught her and we unrolled the bags under the stars. We were happy, I think, I mean glad to be together fishing, and before we went to sleep we named all the constellations we knew, and then I said, “See that cluster over there, above the Bull?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s you.”

“You are so corny!” Her fist came down on my shoulder. “That looks like a bunch of zits.”

“Ouch.”

“It’s alright, Pop, you are a dreamer. That’s why you paint.”

“Huh. Okaaay.”

“I’m a combination of you and Mom, a dreamer and a fighter.”

“Whoa.”

“Yup.”

“Hold on a frigging minute.”

“Glad you didn’t say fucking. You always want to.”

“Given my record, I kinda thought I was the fighter.”

“Nope, you react. That’s why you’re in the ER all the time.”

I laughed out loud. “No shit.”

“Yup. Mom’s a fighter.”

“You are so damned smart. I’ll be damned.”

I watched the stars beside my daughter feeling as proud as if she’d done something great and ordinary, like won the state track meet. I remembered I had felt the same way when she came home from her first day of kindergarten and declared, high spirited, that the teacher couldn’t pronounce her name. “I told her: AL -say! AL -say! Al like Al, Say like say! Now she says it right.”

Alce. “Don’t worry, Pop,” she had said that night. “We probably need dreamers more than we need fighters.”

Four months later she was dead.

I know. I stand out here now in the wind watching the clouds mass and I know. That Steve in his greed is feeding me and will kill my art if I let him. That my daughter died for nothing. That I better go fishing before my thoughts start to spiral.

I drive into town. Down the hill, cross the tracks, no coal train, no seven minute wait as it clatters by. Good. I don’t have to pack the truck because it’s perma-packed for fishing. I keep vest, waders, rods, boots in the backseat or in the bed always. I turn at Brad’s Market, honk at Bob who is changing a tire in front of his station. Good guy. He runs the Sinclair gas and service station with his old father and his son. Three generations of Reids. I met Bob my second day in town. I pulled up to get gas and he saw the rods in the truck bed through the windows of the topper. Saw the unlit stogie in my jaw, the cap paint spattered and stuck with flies. I guess he was curious.