Peter Heller - The Painter

You are All Right . Lighten up. You have made mistakes but getting rid of a very bad man may not have been one of them. If his brother is bad, too, well. Cross that bridge. Whew. Tomorrow you will go fishing. Fish one of the prettiest canyons in the world.

The sun was gone and the country ahead had more trees and the air coming through the window was suddenly chill and smelled of pines. The trees and the asters scattered along the shoulder of the road and the boulders sitting on the slopes all rested in that moment when every line is sharp and things seem to radiate color from within themselves. That perfect balanced moment between day and night. My absolute favorite time.

I slowed. Backed off the accelerator and took a left turn down a dirt track that ran through an open park of sage and grass beneath a ridge of pines. In that moment the sky also does something wonderful. It shines too from within, on its own, without help, a radiant blue sea, as clear and dark as the clearest water. Up there, ahead, sitting over the furthest purple ridge, sat a single star. Faint but irrepressibly alive.

Alce .

It blurted out of me. It was good to be alive and I was okay inside myself, for once I seemed to fit inside this quiet dusk, seemed okay, seemed okay to be alive and. She wasn’t. But in my heart.

She lived. Lived as irrepressibly as that star. I slowed almost to a stop because I could barely see through the blur of my memories, and then I did stop, I pulled over into the grass, not sure why, nobody would drive by all night probably, and I turned off the engine and sat, and when my eyes cleared I saw a herd of five elk in the meadow feeding heads down just below the trees.

It was a bull, with a rack like a tree, and two cows and two calves. A family of sorts, and the strange alloyed happiness welled up again.

They fed, they ignored me, they were in the middle of their reprieve. Bow season not here yet on this side of the New Mexico border, the calves in their first autumn, before the beginning of the hunting season that would bring who knew what terror. I felt the terrible vulnerability of everything, and the depthless peace of the evening, and I wondered that God could have made such a doubleness, allowed it all to exist together so that we might feel so helpless. I swallowed the grief this time. Took a deep breath, wiped my face with my sleeve, and thought, It’s just how the universe is, one big food chain, from galaxies eating other galaxies down to the tiniest shrimp, and it is a wonder we get to be here at all, in the middle of it.

I was certainly in the middle of it. Fuck Grant, fuck his brother, fuck their posse.

I shoved open the door and got out, stretched. The elk lifted their heads, turned them my way, lowered them again. I listened for the sound of water. I wanted to sleep out under the stars, now I could count two then three. Seven. Ten. More the more I looked, faint but burgeoning in the waveless blue. Like a perfectly calm sea, like minnows, who knew how deep.

I listened for the sound of water because it would be nice to sleep beside a creek and to have water to wash with. Dunking my head in a cold current now would be good. I held my breath, listened. The barest of breezes in the pines. The faintest rush. Nothing. Oh well. I had two milk jugs of water for drinking, and I had an old Therm-a-Rest foam pad and a light sleeping bag all stuffed into a milk crate in the back. I’d walk up to the pines and unroll them beneath a big tree. I’d bring a jug, a jacket for a pillow, the gun.

I stretched, my whole body stiff. I hitched myself along the side of the truck to the back and lifted the topper door and jerked open the tailgate. The bull glanced up, but barely, the rest kept feeding, they were used to me now and I was grateful for that, don’t know why.

I leaned in and pulled the milk crate back. Beneath the light sleeping bag was an old rucksack. I opened it and stuffed in my bed, a water jug, a fleece jacket. I went back to the front seat and fetched a packet of little smokes and the gun, locked the truck. The engine was still ticking and a cricket was chirping out of the grass close by. The hopeful end-of-summer chirp when the nights are cooling—he was still singing for a mate maybe.

I walked up the hill. The long grass brushed my legs. The elk had spread out, and once in a while one of the calves lifted its head and cried. It cracked me in two. It was a birdlike cry, something between a chirp and the keen of a hawk. And one of the moms answered, tilting up her chin, louder, hollower, more resonant, a call that must have carried miles down the valley. They were close enough to see each other clearly, I was sure. They were conversing, a kind of call and response, an affirmation that rang against the hill.

Are you there?

I am here .

Will you be there now? Next?

I will be here always .

That’s what it sounded like. To me.

There would be no moon tonight until almost dawn. What light would come from the stars. They were already asserting themselves. I walked up into the deeper shadow of the trees. My breath huffed and the grass swished against my khakis. I picked a spot beneath a huge old pine with a view of the valley. Sat. I’d unfold and blow up the pad in a minute. It felt good to just sit and listen and let the cool air slip around me. I took a swig from the jug and unrolled the foil pouch, dug out a cheroot, lit it.

Then I put it out.

A car engine. Just a vibration at first, the lowest growl, but insistent. It grew slowly, more and more distinct. Jerky faint wash of headlights sliding up the meadow a mile off. Coming around a curve. Then the two headlights themselves, high beams, not shy of the dark. Second gear probably, a truck taking its time, picking its way toward a known destination.

Unlike me. When I came up this road an hour ago I had no place in my mind. And if you listen you can hear the difference in the sound of the two engines.

The headlights jounced, the motor revved then dropped, a rising and falling in cadence with the rising and falling of the road.

Never labored, patient, coming on. I glanced down to my right but the elk had vanished. Maybe they could hear the difference too.

The truck came over a slight swell and then my own truck was caught in the glare. It looked old. As stranded as a boat on a mud-flat, throwing a bulky shadow ahead of it.

The pickup stopped, idled. Spotlight flicked on, one of those lights cops and poachers use. The beam jerked over to the truck then moved back and forth along the shoulders, then twenty feet or so on either side. Looking for someone, looking for me. Maybe a tent, a figure on the ground.

Without thinking I pushed the rucksack flat back against the trunk of the tree behind me and rolled to the side of it myself. Pulled the brim of my cap low and pressed myself to the bark. The .41 mag was in the pack. I pulled it back to me and slid loose the drawstring and stuck my arm in the opening and fished the gun out from under the sleeping bag. The steel was colder than the nylon. I thumbed open the cylinder out of habit and ran the pad of my finger over each chamber, feeling with growing relief again the stamped brass of each bullet. Onetwothreefourfivesix. Had the box of forty-two more, but not here, they were still in the truck. Probably paranoid. Probably it was the rancher who lived on up the road just checking out what new visitor was in his territory.

Then I knew I was wrong. Because the lights went out and I heard his door chunk open and a few seconds later I heard glass breaking.

Windshield glass, that’s a sound like nothing else, an ugly, buffered crunching that is too soft, a fractured thudding that doesn’t even have the tinkle of breaking ice. Without thinking again I shoved the pack forward and raised the revolver in two hands and braced my fists on the taut pack like a sandbag and thumbed back the hammer because it’s more accurate that way than pulling it back with the trigger, and I waited three seconds for my eyes to find the shapes again in the sudden total darkness and then I put two shots into the body of his truck.