Peter Heller - The Painter

I passed the ranch road, on my right. It ran off down a little open valley between wooded hills and it looked beckoning and half remembered like a dream.

At Tres Piedras I stopped at a squat adobe roadside café called Ortega’s. I sat in the darkened dining room and hoped to have huevos rancheros for breakfast. The waitress was young with glossy dark hair swept up into a ponytail and silver stud earrings. She wore denim shorts and flat sandals and she was skittish as a deer. She put down a heavy ceramic bowl of salsa and chilies as if she were putting out bones for a lion. Quick clatter onto the thick wood of the table, then flight. Flight to three steps back. Coffee? Looking at me sideways, a glance over her shoulder to make sure of her escape route.

“Please, yes, cream and sugar.”

I wondered if I smelled of death. Or looked like it. I left my napkin on the table and limped back to the bathroom. Killing was hard work. All the running and lifting and sleeping in the truck had left my knee stiff. I looked in the mirror, the first time since—since what? I murdered a man. I murdered a man ten days ago also. Last night, was what? More of an accident.

I studied my face. My eyes had the shadows underneath that I got when I wasn’t sleeping well. My beard was as salt and pepper as ever, no lion’s feeding mask of blood, not even a fleck. Because by the time I had started really handling Grant he had bled out. Did I smell? If I did I couldn’t tell. I just looked like a traveler who was tired. And my expression didn’t look to me particularly culpable. I checked: did I feel culpable? No. I felt worse about myself after trying to shoot that buck at night in Vermont. Which I never hit of course. Mysterious. Maybe I was worried sick about getting caught—was that tightening my smile, contracting my spirit?

Not really. Here’s what I figured: if Sport or Wheezy ever caught up with me, which I was sure in one way or another they would, then— Wait, why would they? Because some bow hunter would find Grant’s truck and body in the next few weeks. If not then, a rifle hunter later in the fall. Or the rancher rounding up his cows. I hadn’t seen any recent signs of cows, there were some old manure patties, leathery and desiccated and crumbling, probably a couple of years old. Still. Someone was bound to find his truck, even if his bones were scattered by lions and coyotes, which I imagined was happening right now as I leaned to the sink and turned on the faucet and splashed my face, my tired eyes. Maybe Jason would find it and call in an anonymous tip. They would find the truck one day, probably soon, and even if it was next year or the next they would find the skull, and the bullet rattling around in there would match the caliber of the very gun I was on record as buying in Portland twenty years ago. No, there was an exit wound, the back of Grant’s head had blown off, but I had definitely hit his truck. They would find a slug. And then Sport would call me up.

So what? They would not have a murder weapon because I was planning to get rid of the pistol after breakfast. I would drive out into the pine woods north of Española and bury it under a venerable piñon, one of those that had kept its secrets since probably Cortés had stared silent upon a peak in Darien. They would not have an eyewitness and if I’d been careful, they would not have a hair of my head or any DNA at all to put me at the scene.

And anyway, if somehow they honed in, I would claim self-defense. Willy had also gotten those threatening calls. Grant had tried to shoot me through a kitchen window. The bullets in the walls of the house would match his rifle. What was Grant doing down here in the middle of nowhere but stalking me? They would see the spotlight on the truck and maybe, if some hunter didn’t take it, they would find the .223 with the night scope.

If you killed a man in self-defense, why didn’t you call the sheriff right away?

Who would believe me?

You went to great lengths to hide your crime .

Not really. I left everything pretty much right where it was. Just moved it over a little. Got the mess off the road.

It wasn’t very convincing. I was starting to feel like a professional criminal, one of those dumb ones who was never very good at covering up or at flight. One of those who came back to the pen like a roosting pigeon. One thing about getting old, I mean if we get a little wiser as we get older: we learn what we are good at and what we’re not. And we learn that a man is usually only passably good at one or two things.

I took a leak and went back to the empty dining room. A mug of coffee with a rooster glazed on the side was steaming on the table. The girl was nowhere in sight. I heard a ranchera song on a radio coming from what seemed a long way off, though it must have been just in the kitchen. I waited. There was no cream on the table, she had forgotten it, so I stirred a packet of sugar into the mug. Soon she would come back and take my order.

Nothing happened. The music played. The song finished. A voice from another planet, muted by distance, announced a big sale at a Ford dealership in Española, the ringmaster’s rolling of the Rs the way only a Mexican radio drummer can do it. Another song. Had they all fled? I could imagine. Mr. Death walks into your low ceilinged café and if you have time you flee out the back.

It occurred to me again that I might reek. I had been working hard all night, physically hard, like a stint at manual labor, I had been handling corpses, corpse, and I was the one item that I had not scrubbed and sprayed. I might smell like a zoo, worse. A charnel house. The smell of death is particular. Maybe I had scared the shit out of the Ortegas. Maybe they were huddled in the shed with their shotgun like the farm family in an old Western. Left the radio playing and the soup on.

Nothing happened. I almost called out. Hey! Anybody home! I’m hungry! Fee fi fo fum! Almost banged my tin cup on the table except that it wasn’t tin and it was full of black coffee with no cream. Is this what happens after you murder two people? Things get slippery? Reality bends? There’s a disruption in the order, the sequences don’t fall the way they used to, the waitress doesn’t take my order, steps go missing like the treads in a ruined stair?

I left five dollars on the table, drank the coffee in four gulps, went out the screen door which banged behind me.

Just then, as I bumped back onto the paved highway, the cell phone rang. It was Sofia.

“Where are you?” I said.

“Back home. This place is crawling with Feds. Where are you?”

“Feds?”

“Yah. Where are you? You okay? I’ve been calling you. I called your gallery guy, Steve. He said there was a shooting. He said he hadn’t seen you after.”

“I’m on my way back. Be there in a couple of hours. What do you mean, Feds?”

“Grant left. No one knows where. Maybe he’s the one who shot at you. Everybody knows he burned down the barn and threatened everyone. Then they busted his camp. Dell’s camp.”

“Whoa. Slow down. What do you mean busted Dell’s camp?”

“Fucking poachers. They all were. It was a poaching ring. I mean they say the bow camp was a cover. All professional hunters every one. Every year. Some big haul of like black bear gallbladders, mountain lions, trophy heads, what all.” She was breathless. I could tell she was crying and trying to hide it.

“What the fuck did you stumble into?” she said. “What a hornet’s nest. I’m glad, I mean I’m glad you ki——”