Peter Heller: The Painter

“Going fishing?” He unspun the gas cap without looking, placed it on the roof of the topper over the truck bed while he reached for the pump handle, looking at me the whole time.

“Thought I better get after it. Been in town two days.”

He grinned.

“You moved into Pete Doerr’s place.”

“How—?”

“Small town,” he said. “You know how it is. Can’t fart without it coming up at some church breakfast.”

I liked him right away. The way I took to Pete on the phone. Bob watched the spinning clicking numbers on the pump, stopped dead at thirty-eight ninety-nine. Gave it an extra click. Recradled the handle, the metallic double cluck.

“You have a spot you were thinking about?” he said. He turned, spat a stream of tobacco juice on the concrete apron. Pushed his cap back. He was a short man, strong, in a grease smudged t-shirt (North Fork Archery Club), about my age, with a lively humor in his eye.

“I was going to go to the Pleasure Park down at the confluence. Everybody says how it’s Gold Medal and all.”

He nodded. I’d read about the place in magazines, where the Gunnison meets its North Fork. A rock canyon hole, clear water, three pound browns not uncommon.

I handed him two twenties. “Go upstream,” he said. “Go up the Sulphur. Gold Medal is good but what is it? Saturday? Be full of fuckwits from Aspen. But there won’t be a soul on the creek. One dirt road. The only person who goes up this time of year is Ellery who has the ranch above, and Brent the deputy who rents a trailer from him. Son Mark was up there Wednesday night, said it was hitting real good.”

He snagged a dollar out of his breast pocket, handed it to me.

“Let me know how it went. Never seen that dry fly you got on the front of your cap. The one with the orange body.”

I grinned. “That’s a Stegner Killer. I just made it up. The orange is baling twine. Seems to be working.” I took off my cap and worked the hook free and dropped it into his palm. “I’ll make you some more,” I said.

That was mid-April, before snowmelt. The creek was running low and clear. I liked it a lot. I liked it better than any place I had fished in years. The quiet of it. The nobody of it. The elk tracks in the silt and, lately, the piles of bear scat, full of the seeds of berries. That part of it.

Now as I drive by, Bob looks up from the tire he is changing, waves. Sometimes I think that’s all you need. A good man with a fishing tip, a wave. A woman once in a while. Some work to do that might mean something. A truck that runs, that some faceless bastard two hundred miles away can’t turn off. It’s not much, but plenty when you don’t have any of it.

I turn up Grand Avenue: hardware store, two cafés, pizza shop, Mexican restaurant, ice cream, barber. A throwback. The town is half a mile off the county highway, so there’s only local traffic. I pass the gravel company, the trailer park by the river, cross over the bridge and accelerate up the hill past the high school sign EAGLES AAA CHAMPS!, up to the highway and turn right east. Five drops spatter on the windshield and I don’t care. I can already feel the excitement of stepping off the rounded stones of the bank into the clear green water. The wind from upstream will be in my face, wanting to screw with my cast. I can feel the cold current against the light waders, the warmer rain.

Elbow out the window, I smell the downpour that’s already passed cooling the pavement, the ozone. I drive through Stoker. It’s a town of fifty houses, small and grimy, crammed between the river and the tracks. Coal town. Heaps of it, a small mountain piled in a cone on the slope across the river. Conveyors and silos climb the side of the canyon. Above the coal are broken rock ledges and oak brush all the way to the ridgetop. Mountain lion country.

Out the other side of town and now there is just the river. The canyon opens up and the river is wide and riffled, running low and clear. The road straightens and I floor it. I can see the high rugged wall of the Sheep Mountains still streaked with snow. When I get to the green tanks of the gas well I turn sharply off to the left, cross a bridge and the road turns to dirt and follows the Sulphur. Something in me relaxes. I can see from the darkness and shine of the clay that it has just rained. Nothing now. White patches of cloud moving fast and a mobile shifting sunshine. Everything in this whole country is getting ready to move. Archery season’s in two days and Bob tells me the woods will be thick with bow hunters from Arkansas and Texas and I might have to fish in an orange vest. Never happen. If some sonofabitch from the Ozarks mistakes my white beard for the ass of a deer, well.

I cross another small wooden bridge with a clatter of boards and am now on a rough track with a small clear creek running below me. Across the creek is a fancy log lodge and cabins, the last group of houses before there is nothing. A lifesize bronze bear stands in the forecourt, up on two legs and arms spread to the sky as if he were calling down a rain of locusts.

I can already smell the change. The darker spicier scents of spruce and fir. They come right down to the road. Big tall trees, heavy boughed, the branches trailing little flags of dry Spanish moss. Leaning and dark. And the creek below gathering the light as it gathers the water. The water is nearly blue, greener in the pools, snowy in the rapids, a living pulse reflecting trees and sky and cloud and ducks and crossing elk, and soon yours truly as it runs. My own pulse quickening. The excitement that never changes, of getting wet soon. Of facing off with a bunch of wary fish who may or may not be smarter than me.

The afternoon is somber under cloud, then the edge tugs away and the water sparks in a sudden sweep of sunlight. Can I say that I feel happy? First time in how long? No. Won’t say it. Shut up and inhale and drive.

Up ahead there’s a horse trailer in the middle of the road, horses, men. A short man in a big hat, leather vest pushed open by his belly, holds up a hand. Cowboy mustache. I can see the round of the chew tin in his breast pocket. The lace up cowboy boots called packers. Dirty and cracked. Up ahead a big man with a bigger gut and another big hat, liver colored, is trying to load a little strawberry roan. The horse’s head is strained back, the lead line from the man’s hand to the halter is taut and he is jerking on it hard. He is also yelling which is scaring the mare, I can see her sweatsoaked belly now as she wheels, the slack teats. Her eye back in her head.

“Goddamn it! Rockheaded piece of shit! Yaaaah!”

He jerks hard on the lead, the whole weight of his upper body in the twist of his torso. At the very end of his tug the horse rears. The fat man, more bulk than fat, is at the end of his rotation, he has nothing left, and the rearing mare tears the rope through his hand which I notice is bare. No glove.

The man yells. Or roars like a bear. Too bad the mare doesn’t get all the line and run. She doesn’t. I am staring. The short cowboy who has approached my window is half turned and staring too. The horse didn’t get all the line and before it is out of his palm the man dives for it with both hands and hauls. He is screaming now. He ties it, three fast moves, to a ring at the back of the trailer. The mare’s mouth is foaming. She is hauled back stiff legged, neck extended, trying to get as far away from everything at the other end as she can. She can’t.

“You good for nothing balky shit factory.”

The man’s voice is lower. He doesn’t have to scream, the horse is tied. He can do what he wants. He reaches into the back of the trailer, into the corner by the door, and tugs. Unhitches whatever it is, a wood stave, no, some kind of club, looks like a two by four, polished dark, maybe oak, lathed down, but the corners still on it. The first strike is both hands, from back and behind like a slugger swinging for the fences. The club comes down beside the withers and the mare screams, a sound like a choked whimper amplified, and it fells her, partly. Her front legs buckle. Now I am out the door. I shove it hard against the short man and he stumbles back with a surprised shout and lands on his butt in the dirt. I am jogging, hitching, trying to run down the road on my bad knee and yelling.