Peter Heller - The Painter

“Was not!” shouted Alce, her face wavering between crumpling and setting for a fight.

“You’re a spic like Sergito!” the boy taunted, shoving Alce back, his eyes flashing toward his mother, not quite sure of his ground, knowing it was a bad word.

That was all it took. Cristine stepped fast between them and crouched so that she was level with the boy and put her hand on the boy’s chest. “ What did you call my daughter?” she said, very cool. “Do we shove other children?” I knew, coming from her, what the gesture meant, her hand across the boy’s rib cage. It meant: let’s stop right now, let’s reassess. Let’s gather ourselves and feel fully who we really are. Forceful and gentle at the same time. Whatever else she was, she had a special way with children.

The lilied mother didn’t: know what Cristine meant, nor care. The kid was in too much shock to speak. The mom lunged for her son and swatted away Cristine’s arm like a forceful volley at the net. “How dare you!” she blurted. She had no idea. No idea what she’d just asked for. Cristine stood slowly and wound up away from her and pivoted from the torso and slapped the woman full force, open handed across the face. It almost knocked her over. Even the bears heard it, probably. They swam down to the glass curious. All three kids wailed. An overweight guard in a silly khaki safari outfit hurried up. Alce stood there in the midst of the ruckus, her face sticky with pink, and watched it all unfold above her, uncrying, her jaw set like a boxer.

I finally broke my own trance and stepped between the women, the two camps, and separated them like a bouncer in a bar fight. The guard in khaki repeated over and over, “That’s enough! That’s enough! Plenty of bear for everyone!” I knew how she felt. Cristine and the other mom stared at each other, both breathing hard, neither crying, both stung beyond tolerance, both gathering their children to themselves. Pretty evenly matched in tiger mom fury and courage, I have to say. The Waspy woman’s cheek was scarlet but the skin was unbroken. Probably lucky for all of us. She was smart, too, I could tell. She was calculating very fast the percentages—of gain and loss in pressing charges, in dragging her children through more of this kind of day, and suddenly she knelt down, looked her three kids full in the face, each one, tallying the damage, it was livable, and stood, and very haughty, uttered, “Let’s go! Alex, Jessie, Connor. Now! ” and they were gone. Leaving us with the liturgical guard, intoning, “That’s enough . Plenty, plenty of polar bear for everyone!”

Amazing, given Cristine’s pugnaciousness and my volatility that we stayed together for ten more years. After Alce died the marriage broke like an egg. Cristine moved to Tempe and I hear she married the heir to an oil fortune, an alternative therapist who uses flashing lights and spirit journeys to heal his patients. I hear she is content.

“How could I forget?” I said now.

Irmina broke into a wide smile. “I remember how Alce never cried, and how all the way home she kept looking up at her mom with like a new appreciation, like, Holy cow, Mom knocked the shit out of the mother of those mean kids. Wow. After the other family left she didn’t know whether to look at the bears or at Cristine.” Irmina laughed. “After that I think she kind of saw Cristine as the sheriff.”

“That’s what she told me. Why did you bring it up?”

“She learned to fight from her mom.”

“Well.”

The parking lot, the bag of pot, Alce kicking the gangbanger. Well. I knew she learned to fight from both of us. I could feel the tears running on my cheeks.

Alce always adored Irmina. Made Cristine jealous sometimes. I suddenly understood that Alce’s death was like losing a daughter for Irmina, too. That she had been grieving alongside me every step of the way. I’d been so leveled by my own blind loss. Fuck, Jim, self-centered doesn’t even begin to describe it.

I reached across the table and took her hand. It was small and warm.

“I’ve been an ass.”

She raised an eyebrow. “More like a crazed bear I think.”

“You miss her as much as I do.”

Whatever she was feeling, it moved like a flock of fast small birds, the way they whir into and out of a bush.

She squeezed. “I know,” she said. “I know how much you love me.”

“You do?”

Her smile lit the table.

“You want some ribs?”

“Venison? Sure.”

There were no other kind with Irmina. She shot a deer whenever she needed one, in season or out. She was always careful never to shoot a doe with fawn. Her neighbors knew, I guess. Out here the state game wardens were tracked like weather events, like tornadoes. Phones rang down the county roads, anything not quite legal went into the sheds, the lofts. Clap went the barn doors. Hello, Warden! Nice day! How’s the wife, the kids? A way of life.

She got the pan off the woodstove, I went outside into her little sculpture garden. The clouds had moved in and darkened the sky and the sun was a smudge in an ominous overcast. Sometimes a stormy morning can feel like dusk and unsettle the hills. Nothing cast a shadow. In among the sage and the wild rose were some of my fish and birds. They were jumping and swooping. Steel and wood. I could smell the plants. The air was still, a perfect outbreath of day, caesura, pause. Like evening. I could hear the buzz and thrum of hummingbirds going to the feeders but didn’t see them. Was this it? All I had needed the past few months? The perfect stillness? The needing nothing for just a minute? Or did I just need to be seen? Seen right through without fear. I walked over to the edge of her piñons and a jackrabbit shot from under a saltbush and zagged off into the false twilight. Most of us are never seen, not clearly, and when we are we likely jump and run. Because being seen can be followed by the crack of a shot or the twang of an arrow. I took a leak in the flinty dirt. I didn’t know what any of us wanted.

We ate venison ribs in a green chili sauce and late kale from her garden. I wanted badly to tell her everything, from the first fight with Dell. I wanted to see her eyes when I told her I had killed two brothers. That they were orphans, that they were cruel, bad men, but that they had fought for each other their whole lives until I came along. Irmina, more than anyone I had ever met, seemed to be able to feel the balance of energies in the universe. If there were a god who cared about the death of a single sparrow, I knew a woman who could feel it. I wanted to see what the men’s deaths meant to her, to the hot and cold currents, the colors that swirled around her. Maybe I wanted to be absolved. But I also knew better. The way Sport was leaning on Sofia, I knew it was better to keep the stories to myself. You tell a story and no matter how well it is sequestered it still lives. It may be in hibernation, like those microbes trapped in the Antarctic ice. So I told her about the paintings instead. I described them one after another in order, making up the titles I couldn’t remember. Ocean of Women, The Grave in the Garden, Two Horses Carrying a Girl . She watched me closely, and at some point in the telling she closed her eyes and I knew she could see each one, the images in her mind more faithful in their way than the paintings themselves. I told her about giving the picture of the beaver ponds to the trucker, and about the painting of the toiling men in the valley I had titled In Hostile Country. Horse and Crow. The Two Boats . I told her about the birds following the more distant longboat. I understood as I told it that she was already way ahead of me, that her understanding outstripped the details, that she let me tell it because I needed to. When I finished I said,