Peter Heller - The Painter

“I don’t know why I put both of them on the same sea.”

“They are on the same sea. We all are.”

“What about the birds? Following her?”

“The fish are probably giving her an escort. The birds are eating the fish.”

“Huh. Never thought of that. Maybe I should take it back and put in the fish.”

“Leave it alone. You have your gun?” she asked.

Startled: “In the truck,” I said.

“Is it—?”

I nodded.

“Give it to me.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“You’re not a bear, I take it back. You’re a big dumb ox.”

“Thanks.”

“Well, okay, go. Go back to town. Someone will be waiting for you. Before you leave my property get rid of it. Promise me.”

“Okay.”

“You’re sleepy, huh?”

“Yah. All of a sudden.”

She smiled. “Go take a nap in the hammock. Your favorite spot. Then go.”

I hugged her. I may have been a dumb ox but I hugged her like a bear.

I did. I lay in the hammock under her ramada and fell asleep to the buzz and whir of the hummingbirds. I didn’t dream. When I woke it was late afternoon and the sky was still heavy with clouds. I felt refreshed and went straight to the truck. I didn’t say goodbye again, didn’t have to.

Near the end of her driveway, in a stirring of breeze that smelled like rain, I walked off a few hundred yards into the mesquite with my little folding shovel and I buried the gun. I buried it deep and covered it carefully. On private property. Then I walked big circles all through the brush. I drove back through Tesuque and stopped at the Village Market for a beer. It was happy hour and packed with rich hipsters, young and old in silver concha belts, and a lot of local manitos too. Everyone seemed to be getting along. That was like the old days. A band was setting up. Must be Thursday or Friday. I ordered a Buckler, a non-alcoholic beer, and enjoyed sitting at the bar without a single agenda. Nothing to do but sit and look, listen, drink. There was the line from one of the poetry books I kept thinking about, from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets . I felt in the zippered breast pocket of my coat and pulled out the wrinkled slip of paper.

I loved that. No one had ever said it, not to me. Was he saying we are here to pray? To tell you the truth, right now that was all I really felt like doing. I could spend the rest of my goddamn life on my knees. It occurred to me that every painting lately was a prayer. That fishing, with Alce, her memory, was also a kind of prayer. Praying really was all I knew how to do. I read the lines three times, folded them back up and tucked them away.

The beer was cold and it tasted hoppy and good and I didn’t miss the alcohol. The portrait of the girls was done, it was really good, the gun was gone. That surprised me: losing it in the field was like taking off a heavy pack. For a moment you think you will float away. I thanked the bartender and went back into the cool wonderful heaviness of a desert pregnant with rain.

It was that time of day when late afternoon is just tipping into evening. Probably an hour till dusk. It felt like it might rain any second. I’d head back to town and go to the plaza for a simple dinner. In the parking lot against the trees of the west edge was a black El Camino and standing next to it the outline of a man.

He was leaning against the car and he was tall and bearded and wore a baseball hat, and even in ambush, if that’s what this was, he looked relaxed and loose jointed and as familiar as a childhood friend. His eyes were shadowed but they could only be blue, mineral blue and hard with mischief. Fuck. I felt under my seat as I opened the truck door, a reflex, and remembered that the gun was gone, buried. I was on my own. I stiffened tall, looked back toward Jason, raised a hand. He didn’t move. There was a length of pipe behind the seat. Why didn’t I bring the shotgun, too, when I had driven away from the Paonia house? I totally forgot it, that’s why. I waited a beat, got in the truck, started up and pulled out.

I rolled down the window. The evening smelled of juniper smoke from a dozen stoves and the sweet fragrance of the first fallen leaves. I drove back along the creek under trees that obscured the sky and one leaf, then two, hit the windshield. It would have been gorgeous but it wasn’t. He was two hundred yards behind me. Whatever distance it was he kept it to the inch. What it seemed like. If I lost him on a curve, when I moved out onto the next straightaway he slid back into my mirror at the exact interval. Like I was towing a can on a string. It was unnerving, more than if he’d ridden up on me. The message was: I’m in complete control, you can’t shake me. If I can mark this distance with such precision on a twisty back road, I can take you any time I want. And he could. I knew he could. It was a muscle car and on one of these stretches where there were no houses, no farms—and there were plenty of these deserted reaches—he could close the gap in a heartbeat and pull up beside me and blast me with probably the shotgun I wish I had myself.

I gunned it, then slowed, then gunned it. He was right there. Out of every curve. My pulse sped up like the truck, I could feel it pounding in my temples. He seemed to be saying: We aren’t fucking around anymore. Your time, Pops, is up.

If he came up on me and didn’t kill me with the first blast, he could easily make me wreck, then walk up as casual as you please and execute me like a wounded elk. I passed a goat farm down in the creek bottom off to my right, a tight left bend then a short climb and my spirit yearned toward it: like, I wish I were you. Just tending my goats and making dinner with my family and having trouble paying my bills. I wish I were you and not me in this truck right now with that black thing blessedly out of sight for half a minute. The mundane quandaries I yearned for right then. Any predicament but this. Jason’s strategy was bell clear. I could feel the panic rising as I tried to control my speed. There was no point in accelerating. I thought: I could pull into that goat farm, or the next house, I could run for the door.

But he could catch me easily in the yard before I got to the stoop. Even if I made it, then what? Endanger a whole family? Call the cops, Wheezy? Jason would melt away, plug me in the dark when the circus was over. Fuck. I could try to straddle the center line so that he couldn’t pass me. Wouldn’t work. There was too much shoulder on both sides, gravel sure, but he was too good a driver, and anyway he was good enough he could shoot out my rear tires and send me into the ditch any time he wanted.

I felt for a packet of Backwoods and with one hand gripping the wheel—I realized I was clenching it hard and forced myself to relax a little—with my free hand I dug in the console for a packet of cheroots, and unwrapped it clumsily and brought it trembling to my lips and pushed in the lighter knob on the dash. Was I trembling or was it the rush of wind, the frost heaves in the road?

I was scared. Something was definitely different. In all my encounters with the trucker there had been a sense of possible reprieve. That word. I kept saying it, like my whole life now was a search for the nectar of it. That a life could come down to that, it seemed pathetic. Grant me, grant me, oh Lord, relief. From all my fuckups.

Before, between us it had been: confront, measure and maneuver. What was different now was the feel of the pursuit. It was not a game, it was deadly serious now. I knew. You know this stuff. As many bar fights as I had been in, as many brawls, you know when it’s more about roughhouse, about breaking furniture and knockdowns and bruise and blood and welt—and you know when it turns, when it becomes deadly and serious and cold, when the bottles begin to break on the table edges and the knives come out. I knew. As clear as I knew Jason could close the gap in four seconds. He was going to kill me.