Peter Heller - The Painter

Every good and stupid thing I’d done in my life came down in the end to this.

I went through a tight left curve and topped a little rise and came down into a barren stretch of sparse sage and mesquite and the black thing swung across the rearview, slipped square into the center of the mirror exactly as if I were pulling a water-skier on a towrope. I wish. I am towing my own death behind me. That’s what I thought. I have been hauling it behind me ever since the night I went fishing up the Sulphur, pulling it like a carcass.

And then there was the other impulse, the one I always have: just to get it over. Pull over out here in a deserted stretch and get out and face the music, or whip the truck one-eighty at one of these wider pullouts and come back to him, straight at him and aim for a head-on and let the chips fall.

That wasn’t such a bad idea. I had lost him on the last tight curve and was emerging again into a wide treeless valley. I could. He could round that bend with the cold calculating precision of a Formula 1 driver and gape at nothing but my lights and radiator grille barreling at him like a meteor. I wanted that. To do it just to break his icy composure, the one that was more and more apparent after the false reprieve of every curve, that was chilling my guts from an eighth of a mile back.

There was another way. I had done it once to a state trooper who flagged me on a high pass up in the Green River country. The cop had passed me going the other way and hit his lights, which meant pull over, I’m going to spin around and come give you a speeding ticket, and instead I goosed it, it was a twisty pass, and I took the second ranch road, a rocky track that cut up into some outcrop bluffs, and I rattled and bounced onto another track and shut the motor and took a nap until nightfall. The road had been damp from recent rain and it probably saved me, because I didn’t raise any dust. Back then I couldn’t afford the ticket. Had he been less lazy he might have called for backup, and they might have figured I might have a warrant and searched for me, but he was probably at the end of his shift and heading home, and I drove out that night and down to I-70, down to the big wide Utah desert, humming and thinking of dumb ways to spend the money I’d just saved myself. Simpler times.

But I knew this road. This one. I didn’t know every track coming off it, where they went, but at least I knew where they met the Tesuque road. Not like I could sit down and draw a map of them, but I’d driven this stretch so many times, my whole life it seemed, and I could confidently say: There will be a gravel road coming up on the left after this bend. Or: a dirt track after this grove of cottonwoods on the right. Could just feel it coming.

I did. Feel it like a gift. And not dirt. A dirt or gravel turnoff would raise a cloud of dust and signal my entry like a semaphore.

Up ahead I, we, would enter two switchbacks back into the river bottom, with tall cottonwoods and old willows on either side, and just after, there was a county road off to the left. It was perfect because there was one more broad right-hand bend beyond it, just before the road opened out and climbed onto the last mesa before Santa Fe. And it was paved. For the first half mile or so. I knew, because I’d taken it once, looking for a new place to picnic with Cristine that wasn’t crowded with tourists. We’d only gone up it maybe a hundred yards, and found a grove of poplars beside the creek, with benches someone had cut crudely out of logs, and we’d stopped happily and had our meal and made love on a blanket further back in the trees beside the stream. Perfect. If I jammed it I could make the left, and get into the trees while he was still coming out of the last turn. And the empty road ahead wouldn’t bother him, because I would be, he would think, just out of sight on the final arc of the wide bend. Good. And even better, there were two more side roads, just after this on the right, in a space of about half a mile. Two decoys. I took a deep long shuddering breath and made myself wait until I had entered the first twist of the switchback, had lost the black chimera in my mirror, and stomped the gas.

The truck shook and roared. Took the next two turns way too fast. It was too top-heavy, not built for this. The seat belt straps held me against a centrifugal force that tugged and leaned me into the passenger seat, the whole rig trying to hold the pavement and make the leftward trajectory, the tires squealed, then a sound like the shriek of a shot stoat and the rear right tire went off the shoulder and hit soft dirt and gravel sprayed into the undercarriage with a loud rush and we lurched and I thought it was over, he would have his wreck, and then the caroming rig pulled us back into the road, all four tires, and I threw the wheel right for the next turn. We were going downhill. We were accelerating now. Fast glance at the speedometer, it was needling past seventy-five, way way too fast for these curves, Jesus, and I just held the wheel over. I tapped the brakes once and felt the rear tires break free— No! —and then hold as I jammed the gas pedal to carry the turn, my left shoulder pressed into the door and frame, fuck, we would never make it, not this right swing. Again the squeal. A weightless sickening lift—abrupt silence as all four tires broke contact. Here we go, oh Lord. Here the fuck—full slide, sailing for the trees on the left. Not sure. I must’ve eased on the gas, pressed harder, and something in the chemistry of rubber and tarmac: the wheels, first the rear, gathering again under the truck as in the leap of a predator, all haunches, the rear grabbed and propelled us to the shoulder and then the front grabbed and the steering kicked in and we were thrown to the right and I felt both left tires spin and grind in the dirt just off pavement and launch us into the middle of the road, in time for the next left.

I let off, let off completely of the gas and found my seat and coasted through the next two corners and shot out of the switchbacks at close to seventy with both hands tight on the wheel and the cheroot miraculously still in my mouth and lit. Somewhere in there, just before the turns, I had lit it, couldn’t even remember. I thought, Okay, man, you have the distance. You earned the time. Now jam it. I did. Just ahead on the left was my road, the turnoff, and I flew toward it like an arrow and took it in a full slide, I was fucking getting used to this, and careened up it and hit the roof hard, top of the head, as I took the bumps into the makeshift campsite and stuck the gap in the poplars where we had parked once before, stuck it like a cork in a bottle and slid to a stop and turned off the engine. And breathed. Okay wait. I thought I would hear him. Wait till he passes, give him twenty thirty seconds so he is well past, then back fast out onto the country road, probably Forest Service access, whatever, wait because it turns to dirt just ahead, don’t let him see the plume, and then go up it. Go up it fast but not screaming, and get lost in the hills while he looks for you on the highway ahead and on the other side roads first. Because he is methodical. He will eliminate first one then the other and you will be long gone, forked off onto whatever myriad tracks up ahead.

I didn’t hear him. Maybe it was the blood pounding in my ears. I didn’t hear anything. But I figured a minute had passed, plenty long enough, too long, and then I started the truck and backed out and continued on up, jounced over the line where the road turned to dirt, washboarded as it climbed, and took it with a mission but not too fast, not enough to raise a huge plume. Also, the sky was darkening with more than evening, the clouds were thick and black and a wind had kicked up, and it thankfully carried my dust ahead of me to the north. I drove.