Peter Heller - The Painter

I drove up into juniper then aspen with a growing sense of relief. I was climbing a ridge and the track contoured along it so that through the trees to my right I could see now and then the valley below and the darkly wooded piñon hills that fell into it, and the sky darkened and the wind picked up and tore leaves out of the trees that blew across the track. The track got narrower and rougher. Good. Be hard to follow up here, to drive up it at all in the El Camino.

Up ahead, up behind the highest ridge, lightning flashed like distant cannon fire. It flashed through the heavy clouds in silent pulses, muted and buffered by distance, and sometimes sustained like the rolling cannonades of a battle in another province. It was not quite full dusk yet and no longer day, not with the black thunderheads and the soundless vespers of the thunder. Another limbo time. Good. This one felt good. A space to let my panic drain away, an interval that asked for no decision, good or bad, just asked me to drive up a road I had never taken and somehow find my way back to town.

And then two things happened. The road topped out in a smooth track through aspen, thickly ferned at the edges and uncobbled with the rocks of the climb, beautiful, some kind of haven fragrant with ferns and fallen leaves and the charged and humid wind. I released a long breath, felt a gladness surge.

And I glanced in my side mirror and saw headlights swinging through the trees then square up on the track and flood my rearview. Fuck. And the track ahead dropped steeply away. I could see through the pale trunks and limbs of the trees that it was dropping into a cut-rock canyon below, probably the upper reaches of the same creek as in the picnic area, no it wasn’t the headwaters at all, I could see now in the murky light that the cut of the canyon continued on through steep hills into who knew what distances now shuddering with lightning.

It felt like death. Like nowhere to go but there. Between the hard beams of the headlights behind and the vague flashes of the storm ahead. I almost cried. Almost seized and gave up. Almost offered my throat. Hard to describe the collapse: how the strength emptied from my limbs like water, how all conviction of anything worthy, any worthiness left on earth much less in my own life, how it didn’t surrender but simply absented itself, leaving only a chalk outline: this was your reason to live and now it is gone. He could kill me here, a perfect place, kill me any way he wanted to, and bury me in the scented ferns and run my truck off a ledge into the steep woods like some parody of my killing of Grant.

And then he did something shocking: he blared his horn. Leaned on it, then a double tap, then leaned on it again. Less like the trumpeting of a charging army than like Hey, motherfucker, Get a move on—I didn’t trash my shocks to climb all the way up here to have you just fold. Just cry Uncle. That’s what it seemed like to me.

Maybe it was just a head game, a triumphant shout of You are all mine now you piece of shit . Who knows. It woke me up. I stomped the gas and threw dirt behind me and revved off that little bench and the track fell away and the nose of the truck tipped and dropped hard and jounced into a rut and I tapped the brakes and slid just a second, and then I was diving steeply, bouncing down a hunter’s trail straight for the bottom of the canyon. Didn’t need the headlights, I could still see well enough. But with the windows open and the wind whipping through I heard the first rumble of thunder and then raindrops spatted against the windshield, big ones, heavy, singular, and they stopped. One opening salvo. I barreled downhill, holding to the track easily, it wasn’t too rocky, which was maybe not a good thing, because he could take it too without too much trouble, maybe not as fast. Right then no grander thought. Just Drive. All the adrenaline surging back through arms, chest, the strength too, no reason for any of it, but suddenly a boundless desire to get through this, to live.

For a minute I thought he’d had enough. Hoped. Didn’t see his lights, figured maybe he didn’t want to risk the climb back out of here. That rising euphoria. The black bird of false hope, not a phoenix, but one of those raven-vulture things squalling out of the trees. Fuck. Did I think he would come this far, him? And give up? And just as I thought it, his lights dropped, dropped into the rearview from above and burned the mirrors like a pursuing chopper, and we came out of the aspen as suddenly, into the sparse low trees of the junipers. The loss of high canopy opened up the sky and gave more light ahead and fine rain sprayed across the windshield and it was true dusk and I heard a clap now of thunder, loud and close. And just as suddenly I bounced hard and barreled down a sandy bank, past a beaten down turnaround on my right and a rough rock outcrop on my left and hit the creek. I splashed into it with a loud crash of spray that plumed over the windshield and washed into the window and doused my head.

Whoa. Water. I revved and slipped. Wha—? Fuck. Deeper than I thought. The tires spun on the bottom. I was about in the middle of the stream and I wasn’t moving. The water was over the floorboards, oh fuck, and it was muddy. In the half light I could see it was muddy and I looked left upstream and saw the current sliding around the wall, emerging from the little gorge in foamy sheets that carried sticks and limbs and bits of leaves.

Oh fuck. The intake manifolds were clear, barely, the engine would run until they swallowed water. But the creek was rising and if I didn’t break free of this now the motor would sputter and die, and just then I heard a slide and the blast of horn and the lights flooded the creek, me, and then cut. I craned around. The headlights cut off and so did his engine. I could hear it. Could hear it don’t know how, over the sliding of the surging current and my own motor. Heard his car door slam and craned further and saw his car at the very edge of the water, saw him standing on the sandy gravel of the track beneath the outcrop, then lean back against the black car. He wanted me to see him. See him leaning there arms folded while I drowned, that’s why he cut the lights, that’s what I understood. Fuck, I would move. I was moving. Oh, Jesus, I was slipping sideways. The pressure of the current. If I floated free the truck would tip and roll and the current was swollen and swifter than I could handle and I would probably drown. Oh fuck, fuck, not like this! That was the final blast of thought, loud as a car horn: I don’t want to die, not like this. Oh shit.

I pressed the gas and heard the tires spinning underwater, an unreal whining sound, and felt them grab and slip, and the truck was, it was sliding little by little downstream, and I craned around again to look back, for what? At him, desperate I guess, and saw the figure leaning, him thinking, Hah! Let God, let God take care of it, sonofabitch, and as I did there was a crack, a crack loud now of thunder right overhead, and on top of it a crash a loud fork of lightning zagging onto the ridge above us, behind it the boom. Then the sound no one ever ever forgets. Like a jet engine. More than roar, like the earth cracked open and howled without voice.

That roar. A gust of wind hit me, from straight upstream and I turned my head and saw a billow of torn leaves and dust erupt from the canyon and blow through the mist of rain. Maybe fifty yards above me. Or thirty. In that instant the image burned like a shadow on old film: the mouth of the little gorge filled with a wall of water. Or mud.

In the flash, seeing it all, not the lightning, maybe it was, or just the acuity of terror: it was clear in the dusk as if etched: a mudwall of water and in it as if frozen: a tree, yellow leaves, a sheep, the white sheet metal of an old stove. Why did I do the next thing? Never know. I leaned far out the window as if ducking my head into the flood and yelled. He was behind, beneath the outcrop—he couldn’t see it, he was a sitting duck. In five seconds the wall would bury him.