Peter Heller - The Painter

“Hey! Hey! What the fuck!” Running, limping, blind. I am blind. That part of me. Same as in the bar that day. Just a red blindness.

“Hey what the fuck!”

Too late. The man hauls back and swings again, this time against the architecture of the mare’s ribs. A thud and blow like the thud of a hollow drum. And crack. The horse, eyes rolling, white foam at mouth screaming, a madness, high, beyond whinny or snort, something human almost. I am on the man. I topple him and he is under me and we roll into the ditch. There is water in the ditch. Cold and it shocks. He is beside me flailing his arms trying to get back and I am hitting him, I feel something give, the pulp of his nose and he is pushing up and back scrambling.

“Hey what the—” He is scrambling back fast then standing above me on the road blinking, his nose trickling blood. Trying to digest. The meteor, the surprise of it. A stranger. “What the fuck was that ?” His back to the mare who is still standing, I can see beyond the lip of the ditch, standing and shaking like in convulsions. The big man is looking down at me, holding the club. He must have picked it up. The little man has run up and he is staring too, they are looking down at me, as at some animal they never in this world have seen.

“Buddy,” says the big man. “What the hell was that?”

I stand slowly in the ditch water. Try my left leg, don’t know if I can weight it. Pick up my paint-spattered cap. It’s soaked. They are staring.

I look at him. His face meaty like a ham. He does not look particularly perturbed which makes him a dangerous man. Unconsciously he dabs his nose with the sleeve of his forearm. He’s done it before. I’d rather not talk. I’d rather tear his arms loose from his heavy shoulders like the wings of a cooked duck.

“You were going to kill that horse,” I say finally.

“Well. Maybe. My horse not yours. Headed for the glue factory anyway, that one.”

I stand there. Watching them, not the horse. The two men watching me. I cannot put a name to the hatred. The small one looks back to the trailer.

“Dell? What are we gonna do with her? She won’t load.”

“Cut her loose. She can starve if that’s what she wants. Let the coyotes eat her I don’t give a shit. I’m done.” Looks back to me. “Mister I suggest you mind your own goddamn business. Now and evermore.” They turn, walk away.

The big man called Dell stops in the road as if he just remembered something, turns back. Walks to the edge of the ditch, looks down on me. His eyes are small and colorless, without pity, flat with contempt. He gauges the distance. Then he snorts, a loud hawk, and spits. A heavy dark jet. I flinch back, too late, the phlegm hits the side of my neck, hot, a stink of tobacco. The trickle into my collar. Then he shows me his back.

I hear the horse whimper as they approach, like a child’s mew. I hear the metal door of the trailer clang shut, the slide of the bar. Two doors slam, the truck revs, the grind of first gear, the rattle as truck and trailer go on up the road.

I clamber slowly out of the ditch, hitch myself onto the gravel. The little mare is where they left her, standing, in shock, quivering. I wipe my neck with my sleeve—gobbet of snot, trickling tobacco spit, blood. Well.

The mare mews when I approach her. Doesn’t move just shakes. She’s cut, slashed across the back, a wonder he didn’t break her spine, and she’s cut deep, welted over ribs on her left side where the skirt of a saddle might lie. I speak just above a whisper, soft as I can and come slowly. She’s frozen in a paralysis of terror. When I touch her shoulder the quiver and tremor spread outward from the sweatsoaked hide, spread up and back like something seismic. She flinches away from my hand but doesn’t step. As if her hooves, small hooves, shiny and black, newly shod, are glued to the dirt. The lead rope hanging from her halter.

I almost cannot contain—the rage and the tenderness together like a boiling weather front. I stand beside her and breathe. The two of us just stand there.

What I did was gentle her over to a tree by the pullout and tie her there and drive back out to the highway where I got two bars on the stupid phone. Called my neighbor Willy. He’s an elk rancher just east of me. Friendly but not intrusive, neighborly. Bachelor at the moment like me, maybe ten years younger. Told me when I first moved in: If I ever needed anything. Repeats it every time I see him. So I called the number I’d managed to store in my phone and he told me to wait and forty minutes later he pulled up in his own diesel pickup, his own blue six horse trailer, and when he swung down and saw the state she was in he went back to the truck and loaded a feed bag with oats and spoke to her gently like a person who has been aggrieved and injured, and got the bag over her ears and we leaned against my truck and let her eat and calm down.

Willy was in no hurry and neither was I. Now that my chance at fishing was shot for the day. He didn’t seem like the other ranchers I’d met around here. He wore a twisted copper bracelet on his left wrist and he gave off the kind of intelligence of someone who might have read a shitpile of books but would never talk about it. We were in the cool shade of the spruce, smelling the breeze stirring downstream, and he told me he’d grown up in New Hampshire. He took off his raggedy straw cowboy hat and ran a scarred hand through his thinning hair.

“When I first came out here I must’ve stuck out like a finger on a foot,” he said. “But I had good neighbors.”

“New Hampshire? Never knew anybody from there.”

“You can’t move to New Hampshire,” he said, “but you sure as shit can move out of it. First frigging chance you get. You can move there, but. My folks did. From Germany. Don’t ask me.”

He coughed, spat.

“State has a Berlin and a Hanover, maybe enough for them. You know what the closest neighbor gal told my mother when she saw her swelling with her first baby bump? You can have kittens in the oven but that don’t make ’em biscuits . Jeesh.”

Willy said he went to Harvard for a semester, in engineering, he liked to build things, dropped out. Came west and built houses, then cabinets, bought a small farm here and supported it by building kitchens for rich people in Aspen.

“Custom stuff,” he said. “How I got to doing that was I always loved horses. Wanted to be a cowboy all my life. Grew up in Sandwich, New Hampshire, reading those Louis L’Amour books. You know them? About the Sacketts and all? And I loved boats. Went out with some of my buddies and their families in the summer. I liked small sailing boats. How they were built, how everything fit together tight like a puzzle, a place for everything.”

He laughed. Took a can of Red Seal chew out of his vest pocket and pinched a sizable dip, tucked it up under his upper lip, held it to me.

“Thanks.” I waved it away.

“That was gonna make life difficult, huh? Horses, mountains, cowboys and yachts. Never did make anything easy for myself I’ve come to find out.”

He spat on the road, glanced to the mare who was finally eating. It was nice to stand there in the deep afternoon shade, lean against a truck, let things settle. I could hear the creek below and a deerfly buzzed around us. I didn’t mind.

“I was a good woodworker,” he said. “Like my father, and I started out retrofitting big horse trailers, turning the forward end into living quarters, all finished wood, just like the cabin of a boat. Cherry, teak, walnut. Rich people were impressed. Figured I was house broke, I guess. Invited me in for a beer. Started asking could I make their kitchens like the inside of a yacht, too. There’s a dozen breakfast nooks over on the Roaring Fork with chart tables and dedicated weather radios I shit you not. So you can pretend you’re drinking coffee on your sloop. You couldn’t make up the shit I’ve seen.”