Peter Heller - The Painter

A shadow crossed her eyes, but she summoned a smile and said, “Sounds good.” She held up both oven mitts like boxing gloves and said, “Wanna box? I am having the feeling you need the bullshit knocked out of you again.”

She stood there, her curly hair exuberant, flying in every direction, her gloves up, and I laughed. Whew. Sofia knew. She was patient. She would, if I let her, probably knock the bullshit down the road.

“See ya,” I said.

“Byyyyyye.”

The best time of year, period. Anywhere. Mid-October on the Sulphur may be the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. The creek was low, showing its bones, the fallen spruce propped high on the rocks like a wreck, the little rapids now shallow, the pools cold again and slate blue. The wooded canyon had gone to deep shadow but the pink rimrock high up was brilliant with long evening light and the sky was that hard enamel blue. When a gust blew downstream the willows along the gravel bars loosed their pale yellow leaves to the stones and the water. I listened. Hard to hear above the rushing current, but almost every evening I’d heard a crash and seen a yearling bear scrambling up the bank away from me, and I often heard the knock of elk, antlers against a tree, and smelled them nearby, and by nightfall it would be freezing and I would have to quit because my cold fingers could no longer tie on a fly.

I was standing in what I’d named Cutbow Channel, knee deep below a long run of swift water. The rocks in the bed were every color of green and rust and slate. I breathed. The scents of the spruce and the fir stirred downstream, and the smells of water and cold stones.

Above the channel was a corner where a few boulders had made a swift drop and a massive fir tree had fallen across them like a gateway. To get beyond it you had to clamber over rocks and the trunk of the tree, and when you did, the creek opened up: it widened and slowed and spread between wide gravel bars. Nobody ever fished this far in, and it felt remote, out of time, and I called it Heaven. I stopped knee deep at the long riffle beneath it and dug out a vanilla cheroot from the pouch in the vest, and lit it and watched the smoke trail easily downstream.

The current lapped and gabbled here, raising its voice and pressing my legs. I cradled the rod in the crook of my left arm and unhooked a bead head prince off a foam patch on my vest. Fingers already cold. I’d switch out the copper John I was using as a dropper along the bottom. I could feel my pulse quicken. It was a perfect evening, no moon, and a perfect fly, they would not be able to resist the flash of the white wings. Could almost feel the tug of a hit, imagine it, even as I was threading the eye and twisting the tippet and pulling it tight with my teeth.

“Ow—fuck!”

Hard pressed under my jaw the cold prod. Steel. I knew without thought that it was a gun.

“Prince nymph, good choice. What I’d use, probably.”

I couldn’t see him. He was behind me with the handgun held out and up against my throat. His voice was graveled, as if he hadn’t spoken in a while.

“Can’t lose tonight. Nobody feeding up top, all gathered up in the deeper pools, idling, just waiting for that thing to tumble by.”

His voice in the back of my ear. Could smell the chew on his breath, not a bad smell, Copenhagen. Couldn’t look though, couldn’t turn my head, because there was the cold muzzle hard against the bone. The quickening of my heart.

“Hi, Jason.”

A long silence while the snout of the handgun held pressure against my head.

“Isn’t that civil?” he said at last. “Dunno. I’m thinking maybe you should say thanks.”

“For what?”

Slight push of the gun. So that I bent my neck, head away.

“For not blowing up your shit right in the middle of the party, your hour of glory. Or after, while your girlfriend slept in the truck and you fished all night like you were on some fucking vacation.”

The hot smell of the words as much as sound.

“I brought you something.”

The pressure relieved a little. I couldn’t see him but I sensed him switching hands. And then his right hand came to my side. I looked down. It held the rucksack.

“This yours?”

“Yes.”

It swung back out of sight behind me, and I heard it hit the stones of the bank.

“Pretty fucking dumb. Right? They’d a found it, you’d be in County waiting trial. Man.” I heard him blow out his breath. “It was never about the law. I told you we take care of our own business.”

Then the gun was hard against my temple and his left hand slid under my cap, knocked it into the water, and he grabbed a fistful of my hair. He was forcing me to look upstream. Beyond the fallen tree, sunlight cut down through a draw and lit the gravel bar. The light that would last minutes before the sun went over that piece of ridge. I thought, This is the last thing I will see in my life. I didn’t want to die. Right now I didn’t. I had wanted to die many times in my life before but now I didn’t.

“You know I hiked in from the Snowshoe,” he said. “No way anybody knows I’m in here. Nice hike. Places in there I bet nobody in history ever fished. You should’ve tried that sometime. Lotta blowdown though. No, I guess not. Not with your trick knee. It’s the left one ain’t it?”

His boot on the back of it, my left knee, the soft crook, his boot against it shoving slowly, harder, harder until it buckled and I went down on the knee in the creek and the current was against my chest and sweeping hard against the rod. I tried to keep the rod out of the water, but the current levered against it and I needed my right hand for balance. I crooked the rod tighter in my left arm but the current tore it away.

Ahhh! —both hands grabbed for it, reached, and I almost toppled, it was gone. The tip came out of the chop as it went. It was the Sage five weight, the one I had used forever.

“Whoops,” he said.

I watched the rod. Where it had been. My heart broke. What it felt like. It was the rod I had fished with Alce the years we had fished. The one that had been my solace after, the one Sport had taken for testing and given back. I might not have counted on a paintbrush or a bottle of bourbon to save me but I had counted on fishing. I was on both knees now against the current and the swift water was nearly up to the top of the waders above my sternum. I had been so excited to fish I had forgotten to snug on a waist belt for safety, plus the creek now was so shallow, and if the water went in over the top of the waterproof overalls and filled up the legs in this current, that would be another way to die.

“That feels bad, huh? I know what a rod like that can mean. Probably what you taught your little daughter to fish on, huh?

“Huh?” Push against the temple.

I wasn’t even angry. The hot anger I’d depended on in fights. I felt tears running on my cheeks.

“Kinda like a ship without a mast, ain’t it? Or a rudder. Maybe it’s a rudder.”

Push of the gun.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

“I don’t know anything.”

I didn’t. On my knees in the icy creek about to drown with my rod gone, and my daughter gone, and my father, and my mother, and the one patch of light on the gravel gone, and my tears falling in the cold current, I didn’t. Know shit. I didn’t know why they had left, all of them, why I was still here, why my fly rod had been pulled away and sunk. Why I had killed two men. Nothing left. I couldn’t fathom it. He reached around and yanked the cheroot out of my teeth—I didn’t know I was still smoking it—and he flicked it into the current.