Peter Heller - The Painter

“Better not smoke while you listen. I’m going to tell you a story. Don’t worry it’s short. Those waders must be getting pretty leaky and cold by now. My experience, those lightweight summer deals don’t stand up too good to that kind of pressure. Those ones I used the other day? Simms. A little hot on a warm day but they don’t leak.”

He spat out his chew. The black gob hit the water beside me.

“You should use a waist belt. A guy could drown out here by himself.”

Shove against my temple.

“I think I better have a smoke. Chew is good, but smoking is more social.”

He kept the gun to my head and I could tell he was retrieving the pack from a breast pocket with one hand and shaking out a smoke and I heard the snick of an old Zippo as he lit up. I could feel trickles of cold water seeping in at the waist, the legs.

“Whew. Good. Better.”

His smoke trailed downstream. It smelled good, it smelled like life.

“You know Dell and Grant had a sister. Did you know that?”

Shook my head. His words were another sound with the rush of the current and my own thoughts. They went by my head like his smoke, then I saw them re-form. They had a sister.

“Gwen. Funny name. Gwendolina. Like something out of King Arthur, isn’t it? Well, she was parceled out to foster care just like them, but she was older, and she didn’t know them like they knew each other coming up. So when they each ran away from where they were caged, well. She must not have known where to go, or how to stay in touch. And they didn’t know where her foster family was neither—”

Long outbreath of smoke—

“Cruel, huh? Like slavery. But on one of those runaways, well, she had me. I mean got knocked up. It was a religious family where she was at, down in Montrose, and so they beat her bad and let her go to term and then guess who popped out, and guess who went up for adoption and nobody took? Little old Jason. Poor little old guy. Well—” Draw on the smoke, could hear it, hear him blow it out, my aching knees numb now, the gun right there, hard and still—

“Well she died. They had to tell the boys, because after all she was their older sister. How did she die? they wanted to know. Under mysterious circumstances. In a group home of about eight kids in Montrose, she was just about to turn seventeen. Under mysterious circumstances. I guess she was really pretty. Pretty and smart and drug addicted off and on, things she shot up. Well. To Grant and Dell, that was the last straw. That wasn’t happening to them. They were in different homes but they had their ways of getting in touch and they broke out and stayed out until they were the age of majority or whatever the shit they call it, till they were legally adults. And you know what?”

I didn’t. I mean I couldn’t get my thoughts in line. I could hear the water and my own thrumming pulse and his words but. I couldn’t, I didn’t know anything. Shove of the gun against my temple. “You know what?”

“No,” I said.

“They didn’t forget me. It took them four years, but they kept at it, kept at it the way they stayed on the blood trail of a shot elk. They worked every angle and they sprung me. I was eleven. They were what, just kids themselves, twenty-two and twenty-three. Brought me over to Delta for middle and high school, had me legally adopted, taught me to ride and fish and hunt. They didn’t forget did they?”

Shove.

“Didn’t let me go.”

Shove. My tears running, hitting the current, I watched them hit right there below my face.

“And you know before they got to me it was pretty rough.” His voice rising now.

“It was pretty fucking rough in that place I was in, in fact there was some shit going on in there I don’t know if I would have survived. God’s truth.”

Shove, harder.

“And they sprung me. And they brought me into a real home, a family. A fucked up home at times. A hard drinking, hard fighting fucked up home, and maybe when they got going they didn’t treat their stock so good, I didn’t agree with that and I was working on that, I was, but it was a fucking home. And some of the other shit, maybe some of the other shit with the hunting outside the law, that wasn’t me either, and I told them: That’s not me. I’ll bring you hay, I’ll help you load up, maybe set up camp but that’s as far as it goes, I’ve got other fish to fry and it’s not me and they could respect it. See, there was respect.”

Hard shove.

“Now there ain’t shit. Is there? Because of you.”

The gun was gone. Sudden relief of pressure, absence, only then feel the ache, how hard it had been. Nothing. The current. Burble. I straightened my back from where I was bent over the water and turned my head, neck stiff, looked up.

He wasn’t wearing the shades. He was standing calf deep in the water in his jeans. No cap. The cigarette was in the corner of his mouth burnt down almost to the filter, the downstream breeze taking the smoke away. His blue eyes looked down on me, tears running out of the corners.

“I ain’t gonna cry in front of you. Give you the satisfaction. I ain’t.”

He wiped his face with the back of his sleeve, shook his head. The gun was still up.

“All this time trailing you I thought about what I wanted to do to you. Killing you would have been easy. I could’ve done it five, six times, clean. Easy. Grant got too excited I guess. He was always a little like that, a little too much of a hothead. Then what? I kill you and you go dark. You don’t even know. Or I give you a few minutes to repent and beg and shit your pants and then I kill you, like in the movies. Like now. Well. You’re not begging and you haven’t shit your pants as far as I can tell. Good for you.”

He snagged the pack out of his shirt pocket, shook out another cigarette, dug into his jeans and thumbed open the Zippo, lit up. Let out a long stream of smoke.

“Then I thought, Well, I can string you up by the feet like an elk and maybe even skin you alive. That’d be sort of fun. And with each strip I slipped off I could ask How was it—selling all these paintings and making shitpiles of money off my uncles’ killings. Pretty fucked up, ain’t it? That the world works like that. I even thought about cutting off your hands. It’d make painting and fishing pretty tough. You could still fuck, though. So I could cut off your dick, too. I could. Easy as gutting a trout.”

He stared down at me. The gun was aimed at my face.

“That’s not really me, though. I never pulled the wings off a fly or tortured a cat, nothing like that. I think it would give me nightmares. Even you. Screaming like that and all the blood. Fact is, I realized that any of that would hurt me more. That’s what came to me as I was driving around stalking you like prey. Call it a Jesus moment. You’d be dead and I’d be driving down the road the rest of my life wondering if Tweedledum and Tweedledee would ever have enough to put me in a cage. And wondering why all the things I did to you didn’t bring my uncles back and why I still didn’t have people to call at Christmas, and why there was still that big hole where a family should have been, and why maybe I felt worse about everything.”

Suck on the cigarette, exhale, toss it in the creek.

“It’s a quandary, ain’t it?”

He raised the gun and pulled the trigger.

I flinched, jumped. Water erupted a foot to my right. The crack reverberated in the canyon like five guns going off at once. Fuck . Echo. Echo. The gun there where he had fired it, straight armed. The whole canyon awake now, altered, like a top that wobbles and regains balance.

“Still works.”

He was staring at me and his eyes had gone hard again and they were lit with violence.