Peter Heller - The Painter

What I’d noticed was that here, in the windshadow of the mountain, it often smelled like rain. It might be raining up on the ridge, I might see the veils and rags of rain hanging down out of the scudding clouds, I might see shrouds of rain hauled over the country the way a fishing boat might drag a net, but—no rain here. A spatter, maybe, then nothing. Willy told me when I first moved in that it was like living in a strip bar. So close, looks so good and you never get laid.

Virga. That’s what it was called. Alce told me that once. Came home from school one day and told me. Rain that falls and never hits the ground.

“C’mon I’ll show you,” she said.

I told her we might as well go fishing while we were at it. It was the first afternoon she ever caught a fish, I don’t know how old she was. Little. She was small for her age. She pointed up at the veils over the west rim, the water in the pool smooth, without a drop.

“Virga!”

I gave her a thumbs-up and threw a caddis for her and let it drift and gave her the rod and as soon as she touched it the trout hit and almost pulled it out of her small hands. Oh God! Oh God , I yelled. Way to go! Keep the tip up! Like that! Yeah! She was holding the rod straight up with all her strength and it was all she could do and she was in hysterics, laughing, as much from shock as anything. Her hair was blowing across her face and the jerking rod was shaking the counterweight of her body and the fish was whizzing out the line. I wanted her to catch it herself, I was almost as panicked as she was, I had an idea. Run backwards! I yelled. Try and hold around the line, yeah like that, slow it down, go! Run up the bank! I was awed that she could even shift her grip. She ran. Half backwards, half sideways, trying to hold the rod high like a broadsword. Ran up into the dried stalks of mullein the willows and the fish came with her up onto the rocks and was flopping, thwacking the stones, a big brown, God, big. She dropped the rod and ran like a puma down over the stones and pounced. Both hands. The trout got away from her and she chased it, bent double, trying to wrangle it, landing on it again with both hands, it squirted out like a watermelon seed, slipped over the rocks, she was after it, I was laughing. Yelling and laughing. She got to it and grasped it and then fell on it, covering it with her whole body like a punt returner covering the ball, screaming with glee, laughing and crying too. I reached under her, and I picked up the heavy fish and thwacked it on a rock and it was finally still and the colors dulled the way they do and then she burst into tears. Her print dress stained with fish slime and algae and blood. She was inconsolable. Not for her clothes, for the fish. All the way home I held her in one arm as I drove and told her about the spirit of the trout, how he was probably swimming now among the stars and would be happy to feed her and her mother and father tonight and how proud I was of her, and I was surprised when a few days later she wanted to go out with me again, and that’s when I bought her a seven-and-a-half-foot four weight and began to teach her to cast.

After she died I moved from Taos to Pilar, closer to the Rio Grande. Cristine wasn’t coming. She had her own history there and she was no way going back. She had a bodywork business going, massage and pressure point, a good trade among rich steady clients who appreciated her strong capable technique and her no bullshit attitude. One Silicon Valley transplant tried to paw her breasts once and she told him politely that was not part of the service so he tried again and she squeezed his balls so hard through the towel he screamed. She was laughing when she told me. If I could get Cristine laughing I was probably good for at least twenty-four hours.

Anyway by then it was just the two of us and we needed a lot of space, from each other.

Back then I went fishing. Every day. Alce was suddenly gone and I didn’t know what else to do. I fished the dawn and I fished the evening. Down in the canyon of the Lower Box. Down under the rushing drop where Pueblo Creek comes in. Down in the yellowing leaves of the cottonwoods, the box elders. Yellowing then falling leaves. Then the nights when my fingers got numb, and toes. The October cold numbing more than my hands. I cast way across the river and let the fly tumble down the edges of the far pools, pulling line off the clicking reel as fast as I could. So much line out, so much current it’s heavy against the rod, my arm, stop the line, let the fly swing across the current to the middle of the river. And—Bang! They hit.

They were twenty, thirty yards downstream and mad and full of autumn vigor, sleek and fat with summer bugs, with crawdads, frogs, with colder water, and then I had to fight them against the current all the way back up, thigh deep in the dark water, sucking on the stub of cigar, not sure if it’s even lit, three stars, sweet smell of fallen leaves, raising the rod tip against all the weight trying to feel the limit, the limit of the tippet and the knots, the breaking point, then dropping the rod fast and stripping in the sudden slack, foot by foot, and the trout, if he was big, suddenly deciding too that that’s enough and putting on the jets, get the hell away from here and running zing , every foot I’d just fought for gone in a flash in the willed charge of a fast-tiring trout. Running with my line. The song of the reel. I loved this.

I would be moving in the cold of the settling evening, the few stars in the chasm overhead, the only way I could still myself at all: move.

The only time I could forget myself, forget Alce. Lost to anything but fighting the fish. And if I got him in finally and he had fought and fought and if he was beautiful which he always was I reached down and cradled him in the current with one hand and with one twist of the other slipped the hook out of his lip and cradled him some more. Cradled and watched him idling there, tail slowly finning while he caught his breath and strength. Like me, I thought. Idling, barely able to breathe. And then a wriggle and slip against my palm and he was gone, lost among the green shadows of the stones and I said Thanks. Thanks for letting me live another evening.

I drank sometimes. I had quit maybe two years, pretty much, off and on, but sometimes I went to the Boxcar and sat at the bar, sometimes the same stool where I had turned and shot Lauder Simms, maybe wishing the bastard was there again, insinuating the unspeakable things he wanted to do to my daughter. Wishing that I could shoot him again and relive a year in Santa Fe State, so Alce would still be here. I drank, drank steady like it was a job and Johnny nodded to Nacho and Nacho drove me home. More than once he carried me inside and laid me down on the couch and I remember him whispering Dios, Jim, He is looking over you, you don’t need to join your daughter, not yet compa . This from a cousin of Cristine’s who had spent more time inside Santa Fe than he had out, who ran the cell block when he was there and saved my life just by being incarcerated same time as me. God is looking over you. I remember it like it was whispered by an angel. And it didn’t feel like that, not one bit. Like anything else was looking over me, like some kind of bad weather.

That engine. Grief is an engine. Feels like that. It does not fade, what they say, with time. Sometimes it accelerates. I was accelerating. I could feel it, the g-force pressing my chest. I wrecked my truck. Definitely a one car accident, nobody else to blame. Me and a rock. But somehow I was up to date on the insurance—because I had paid it all in a lump sum that spring, sometimes I did that after I sold a painting—didn’t even know if I had insurance but I did, and the adjuster knew my work, had seen it in an airline magazine, a story about the art scene in Taos, and it turned out he had lost a son at four to a heart defect and he rigged it so the truck was covered, total loss, and I got a new one, and I knew that I would wreck that too, knew it like I knew winter would come and I didn’t care, and I drank and then one morning the door shoved open and in walked Irmina carrying an overnight bag and a string of habaneras and an unplucked chicken carcass I shit you not and it was the only time since I’d left her house that we ever stayed together more than a few days.