The Painter: A Novel (17 page)

“I want this to stop,” he said. “Now. I don’t want any more bodies.”

He turned his head and looked straight at me. His eyes were black and dark blue in the flashing lights and they were empty of kindness. “You fish the Forks today?”

I think I must’ve shaken my head to clear it.

“No?” he said.

I nodded.

“How was it?”

I stared at him.

“Good,” I said. “It was good. Pretty.”

“Windy though, huh? And hot. Catch anything?”

“Pretty big brown.”

“On what?”

Now I felt like I was in a dream, a weird dream.

“Bead head prince on the bottom. That’s what he hit. Had a royal coachman on top.”

The sheriff nodded, spat.

“Hit it on the swing did he?”

I must have been looking at him like he was speaking a foreign language. Hearing the words but trying hard to understand the meaning, the intent.

He pretended not to notice. He said, “I fished down there this morning early. Used a streamer just because I felt like it. Didn’t catch shit. Couple of little rainbows. I blamed it on the moon.” He smiled without mirth. “Always good to have a big fat moon to blame it on. You gonna do any creek fishing in the next few weeks?”

“Sure. If—”

“If you’re not in jail? We’re trying our hardest. Tell you the truth, the quality of witnesses isn’t what they used to be.” He glanced at Willy.

He spat a clean jet onto the gravel. “If you’re fishing the mountain creeks I’d get one of these.” He patted his neon orange cap. “Don’t want some asshole from Alabama thinking you’re a muley.”

I didn’t know what to say so I said, “Thanks.”

“I’m posting a deputy at your house tonight for your protection. Another will come tomorrow. And I’m taking the horse.”

Willy started as if someone had touched him with a lit match. “Mark—”

“Until we get this sorted out that horse is going into the witness protection program. She’ll be well cared for.”

“Marly’s—?”

“No not Marly’s for chrissakes. You know about Marly. So does Grant. Don’t concern yourself. Why don’t you go get her. Keep her back in the corral if you want. Just a few minutes. I just called Eckly, he’s on his way with a trailer.”

“She needs a vet’s attention. He clubbed her, nearly killed her.”

“She’ll get it, you have my word.”

“I don’t want a deputy,” I said.

“I can’t post one on your property without your permission.”

“Then don’t,” I said.

He studied me. “Okay.” He nodded to all three of us, lumbered back to his car. Leaned against it and began talking on a phone.

Willy called in his big gelding and hopped on him and hazed the other horses back into the corral. When Eckly arrived, Willy led the little roan slowly from the corral and she was unsure and trembling, and she shied when she neared the barn and there was a sudden hiss of steam. She was frightened by the sliding snake
of a hose getting rolled in, but she never balked as he led her. He walked her right up the ramp of the sheriff department trailer, talking to her low and gentle the whole time.

I lay on top of the quilt naked and I cried. For the horse. Who was being moved to another strange place, into the tenuous care of more strangers. For myself, who couldn’t seem to stop spreading trouble wherever I went. How the violence seemed to follow me, and it was wildly undiscerning and it hurt the things around me: horses, friends, neighbors. I cried. Jesus, Jim, Irmina was right, you need to get calm, make some peace around you, not mayhem. For everyone’s sake. How did you get like this?

The three quarter moon rose over the shoulder of the mountain. At some point I heard the diesel pumper trucks roar, the air brakes, the fading growl as they went back down the road. At some point I stopped feeling sorry for myself, for everyone. The horse was in much better hands than she was a few days ago. Willy’s barn burned, but not all of it, he hadn’t lost any animals, and he told me before I left not to lose any sleep over that—he was heavily insured. He said the tack room was getting way too small anyway and that he had insured the building for so damn much he was sure they would think he burned it down himself. I got up and went to one of the poetry shelves set into the wall at the end of the bed. I flicked on a light switch there that lit only the books. Picked out a thick volume of Derek Walcott’s collected poetry and scanned the titles.
The Schooner Flight
caught my eye.

It’s an old style sea tale. Reminded me of the
Ancient Mariner
and
Moby-Dick
and “The Secret Sharer,” all those poems and stories I’d read in school. It lulled me. I thought: Maybe that’s what I need to do, go back to the coast, go past it, get washed by salt fog. Or. I had no idea what I needed to do. I reminded myself that I never had.

The next morning I loaded the new paintings and my dovetail jointed paint boxes and my new fishing gear and drove to Santa Fe.

On my way through town I stopped in at Bob’s to fill up. He came out of the station slowly, snapping his jacket at the waist and hunching his shoulders like a man going out to do a chore he didn’t much like. He unspun the gas cap and hit the lever on the pump without asking me how much, and as he cleaned the windshield he didn’t look at me. I leaned out the window and opened my mouth to ask him how his cows were doing, then shut it. I’d never asked him that before. Fuck. I got it. He stopped at forty zero zero, no need for change, no extra conversation, and cradled the pump handle with the same remoteness. I held out two crumpled twenties. I felt nauseous. He took the bills, turned away. Stopped. He took a deep breath, turned back.

“Jim, if anyone deserved an early demise it was that sonofabitch. But you know, we can’t just go around killing each other. Just saying.

“Be good,” he said again, the way he does.

A partial reprieve. It was fifty miles of state highway before I could breathe normally again.

I have never painted in plein air. Never set up on some hillside, on some shore, in a big hat. But I did on the road south of Saguache. I made the right turn off the state highway onto a smaller paved road that went over a swell of grass hills and dropped down to a little creek limned with willows that ran off through open hills and pinewoods. The stream along the road ran dark and clear. It ruffled to white then smoothed almost black again. I slowed the truck, leaned out the window. I watched the creek, the purple stemmed willowbrush, the redwing blackbirds rising out of it, and I had two urges: to fish and to paint. Also, I wanted to shake off the scene with Bob.

As I studied the trout stream, the painting won out.

I turned a corner around a ruddy rock outcrop and saw the creek fan into a plain of willows, beaver dams, tannin dark pools. The pools stepped down the valley and cloud shadows tugged across them and the still water was touched with the quiet rings of feeding trout. In almost every one was a stick lodge. The beaver lodges were covered with a spotty packing of dirt, as if the animals had tossed shovelfuls of mud onto the roofs of their houses. How did they do that? Where did they carry it? I pulled over in a widening
of trammeled tire tracks. The bank looked over the braids and pools, the thick low brush. A worn trail cut down to the water. For the first time in maybe my life I didn’t take it. Kinda blinked at myself. Gee, Jim, are you growing up? Or old? Art over life?

I could paint, then fish. There was plenty of daylight and I was in no hurry. Nobody would bother me out here.

But just in case, I set up the easel, swung down and latched the narrow shelf for brushes and stuck the .41 magnum in a hole meant for a jar.

The sheriff hadn’t been taking any chances, either. When I pulled out of my driveway this morning there was the young flattopped deputy who had admired my nudes. He must have been there all night. His beefy face in the open window was blotched with lack of sleep. He waved, very friendly, I waved back, then he started up and followed me down the county road. He followed me through Hotchkiss, past the turnoff to the Pleasure Park, all the way through Delta. We passed the little airport and the salvage yard Black Jacks where I had stopped a month ago to get a side mirror and the proprietress had fed her big Rottweiler watermelon gum-balls. We passed the propane yard, and a mile after that he blasted his siren, one long two shorts, and I crossed the county line. The sign said,

I looked in the mirror and he was pulled over and his arm was out the window and he was waving. I waved back.

Now above the open creek I unwrapped the brushes from their rag, flipped open my folding knife and scored then broke off a
rough square of fiberboard. I pulled out a for sale sign and taped it white side up onto the board. I’d use a similar palette to
Ocean of Women
. A tremor of anxiety and I realized I was thinking about Sofia. She was safe, right? I dug my phone out of my khaki pocket, no reception of course. Grant Siminoe wasn’t going to go after an innocent woman, a bystander. Nah. Well. He did try to burn up a couple of horses. Panic like reflux rose in my throat. She said she was going to Crested Butte. She wouldn’t have thought of it, but the road to the old mining town went right by the Sulphur, the steep turnoff where the bow hunters had their camp. Well. She was going to go in the morning, they’d all be in the woods hunting. Right? Grant didn’t even know I had a girlfriend. Right?

I almost packed up everything right then, almost got back in the truck and turned around. Whoa. Cool off Jim. The sheriff would be all over Siminoe. If he was watching me he was sure as shit staking out the Sulphur road and keeping an eye on who was coming and going. He sure as shit didn’t want Grant burning down any more buildings. Or assaulting girlfriends. Is that what she was? Calm down. Breathe.

Hey, Pop?

Yeah?

Don’t get so excited about everything. That’s what always gets you in so much trouble. Just leaping all the time. Like a chicken. A rooster. Right?

Right.

Always striking at a bug, another rooster, chasing a hen. How do those little hearts handle all that all the time?

Hunh.

Try just sitting still for a sec. Want to?

Okay. You sound like Irmina.

I like Irmina. Okay, meditate
.

Sure.

Pop?

Yes, Alce.

You have three speeds, huh? Like that antique station wagon we used to have. With the shifter on the wheel? Remember?

Sure.

That’s you, right? Kinda: crawl, fast, stop. Right?

Right. Laugh.

Maybe you should stop now. For a sec. Paint the picture. Everything will work out
.

It will?

Sure
.

I stood by the empty easel looking over all those mirrored beaver ponds and thought, That is some advice coming from my girl. My girl who one morning didn’t have a chance. I stood and breathed and then I pulled the jars out of the jointed box and filled them
with turps and walked down the steep trail to water’s edge and splashed my face with tea colored water.