The Painter: A Novel

  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.

  I had put five small canvases in the back of the truck with the new paintings. The unused canvases were wrapped and tied in an old piece of rubber tarp. I pulled out a twenty-thirty and set it on the easel and began. I painted what I saw. The braided stream threading the green and red willows like a little delta, the blackbirds flying. Three black birds of life. Not the deathly watchers. Could hear them as I painted, the peculiar exuberant buzzing call like an electric cable. I painted the Cooper’s hawk that circled high, the clouds above him on their own compelled heading. I painted fish jumping out of the water though they weren’t really jumping they were sipping the surface but fuck it, let’s not be too literal, and I refrained from putting in a chicken or any death anywhere. Funny, but it was very freeing just sticking to the landscape. You’d think it would be the opposite. A certain kind of pressure was lifted, one I realized now that I’d always felt in the limitless blank outer space of total freedom. Which is a vacuum of sorts and has its own imploding force.

  I thought it was ironic that now, with my assignment in front of me—paint the creek, the whole creek and nothing but the creek—now I felt released. My spirit flew. I painted like a child, without thought, one color to the next, one bush to one pool to the next to the birds to fish to a June bug about as big as a hummingbird who landed on my cap. Fun to paint like this. I mean it wasn’t much different than painting an ocean of women except that I had forbidden myself that kind of license and I hummed and sang and my imagination rested, not frightened at all of any sharks coming up from the deep or any malevolent birds.

  I was happy painting and suddenly envied my friends who built houses and cut down trees, the gypo loggers like Pop, the ones in Mora County who were Irmina’s friends, Bob at the station: fix the transmission, change the oil. Or build a foundation, cut down the tree and the one next to it. What Irmina had said: Jim you burn so hot. What felt good was to cool. To paint simply and to feel a cooling, the calmness of craft, of being a journeyman who focuses on the simple task: pin this one corner together and make it fit in an expanding universe.

  Not a single car passed in not sure how much time. A katydid pulsed out of the grass on the shoulder. The blackbirds buzzed and shrieked in happy territorial arguments. The sun climbed over the low ridge behind me and threw my shadow down to water’s edge. After a while the beaver in the closest pond emerged and cut a faint wake across the still water. Came back. Some woodless errand. I could hear too the slow current pouring over the closest dam, sifting and burbling in the pool below. I painted. Painted the pace of it, the sounds as much as anything. The calm. It calmed me. That thing happened where I disappear. Except this time it was not into the poised energy of a woman, or into some watery interior landscape, but into instead the quiet creek in front of me, into the raucous commerce of corvids, the inscrutable transit of a beaver, the slow breathing of the morning. It was different and soothing and freeing and I didn’t even know that I’d disappeared until I heard the higher vibration of an approaching car, still a ways off.

  It wasn’t a car it was a truck. A tall long-nosed blue semi with a shiny V grille like a cowcatcher and a high load of hay. Downshifted as it came around the last bend into view, the loud stuttered growl and cough and pitch into a higher octave.

  The hay was in square bales and stacked tight and green. He passed at maybe 40 mph, blasting me with a sweet grass-smelling wind and then I heard the air brakes hiss, the double downshift and he stopped along the shoulder. Grind of gears and he backed up, neatly slotting into what was left of the pullout ahead of me as if it had been made for him. The high door clucked open and he swung down, the idle of the big diesel somehow growling benignly, fitting nicely with the other sounds of the morning.

  I thought of “Phantom 309” the way Tom Waits sang it, I loved that song. At the wheel sat a big man / and I’d have to say he must’ve weighed two ten / As he stuck out a big hand and he said with a grin / “Big Joe’s the name …”

  He was—big. Not sure about two-ten but he was like six feet, heavy in the shoulders. Wore a camo cap and a full beard like me, but dark. Aviator shades, Wranglers, brown leather shitkickers. His boots scuffed the ridged dirt as he walked the length of his rig, unconsciously checking the straps and the load as he came. He moved with the loose jointed rhythm of an athlete. Hand came up in a wave, still twenty yards off. Country. I noticed that most country people hail you from a decent distance, city people wait till they’re right up in your face. Then he stopped at the end of the trailer, looked up at the high stack of bales, put a hand up on the wall of hay, patted it. Fished a tin of chew out of his breast pocket, twisted off the lid and put a plug in his upper lip. Extra polite. I smiled. I raised my chin: c’mon. He came.

  “Morning.”

  He stood off twice the length of an extended arm. Somehow I knew right then that he was a hunter.

  “Hey.”

  “Dip?” he said.

  Shook my head. “Took me five years to quit.”

  He nodded, spat. “Don’t want to interrupt.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Sure?”

  “Yup.”

  “You a painter?”

  He broke into a wide smile at his own question, showed white teeth, surprisingly white for a guy who chewed.

  “I mean as opposed to a hobbyist. I mean you sure as shit look like you know what you’re doing.”

  “Well I don’t know how to do much else if that’s what you mean.”

  “ ’Cept fish?”

  That surprised me.

  “You got two rods leaning against the cap of your truck. I noticed as I passed. I thought fisherman-painter, this guy’s got the life.”

  He took off his shades, folded them and hung them off the same pocket the chew came out of. He glanced at the canvas, shyly, as if he were sneaking a look at something very personal which I guess it was.

  “Nice,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  “I like the fish.”

  He looked past the bank at the stepped and spreading ponds.

  “The way you made ’em jump even though they ain’t jumping. That takes something. Maybe balls isn’t the word. Spirit.”

  “Huh.”

  He was looking at the creek but addressing the painting, politely.

  “The thing moves. The picture. I like that. The birds, the fish, the beaver, the clouds, the water. Sorta like looking at music. You know if it had colors. Nice.”

  Nodded to himself.

  “Jason,” he said.

  “Jim.”

  “Pleasure.”

  “Likewise.”

  “I fished this stretch before. Why I stopped, partly. Brookies a course, but last time, it was fall, I got a cutthroat about as big as a tuna. Surprised the shit out of me. Didn’t even know they were in here.”

  He glanced over. “You expecting company?”

  I put the bru
sh I was still holding back in the murky spirit jar, set my own cap back, rubbed my forehead.

  “No. Don’t think so.”

  I looked at him puzzled.

  “You got a .41 magnum stuck in your easel.”

  “Oh shit.” My hand went instinctively to the gun, stopped halfway. I shrugged.

  “Maybe for bear,” he said politely.

  I didn’t know what to say. Suddenly my whole predicament, the one I’d happily forgotten for a few hours, came tumbling down. He must’ve seen it.

  “Or lion,” he said more helpfully. “Lotta lion coming back into these hills.”

  I rubbed my face. We both looked down at the creek, at the molten rings of the sipping trout touching the black surface with the delayed rhythm of a very slow rain.

  “You like to fish the Sulphur, huh?”

  “What?”

  “Me, too. I fished it just the other day. Hay delivery. I never fished it in the middle of the night, though. That must be interesting. With a moon and all.”

  He was looking down at the creek, very casual. My hand went to the shelf of the easel, rested there.

  “Amazing that’s legal when you think about it. I mean fishing and hunting, they’re pretty much the same. Going out to stalk something in the dark like that. Maybe kill it.”

  He patted the tin of snuff in the breast pocket of his snap shirt, thought about doubling the size of his plug, decided against it. Maybe trying to cut down. A phone rang, his. The ring was coyotes yapping. He pulled it out of his jeans, glanced at the ID, at me, and silenced the ringer. Put it back.

  My hand did not move from the easel. Inches from the gun. I was very still.

  “You must have Verizon,” I said.

  “What? Oh. Yeah, only way to go around here. If you don’t have it you need it.” He spat, hit a clod with a neat jet. He said, “Not good to be out in the middle of nowhere with no way to, you know, get in touch.”

  Turned his head, looked at me full on, expressionless. “I was thinking of fishing this, take a break for an hour. Take a chill pill. You?”

  I didn’t answer. Chill pill. I’d heard that expression recently and then I remembered where: at Dell’s camp, two minutes before I’d killed him.

  Sometimes in a bar fight, just before it erupts, you feel the way things are going, they can’t go any other way, and you strike. Preempt. Maybe you don’t even want to, but you’ve been here before and you know how it will go if you don’t. Now I didn’t. It teetered. I watched him.

  “You deliver hay to a hunting camp? Half a dozen guys?”

  “Eight guys. Well. Seven. Now it’d be seven, wouldn’t it?” Spat. “Yeah, one on the slab makes seven. I never was too good at math.”

  “Maybe the fishing isn’t too good here right now.”

  “Maybe not. I got things I got to do anyway just down the road.” He turned his head, worked the plug in his cheek with his tongue, looked at me, steady. His hair was very dark, almost black, but his eyes were mineral blue. They were mineral hard and the calmness in them tightened my wires more than any anger.

  “Dell is family,” he said.

  I didn’t move.

  “Well, we don’t choose ’em, do we?” he said. “Too bad.” Spat. “Whoever fucks with them. The law might not take care of it, but one of us always does.”

  He looked down at the creek.

  “Second thought, I think I will fish,” he said. “Could use a stretch. You? An hour?”

  It was a bald challenge.

  “Sure,” I said. It was the only answer. I said, “Hold on.”

  I took the canvas off the easel with both hands, then thought better and put it back on the stand. Picked out a smaller brush and dabbed it in black on the palette. Scrawled in the lower right corner: Just Before Fishing with Jason—Jim Stegner.

  “Here,” I said.

  “You want me to hold it? On the edges?”

  “It’s for you.”

  “Me?”

  “It’s for you.”

  He stepped forward and his hands closed around the sides. Strong and scarred. He stood there with the painting held straight out and too gingerly the way a man who is unused to it holds an infant. His eyes went from me to the picture and back. A flicker of confusion. He wasn’t exactly back on his heels, but it was where I wanted him.

  “Do you have a place you can lay it flat for a few days? While it sets up?”

  “Oh yeah sure. I can lay it in the sleeper.”

  “Might wanna crack your windows. You know for the fumes.”

  “Well shit. No one ever gave me anything like this.” He just stood there. Finally he turned his wrist so he could read his watch.

  “I got an hour, better get after it.”

  He grinned and suddenly he looked like a kid. He held the painting out in front of him with both hands and trotted back along his load of hay.

  We fished. He snugged together the four pieces of his rod and strung it and hopped down the steep trail of the bank with a natural’s grace, his eyes sweeping the braids and picking his spot as he fell into the brush.

  I put on hip waders and took the gun out of the easel and shoved it into my belt on the inside of my pants, just back of the hip the way I used to wear it, took up my rod and pushed through the scratchy trees. A redwing flew up from the willows and whistled and buzzed and made a commotion. Landed in a Russian olive that overhung the beaver pond. I knew he would supervise the rest of my session with a restless disapproval. The sandbar was yellow in the murky tea water and welcoming, maybe a foot deep where it extended into the pool and through the short watergrass I saw minnows darting. I could smell the perfume of the olive tree and feel the cold of the water through my waders. Sometimes you just fish a spot because it makes you welcome. Under different circumstances I would have felt happy. I can say that. Even the territorial blackbird clicking and hopping: as agitated as he was, he would have seemed auspicious. But there was zero traffic on the road and now as I fished I was aware of the weight on my hip and I kept one eye on the trucker who was casting into a braid maybe sixty yards downstream. Fished his own braid and thought his own thoughts.

  We fished for over an hour. Don’t know how long. Long enough that a tamarisk on the far bank was throwing its shadow across the pool. Long enough that I had released a mess of little brookies not a whole lot bigger than the streamer fly itself, which always made me laugh—the bravery!—and landed a two pound cutthroat that surprised the shit out of me and which I also let go. I’d usually cook that one, and sometimes carried a camp stove and a pan in the truck with me, but this time I didn’t, and didn’t care to build a fire. I was happy to watch him fin with what looked to me like great dignity back into the tea colored murk. At first it wasn’t fun. I was watching Jason. There was a cold grip in my gut and I was aware of how vulnerable I’d made myself. We were in the middle of nowhere and now we were off the road. It came down to proximity and angles and the knowledge that I had a gun and that he might or might not. Well. After a while I relaxed a little and just fished, fishing has a way of taking care of things, and I kept one eye downstream and found I could pretty well do the two things at once. Jason was more than forty yards downstream, he’d been working up. I was sight casting after a rise and I’d let myself get lost in thought when I looked up and he was gone. Nowhere. Panic sounds like tearing paper. I remember thinking that as I backed further out into the water and scanned the willows. He might have circled upstream. I would have. If I wanted to surprise me I’d get to the bank and circle fast. I turned, stepped in up to my knees and searched the bend above the little pond. Fuck. Scrape. Whisk of branches, the knick of stone, and I spun around.

  He was right there. Out of the brush, on the shallow edge of the pool. He was less than fifteen feet from me and he had something in his hand.

  I stepped back careful of my footing and shifted the rod fast into my left hand and let my right drop to the gun in my belt. “Whoa!” I said.

  He stopped, took
it in, measured the distance.

  “Whoa, Pops.” His eyes were dancing. “I just caught three in a row on this thing, ugly little fucker, I tie ’em myself. Thought you might wanna try it.”

  He held out something that looked like a big ant, but wasn’t, with a half dozen rubber legs. Ugly.

  The proffered fly, the hand out, down here off the road in the brush. I cleared my throat.

  “Think I’m done,” I said.

  Was that a smile? Not sure. He could be amused, I wasn’t. If the ugly fly had looked less like an ant and a little bit more like, say, a Glock, I might have plugged him. I backed up two more steps and retrieved the line and swung the fly back in and hooked it to the keeper. I kept my eyes on him the whole time. I wanted him to wait because I wanted him to go ahead of me up the steep trail, but not too far ahead to where he could ambush me. He had sussed it, too, and he got it. He waited for me, very civil, and then he turned and led me back up to the road.

  Before he got back in his rig he said, “You did pretty good.” It wasn’t a question. Then: “Thanks for the painting. I’m sure I’ll see you down the road. Can pretty much guarantee it.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Wait a sec,” he said. He trotted back to the cab, threw in the pieces of the rod, swung up, and a minute later jumped down in his jeans, and stuck something in his mouth as he came.

  “Here,” he said. “One of my ranchers gave it to me a week ago. He and his wife went on a cruise last winter.”

  It was a cigar, a Montecristo Number Two, a classic, a great Cuban. Steve had given me a box once after I sold the entire Dung Beetle Series.

  “It’s pretty good I guess,” he said. “Never had anything to compare it to, so what do I know.” He pulled out a lighter and lit my smoke. As he did his blue eyes met mine. I shuddered. They were warm with more than mischief. You aren’t the only one who can play at this, they seemed to say.

  “We might as well enjoy ourselves,” he said. “One of us for sure is going down.”

  He turned in a wreathing of gray smoke, walked back to his cab and climbed up. I put my rod in the bed of my truck. I glanced up once, and in his big driver side mirror I saw him talking on his cell, looking back at me and talking. Then the grind of a low gear, the loud rev and he pulled out.