The Painter: A Novel

  You are not here to verify,

  Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity

  Or carry report. You are here to kneel

  Where prayer has been valid.

  I loved that. No one had ever said it, not to me. Was he saying we are here to pray? To tell you the truth, right now that was all I really felt like doing. I could spend the rest of my goddamn life on my knees. It occurred to me that every painting lately was a prayer. That fishing, with Alce, her memory, was also a kind of prayer. Praying really was all I knew how to do. I read the lines three times, folded them back up and tucked them away.

  The beer was cold and it tasted hoppy and good and I didn’t miss the alcohol. The portrait of the girls was done, it was really good, the gun was gone. That surprised me: losing it in the field was like taking off a heavy pack. For a moment you think you will float away. I thanked the bartender and went back into the cool wonderful heaviness of a desert pregnant with rain.

  It was that time of day when late afternoon is just tipping into evening. Probably an hour till dusk. It felt like it might rain any second. I’d head back to town and go to the plaza for a simple dinner. In the parking lot against the trees of the west edge was a black El Camino and standing next to it the outline of a man.

  He was leaning against the car and he was tall and bearded and wore a baseball hat, and even in ambush, if that’s what this was, he looked relaxed and loose jointed and as familiar as a childhood friend. His eyes were shadowed but they could only be blue, mineral blue and hard with mischief. Fuck. I felt under my seat as I opened the truck door, a reflex, and remembered that the gun was gone, buried. I was on my own. I stiffened tall, looked back toward Jason, raised a hand. He didn’t move. There was a length of pipe behind the seat. Why didn’t I bring the shotgun, too, when I had driven away from the Paonia house? I totally forgot it, that’s why. I waited a beat, got in the truck, started up and pulled out.

  I rolled down the window. The evening smelled of juniper smoke from a dozen stoves and the sweet fragrance of the first fallen leaves. I drove back along the creek under trees that obscured the sky and one leaf, then two, hit the windshield. It would have been gorgeous but it wasn’t. He was two hundred yards behind me. Whatever distance it was he kept it to the inch. What it seemed like. If I lost him on a curve, when I moved out onto the next straightaway he slid back into my mirror at the exact interval. Like I was towing a can on a string. It was unnerving, more than if he’d ridden up on me. The message was: I’m in complete control, you can’t shake me. If I can mark this distance with such precision on a twisty back road, I can take you any time I want. And he could. I knew he could. It was a muscle car and on one of these stretches where there were no houses, no farms—and there were plenty of these deserted reaches—he could close the gap in a heartbeat and pull up beside me and blast me with probably the shotgun I wish I had myself.

  I gunned it, then slowed, then gunned it. He was right there. Out of every curve. My pulse sped up like the truck, I could feel it pounding in my temples. He seemed to be saying: We aren’t fucking around anymore. Your time, Pops, is up.

  If he came up on me and didn’t kill me with the first blast, he could easily make me wreck, then walk up as casual as you please and execute me like a wounded elk. I passed a goat farm down in the creek bottom off to my right, a tight left bend then a short climb and my spirit yearned toward it: like, I wish I were you. Just tending my goats and making dinner with my family and having trouble paying my bills. I wish I were you and not me in this truck right now with that black thing blessedly out of sight for half a minute. The mundane quandaries I yearned for right then. Any predicament but this. Jason’s strategy was bell clear. I could feel the panic rising as I tried to control my speed. There was no point in accelerating. I thought: I could pull into that goat farm, or the next house, I could run for the door.

  But he could catch me easily in the yard before I got to the stoop. Even if I made it, then what? Endanger a whole family? Call the cops, Wheezy? Jason would melt away, plug me in the dark when the circus was over. Fuck. I could try to straddle the center line so that he couldn’t pass me. Wouldn’t work. There was too much shoulder on both sides, gravel sure, but he was too good a driver, and anyway he was good enough he could shoot out my rear tires and send me into the ditch any time he wanted.

  I felt for a packet of Backwoods and with one hand gripping the wheel—I realized I was clenching it hard and forced myself to relax a little—with my free hand I dug in the console for a packet of cheroots, and unwrapped it clumsily and brought it trembling to my lips and pushed in the lighter knob on the dash. Was I trembling or was it the rush of wind, the frost heaves in the road?

  I was scared. Something was definitely different. In all my encounters with the trucker there had been a sense of possible reprieve. That word. I kept saying it, like my whole life now was a search for the nectar of it. That a life could come down to that, it seemed pathetic. Grant me, grant me, oh Lord, relief. From all my fuckups.

  Before, between us it had been: confront, measure and maneuver. What was different now was the feel of the pursuit. It was not a game, it was deadly serious now. I knew. You know this stuff. As many bar fights as I had been in, as many brawls, you know when it’s more about roughhouse, about breaking furniture and knockdowns and bruise and blood and welt—and you know when it turns, when it becomes deadly and serious and cold, when the bottles begin to break on the table edges and the knives come out. I knew. As clear as I knew Jason could close the gap in four seconds. He was going to kill me.

  Every good and stupid thing I’d done in my life came down in the end to this.

  I went through a tight left curve and topped a little rise and came down into a barren stretch of sparse sage and mesquite and the black thing swung across the rearview, slipped square into the center of the mirror exactly as if I were pulling a water-skier on a towrope. I wish. I am towing my own death behind me. That’s what I thought. I have been hauling it behind me ever since the night I went fishing up the Sulphur, pulling it like a carcass.

  And then there was the other impulse, the one I always have: just to get it over. Pull over out here in a deserted stretch and get out and face the music, or whip the truck one-eighty at one of these wider pullouts and come back to him, straight at him and aim for a head-on and let the chips fall.

  That wasn’t such a bad idea. I had lost him on the last tight curve and was emerging again into a wide treeless valley. I could. He could round that bend with the cold calculating precision of a Formula 1 driver and gape at nothing but my lights and radiator grille barreling at him like a meteor. I wanted that. To do it just to break his icy composure, the one that was more and more apparent after the false reprieve of every curve, that was chilling my guts from an eighth of a mile back.

  There was another way. I had done it once to a state trooper who flagged me on a high pass up in the Green River country. The cop had passed me going the other way and hit his lights, which meant pull over, I’m going to spin around and come give you a speeding ticket, and instead I goosed it, it was a twisty pass, and I took the second ranch road, a rocky track that cut up into some outcrop bluffs, and I rattled and bounced onto another track and shut the motor and took a nap until nightfall. The road had been damp from recent rain and it probably saved me, because I didn’t raise any dust. Back then I couldn’t afford the ticket. Had he been less lazy he might have called for backup, and they might have figured I might have a warrant and searched for me, but he was probably at the end of his shift and heading home, and I drove out that night and down to I-70, down to the big wide Utah desert, humming and thinking of dumb ways to spend the money I’d just saved myself. Simpler times.

  But I knew this road. This one. I didn’t know every track coming off it, where they went, but at least I knew where they met the Tesuque road. Not like I could sit down and draw a map of them, but I’d driven this stretch so many times, my whole life it seemed, and I could confident
ly say: There will be a gravel road coming up on the left after this bend. Or: a dirt track after this grove of cottonwoods on the right. Could just feel it coming.

  I did. Feel it like a gift. And not dirt. A dirt or gravel turnoff would raise a cloud of dust and signal my entry like a semaphore.

  Up ahead I, we, would enter two switchbacks back into the river bottom, with tall cottonwoods and old willows on either side, and just after, there was a county road off to the left. It was perfect because there was one more broad right-hand bend beyond it, just before the road opened out and climbed onto the last mesa before Santa Fe. And it was paved. For the first half mile or so. I knew, because I’d taken it once, looking for a new place to picnic with Cristine that wasn’t crowded with tourists. We’d only gone up it maybe a hundred yards, and found a grove of poplars beside the creek, with benches someone had cut crudely out of logs, and we’d stopped happily and had our meal and made love on a blanket further back in the trees beside the stream. Perfect. If I jammed it I could make the left, and get into the trees while he was still coming out of the last turn. And the empty road ahead wouldn’t bother him, because I would be, he would think, just out of sight on the final arc of the wide bend. Good. And even better, there were two more side roads, just after this on the right, in a space of about half a mile. Two decoys. I took a deep long shuddering breath and made myself wait until I had entered the first twist of the switchback, had lost the black chimera in my mirror, and stomped the gas.

  The truck shook and roared. Took the next two turns way too fast. It was too top-heavy, not built for this. The seat belt straps held me against a centrifugal force that tugged and leaned me into the passenger seat, the whole rig trying to hold the pavement and make the leftward trajectory, the tires squealed, then a sound like the shriek of a shot stoat and the rear right tire went off the shoulder and hit soft dirt and gravel sprayed into the undercarriage with a loud rush and we lurched and I thought it was over, he would have his wreck, and then the caroming rig pulled us back into the road, all four tires, and I threw the wheel right for the next turn. We were going downhill. We were accelerating now. Fast glance at the speedometer, it was needling past seventy-five, way way too fast for these curves, Jesus, and I just held the wheel over. I tapped the brakes once and felt the rear tires break free—No!—and then hold as I jammed the gas pedal to carry the turn, my left shoulder pressed into the door and frame, fuck, we would never make it, not this right swing. Again the squeal. A weightless sickening lift—abrupt silence as all four tires broke contact. Here we go, oh Lord. Here the fuck—full slide, sailing for the trees on the left. Not sure. I must’ve eased on the gas, pressed harder, and something in the chemistry of rubber and tarmac: the wheels, first the rear, gathering again under the truck as in the leap of a predator, all haunches, the rear grabbed and propelled us to the shoulder and then the front grabbed and the steering kicked in and we were thrown to the right and I felt both left tires spin and grind in the dirt just off pavement and launch us into the middle of the road, in time for the next left.

  I let off, let off completely of the gas and found my seat and coasted through the next two corners and shot out of the switchbacks at close to seventy with both hands tight on the wheel and the cheroot miraculously still in my mouth and lit. Somewhere in there, just before the turns, I had lit it, couldn’t even remember. I thought, Okay, man, you have the distance. You earned the time. Now jam it. I did. Just ahead on the left was my road, the turnoff, and I flew toward it like an arrow and took it in a full slide, I was fucking getting used to this, and careened up it and hit the roof hard, top of the head, as I took the bumps into the makeshift campsite and stuck the gap in the poplars where we had parked once before, stuck it like a cork in a bottle and slid to a stop and turned off the engine. And breathed. Okay wait. I thought I would hear him. Wait till he passes, give him twenty thirty seconds so he is well past, then back fast out onto the country road, probably Forest Service access, whatever, wait because it turns to dirt just ahead, don’t let him see the plume, and then go up it. Go up it fast but not screaming, and get lost in the hills while he looks for you on the highway ahead and on the other side roads first. Because he is methodical. He will eliminate first one then the other and you will be long gone, forked off onto whatever myriad tracks up ahead.

  I didn’t hear him. Maybe it was the blood pounding in my ears. I didn’t hear anything. But I figured a minute had passed, plenty long enough, too long, and then I started the truck and backed out and continued on up, jounced over the line where the road turned to dirt, washboarded as it climbed, and took it with a mission but not too fast, not enough to raise a huge plume. Also, the sky was darkening with more than evening, the clouds were thick and black and a wind had kicked up, and it thankfully carried my dust ahead of me to the north. I drove.

  I drove up into juniper then aspen with a growing sense of relief. I was climbing a ridge and the track contoured along it so that through the trees to my right I could see now and then the valley below and the darkly wooded piñon hills that fell into it, and the sky darkened and the wind picked up and tore leaves out of the trees that blew across the track. The track got narrower and rougher. Good. Be hard to follow up here, to drive up it at all in the El Camino.

  Up ahead, up behind the highest ridge, lightning flashed like distant cannon fire. It flashed through the heavy clouds in silent pulses, muted and buffered by distance, and sometimes sustained like the rolling cannonades of a battle in another province. It was not quite full dusk yet and no longer day, not with the black thunderheads and the soundless vespers of the thunder. Another limbo time. Good. This one felt good. A space to let my panic drain away, an interval that asked for no decision, good or bad, just asked me to drive up a road I had never taken and somehow find my way back to town.

  And then two things happened. The road topped out in a smooth track through aspen, thickly ferned at the edges and uncobbled with the rocks of the climb, beautiful, some kind of haven fragrant with ferns and fallen leaves and the charged and humid wind. I released a long breath, felt a gladness surge.

  And I glanced in my side mirror and saw headlights swinging through the trees then square up on the track and flood my rearview. Fuck. And the track ahead dropped steeply away. I could see through the pale trunks and limbs of the trees that it was dropping into a cut-rock canyon below, probably the upper reaches of the same creek as in the picnic area, no it wasn’t the headwaters at all, I could see now in the murky light that the cut of the canyon continued on through steep hills into who knew what distances now shuddering with lightning.

  It felt like death. Like nowhere to go but there. Between the hard beams of the headlights behind and the vague flashes of the storm ahead. I almost cried. Almost seized and gave up. Almost offered my throat. Hard to describe the collapse: how the strength emptied from my limbs like water, how all conviction of anything worthy, any worthiness left on earth much less in my own life, how it didn’t surrender but simply absented itself, leaving only a chalk outline: this was your reason to live and now it is gone. He could kill me here, a perfect place, kill me any way he wanted to, and bury me in the scented ferns and run my truck off a ledge into the steep woods like some parody of my killing of Grant.

  And then he did something shocking: he blared his horn. Leaned on it, then a double tap, then leaned on it again. Less like the trumpeting of a charging army than like Hey, motherfucker, Get a move on—I didn’t trash my shocks to climb all the way up here to have you just fold. Just cry Uncle. That’s what it seemed like to me.

  Maybe it was just a head game, a triumphant shout of You are all mine now you piece of shit. Who knows. It woke me up. I stomped the gas and threw dirt behind me and revved off that little bench and the track fell away and the nose of the truck tipped and dropped hard and jounced into a rut and I tapped the brakes and slid just a second, and then I was diving steeply, bouncing down a hunter’s trail straight for the bottom of the canyon. Didn’t need the hea
dlights, I could still see well enough. But with the windows open and the wind whipping through I heard the first rumble of thunder and then raindrops spatted against the windshield, big ones, heavy, singular, and they stopped. One opening salvo. I barreled downhill, holding to the track easily, it wasn’t too rocky, which was maybe not a good thing, because he could take it too without too much trouble, maybe not as fast. Right then no grander thought. Just Drive. All the adrenaline surging back through arms, chest, the strength too, no reason for any of it, but suddenly a boundless desire to get through this, to live.

  For a minute I thought he’d had enough. Hoped. Didn’t see his lights, figured maybe he didn’t want to risk the climb back out of here. That rising euphoria. The black bird of false hope, not a phoenix, but one of those raven-vulture things squalling out of the trees. Fuck. Did I think he would come this far, him? And give up? And just as I thought it, his lights dropped, dropped into the rearview from above and burned the mirrors like a pursuing chopper, and we came out of the aspen as suddenly, into the sparse low trees of the junipers. The loss of high canopy opened up the sky and gave more light ahead and fine rain sprayed across the windshield and it was true dusk and I heard a clap now of thunder, loud and close. And just as suddenly I bounced hard and barreled down a sandy bank, past a beaten down turnaround on my right and a rough rock outcrop on my left and hit the creek. I splashed into it with a loud crash of spray that plumed over the windshield and washed into the window and doused my head.

  Whoa. Water. I revved and slipped. Wha—? Fuck. Deeper than I thought. The tires spun on the bottom. I was about in the middle of the stream and I wasn’t moving. The water was over the floorboards, oh fuck, and it was muddy. In the half light I could see it was muddy and I looked left upstream and saw the current sliding around the wall, emerging from the little gorge in foamy sheets that carried sticks and limbs and bits of leaves.