The Painter: A Novel

“Can you match broken window glass?” I said.

  His head came around. All his cheer fell away. He studied me. I was thinking that one crumb on the shoulder of the ranch road that matched the pieces in his envelope would place me unequivocally at the scene. Not proximity, but ground zero. Not to mention if they found the pack while they were looking for the glass.

  “We can try. It’s not a precise science. It’s like tire tracks: the most you can say is that the pieces are of the same type and match two million other trucks on the road.”

  I took the keys.

  “Things can pile up,” he said. “What they mean by the weight of evidence. It just piles and piles up and you carry it all with you until you’re walking around like a hunchback. You, not me.”

  He wheezed. He shook his pant leg out of his shoe. “Try to be good,” he said and walked off.

  What Bob had said at the gas station. Be good. I was good. I think. Being good, on the other hand, is really hard.

  I watched Wheezy go, and then watched as he turned around abruptly. He came back.

  “Just had an idea,” he said. “I’m going to take a little trip now”—wheeze—“back up to the scene of Grant’s demise. Go look for a little broken glass. Why don’t you come? You know, see some new country.”

  New country. He and I, we both knew it wasn’t new for either of us. His eyes were dancing.

  That’s what they do, don’t they? I thought. They get the killer back to the scene of the crime and they watch him like a hawk and wait for him to trigger and slip up and give it all away. And just after I thought that, I thought, What the fuck! Of course I’ll go with you!

  I’ll go, because if I don’t you’ll stumble on the rucksack, my personal warrant to the pen, stumble on it while you’re looking for crumbs of windshield—and why you didn’t find it already I’m not sure, it must be under some brush, you must have been focused on the mess in the gully. Of course I’ll go. And if I can distract you somehow, or you can distract yourselves, I’ll slip over to that rock and get rid of the pack. Not sure where, or how, but I have two hours of highway till then to figure it out, make a plan.

  I kissed Sofia fast and told her I was glad to see her and that I’d probably be back by nightfall, don’t ask. I nodded to Steve. I got into Wheezy’s unmarked Crown Vic and when I craned out the window and lifted a hand they both waved awkwardly. Wheezy drove. I leaned my head back against the front passenger seat and I thought, I have no frigging plan. No plan. Then I must have fallen asleep.

  I can’t say I had a plan when I woke up. Nothing came to me in a dream. He was joggling my shoulder, he was saying, “Hey tough guy, hey Jim”—the second time he’d called me by my first name—“rise and shine.” And: “Jesus, you snore like a freight train! You must have been whipped.”

  He got out and stretched, and wheezed the fresh high-plains air as if it were clearing his lungs which it wasn’t. I heard the two squad cars pull in behind us. Must have rained here, too, recently, I smelled the grass of the valley and the damp earth. I got out, stretched with the fat detective as if we were warming up for a yoga class.

  We weren’t. We were twenty yards east of the boulder which was just off the shoulder of the road. All they had to do was walk by it looking for glass and they could not help but see the rucksack behind it. My heart began to hammer and I could feel my face flush with heat. He was watching me with a casual sideways glance as I made myself take in the ribbon of ranch road running up into the pretty meadowed valley where the elk had been. And the ponderosas on the hill, and the trees along the creased bottom where the arroyo would be. Made myself take it in like a tourist.

  “Pretty,” I said.

  He grinned. “Pretty like a postcard or pretty like one of those places you can’t get out of your head?”

  I shrugged. He turned and spoke low to the deputies who began to comb the dirt of the road and the edges of the shoulder. Looking for window glass. They began just ahead of our car and very slowly moved west, toward the rock.

  “Let’s take a walk,” he said, pointing to the gully.

  “Just a sec,” I said, maybe too quickly. “I’ve got to take a leak.”

  He studied me for a beat, said, “Be my guest.”

  I glanced around as if looking for a place, as if I were shy, settled on the boulder with an expression that was meant to convey, Oh look there, a perfect piss spot! Maybe none of it very natural—and isn’t this why they brought us out here after all? To test and rattle us? Fuck that, I walked forward, and I passed the furthest deputy who was crouching and picking up a crystal crumb with a pair of tweezers and moving it toward a clear envelope, I walked and made myself go one step at a time, go slow. As if I weren’t walking straight toward my own conviction.

  I looked back once, again as if I were shy, and Wheezy was in intense conversation with the deputy who was holding up the little envelope with the glass. Perfect. They were in a kind of huddle, so I speeded up, I covered the last fifteen feet in a near jog. If they just kept talking, bent in conference—I could grab the rucksack and hurl it like a hammer throw far into the grass, further up the hill. They wouldn’t be searching the hill, they were looking along the road for glass. That would be enough, get it just out of sight. I could come back tonight and get it. Yes. If they just kept talking, the others bent to the road—if. It was my only chance. All I needed was to get the pack maybe ten or twelve feet further back and into the tall grass.

  I stepped fast up to the boulder and stepped around it, reached for my fly.

  There was a bush, a saltbush growing right up against the hump of rock. Just about the color of the rucksack.

  It wasn’t there.

  There was nothing there. Grass, the bush. The rock. Nothing.

  My mind sped up, ran. Wait—wait. Maybe. I might not have left it here. Maybe. Where else? I ran through the whole scene again, the sequence from first seeing Grant’s spotlight. I did, I took it with me down the hill because I remembered clearly how heavy it was, how it swung as I ran and how I’d wished I’d left it up in the trees as I came down the hill, thinking, Dumb. Should’ve left it. And I remembered yelling to Grant to come get me, come and get it over with, and I remembered charging my truck and finding him, and after that I had no memory of the rucksack, not one. I had left it here.

  Had they already found it? Fuck. No. No way, I would already be in jail.

  Wheezy must have noticed, because when I was done peeing, actually peeing out of sheer nervousness, he looked at me strangely and brought a deputy with him and they searched carefully all around the rock and up into the grass of the hill.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  My Lover Is a Train

  OIL ON CANVAS

  11 X 14 INCHES

  COLLECTION OF THE ARTIST

  Brothers

  OIL ON CANVAS

  50 X 80 INCHES

  Pim decided to hold an unveiling party when he got back from Detroit. The police had assured him that he was not under any threat, but that extra security for the party might not be a bad idea. The Pantelas were the kind of couple that would make a show of shaking off any kind of mishap or misfortune, could send out one hundred and fifty evites for a party five days hence and a hundred and forty-three people would show. I would be the guest of honor and Julia asked me who I’d like to be there. I told her John “Wheezy” Hinchman, Santa Fe PD, and Celia Anson. The Pantelas adored their portrait of the girls, and even better, Julia called to tell me that Celine and Julie couldn’t get over it. Her voice was bright, without a hint of trauma, a marvel of resilience. She told the girls that what had happened that afternoon was a hunting accident, that everybody had gotten excited over nothing, and they had digested that and accepted it, the way children do. She said the painting made them laugh and laugh and they had endless discussions about what the chicken and colored blackbirds were doing on each other’s heads. The best theory was that being atop a small person, especially one linked to another small person, kept the foxes away an
d gave them a changing view of the world that was way less boring than, say, being in a tree. Julia’s laugh rang over the phone as she told it. I told her that I thought the girls simply had a strong association between the painting and bubble gum cigars.

  I said, “I told Steve to keep a box of them on a pedestal next to my wall of latest paintings.”

  “Paaw! You didn’t!”

  “Yes, and just for fun, he did. Go look. He put them in a Cohiba box, pink and blue ones, and one of his customers said it was a terrifically ironic comment on tradition, authenticity, self-congratulation and self-mockery in contemporary art and asked how much.”

  “Oweee! Knowing Steve, he probably sold it.”

  “No, he wasn’t fast enough on his feet. He didn’t have clearance to put my name on it. That’s when he got the idea of inventing an artist, like in that Banksy movie. Dunno. I think he’s working on it. The backstory et cetera. It’s like inventing a cover dossier for a CIA agent or something. He’s afraid of the liability issues but he can’t get over the temptation of not splitting the sale price with anyone.”

  “You make me laugh.”

  “Yup. We started a tradition with those cigars. He says it’s a hit with the patrons. Gets them in a buying mood like balloons at a car dealership.”

  I hung up feeling happy. Pim also decided that he’d like to keep me in the hotel another week, until after the party. It was only fair, he said. I wasn’t going to argue. I was painting every day up on the roof and I was painting well. I had Steve send half a dozen thirty by forty canvases and I tore through them in four days. I don’t paint with a lot of detail, especially in landscapes it’s mostly about color and movement, and I painted into the afternoon without pause. I felt lighter in my spirit. Sofia stayed with me in the suite and delighted in letting the valet dudes park Triceratops. Which they did with alacrity, as she always blessed them with very small fitted tops. The management politely asked that she please not pull out or in too early in the morning or too late at night because of the roar. She loved the hotel. She put in dedicated time reading on the wide porch, and in the big tub with lighthouse candles and whirlpool jets. We went to Ten Thousand Steps one afternoon and got sunburned and turned into raisins and on another day I showed her the stick hobbit shelters up on the mountain, and we followed the creek on a deer trail up through the aspen and all the way to the high ridge. In the evening we liked to walk up Canyon Road and tour the galleries. Unlike me, she was methodical, and she found a lot to appreciate. She even found a blue coyote red moon painting to love.

  “Look, look you big lug. This one. Stand here. No, here. Close your eyes. Now imagine there had never been a blue coyote in the world. There was water, there was darkness, there was the Void, and then the Word and then there was a blue coyote! Voila!”

  She poked me. “You can open your eyes now.”

  “Oh, sorry.”

  She was sort of right. To me. It was a good painting. That’s probably how it happened for Heberto Nuñez-Jackson. He painted the first one out of the Void and it was really compelling and he did it again and it was also pretty good and he got addicted to that relationship with Creation: him, the darkness, the coyote, blue. And the red moon broke his own heart one day. I got it. And then you have a habit and all you ever wanted in the world was to feel this thing about what you create, and then presto your coyote paintings begin to sell like hotcakes. And the people in the ski lodges and big adobe houses who buy them don’t really care if their blue coyote has a hundred cousins, maybe they actually like it, it makes them feel part of a trend, a phenomenon in art that is repeatedly reinforced. And so everybody is happy.

  “What do you think?” she said, standing before it and gesturing with her hand like a game show model. “The only, the first. Look! The composition, the color. It’s really good. How is it different than a thousand of your Diebenkorn Ocean Park paintings?”

  I looked.

  “It just is.”

  “Ohhhh, snobbism. I never, ever thought I’d see that in Jim Stegner.”

  “Not a snob. I believe in truth. Which is also excellence, by the way.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “You mean raw, clumsy honesty is the same as excellence?”

  “I didn’t say that. Truth is excellence. Honesty is not the same as truth.”

  “Huh.” She frowned, willing, maybe, to give me the benefit of the doubt for at least a split second.

  “Truth needs honesty, but that is not all it needs.”

  “Speak.”

  “Well, an artist can be honest in her rendition of say a hummingbird, in how she sees it, in her application of technique, but she may not be true to the bird.”

  “You mean in skill?”

  “In skill, in her ability to see. To really see the bird. To see the bird as it bears its spirit forward into the world. In empathy. When all of that is there you can feel it. It knocks you over.”

  “Huh.”

  “There is something in even this coyote, this dawn of the world Genesis coyote, that is not true. He did not see into the heart of the coyote. And so I reject it. That’s not snobbism.”

  “Huh.” She smiled at me. She said: “He speaks, who knew? He’s sort of a guru.”

  “You didn’t think I had opinions on art?”

  “Pretty much I just saw you as a sex object,” she said.

  “Hah!”

  One night we walked all the way to the top of the road and I took her into El Farol for dinner. I’d about gotten over the shame of my incident with Celia. I had played it over and over in my mind and I could not see the man’s moves as expressing anything other than malicious intent. He needed to be stopped and I stopped him. Right? Maybe. A salsa band was rocking in the packed low-beamed room. We sat at a small table in a corner and ate little plates of sautéed eggplant and duck empanadas. Who would make an empanada out of a duck? Someone straining for originality like Nuñez-Jackson. Tapas is a fancy way of saying a morsel of food for a fuckload of money, but I didn’t mind, I was feeling flush. Pim wired the money for the portrait before he had even seen it. Steve forked over the promised 60 percent in cash, twenty-one grand, though I could tell it hurt him.

  “You sure you want this in small bills like a felon?” he said, holding out a courier bag full of twenties. Then he turned white. He actually paled.

  “Oh, sorry, Jim. Dumb dumb stupid.”

  “I am a felon, get used to it. A felon who pled down to misdemeanor.”

  “Yes, before. A long time ago, well. But. I’m sorry.”

  I took the bag and slung it on my shoulder. “It’s been a weird month,” I said.

  He chewed the inside of his mouth, hesitated. I knew him so well.

  “What? Spit it out,” I said.

  “Well, I’ve been hanging your paintings as they come in, in order. The west wall. And.”

  He took a big breath, it expanded him, there was hope for all of us, and then he slumped. He looked beset, excited, too. Not sure I’d ever met anyone who could telegraph so many battling emotions at once.

  “And what?”

  “Your work has changed. Whatever is going on out there on the road, with our nice detective friends, whatever. Something has happened to your painting. I’ve known you since you were a kid. And—” I knew what he was going to say next: “I’ve been in this business a long time.” He continued: “When Alce died things changed, too, it got darker sometimes, but not like this. Back then it seemed you fought your grief by getting more and more whimsical. I’m not saying the work is better now, but it has deepened. The patrons are noticing it, too.”

  “You raised the prices.”

  He shrugged.

  I thought about that. Sour disgust. And then for some reason a huge sadness overtook me, right there in his office, holding a bagful of money. All my lightness vanished.

  “I couldn’t paint my way out of it,” I said. “Of Alce.”

  “I know.”

  “I tried everything.”


  “I know.”

  I stood there.

  “I was drinking, fucking people. I didn’t protect her. She came to me for help before she died and I just yelled at her.”

  Steve looked at me. He didn’t say a word, for once.

  “Okay,” I said, and adjusted the bag on my shoulder. “Thanks.”

  “I’ve gotten some calls from some producers,” Steve said. “And magazines.”

  “What?”

  “Go, get out of here. Spend some twenties. I’ll tell you later.”

  That was the long way of saying I had a pocket full of money and I didn’t mind cutting loose and spending it on the two of us, Sofia and me. Also, Steve was up to something. He is always up to something. I hadn’t been this flush since the book about me came out. That had lasted a little less than a year and I pretty much blew it all gambling and doing other stupid shit. This time it felt different. This was a better cutting loose, with Sofia, and for some reason when it’s all cash it spends easier and lighter. I liked it that way. At the little table in El Farol we leaned forward and talked into the music the way you would talk into the wind. Sofia had been several times to the gallery on mornings I was working in the sun room, she’d walk over and study the wall of my paintings. She and Steve got along like two train engines on fire. I made that painting fast one morning, on a small canvas, their two locomotives flaming and chugging happily toward each other under a benign mesa. With her training at RISD and all her reading and the traveling she’d done in the best museums, they could talk to each other in a way I never could. “You and Steve,” I’d said, holding up the picture. “Wow,” she said and laughed. “Those billowing plumes of black smoke, that’s art talk,” I had said. She laughed harder. “It’s for you,” I said. She was very touched. “I think I can I think I can,” she murmured and kissed my ear. Now in El Farol we drank espresso, full caffeine, we weren’t on any schedule, and leaned into each other and she asked about the horse and the crow and I tried to tell her about their evolving conversation.