The Painter: A Novel

  Dunno. Maybe it was the jiggerful of booze.

  I scanned the crowd around me. Celia Anson caught my eye and waved, relieved. She began to make her way toward us. I saw my other big collectors, the Sidells, up against the windows talking to the hanging-stone artist. Invited I knew in the spirit of amicable competition. Speaking of hangings, where was Detective Wheezy Hinchman? I went onto my toes and searched the way I looked sometimes for trout rising along an evening bank. I saw Fazil, the owner of the torture gallery next door to Steve’s, and I saw Steve in animated conversation with the owner of the La Paloma Hotel, another rich collector but of dubious taste.

  Sofia squeezed my arm. She was a knockout tonight, dressed elegantly in a new black silk shift and silver chain belt, watching me closely, with the rapt attention of a volcanologist: she was very close, right at the base of the mountain, and her interest in the smoking peak was equal parts science and self-preservation. She stretched and said loudly into my left ear:

  “Hand that feeds you, buddy.”

  I shook my head against her lips. “What?”

  “Relax! It’s a scene. You can’t paint in a vacuum. You need these people.”

  These people. I took in the room, and the faces blurred and she was telling me that they loved my work, loved me.

  They do? That’s what I thought to myself. They do? After what I’ve done? Nobody knew. They knew. A lot of them knew. I felt queasy, I felt like turning around and rushing back out the door.

  I sucked in a big breath and found Steve again in the crowd. He does. He really does. Julia was at the front of the room, listening to her handsome husband with huge indulgence. She did. She really loved it. Pim must. I’d seen him go apeshit over a painting. It wasn’t just an investment. I knew how much he adored his daughters, more than anything on earth maybe, and he had asked me to memorialize this time in their lives. So what if the Pantelas had everything and wanted more?

  “Not everybody can paint,” she said into my ear like a megaphone. “Some people just get to love it. Buy it, treasure it. The way it should be.”

  “The way it should be.”

  I felt her squeeze my arm hard again and I felt the adrenaline wash out into my limbs. She squeezed and the fight fluttered out of me. Whatever I was about to say in front of everyone, I had lost it. Was I really not going to fuck up and not blow my life apart right here at this autumn art party? Really?

  A new phase. Maybe. Damn. Celia grabbed my other arm as if she’d just reached a life ring.

  “There you are! How exciting.” Lush kiss low on my cheek.

  “Fazil is such an asshole,” she said much too loudly. “Would you kill him for me? You look so different with your clothes on!” She started in on Fazil and all the twisted dealers in town and she was clearly sauced or getting there. She said excitedly that there were reporters here from Albuquerque and Bullett, and I lost her words to the clamor in my head, and when they came clear again she was saying that some blogger for ARTnews asked—in reference to you Jim, to you!—if the tendency among talented artists to believe themselves above the law might extend to a crime like murder—

  I lost the sound. The room went mute and began to tilt. What the fuck was I doing here? A burst of loud applause roared through my vertigo and I saw that they were ushering up the little girls, their Costa Rican nanny was, and of course they were in their sailor suits. Pim handed his glass to Julia and reached down to lift one of the girls. The nanny hoisted the other. They swung them up onto a table that had been placed next to the covered easel so the crowd could see. Instantly the hands found each other, came together. They wouldn’t look at their mother, they didn’t know where to look. Someone yelled, “Cheese, girls!” Cameras flashed. Smiles fluttered over their faces like butterflies in the last cold sunlight before a killer frost. I could see that they were terrified. Julia went to them, smoothed their hair, their dresses, whispered in their ears, leaned over to Pim, was clearly telling him to get his stunt over with.

  “—life does imitate art. Can’t help itself. Without further ado, I give you Jim Stegner’s latest great painting.”

  Well, that wasn’t exactly true, but. He handed the nanny his glass this time, carefully rolled up the drop cloth, then jerked it up and free with a flourish. Cameras flashed. The crowd shifted and shifted back like an ocean swell. Cheers went up, laughter, applause, the girls tucked closer together, eyes closed, and shivered as if weathering a hailstorm. For a long moment the tableau held. Then Julia spoke sharply to the nanny and the two of them lifted the girls down and shuttled them out.

  Here’s the strange thing: I felt the energy of the painting move into and through the people around me. A compression and release, maybe the way an explosion moves through water. The sight of the painting. That’s what it was, without a doubt. The spontaneous laughter, the clapping, the sounds, the childlike glee on some of the faces, the sudden serious focus, maybe recognition, on others. What it is about painting, how it can hit people exactly like music, and hit people so differently.

  Pim was grinning like he’d just landed a five pound German brown.

  “Jim! Where’s Jim Stegner? Can we get our favorite artist up here? Can you say a few words, Jim?”

  Filament of panic, lit like a bulb. All eyes turning now to me. A kaleidoscope of hooting owls, huge dark owl eyes lit with love. Goddamn, lucky thing I’m not a mouse. They weren’t scared at all now. How could the man who had painted the twins this way be a murderer? A loose cannon? Well.

  Pim was extending a hand, as if to help me from the dock to his yacht. I was on the edge of an open aisle to the painting. Not a red carpet but the blue kilim runner.

  Sofia grabbed a handful of my butt and pushed. What the hell. Die Another Day.

  Pim put his arm around my shoulders. He raised his glass and two hundred glasses lifted. “To one of America’s greatest painters!”

  I thought: None of this would be happening if I hadn’t killed two men. We might be having an unveiling, but there would be less of a crowd, it would be a lot quieter, no writers from Bullett. That queasiness, the nausea, washed through the warmth of the booze and rose into my craw. I remembered getting hit by a rogue set wave surfing. Clawing out through the crashing whitewater on a big day to sit well out past the break on the safe calm of the swell and then seeing the thing rise in a wall beyond me, out where I did not think a wave could be, rise and stiffen and begin to collapse. The tumbling wall of my immediate future. Just then a pair of eyes that weren’t owl at all, and weren’t smiling, just a man, looking straight at me, serious, it was Sport, holy shit. Wearing a gray Harris tweed jacket and a predatory expression. Not mean, just patient. Watching the prey. Not still so much as withholding action, for the moment. The way, it occurred to me, I had watched Dellwood from the willows. And next to him was Wheezy. Wheezy at least seemed about to laugh. He couldn’t get over it, any of it.

  Another jolt of panic. Had they found the rucksack? Or the gun? Had one of the hunters stepped forward as an eyewitness? Had they come to arrest me in front of all my hometown admirers? I didn’t think so.

  “Go ahead, Jim,” Pim prompted. “Give us a word.”

  I shook myself off like a dog.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Thank you all for years of support. And friendship. I’m not sure what else to say.”

  I couldn’t breathe. I needed to get out of here. My mouth felt like parchment. I looked on the table beside me for something to drink. There was nothing. I took a deep breath, let the pounding of the pulse in my ears subside. Did I? Think I was above the law? No. If anything, I always thought the law would probably have its way with me no matter how I chose to live. I said:

  “I never thought I was above the law, above anybody, ever.” I looked at Sport. “The law is relentless. I—”

  A gasp from the crowd. Pressure drop in the house, just like before a big thunderstorm.

  There’s this scene in one of those asteroid movies, where the fleeing, hapless victims—wher
e the fuck are they running? Where could they go, after all?—where they just turn and stand transfixed on a mountainside and watch the hurtling rock the size of like Australia falling out of the sky. That’s what the guests looked like. Like I was about to reach impact and maybe take them all with me. Some, have to hand it to them, were fascinated and incredulous at once. Not every day you get clobbered by a rock. Ask Dell.

  Still couldn’t get a full breath. Suddenly I felt sad. Incredibly sad. I looked around the room, scanned face to face. So many faces I knew. I cleared my throat.

  “Does anyone have some sparkling water or something?”

  A young woman waiter in a short tux jacket and red bow tie came swiftly out of the crowd bearing a tray of tumblers garnished with limes, offered them up, and was gone. I took a long sip, set the glass on the table by the painting, took in the faces, the silence freighted and palpable as fog.

  “You know I lost my daughter a few years ago. She was my best friend.”

  I saw her again, stepping down the bank ahead of me, excited, holding up her rod, turning over stones at water’s edge. I thought how she would have loved this party. We would have fished together this afternoon and come straight from the river. She would have caught more fish. She would have teased me about it.

  I saw her casting. The long living loops of line. Saw her step to the turn of the bend, look back, her face a question: Are you there? Are you coming?

  I am here. Now. I—

  “I didn’t protect her,” I said. “I let her go away.”

  Silence.

  “I can’t bring her back.”

  I clawed at my collar. I needed cold fresh air.

  “I’ve got to go. Is it too dark to go fishing?” I turned to the big window where a smoky harvest moon was breaking over the eastern ridge. Turned back.

  “A moon. There’s a moon—I better try.”

  A murmur filled the room like water. Some of the faces looked stricken. I heard someone whisper, He’s leaving? Already?

  And another, hushed, It’s so sad. It’s awful.

  I walked fast down the runner and out the door and out the drive and down the road. Sofia came right behind me. In a few minutes we were washed in headlights and Steve pulled over and picked us up and knew enough not to say a word. All the way to the hotel.

  We did go fishing. We drove, the two of us, all the way to the Taos Box. While Sofia slept I fished in the cold and the dark, the stretch Alce and I used to fish together. I fished above the falls, and below in the big pool that silvered in the moonlight. I caught a few fighters and I fished until daybreak.

  EPILOGUE

  Not Too Scary

  OIL ON CANVAS

  20 X 30 INCHES

  At the house in Paonia I put a cattle guard in the driveway where it crosses over the ditch from the county road, the road that goes to Willy’s. It’s one of those grates a car can drive over but an animal won’t cross. So the little roan wanders the whole property, all forty acres, drinks at the pond, leaves piles of manure on the little swimming beach, wanders by the house and looks in the west window when I am painting. No shit. She likes to watch me paint. Or maybe it’s the smell. Something. From where I was standing at the easel, I could see her now: head down past the dock, tugging at the brown wheatgrass. A little helmeted kestrel sat in the young cottonwood above the mare, waiting I guess for her to kick up a mouse. Behind the bird and the horse, up on the mountain, the swaths of aspen on the ridges were a shimmering yellow that did not have a name.

  We’d been back almost two weeks. It was mid-October, into the first rifle season on elk, and once in a while, especially at dawn and dusk, the shots came off the mountain, sporadic and muffled by distance. I didn’t mind them. It was the sound of a changing season. Bob Reid and his son would be up there now. The first time I pulled in for gas he came around to my window and looked straight at me, way longer than most people would find comfortable. He was asking himself, I guess, what he felt about everything. Then he shook his head like, What the hell, and reached into the breast pocket of his shirt and pulled out his can of Skoal. He took a pinch and said, “Dip?” And I knew we would be okay.

  Willy was glad to see me and helped me get the roan settled on my place, and helped me put in the grate. He had been designing his new bigger barn and was almost ready to break ground. He never mentioned the killing of Grant, which I was sure he’d read about, and he never mentioned either of the brothers again.

  The cops weren’t so tactful. Sport called me the day we got back, to let me know, I guess, that he was keeping tabs on me and knew exactly what I was up to all the time. He didn’t have much to say except that the investigation was still very much open. He was all business. He said that any time it occurred to me to come down and add some new information it would probably be better for everyone in the long run. The long run. I never could, ever, wrap my head around that concept. I guess the short run always seemed hard enough.

  The painting I was doing now was of two birds, redwings, sitting on the head of a scarecrow. A cloudy choppy sky, veils of rain, not virga. That’s all. The scarecrow looked resigned, like he had been handsome and imposing once, but was now in tatters and just happy to be outside looking over a stormy beautiful afternoon. I signed the canvas and took it down and leaned it against the wall. Sometimes when a painting is hot off the press I get it off the easel fast so I won’t be tempted to mess with it in passing.

  “Nice,” she said from behind the counter.

  Sofia had on hot mitts and she turned back and leaned down and pulled two bread tins out of the oven and set them clattering on the stove top and I heard the hinge of the oven door and the door bang shut.

  “There.” She blew a strand of curly hair off her face. She said: “Bread. You want some hot, with honey?”

  I shrugged. I felt uneasy. Sofia had moved right in. I was glad, mostly. There was not one thing wrong and that spring inside was coiled pretty tight. I had seen this version of domestic bliss before and it had never worked out. Maybe that was it. If I could just let things be what they are. I was trying, would try. It’s okay, Jim, to be content for once, you might even like it.

  “Smells delicious.”

  “And?”

  “I’m going up the Sulphur, till dark,” I said. “Maybe we can have trout for dinner.”

  A shadow crossed her eyes, but she summoned a smile and said, “Sounds good.” She held up both oven mitts like boxing gloves and said, “Wanna box? I am having the feeling you need the bullshit knocked out of you again.”

  She stood there, her curly hair exuberant, flying in every direction, her gloves up, and I laughed. Whew. Sofia knew. She was patient. She would, if I let her, probably knock the bullshit down the road.

  “See ya,” I said.

  “Byyyyyye.”

  The best time of year, period. Anywhere. Mid-October on the Sulphur may be the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. The creek was low, showing its bones, the fallen spruce propped high on the rocks like a wreck, the little rapids now shallow, the pools cold again and slate blue. The wooded canyon had gone to deep shadow but the pink rimrock high up was brilliant with long evening light and the sky was that hard enamel blue. When a gust blew downstream the willows along the gravel bars loosed their pale yellow leaves to the stones and the water. I listened. Hard to hear above the rushing current, but almost every evening I’d heard a crash and seen a yearling bear scrambling up the bank away from me, and I often heard the knock of elk, antlers against a tree, and smelled them nearby, and by nightfall it would be freezing and I would have to quit because my cold fingers could no longer tie on a fly.

  I was standing in what I’d named Cutbow Channel, knee deep below a long run of swift water. The rocks in the bed were every color of green and rust and slate. I breathed. The scents of the spruce and the fir stirred downstream, and the smells of water and cold stones.

  Above the channel was a corner where a few boulders had made a swift drop and a massive fir tree
had fallen across them like a gateway. To get beyond it you had to clamber over rocks and the trunk of the tree, and when you did, the creek opened up: it widened and slowed and spread between wide gravel bars. Nobody ever fished this far in, and it felt remote, out of time, and I called it Heaven. I stopped knee deep at the long riffle beneath it and dug out a vanilla cheroot from the pouch in the vest, and lit it and watched the smoke trail easily downstream.

  The current lapped and gabbled here, raising its voice and pressing my legs. I cradled the rod in the crook of my left arm and unhooked a bead head prince off a foam patch on my vest. Fingers already cold. I’d switch out the copper John I was using as a dropper along the bottom. I could feel my pulse quicken. It was a perfect evening, no moon, and a perfect fly, they would not be able to resist the flash of the white wings. Could almost feel the tug of a hit, imagine it, even as I was threading the eye and twisting the tippet and pulling it tight with my teeth.

  “Ow—fuck!”

  Hard pressed under my jaw the cold prod. Steel. I knew without thought that it was a gun.

  “Prince nymph, good choice. What I’d use, probably.”

  I couldn’t see him. He was behind me with the handgun held out and up against my throat. His voice was graveled, as if he hadn’t spoken in a while.

  “Can’t lose tonight. Nobody feeding up top, all gathered up in the deeper pools, idling, just waiting for that thing to tumble by.”

  His voice in the back of my ear. Could smell the chew on his breath, not a bad smell, Copenhagen. Couldn’t look though, couldn’t turn my head, because there was the cold muzzle hard against the bone. The quickening of my heart.

  “Hi, Jason.”

  A long silence while the snout of the handgun held pressure against my head.

  “Isn’t that civil?” he said at last. “Dunno. I’m thinking maybe you should say thanks.”

  “For what?”

  Slight push of the gun. So that I bent my neck, head away.

  “For not blowing up your shit right in the middle of the party, your hour of glory. Or after, while your girlfriend slept in the truck and you fished all night like you were on some fucking vacation.”