The Painter: A Novel

  I put out the half and half and honey, took mine, alternating with Sport, our spoons tinking in happy duet, picked up my Ugly Mug and leaned back, crossed my arms. The mug by the way is a bad picture of an ocean liner, don’t ask me. I was awake now, felt ready. Sport sipped, nodded, smiled, said,

  “You often fish in the middle of the night?”

  This time I did not let myself get thrown. I did not babble. I took a long sip of strong coffee looking at the greening base of the mountain out the window and thought, Virga. Not last night. Last night the rain reached the ground with a will, furious. Furious and glad. The way I would be feeling right now if Sport didn’t scare me. Well. Don’t be scared. Be yourself. Be honest. About the things you can be honest about.

  “Yes. Once in a while. My daughter and I used to do it pretty often. When there was a moon.”

  “Where’s your daughter now?”

  I put down the Ugly Mug.

  “She was murdered.”

  Sport’s mug stopped halfway to his mouth.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “She was fifteen.”

  He nodded. He drank, didn’t say anything. We all looked into our mugs.

  “There was a moon last night before the rain?”

  “I guess there was.”

  “Did you go fishing last night?”

  I shook my head, sipped. “Last night I slept.”

  “Your wading boots are puddling by the front door.”

  I blinked.

  “Rain,” I said. “Remember.”

  “They’re in under the roof, in your vestibule. Nothing else wet.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “After it poured I remembered I’d left my whole kit lying on the grass and over the stump. From the other day. Boots, waders, rod. Sometimes I just let it all dry out there. I thought fuck. In the middle of the night when I woke up to pee. So I went out and put them away. I mean it won’t hurt anything but it’s better to let everything air out.”

  “Good coffee,” Sport said. “What is it?”

  “Folgers. New whole bean.”

  He raised an eyebrow, grinned.

  “Tastes better when you take it out of a fancy jar.”

  “I’ll have to try that. Huh. But you brought your vest in?”

  That stopped me. Cocked my head, turned, slid the pot off the hot pad on the coffeemaker, gave us all a refill, the three cups, elk, cow, Titanic.

  “The vest by the door that’s flecked with old blood,” he said.

  Everybody stared at him. Everybody being me and Flattop.

  He sipped, little smile. “Fish blood, I’m guessing.”

  I turned, slipped the pot back onto the burner, mind jumbling. Turned off the pot’s red-lit power switch, flick, now brown and dead. Off. Same as blood. Red going on, then brown. Dell’s blood. DNA, all that. The picture of the man raising the club to strike the little roan for the third time probably to kill it. Hitching up the road fast as I could to take him down. Down into the ditch. I straightened, drew a breath, turned.

  “That’s a man’s blood to tell you the truth. Recent.”

  Flattop’s mouth actually opened.

  I wanted to see. If I could make Sport stop in his tracks. Reciprocate. Make him tick into a facial expression he hadn’t planned on. Catch his breath. Drain some of that runner’s blush from his boy’s cheeks.

  It worked. He had the mug coming down from his lips and he almost choked. Everybody knew what everybody was after, this wasn’t anybody’s first rodeo except maybe the kid deputy who, I noticed, had been watching the whole interview with a kind of awe.

  “Man’s blood? You don’t say?”

  “Yup. Outfitter named Dell Siminoe.”

  Now the kid actually choked. Hid it in a big cough, took a white kerchief out of his back pocket and wiped his brow instead of his mouth, stared at me, then his mentor. Like he was watching a tennis match. I smiled at him. A big honest smile, the first one since the two arrived. I wanted to laugh, but, funny thing, I didn’t want to embarrass the kid in front of Sport. Instead I topped off his cup, leaned back against the far counter, against the drawers next to the stove. Through the French doors onto the ramada, which were open to screen, I noticed the sun breaking over the cottonwood leaves, the big trees up on the ditch, the morning was cool and fresh and soon it would start getting hot. I loved this. The morning. The smell of the damp ground coming through the screen doors after night rain. Even having visitors, these visitors. I felt happy. Which was fucked up, thinking about it now.

  It was Sport’s turn to collect himself. He was too smart not to know what was coming. He just had to drink his coffee and watch it play out. I thought.

  “Dell Siminoe?” he said.

  “Yah. The reason you all are here. Because of the fight. Because I assaulted the man day before yesterday and gave him a bloody nose and I guess he’s just a big pussy and now he’s filing charges. Probably didn’t tell you he was in the middle of killing a little horse.”

  They stared at me.

  I thought he would say, Why don’t you start from the beginning. Thought now we could stop the foreplay and he would pull out a steno pad, one of those flip notebooks, all official now, and start writing. He didn’t. He said,

  “Dell Siminoe isn’t filing any charges. Dell Siminoe is dead.”

  Pause.

  “Murdered in cold blood.”

  Pause.

  “Thirty steps from seven bow hunters and a campfire.”

  Pause.

  “In the middle of last night.”

  Pause.

  “Would you mind telling us where you were last night? All of last night.”

  “RIP,” I said. I said: “Not really. Dead? Kinda hope he’s in the bad place. You think I killed him because I was mad enough to give the man a bloody nose?”

  All the time I was thinking, I wasn’t wearing the fishing vest. When I tackled him, when we fought. I don’t dress until I get to the creek. Thinking, wondering if the cowboy Stinky would remember that, the one I knocked into the road. Probably not. I’d have to go with it anyway. That was a gamble. I was not averse to gambling when I didn’t have to, so it was no stretch at all to roll the dice, go all in when I had no choice.

  “I don’t think anything,” Sport said. “We’d just like to eliminate you as a suspect.”

  “Huh,” I said. “I’ll bet.” Everybody’s gloves off now.

  “Why don’t you just tell us what you were doing starting, say, Thursday morning.”

  This is going to be fun, I thought. And wished Sofia wasn’t in the next room, just beyond that door, about to hear everything I was going to say.

  I was getting good at telling the story, this my third telling in two days, and I told it. A good morning painting. The girl leaving.

  Knocking the man into the dirt with my door and running as best I could up the road before the big man could kill the mare. Rolling in the ditch, Siminoe’s nose bleeding— He stopped me.

  “You say you were grappling and rolling when you felt his nose break?”

  I knew what he was after. The blood on the vest. It was flecked, spattered. Just like if you hit someone on the head, say, with a rock. A bloody nose rolling in a ditch would probably streak and smear, blotch. Well, you do the best you can. What if there were brain matter flecked there too? Well, I’d probably get good at learning how to order grease pencils and watercolor paper from Cañon City or Walsenburg, if they let you do that from max security. There wasn’t, wouldn’t be brains. Right Jim? Right. I’d hit him once with the flat side of a rock, hadn’t like smashed his head in, he probably died of drowning. Same as thwacking a trout: sometimes there’s a spray of blood, but never any brain. Probably because their brain is the size of a pea. Well.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Sport nodded, writing it down, taking me at my word, nobody lying yet except about when exactly we went fishing.

  “The girl?” he said suddenly shifting tack. “In the bedroom? She’s the
model you mentioned you were painting Thursday morning before you went fishing? Let’s see.” Began flipping back the pages of his pad.

  “Sofia.”

  “Sofia, right. Last name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He raised an eyebrow, wrote.

  “You said she left these premises some time around midday on Thursday, she was modeling for a painting and left, and when did she return?”

  “Yesterday morning.”

  “You called her?”

  “No.”

  “She came uninvited?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that the painting?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I take a look at it?”

  “Sure.”

  He got up. The young deputy got up. I moved around the counter fast, not sure why, to overtake them. Got to the easel first. Stood beside it like a kid at a judged show waiting for my ribbon. Sport smiled, genuine. His eyes moved over the canvas and I watched the picture overcome him, exactly the way the light that trails a cloud shadow overtakes a hillside. For a moment he was off the job, he was a spectator, an appreciator, he looked years younger. He smiled, said,

  “Have a name yet?”

  “An Ocean of Women.”

  Smile to a big grin.

  An Ocean of Women was maybe a great painting. It took the viewer to a lot of different places at once which a great painting can do. The first impulse on seeing the painting was to laugh, but at the same time a queasy feeling rose out of the depths, rose with the big sharks, swimming up to the surface: a tinge of fear: would the man make it? He looked pretty happy swimming but he also looked lost. He looked very far from anything like a boat or a shore, he looked a little like a man taking his very last swim.

  The kid stood uneasily before the easel, his hand on his holstered gun, blinking. I could tell he wanted to laugh, maybe the first time he’d seen an original painting ever, one that wasn’t painted by an aunt that had taken a How to Paint a Western Landscape by the Numbers class and hung it in the den next to the flat screen, he glanced at his mentor and relaxed, twitched a smile, studied the painting, dove into it, couldn’t help himself, his eyes roved from woman to woman wondering maybe how many the swimmer could fuck and still tread water. A good picture should do all of that. Invite the viewer in from just wherever he stood, lead him on a different journey than the person standing beside him. I loved that, watching different people watch a painting at the same time. Because that’s what it turned into: in front of a fine painting a viewer stopped looking and started watching, watching is more specific, watching is a hunt for something, a search, the way we watch for a loved one’s boat on the horizon, or an elk in the trees. Before a good painting they started watching for clues to their own life.

  Abruptly Sport straightened, sort of shook himself off, took two steps behind me to the wall, bent down and lifted the turned-back canvas. Flipped it around and held it arm extended, nostrils flaring at the fresh paint. The man hunched and digging a grave, four vultures or ravens watching.

  “Wow,” he said. “Diverse. When’d you paint this?”

  The stark and surprising shock of being violated, as swift and sudden as a hawk stooping out of the sky and strike.

  I let go the breath. As if Sport had been gently gyring, wings extended the whole time, lazy circles and siiiiiiiiiiiii—WHAM. A dangerous man. Far more dangerous than I’d thought or given him credit for. No point in lying.

  “Yesterday,” I said.

  “About what time?”

  “Maybe it’s time I get a lawyer.”

  He cocked his head and looked at me. The first time level. No BS, squared off, measuring. “That’s your right. Is that something you want to do?”

  “I don’t want to do any of this.”

  We looked at each other. He nodded.

  “Understood,” he said. “Could you ask Sofia to come out and talk to us for a second?”

  “No.”

  He nodded.

  “I think you two better leave,” I said.

  He nodded. Took one more long look at the painting, glanced at me again, this one honest and bleak, like: I have just looked into the heart of a murder and it raises the hair on the back of my neck, still—as many of these as I work I still can’t get used to it. Then he set the painting back down, carefully flipped it backside-out, fastidious, the way you do something distasteful and guilty, leaned it so the paint wouldn’t smear.

  “I wanted to be an artist growing up,” he said. “Then I got married.”

  He said it like he thought maybe he had made the right choice after all.

  “Thanks for the coffee,” he said, and went through the door. The big kid followed him, ducked his head at me, didn’t say a word, didn’t know what to say, looked like he’d been hit on the head with a cow.

  Sofia flew out of the bedroom. The second they left. It’s a small house. The bedroom is just off the main room with the long counter, the kitchen, their stools weren’t twenty feet from her listening head. The door flew open and she burst out naked.

  Most women would have dressed, armored themselves somehow with clothes. She felt stronger I think without them. She came out of the bedroom like a whirlwind, all tossing dark hair, all curves, all huge eyes flashing the five colors, and scents and something like a hum, a breathed song, a sigh, like someone singing to herself.

  She wasn’t singing to herself, she was finding her rhythm. She did that when she modeled, very low, didn’t distract me, and she did it now with an urgency. I was rooted to my spot between the painting and the front door.

  “You killed that sonofabitch? Last night?”

  She stood just more than an arm’s length away.

  “When you got up in the middle of the night? I felt you, I went back to sleep. Thought you were peeing. Heard the truck, thought you were gone a long time, too sleepy to wonder about it, figured you might be an insomniac, next thing I felt your arms around me.”

  She stopped, cocked her head the way she does, listening for something it seemed inside her. She was more beautiful right then than maybe any woman I had ever seen.

  “You killed him?”

  Not really saying it to me. To herself. Listening inside for how she felt about it. Then eyes on me. The eyes different colors, the colors shifting, the way pebbles on the bottom of a stream, the way the fast water is constantly moving the lances of sunlight.

  She said: “He didn’t say how. I guess he wouldn’t. That’d be giving a suspect inside information. Fuck. With a knife?”

  She shook her head. Like trying to clear her ear of water. She looked straight into me. Not only with her eyes, with all of her—her eyes, her breasts, hips, the sparse thatch of dark hair.

  “Well you better have a good fuck.” She said it exasperated, as if she didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. “You better store them up, who knows how long it will be when they get serious about you.”

  I stood there. Kind of transfixed. Watched her turn and walk bare-ass into the bedroom.

  Falling. Falling into her. Like stepping off a cliff and spreading arms and flying downwards. Didn’t matter to where. Because she would swoop up under me and carry me down. With Irmina maybe once or twice like this. Maybe not. Because she was always trying somehow to heal me, to make me better. Not now. Sofia let me fall. Met and wrapped and covered me and we went down together and I cracked open, not like hitting the bottom but like a chrysalis maybe, shuddered open all light and weightless and winged, blown skyward, hearing her with me with me—a cry—whose? No names no words, lost and falling upwards with her in blinding light. Like that.

  When it was over she touched her nose to mine.

  “You didn’t kill him did you?”

  I didn’t move.

  “You got up to pee once. And to get the gear from the truck, out of the rain. To hang it up. I heard you say that.”

  I didn’t move.

  “You were here in my arms all night, weren’t you? I don’t r
emember much about it do I? Do I?”

  I shook my head. Barely.

  “Because we were sleeping.”

  “We were sleeping.”

  II

  The search warrant was executed that afternoon. The bloody vest was enough for any judge and I knew it was coming. But I was careful not to touch it. Before they came I stood next to the hanging vest that smelled like fish and studied it from inches away, didn’t look like any pieces of brain. Like I said, I was pretty confident that the one blow hadn’t gone that far into the Simian’s brainpan. The blood? Where did all the blood come from? Must have hit and broke that vein that throbs on the temple.

  A squad car, a white van, and a plain white Crown Vic with Sport driving alone. Seemed like a lonely man, to me. Twice as smart probably as anybody in the sheriff’s office, twice as sensitive. Wanted to be an artist. Well.

  They didn’t take much. The vest, my rod, boots, waders. The light nylon sack with shoulder straps I sometimes use to carry lunch, a water bottle, extra pack of the cigars if I am going all day which I hardly ever do. They took photographs of the two paintings, first separately then side by side which I thought was pretty sophisticated. Evidence of a sudden shift in state of mind would be my guess. Premeditation. Sport asked us politely to stand outside, formal now, friendly still but making no effort to hide that this was a contest, a match and we were on opposite sides and he, beg your pardon, had every intention of winning. Watched him direct the tech to sample the clay under the truck in the frame, take an imprint of the treads on the tires, all four.

  Took maybe twenty minutes, the whole thing. When it was done he walked up to us where we were standing in the shade of a young cottonwood on the west side of the house. Not wearing the green shell anymore, too hot, had on a short sleeved button shirt but not business, more like what a surfer or climber would wear at a barbecue, but tucked in, a wide checked pattern olive and soft yellow, and brown loafers, all very casual. He walked up, nodded to Sofia, to me, a frank not unfriendly look as if we had been friends for a long time and didn’t have to pretend anything, said,