by Larry Watson
Henry turned his back to the bar, and with both hands held his rifle overhead. He raised his voice so all the patrons of the Top Deck Tavern could hear him.
“Can I have your attention? I got a Winchester thirty-thirty here I’m willing to sell to the highest bidder.”
A man at a table near the window shouted out, “What’s the matter, Henry—won’t your wife let you out hunting no more?”
Henry ignored him. “Those of you know me know I take care of my equipment. The man who buys this rifle will get himself a clean gun that shoots true and has never jammed.”
A cigar smoker sitting a few stools away from Henry said, “If it shoots so goddamn straight, why’re you selling it.” He didn’t pose this as a question, and his companion, the only man in the bar wearing a tie, said, “A fellow hard up for cash and in a hurry. Always a bad combination.”
The bartender wiped off the bar where only a moment earlier the rifle had lain. He inspected his rag as though he expected it to show a stain of gun oil. “Suppose I bid a buck,” he said confidentially to Henry, “and that’s the only offer you get.”
Over his shoulder Henry said, “Then you got yourself a rifle and I’m a dollar richer.”
“Jesus, Henry. You could just as well give it away.”
“If it comes down to it, Owen, I might do exactly that.”
From the end of the bar, a man sitting alone said, “What the hell. I’ll give you fifty dollars for your rifle.” If it weren’t for the voice—as deep and casually precise as a radio announcer’s—you might have thought, as you squinted through the Top Deck’s dim light, that this offer came from a boy, so slight was the figure perched on the stool.
“Maybe you’re joking, mister,” Henry said, “but I’m bringing this gun over to you and I expect to get paid in return.”
“For Christ’s sake, Henry,” Owen said. “You don’t want to do this. If you’re strapped for cash, there’s other ways.”
Henry looked down at the Winchester as if he were contemplating an object that already belonged to another.
“I could help you out myself,” Owen said.
“If you want to help me,” Henry said, “offer me fifty-one dollars and take this gun out of my hands.”
Meanwhile, the short man at the end of the bar had climbed off his stool, taken out his billfold, and was counting off fives and tens on the bar. “And that’s fifty.” He knocked on the small stack of bills and then spread his arms wide.
Henry walked over and extended the rifle. “Mister, you bought yourself a Winchester.” He swept up the bills and without counting them stuffed them into the front pocket of his dungarees.
The rifle’s new owner hefted the gun and tilted it back and forth the way a tightrope walker might hold his balancing pole.
Look here, Henry wanted to say, you buy yourself a rifle you don’t want to check its weight; you want to bring it to your shoulder, peer down its sights, work its action.
Instead, this slight, wiry man dressed in a white shirt and paintsplattered khakis leaned the rifle against the bar, and then stepped back and cocked his head as if his main concern were with how the blue-black steel caught the light. When he lifted it again, he picked it up by the barrel and passed the bore under his nose. “It’s been fired recently.”
Maybe this fellow knew guns better than Henry thought. “I wanted to make sure it was firing properly.”
“Why would you have any doubt?” He laid it back down on the bar and picked up his drink.
The man had a way of locking you in with his narrow-eyed gaze and holding you longer than you liked. Now he arched his eyebrows as if he expected Henry to blurt out a confession that would reveal his real reason for firing the rifle. I only killed a maple tree, mister.
“You can sight it in all you like,” Henry said. “It’s always going to shoot a tad high.”
“What was all that talk about straight shooting? Was that just advertising?”
“It shoots straight. Just a little high.”
“Whoa. Take it easy. You don’t have to defend your rifle’s honor. I don’t give a damn if it shoots around corners. I have no interest in firing the thing.”
“What do you want it for then?”
The man regarded the rifle once again in that head-cocked way. “I’m going to paint it.”
He glanced down at the streaks, smears, and splatterings of white, gray, brown, black, yellow, and green paint on the man’s trousers and tennis shoes, and then Henry drew a breath and asked the question, though he dreaded the answer. “What color?”
“What color? What color? Jesus Christ, I’m not going to paint the goddamn gun; I’m painting a picture of it.”
Henry nodded in relief. “And why my rifle?”
“You mean mine.” He tossed back his drink, then cracked an ice cube between his teeth just the way Henry’s mother used to do back in her drinking days. “I wanted the history.”
If Henry hadn’t felt so embarrassed over his question about painting, he might have asked, What history? Instead he said, “Like you say: It’s your gun. You’re free to paint it with red and blue polka dots, if you like.” He chose those colors because they did not appear on the man’s pants.
When Henry left the Top Deck, he did not go directly home. He walked along Gull Road, past the Loch Lomond Resort and the new golf course. He remembered another walk after giving up a gun. . . . Henry’s father had confiscated Henry’s rifle the day before deer season opened because Henry had left it out unsheathed overnight. One afternoon Henry’s friend Phil Trent came over, and by the time the boys had finished looking at the French playing cards that Phil had borrowed from his father’s dresser drawer, Henry had forgotten about his gun. The faint blush of rust on the barrel did not magically appear during the night, but that sign of neglect was exactly what caught Henry’s father’s eye. He made Henry put the rifle in a storage locker in the cellar. On the opening day of deer season, Henry was up before dawn, and by the time the sun rose, he was out walking, weaponless, as the first shots were fired.
He could not see a single hunter, but Henry believed that with each gunshot he could name the particulars of the situation—that deep boom, a noise like a heavy wooden door slammed on an empty church, was a shotgun rifled for slugs and likely fired from that stand of tamarack bordering the east orchard; that sharper krang, a plank dropped from the scaffolding of a house under construction, issued from the stone wall separating Blander’s land from Otley’s; and that blam-blam-blam series, a screen door banging in the wind, probably came from an inexperienced hunter up on the ridge, someone shooting down at a deer running for the trees. That was the autumn of Henry’s fourteenth year, and though his father returned the rifle to Henry’s hands one year later, in time for deer season, Henry had always felt a vacancy in his life where that lost season should have gone.
Henry supposed he should head home, but he had trouble making himself move in that direction. The sun was low in the west, and if he stayed on this road, he would soon find himself climbing the rocky bluffs that looked down on the bay. So he had choices. He could keep walking and enjoy the view. He could return to the Top Deck—after all, he had fifty dollars in his pocket. Or he could go back to his family, to a waiting meal, though the potatoes that Sonja had boiled were surely cold by now. In another minute he’d turn around. . . . He kept thinking—as he looked out at the ashy brown-black of the tree trunks, the bone white of the rocks, the yellow-green of the grasses and leaves—of the painter’s trousers. He must have been painting a scene similar to the one Henry was contemplating—how could an artist resist it?—yet there had been no streaks of blue on the man’s pants. Where was the water? Where was the sky?
In the painting, the rifle barely shows. A window at the front of the house is open, and the curtains billow outward, as if the wind has found a way to reach inside the house and pull out the tattered lace. Through that window a table is visible, and leaning against the table, the rifle, only the tip of
its barrel revealed. But really, one would have to stare at the painting a long time before noticing the rifle at all. It is the deer that captures the eye, the dead deer hanging head down from a tree branch. The season is obviously autumn, but perhaps the year’s last warm day—hence, the open, unscreened window. Leaves, all shades of ocher, litter the yard, and the wind has swept—is sweeping, for a few leaves hover in the air—some of them into a little pile under the deer, so it appears that once the animal was split open, leaves tumbled out.
4
Winter still—yes, that was both how and when Weaver first saw her.
He had been in his gallery sorting through a series of landscapes— few of them his, and those only watercolors he had done years before— and when he came out, she was there, a brushstroke of scarlet amid all the surrounding shades of gray, dun, rust, and ash. She was sitting on a boulder, staring down at the ice-locked little bay that gave Fox Harbor its name.
As Weaver approached her—she was hatless and her red duffel coat was unbuttoned, though the northwest wind was blade-sharp and each gust tore loose a few snowflakes—she did not look his way. Yet she had to see him coming. He walked right along the edge of her field of vision, but her gaze was as frozen as the harbor and she was as motionless as the rock she sat upon. Winter still.
“I remember a year not so long ago,” he said, “when they were ice fishing out there on Easter Sunday. In April.”
When she turned to face him, Weaver almost walked away in disappointment. He wanted her for his subject, yet when he saw her full-on—the high forehead and prominent cheekbones, the square jaw, the wide-set, downturned eyes, the upper lip fuller than the lower—he thought, I’m too late; another artist has already created this work. A sculptor chiseled her from stone and set her upon stone, here on a wind-blown hill above water as still as stone. And then he gave her an expression as blank as stone . . .
But statues do not wear red coats. Nor do they pull back and plait their hair, hair the color of the bur oak leaves that hang on through the winter. And the faces of statues do not redden and chafe in the wind and the cold.
“A winter like this one,” Weaver went on, “I wonder if it might just hang on. April, May—we’ve had snow in those months. June, July— maybe this is the year winter won’t leave.”
And what did she think of the man who stood before her, yammering on in so inconsequential a way? Surely she saw in him no threat. Even in his work boots, Weaver did not top five and a half feet, and in build he was thin-boned and slender. His haircut was a schoolboy’s, his steel-gray thatch close-cropped. The face, however, was a man’s, tanned, gaunt, and riven from days of sun and wind and nights of whiskey and tobacco. While he waited for her to finish her appraisal, Weaver burrowed in the pockets of his peacoat for his cigarettes and lighter.
He twisted away from the wind to light his cigarette, and when he came back, she was fixed once again on the frozen harbor.
Very well. Weaver would forgo any further attempts at smiling charm or weather chitchat. “Do you know who I am?” he asked.
“I know.”
“Who? Who am I?”
“You’re the artist.” She lifted her chin in the direction of his gallery. “The painter.” A tongue tap at the th, the vowels forward, a little lift on an odd syllable—Scandinavia? Sweden, perhaps?
“That’s right,” Weaver said. “And I’d like to paint you.”
She did not giggle. Neither did she blush or look away or stammer a response. All good signs.
“I mean it. This is a serious proposition. Come to my cabin sometime.”
“For money?”
Weaver drew deeply on his cigarette. He exhaled hard and watched to see how close to her face the wind would blow the smoke before it diffused in the frigid air.
“If that would be the only circumstance under which you would pose, then yes. For money. Certainly for money.”
Was she about to answer? Over her shoulder, Weaver saw a young man and a little girl approach. They came from the direction of the Lutheran church, and they were dressed for services, he in an ill-fitting dark suit and she in a pale-green gingham dress and white shoes. Her new Easter outfit. But her dress hung below the wool coat that she had outgrown and that would need to be replaced before next winter. Weaver guessed she was about seven or eight. The color of her hair and the geometry of her jaw—she was without doubt her mother’s daughter. But her father’s as well. She wore the same unguarded, ready-to-smile expression as the tall, wide-shouldered man at her side.
The woman must have noticed where Weaver’s gaze had gone, and she turned quickly. When she saw the man and child, she climbed down from her rock and joined them. She put one arm around her daughter, linked the other with her husband’s, and together they walked away from Weaver. The husband, however, kept glancing back over his shoulder and finally tugged his arm free to wave to Weaver.
Then it came to him—this was the young fellow who had been so desperate to sell his rifle that day in the Top Deck Tavern. Weaver wondered if that desperation had anything to do with his wife’s refusal to enter church. Of course it did. Desperation did not enter one room of a family’s house and stay out of the others.
Weaver smoked and waited until they were out of sight. Then he walked over to the rock and put his palm right where she had sat. Of course, granite had no properties that would allow it to hold any of her body’s heat. . . .
And to think she preferred this surface—rough, hard, and almost as cold to the touch as if it had been chipped from a glacier—to the warm, dark pew where her husband and daughter had sat through the last hour. For his part, Weaver preferred a faith founded on a rock like this one.
5
This was the wager Harriet Weaver made with herself as she watched from the second-story window: If the woman standing at the bottom of the driveway came up to the house by way of the rutted track on the left, Ned would take the woman to Paris. If she chose the right track, they would visit London. If she walked the grassy mound between, she would do no better than New York. Most certainly he would take her to Chicago. But if she wanted more, she had only to set a foot forward on the right, left, or middle path.
Yes, Chicago was assured, as much a part of the pattern as the art itself. Pencil first. Rapid sketches in pencil and perhaps charcoal, lines hardly enough to flatter. But then a few would be washed in with watercolor. More sketches, possibly a pen-and-ink drawing, and in the cross-hatching she might see how close her shadows were to her sunlit spaces. Finally, if she made it that far, oils. And if something in her remained uncaptured, perhaps he would move back through the entire process. The next time, however, each rendering might be sparser, more austere, as he put more pressure on each individual line or stroke, asking it to reveal as much of her essence as possible.
And how would Harriet remember the terms of her wager? It was simple—the track on the left was the trip to Paris. Paris, famous for its Left Bank, the site, oddly enough, of Harriet’s happiest night. And what a quiet, unadorned set of hours it was, if any hour spent in Paris can be said to exist without adornment. It was May, and they walked from their hotel—back then they stayed at the tiny Hotel Antinea on rue Cujas—to Violon, their favorite restaurant, for a meal they could barely afford. After dinner, in the soft, everlasting light of a Paris spring evening, they simply wandered through the streets near the Sorbonne. Ned never spoke of art or ambition, and he never stopped touching her, whether it was to hold her hand or drape his arm across her shoulder and caress the top of her breast. And when dark finally fell, back at their room, after lovemaking, Harriet stood at the window, looking out at the empty street. From the window box the smell of geraniums and fresh dirt rose to her nostrils. He came up behind her and pulled open her robe, under which she wore nothing. She tried to scold him and cover herself, but he would have none of it. From her thighs to her throat, his hands slowly traveled. The curtain’s open, she protested, and Ned said, What of it? Let all of Paris see what�
�s mine.
The month was May, she was sure of that, but what was the year? It was before the girls were born—if nothing else, the way she remembered her body told her that. They had no money. Ned had no fame. My God, shouldn’t she be able to recall more than the month when her happiness was at its greatest height?
If she won this bet she made with herself, her reward, Harriet decided, would be a meal of Ned’s favorite foods, not a particularly easy thing to do since food gave him so little pleasure. But she recalled that once he admired a roast duck that Sheila Hartwick prepared—or was he merely flattering Sheila?—and on their Friday-night excursions to the Ship and Shore for boiled whitefish, Ned frequently ate nothing but cherry pie. So, Harriet would roast a duck and bake a cherry pie.
Since eating this meal would mean she had won her wager and would therefore be eating alone, Harriet would indulge herself. She would eat only the breast of the duck, and even then, if so much as a single bite was in the least stringy or dry, she would throw the rest away. With the pie, she would break through the center of the crust and spoon out as many mouthfuls of the tart cherries and sweet syrup as she liked. When she tired of it, the rest of the pie, tin and all, would go into the garbage. Others might gratify themselves with excess; Harriet’s extravagance would be waste.
She was tempted to make another bet—how long from this date would it be until the results of her first wager played out?—when the woman at the bottom of the hill suddenly turned and began to walk back the way she came. Her stride was long and purposeful, yet for all the vigor of the woman’s forward motion, the thick braid that hung down her back swung from side to side.
