The Painter: A Novel

by Peter Heller

  How often is anything that simple?

  We lay in the coolness from the open door. I could hear the burble of the water running through cattails down into the pond. A cricket warming to the morning on the ramada. Her head was in the crook of my arm and I thought she might be asleep. This much peace vouchsafed to any one man. The luck of it. That’s what I thought. Drifting in it. And as I drifted I was open and careless in my thoughts and I bumped up against something barnacle sharp and ugly. Dellwood Siminoe, swinging the club against the little mare like she was a piñata. The candy spilling, and I knew the candy for him was the pain and terror of the other. Clotted and dribbling, then pouring onto the road in a shiny gush. How many terrified horses like that? Enough to make a business of shipping those broken to Arizona. What Bob told me.

  Fuck it. I pushed it away. Pushed my nose into the warm mass of Sofia’s dark hair, breathed it, pushed everything else away.

  I made omelets and we shared a trout, fried in butter with a little salt and pepper, lemon. Made another pot of coffee. Sat on the ramada.

  She said, “I thought of doing that a few times.” She smiled, her hand curled on my thigh. “Doing you.”

  “Really? When?”

  “When you were painting me.”

  “Workplace harassment.”

  “I know, that’s why I didn’t. I knew on some level it would have made you mad. I almost didn’t care.”

  We made love again. This time it was me who asked. Lying there again, on the bed, this time with heat, almost an oven heat, coming through the screen, and sweat instead of tears, I wondered how simple we really are. That we can do the same things again and again and again and find them interesting, even fascinating, and seek the repetition with a hunger as avid. How fishing was like that, and painting. And this time as we lay quiet and listening, our pulses coming through now and then like the drumming of a distant village, this time I kept the boat of my thoughts sailing along from one tack to the next on a course I could control.

  Somehow the day passed like that. We made more food, went for a walk to the far pond, I read her the lines from the Four Quartets I had copied down and stuck into the breast pocket of my Carhartt barn coat:

  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 don’t know, it made me feel better. Another way of saying, Keep it simple. You don’t even have to pray, just kneel where there’s prayer and I’m beginning to think there is prayer everywhere. I had written down another bunch of lines and tucked them in there, too—about how crazy hard is the journey of getting to where you have never been. That too rang bells for me in this new place, trying to paint something good. Sofia’s cell phone buzzed a few times and she finally picked it up and I heard her telling Dugar she wouldn’t be coming home for a couple of days, he could move in with that hippy chick from the orchard he’d been banging for who knew how long, she didn’t give a shit, and I stared at her, checking the checklist, was any of that okay with me, I mean she hadn’t said she was staying here, had she? But come on Jim, this is not your first rodeo, you know exactly where she’s staying tonight, but she hadn’t telegraphed or acted in any way like she wanted anything more than this, not one inch past what I could give freely. Right? Why don’t you try trusting her for a second?

  She rummaged through the fridge, the cabinets, began putting together a spaghetti dinner. Said her mother was half Italian. I took a small pre-stretched canvas from the stack against the wall, about two by three, and propped it on the empty easel. Picked up a piece of fiberboard and taped a flipped for sale sign over it and squeezed out turquoise, cobalt violet, white, a stiff white close to the lead white I can’t get anymore. Yellow. I wanted cool yellow. My favorite lemon yellow was used up, so I put out cadmium yellow light, which is not as sharp or cold. Good for now, maybe better. Terre verte, cobalt blue. Joyful colors.

  While she chopped garlic and heirloom tomatoes, while she hummed and sang, I painted a house. A small adobe house on an ochre hill, like this one, like mine. I painted a blue pond and sailing glad clouds, and I mixed the terre verte with cobalt violet and tinted it in half with the white to make the delicate undersides of the cumulus. I began to feel that gladness that can only come when I paint. I painted a crane-like bird hunched at the edge of the pond fishing. Then I painted a man in the garden, also hunched, leaning to a shovel digging. An intensity in the man. A garden? Yes. No. The dirt he threw grew into a pile. As I painted, I myself grew alarmed. The pile grew and grew, the man dug, until the hole could only be of a certain size, could only be one thing. I squeezed a tube of Mars black onto the palette and I painted birds: one two three four large night colored birds. Like that Carl Sandburg poem I had read the other day They have been swimming in midnights of coal mines somewhere. Except they were not crows. They were bigger, they were ravens, but big as vultures. Four in a line looking down off the roof at a man digging a grave. A man like me.

  I painted fast. Sometimes I painted so fast I did not see how it could be done. If I happened to look at a clock. Sometimes a big painting with a lot of elements in four, five hours. Or one. Or half. Sofia was humming, I could hear the bubble of boiling water. Smell sautéed onion, garlic, simmered tomatoes. In the time it took her to make dinner.

  We had no Italian bread, she had popped two slices of Sara Lee into the toaster. Could smell that too. Out the open double doors the mountain was catching the full brunt of the lowering sun. Every outcrop and rockslide, the quilt of the forests: spruce and aspen, juniper, oak, lit to sharper detail and warmed by the honeyed light. Sharpened and softened at the same time. One reason I could spend so much time alone up here, happily: could sit and absorb the two hours before dark every evening as if it were a pageant.

  But the picture on the easel. Somehow it spawned itself and somehow it felt, what?

  I felt guilty. Like the man digging the grave. I got myself, the bulk of me, between the painting and Sofia behind the long counter. As if I could cover it. She glanced up now and then as she worked and she seemed happy—happy that she was cooking, happy that I was painting, happy that it was a lovely evening and that we were doing whatever we were doing, happy maybe that it wasn’t at all defined. She did not seem to be focusing on the painting in particular when she looked, on the details, maybe it was a little too far away. It was a landscape with a figure, like so many. I stepped to the canvas and quickly lifted and flipped it and leaned it against the wall frame out, against a large piece of fiberboard I tore up for palettes. Leaned it at enough of an angle that the paint wouldn’t smear. And straightened.

  “Smells good,” I said a little too loud, a little too hearty. Her head came up sharply and she studied me for a second, curious, then went back to laying out plates. I went onto the ramada, lit up. What the hell was going on with me? I had never hidden a painting ever. A bug, a freight train, a trout, they had all seemed born more out of themselves than me, they deserved the simple respect of being. I could not remember hiding a painting from anyone, much less myself. Even the nudes that had so pricked Maggie. Because that’s what it felt like—hiding. I had turned the picture’s face to the wall so fast as much to hide its guilty expression from my own eyes. Strange. That’s one thing, I murmured. One thing we are learning to be sure of: life does not get less strange.

  “Ding ding!” she called happily. “Ding a ling. Pronta!”

  “Great,” I called. I called Great and didn’t feel so good.

  Watch it brother, I said to myself, and set the cheroot carefully on the arm of one of the Adirondack chairs. Watch yourself. Start lying this early and. It can’t be good.

  We hit the hay early, soon after full dark, must have been close to nine, and I asked her to rub my shoulders, and she did, and we fell asleep curled around each other. Me around her, looking out the screen door to the broad shadow of the mountain. She slept, the even breathing, d
eep, the twitches, sighs. A content sleep I envied. I could not. I lay awake, elbow against her hip and hand cupped over her breast. The weight of it. I lay awake and watched the heat lightning. Wondered what good would come of it. Had found a model I could really work with and now look: complication. Well. It worked for Wyeth and Helga, for decades, wasn’t it? Had never worked for me. I never needed a subject that badly. Fuck, Jim, way to go.

  I watched the heat lightning and small fleets of clouds sail over the mountain ridge, lit from underneath, pale hulls and dark in the rigging. The lightning shimmered and boomed without sound, a far off battle. Heat lightning is a funny name. I guess because it comes this time of year, in the heaviest, sultry nights. But the glimmers seemed cold, part of the same cold distance as planets and stars.

  Few stars tonight, just noticed. And then a minute later I saw why: as I watched the clouds scudding over the mountain’s shoulder, a bright white light flashed on the eastern ridge. Like hunters playing with a powerful spotlight up there. It wasn’t a spotlight, it was the moon. It flashed and then domed and it backlit perfectly the trees on the ridgeline, made of them a finely drawn fringe. I sucked in a breath. I hadn’t seen this, not since I’d been here. It rose, the moon, so fast it seemed to lift off like a big bright bird. Like a great egret rising out of the cattails, too big too white too slow. Too pure. The moon in that instant brought the mountain close, close enough it seemed I could reach out and touch the bristle of trees.

  The same moon was shining down on Santa Fe, on Irmina with her losses, who harbored nothing it seemed but compassion, on Steve, on whatever deals were hatching like red birds in his head. On the Box of the Rio Grande where the river was threshing pale and loud over the big drops, in the long pool where I had spread Alce’s ashes. On the bends of the little Sulphur where I had found some peace in the past weeks. On bow hunting camps and bronze grizzly bears.

  I lay watching the moon detach and distance itself from our troubled topography, and sail, it seemed, with some relief into the absences of space.

  The trout were probably wide awake like me tonight, finning the current at the edge of the riffles, feeding on the bugs haplessly lit.

  That is where my heart went. To them. To the cool water. The unburdened sounds of water flowing over rock, smooth water over smooth rock, roiled into a rough edged rush and burble that was also somehow soothing. Under the moon the whitewater would be rips and tears in the darkness, the pools black, or maybe black with the bright moon reflected there, the trout lost to sight but looking up themselves into a bright firmament. I cannot name it but my heart felt like that. All those reversals, rough to smooth and back again, light erupting in the dark and subsiding back to a blind flow where sound and smell and cold were more important. Where touch was. The thing about night, about dark: touch is most important. And lying there against the heat of Sofia I could feel the stones underfoot, the press and cold of the current.

  I, we, used to fish at night. Alce and I. Under a moon. We did well when we could rouse ourselves to do it. When we could be bothered to put on sweaters. There was something so magical about the two of us fishing a run together in the dark, barely visible to each other, throwing flies for fish we would never see until they leapt into the sere gaze of the moon.

  I slipped out of bed. Slipped my arm from under Sofia’s, kissed the back of her head, held the quilt in place as I moved out from under and felt the cold earth of the floor. Found jeans thrown over a rocker, the flannel shirt, dressed fast, stepped into clogs. Poured what was left of the morning’s coffeepot cold into a travel mug and went quietly out the screen door. Night warm enough, end of summer, but with a chill scent of fall. How can it be both? Cold and warm, I don’t know but it can. The five weight rod was in the back of the truck with the old felt soled boots, vest behind the seat, light waders over the side mirror where I had hung them yesterday. I felt between the front seats for a packet of Backwoods cigars, good, the foil pouch was fat, held four or five. I’d smoke them while I fished, one after another, and I looked forward to that as much as the fishing.

  Don’t remember much of the drive. Bumped over the railroad tracks at the edge of town. Turned along the length of the fruit packing shed. I remember glancing down Grand Ave, the short route out to the county highway, and that the digital bank clock read 11:32 and the town was dead. And I remember: straightening the wheel and continuing on, out toward the orchards. I shivered. I skirted the main street and instead went a mile further out of my way and took the black bridge over the river to the highway, took the windier, the prettier way around. Just wanted that certain quiet, I guess, that peace.

  There was one house along the road there, before the bridge, a big house, the doctor’s, and the rest was dark with orchards, and farms with long drives. The staccato tumps of the bridge a sudden drum-roll as the tires rolled over the planks, the sudden smell of water.

  That smell always stirs me. I felt excited the way I always am before a session fishing, also angry, also a little scared. What was I scared of? I would never say.

  In twenty minutes I turned off the highway and dropped down to the creek bottom where the lodge stood darkly, the reaching bear. Right there I turned off my lights. Because this is where the road turns to dirt and it gets beautiful, and there is the moon, and I like to navigate in natural light, acclimate eyes for fishing. Night vision. I also slowed, to make less rattle and rev, and I was careful not to touch the brakes, not to pulse the brake lights.

  Because at night there is a comfort in moving darkly. In slipping through, shadow to shadow. Can’t say why. Maybe because we were hunters, all of us. The way a cat moves in the shadows. Or a wolf. The instinctive safety in that. I know that when Alce and I went fishing at night I often did that: turned the lights off as we clattered along the river, eased off the gas. Maybe hoping to surprise a herd of bighorn or deer, or a great horned owl in the road.

  I wanted a drink. How many days, months now? I thought counting days in AA was obsessive, but could see that it might have saved my life. Well.

  The creek at night under the moon was just enough like the creek in daylight to be reassuring. There was the deadfall spruce that sieved the current with skeleton branches, churning a line of pale foam. There was the long pool above, a dark mirror of tree shadows and beacon moon. There were the gravel bars, chalky, shaped to the banks and swept into low moraines that divided the water. There the sky, softened as if by a thin fog of moonlight, filling the canyon. For a moment I forgot my preoccupation with the dark and drove up the road with that awe I felt before certain paintings in certain museums, the awe in which I disappeared.

  There was a pullout I had come to use when I wanted to fish this stretch of creek, just a widening of the road, but tonight I turned off just before it. I swung right into a rutted opening of thick willows into a small clearing where people had camped. Tonight I parked here, hidden, and tonight I pulled on waders and boots quickly and shut the door carefully with a quiet click. The warm comfort in moving like a ghost, being part of the night. Tonight I took the already strung rod out of the truck bed and barely checked the two flies, a Stegner Killer on top, a shiny copper John on the bottom, I didn’t really care. Pushed through the willowbrush holding the rod high over my head and out of the snagging branches like a brandished sword and stepped over the smooth stones and into the dark water with a relief and sigh. Stepped in up to my knees. The cold. Smelled woodsmoke trailing down from upstream with the current. Began to cast.

  Time past and time present. Whatever kind of time ruled the earth receded into the night shadows. I cast and cast and walked carefully upstream, sometimes the slow current of the pools up to my waist, sometimes taking to the bank to get a better angle on a piece of slackwater, throwing into the fast funnels between rocks, the boulders bleached by the moon and marking the course of the creek upstream the way a scattered herd of humped and silent beasts might mark a twisting trail.

  I followed them. Lost myself and followed them. Somet
imes I saw the bushy little fly hit and drift, sometimes I lost it in a silvering of current. When I got a strike—sometimes I heard it first. In the calm places. A gulp. A blip, the double note, nose and tail. And the rod tip bent hard, the shiver. And then the old euphoria. I know I talked to myself, to the fish—that’s it, you’re alright you’re alright, come up come up, off of those rocks, careful careful, that’s it—to him and me the same. I loved this, and in the lost time I worked in a trout I forgot the preoccupation of the predator, with stealth, with melding into the night, forgot myself, which is maybe how a true predator disappears, I don’t know.

  Released them all easily, no deep swallowed hooks, no snags, fishing as well probably as I have ever fished in my life. I reached into a side pocket of the vest and pulled out the foil pouch, unrolled it and dug out a soft cheroot, the vanilla scent heady, and stuck it between my teeth, just sucked it. Content with that.

  It must have been close to a mile. Around the third bend as I worked upstream I saw the firelight. It was thrown across the creek onto a backstop of shaggy trees, a high shifting flicker cut with shadows. And heard the laughter. Fuck. Of course. It was what? Friday night. Tomorrow the first morning of archery season, deer and elk. Everybody would be amped, nobody exhausted yet, cutting the edge of their excitement with booze and loud talk. I fished up. I fished. That’s what I was here for. Fished up until I could see the campfire through a scrim of willow and alder. Could see the three pale wall tents, the trucks, shapes of horses on a taut line. Could smell smoke, manure, burnt meat. A shout, raucous laughs,