The Painter: A Novel (10 page)

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. Sometimes 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,

That was not a cunt it was mud wallow!

Aw crap, Les wouldn’t know the difference if he was up to his neck in either one!

The fire popping, crack of a limb on rock, a stirring of sparks as someone threw it on.

If you fuckers are on good behavior we just might see what Les knows about cunts. Maybe Sunday
.

It was him, the voice. The shiver inside like hooking a trout but icy.

A couple of those gals from the Mill might come up and party with us. You seen ’em. Spirited. Do about anything after the fourth round. This is the pussy you dream about tonight while you got your dicks in your hands. Damn
.

Dell. It was him talking, a booming voice, coming up out of a gravel pit. Ugly, a little slurred. The image hit the group, onetwothreefourfive … counted seven, hit them like a gust of wind: the prospect of young women in tight skirts, tight jeans. Maybe that’s how he got so many return clients. For about a second, the quiet, and then the uproar, the overlapping claims and yells calling bullshit, calling out the shit they would do with a girl that would do anything, more loud laughter. I scanned and found him at the edge of the group, a hulking shadow on the creek side of the fire, bigger than I remembered. He was shaking his head. I saw him tip it back and drink, pass the bottle, holding a beer in the other hand.

Dell!
one called from the other side of the fire. A sallow face, unshaven, hollow in the cheeks leaning into the uneven light.
Kip thinks you should call one now. One or two. Call that one called herself Trina. That skinny one likes to dance
.

Laughter.

Another voice, deeper, out of the shadows, said,
You all need to take a chill pill and focus. Get some rest. Goddamn
.

Use the sat phone
, another said, ignoring the voice of reason.
The one we got for emergencies. Like this
.

More laughs.

Dell gestured with the can like he was swatting away a fly.

You all just fill your orders this weekend. You’ll get it when you get it
.

He hitched himself tall.
Jason
, he said, almost shouting.
Keep an eye on Tyler will you? Make sure he don’t fall in the damn fire? I’m gonna piss in the creek, see if I can make a trout drunk
.

He turned and swaggered away from the light.

I couldn’t keep my eyes off him. I went still, barely breathed. You are fishing, night fishing, fish on. Before he sees you. No. I couldn’t move. It was like I was paralyzed. He was a big man, even bigger than I remembered, bigger than me, which few men are. He dropped the can of beer as he walked and I could hear by the sound of it hitting the stones it was partly full. A big man in a dark colored Carhartt coat, unzipped, a baseball cap. Broad shouldered, a gut, heavy in the legs, walking with a hitch. I have hunted a little and I did not watch him that way, moving unevenly to the bank, his shadow thrown on the rocks by the moon and thinned by the fire. The way you watch a deer moving or an elk. And my heart was not hammering the same way, the way it does when you are hard against a tree, pressed into the bark for steadiness. The stillness, the long drawn breath, the leaning into a future where the gun bucks and the deer falls. Not like that. Not expectant, not excited. The ice of my focus took the heat out of it. For once I did not feel blind.

The scrim of willows went almost to the water. I watched his progress through the leaves more the way a cat watches a bird. Utterly stilled. The line between us a thread of simple attention, as taut as a line can be without breaking. He got to water’s edge, a cutbank maybe two feet above the current. He cleared his throat, coughed, spat, shrugged up his shoulders to unzip. One of the hunters was yelling
C’mon! You ain’t never come near that and don’t say you
did!
Peckerwood accent, probably Arkansas. Laughter. Someone turned on a boom box. Old Little Feat,
Dixie Chicken
. Well. Pretty good music. He was less than fifteen feet away, partly turned, I could see his back, his right ear, the curve of his cheek. The oak leaf pattern of the camo on his cap and hear the stream of urine hitting the slow water. Slide guitar, taunts, bottle breaking.

The whimper of the mare like a human baby, eye rolled back, absolute terror.

Leaned the rod against a branch, squatted, felt the fit of the smooth rock in my hand and stepped out fast.

He turned and the piss spattered against the leg of my waders.

“Matt? What the— Oh—”

Face lengthening in recognition.

“You!”

He couldn’t wait to finish it, me. His hand went to his waist and came up with a hunting knife which flashed with firelight and in the same instant I swung. I swung as hard as he had swung at the little horse and the rock caught the side of his right eye the temple and a crush louder firmer than breaking eggs and a warm prickle pattered my face and I shoved with my left hand and the knife clattered onto stone and he splashed into the creek. Face down.

I pivoted and threw the rock as far as I could downstream and heard it plash, and before I picked up my rod I made sure he had washed to the bottom of the pool, into the rocks there half submerged and that he was still face down. I thought I saw his arms moving, spastic. Not too late. I could. I stayed. I watched until I
was sure the only movement was the back and forth rocking of the pulsing current.

Slow, slow down. Breathe. I stumbled back of the brush and made myself take my time. They were all drunk with cognitive abilities further smitten by dreams of easy women. They wouldn’t bother about him for an hour probably, then figure he hit the cot in his personal tent early, was it early? No it was late, and he’d be the first up, rousting the cook and graining the horses. If he did that. Probably not, probably fed them only dusty second rate hay. Anyway, if he wasn’t in his bed and someone noticed they’d figure he was tugging it off in the trees, or passed out on a hummock, he was a big boy, let him sleep it off. Wouldn’t miss him till morning. So I hiked downstream slowly, the last thing I wanted to do was twist an ankle.

I kept to the game and fishermen’s trail along the bank. The trail pushed through the thick brush and dark open groves of virgin firs and pines, footfall soft on needles there and scented. Threaded back to the bank. At a long pool with a flat and stony bar I knelt and dunked my head in the icy water, scrubbing and scrubbing my face and hair with both hands, dunking again. The fine patter had been his blood. I waded in up to my waist and let the current wash the waders. Picked up the rod again and walked. Wanted to light the cigar bad but didn’t. Wanted a drink, didn’t have one. Was tempted to throw some casts and fish the bottom of the pool, like if I fished, like if I picked up the routine where I’d left it off, fishing under the moon, watching the molten light twine in the flats and unravel in the riffles, if I did that then I could pretend that thing between hadn’t happened. Did I want that? To pretend? No. I wanted to hoof it downstream and get to the truck and didn’t know beyond that.

I did. I must have dropped the rod in the truck bed less than twenty minutes later. I climbed in, wet wading boots and waders and vest and all, and started it up and backed around in the little clearing where the reverse lights wouldn’t be visible from the road and rolled slowly out onto the packed clay of the track, accelerated smoothly and not too fast, and hit the pavement in ten more minutes and goosed it. No lights at the lodge and cabins but security lights. Desolate. Not another car. Lit the vanilla sweetened cheroot with the dash lighter and drew on it hard and let the smoke get sucked out the open window.

At Stoker no one. Just the strung white lights of the coal conveyors, the towers. It was well into the graveyard shift, no one coming from town. Pulled my shirt up to my chin anyway, lowered head and cap brim and drove through. Passed the turnoff to Grand Ave and took the back road again over the black bridge, and where the sign at a drive said
OLD BRIDGE ORCHARDS
and the woods in the bottom were thickest I turned in. Just a hundred feet. I had been here last week to buy peaches and remembered a tractor yard on the right, a Mexican filling up a spray tank from a hose and hydrant. I pulled in, shut the lights, the motor, listened for the barking of a dog—none. Could see the orchard house up the hill above the rows of apple trees, one window lit. Could smell late summer roses, a hedge here somewhere. Everything still, all at peace.