The Painter: A Novel (20 page)

With great effort and grunting he finally roused himself and came to the fence head down like it took all his will, and when I lifted the bucket he looked up at me and I swear his beady black eyes looked like they were crying. There were no tears, but that’s how they looked. I dumped it and he looked up at me again and nosed the food and barely ate. I was turning back to the shed when I heard the tires on the gravel and the cruiser pulled in. It was Finn, the sheriff who had arrested me once before. He looked ashen, stricken, and he took off his hat and stood like a man who had been hit by lightning and was just coming out of it. I thought he might need help.

He really loved Alce. He was the one who had picked her up when she was caught shoplifting a few months before, and he was the one who told me that her boyfriend was distributing X and other pills to his friends, if not exactly dealing, he was worried about
her. Everybody in town loved Alce. She loved to laugh with you and listen to what got you excited and then she got excited, too. She protected kids in school who got picked on. She gave away trout she caught to the old Chinese woman who lived alone down the block and couldn’t speak more than five words of English and looked forward to Alce’s fresh fish more than anything in her day or week. Alce was good to the bone.

He stood there in the yard and I asked him if he was okay and he said No, Alce is gone, and I said What do you mean
gone?
And he said she had been knifed to death trying to buy pot in the lot on Mission and I stood there then and couldn’t move. He put his hand on my shoulder, he tried to lead me inside but I was stone and he finally touched my beard, reached out and touched it the way a parent would and got in his car and left me in the yard. The next day I went out to feed Mittens, I wasn’t going to forget her best friend in my blind grief and he was lying out in the middle of the sunbaked pen, the part without shade where he never rested. Hey Mits, I said. Just the sight of him, her friend since she was little, was too much. I unlatched the gate and went over. He barely lifted his head off the dirt and he looked at me again, straight into my eyes, his eyes like wet black pebbles, like he was trying to speak to me, speak out of his animal muteness of something too big for his heart to bear and then he lay his head down again with a huff and he hardly moved the next day or the next, and two weeks later he died.

In Antonito there was a billboard for a railway trip along the Toltec Gorge, a painter’s rendition of a steam engine coming around a piney bend above a narrow rock canyon and it woke me up. Hey, hey, you are driving, it’s getting late, it’s dusk.

I had fished the Rio de los Pinos before. It’s the little creek that runs through the gorge. How those little streams make such a big impression. I had driven the long washboarded dirt road down off the plateau and parked at a little bridge. I had walked up into the walled canyon. I had fished with a peregrine gliding the wall just over my head, and later with the sun slanting down and backlighting the biggest hatch of mayflies I had ever seen, the light coming through a candescent mist of wings, and I caught more fish in an hour than I ever had before.

Some creeks you simply loved, and seeing the railroad sign with the craggy gorge reminded me that we can proceed in our lives just as easily from love to love as from loss to loss. A good thing to remember in the middle of the night when you’re not sure how you will get through the next three breaths.

I pulled off at the road I remembered and switchbacked down to the bridge and unrolled my sleeping bag just on the other side in some ferns. I fell into a dreamless sleep under a cloudy sky that smelled like rain. It sprinkled before dawn, barely wetting the bag. I folded the ground tarp over me and went back to sleep. Didn’t fish at daybreak. Threw my gear back in the truck and under a sky cleaned of clouds I drove to Santa Fe.

Once an interviewer on a radio show right on the dock in San Francisco asked me why, coming from a family of gypo loggers in Oregon, I had decided to paint. He was sitting on a stool beside me, and we were beneath a large window that looked from the Embarcadero out onto San Francisco Bay.

I used to get drunk before interviews like this, but this was eight a.m., a little too early for even me. The interviews tended to make me feel like a rabbit or a lamb caught above treeline at nightfall. Steve, who had just become my most important dealer and sort of my manager, swore he would cut me off and send my paintings back if I ever got drunk again on live radio or TV. So I was stone cold sober except for a one hitter I did openly in the green room with the window looking out to Alcatraz, and I shivered and tried not to follow the progress of a small white sailboat and a big white ferry moving obliquely toward each other on the choppy blue water—what a cool place to have a radio interview, right on the
dock—and I tried to think seriously about the man’s question. He was a good interviewer, warm and really interested and he seemed to have actually read some of the coffee table book about me that I was now promoting. He must have looked carefully at the images of my work on the gallery’s website. I could tell by his questions.

But this question stopped my wildly beating heart for a moment and stiffened my bristles and raised hackles I suddenly discovered I had. Maybe I was not a rabbit after all. If I was a little stoned before, I was not stoned now. I blinked. I turned from the imminent and beautiful sea tragedy that was unfolding out the big windows and stared at the man.

“What did you ask? Why does the son of a simple logger paint?”

“Yes,” he said smiling. “Why choose to be an outsider artist with all the vagaries of a fickle art market, the stormy uncertainties of creativity? I mean it is practically asking to be poor, at least for a decade or two in the best case, isn’t it? And your family can’t have much money to help, I read that you grew up in a trailer in the woods. Why choose art when you might have a decent and rugged living as a logger like your father?”

I stared at him and thought about my father who died on a forty degree slope under five tons of Doug fir when a choke cable snapped. For some reason right then I thought about his red Jonsered chain saw which had a thirty-six inch bar. How he had set it down still running on a big stump and turned to lift a canteen filled with tap water when he died. What his buddy Egger told me as he handed me the saw.

“I sharpened it,” he said. I thought about that. All Egger could say after sketching the scene was: I sharpened the chain.

“I think a lot of our listeners would like to know,” the interviewer was saying. “It seems terribly brave. Or reckless? I mean where you came from. Your father was practically illiterate.”

That I could tell was the question of the day. Was it reckless for the son of a gypo logger to aspire to be an artist. It was the recklessness that informed this
visceral, muscular, exuberant, outsider
art. How he had described it in the intro. I got it. How the art world worked: it was okay to be an outsider as long as you carried your spear and wore your loincloth, stayed primitive. Didn’t get any uppity ideas. He widened his smile until it was pressing against his cheeks.

I looked at him. I knew he would never ask the same question of a RISD grad. I had spent nights in jail because of men like this, men who condescended, who impugned. Getting in fights. I had paid fines, been on probation.

I said, “Is this show live? It is, right?”

Now it was his turn to blink. He didn’t understand, I could see it. But he held his smile.

“Yes, of course. That’s why we call it
West Coast Live
, ha!”

A flash of fear appeared in his eyes, there and gone, like the flank of a trout catching sunlight.

“Okay.” I nodded, in some kind of complicit agreement. I stuck out my hand, like for a handshake. He hesitated. He seemed relieved.

“Okay, a handshake,” he said. “Let’s shake on it. To the recklessness of the artist who is truly down out of the hills, and to the recklessness of live radio!”

He held out his long slender hand and I took it warmly like the fish that it was, and gripped it the way you grip a big brown to get the hook out, and then I squeezed. He chirped. Like a chipmunk. Then groaned. I squeezed.

He pulled away, then tugged, then he was half laughing half crying
Owww!
, okay okay
uncle!
, then he was kind of rearing back out of his stool and then he was howling and then I felt a bone snap, one of the knuckles in the first joint and he screamed, an unbridled uncensored live radio shriek, and in his panic he had knocked over the stool and two soundmen or whatever they were, stout guys in baggy jeans, shot across the floor and smothered me. They pulled me off and just half ushered, half shoved me out the double doors that led onto the bright atrium gallery and the wide steps. Nobody followed. No cops, nothing. I stood at the top of the steps with the blood pounding in my temples and looked down at the bustling crowd milling through the indoor market, the coffee shops and bookstores and restaurants, and felt the sun through the skylight warm on my shoulders and let the anger wash through me like warmed oil. A fine skim of anger on every working part until I didn’t feel it at all, except that I moved smoother, cleaner than I had in weeks.

I felt as if the ghost of my father were standing next to me, and he was laughing. Pop, I said out loud. Fuck the fuckers. Let’s go get drunk. And I bounded down the steps.

Why I remembered that now, driving through Española and onto the last stretch of highway into Santa Fe, I don’t know. Maybe it was because I was about to see Steve. For the first time in more than six months. I had been painting pretty well, through the
move to Paonia, and had been shipping the canvases from Delta, a few a week, mostly small, so he had been mollified, then happy, then thrilled, and he stayed off my back. The pictures were selling. I painted, sent off the canvases, didn’t think of Steve much. But now I did. Driving into the outskirts of Santa Fe and onto St. Francis Drive and down the long hill with the view of the town spreading its pink adobes under the piñon hills, driving like an arrow straight toward the gallery—now I did. Think of him and remember that fucked up and wonderful scene on the pier after which he called me and screamed into my ear,
You crazy motherfucker. You total embarrassment to the Taos School, whatever the hell that is, you blight on the community of artists of the American Southwest, you—you—you
—stammering, spitting I’m sure all over his phone—
you goddamn loose cannon, you—you—can dress him up but better not take him out—goddamn it, you basically redneck fucking freak—I LOVE YOU!

He loved me because all of San Francisco sat up and took notice. All of California. All of the Internet and the news channels and then the networks and CNN. They YouTubed and Twittered and the interviewer’s howl went viral. They replayed the scene on nightly news and I was a sensation and suddenly you couldn’t find a Jim Stegner painting anywhere, couldn’t touch one for less than five figures. I was a hero. Apparently it wasn’t only me who had been offended by the condescending, snotty tone of the man’s questions. It was class warfare, it was authentic, hardscrabble, bootstrap Truth vs. entitled, pedigreed, monopolizing bullshit. It was everything wrong with the art world, with the whole goddamn society for that matter, exposed in a raw scream. People loved it. They loved me. They bought my paintings. Steve was putty. It was right before I met Cristine and when she listened to the interview later she laughed out loud, and I could see that she was impressed: it was something she would do.