The Painter: A Novel (28 page)

I drove up Double Arrow, let myself in at the gate, parked in the gravel circle and knocked. In a minute Julia answered. Her face was lit with surprise. She laughed, the high bell-like laugh that must have been one of the reasons Pim married her.

“You are back? So soon? Do you need another look at the girls or did you just come for some more espresso?”

She was wearing running shorts and shoes and a St. John’s College t-shirt that must have been Pim’s. No makeup, mother of pearl stud earrings, she was lovely.

“I have a surprise for you.”

A flicker of uncertainty crossed her face.

“What? Another surprise? I don’t know if I can take any more, Jim.” She laughed. “Did you bring more candy?”

“No, something else.”

I went to the truck. Her eyes followed me. I unlatched and raised the door in the rear of the topper and lifted the painting out of the bed.

“Oh, pawww! Jim, you can’t be serious? Come in, come in, I’ll get the girls. You remember the kitchen—”

She was off. There, then gone like a bird off a limb. I held the canvas by the stretchers and carried it into the bright kitchen and leaned it against the table where the girls had posed. The bomb victim doll was now head first behind a banquette pillow, and the tiara was under the table, but there were new toys, a pink princess convertible on the table edge about to pull a Thelma and Louise, and a large plush dolphin, about a quarter scale, in the middle of the floor. The girls were into sea life. I heard a clatter, an excited clamor of conversation and the swing door pushed open and in tumbled the three of them. The girls were wearing matching lilac capri pants and plaid light cotton hoodie jackets. Like something you’d wear after a session surfing. Everybody seemed ready for action. They saw me and squealed. Couldn’t help themselves. With delight. Ran to me, skidded to a stop a foot away and yammered over each other. I have to say that just then I felt happier than I had in years. Better. I felt good, I mean like a good man in a good world, like the sunlight slanting through the big windows was also warming our spirits. I turned my pockets inside out.

“No necklaces, no gum.”

The girls exchanged a quick look as if seeking permission to forgive me. The answer was simultaneous and seemed to be Yes.

“But. I have something else.”

I pointed behind them. They turned. They had their mother’s panache with exclamation. They released a high chirr like startled birds, then stood stock still and their mouths fell open in unison. Their hands came unconsciously together and their eyes widened. For a perfect moment they took it in, their delight about to take wing. Then
Crack!

A clay pot shattered off a shelf above us.

Stung cheek, raining bits, sharp, pottery clattering over the floor, another pot exploding off the shelf, crack, gunshot, unmistakable. The airless hum. My hand to face, bloody, blinking, the girls screaming out of the sudden caesura and two neat holes in the plate glass in front of us, the garden sunlight altered there, swirling, tiny vortexes of shadow. Holy fuck. All this in a flash and I bent and grasped, picked up both girls as I spun and hunched and covered them, covering, on my knees now and pushing all of us back behind the granite island, down onto the floor and sliding backwards, somehow pulling Julia down with us. The girls wailing, Julia making a breathy keening, a stream of questions in French I didn’t understand, her hands everywhere, under us, on the heads of the girls. Everyone shaking, pushed back now into the farthest corner of the room, pushed over the clay tiles with a bunching runner carpet and shards of blue pottery, back behind the counter, one tiny hand clutching my beard, another poking my right eye trying to hug my neck. Okay okay. Above, down the wall I saw a portable phone.

“Stay, stay!” I breathed. “Stay, just a sec.” Released them all long enough to lunge up for the phone, grabbed it and back, punching in 9-1-1 as I covered them again.

“Talk to them,” I whispered to Julia. Why was I whispering? I pressed the phone to Julia’s ear, her eyes just focusing.

“Talk to them. Stay here. I’m going to get this thing away from here.”

“Non! Non!”
She almost hysterical, pleading, gripping my shirt.

“No, please. It’ll be fine. He’s not coming back. Talk, talk to them, now!”

Her tearstained face, nodding.

I half stood. The line of fire from the window could not touch them here in the corner. Plus the counter. Okay for the moment, they were safe. Fuck. I moved fast, as fast as I could, through the swing door and down the runnered hall and out to the main entrance and pressed into the jamb of the front door and shoved it open. Nothing. I could see the flower garden at the corner of the house outside the kitchen, all golds and yellows and flecks of blue, and a stretch of buffalo grass lawn gently sloping away from the house to the pines, he had been shooting upward, barely, he had missed because of the angle probably and the hard reflections of flowers and sky off the window.

From where I stood to my truck in the drive, from where he must have been, there was no angle. Except the first ten feet across the gravel. I took a breath and ran.
CRAACK!
Thud into stucco behind me. You fucker. You’re getting old and slow goddamn you. Goddamn you for hurting those little girls. Trying to.

I pulled open the door and clawed out the .41 under the seat and grasped the grip and shook off the rag and moved back to the
rear of the bed and gripped the pistol in both hands, edged to the corner of the tailgate and looked around it. Flash in the trees, off glass his scope just at the expected spot. Forty yards. I jerked back, took a breath, visualized the target and then swung around the tailgate and pulled off two shots. Silence. A lazy shirr in the pines like distant water. Could smell the tang of them, the warm-bark afternoon peace of them. Silence.

The fucker maybe didn’t expect me to be armed. Why not? I waited, put one eye around the back of the truck. He would have to cross open space to do more harm, to get to anyone in the kitchen. He would be counting down, he would know there was a call to 911. Silence. The fucker. Three ways off the mountain from below the gate. I counted to two hundred, more, and then I heard the cough of a starter, rev, the rattle of a truck through wind and trees. And then I saw the dust rising through the pines down at the end of the driveway. Diesel. It was diesel, the growl. It was him. Not an El Camino but a big diesel pickup. Barn burner, assassin. I looked down at my hand, the hand holding the gun, and it was shaking like an aspen leaf and my heart was pounding in my ears like a bongo and I could feel a trickle of blood running off my cheek into my collar.

Cold rage. Cold and dry and sharp, a honed and frozen blade, unstained by pity, by any sentiment at all.

The cops came. I heard them three minutes before they arrived, in a snaking convoy. My gun was a revolver so there was no brass in the driveway. I wrapped the gun and tucked it back under the seat. Five cars, an ambulance, a fire truck. Wheezy got out of his own unmarked cruiser. He still had the air of a man who can’t get over the antics of the species, but now he had an edge of real worry,
the first crack in his impeccable jocularity. He went straight to Julia and when they were done talking he came to me where I was leaning against my truck. I told him everything in four minutes except—Some instinct. Didn’t want him to know I had a gun. So I didn’t mention the part about me shooting back and he wrote it all down and licked his lips and glanced up at me and said,

“Why did you run to your truck? To get something?”

That got my attention. He saw it.

“Nope. To draw him away from the girls.”

He nodded, studied me.

“You in possession of a firearm?”

“You mean, like my .41 magnum?”

I thought: Might as well, they would know I had it anyway, bought and registered in Portland, Oregon. My other guns were back at the house, which they surely also knew.

“That one, yeah.”

“I got rid of it. A while ago.”

He moved his lips around, seemed disappointed. In me. That hurt, ow.

“Happen to remember when and where?”

“Nope. Must’ve been one of my drunks. I lost it.”

He nodded. He mustered a smile, seemed sad.

“Wherever it is, maybe it should stay there. I don’t want any more killing in my town. I have too many other fun things to do.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Mrs. Pantela says the first thing you did after shots were fired was cover the girls.”

He nodded. “That makes sense. Other stuff doesn’t add up. Know what I mean?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Okay,” he blew out at last. “You want to go, huh?”

I nodded.

“You want security? No? I knew the answer. That self-sufficient streak. I’d like to lock you up right now, Mr. Stegner, for your own good. For everyone’s.”

That stung.

“I wish you’d call me Jim.”

“You can go whenever you want.”

I went back into the kitchen. The girls, thank God, and Julia, had not been hit by any shards of the pots, at least not anywhere exposed, and when the twins saw me I had a moment of panic, I thought they would reject me, the horrible cause of everything, but kids’ minds don’t work like that, they tore themselves from
the ministrations of two women paramedics and ran to me and hugged my legs.

“You guys okay?”

The nods in unison.

“That will never ever happen again. That thing is gone forever.”

I didn’t say That Man is gone, I didn’t want them to attach a specter to the things that had happened.

“I’m going away for a couple of days, I’ll see you after that, okay?”

Nods okay, still clutching. I lifted them up one at a time and squeezed them, and kissed them on the tops of their heads, the places where the happy birds should have been.

Julia was shaking. When she met my eyes her own welled with tears and she hugged me so hard, and I whispered into her ear, “Don’t be grateful. That was because of me.”

“I know I know,” she said. “But.”

“He’s gone, he’s not coming back. He wanted me, not you all.”

She kept saying I know I know. I got in my truck and drove off the mountain onto the paved road and onto the pavement of the Old Santa Fe Trail and I didn’t stop. Fuck. Fuck Jim. You will kill everything good in your life. Kill it always. You always do. You pull the storms after you like hellhounds on a leash. What the fuck is the matter with you? You should maybe shoot yourself and end it before someone else you love dies.

I thought that. Knew I would never do it, never stand in that pond. Or freeze to death. Ever. Knew my curse was that I had to see whatever havoc I wreaked, always, everywhere. Goddamn.

I drove the black two-lane straight through the outskirts of town, straight into the juniper hills, straight north through Española and into the ranch country of Rio Arriba County. Already late afternoon, maybe an hour to dusk. I didn’t call Sofia, I didn’t call anyone. Didn’t even know what the fuck I was doing really, except getting away, getting the blackness and threat away from everyone else. I’d stay away for a couple of days. I’d hit 285 and drive back to the Rio de los Pinos and fish it. Far enough away. Everything was in the back of the truck as it always was. I’d sleep out.

Julia wouldn’t have counted the shots, wouldn’t have known who fired them if she had. Nobody had to know I had a gun. I pulled over and felt under the seat. Beside the pistol in its rag was a box of ammo. I pulled it out, heavy with fifty bullets minus the six, and I tugged out the gun and thumbed open the cylinder and ejected the brass of the two I’d fired and threw them off into the weeds. I thumbed in two fresh bullets and put everything back. Drove.

Already late. I drove up into the open country south of the San Luis Valley, back toward Antonito and the los Pinos gorge. The instinct to go someplace I loved, someplace of peace, someplace where there would be no one. Especially no one I cared about.

Vast grass and sage plains, wooded hills. Something about the wide openness of it, the nothingness of it, the sun touching the hills off to my left. I breathed, felt the piano wires in my limbs relax. The windows were rolled down and poured warm air and the tangy scents of Mormon tea and sage. I breathed. Settled.