The Painter: A Novel (29 page)

Everyone was okay. They were okay, no one was hurt, he wouldn’t bother them again, not his game. Right? Right.

And you have all your limbs, your legs, your arms, they all work, right? Right. There are bad things in the world, bad people, not you. Okay? Okay.

You are
All Right
. Lighten up. You have made mistakes but getting rid of a very bad man may not have been one of them. If his brother is bad, too, well. Cross that bridge. Whew. Tomorrow you will go fishing. Fish one of the prettiest canyons in the world.

The sun was gone and the country ahead had more trees and the air coming through the window was suddenly chill and smelled of pines. The trees and the asters scattered along the shoulder of the road and the boulders sitting on the slopes all rested in that moment when every line is sharp and things seem to radiate color from within themselves. That perfect balanced moment between day and night. My absolute favorite time.

I slowed. Backed off the accelerator and took a left turn down a dirt track that ran through an open park of sage and grass beneath a ridge of pines. In that moment the sky also does something wonderful. It shines too from within, on its own, without help, a radiant blue sea, as clear and dark as the clearest water. Up there, ahead, sitting over the furthest purple ridge, sat a single star. Faint but irrepressibly alive.

Alce
.

It blurted out of me. It was good to be alive and I was okay inside myself, for once I seemed to fit inside this quiet dusk, seemed okay, seemed okay to be alive and. She wasn’t. But in my heart.

She lived. Lived as irrepressibly as that star. I slowed almost to a stop because I could barely see through the blur of my memories, and then I did stop, I pulled over into the grass, not sure why, nobody would drive by all night probably, and I turned off the engine and sat, and when my eyes cleared I saw a herd of five elk in the meadow feeding heads down just below the trees.

It was a bull, with a rack like a tree, and two cows and two calves. A family of sorts, and the strange alloyed happiness welled up again.

They fed, they ignored me, they were in the middle of their reprieve. Bow season not here yet on this side of the New Mexico border, the calves in their first autumn, before the beginning of the hunting season that would bring who knew what terror. I felt the terrible vulnerability of everything, and the depthless peace of the evening, and I wondered that God could have made such a doubleness, allowed it all to exist together so that we might feel so helpless. I swallowed the grief this time. Took a deep breath, wiped my face with my sleeve, and thought, It’s just how the universe is, one big food chain, from galaxies eating other galaxies down to the tiniest shrimp, and it is a wonder we get to be here at all, in the middle of it.

I was certainly in the middle of it. Fuck Grant, fuck his brother, fuck their posse.

I shoved open the door and got out, stretched. The elk lifted their heads, turned them my way, lowered them again. I listened for the sound of water. I wanted to sleep out under the stars, now I could count two then three. Seven. Ten. More the more I looked, faint but burgeoning in the waveless blue. Like a perfectly calm sea, like minnows, who knew how deep.

I listened for the sound of water because it would be nice to sleep beside a creek and to have water to wash with. Dunking my head in a cold current now would be good. I held my breath, listened. The barest of breezes in the pines. The faintest rush. Nothing. Oh well. I had two milk jugs of water for drinking, and I had an old Therm-a-Rest foam pad and a light sleeping bag all stuffed into a milk crate in the back. I’d walk up to the pines and unroll them beneath a big tree. I’d bring a jug, a jacket for a pillow, the gun.

I stretched, my whole body stiff. I hitched myself along the side of the truck to the back and lifted the topper door and jerked open the tailgate. The bull glanced up, but barely, the rest kept feeding, they were used to me now and I was grateful for that, don’t know why.

I leaned in and pulled the milk crate back. Beneath the light sleeping bag was an old rucksack. I opened it and stuffed in my bed, a water jug, a fleece jacket. I went back to the front seat and fetched a packet of little smokes and the gun, locked the truck. The engine was still ticking and a cricket was chirping out of the grass close by. The hopeful end-of-summer chirp when the nights are cooling—he was still singing for a mate maybe.

I walked up the hill. The long grass brushed my legs. The elk had spread out, and once in a while one of the calves lifted its head and cried. It cracked me in two. It was a birdlike cry, something between a chirp and the keen of a hawk. And one of the moms answered, tilting up her chin, louder, hollower, more resonant, a call that must have carried miles down the valley. They were close enough to see each other clearly, I was sure. They were conversing, a kind of call and response, an affirmation that rang against the hill.

Are you there?

I am here
.

Will you be there now? Next?

I will be here always
.

That’s what it sounded like. To me.

There would be no moon tonight until almost dawn. What light would come from the stars. They were already asserting themselves. I walked up into the deeper shadow of the trees. My breath huffed and the grass swished against my khakis. I picked a spot beneath a huge old pine with a view of the valley. Sat. I’d unfold and blow up the pad in a minute. It felt good to just sit and listen and let the cool air slip around me. I took a swig from the jug and unrolled the foil pouch, dug out a cheroot, lit it.

Then I put it out.

A car engine. Just a vibration at first, the lowest growl, but insistent. It grew slowly, more and more distinct. Jerky faint wash of headlights sliding up the meadow a mile off. Coming around a curve. Then the two headlights themselves, high beams, not shy of the dark. Second gear probably, a truck taking its time, picking its way toward a known destination.

Unlike me. When I came up this road an hour ago I had no place in my mind. And if you listen you can hear the difference in the sound of the two engines.

The headlights jounced, the motor revved then dropped, a rising and falling in cadence with the rising and falling of the road.

Never labored, patient, coming on. I glanced down to my right but the elk had vanished. Maybe they could hear the difference too.

The truck came over a slight swell and then my own truck was caught in the glare. It looked old. As stranded as a boat on a mud-flat, throwing a bulky shadow ahead of it.

The pickup stopped, idled. Spotlight flicked on, one of those lights cops and poachers use. The beam jerked over to the truck then moved back and forth along the shoulders, then twenty feet or so on either side. Looking for someone, looking for me. Maybe a tent, a figure on the ground.

Without thinking I pushed the rucksack flat back against the trunk of the tree behind me and rolled to the side of it myself. Pulled the brim of my cap low and pressed myself to the bark. The .41 mag was in the pack. I pulled it back to me and slid loose the drawstring and stuck my arm in the opening and fished the gun out from under the sleeping bag. The steel was colder than the nylon. I thumbed open the cylinder out of habit and ran the pad of my finger over each chamber, feeling with growing relief again the stamped brass of each bullet. Onetwothreefourfivesix. Had the box of forty-two more, but not here, they were still in the truck. Probably paranoid. Probably it was the rancher who lived on up the road just checking out what new visitor was in his territory.

Then I knew I was wrong. Because the lights went out and I heard his door chunk open and a few seconds later I heard glass breaking.

Windshield glass, that’s a sound like nothing else, an ugly, buffered crunching that is too soft, a fractured thudding that doesn’t even have the tinkle of breaking ice. Without thinking again I
shoved the pack forward and raised the revolver in two hands and braced my fists on the taut pack like a sandbag and thumbed back the hammer because it’s more accurate that way than pulling it back with the trigger, and I waited three seconds for my eyes to find the shapes again in the sudden total darkness and then I put two shots into the body of his truck.

The gun jumped. Concussions wiped the night clean of sound. Flame shot from the barrel.

It felt good. To blast away.

At two hundred yards I knew I’d be lucky to even hit the truck. Fuck it. I shifted over to my right and muttered
Fuck off
and aimed about where my windshield would be, where he would be, then raised it higher so the bullet could drop, somewhere over the back of the hood, just to let him know I was serious. Should scare the shit out of him. I thumbed back the hammer and pulled the trigger.

The thudding and breaking ceased. Silence. I waited.

He’d be crouched. I couldn’t make out the shadow of any figure in the dark. This could take a while. He would be patient this time. Grant. Brother, barn burner, anonymous threatener and killer.

I didn’t wonder what the fuck he was doing here, it seemed like a natural conclusion. Not conclusion, better hope not—development. If I’d thought the shots at the house might be a warning, a scare tactic, now I knew they weren’t. He had missed, period. Jason had called him of course. Or he’d followed me from the house. They’d been keeping track. I’d been so lost in my musing while driving I’d never noticed the now and then glimpse of Grant’s pickup a few curves back. And there, with a couple of hundred
yards of cool country night between us, I could feel he had the meanness of a true coward.

He would be crouched now, behind one of the trucks, and I also knew without considering that he would be armed perfectly for the job. He would have a handgun as I had, and he would also have a rifle, or several, and I had an idea what they would be: an AR-15 .223 for the middle distance flat shot, one of the best setups for killing a man, and a .30-06 or a .308, bolt action, his elk gun, and if I knew the man and I didn’t but could feel his malevolence like a smell even at this distance, if I knew him he had night vision scopes on one or both rifles. Because that’s where he and his brother really made their money: poaching, and there was no better time to do that than at night.

I went to visit my uncle and aunt in southern Vermont, I was maybe twenty-six, and one night I got drunk and walked up the road, just maple and birch woods on either side, fields, and came to Sam Frazer’s, a guy my age I’d known since I used to visit when I was a kid. An old farm house, the light in the front parlor was on and I knocked. He was a town selectman now, and his wife had just left him and he was glad to see me. He’d been drinking, too, and we got more drunk together, then drove into the field west of his house and I tried to shoot a buck in his headlights. I was so drunk that I’d duct taped a flashlight to the receiver of the little .30-30, and taped right around the lever so I couldn’t work the action. Well. I’m glad now that the whole herd ran off before I could get my act together.

I imagined that Grant was much better at shooting things at night.

There was no sound coming from the trucks and no shadowed figure moving between them or moving at all. He was waiting. He had broken the glass to draw me out of wherever I might be sleeping
nearby and it had worked. Now he was crouched with some flat shooting rifle and a night scope and he was cursing himself for not getting a bead on the short stab of flame from the barrel of my handgun. He would wait. He would maybe expect me to work my way down, to get closer, and that would be fine because he would be scanning the hillside which was all open meadow between us.

My heart was thumping against my ribs. Fuck. I knew, I
knew
there was a man down there waiting to kill me. I think I knew from the moment his truck stopped that certain distance back and froze my own pickup in his headlights. Something about the jerky rhythm of the spotlight, something about all of it that was malevolent and evil, and worse because it was practiced, because it was clear this sonofabitch had done this before and who knew how many animals he had killed this way, who knew even how many men. Because a man who burns down another man’s barn, a barn full of horses, seemed capable of most things.

But this way, the coward’s way, in the dark from cover. Fuck. Which made us two killers. That occurred to me with a shock: we were two practiced killers squaring off in the thick of night, and it also occurred to me that I wasn’t certain he was a murderer but I knew that I was. How much less cowardly to jump out of a bush and surprise a drunk man with his dick in his hands and crush his skull?

So it seemed to me that this was a fitting showdown. Two cowards in the cloaking dark, cloaking their shame which I was sure neither of us felt.

I was pressed against the fragrant bark of the old ponderosa. My heart no longer hammered. Good. If I ever got close enough and had to actually shoot the bastard, being a little calmer would be helpful.

I wouldn’t shoot him. One Siminoe was enough. Wasn’t it? What was I supposed to do now? He was trying to kill me. I was sure, I could feel it like the heat of an engine.