The Painter: A Novel (42 page)

“Does anyone have some sparkling water or something?”

A young woman waiter in a short tux jacket and red bow tie came swiftly out of the crowd bearing a tray of tumblers garnished with limes, offered them up, and was gone. I took a long sip, set the
glass on the table by the painting, took in the faces, the silence freighted and palpable as fog.

“You know I lost my daughter a few years ago. She was my best friend.”

I saw her again, stepping down the bank ahead of me, excited, holding up her rod, turning over stones at water’s edge. I thought how she would have loved this party. We would have fished together this afternoon and come straight from the river. She would have caught more fish. She would have teased me about it.

I saw her casting. The long living loops of line. Saw her step to the turn of the bend, look back, her face a question:
Are you there? Are you coming?

I am here. Now. I—

“I didn’t protect her,” I said. “I let her go away.”

Silence.

“I can’t bring her back.”

I clawed at my collar. I needed cold fresh air.

“I’ve got to go. Is it too dark to go fishing?” I turned to the big window where a smoky harvest moon was breaking over the eastern ridge. Turned back.

“A moon. There’s a moon—I better try.”

A murmur filled the room like water. Some of the faces looked stricken. I heard someone whisper,
He’s leaving? Already?

And another, hushed,
It’s so sad. It’s awful
.

I walked fast down the runner and out the door and out the drive and down the road. Sofia came right behind me. In a few minutes we were washed in headlights and Steve pulled over and picked us up and knew enough not to say a word. All the way to the hotel.

We did go fishing. We drove, the two of us, all the way to the Taos Box. While Sofia slept I fished in the cold and the dark, the stretch Alce and I used to fish together. I fished above the falls, and below in the big pool that silvered in the moonlight. I caught a few fighters and I fished until daybreak.

At the house in Paonia I put a cattle guard in the driveway where it crosses over the ditch from the county road, the road that goes to Willy’s. It’s one of those grates a car can drive over but an animal won’t cross. So the little roan wanders the whole property, all forty acres, drinks at the pond, leaves piles of manure on the little swimming beach, wanders by the house and looks in the west window when I am painting. No shit. She likes to watch me paint. Or maybe it’s the smell. Something. From where I was standing at the easel, I could see her now: head down past the dock, tugging at the brown wheatgrass. A little helmeted kestrel sat in the young cottonwood above the mare, waiting I guess for her to kick up a mouse. Behind the bird and the horse, up on the mountain, the swaths of aspen on the ridges were a shimmering yellow that did not have a name.

We’d been back almost two weeks. It was mid-October, into the first rifle season on elk, and once in a while, especially at dawn and dusk, the shots came off the mountain, sporadic and muffled by distance. I didn’t mind them. It was the sound of a changing season. Bob Reid and his son would be up there now. The first time I pulled in for gas he came around to my window and looked straight at me, way longer than most people would find comfortable. He was asking himself, I guess, what he felt about everything. Then he shook his head like, What the hell, and reached into the breast pocket of his shirt and pulled out his can of Skoal. He took a pinch and said, “Dip?” And I knew we would be okay.

Willy was glad to see me and helped me get the roan settled on my place, and helped me put in the grate. He had been designing his new bigger barn and was almost ready to break ground. He never mentioned the killing of Grant, which I was sure he’d read about, and he never mentioned either of the brothers again.

The cops weren’t so tactful. Sport called me the day we got back, to let me know, I guess, that he was keeping tabs on me and knew exactly what I was up to all the time. He didn’t have much to say except that the investigation was still very much open. He was all business. He said that any time it occurred to me to come down and add some new information it would probably be better for everyone in the long run. The long run. I never could, ever, wrap my head around that concept. I guess the short run always seemed hard enough.

The painting I was doing now was of two birds, redwings, sitting on the head of a scarecrow. A cloudy choppy sky, veils of rain, not virga. That’s all. The scarecrow looked resigned, like he had been handsome and imposing once, but was now in tatters and just happy to be outside looking over a stormy beautiful afternoon. I
signed the canvas and took it down and leaned it against the wall. Sometimes when a painting is hot off the press I get it off the easel fast so I won’t be tempted to mess with it in passing.

“Nice,” she said from behind the counter.

Sofia had on hot mitts and she turned back and leaned down and pulled two bread tins out of the oven and set them clattering on the stove top and I heard the hinge of the oven door and the door bang shut.

“There.” She blew a strand of curly hair off her face. She said: “Bread. You want some hot, with honey?”

I shrugged. I felt uneasy. Sofia had moved right in. I was glad, mostly. There was not one thing wrong and that spring inside was coiled pretty tight. I had seen this version of domestic bliss before and it had never worked out. Maybe that was it. If I could just let things be what they are. I was trying, would try. It’s okay, Jim, to be content for once, you might even like it.

“Smells delicious.”

“And?”

“I’m going up the Sulphur, till dark,” I said. “Maybe we can have trout for dinner.”

A shadow crossed her eyes, but she summoned a smile and said, “Sounds good.” She held up both oven mitts like boxing gloves and said, “Wanna box? I am having the feeling you need the bullshit knocked out of you again.”

She stood there, her curly hair exuberant, flying in every direction, her gloves up, and I laughed. Whew. Sofia knew. She was patient. She would, if I let her, probably knock the bullshit down the road.

“See ya,” I said.

“Byyyyyye.”

The best time of year, period. Anywhere. Mid-October on the Sulphur may be the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. The creek was low, showing its bones, the fallen spruce propped high on the rocks like a wreck, the little rapids now shallow, the pools cold again and slate blue. The wooded canyon had gone to deep shadow but the pink rimrock high up was brilliant with long evening light and the sky was that hard enamel blue. When a gust blew downstream the willows along the gravel bars loosed their pale yellow leaves to the stones and the water. I listened. Hard to hear above the rushing current, but almost every evening I’d heard a crash and seen a yearling bear scrambling up the bank away from me, and I often heard the knock of elk, antlers against a tree, and smelled them nearby, and by nightfall it would be freezing and I would have to quit because my cold fingers could no longer tie on a fly.

I was standing in what I’d named Cutbow Channel, knee deep below a long run of swift water. The rocks in the bed were every color of green and rust and slate. I breathed. The scents of the spruce and the fir stirred downstream, and the smells of water and cold stones.

Above the channel was a corner where a few boulders had made a swift drop and a massive fir tree had fallen across them like a gateway.
To get beyond it you had to clamber over rocks and the trunk of the tree, and when you did, the creek opened up: it widened and slowed and spread between wide gravel bars. Nobody ever fished this far in, and it felt remote, out of time, and I called it Heaven. I stopped knee deep at the long riffle beneath it and dug out a vanilla cheroot from the pouch in the vest, and lit it and watched the smoke trail easily downstream.

The current lapped and gabbled here, raising its voice and pressing my legs. I cradled the rod in the crook of my left arm and unhooked a bead head prince off a foam patch on my vest. Fingers already cold. I’d switch out the copper John I was using as a dropper along the bottom. I could feel my pulse quicken. It was a perfect evening, no moon, and a perfect fly, they would not be able to resist the flash of the white wings. Could almost feel the tug of a hit, imagine it, even as I was threading the eye and twisting the tippet and pulling it tight with my teeth.

“Ow—fuck!”

Hard pressed under my jaw the cold prod. Steel. I knew without thought that it was a gun.

“Prince nymph, good choice. What I’d use, probably.”

I couldn’t see him. He was behind me with the handgun held out and up against my throat. His voice was graveled, as if he hadn’t spoken in a while.

“Can’t lose tonight. Nobody feeding up top, all gathered up in the deeper pools, idling, just waiting for that thing to tumble by.”

His voice in the back of my ear. Could smell the chew on his breath, not a bad smell, Copenhagen. Couldn’t look though,
couldn’t turn my head, because there was the cold muzzle hard against the bone. The quickening of my heart.

“Hi, Jason.”

A long silence while the snout of the handgun held pressure against my head.

“Isn’t that civil?” he said at last. “Dunno. I’m thinking maybe you should say thanks.”

“For what?”

Slight push of the gun. So that I bent my neck, head away.

“For not blowing up your shit right in the middle of the party, your hour of glory. Or after, while your girlfriend slept in the truck and you fished all night like you were on some fucking vacation.”

The hot smell of the words as much as sound.

“I brought you something.”

The pressure relieved a little. I couldn’t see him but I sensed him switching hands. And then his right hand came to my side. I looked down. It held the rucksack.

“This yours?”

“Yes.”

It swung back out of sight behind me, and I heard it hit the stones of the bank.

“Pretty fucking dumb. Right? They’d a found it, you’d be in County waiting trial. Man.” I heard him blow out his breath. “It was never about the law. I told you we take care of our own business.”

Then the gun was hard against my temple and his left hand slid under my cap, knocked it into the water, and he grabbed a fistful of my hair. He was forcing me to look upstream. Beyond the fallen tree, sunlight cut down through a draw and lit the gravel bar. The light that would last minutes before the sun went over that piece of ridge. I thought, This is the last thing I will see in my life. I didn’t want to die. Right now I didn’t. I had wanted to die many times in my life before but now I didn’t.

“You know I hiked in from the Snowshoe,” he said. “No way anybody knows I’m in here. Nice hike. Places in there I bet nobody in history ever fished. You should’ve tried that sometime. Lotta blowdown though. No, I guess not. Not with your trick knee. It’s the left one ain’t it?”

His boot on the back of it, my left knee, the soft crook, his boot against it shoving slowly, harder, harder until it buckled and I went down on the knee in the creek and the current was against my chest and sweeping hard against the rod. I tried to keep the rod out of the water, but the current levered against it and I needed my right hand for balance. I crooked the rod tighter in my left arm but the current tore it away.

Ahhh!
—both hands grabbed for it, reached, and I almost toppled, it was gone. The tip came out of the chop as it went. It was the Sage five weight, the one I had used forever.

“Whoops,” he said.

I watched the rod. Where it had been. My heart broke. What it felt like. It was the rod I had fished with Alce the years we had fished. The one that had been my solace after, the one Sport had taken for testing and given back. I might not have counted on a paintbrush or a bottle of bourbon to save me but I had counted on fishing. I was on both knees now against the current and the swift water was nearly up to the top of the waders above my sternum. I had been so excited to fish I had forgotten to snug on a waist belt for safety, plus the creek now was so shallow, and if the water went in over the top of the waterproof overalls and filled up the legs in this current, that would be another way to die.