The Painter: A Novel (7 page)

I would be moving in the cold of the settling evening, the few stars in the chasm overhead, the only way I could still myself at all: move.

The only time I could forget myself, forget Alce. Lost to anything but fighting the fish. And if I got him in finally and he had fought and fought and if he was beautiful which he always was I reached down and cradled him in the current with one hand and with one twist of the other slipped the hook out of his lip and cradled him some more. Cradled and watched him idling there, tail slowly finning while he caught his breath and strength. Like me, I thought. Idling, barely able to breathe. And then a wriggle and slip against my palm and he was gone, lost among the green shadows
of the stones and I said Thanks. Thanks for letting me live another evening.

I drank sometimes. I had quit maybe two years, pretty much, off and on, but sometimes I went to the Boxcar and sat at the bar, sometimes the same stool where I had turned and shot Lauder Simms, maybe wishing the bastard was there again, insinuating the unspeakable things he wanted to do to my daughter. Wishing that I could shoot him again and relive a year in Santa Fe State, so Alce would still be here. I drank, drank steady like it was a job and Johnny nodded to Nacho and Nacho drove me home. More than once he carried me inside and laid me down on the couch and I remember him whispering
Dios, Jim, He is looking over you, you don’t need to join your daughter, not yet compa
. This from a cousin of Cristine’s who had spent more time inside Santa Fe than he had out, who
ran
the cell block when he was there and saved my life just by being incarcerated same time as me. God is looking over you. I remember it like it was whispered by an angel. And it didn’t feel like that, not one bit. Like anything else was looking over me, like some kind of bad weather.

That engine. Grief is an engine. Feels like that. It does not fade, what they say, with time. Sometimes it accelerates. I was accelerating. I could feel it, the g-force pressing my chest. I wrecked my truck. Definitely a one car accident, nobody else to blame. Me and a rock. But somehow I was up to date on the insurance—because I had paid it all in a lump sum that spring, sometimes I did that after I sold a painting—didn’t even know if I had insurance but I did, and the adjuster knew my work, had seen it in an airline magazine, a story about the art scene in Taos, and it turned out he had lost a son at four to a heart defect and he rigged it so the truck was covered, total loss, and I got a new one, and I knew that I would wreck that too, knew it like I knew winter would come and I didn’t care, and I drank and then one morning the door shoved
open and in walked Irmina carrying an overnight bag and a string of habaneras and an unplucked chicken carcass I shit you not and it was the only time since I’d left her house that we ever stayed together more than a few days.

She stayed for three months. She rescued me. She made me go to AA meetings. She drove me and sat next to me at the open groups. She cooked me food so spicy every meal was some kind of battle. She made love to me again and again until I was sore and gasping like one of those trout, and then she cradled me like a trout and let me catch my breath and then she let me go into sleep.

This is how I healed. Or didn’t. One evening I took her down to the river. We turned off the highway and rattled slowly up the gravel road and into the heart of the canyon. The walls closed in above us, the high blue of the sky deeper, deep and dark like a river is deep. The highest rock at the rim was a strip of fire, holding the last long sun. The old gorge was a vessel and it was filling with shadow, slowly, and with wind. We drove upstream. We drove with the windows down and the wind came down against us bringing a night’s cold and blowing the last rattling leaves off the cottonwoods. They blew into the river and floated slowly in the pools, pushed by the wrinkles of the wind, singly and in sad fleets. I pulled over when we got to the end of the road, where the creek poured in from above. Now we could see the first few stars above the walls, smell the smoke of some fisherman’s fire, someone who had hiked up into my favorite stretch and was unwilling to leave with the thickening darkness. Got out. Tang of smoke and the sweet decay of leaves. I could smell my past.

These were the smells of a devotion and of a history and they carried the touch of my daughter. Her voice. The way she was when she came with me here.

“Did I tell you that she was a better fisherperson than me? Would have been?”

Irmina smiled at me in the dusk, breathed.

Alce was curious, down at water’s edge faster than me, turning over smooth stones, looking for bugs, standing in the wind with her long dark hair blowing around her face and squinting at the hatch, the cloud of mayflies backlit like some blizzard, smiling like that, the pride of knowledge, knowing: that is a mayfly, maybe number 18, that is a stone fly, a gnat. Before I had even tied my shoes she would have decided on a strategy, what she would use and how she would fish it.

Was I speaking this to Irmina or talking to myself or thinking it? Didn’t know.

Now next to Irmina I stood on the high bank and smelled the dusk and watched the white thresh of the rapid pouring over the rocks that spilled out of the mouth of the creek. The thrashing water, the rush like some pounding prayer.
Deliver me, Oh God, deliver me, not out of but into, further into what is here
. I felt Irmina’s hand slip into mine and she was beside me, up against me but not leaning. Her hand was warm. We stood there. A pair of ducks angled fast out of a luminous sky, just shadows, veered hard last second and dropped into the long pool below. Their wakes silver on the dark water. Years of getting shot at. They waited until very last light and came in fast and turning.

“We fished here together, here most of all.”

“But she stopped fishing?”

“Yes, the last year. Just after she turned fifteen she didn’t fish at all.”

“She got angry?”

“Unh huh. And I don’t know why.”

I knew. I think I knew it was because her mother and I were angry at each other. Alce wanted peace and she couldn’t make it, tried, couldn’t, got mad and surly. She got sick of hearing doors slam. How I blamed myself. Why she disappeared into that crowd, into the drugs, etc. Because I wasn’t big enough to make peace with her mother.

Squeeze. Irmina squeezing my hand now, relaxing. Holding it, warm, almost hot in the chilling air.

She said, “She was a teenager. Every teenager has to do that somehow. It is how you become your own person. And every marriage has those times. You know. Jim?”

I watched the current, the tailwater rolling out of the bottom of the falls, white and fast and pushing through the little haystacking waves and quieting into the darker water of the pool, the smooth stretch where I could see the pair of ducks drifting, dark against the dark silverblue of the reflected sky. That luminous night that is not yet true night. Why couldn’t we be like ducks? Make the decision to be together and be together forever without argument, flying wing to wing into and out of the seasons year after year. Drifting on some slow night current, muttering each to each.

“Jim?”

“Huh.”

“You know. You have to let her be her own person. Before and now.”

I stood and breathed. Grateful for the ice in the air. Frost tonight down here, down in the canyon, maybe already forming.

Her own person. I watched Alce in the dark. As if she were here. I saw her step down to the river and begin to cast. Letting out the line smoothly in longer and longer throws, the loop up high over her head and behind her growing longer, a graceful animal coiling and straightening, lengthening and lancing far downstream, right along the slackwater of the eddy line, fishing a streamer the way I would have. I watched her in the dark, fishing past when we could see as we did so often, the trout able to see the flies on the surface against the lighter sky, I heard us laughing and cursing as we stubbed and stumbled over the rocks of the bank when we had finally given up and were climbing back to the road.

Pop?

Huh?

I got a sixteen incher. A cutbow. I put him back
.

You’re fibbing
.

She clambering behind me, poked me in the butt with the rim of her net.

Heard rock scrape as she stumbled.

Ow. I wish I had owl eyes. Or was just an owl. We could fly back to the truck
.

Why would we need the truck then?
I said.
We would just fly home
.

Carrying all this junk? The rod. We couldn’t fly that far in our waders
.

If we were owls we could, we wouldn’t need rods, we could just—Nah
.

What? What, Pop?

Owls don’t fish do they? I don’t think they like water much, only snow
.

Miss Pettigrew told us that they can sit in a tree and hear mice in a field under a foot of snow. Those ones that turn white
.

No shit?

Fifty cents
.

Ouch. Shit
.

A dollar
.

Damn!

A dollar fifty. Pop, if you keep swearing you’ll go broke
.

Silence.

If we were osprey, Pop, we could fish and fly back to the truck and fly home because we wouldn’t need any of this crap
.

Climbing slowly. On a smoother trail now. Walking with some rhythm, she and I. The scuff of our wading boots, tick of the swinging nets, loud croak and squawk rising from the river below, a heron complaining.

Back to a dollar, you said crap
.

Crap is not a bad word
.

Are you the bad word dictionary now?

Silence. Knew she was nodding her head.

I painted that. The first and only good picture I made in the year after. She and I over that canyon, ospreys. Carrying our rods, the fish teeming below us.

I stood with Irmina and watched my daughter Alce fish into real dark. Past when we would have ever fished. Watched her fish until even her imagined shadow was swallowed by the night and the rush of water.

Good night beautiful. Fish on.

What got to me was the thought that maybe she did not want to fish on, into the full darkness alone. That she was tired and alone and cold but didn’t know what else to do. That she couldn’t stand for us to leave. That I couldn’t bear.

Felt Irmina’s hand again squeezing.

“She can go wherever she wants now. If she is here it is because love holds her here. Because she loves it.”

“Okay,” I said. The tears were streaming into my beard. We got back in the truck and drove home in silence. The next day Irmina left.

That was the other lesson Irmina taught. It is okay for people you love to leave. For them to come and go. She taught it to me over and over.

I stood on the ramada and smelled the rain that hadn’t arrived and thought about the little horse. I prayed she could recover. She would never be the same, certainly. None of us ever are, the same. I lit another cheroot. Smoking seemed to lessen Dell’s residual stench. I wished it would rain tonight. I felt what? Unmoored. Felt like I was just getting my feet. Like I had a friend, two, in town, had a good spot to fish mostly alone. I was just starting to work again, good work, which was anything I could get lost in. And then Steve called with his stupid commission, which meant climbing back into the truck and driving back to Santa Fe to paint something I didn’t at all want to paint. Two things. Two little girls, I’m sure were nice enough, I mean how bratty and screwed up could they be in six short years? Even in the House of Pim. And then the horse. The horse happened. Dell Siminoe happened, all over the road, all over the creek where I had found a certain refuge, all over me like a scum.

Nothing ever happens just how you want it to.

Next morning Sofia came over. I had told her not to come. We’d left it I would call her if I needed a little more Double U O M A N in the picture but thought I had plenty, more than enough. I said I needed maybe a giant halibut to model for a day. I’m not a funny person, have long accepted that. I was just trying to enjoy my first cup of coffee in the Adirondack chair on the ramada, the first little stogie, I felt hungover—I wasn’t—but groggy, edgy, and I heard Tops rumbling and coughing up the drive. Car door slam, counted to ten: front door flew in, could hear it hit the antique school desk where I drop my keys, heard a yell.
Hey! Where are you?