The Painter: A Novel (43 page)

“That feels bad, huh? I know what a rod like that can mean. Probably what you taught your little daughter to fish on, huh?

“Huh?” Push against the temple.

I wasn’t even angry. The hot anger I’d depended on in fights. I felt tears running on my cheeks.

“Kinda like a ship without a mast, ain’t it? Or a rudder. Maybe it’s a rudder.”

Push of the gun.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

“I don’t know anything.”

I didn’t. On my knees in the icy creek about to drown with my rod gone, and my daughter gone, and my father, and my mother, and
the one patch of light on the gravel gone, and my tears falling in the cold current, I didn’t. Know shit. I didn’t know why they had left, all of them, why I was still here, why my fly rod had been pulled away and sunk. Why I had killed two men. Nothing left. I couldn’t fathom it. He reached around and yanked the cheroot out of my teeth—I didn’t know I was still smoking it—and he flicked it into the current.

“Better not smoke while you listen. I’m going to tell you a story. Don’t worry it’s short. Those waders must be getting pretty leaky and cold by now. My experience, those lightweight summer deals don’t stand up too good to that kind of pressure. Those ones I used the other day? Simms. A little hot on a warm day but they don’t leak.”

He spat out his chew. The black gob hit the water beside me.

“You should use a waist belt. A guy could drown out here by himself.”

Shove against my temple.

“I think I better have a smoke. Chew is good, but smoking is more social.”

He kept the gun to my head and I could tell he was retrieving the pack from a breast pocket with one hand and shaking out a smoke and I heard the snick of an old Zippo as he lit up. I could feel trickles of cold water seeping in at the waist, the legs.

“Whew. Good. Better.”

His smoke trailed downstream. It smelled good, it smelled like life.

“You know Dell and Grant had a sister. Did you know that?”

Shook my head. His words were another sound with the rush of the current and my own thoughts. They went by my head like his smoke, then I saw them re-form. They had a sister.

“Gwen. Funny name. Gwendolina. Like something out of King Arthur, isn’t it? Well, she was parceled out to foster care just like them, but she was older, and she didn’t know them like they knew each other coming up. So when they each ran away from where they were caged, well. She must not have known where to go, or how to stay in touch. And they didn’t know where her foster family was neither—”

Long outbreath of smoke—

“Cruel, huh? Like slavery. But on one of those runaways, well, she had me. I mean got knocked up. It was a religious family where she was at, down in Montrose, and so they beat her bad and let her go to term and then guess who popped out, and guess who went up for adoption and nobody took? Little old Jason. Poor little old guy. Well—” Draw on the smoke, could hear it, hear him blow it out, my aching knees numb now, the gun right there, hard and still—

“Well she died. They had to tell the boys, because after all she was their older sister. How did she die? they wanted to know. Under mysterious circumstances. In a group home of about eight kids in Montrose, she was just about to turn seventeen. Under mysterious circumstances. I guess she was really pretty. Pretty and smart and drug addicted off and on, things she shot up. Well. To Grant and Dell, that was the last straw. That wasn’t happening to them. They were in different homes but they had their ways of getting
in touch and they broke out and stayed out until they were the age of majority or whatever the shit they call it, till they were legally adults. And you know what?”

I didn’t. I mean I couldn’t get my thoughts in line. I could hear the water and my own thrumming pulse and his words but. I couldn’t, I didn’t know anything. Shove of the gun against my temple. “You know what?”

“No,” I said.

“They didn’t forget me. It took them four years, but they kept at it, kept at it the way they stayed on the blood trail of a shot elk. They worked every angle and they sprung me. I was eleven. They were what, just kids themselves, twenty-two and twenty-three. Brought me over to Delta for middle and high school, had me legally adopted, taught me to ride and fish and hunt. They didn’t forget did they?”

Shove.

“Didn’t let me go.”

Shove. My tears running, hitting the current, I watched them hit right there below my face.

“And you know before they got to me it was pretty rough.” His voice rising now.

“It was pretty fucking rough in that place I was in, in fact there was some shit going on in there I don’t know if I would have survived. God’s truth.”

Shove, harder.

“And they sprung me. And they brought me into a real home, a family. A fucked up home at times. A hard drinking, hard fighting fucked up home, and maybe when they got going they didn’t treat their stock so good, I didn’t agree with that and I was working on that, I was, but it was a fucking home. And some of the other shit, maybe some of the other shit with the hunting outside the law, that wasn’t me either, and I told them: That’s not me. I’ll bring you hay, I’ll help you load up, maybe set up camp but that’s as far as it goes, I’ve got other fish to fry and it’s not me and they could respect it. See, there was respect.”

Hard shove.

“Now there ain’t shit. Is there? Because of you.”

The gun was gone. Sudden relief of pressure, absence, only then feel the ache, how hard it had been. Nothing. The current. Burble. I straightened my back from where I was bent over the water and turned my head, neck stiff, looked up.

He wasn’t wearing the shades. He was standing calf deep in the water in his jeans. No cap. The cigarette was in the corner of his mouth burnt down almost to the filter, the downstream breeze taking the smoke away. His blue eyes looked down on me, tears running out of the corners.

“I ain’t gonna cry in front of you. Give you the satisfaction. I ain’t.”

He wiped his face with the back of his sleeve, shook his head. The gun was still up.

“All this time trailing you I thought about what I wanted to do to you. Killing you would have been easy. I could’ve done it five, six
times, clean. Easy. Grant got too excited I guess. He was always a little like that, a little too much of a hothead. Then what? I kill you and you go dark. You don’t even know. Or I give you a few minutes to repent and beg and shit your pants and then I kill you, like in the movies. Like now. Well. You’re not begging and you haven’t shit your pants as far as I can tell. Good for you.”

He snagged the pack out of his shirt pocket, shook out another cigarette, dug into his jeans and thumbed open the Zippo, lit up. Let out a long stream of smoke.

“Then I thought, Well, I can string you up by the feet like an elk and maybe even skin you alive. That’d be sort of fun. And with each strip I slipped off I could ask How was it—selling all these paintings and making shitpiles of money off my uncles’ killings. Pretty fucked up, ain’t it? That the world works like that. I even thought about cutting off your hands. It’d make painting and fishing pretty tough. You could still fuck, though. So I could cut off your dick, too. I could. Easy as gutting a trout.”

He stared down at me. The gun was aimed at my face.

“That’s not really me, though. I never pulled the wings off a fly or tortured a cat, nothing like that. I think it would give me nightmares. Even you. Screaming like that and all the blood. Fact is, I realized that any of that would hurt me more. That’s what came to me as I was driving around stalking you like prey. Call it a Jesus moment. You’d be dead and I’d be driving down the road the rest of my life wondering if Tweedledum and Tweedledee would ever have enough to put me in a cage. And wondering why all the things I did to you didn’t bring my uncles back and why I still didn’t have people to call at Christmas, and why there was still that big hole where a family should have been, and why maybe I felt worse about everything.”

Suck on the cigarette, exhale, toss it in the creek.

“It’s a quandary, ain’t it?”

He raised the gun and pulled the trigger.

I flinched, jumped. Water erupted a foot to my right. The crack reverberated in the canyon like five guns going off at once.
Fuck
. Echo. Echo. The gun there where he had fired it, straight armed. The whole canyon awake now, altered, like a top that wobbles and regains balance.

“Still works.”

He was staring at me and his eyes had gone hard again and they were lit with violence.

“And then I think, J, just keep it fucking simple. You think too goddamn much. Just shoot the fucker and let the chips fall.”

My pulse hammering now.
Alce
. Just the name, no other thought.

He stared at me.

“I think it’s better like this. Maybe I walk away. Not too far. You can be one of my projects. Like a hobby. We’ll see how you come along. We will never ever be very far apart. You took away my family and you’re gonna carry around a piece of hell wherever you go. More of the hell to add to the one you already got inside you. Shit yeah, I see it. Like a house fire you can see through the front windows, before the whole shittin place goes up in flames.”

He reached across and shoved the automatic into a Cordura holster sewed to the side of his own rucksack and turned away, turned back.

“Get you another Sage. They’re having a sale down at Leroy’s. You already got that fancy Winston rod, huh? But it ain’t the same, is it? Not like the old standby.”

He hitched his thumbs into the pack straps, tugged one tighter and turned in to the willows.

“Hey. Hey!”

He stopped, looked back.

“I—”

He stared hard, like he was rethinking whether to shoot me.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He stared at me.

“I know,” I said. “I took your family away. I know about things you can never put back.”

I wiped my own face with my sleeve. “I fucking know.”

I got off my knees and straightened slowly. A gust of wind blew willow leaves onto the stones of the bank.

“What do you want me to do?” I said.

His blue eyes were very still. He looked as if he were barely breathing.

“I’ll do anything you want. Do you want me to go down to the courthouse? Turn myself in?”

He turned full around and looked at me hard, his imagination tightening the screws. I heard the current ripping along the rocks, the wind. The canyon was in full shadow now, it was that time of day, the cusp. Then I saw a sharp light move in his eyes.

“Something with kids,” he said. “You do something for some lost kids. Or old folks, I don’t give a shit. You bust your ass.”

He met my eyes. “For the rest of your fucked up life,” he said. “I mean it. Like a goddamn saint. And then one day I still might wake up in the morning and decide to shoot you in the fucking head. Goddamn you.”

I started to say Okay and he shrugged the pack higher and turned his back and disappeared into the trees.

I walked to the bank and stripped off the waders and emptied them on the stones. I sat on a rock and let the feeling come back to my legs. I sat for a long time as the canyon filled with dusk. I let his words sift. Something had just happened and I wasn’t sure what. I put the wading boots back on and picked up the rucksack and walked downstream to the truck.

Many dear friends and family gave generously to the making of this book. Kim Yan was, as always, my first reader, and I am deeply grateful. Lisa Jones, Helen Thorpe, Rebecca Rowe, David Grinspoon and Donna Gershten gave crucial, passionate input, as did Nathan Fischer, Pete Beveridge and Caro Heller. Leslie Heller kept the idea alive for many years. Sascha Steinway and Mark Lough were immensely helpful all along. Lawrence Norfolk gave me a brilliant notion. Jeff Streeter, Jason Hicks and Max Marquez lent generously of their expertise, as they have in the past. And Eric Aho and Jay Mead read closely and gave the best advice. Thanks also to Louise Quayle and Matthew Snyder for their wonderful work.

This book would not have been written without the stewardship, intellect and integrity of David Halpern. Nor would it exist without the inspiration and brilliance of Jenny Jackson, who is a truly great editor.

What a pleasure and a privilege. Thank you all.

Peter Heller is the best-selling author of
The Dog Stars
. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in both fiction and poetry. An award-winning adventure writer and longtime contributor to NPR, Heller is a contributing editor at
Outside
magazine,
Men’s Journal
and
National Geographic Adventure
and a regular contributor to
Bloomberg Businessweek
. He is also the author of several non-fiction books, including
Kook
,
The Whale Warriors
and
Hell or High Water: Surviving Tibet’s Tsangpo River
. He lives in Denver, Colorado.

Peter Heller

Reading Group Guide

The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group’s discussion of
The Painter
, best-selling author Peter Heller’s hauntingly beautiful novel about a reclusive artist who is forced to face his demons after a violent encounter in a small Colorado town.

From the author of the acclaimed novel
The Dog Stars
comes
The Painter
, a stunning and suspenseful novel about a man trying to create a good life in the wake of loss and violence.

Celebrated painter Jim Stegner has finally reached a place of equilibrium. Years after serving time in jail for shooting a man in a bar, he leads a quiet life in the hills of the Colorado valley. His days are dictated by simple routines—he no longer drinks, preferring to spend his evenings fly-fishing; he enjoys the company of his effervescent muse; and he works prolifically, allowing him financial stability. In an instant, this peacefulness shatters when Jim witnesses a
horrific roadside beating of a horse. Unable to stand idly by, Jim jumps out of his truck and gets into a bloody scuffle with the attacker, breaking his nose. That man, Dell, is a local legend of the worst kind, a hunter whose reputation of cruelty precedes him. The brutality of the incident sticks with Jim, and his rage builds. Jim struggles with the reemergence of this violent side of his personality, all while trying to evade both the police and Dell’s family. The only thing that keeps him sane is painting, a source of comfort and emotional release.