The Painter

I

My house is three miles south of town. There are forty acres of wheatgrass and sage, a ditch with a hedgerow of cottonwoods and willows, a small pond with a dock. The back fence gives on to the West Elk Mountains. Right there. They are rugged and they rise up just past the back of my place, from sage into juniper woods, then oak brush, then steep slopes of black timber, spruce and fir, and outcrops of rock and swaths of aspen clinging to the shoulders of the ridges. If I walk a few miles south, up around the flank of Mount Lamborn, I am in the Wilderness, which runs all the way to the Curecanti above Gunnison, and across to Crested Butte.

From the little ramada I look south to all those mountains and east to the massif of Mount Gunnison. All rock and timber now in August. There’s snow up there all but a few months a year. They tell me that some years the snow never vanishes. I’d like to see that.

If I step out in front of the small house and look west it is softer and drier that direction: the gently stepping uplift of Black Mesa where the Black Canyon of the Gunnison River cuts through; other desert mesas; the Uncompahgre Plateau out beyond it all, hazy and blue.

This is my new home. It’s kind of overwhelming how beautiful. And little Paonia, funny name for a village out here, some old misspelling of Peony. Nestled down in all this high rough country like a train set. The North Fork of the Gunnison runs through it, a winding of giant leafy cottonwoods and orchards, farms, vineyards. A good place I guess to make a field of peace, to gather and breathe.

Thing is I don’t feel like just breathing.

Sofia pulls up in the Subaru she calls Triceratops. It’s that old. I can hear the rusted out muffler up on the county road, caterwauling like a Harley, hear the drop in tone as it turns down the steep gravel driveway. The downshift in the dip and dinosaur roar as it climbs again to the house. Makes every entrance very dramatic, which she is.

She is twenty-eight. An age of drama. She reminds me of a chicken in the way she is top-heavy, looks like she should topple over. I mean her trim body is small enough to support breasts the size of tangerines and she is grapefruit. It is not that she is out of proportion, it’s exaggerated proportion which I guess fascinates me. I asked her to model for me five minutes after meeting her. That was about three months ago. We were standing in line in the tiny hippy coffee shop—Blue Moon, what else?—the only place in town with an espresso machine. She was wearing a short knit top and she had strong arms, scarred along the forearms the way someone who has worked outside is scarred, and a slightly crooked nose, somehow Latin. She looked like a fighter, like me. Sofia noticed the paint splattered on my cap, hands, khaki pants.

“Artist,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

Her brown eyes which were flecked with green roved over my head, clothes, and I realized she was cataloguing the colors in the spatters.

“Exuberant,” she said. “Primitive. Outsider—in quotes.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I went to RISD for a year but dropped out.”

Then her eyes went to the flies stuck in the cap.

“Artist fisherman,” she said. “Cool.”

She asked how long I’d been here, I said two weeks, she said, “Welcome. Sofia,” and stuck out her hand.

I said I needed models.

She cocked her head and measured me with one eye. Held it way past politeness.

“Nude?”

“Sure.”

“How much?”

Shrug. “Twenty bucks an hour?”

“I’m trying to decide if you are a creep. You’re not a violent felon are you?”

“Yes. I am.”

A smile trembled across her face. “Really?”

I nodded.

“Wow. What’d you do?”

“I shot a man in a bar. You’re not going to back out the door like in a horror movie are you?”

She laughed. “I was thinking about it.”

“My second wife did that when she found out.”

She was laughing uninhibited. People in line were smiling at her.

“You’re married?”

“Not anymore. She ran off down the road.”

“I’ll do it,” she said. “For twenty-five. Danger pay.”

Took her a while to rein in her mirth.

“Nude modeling for a violent killer convict. That is a first. Twenty-five, right?”

I nodded. “I didn’t kill the guy, I just shot him. I was a little high and to the left.”

She was laughing again and I knew that I had made a friend.

Now she shoved open the door like she always did, like she was doing some SWAT breach entry. Tumbled into the room.

“Morning.”

“Hey.”

“Your muffler is getting worse.”

“Really? Tops is balking at extinction. Poor guy.”

She sat on a stool at the long butcher block counter that separates the kitchen in this one big room. I pushed aside a bunch of sketch paper and charcoal and the fly-tying vise where I’d been tying up some Stegner Killers, invented by yours truly, which the trout couldn’t seem to resist the past couple of weeks. I set a mug of coffee on the counter between us, poured myself another.

“What are we doing today?”

“An Ocean of Women. Something I’ve been thinking about.”

“An ocean? Just me?”

“On my way up here from Santa Fe a good friend told me I can’t always swim in an ocean of women. I saw it. Me swimming, all the women, the fish. I thought we could give it a try.”

“Forget it.”

I set down my mug. “Really? No?”

“Just kidding. Fuck, Jim, you ask a lot of a girl.”

“Want an egg with chilies?”

Shook her head.

“You just have to make like an ocean. Just once.”

She cocked her head the way she does, fixed me with an eye. The light from the south windows brushed a peppering of faint acne pits on her temple and it somehow drew attention to the smoothness of her cheek and neck.

“Stormy or calm?” she said.

I shrugged.

She leaned forward on the counter, her breasts roosting happily in her little button top.

“How about choppy and disturbed? Dugar told me yesterday he wants to move to Big Sur.” Dugar was her hippy boyfriend. “I’m like how fucking corny. Plus nobody lives there anymore, it’s so damn expensive. He read a bunch of Henry Miller. Are you a teenager? I said. You like read a novel and want to move there?”

She stuck out her mug and I refilled it.

“It wasn’t a novel it was a memoir, he says. Jeez. He says he is a poet but between you and me his poems are sophomoric. Lately, since he’s read up on Big Sur, they are all about sea elephants which he has never seen. I have and they are not prepossessing, know what I mean? They would never even move if they didn’t have to eat. I said there is no fucking way I’m moving to Big Sur with the sea elephants, or even Castroville, which is like the closest place a normal person could afford to live. I mean, do you want to live in the artichoke capital of the world? Be grateful for what you’ve got right now, where you are right now. Then I unleash the twins.”

I am laughing now.

“That’s not fair, is it?”

“Not by a long shot.”

“I’m young,” she says. It’s a simple statement, incontrovertible, and it stabs me with something like pain in the middle of my laughter.

We begin. Sofia is a champ of an ocean, a natural. I paint fast. I paint her oceaning on her side, arched, facing and away from me, swimming down off a pile of pillows, breaststroke, on her back over the same pillows willowing backwards arms extended as if reaching after a brilliant fish. I paint the fish as big as she is, invoking him. More fish, a hungry dark shark swimming up from the gloom below with what looks like a dog’s pink boner.

The shark has a blue human eye, not devoid of embarrassment. I am lost. In the sea. I don’t speak. Sofia has the rhythm of a dancer and she changes as she feels the mood change.

I love this. I paint myself swimming. A big bearded man, beard going white—I’m forty-five and it’s been salt and pepper since I was thirty. I’m clothed in denim shirt and khakis and boots, ungainly and hulking in this ocean of women, swimming for my life and somehow enjoying it. In my right hand is a fishing rod. It looks like the swimmer is doing too many things at once and this may be his downfall. Or maybe it’s the root of his joy. My palette is a piece of covered fiberboard and I am swiping, touching, shuttling between it and the canvas, stowing the small brush with a cocked little finger and reaching for the knife, all in time to her slowly shifting poses. I am a fish myself, making small darting turns against the slower background rhythms and sway of the swell. No thought, not once. Nothing I can remember.

It is not a fugue state. I’ve heard artists talk about that like it’s some kind of religious thing. For me it’s the same as when I am having a good day fishing. I move up the creek, tie on flies, cast to the far bank, wade, throw into the edge of a pool, feel the hitch the tug of a strike bang!—all in a happy silence of mind. Quiet. The kind of quiet feeling that fills you all night as you ready the meal, steam the asparagus, pour the sparkling water and cut the limes. Fills you into the next day.

I wouldn’t call it divine. I think it’s just showing up for once. Paying attention. I have heard artists say they are channeling God. You have to have a really good gallery to say that. I am painting now without naming any of it, can name it only in memory, and I become aware of a tickling on my neck. Sofia is leaning into me, standing on her tiptoes and watching over my shoulder. I turn my head so that my bearded chin is against her curly head. She is wearing the terry cloth robe she leaves here. She doesn’t say a word. She is behind me, but I can feel her smile, a lifting and tautening of the pillow of her cheek against my chin. I was painting more fish, and women, and these crab-like things at the bottom that had men’s eyes and reaching claws, and had somehow lost the fact that my model had vanished in the tumult.

“It’s been three hours,” she whispers. “I’m gonna go.” I nod. She tugs my beard once and is gone. Somewhere in there among the ocean of women and the darting fish and a man happily lost at sea I hear wind over water and a heart breaking like crockery and the bleating roar of a retreating dinosaur.

II

I came to the valley to paint. That was four months ago and I am painting, finally. I came up from Taos which is getting more crowded and pretentious by the minute. I was looking to find a place that was drama free. I am pretty good, somewhat famous, which means it gets harder to be quiet. A quiet place. There are two books about me. One I admit was commissioned years ago by Steve, my dealer in Santa Fe, as a way to boost my cachet, and it worked: prices for the paintings almost doubled. That’s when I traded in my used van, the one with the satellite Off switch that the collection agency in Santa Fe could activate if I missed a payment. Leaving me stranded by the side of the empty desert highway.

The other book is a fine and true scholarly study of what the author calls a Great American Southwest Post-Expressionist Naïf. I’ve been called a lot of things, but naïve was never one of them. It must have been because I couldn’t stop painting chickens. Farmyard chickens in every frame: landscapes, adobe houses, coal trains, even nudes. There was a chicken. They make me laugh, their jaunty shape all out of balance—like a boat that was built by a savant boat maker, you know it shouldn’t float but the fucker does. That’s chickens. Naïf.

So I bought this what? Cabin, or cottage, up against the mountain. Bought it because it was made of real adobe bricks by a poet no less—a good one named Pete Doerr, I read his stuff—who had to go back East because his sister contracted cerebral palsy. Wait, I don’t think you contract that. She contracted something that as he described it to me halted her gait, confined her to a wheelchair and turned her into a Christian fundamentalist, which he said is like watching someone turn into an idiot before your eyes. I laughed so hard and liked the guy so much I bought the house without negotiating. Plus, he said I could have the books, which I appreciated. For a poet to do that. I asked him if he was going into this deal of sound mind, giving away his books and all. He laughed loud and long. I really liked this guy. He said Yes, I just don’t have the time or the energy or the money to box them up and send them. I offered. Nah, keep ’em, he said. Maybe one day I’ll come out and pick a few favorites and we can drink a bourbon together. Do, I said. I really wish you do, and I meant it. Thirty months of sobriety or not.

He was big into Pablo Neruda and Rilke. I read some of them. Seemed like very different guys, to me, what do I know. Neruda making little doves out of his lover’s hands and wheat fields out of her stomach and stretching out like a root in the dark, he made me horny he really did. Made me want to find a Latin lover, Spanish or Chilean, not too young, one with hips and eyelashes and a voice like dusk rubbing over a calm water. Read enough Neruda you can’t stop.

Rilke on the other hand did not make me horny at all. He walked around like a man who had been skinned alive, didn’t know what to do with all those acute impressions and so made his poems. I can see why Pete Doerr was fascinated by him. I mean Rilke wrote the Duino Elegies in three weeks in the so named castle. I paint fast, but not that fast. Anyway, I admired Rilke as I read him and loved some of his poems, especially the part in the Elegies where he talks about animals, and the one poem about the panther in the cage which has to just slay you:

The cell phone rings. The house has no phone line, it’s off the grid, all the electricity comes from four solar panels on a pole off the northeast corner. Doerr was probably some sort of an environmentalist with this solar power, the woodstove, these thick dirt walls that absorb the sun coming in from the big plate windows on the south side. No phone, no grid, a little propane, the poet was an idealist and an environmentalist and so probably mostly miserable.

The phone rings. It’s Steve. He’s my dealer in Santa Fe. Has been for almost twenty years. The Stephen Lily Gallery. Very high end.

“How’s my clean and sober genius?”

I wince. How does a guy who has known me for twenty years talk to me like this? Hmp. Maybe exactly because he has known me that long, I think.

“You are, aren’t you?” Edge of anxiety.

That’s his big sweat. I am one of his top earners. The gambling addiction, the costly divorces, these things he can absorb with epic calm, without even a little pit stain on his immaculately pressed madras shirt. Those times, the chaos, they actually serve him because when I get hard up and desperate I paint faster. But when I binge, forget it. He might not see a canvas for three months. That makes him nervous. I suspect he has payments on things even his wife doesn’t know about.

“Huh?” I say. All muffled and growly. “Who the fuck’s jis?” I slur it.

I can almost hear the sharp intake of breath.

“Jim? Jim?”

Poor bastard. I relent.

“Oh, Steve, it’s you. Christ. I thought it was the collection agency.”

His relief is a cool wind through the airwaves. “You’re not in trouble with the car payments?” he says hopefully. “Or the rent?” His good cheer is truly obnoxious. How can I love a guy I want to strangle most of the time? I do love him, I don’t know why. Maybe because he knew I was good before anyone else.

“I’ve got good news and better news,” he says.

I notice that his attempts at fraternal concern have been forgotten, thank God. When he just acts like the ruthless predatory sonofabitch he is I can respect him.

“You there?”

“Barely.”

“Effy Sidell bought your Fish Swallowing All Those Houses. What were we going to title it? The Continuing Housing Crisis? Well it was perfect. The timing. He came in and saw it just as we were hanging it. You have to dream about timing like that. I saw the gleam in his eye, how he pretended to move on, how his eye kept flitting back to it. He was rattling on about this and that, covering his excitement, then very casual he says, What is Jim working on these days?

“Well, we didn’t want to pique his interest in anything else did we? So I said: A series of dung beetles I think. Whatever the shiny ones are. Jim says they are his best bug work yet. Definitely worth waiting for!

“Sounds like it, Eff said drily. Then he gestured at the Fish House thing and says very offhand, That’s interesting.

“Yes, we love that, I said. Several collectors have expressed interest already. But I told everyone we hadn’t even set a price yet.

“Why haven’t you called me? he shot back angrily. I mean he tried to sound suave, but you know Eff.

“Oh, well. I mean. Two regulars just dropped in this morning. It was leaning against the wall.

“Pim Pantela, he almost snarled. Well? Have you priced it?

“Yes, I said without thinking. Instinct, Jim, instinct. I tacked on two thousand plus the ten percent consideration I would take off because he was so decisive.

“Twenty-two thousand, I said.

“I’ll take it, he said. Have it sent up to the house today. Tomorrow is Margaret’s birthday.

“Can you believe that? He told me he loves you like a brother.”

“No shit.”

“He said that if you have anything that isn’t a goddamn bug to call him first.”

Pause while he catches his breath.

“Don’t go out and get hammered to celebrate?” he says with sudden seriousness.

“Wouldn’t think of it.”

“Well, there’s better news,” Steve said.

I was looking out the window. Heavy clouds were blowing in on the mountain ridges from the southwest. No wind here though. And the air had that darkening, heavy, pressure drop feel. If the wind didn’t pick up it would be a perfect afternoon for throwing some flies up on the Sulphur. We were in a gibbous moon if I was remembering right. They might be feeding at night, might not be too hungry, but if it spat a little rain so much the better. Hadn’t been fishing in maybe four days.

I have to admit that the prospect of thousands of dollars pouring into my Paonia State Bank account via instantaneous electronic transfer right now was appealing. I would not bet on horses or even a baseball game, and I certainly wouldn’t play online Texas hold ’em. I mean only a stupid compulsive idiot would do that.

“So?” I say into the phone. “And?”

“The aforementioned Pim Pantela wants to fly you down here for a week. He is commissioning a large portrait of his daughters. We talked about size and came to fifty by eighty.”

That woke me up.

“What do you mean you ‘came to’? I don’t recall you asking me.”

“Jim, your phone has been off for ten days.”

He had a point. I just found the charger in my truck last night. It was down in a clutter of Backwoods cigar pouches and old tippet spools. Tippet is the thinner gauge fishing line you tie on the end of your leader. I had lost the charger that plugs into a house outlet. I only had the one for the cigarette lighter, so I had to charge it driving to the coffee shop and back.

“A week? I’ve met his kids. They came in that one afternoon right? In matching polka dots?”

“Right!”

“I could paint them in two hours.”

“He wants you to cut loose, Be Jim. Really be yourself. You know, throw in some chickens if you want. Or a coal train.”

“For fuck’s sake. Be Jim? A coal train?”

I was now officially steamed. Steve had already said yes.

“I’m just getting to work here, Steve. I’m doing good work. Tell him another time. Anyway I need to get off now.”

The silence now was stony. Slight clearing of the throat. “He has offered thirty-five grand. Since I made the commitment without asking you, I admit, I am willing to take a forty-sixty split.” His voice was cool the way it almost never is.

“I’ll think about it. Gotta go.” I hung up before I could blow my top.

I dug out a cigarillo from the foil pouch and stood out on the ramada. Cool wind now pouring down off the mountain, smelling of ozone and juniper. The way the clouds were. That’s how I felt. The mountain formed a long ridge, higher peak swooping to lower, left to right, east to west.

The clouds massed in from the south, dark bellied and brooding. They hung against the ridge like a herd of deer afraid to cross a fence. How I felt. I lit and sucked on the stogie. If the anger I felt now—if I let it cross some line, let it spill, I probably wouldn’t have a gallery.

The cigars are little rough-ended cheroots, made to look hand rolled like the stubs Clint chewed in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Vanilla flavored and irresistible. Limit myself to two packs of eight a day. The wind tore away the smoke. Maybe too windy now to fish the creek, I didn’t care, I’d go up anyway and get the fly into the water. I could always fish a weighted wooly bugger, let it drift down on the current and strip it back up like a wounded minnow. The thing was to get in the water, feel the cold press against my knees, smell the current.

Steve, the fucker. I hated this part. Just when I am moving on something good and true he throws out some bullshit like a commission for two panfaced little girls in polka dots. And makes it clear that unless I spend a full agonizing week on the thing the guy writing the check won’t feel he’s getting his thirty grand worth. Thinks it’s okay because I have full creative freedom to throw in a chicken. Fuck. Fuck that. If I finish in a day they can take it or leave it.

The Ocean of Women painting was the first big piece I had made it halfway through since I’d come up here four months ago. I’d made a bunch of smaller paintings, but it took so much energy in just figuring out who to pay for the water bill, etc., where to buy the cigars, find a model. Sofia was a good one, a great one. She didn’t need much direction, she was creative, she knew what painting was and she allowed for departure, the kind we had this morning, where eventually she disappeared. I loved that.

I smoked and breathed. I was standing there. The floor of the outdoor ramada was rough sandstone flags, inexpertly laid by the poet probably, with sand between. Basic. The stones were reddish, ruddy to ochre. The roof just shade, latilla poles covered with a rush of young willows, haphazardly piled, tied down with cord. The simplicity. Something about the sincerity of this partial shelter. I was standing there and I thought of Alce, my daughter. That she would be eighteen, that she would be a better fisherperson than me now. Very damn good at fifteen. When I could get her to go out, get her away from that crowd. That she could have come with me this afternoon, fished with me up into the night, the rain. Relax, Dad, she’d say. Steve is a pain but he loves you. I know, I know, she’d insist, the commercial part of your painting, what a pain in the ass, but relax. Everybody’s gotta serve somebody, right? Sometimes we just pay the piper. Get our meal ticket.

She loved using a string of clichés, making them go where she wanted. Just one week, she’d tell me now. Finish this beautiful one you’re working on, then go down there. Go grateful. Grateful you have a job, doing what you love. Right, Pop? Uncanny wisdom for a fifteen year old who had been so tied to her own tugging needs.

Right, Alce.

Her flashing smile, dark eyed like her mom, Cristine—the high cheeks, my fine hair. Not too tall, no longer gangly, filled out, long legged. Always graceful. Moved like an animal I thought. Moving upstream away from me to fish ahead, the next bend. Moving upstream away, away. You went around the turn of the gravel bar looked back once, raised your chin. And gone. Gone. Alce.

I have an iPhone and now Steve can get to me. I don’t text, don’t get email or sports news on the fucker. It is little, too small for my hands, I’m always pushing the wrong button, losing the call, calling the wrong person. Steve made me get it so I can take photos of my new paintings—he showed me how—and then I message him the image. That’s why he got it for me, he said.

With the phone I get to talk to people I might not have talked to again before I died. Some upside. I don’t read the thing while I’m driving like I see so many do, even around here. Or teens, walking down the sidewalk together, each one on a phone, working their thumbs. Probably messaging each other, one foot away. Leads to an evolutionary loss of the vocal cords. Alce didn’t do that, she didn’t have a phone. I know she wanted one.

The last time we spent together, just the two of us, was the summer before the fall she started getting into trouble. Cristine’s sister Danika was dying of lymphoma up in Mora County outside of Las Vegas, NM, and Cristine went up for two weeks to be with her. It was summer and Alce and I took a couple of flannel sleeping bags and some meat loaf sandwiches and cans of Hawaiian Punch and fished her favorite pool below the falls at dusk. We both caught a couple of browns, nothing big, and then she made a small twig fire on the gravel bar the way I had taught her and we unrolled the bags under the stars. We were happy, I think, I mean glad to be together fishing, and before we went to sleep we named all the constellations we knew, and then I said, “See that cluster over there, above the Bull?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s you.”

“You are so corny!” Her fist came down on my shoulder. “That looks like a bunch of zits.”

“Ouch.”

“It’s alright, Pop, you are a dreamer. That’s why you paint.”

“Huh. Okaaay.”

“I’m a combination of you and Mom, a dreamer and a fighter.”

“Whoa.”

“Yup.”

“Hold on a frigging minute.”

“Glad you didn’t say fucking. You always want to.”

“Given my record, I kinda thought I was the fighter.”

“Nope, you react. That’s why you’re in the ER all the time.”

I laughed out loud. “No shit.”

“Yup. Mom’s a fighter.”

“You are so damned smart. I’ll be damned.”

I watched the stars beside my daughter feeling as proud as if she’d done something great and ordinary, like won the state track meet. I remembered I had felt the same way when she came home from her first day of kindergarten and declared, high spirited, that the teacher couldn’t pronounce her name. “I told her: AL-say! AL-say! Al like Al, Say like say! Now she says it right.”

Alce. “Don’t worry, Pop,” she had said that night. “We probably need dreamers more than we need fighters.”

Four months later she was dead.

I know. I stand out here now in the wind watching the clouds mass and I know. That Steve in his greed is feeding me and will kill my art if I let him. That my daughter died for nothing. That I better go fishing before my thoughts start to spiral.

I drive into town. Down the hill, cross the tracks, no coal train, no seven minute wait as it clatters by. Good. I don’t have to pack the truck because it’s perma-packed for fishing. I keep vest, waders, rods, boots in the backseat or in the bed always. I turn at Brad’s Market, honk at Bob who is changing a tire in front of his station. Good guy. He runs the Sinclair gas and service station with his old father and his son. Three generations of Reids. I met Bob my second day in town. I pulled up to get gas and he saw the rods in the truck bed through the windows of the topper. Saw the unlit stogie in my jaw, the cap paint spattered and stuck with flies. I guess he was curious.

“Going fishing?” He unspun the gas cap without looking, placed it on the roof of the topper over the truck bed while he reached for the pump handle, looking at me the whole time.

“Thought I better get after it. Been in town two days.”

He grinned.

“You moved into Pete Doerr’s place.”

“How—?”

“Small town,” he said. “You know how it is. Can’t fart without it coming up at some church breakfast.”

I liked him right away. The way I took to Pete on the phone. Bob watched the spinning clicking numbers on the pump, stopped dead at thirty-eight ninety-nine. Gave it an extra click. Recradled the handle, the metallic double cluck.

“You have a spot you were thinking about?” he said. He turned, spat a stream of tobacco juice on the concrete apron. Pushed his cap back. He was a short man, strong, in a grease smudged t-shirt (North Fork Archery Club), about my age, with a lively humor in his eye.

“I was going to go to the Pleasure Park down at the confluence. Everybody says how it’s Gold Medal and all.”

He nodded. I’d read about the place in magazines, where the Gunnison meets its North Fork. A rock canyon hole, clear water, three pound browns not uncommon.

I handed him two twenties. “Go upstream,” he said. “Go up the Sulphur. Gold Medal is good but what is it? Saturday? Be full of fuckwits from Aspen. But there won’t be a soul on the creek. One dirt road. The only person who goes up this time of year is Ellery who has the ranch above, and Brent the deputy who rents a trailer from him. Son Mark was up there Wednesday night, said it was hitting real good.”

He snagged a dollar out of his breast pocket, handed it to me.

“Let me know how it went. Never seen that dry fly you got on the front of your cap. The one with the orange body.”

I grinned. “That’s a Stegner Killer. I just made it up. The orange is baling twine. Seems to be working.” I took off my cap and worked the hook free and dropped it into his palm. “I’ll make you some more,” I said.

That was mid-April, before snowmelt. The creek was running low and clear. I liked it a lot. I liked it better than any place I had fished in years. The quiet of it. The nobody of it. The elk tracks in the silt and, lately, the piles of bear scat, full of the seeds of berries. That part of it.

Now as I drive by, Bob looks up from the tire he is changing, waves. Sometimes I think that’s all you need. A good man with a fishing tip, a wave. A woman once in a while. Some work to do that might mean something. A truck that runs, that some faceless bastard two hundred miles away can’t turn off. It’s not much, but plenty when you don’t have any of it.

I turn up Grand Avenue: hardware store, two cafés, pizza shop, Mexican restaurant, ice cream, barber. A throwback. The town is half a mile off the county highway, so there’s only local traffic. I pass the gravel company, the trailer park by the river, cross over the bridge and accelerate up the hill past the high school sign EAGLES AAA CHAMPS!, up to the highway and turn right east. Five drops spatter on the windshield and I don’t care. I can already feel the excitement of stepping off the rounded stones of the bank into the clear green water. The wind from upstream will be in my face, wanting to screw with my cast. I can feel the cold current against the light waders, the warmer rain.

Elbow out the window, I smell the downpour that’s already passed cooling the pavement, the ozone. I drive through Stoker. It’s a town of fifty houses, small and grimy, crammed between the river and the tracks. Coal town. Heaps of it, a small mountain piled in a cone on the slope across the river. Conveyors and silos climb the side of the canyon. Above the coal are broken rock ledges and oak brush all the way to the ridgetop. Mountain lion country.

Out the other side of town and now there is just the river. The canyon opens up and the river is wide and riffled, running low and clear. The road straightens and I floor it. I can see the high rugged wall of the Sheep Mountains still streaked with snow. When I get to the green tanks of the gas well I turn sharply off to the left, cross a bridge and the road turns to dirt and follows the Sulphur. Something in me relaxes. I can see from the darkness and shine of the clay that it has just rained. Nothing now. White patches of cloud moving fast and a mobile shifting sunshine. Everything in this whole country is getting ready to move. Archery season’s in two days and Bob tells me the woods will be thick with bow hunters from Arkansas and Texas and I might have to fish in an orange vest. Never happen. If some sonofabitch from the Ozarks mistakes my white beard for the ass of a deer, well.

I cross another small wooden bridge with a clatter of boards and am now on a rough track with a small clear creek running below me. Across the creek is a fancy log lodge and cabins, the last group of houses before there is nothing. A lifesize bronze bear stands in the forecourt, up on two legs and arms spread to the sky as if he were calling down a rain of locusts.

I can already smell the change. The darker spicier scents of spruce and fir. They come right down to the road. Big tall trees, heavy boughed, the branches trailing little flags of dry Spanish moss. Leaning and dark. And the creek below gathering the light as it gathers the water. The water is nearly blue, greener in the pools, snowy in the rapids, a living pulse reflecting trees and sky and cloud and ducks and crossing elk, and soon yours truly as it runs. My own pulse quickening. The excitement that never changes, of getting wet soon. Of facing off with a bunch of wary fish who may or may not be smarter than me.

The afternoon is somber under cloud, then the edge tugs away and the water sparks in a sudden sweep of sunlight. Can I say that I feel happy? First time in how long? No. Won’t say it. Shut up and inhale and drive.

Up ahead there’s a horse trailer in the middle of the road, horses, men. A short man in a big hat, leather vest pushed open by his belly, holds up a hand. Cowboy mustache. I can see the round of the chew tin in his breast pocket. The lace up cowboy boots called packers. Dirty and cracked. Up ahead a big man with a bigger gut and another big hat, liver colored, is trying to load a little strawberry roan. The horse’s head is strained back, the lead line from the man’s hand to the halter is taut and he is jerking on it hard. He is also yelling which is scaring the mare, I can see her sweatsoaked belly now as she wheels, the slack teats. Her eye back in her head.

“Goddamn it! Rockheaded piece of shit! Yaaaah!”

He jerks hard on the lead, the whole weight of his upper body in the twist of his torso. At the very end of his tug the horse rears. The fat man, more bulk than fat, is at the end of his rotation, he has nothing left, and the rearing mare tears the rope through his hand which I notice is bare. No glove.

The man yells. Or roars like a bear. Too bad the mare doesn’t get all the line and run. She doesn’t. I am staring. The short cowboy who has approached my window is half turned and staring too. The horse didn’t get all the line and before it is out of his palm the man dives for it with both hands and hauls. He is screaming now. He ties it, three fast moves, to a ring at the back of the trailer. The mare’s mouth is foaming. She is hauled back stiff legged, neck extended, trying to get as far away from everything at the other end as she can. She can’t.

“You good for nothing balky shit factory.”

The man’s voice is lower. He doesn’t have to scream, the horse is tied. He can do what he wants. He reaches into the back of the trailer, into the corner by the door, and tugs. Unhitches whatever it is, a wood stave, no, some kind of club, looks like a two by four, polished dark, maybe oak, lathed down, but the corners still on it. The first strike is both hands, from back and behind like a slugger swinging for the fences. The club comes down beside the withers and the mare screams, a sound like a choked whimper amplified, and it fells her, partly. Her front legs buckle. Now I am out the door. I shove it hard against the short man and he stumbles back with a surprised shout and lands on his butt in the dirt. I am jogging, hitching, trying to run down the road on my bad knee and yelling.

“Hey! Hey! What the fuck!” Running, limping, blind. I am blind. That part of me. Same as in the bar that day. Just a red blindness.

“Hey what the fuck!”

Too late. The man hauls back and swings again, this time against the architecture of the mare’s ribs. A thud and blow like the thud of a hollow drum. And crack. The horse, eyes rolling, white foam at mouth screaming, a madness, high, beyond whinny or snort, something human almost. I am on the man. I topple him and he is under me and we roll into the ditch. There is water in the ditch. Cold and it shocks. He is beside me flailing his arms trying to get back and I am hitting him, I feel something give, the pulp of his nose and he is pushing up and back scrambling.

“Hey what the—” He is scrambling back fast then standing above me on the road blinking, his nose trickling blood. Trying to digest. The meteor, the surprise of it. A stranger. “What the fuck was that?” His back to the mare who is still standing, I can see beyond the lip of the ditch, standing and shaking like in convulsions. The big man is looking down at me, holding the club. He must have picked it up. The little man has run up and he is staring too, they are looking down at me, as at some animal they never in this world have seen.

“Buddy,” says the big man. “What the hell was that?”

I stand slowly in the ditch water. Try my left leg, don’t know if I can weight it. Pick up my paint-spattered cap. It’s soaked. They are staring.

I look at him. His face meaty like a ham. He does not look particularly perturbed which makes him a dangerous man. Unconsciously he dabs his nose with the sleeve of his forearm. He’s done it before. I’d rather not talk. I’d rather tear his arms loose from his heavy shoulders like the wings of a cooked duck.

“You were going to kill that horse,” I say finally.

“Well. Maybe. My horse not yours. Headed for the glue factory anyway, that one.”

I stand there. Watching them, not the horse. The two men watching me. I cannot put a name to the hatred. The small one looks back to the trailer.

“Dell? What are we gonna do with her? She won’t load.”

“Cut her loose. She can starve if that’s what she wants. Let the coyotes eat her I don’t give a shit. I’m done.” Looks back to me. “Mister I suggest you mind your own goddamn business. Now and evermore.” They turn, walk away.

The big man called Dell stops in the road as if he just remembered something, turns back. Walks to the edge of the ditch, looks down on me. His eyes are small and colorless, without pity, flat with contempt. He gauges the distance. Then he snorts, a loud hawk, and spits. A heavy dark jet. I flinch back, too late, the phlegm hits the side of my neck, hot, a stink of tobacco. The trickle into my collar. Then he shows me his back.

I hear the horse whimper as they approach, like a child’s mew. I hear the metal door of the trailer clang shut, the slide of the bar. Two doors slam, the truck revs, the grind of first gear, the rattle as truck and trailer go on up the road.

I clamber slowly out of the ditch, hitch myself onto the gravel. The little mare is where they left her, standing, in shock, quivering. I wipe my neck with my sleeve—gobbet of snot, trickling tobacco spit, blood. Well.

The mare mews when I approach her. Doesn’t move just shakes. She’s cut, slashed across the back, a wonder he didn’t break her spine, and she’s cut deep, welted over ribs on her left side where the skirt of a saddle might lie. I speak just above a whisper, soft as I can and come slowly. She’s frozen in a paralysis of terror. When I touch her shoulder the quiver and tremor spread outward from the sweatsoaked hide, spread up and back like something seismic. She flinches away from my hand but doesn’t step. As if her hooves, small hooves, shiny and black, newly shod, are glued to the dirt. The lead rope hanging from her halter.

I almost cannot contain—the rage and the tenderness together like a boiling weather front. I stand beside her and breathe. The two of us just stand there.

I

What I did was gentle her over to a tree by the pullout and tie her there and drive back out to the highway where I got two bars on the stupid phone. Called my neighbor Willy. He’s an elk rancher just east of me. Friendly but not intrusive, neighborly. Bachelor at the moment like me, maybe ten years younger. Told me when I first moved in: If I ever needed anything. Repeats it every time I see him. So I called the number I’d managed to store in my phone and he told me to wait and forty minutes later he pulled up in his own diesel pickup, his own blue six horse trailer, and when he swung down and saw the state she was in he went back to the truck and loaded a feed bag with oats and spoke to her gently like a person who has been aggrieved and injured, and got the bag over her ears and we leaned against my truck and let her eat and calm down.

Willy was in no hurry and neither was I. Now that my chance at fishing was shot for the day. He didn’t seem like the other ranchers I’d met around here. He wore a twisted copper bracelet on his left wrist and he gave off the kind of intelligence of someone who might have read a shitpile of books but would never talk about it. We were in the cool shade of the spruce, smelling the breeze stirring downstream, and he told me he’d grown up in New Hampshire. He took off his raggedy straw cowboy hat and ran a scarred hand through his thinning hair.

“When I first came out here I must’ve stuck out like a finger on a foot,” he said. “But I had good neighbors.”

“New Hampshire? Never knew anybody from there.”

“You can’t move to New Hampshire,” he said, “but you sure as shit can move out of it. First frigging chance you get. You can move there, but. My folks did. From Germany. Don’t ask me.”

He coughed, spat.

“State has a Berlin and a Hanover, maybe enough for them. You know what the closest neighbor gal told my mother when she saw her swelling with her first baby bump? You can have kittens in the oven but that don’t make ’em biscuits. Jeesh.”

Willy said he went to Harvard for a semester, in engineering, he liked to build things, dropped out. Came west and built houses, then cabinets, bought a small farm here and supported it by building kitchens for rich people in Aspen.

“Custom stuff,” he said. “How I got to doing that was I always loved horses. Wanted to be a cowboy all my life. Grew up in Sandwich, New Hampshire, reading those Louis L’Amour books. You know them? About the Sacketts and all? And I loved boats. Went out with some of my buddies and their families in the summer. I liked small sailing boats. How they were built, how everything fit together tight like a puzzle, a place for everything.”

He laughed. Took a can of Red Seal chew out of his vest pocket and pinched a sizable dip, tucked it up under his upper lip, held it to me.

“Thanks.” I waved it away.

“That was gonna make life difficult, huh? Horses, mountains, cowboys and yachts. Never did make anything easy for myself I’ve come to find out.”

He spat on the road, glanced to the mare who was finally eating. It was nice to stand there in the deep afternoon shade, lean against a truck, let things settle. I could hear the creek below and a deerfly buzzed around us. I didn’t mind.

“I was a good woodworker,” he said. “Like my father, and I started out retrofitting big horse trailers, turning the forward end into living quarters, all finished wood, just like the cabin of a boat. Cherry, teak, walnut. Rich people were impressed. Figured I was house broke, I guess. Invited me in for a beer. Started asking could I make their kitchens like the inside of a yacht, too. There’s a dozen breakfast nooks over on the Roaring Fork with chart tables and dedicated weather radios I shit you not. So you can pretend you’re drinking coffee on your sloop. You couldn’t make up the shit I’ve seen.”

“Weather radios?”

“Yup. And VHF type radios, mounted overhead like in the nav station of a yacht, with mics on pigtail cords they unhook and call like the pool deck or the guesthouse or whatever. Everybody a captain in their own dream. Long as they pay me.”

He spat. We watched the mare.

“I’d like to see your paintings sometime,” he said. “Won’t hurt my feelings if that’s not something you do.”

“You come over any time,” I said.

Willy watched the little mare shaking the feed bag for the last oats, raising her nose.

“Why don’t I take her for a while? Till you get set up. I got an empty stall, we’ll throw some hay down, let her heal up, calm down. Don’t want her getting excited and hauling the mail into a bunch of barbed wire. I got a bunch of horses, and I feed every day anyway. And you can sort it out with the outfitter. He’ll have to give you her papers or the brand inspector will be climbing your backside. Nobody wants the good Inspector Madriaga in their face.”

“Dell,” I said. “His name is Dell. The outfitter.”

Willy’s eyes went blank. His face got stony. He didn’t look at me.

“Don’t know him,” he said.

When it came time Willy talked to the mare and stroked her neck and she followed him up and into the trailer like a heeling dog. Go figure.

I can’t get it out of me. My head. The heat of it in my blood.

The picture of the man swinging the club. The man in the picture in my head much bigger than the little horse. The man swinging with a hatred, to kill or not he doesn’t care.

I call Sofia tell her not to come tomorrow. I take the Ocean off the easel. The bearded man swimming happily with his fishing rod through an ocean of women, that seems like a different man than me. The swirling women, the fish, the glad waters, they are in another universe than the one I am in now.

I think of Guernica, the painting. The knife in the horse. A story I read once by one of the Russians, maybe Chekhov, a man beating a horse. How seeing it happen is so much worse. A big man wreaking his anger on a tied horse who cannot even beg.

II

The door of my bedroom opens onto the ramada. The clap of the screen door behind me and a nightjar, startled, flutters out of the little arroyo that feeds the pond. Flutters without sound into the light from the window and on into the dark. Love those birds. They fly up off the dirt roads at night through the beam of the headlights, fly up from where they are roosting in the heat of the ground, a muffled rising like a giant moth, softer.

I light a cheroot and smoke, listen to the burble of water falling through the crease. I was so rattled tonight. Didn’t eat. I followed Willy into his yard and helped him bed down the mare. She seemed to know. Willy handled her with such a sureness, so gentle, she seemed to know that this two legged at least would not beat her to death, probably.

We cut the strings on two bales of musty hay and spread it on the floor of the box stall, gave her grain in a bucket and water in the cut round of an old tractor tire. Willy dabbed her cuts with a salve like auto grease and we left her to sniff out her new circumstances. Whoever the fucker Dell was, I didn’t give a shit if he signed over her papers or not, there was no way I was going to give her back. It was the one thing I knew, maybe the only one. I also decided I would give Willy a painting. Not sure of what, but the other thing I knew was that Stephen Lily would never hear about it and that I would know exactly what to paint when I got to it.

Now I smoke and breathe trying to shake off the fight. Cloudy tonight like a lid, down over the top of Lamborn. Smell of dampness. The rain that didn’t fall this afternoon is gathering up there. Maybe tonight. Maybe the sweep and drum of it on the metal roof, a sound so loud and whelming and sweet it turns the bed into a little boat and thoughts into a wind that blows on northward. What they should do in psych wards to calm everybody down: build a steel roof over the beds and wash it with hoses, and pump in the smell of wet sage.

I had pulled down one of Pete’s poetry books tonight, the collected T. S. Eliot I’ve been reading, and opened again to the Four Quartets.

I read the lines and I put the book down open on the counter. If that were true about time. Then. Then we could be together again, could be now. It was redeemable. I couldn’t follow the logic, he was saying it wasn’t, but it was somehow comforting anyway. Can’t explain it. My daughter was not gone, not completely ever. Nor Cristine, her mother. We were held somehow in our circle and would be always. The river flowed around us.

It didn’t feel that way. Not really. It felt like what? A hollow bell. A bell that poured sound like water, the sound of our three lives together, but when you went to look in there was nothing.

Less than a year after Alce went and Cristine left, I remarried; trying to fill the bell, I guess. It didn’t last long.

I divorced Maggie just over a year and a half ago, part of the reason I moved up here. She was a wholesome Minnesota redhead who had once been a Playboy bunny, very by the book in all things. We got along, moved back to Taos together, and I wondered fifty times a week why I married her. Like when I came back from fishing and found my studio cleaned up, the canvases in progress set in order along one wall according to her estimate of their chronology, my paints, which tubes I leave scattered over a giant walnut table we inherited with the house, all laid in a row according to the Koala Paints color chart. The chart she left square on the table also in case I needed refreshing.

Coming to the Valley and living by myself for the first time in two decades, and letting the ache for a woman settle on my memories like a fine mist, greening them too, I realized that I hadn’t loved Maggie, not once.

Isn’t that strange? To be able to feel so much tenderness for a person, and I did, and powerful attraction, sometimes, and yet feel no love. It seems cruel, almost monstrous. I mean I can love a bug. I have watched a spider weaving her web in the evening, in the young alder branches along the river, and I have loved her. Truly. Or a small moth trying to beat her way off the water of a dark pool, her soaked wings stuck to the surface as if by glue. And gently slid a leaf beneath her and lifted her to the ground, praying that her wings would dry without damage. I’ve done that. And yet I could not love my wife. Not that wife. As many knitted wool hats and back rubs later.

This is one of the things I ponder when I think about stuff, which I try not to do too much.

The other is how I could have loved Cristine so fiercely, who was such a world champion bitch, who even came after me once with a kitchen knife.

This was supposed to be a time of peace. Not a Holding Pattern—a Gathering Period.

Well, I pretty much fucked that up this afternoon.

It was supposed to be a time for having both feet on the ground and drawing breath. That’s what Irmina my fortune-teller–healer friend in Tesuque told me before I came up here. She said: “Jim, in every life there are seasons. You are a planet you know.”

“I am?”

She has black, almost violet eyes, not so serious, full of lights and humor. Of course I loved her. I really loved her. Anyone who looks like she does and puts her hand on your knee and heals it from a tweaky soreness you’ve had forever, that’s a person to adore.

She lived in a small adobe house shaded by one old willow and a few piñons in the middle of miles of rabbitbrush and mesquite. She had lost her husband to a car wreck very young. We had been lovers off and on for many years, before Cristine, and were both wise enough to know that our limit was a day and a half. Then she got breast cancer and had a mastectomy and I moved in with her for almost a year, to take care of her while she went through the treatments. We remained close, and after Alce died and Cristine left, we saw each other sporadically and it was always like coming home and we always kept it short. She was the one to teach me that this was not a bad thing, just a thing, something to honor that allowed a friendship to flower. It was a great lesson, one I have used in every kind of relationship since.

“You are a planet and you have a magnetic resonance,” she said, “and spin, and gravity. You have an atmosphere and a hot core. You do. I’ve told you that. Others have a core that is cooling. You have seasons and tides and one or two moons who will circle you for life.”

“I do?”

“Give me your hands.”

She held my big rough hands, hands I have always thought of as awkward—I’m missing half the right ring finger and the left hand is covered in scars—she held them in her round little ones, very warm, and squeezed them.

“You can’t run all the time. You can’t create all the time. You can’t always swim in an ocean of women.”

“I can’t?”

When she said that, my eyes got wet, I don’t know why. The way she was holding me and looking at me so steady and warm.

“You can breathe. Sometimes just breathe. Go ahead.”

I breathed.

“You are holding Alce so tight. That’s okay. How many years has it been?”

“I don’t know. Three.”

“It’s not possible to hold that much pain.”

Then there was a silence, and then she said, “Jim, even the earth rests. The moon swims up, thin as grass, and the stars, and you can see every one. It is a much quieter song.”

She had this way of talking in pictures which I also loved.

“You rest now. Rest for longer than you are used to resting. Make a stillness around you, a field of peace. Your best work, the best time of your life will grow out of this peace. And don’t worry, compa, you will be rowdy and out of control again. You will throw off every kind of light. You can’t help yourself.”

She leaned forward and kissed me, warm and lingering, and my rowdy aurora borealis self was like Fuck the field of peace, I want to bed Irmina right now, and then she pushed her little hands against my big shoulders and said, “Go now.” Smile. “Next time.”

And I thought, How long do you need between times to make one Next? Like could I drive out to the county highway and turn around and come back?

That was just over six months ago. I had been trying really hard to do what she said, until today.

After Willy and I had gotten the mare settled earlier this afternoon I drove back down to town and stopped at Bob’s gas station. The time was beer-thirty, just after closing, and he was sitting on the torn couch on one side of the front office with a twelve-pack of Bud Light, what else. A fat old redneck in suspenders with three days of grizzled beard was on one of the metal chairs—the man stood when I pushed open the door, stretched, crumpled his can in a ham fist and tossed it perfectly into the corner trash can with a neat ring of steel, said to Bob,

“Keep the dirty side down.” Nodded to me once and went out the door.

“Do I look scary?” I said. “Scared him away?”

“You don’t look that good to tell you the truth.” Bob pried a can out of the torn box and held it out.

“No thanks.”

He cracked it, took a long swallow.

“I forget you’re on the wagon. I should do.” Smiled. “Never happen.”

I sat on the vacated metal chair, still warm from the man’s big butt.

“You see a ghost or just didn’t catch any fish? I saw you go by. You were driving a little too fast so I knew you were going fishing.”

Being in Bob’s front office always settles me. Something about—I don’t know what. Always having enough time for whatever needs doing. Taking it just as it comes: everything’s fucked up, might as well meet it halfway and see what happens, that was Bob’s approach. And laugh about it if possible.

I said, “I went up the Sulphur. You know the second pullout, by that flat where people camp?”

He nodded, drank. He was watching me and his face was serious, like it rarely is. Could see I was somehow shaken, I guess.

“Somebody was setting up some wall tents, had the road blocked with a horse trailer.”

Bob’s new beer was already done. He crumpled the can, set it in a fruit box to the side of the couch.

“You met Dellwood,” he said. “Big guy with a gut? That could ruin anybody’s day.”

“Dellwood?”

“That’s where Dell puts his bow camp every year. He’s an outfitter out of Delta. Camps there and rides his hunters up into the basin every morning on horseback. Ask me, it’s a back assward way to do it but that’s Dell. He gets a lot of return hunters so they must like it. Kinda like cowboy camp. For folks from Alabama.”

The compressor rattled. Bob cracked another beer.

“He doesn’t do too bad on bulls neither. I think he’s got salt licks but I can’t prove it. I gather you traded words.”

“How—”

“You got blood on your shirt.”

“Huh.”

I told him. The whole thing. The horse, the fight, Willy.

“You knocked Stinky into the road? Opening the door? Well shit. Goddamn, Jim.” He couldn’t contain his laugh.

“Then you took Fats into the ditch? Pretty good for an artiste. Goddamn.” Shook his head. Pried a tin of Skoal out of his breast pocket with one finger, took a dip that would make me faint. Offered it. This time I took a pinch.

“He won’t forget you, Dell. He’s a mean SOB.”

“I won’t forget him.”

“Yeah, I can see.”

Spat. Handed me the cup.

“He’s a different cat. Last fall I found one of his horses lying down by the creek. Curled up like a dog. Whimpered like a baby when I came up. Like I was gonna hurt her. Saddest goddamn thing I ever saw.”

“Ouch.”

“His hunters think he’s John F. Wayne I guess. He can spin a story that’s one thing. And they get their elk. So.”

He spat.

“Are they poaching up there? Who knows? If they are, they get the animals out at night. And he sure as shit is not easy on his stock. Half his horses are so broke down at the end of the season he ships the whole bunch down to his brother in Arizona where he sells the used up ones to the killers, is what I heard. Guess they make more money that way than feeding them right and working them to what they can handle.”

He spat. “One way of doing it, I guess. Not the right way.”

The compressor rattled, hissed. A truck rolled through the pumps, dinged the loud bell, a driver in a baseball cap leaned forward in his seat, waved, rolled on through.

“Alright,” I said. Stood. “I’ll let you go.”

“You don’t gotta run off. Soon as you do I gotta go move cows.”

I grinned. Bob had about four jobs when I stopped counting. In another week he’d start driving a school bus.

“Bob?”

“Yeah?”

“What’s his last name?”

“Dell? Siminoe.”

“Thanks.”

“Be good.”

Bob probably reading my mind. Be good. Be good.

I stood on the ramada and tried to shake off the pressure of Dell’s body pressing me into the cold wet of the ditch, the sound of his grunt. I smoked the cigar down to the root, crushed it on a flagstone, lit another. The smell of rain.

What I’d noticed was that here, in the windshadow of the mountain, it often smelled like rain. It might be raining up on the ridge, I might see the veils and rags of rain hanging down out of the scudding clouds, I might see shrouds of rain hauled over the country the way a fishing boat might drag a net, but—no rain here. A spatter, maybe, then nothing. Willy told me when I first moved in that it was like living in a strip bar. So close, looks so good and you never get laid.

Virga. That’s what it was called. Alce told me that once. Came home from school one day and told me. Rain that falls and never hits the ground.

“C’mon I’ll show you,” she said.

I told her we might as well go fishing while we were at it. It was the first afternoon she ever caught a fish, I don’t know how old she was. Little. She was small for her age. She pointed up at the veils over the west rim, the water in the pool smooth, without a drop.

“Virga!”

I gave her a thumbs-up and threw a caddis for her and let it drift and gave her the rod and as soon as she touched it the trout hit and almost pulled it out of her small hands. Oh God! Oh God, I yelled. Way to go! Keep the tip up! Like that! Yeah! She was holding the rod straight up with all her strength and it was all she could do and she was in hysterics, laughing, as much from shock as anything. Her hair was blowing across her face and the jerking rod was shaking the counterweight of her body and the fish was whizzing out the line. I wanted her to catch it herself, I was almost as panicked as she was, I had an idea. Run backwards! I yelled. Try and hold around the line, yeah like that, slow it down, go! Run up the bank! I was awed that she could even shift her grip. She ran. Half backwards, half sideways, trying to hold the rod high like a broadsword. Ran up into the dried stalks of mullein the willows and the fish came with her up onto the rocks and was flopping, thwacking the stones, a big brown, God, big. She dropped the rod and ran like a puma down over the stones and pounced. Both hands. The trout got away from her and she chased it, bent double, trying to wrangle it, landing on it again with both hands, it squirted out like a watermelon seed, slipped over the rocks, she was after it, I was laughing. Yelling and laughing. She got to it and grasped it and then fell on it, covering it with her whole body like a punt returner covering the ball, screaming with glee, laughing and crying too. I reached under her, and I picked up the heavy fish and thwacked it on a rock and it was finally still and the colors dulled the way they do and then she burst into tears. Her print dress stained with fish slime and algae and blood. She was inconsolable. Not for her clothes, for the fish. All the way home I held her in one arm as I drove and told her about the spirit of the trout, how he was probably swimming now among the stars and would be happy to feed her and her mother and father tonight and how proud I was of her, and I was surprised when a few days later she wanted to go out with me again, and that’s when I bought her a seven-and-a-half-foot four weight and began to teach her to cast.

After she died I moved from Taos to Pilar, closer to the Rio Grande. Cristine wasn’t coming. She had her own history there and she was no way going back. She had a bodywork business going, massage and pressure point, a good trade among rich steady clients who appreciated her strong capable technique and her no bullshit attitude. One Silicon Valley transplant tried to paw her breasts once and she told him politely that was not part of the service so he tried again and she squeezed his balls so hard through the towel he screamed. She was laughing when she told me. If I could get Cristine laughing I was probably good for at least twenty-four hours.

Anyway by then it was just the two of us and we needed a lot of space, from each other.

Back then I went fishing. Every day. Alce was suddenly gone and I didn’t know what else to do. I fished the dawn and I fished the evening. Down in the canyon of the Lower Box. Down under the rushing drop where Pueblo Creek comes in. Down in the yellowing leaves of the cottonwoods, the box elders. Yellowing then falling leaves. Then the nights when my fingers got numb, and toes. The October cold numbing more than my hands. I cast way across the river and let the fly tumble down the edges of the far pools, pulling line off the clicking reel as fast as I could. So much line out, so much current it’s heavy against the rod, my arm, stop the line, let the fly swing across the current to the middle of the river. And—Bang! They hit.

They were twenty, thirty yards downstream and mad and full of autumn vigor, sleek and fat with summer bugs, with crawdads, frogs, with colder water, and then I had to fight them against the current all the way back up, thigh deep in the dark water, sucking on the stub of cigar, not sure if it’s even lit, three stars, sweet smell of fallen leaves, raising the rod tip against all the weight trying to feel the limit, the limit of the tippet and the knots, the breaking point, then dropping the rod fast and stripping in the sudden slack, foot by foot, and the trout, if he was big, suddenly deciding too that that’s enough and putting on the jets, get the hell away from here and running zing, every foot I’d just fought for gone in a flash in the willed charge of a fast-tiring trout. Running with my line. The song of the reel. I loved this.

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.

III

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?

“There you are! Smoking away your breakfast.”

“How do you know I haven’t already eaten a stack of pancakes? Were you raised in a barn?”

She pulled over the other chair, just scraped it over the rough rock, plopped down beside me. Tossed her curly hair off her face.

“You mean not knocking? I’m always hoping I’ll catch you—what’s that Latin—in flagrante delicto.”

“With whom?”

“A muse. An angel maybe.”

“You should knock.” And I thought to myself: If I were in a better mood that would be my next painting. Me in the arms of a muse. A dangerous proposition. I mean getting that close to the one who brings the gifts.

She turned bodily in the chair and looked at me. Then prodded my calf with the toes of her sandaled foot. “You’re serious today,” she said. “What’s the matter?”

I let out a breath, stubbed the cheroot on the stone. “I got in a fight. Sort of.”

“Yeah? Like the Jim of old? The violent felon I’ve heard about?”

“Kind of.”

“Sorry. I don’t mean to joke. If you got in a fight you must have been really mad.”

“I guess. I was blind. The way you get.”

She shook her head.

“Everything goes dark at the edges. Kind of tunnels down to the target. A good fighter, a real brawler has to open up that vision. Use the anger but open up the field of view and stay relaxed. My friend Nacho used to tell me that. Don’t just charge in swinging like a crazed bull, Jesus, compa, you are going to get yourself killed. That was never me. I was the one rolling around in the spit on the floor.”

“Wow.”

“That’s what happened yesterday.”

“It did? Jeez.”

I told her. The whole thing: Dell beating the mare, the rolling wet in the ditch, bloodying Dell’s nose, my talk with Bob. I told her and we watched a harrier, a big hawk fluttering low over the sage, beating its wings over a bush, lift then glide, scaring up the mice, methodically hunting.

When I was done she was looking at the mountain. A flash of blue and four small birds tore by the edge of the porch and down past the pond. Mountain bluebirds. Early to be here, maybe they just stayed all summer. When I was done I lit another cheroot. She didn’t say anything.

“Don’t you want to kill the bastard,” she said at last.

“It had occurred to me. Mostly I just want to get his stench out of my nose.”

“No kidding. Fuck. I’m not even a violent felon and I want to tie him to a post and shoot him. How do people even get like that? Like a stain.”

We sat side by side, watched the big hawk. It had a white rump that flashed as it rose. A cool morning, the sky over the mountains washed clean. Something touched my arm below the rolled up sleeve. Her hand. Her small fingers. Brushed the skin lightly and lay over my forearm. Don’t know why it surprised me. I watched them, her fingers, the way I had just been watching the bird, happy to see them there, a little awed.

Her fingers migrated down toward my hand, rested on a scab of dried green paint, picked at it, moved on, covered my paint spackled knuckles, one finger sliding down over the stub end of my half finger. Resting there a second, pushing on the end.

Slipping to the side, onto my thigh. I was wearing baggy khaki shorts, enjoying the chill, and her warm fingers wriggled under the hem and her touch on my bare thigh raised instant goosebumps. We were both watching the transit of her hand as if it were another animal. She stopped, let it rest and curl on top of my leg.

“You see me naked all the time,” she said. “Does that do anything for you?”

I lay the half cheroot down across a lip of flagstone for later. She was very pretty. Head tipped downward, quarter profile. The length of her eyelashes. Maybe the prettiest angle for a human head, a woman.

“Yes.”

“What?”

Didn’t answer.

“What?”

“Sometimes I get— When you were a mermaid. Arching backwards and all.”

“You get a boner.” She lifted her head and smiled at me, open, guileless, her eyes suddenly as faceted and sparkly as gems.

I nodded.

“You have a boyfriend,” I said lamely.

She pursed and twisted her soft lips, like: That is really stupid.

“Dugar is a certified airhead. The official documents just arrived. He wants to go live with sea cows or whatever they are. Plus, I have suspected for a while that he’s been banging the hippy girl from the orchard and now I know. I told him we were coasting, just coasting, no more gas. He asked me if he could use that in a poem.”

Her hand stirred, woke up. Crept stealthily up under the loose leg of the shorts, worked inward, found me. I don’t wear underwear unless it’s like some formal event.

My dick was as surprised as I was. Kind of embarrassed. She brushed it with the curled backs of her fingers then pounced. Squeezed and tapped. Amazing how fast an embarrassed cock, one with ethics, social sensibilities and all sorts of reasons to just stay home, amazing how fast it can forget everything and lunge for the prize at a hundred miles an hour. Must be how a venerable, canny trout feels when it triggers on an elk hair caddis—somewhere in its pea brain it knows, knows, this is probably not a good idea, but Fuck it. Bang! Also, she was—what? Ten years older than Alce would be, but still, she was young. I shuddered. She— It wasn’t right. Any of it.

“Uhh,” I said.

“I want you to see me naked. No painting. A person seeing another person.”

“Uhh,” I said. “I haven’t had much luck lately.”

“You don’t need luck, dummy. I just want you to look at me. C’mere.”

She gave the head one more friendly squeeze and took my hand and led me through the screen door into the bedroom.

Context is funny. How things hit you. Like on one planet there is gravity and you are walking along, then there is no gravity and you are airborne, sort of flying in slow parabolic leaps. I had seen Sofia undress probably a dozen times. Had seen her stretch out naked. Had paid attention to the curves and the colors and living heat of her body, the potential for movement there, and rhythm, even when she was very still. She was never still. Even immobile she had the sprung tautness, the restrained leap of a deer, one at dusk who lifts her head from the grass and is—listening. For threat I suppose.

With Sofia it was as if her body were listening, but it was for some inner laughter. That’s how it seemed when I painted her. That thing where color and form become almost like a music, something rhythmic and flowing, and somewhere in there I lose myself. When I am really painting, when I am painting well. I lose myself and may not wake up for hours, for most of a day. What I loved was how Sofia understood that and gently took her leave. And in that, when I was really painting and in it, and if she was modeling for me, I would see her and not see her. I would not see her as a young woman, naked, open, waiting for me to make love to her. I would not see her as a nude girl coyly, just barely covering, enticing the next move in the game. It was not a game, ever, it was completely, wonderfully serious, and it was never about sex. The boner thing was when I needed a break, got hungry, snapped out of it.

As she tugged me into the bedroom the screen door clapped behind me. I thought: Punctuation. A period on the last long paragraph of my life.

“You look like you are being led to slaughter,” she said.

She turned and pulled off her thin jersey blouse, unclipped the bra from the front and loosed her generous breasts. Wriggled out of her cutoff shorts, let them fall. Pushed down on the elastic of her little thong and worked it down to her knees where it relinquished itself also to the floor. She smiled up at me, as open and guileless as before. Her eyes about five different colors, blues, grays, greens, warm browns. Then she took my hands as she had before, hers small and warm and assured, and she placed them open on her collarbones, still smiling, and stood straight and still and closed her eyes. Something about that gesture. So simple, so joyful, so trusting. I felt a surge of something simple and clean, something like happiness. Felt myself rouse and reach with a sympathetic attention. I was up against her, my dick was touching her belly and she reached and pushed it down so that it was against her, her crack, sort of sprung against it, and I could feel the brush of her curly hair, the pressure where she clamped me there. And we stood. And we looked at each other and laughed. And my hands moved along her collarbones, the delicate birdlike architecture. And down over her breasts and back up to her slender neck, the perfect ears. Over her strong shoulders. And her hands down over my hips, around to the front, stroking and pressing me into her, up against her. I lost myself again. But this time it was to a euphoria with a different gravity. I think I was laughing. She pulled me toward the bed and fell backward and suddenly all the angles were right and she was moist and open and I was in her and it was that shock. The shock that never dulls. Of being inside another. And her laughter was overtaken by breath and we rocked together in a pure and simple delight. That’s what I remember: the simplicity, the lightness.

How often is anything that simple?

We lay in the coolness from the open door. I could hear the burble of the water running through cattails down into the pond. A cricket warming to the morning on the ramada. Her head was in the crook of my arm and I thought she might be asleep. This much peace vouchsafed to any one man. The luck of it. That’s what I thought. Drifting in it. And as I drifted I was open and careless in my thoughts and I bumped up against something barnacle sharp and ugly. Dellwood Siminoe, swinging the club against the little mare like she was a piñata. The candy spilling, and I knew the candy for him was the pain and terror of the other. Clotted and dribbling, then pouring onto the road in a shiny gush. How many terrified horses like that? Enough to make a business of shipping those broken to Arizona. What Bob told me.

Fuck it. I pushed it away. Pushed my nose into the warm mass of Sofia’s dark hair, breathed it, pushed everything else away.

I made omelets and we shared a trout, fried in butter with a little salt and pepper, lemon. Made another pot of coffee. Sat on the ramada.

She said, “I thought of doing that a few times.” She smiled, her hand curled on my thigh. “Doing you.”

“Really? When?”

“When you were painting me.”

“Workplace harassment.”

“I know, that’s why I didn’t. I knew on some level it would have made you mad. I almost didn’t care.”

We made love again. This time it was me who asked. Lying there again, on the bed, this time with heat, almost an oven heat, coming through the screen, and sweat instead of tears, I wondered how simple we really are. That we can do the same things again and again and again and find them interesting, even fascinating, and seek the repetition with a hunger as avid. How fishing was like that, and painting. And this time as we lay quiet and listening, our pulses coming through now and then like the drumming of a distant village, this time I kept the boat of my thoughts sailing along from one tack to the next on a course I could control.

Somehow the day passed like that. We made more food, went for a walk to the far pond, I read her the lines from the Four Quartets I had copied down and stuck into the breast pocket of my Carhartt barn coat:

I don’t know, it made me feel better. Another way of saying, Keep it simple. You don’t even have to pray, just kneel where there’s prayer and I’m beginning to think there is prayer everywhere. I had written down another bunch of lines and tucked them in there, too—about how crazy hard is the journey of getting to where you have never been. That too rang bells for me in this new place, trying to paint something good. Sofia’s cell phone buzzed a few times and she finally picked it up and I heard her telling Dugar she wouldn’t be coming home for a couple of days, he could move in with that hippy chick from the orchard he’d been banging for who knew how long, she didn’t give a shit, and I stared at her, checking the checklist, was any of that okay with me, I mean she hadn’t said she was staying here, had she? But come on Jim, this is not your first rodeo, you know exactly where she’s staying tonight, but she hadn’t telegraphed or acted in any way like she wanted anything more than this, not one inch past what I could give freely. Right? Why don’t you try trusting her for a second?

She rummaged through the fridge, the cabinets, began putting together a spaghetti dinner. Said her mother was half Italian. I took a small pre-stretched canvas from the stack against the wall, about two by three, and propped it on the empty easel. Picked up a piece of fiberboard and taped a flipped for sale sign over it and squeezed out turquoise, cobalt violet, white, a stiff white close to the lead white I can’t get anymore. Yellow. I wanted cool yellow. My favorite lemon yellow was used up, so I put out cadmium yellow light, which is not as sharp or cold. Good for now, maybe better. Terre verte, cobalt blue. Joyful colors.

While she chopped garlic and heirloom tomatoes, while she hummed and sang, I painted a house. A small adobe house on an ochre hill, like this one, like mine. I painted a blue pond and sailing glad clouds, and I mixed the terre verte with cobalt violet and tinted it in half with the white to make the delicate undersides of the cumulus. I began to feel that gladness that can only come when I paint. I painted a crane-like bird hunched at the edge of the pond fishing. Then I painted a man in the garden, also hunched, leaning to a shovel digging. An intensity in the man. A garden? Yes. No. The dirt he threw grew into a pile. As I painted, I myself grew alarmed. The pile grew and grew, the man dug, until the hole could only be of a certain size, could only be one thing. I squeezed a tube of Mars black onto the palette and I painted birds: one two three four large night colored birds. Like that Carl Sandburg poem I had read the other day They have been swimming in midnights of coal mines somewhere. Except they were not crows. They were bigger, they were ravens, but big as vultures. Four in a line looking down off the roof at a man digging a grave. A man like me.

I painted fast. Sometimes I painted so fast I did not see how it could be done. If I happened to look at a clock. Sometimes a big painting with a lot of elements in four, five hours. Or one. Or half. Sofia was humming, I could hear the bubble of boiling water. Smell sautéed onion, garlic, simmered tomatoes. In the time it took her to make dinner.

We had no Italian bread, she had popped two slices of Sara Lee into the toaster. Could smell that too. Out the open double doors the mountain was catching the full brunt of the lowering sun. Every outcrop and rockslide, the quilt of the forests: spruce and aspen, juniper, oak, lit to sharper detail and warmed by the honeyed light. Sharpened and softened at the same time. One reason I could spend so much time alone up here, happily: could sit and absorb the two hours before dark every evening as if it were a pageant.

But the picture on the easel. Somehow it spawned itself and somehow it felt, what?

I felt guilty. Like the man digging the grave. I got myself, the bulk of me, between the painting and Sofia behind the long counter. As if I could cover it. She glanced up now and then as she worked and she seemed happy—happy that she was cooking, happy that I was painting, happy that it was a lovely evening and that we were doing whatever we were doing, happy maybe that it wasn’t at all defined. She did not seem to be focusing on the painting in particular when she looked, on the details, maybe it was a little too far away. It was a landscape with a figure, like so many. I stepped to the canvas and quickly lifted and flipped it and leaned it against the wall frame out, against a large piece of fiberboard I tore up for palettes. Leaned it at enough of an angle that the paint wouldn’t smear. And straightened.

“Smells good,” I said a little too loud, a little too hearty. Her head came up sharply and she studied me for a second, curious, then went back to laying out plates. I went onto the ramada, lit up. What the hell was going on with me? I had never hidden a painting ever. A bug, a freight train, a trout, they had all seemed born more out of themselves than me, they deserved the simple respect of being. I could not remember hiding a painting from anyone, much less myself. Even the nudes that had so pricked Maggie. Because that’s what it felt like—hiding. I had turned the picture’s face to the wall so fast as much to hide its guilty expression from my own eyes. Strange. That’s one thing, I murmured. One thing we are learning to be sure of: life does not get less strange.

“Ding ding!” she called happily. “Ding a ling. Pronta!”

“Great,” I called. I called Great and didn’t feel so good.

Watch it brother, I said to myself, and set the cheroot carefully on the arm of one of the Adirondack chairs. Watch yourself. Start lying this early and. It can’t be good.

We hit the hay early, soon after full dark, must have been close to nine, and I asked her to rub my shoulders, and she did, and we fell asleep curled around each other. Me around her, looking out the screen door to the broad shadow of the mountain. She slept, the even breathing, deep, the twitches, sighs. A content sleep I envied. I could not. I lay awake, elbow against her hip and hand cupped over her breast. The weight of it. I lay awake and watched the heat lightning. Wondered what good would come of it. Had found a model I could really work with and now look: complication. Well. It worked for Wyeth and Helga, for decades, wasn’t it? Had never worked for me. I never needed a subject that badly. Fuck, Jim, way to go.

I watched the heat lightning and small fleets of clouds sail over the mountain ridge, lit from underneath, pale hulls and dark in the rigging. The lightning shimmered and boomed without sound, a far off battle. Heat lightning is a funny name. I guess because it comes this time of year, in the heaviest, sultry nights. But the glimmers seemed cold, part of the same cold distance as planets and stars.

Few stars tonight, just noticed. And then a minute later I saw why: as I watched the clouds scudding over the mountain’s shoulder, a bright white light flashed on the eastern ridge. Like hunters playing with a powerful spotlight up there. It wasn’t a spotlight, it was the moon. It flashed and then domed and it backlit perfectly the trees on the ridgeline, made of them a finely drawn fringe. I sucked in a breath. I hadn’t seen this, not since I’d been here. It rose, the moon, so fast it seemed to lift off like a big bright bird. Like a great egret rising out of the cattails, too big too white too slow. Too pure. The moon in that instant brought the mountain close, close enough it seemed I could reach out and touch the bristle of trees.

The same moon was shining down on Santa Fe, on Irmina with her losses, who harbored nothing it seemed but compassion, on Steve, on whatever deals were hatching like red birds in his head. On the Box of the Rio Grande where the river was threshing pale and loud over the big drops, in the long pool where I had spread Alce’s ashes. On the bends of the little Sulphur where I had found some peace in the past weeks. On bow hunting camps and bronze grizzly bears.

I lay watching the moon detach and distance itself from our troubled topography, and sail, it seemed, with some relief into the absences of space.

The trout were probably wide awake like me tonight, finning the current at the edge of the riffles, feeding on the bugs haplessly lit.

That is where my heart went. To them. To the cool water. The unburdened sounds of water flowing over rock, smooth water over smooth rock, roiled into a rough edged rush and burble that was also somehow soothing. Under the moon the whitewater would be rips and tears in the darkness, the pools black, or maybe black with the bright moon reflected there, the trout lost to sight but looking up themselves into a bright firmament. I cannot name it but my heart felt like that. All those reversals, rough to smooth and back again, light erupting in the dark and subsiding back to a blind flow where sound and smell and cold were more important. Where touch was. The thing about night, about dark: touch is most important. And lying there against the heat of Sofia I could feel the stones underfoot, the press and cold of the current.

I, we, used to fish at night. Alce and I. Under a moon. We did well when we could rouse ourselves to do it. When we could be bothered to put on sweaters. There was something so magical about the two of us fishing a run together in the dark, barely visible to each other, throwing flies for fish we would never see until they leapt into the sere gaze of the moon.

I slipped out of bed. Slipped my arm from under Sofia’s, kissed the back of her head, held the quilt in place as I moved out from under and felt the cold earth of the floor. Found jeans thrown over a rocker, the flannel shirt, dressed fast, stepped into clogs. Poured what was left of the morning’s coffeepot cold into a travel mug and went quietly out the screen door. Night warm enough, end of summer, but with a chill scent of fall. How can it be both? Cold and warm, I don’t know but it can. The five weight rod was in the back of the truck with the old felt soled boots, vest behind the seat, light waders over the side mirror where I had hung them yesterday. I felt between the front seats for a packet of Backwoods cigars, good, the foil pouch was fat, held four or five. I’d smoke them while I fished, one after another, and I looked forward to that as much as the fishing.

Don’t remember much of the drive. Bumped over the railroad tracks at the edge of town. Turned along the length of the fruit packing shed. I remember glancing down Grand Ave, the short route out to the county highway, and that the digital bank clock read 11:32 and the town was dead. And I remember: straightening the wheel and continuing on, out toward the orchards. I shivered. I skirted the main street and instead went a mile further out of my way and took the black bridge over the river to the highway, took the windier, the prettier way around. Just wanted that certain quiet, I guess, that peace.

There was one house along the road there, before the bridge, a big house, the doctor’s, and the rest was dark with orchards, and farms with long drives. The staccato tumps of the bridge a sudden drum-roll as the tires rolled over the planks, the sudden smell of water.

That smell always stirs me. I felt excited the way I always am before a session fishing, also angry, also a little scared. What was I scared of? I would never say.

In twenty minutes I turned off the highway and dropped down to the creek bottom where the lodge stood darkly, the reaching bear. Right there I turned off my lights. Because this is where the road turns to dirt and it gets beautiful, and there is the moon, and I like to navigate in natural light, acclimate eyes for fishing. Night vision. I also slowed, to make less rattle and rev, and I was careful not to touch the brakes, not to pulse the brake lights.

Because at night there is a comfort in moving darkly. In slipping through, shadow to shadow. Can’t say why. Maybe because we were hunters, all of us. The way a cat moves in the shadows. Or a wolf. The instinctive safety in that. I know that when Alce and I went fishing at night I often did that: turned the lights off as we clattered along the river, eased off the gas. Maybe hoping to surprise a herd of bighorn or deer, or a great horned owl in the road.

I wanted a drink. How many days, months now? I thought counting days in AA was obsessive, but could see that it might have saved my life. Well.

The creek at night under the moon was just enough like the creek in daylight to be reassuring. There was the deadfall spruce that sieved the current with skeleton branches, churning a line of pale foam. There was the long pool above, a dark mirror of tree shadows and beacon moon. There were the gravel bars, chalky, shaped to the banks and swept into low moraines that divided the water. There the sky, softened as if by a thin fog of moonlight, filling the canyon. For a moment I forgot my preoccupation with the dark and drove up the road with that awe I felt before certain paintings in certain museums, the awe in which I disappeared.

There was a pullout I had come to use when I wanted to fish this stretch of creek, just a widening of the road, but tonight I turned off just before it. I swung right into a rutted opening of thick willows into a small clearing where people had camped. Tonight I parked here, hidden, and tonight I pulled on waders and boots quickly and shut the door carefully with a quiet click. The warm comfort in moving like a ghost, being part of the night. Tonight I took the already strung rod out of the truck bed and barely checked the two flies, a Stegner Killer on top, a shiny copper John on the bottom, I didn’t really care. Pushed through the willowbrush holding the rod high over my head and out of the snagging branches like a brandished sword and stepped over the smooth stones and into the dark water with a relief and sigh. Stepped in up to my knees. The cold. Smelled woodsmoke trailing down from upstream with the current. Began to cast.

Time past and time present. Whatever kind of time ruled the earth receded into the night shadows. I cast and cast and walked carefully upstream, sometimes the slow current of the pools up to my waist, sometimes taking to the bank to get a better angle on a piece of slackwater, throwing into the fast funnels between rocks, the boulders bleached by the moon and marking the course of the creek upstream the way a scattered herd of humped and silent beasts might mark a twisting trail.

I followed them. Lost myself and followed them. Sometimes I saw the bushy little fly hit and drift, sometimes I lost it in a silvering of current. When I got a strike—sometimes I heard it first. In the calm places. A gulp. A blip, the double note, nose and tail. And the rod tip bent hard, the shiver. And then the old euphoria. I know I talked to myself, to the fish—that’s it, you’re alright you’re alright, come up come up, off of those rocks, careful careful, that’s it—to him and me the same. I loved this, and in the lost time I worked in a trout I forgot the preoccupation of the predator, with stealth, with melding into the night, forgot myself, which is maybe how a true predator disappears, I don’t know.

Released them all easily, no deep swallowed hooks, no snags, fishing as well probably as I have ever fished in my life. I reached into a side pocket of the vest and pulled out the foil pouch, unrolled it and dug out a soft cheroot, the vanilla scent heady, and stuck it between my teeth, just sucked it. Content with that.

It must have been close to a mile. Around the third bend as I worked upstream I saw the firelight. It was thrown across the creek onto a backstop of shaggy trees, a high shifting flicker cut with shadows. And heard the laughter. Fuck. Of course. It was what? Friday night. Tomorrow the first morning of archery season, deer and elk. Everybody would be amped, nobody exhausted yet, cutting the edge of their excitement with booze and loud talk. I fished up. I fished. That’s what I was here for. Fished up until I could see the campfire through a scrim of willow and alder. Could see the three pale wall tents, the trucks, shapes of horses on a taut line. Could smell smoke, manure, burnt meat. A shout, raucous laughs,

That was not a cunt it was mud wallow!

Aw crap, Les wouldn’t know the difference if he was up to his neck in either one!

The fire popping, crack of a limb on rock, a stirring of sparks as someone threw it on.

If you fuckers are on good behavior we just might see what Les knows about cunts. Maybe Sunday.

It was him, the voice. The shiver inside like hooking a trout but icy.

A couple of those gals from the Mill might come up and party with us. You seen ’em. Spirited. Do about anything after the fourth round. This is the pussy you dream about tonight while you got your dicks in your hands. Damn.

Dell. It was him talking, a booming voice, coming up out of a gravel pit. Ugly, a little slurred. The image hit the group, onetwothreefourfive… counted seven, hit them like a gust of wind: the prospect of young women in tight skirts, tight jeans. Maybe that’s how he got so many return clients. For about a second, the quiet, and then the uproar, the overlapping claims and yells calling bullshit, calling out the shit they would do with a girl that would do anything, more loud laughter. I scanned and found him at the edge of the group, a hulking shadow on the creek side of the fire, bigger than I remembered. He was shaking his head. I saw him tip it back and drink, pass the bottle, holding a beer in the other hand.

Dell! one called from the other side of the fire. A sallow face, unshaven, hollow in the cheeks leaning into the uneven light. Kip thinks you should call one now. One or two. Call that one called herself Trina. That skinny one likes to dance.

Laughter.

Another voice, deeper, out of the shadows, said, You all need to take a chill pill and focus. Get some rest. Goddamn.

Use the sat phone, another said, ignoring the voice of reason. The one we got for emergencies. Like this.

More laughs.

Dell gestured with the can like he was swatting away a fly.

You all just fill your orders this weekend. You’ll get it when you get it.

He hitched himself tall. Jason, he said, almost shouting. Keep an eye on Tyler will you? Make sure he don’t fall in the damn fire? I’m gonna piss in the creek, see if I can make a trout drunk.

He turned and swaggered away from the light.

I couldn’t keep my eyes off him. I went still, barely breathed. You are fishing, night fishing, fish on. Before he sees you. No. I couldn’t move. It was like I was paralyzed. He was a big man, even bigger than I remembered, bigger than me, which few men are. He dropped the can of beer as he walked and I could hear by the sound of it hitting the stones it was partly full. A big man in a dark colored Carhartt coat, unzipped, a baseball cap. Broad shouldered, a gut, heavy in the legs, walking with a hitch. I have hunted a little and I did not watch him that way, moving unevenly to the bank, his shadow thrown on the rocks by the moon and thinned by the fire. The way you watch a deer moving or an elk. And my heart was not hammering the same way, the way it does when you are hard against a tree, pressed into the bark for steadiness. The stillness, the long drawn breath, the leaning into a future where the gun bucks and the deer falls. Not like that. Not expectant, not excited. The ice of my focus took the heat out of it. For once I did not feel blind.

The scrim of willows went almost to the water. I watched his progress through the leaves more the way a cat watches a bird. Utterly stilled. The line between us a thread of simple attention, as taut as a line can be without breaking. He got to water’s edge, a cutbank maybe two feet above the current. He cleared his throat, coughed, spat, shrugged up his shoulders to unzip. One of the hunters was yelling C’mon! You ain’t never come near that and don’t say you did! Peckerwood accent, probably Arkansas. Laughter. Someone turned on a boom box. Old Little Feat, Dixie Chicken. Well. Pretty good music. He was less than fifteen feet away, partly turned, I could see his back, his right ear, the curve of his cheek. The oak leaf pattern of the camo on his cap and hear the stream of urine hitting the slow water. Slide guitar, taunts, bottle breaking.

The whimper of the mare like a human baby, eye rolled back, absolute terror.

Leaned the rod against a branch, squatted, felt the fit of the smooth rock in my hand and stepped out fast.

He turned and the piss spattered against the leg of my waders.

“Matt? What the— Oh—”

Face lengthening in recognition.

“You!”

He couldn’t wait to finish it, me. His hand went to his waist and came up with a hunting knife which flashed with firelight and in the same instant I swung. I swung as hard as he had swung at the little horse and the rock caught the side of his right eye the temple and a crush louder firmer than breaking eggs and a warm prickle pattered my face and I shoved with my left hand and the knife clattered onto stone and he splashed into the creek. Face down.

I pivoted and threw the rock as far as I could downstream and heard it plash, and before I picked up my rod I made sure he had washed to the bottom of the pool, into the rocks there half submerged and that he was still face down. I thought I saw his arms moving, spastic. Not too late. I could. I stayed. I watched until I was sure the only movement was the back and forth rocking of the pulsing current.

Slow, slow down. Breathe. I stumbled back of the brush and made myself take my time. They were all drunk with cognitive abilities further smitten by dreams of easy women. They wouldn’t bother about him for an hour probably, then figure he hit the cot in his personal tent early, was it early? No it was late, and he’d be the first up, rousting the cook and graining the horses. If he did that. Probably not, probably fed them only dusty second rate hay. Anyway, if he wasn’t in his bed and someone noticed they’d figure he was tugging it off in the trees, or passed out on a hummock, he was a big boy, let him sleep it off. Wouldn’t miss him till morning. So I hiked downstream slowly, the last thing I wanted to do was twist an ankle.

I kept to the game and fishermen’s trail along the bank. The trail pushed through the thick brush and dark open groves of virgin firs and pines, footfall soft on needles there and scented. Threaded back to the bank. At a long pool with a flat and stony bar I knelt and dunked my head in the icy water, scrubbing and scrubbing my face and hair with both hands, dunking again. The fine patter had been his blood. I waded in up to my waist and let the current wash the waders. Picked up the rod again and walked. Wanted to light the cigar bad but didn’t. Wanted a drink, didn’t have one. Was tempted to throw some casts and fish the bottom of the pool, like if I fished, like if I picked up the routine where I’d left it off, fishing under the moon, watching the molten light twine in the flats and unravel in the riffles, if I did that then I could pretend that thing between hadn’t happened. Did I want that? To pretend? No. I wanted to hoof it downstream and get to the truck and didn’t know beyond that.

I did. I must have dropped the rod in the truck bed less than twenty minutes later. I climbed in, wet wading boots and waders and vest and all, and started it up and backed around in the little clearing where the reverse lights wouldn’t be visible from the road and rolled slowly out onto the packed clay of the track, accelerated smoothly and not too fast, and hit the pavement in ten more minutes and goosed it. No lights at the lodge and cabins but security lights. Desolate. Not another car. Lit the vanilla sweetened cheroot with the dash lighter and drew on it hard and let the smoke get sucked out the open window.

At Stoker no one. Just the strung white lights of the coal conveyors, the towers. It was well into the graveyard shift, no one coming from town. Pulled my shirt up to my chin anyway, lowered head and cap brim and drove through. Passed the turnoff to Grand Ave and took the back road again over the black bridge, and where the sign at a drive said OLD BRIDGE ORCHARDS and the woods in the bottom were thickest I turned in. Just a hundred feet. I had been here last week to buy peaches and remembered a tractor yard on the right, a Mexican filling up a spray tank from a hose and hydrant. I pulled in, shut the lights, the motor, listened for the barking of a dog—none. Could see the orchard house up the hill above the rows of apple trees, one window lit. Could smell late summer roses, a hedge here somewhere. Everything still, all at peace.

The moon was settling now into the western quadrant, settling in for a long sail, casting the fragrant valley in something between dark and dawn, a midway limbo that suited. In its benign light I could make out the fruited trees, the boughs heavy with black apples. I saw the hydrant and the hose as if it were morning, and for a moment I just stood there, wishing that this stillness, this limbo, could last forever. It couldn’t. The ugly man intruded again, his image face down washing against the boulders, moving a little with the rhythm of the stream.

I pulled up on the stiff tap handle, felt the gush swell and weight the hose. A spray head at the end. Moved it over the truck, from hood to bed, bumpers, back up the other side, remembered the roof. Crouched stiffly down and washed the undercarriage as best I could, re-coiled the hose, took one more deep breath of flowers and pulled out. Pulled on the headlights: reminded myself that if seen now in town it would look worse with the beams off. I turned back onto the pavement that led to the edge of Grand Ave and as I did my headlights swung and a bright shape filled the windshield, splayed across, big as the night. Owl. White owl, wings wide as the truck, soundless swift and gone. Jesus. Heart hammering now, booming. Had kept my cool before, but now— It was spirit. I had not one doubt, not one doubt in the world. And it was not of the man because it was beautiful and it flew and was silent, it was Alce. That’s what I thought, said: Alce.

Thanks or warning or just company, reassurance, I didn’t know. Alce. Out of the twilit limbo of this night that was both night and day, deeply peaceful and profoundly violent. In a night that was between everything, came my daughter flying. Thanks, I said as I drove.

I crawled into bed and curled around Sofia. Sleep came stubborn and slow but came, carried me into the dark. Sometime between falling asleep and morning a storm swept in and it rained. Hard. Then cleared just as fast. Monsoon season.