The Painter

EPILOGUE

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

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

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

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

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

“Nice,” she said from behind the counter.

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

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

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

“Smells delicious.”

“And?”

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

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

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

“See ya,” I said.

“Byyyyyye.”

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

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

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

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

“Ow—fuck!”

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

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

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

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

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

“Hi, Jason.”

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

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

“For what?”

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

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

The hot smell of the words as much as sound.

“I brought you something.”

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

“This yours?”

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Whoops,” he said.

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

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

“Huh?” Push against the temple.

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

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

Push of the gun.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

“I don’t know anything.”

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

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

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

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

Shove against my temple.

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

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

“Whew. Good. Better.”

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

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

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

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

Long outbreath of smoke—

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

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

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

“No,” I said.

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

Shove.

“Didn’t let me go.”

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

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

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

Shove, harder.

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

Hard shove.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s a quandary, ain’t it?”

He raised the gun and pulled the trigger.

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

“Still works.”

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

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

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

He stared at me.

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

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

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

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

“Hey. Hey!”

He stopped, looked back.

“I—”

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

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He stared at me.

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

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

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

“What do you want me to do?” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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