CHAPTER ONE

■

I

An Ocean of Women

OIL ON CANVAS

52 x 48 INCHES

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 fi sh. 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, Spanishor 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:

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,

the movement of his powerful soft strides

is like a ritual dance around a center

in which a mighty will stands paralyzed . . .

■

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, fi shed 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 fi ne 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 fi re 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 fi shed 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 fi r. 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.

Excerpted from The Painter by Peter Heller Copyright © 2014 by Peter Heller. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.