The Painter: A Novel (31 page)

At Tres Piedras I stopped at a squat adobe roadside café called Ortega’s. I sat in the darkened dining room and hoped to have
huevos rancheros for breakfast. The waitress was young with glossy dark hair swept up into a ponytail and silver stud earrings. She wore denim shorts and flat sandals and she was skittish as a deer. She put down a heavy ceramic bowl of salsa and chilies as if she were putting out bones for a lion. Quick clatter onto the thick wood of the table, then flight. Flight to three steps back. Coffee? Looking at me sideways, a glance over her shoulder to make sure of her escape route.

“Please, yes, cream and sugar.”

I wondered if I smelled of death. Or looked like it. I left my napkin on the table and limped back to the bathroom. Killing was hard work. All the running and lifting and sleeping in the truck had left my knee stiff. I looked in the mirror, the first time since—since what? I murdered a man. I murdered a man ten days ago also. Last night, was what? More of an accident.

I studied my face. My eyes had the shadows underneath that I got when I wasn’t sleeping well. My beard was as salt and pepper as ever, no lion’s feeding mask of blood, not even a fleck. Because by the time I had started really handling Grant he had bled out. Did I smell? If I did I couldn’t tell. I just looked like a traveler who was tired. And my expression didn’t look to me particularly culpable. I checked: did I feel culpable? No. I felt worse about myself after trying to shoot that buck at night in Vermont. Which I never hit of course. Mysterious. Maybe I was worried sick about getting caught—was that tightening my smile, contracting my spirit?

Not really. Here’s what I figured: if Sport or Wheezy ever caught up with me, which I was sure in one way or another they would, then— Wait, why would they? Because some bow hunter would find Grant’s truck and body in the next few weeks. If not then, a rifle hunter later in the fall. Or the rancher rounding up his
cows. I hadn’t seen any recent signs of cows, there were some old manure patties, leathery and desiccated and crumbling, probably a couple of years old. Still. Someone was bound to find his truck, even if his bones were scattered by lions and coyotes, which I imagined was happening right now as I leaned to the sink and turned on the faucet and splashed my face, my tired eyes. Maybe Jason would find it and call in an anonymous tip. They would find the truck one day, probably soon, and even if it was next year or the next they would find the skull, and the bullet rattling around in there would match the caliber of the very gun I was on record as buying in Portland twenty years ago. No, there was an exit wound, the back of Grant’s head had blown off, but I had definitely hit his truck. They would find a slug. And then Sport would call me up.

So what? They would not have a murder weapon because I was planning to get rid of the pistol after breakfast. I would drive out into the pine woods north of Española and bury it under a venerable piñon, one of those that had kept its secrets since probably Cortés had stared silent upon a peak in Darien. They would not have an eyewitness and if I’d been careful, they would not have a hair of my head or any DNA at all to put me at the scene.

And anyway, if somehow they honed in, I would claim self-defense. Willy had also gotten those threatening calls. Grant had tried to shoot me through a kitchen window. The bullets in the walls of the house would match his rifle. What was Grant doing down here in the middle of nowhere but stalking me? They would see the spotlight on the truck and maybe, if some hunter didn’t take it, they would find the .223 with the night scope.

If you killed a man in self-defense, why didn’t you call the sheriff right away?

Who would believe me?

You went to great lengths to hide your crime
.

Not really. I left everything pretty much right where it was. Just moved it over a little. Got the mess off the road.

It wasn’t very convincing. I was starting to feel like a professional criminal, one of those dumb ones who was never very good at covering up or at flight. One of those who came back to the pen like a roosting pigeon. One thing about getting old, I mean if we get a little wiser as we get older: we learn what we are good at and what we’re not. And we learn that a man is usually only passably good at one or two things.

I took a leak and went back to the empty dining room. A mug of coffee with a rooster glazed on the side was steaming on the table. The girl was nowhere in sight. I heard a ranchera song on a radio coming from what seemed a long way off, though it must have been just in the kitchen. I waited. There was no cream on the table, she had forgotten it, so I stirred a packet of sugar into the mug. Soon she would come back and take my order.

Nothing happened. The music played. The song finished. A voice from another planet, muted by distance, announced a big sale at a Ford dealership in Española, the ringmaster’s rolling of the Rs the way only a Mexican radio drummer can do it. Another song. Had they all fled? I could imagine. Mr. Death walks into your low ceilinged café and if you have time you flee out the back.

It occurred to me again that I might reek. I had been working hard all night, physically hard, like a stint at manual labor, I had been handling corpses, corpse, and I was the one item that I had not scrubbed and sprayed. I might smell like a zoo, worse. A charnel house. The smell of death is particular. Maybe I had scared
the shit out of the Ortegas. Maybe they were huddled in the shed with their shotgun like the farm family in an old Western. Left the radio playing and the soup on.

Nothing happened. I almost called out. Hey! Anybody home! I’m hungry! Fee fi fo fum! Almost banged my tin cup on the table except that it wasn’t tin and it was full of black coffee with no cream. Is this what happens after you murder two people? Things get slippery? Reality bends? There’s a disruption in the order, the sequences don’t fall the way they used to, the waitress doesn’t take my order, steps go missing like the treads in a ruined stair?

I left five dollars on the table, drank the coffee in four gulps, went out the screen door which banged behind me.

Just then, as I bumped back onto the paved highway, the cell phone rang. It was Sofia.

“Where are you?” I said.

“Back home. This place is crawling with Feds. Where are you?”

“Feds?”

“Yah. Where are you? You okay? I’ve been calling you. I called your gallery guy, Steve. He said there was a shooting. He said he hadn’t seen you after.”

“I’m on my way back. Be there in a couple of hours. What do you mean, Feds?”

“Grant left. No one knows where. Maybe he’s the one who shot at you. Everybody knows he burned down the barn and threatened everyone. Then they busted his camp. Dell’s camp.”

“Whoa. Slow down. What do you mean busted Dell’s camp?”

“Fucking poachers. They all were. It was a poaching ring. I mean they say the bow camp was a cover. All professional hunters every one. Every year. Some big haul of like black bear gallbladders, mountain lions, trophy heads, what all.” She was breathless. I could tell she was crying and trying to hide it.

“What the fuck did you stumble into?” she said. “What a hornet’s nest. I’m glad, I mean I’m glad you ki——”

She stopped.

“Yeah. Well. These kind of stories don’t just end,” I said.

“Telling me. Fuck.
Fuck
, Jim. I miss you. I mean. I know we only just—”

“I miss you too.”

I did. A lot. Especially right then, hearing the warmth and the rasp and the pain in her voice. Her voice was full of colors, like her eyes. It was a current that tugged and flowed with the force of her. I could have painted it. It would be a river full of fish, and red leaves fallen out of the woods, and this time she would be swimming alone with the grace of a mermaid but she would not have a tail she would be all woman, and there would be a big elk on the bank, a bull, his flank would be bloody and stuck with arrows but he wouldn’t care much and he would be lowering his head to drink in her water.

I had my elbow on the window frame and I pulled it in and rolled up the window so I wouldn’t have to strain to hear her.

“A lot of stuff happened,” I said. “I’ll tell you one day.”

Now she was crying openly. I didn’t interrupt her. It came in waves, the way crying does, and then it blew through.

“Sport found me at the coffee shop,” she said.

“Yeah? What did he say?”

“He’s so goddamn smooth. He was real concerned. For both of us. He bought me a dry double cappuccino which is creepy, I mean that he knew what I took, kinda like saying, Hey, I know a lot more about everything than you think I know—even though I told him no, I would definitely be buying my own, and then he sat down at my table and said that at some point, which was just about now, obstructing an investigation of homicide, which is withholding any knowledge of a homicide, becomes accessory to murder which is treated by the law the same as murder. He said that now was the time to come clean with any information, any at all, about Dellwood Siminoe’s death, and I would be treated, you know, as a witness, but that after this point it was accessory and that I could spend most of the rest of my life in jail. Which was not fun. Oh fuck.”

She collected herself, breathed. I could see her face as if she were in front of me, exasperated, with herself for weakness.

“Hold on,” she said.

I waited.

“Okay. He was smooth, Jim. I mean really really smooth. I couldn’t ask him to leave or leave myself like he had me in some kind of spell. He painted a picture for me of the daily routine at the women’s pen in Pueblo. The disgusting food, the stench, the fights. It went on and on. I was frigging transfixed. It was sickening, everything he was saying. Then he says, And that’s just one day. The lights don’t go out and you lie down in your concrete cell and you can’t sleep and then the next day is the same. And that’s two days. A week is an eternity. But the second week starts with a day like the first and the second and the third and then you are not done with the second week and the lights stay on and you only have twenty more years like that and you definitely go mad. A madness that is not even human. Why you can always tell a con from half a mile off, that thing in their eyes, that stare they try to cover up which is the madness of the first day becoming the second becoming the third. Jim, it worked on me like a spell, what he was saying, like I couldn’t move and kept listening like I was hypnotized. Which made me want to throw up. Which I refused to do because it seemed, well, self-incriminating, though it was touch and go for a minute and I indulged myself in an image of his nice clean hiking boots covered in my vomit.”

I felt nauseous just listening to her. I rolled the window down again. Sport may have been playing her but he had the prison thing pretty well nailed. Hearing her I remembered that I’d rather die than go back for another year. Years.

“Whew.” I took a deep breath.

“I forgot.”

“What?”

“That you did time in—”

“Yeah. I think you should talk to him,” I said.

“What?”

“Tell him what you know.”

“I don’t know anything!”
She practically yelled it.

“Well.”

“You
listen
!” She was crying again. She was hysterical.

“Listen you big fat wonderful motherfucker, I don’t know a goddamn thing! What happened the night Dellwood died. I went to sleep. I remember you got up to pee, I woke up a little, and then I fell right back to sleep and that’s all I remember. I remember waking up with you in the morning! Do you hear me? What I told them, what I’m telling you!”

“I know I know.”

“I’m coming to Santa Fe.”

“Well.”

“Shut up, I’m coming. I need a vacation.”

“Well.”

“I miss the fuck out of you and I need a vacation.”

“Okay. That’d be good.”

“You are going to paint some big fat twenty thousand dollar canvases of yours truly naked and put some goddamn fish in the things somewhere and take me out to fancy dinners every night.”

“Well.”

“Say Yes. Just shut the fuck up and say Yes, dear.”

I started laughing. Man. That was the other thing about women. The great ones made me laugh and laugh.

“Okay. Yes.”

“Right. Good. I’m not coming for a couple of days. I have a life you know, stuff to do. You aren’t the center of the frigging universe!”

“Whoa!”

“I’ve got to get a restraining order on Dugar for one thing, I think. He keeps mooning around after me declaring a love for me that is deeper than human love, deeper even than sea elephant love. He wrote me a poem called ‘Mammal Amor’ in which I think a dolphin fucks a beaver. I don’t know I didn’t read it, just caught a few words as I crumpled it up.”

I was laughing. I told her I would get my money from Steve so I could take her out to Pasqual’s and The Compound every night. I hung up. Before I did she ordered me to write her number on the vinyl of the dashboard, if I lost my phone and her number along with it she would hunt me down and cut my nuts off. I swore I would. I did.

I drove south onto the high piñon plateau above Española. I felt almost okay again. As okay as a man can be who kills like a pro and has a sporty detective scaring the shit out of his—what? His lover. Don’t scare yourself, I said to myself. Be in the moment. Maybe find someplace to pull over and go fishing.