The Painter: A Novel (35 page)

And then two things happened. The road topped out in a smooth track through aspen, thickly ferned at the edges and uncobbled with the rocks of the climb, beautiful, some kind of haven fragrant with ferns and fallen leaves and the charged and humid wind. I released a long breath, felt a gladness surge.

And I glanced in my side mirror and saw headlights swinging through the trees then square up on the track and flood my rearview. Fuck. And the track ahead dropped steeply away. I could see through the pale trunks and limbs of the trees that it was dropping into a cut-rock canyon below, probably the upper reaches of the same creek as in the picnic area, no it wasn’t the headwaters at all, I could see now in the murky light that the cut of the canyon
continued on through steep hills into who knew what distances now shuddering with lightning.

It felt like death. Like nowhere to go but there. Between the hard beams of the headlights behind and the vague flashes of the storm ahead. I almost cried. Almost seized and gave up. Almost offered my throat. Hard to describe the collapse: how the strength emptied from my limbs like water, how all conviction of anything worthy, any worthiness left on earth much less in my own life, how it didn’t surrender but simply absented itself, leaving only a chalk outline: this was your reason to live and now it is gone. He could kill me here, a perfect place, kill me any way he wanted to, and bury me in the scented ferns and run my truck off a ledge into the steep woods like some parody of my killing of Grant.

And then he did something shocking: he blared his horn. Leaned on it, then a double tap, then leaned on it again. Less like the trumpeting of a charging army than like Hey, motherfucker, Get a move on—I didn’t trash my shocks to climb all the way up here to have you just fold. Just cry Uncle. That’s what it seemed like to me.

Maybe it was just a head game, a triumphant shout of
You are all mine now you piece of shit
. Who knows. It woke me up. I stomped the gas and threw dirt behind me and revved off that little bench and the track fell away and the nose of the truck tipped and dropped hard and jounced into a rut and I tapped the brakes and slid just a second, and then I was diving steeply, bouncing down a hunter’s trail straight for the bottom of the canyon. Didn’t need the headlights, I could still see well enough. But with the windows open and the wind whipping through I heard the first rumble of thunder and then raindrops spatted against the windshield, big ones, heavy, singular, and they stopped. One opening salvo. I barreled downhill, holding to the track easily, it wasn’t too rocky, which was
maybe not a good thing, because he could take it too without too much trouble, maybe not as fast. Right then no grander thought. Just Drive. All the adrenaline surging back through arms, chest, the strength too, no reason for any of it, but suddenly a boundless desire to get through this, to live.

For a minute I thought he’d had enough. Hoped. Didn’t see his lights, figured maybe he didn’t want to risk the climb back out of here. That rising euphoria. The black bird of false hope, not a phoenix, but one of those raven-vulture things squalling out of the trees. Fuck. Did I think he would come this far, him? And give up? And just as I thought it, his lights dropped, dropped into the rearview from above and burned the mirrors like a pursuing chopper, and we came out of the aspen as suddenly, into the sparse low trees of the junipers. The loss of high canopy opened up the sky and gave more light ahead and fine rain sprayed across the windshield and it was true dusk and I heard a clap now of thunder, loud and close. And just as suddenly I bounced hard and barreled down a sandy bank, past a beaten down turnaround on my right and a rough rock outcrop on my left and hit the creek. I splashed into it with a loud crash of spray that plumed over the windshield and washed into the window and doused my head.

Whoa. Water. I revved and slipped. Wha—? Fuck. Deeper than I thought. The tires spun on the bottom. I was about in the middle of the stream and I wasn’t moving. The water was over the floorboards, oh fuck, and it was muddy. In the half light I could see it was muddy and I looked left upstream and saw the current sliding around the wall, emerging from the little gorge in foamy sheets that carried sticks and limbs and bits of leaves.

Oh fuck. The intake manifolds were clear, barely, the engine would run until they swallowed water. But the creek was rising and if I didn’t break free of this now the motor would sputter and
die, and just then I heard a slide and the blast of horn and the lights flooded the creek, me, and then cut. I craned around. The headlights cut off and so did his engine. I could hear it. Could hear it don’t know how, over the sliding of the surging current and my own motor. Heard his car door slam and craned further and saw his car at the very edge of the water, saw him standing on the sandy gravel of the track beneath the outcrop, then lean back against the black car. He wanted me to see him. See him leaning there arms folded while I drowned, that’s why he cut the lights, that’s what I understood. Fuck, I would move. I was moving. Oh, Jesus, I was slipping sideways. The pressure of the current. If I floated free the truck would tip and roll and the current was swollen and swifter than I could handle and I would probably drown. Oh fuck, fuck, not like this! That was the final blast of thought, loud as a car horn: I don’t want to die, not like this. Oh shit.

I pressed the gas and heard the tires spinning underwater, an unreal whining sound, and felt them grab and slip, and the truck was, it was sliding little by little downstream, and I craned around again to look back, for what? At him, desperate I guess, and saw the figure leaning, him thinking, Hah! Let God, let God take care of it, sonofabitch, and as I did there was a crack, a crack loud now of thunder right overhead, and on top of it a crash a loud fork of lightning zagging onto the ridge above us, behind it the boom. Then the sound no one ever ever forgets. Like a jet engine. More than roar, like the earth cracked open and howled without voice.

That roar. A gust of wind hit me, from straight upstream and I turned my head and saw a billow of torn leaves and dust erupt from the canyon and blow through the mist of rain. Maybe fifty yards above me. Or thirty. In that instant the image burned like a shadow on old film: the mouth of the little gorge filled with a wall of water. Or mud.

In the flash, seeing it all, not the lightning, maybe it was, or just the acuity of terror: it was clear in the dusk as if etched: a mudwall of water and in it as if frozen: a tree, yellow leaves, a sheep, the white sheet metal of an old stove. Why did I do the next thing? Never know. I leaned far out the window as if ducking my head into the flood and yelled. He was behind, beneath the outcrop—he couldn’t see it, he was a sitting duck. In five seconds the wall would bury him.

FLASH FLOOD!
I screamed it, as loud as I could, and saw him startle, bolt for the door handle and jump into his car.

That was all. Reflex. I slammed the accelerator and the truck roared, bellowed I remember just like a beast. The rear end fish-tailed and we must have slid into a shallower shelf of rock because the whole thing grabbed and tore into the bottom and gunned as if shot out of the water, tearing into the gravel of the far bank and lurching, almost like an animate—an animal—up the ramp of the far side, slamming up onto the bench as the roar swallowed the entire world and I felt it whomp the rear end, the wind and spray of it, and the hard rain hit at the same moment. A fierce wind rank of rot and death and mingled with clean mud and water tore through the cab and pummeled my face and I felt the ground shudder and the flood pass behind us.

I was shaking, just like a poplar, uncontrolled. Pulled the emergency brake hard and shoved the door and stood on the mud, and shook, and turned, and searched the near dark now of the far bank as if I could conjure him out of it. Why did I think:
Please, oh God, let him be there?

He was. The car was on its own bench on the far side. Oh, man, lights still off but it was there, up at the lip of the sand ramp that had descended to the creek. Where he had been seconds ago was
now subsumed in foam and clotted wood, sticks and logs circling there in an angry vortex, in the eddy formed by the rock, what would have been his own mudwater grave. I shook. I winced down my eyes to see more but didn’t. Didn’t see him, couldn’t, his shape anywhere, he must’ve been in the driver’s seat watching also.

Then the headlights flicked on, I could hear over the wash and tear of current against the new-ripped bank the uptake of the engine and the lights swung back into the turnaround, lit the piñons and pushed forward in a tight arc and then nothing but taillights rising slowly up into the black backdrop of the trees. He was gone.

I stood and shook and it rained on my bare head, somewhere in there I had lost my hat, and I cried like a baby. Bawled. Not sure for what. For everything. Shook and howled and the rain came down hard and the lightning exploded right on top of the thunder and rolled away, shook me to the roots, and I knew.

I knew: that whatever I was, my soul was no more substantial than a tattered leaf, one of those torn off a streamside tree in the flood. That I was nothing, that whatever I had done in my life amounted to just that, shreds no heavier than leaves, and that also whatever I had done, I had done it like a blind storm-ripped thing, or like a blind animal nosing from scent to scent and was whomped and carried most of my life by the wrath and high spirits of a power without malice, and that I had done my best and loved my daughter. I had loved her. I had loved Alce the best I could, the best I knew which was nothing to brag about, but I had loved her hard, as hard as a heart could, as hard as this flood tonight. I loved you.

I wept and I said it over and over, I loved you. I loved you.

The storm might have lasted two hours. I stood in the downpour and filled with cold water like a cracked shell. I shook apart. And then I could no longer feel anything except that I was freezing, to the bone, and that whatever pieces of me were left were shivering now with hypothermia. I thought of what Mitchell my doc friend had told me about dying that way, and I would not. I would pull into the partial shelter of some big juniper and pull out my sleeping bag that might or not be soaked, and unroll it in the truck bed under the topper and try to sleep. Sleep till morning and let the creek subside and cross it again and go home. To the hotel. To a meal and a hot bath.

I did pull in under a big old cedar, to buffer the impact of the rain on the topper’s roof, if nothing else, and crawled around in the back and found the milk crate in which I kept the sleeping pad and bag and they weren’t there. And remembered: they are in my rucksack, still stuffed in there from my last brush with Grant. Okay. I felt around for the pack, felt up in the front corner where it often ended up and nothing. Where the fuck? I was kneeling, shivering on all fours in the back of the truck, the rain whipping against the camper shell, knees hard on the corrugated bedliner, thinking back, tracing. And then it hit me: I left the pack. That night. I left it behind the boulder, the big rock I had dived behind when I thought Grant would plug me. I left it.

I froze there on my knees and went over it again: remembered that I had taken it with me out of the trees, and down the grass hill as I ran zigzag, expecting to be torn apart by a bullet any second, and dived for the boulder, and taunted Grant, what I thought would be him and was instead an already cold corpse, and then I charged him, charged my truck and I left the pack. Oh my frigging God. Left it behind the rock like a calling card at the scene of a murder. And then I laughed. Like a maniac. I laughed so that
it rebounded in that tight dark space and shook me harder than the cold. I laughed because I had thought I was such a wise guy, covering up all the signs with the little shovel and dirt, washing the truck the next morning, replacing the windshield, felt almost like a pro, which had creeped me out. Well, I need not have been so proud of myself nor so creeped out. I was a stone cold amateur. I had left a sleeping bag right there like a DNA-covered flag. I was an idiot. No different than I ever was. God.

Something about that realization warmed me. The return to my old dumbass self. I found the tattered wool sweater I sometimes wore fishing in the crate with my gear, and I stripped my sopping shirt and tugged it on and it was wet but it warmed me instantly. In my wet vest I found a fruit and nut bar and tore open the cellophane with my teeth and devoured it. Better. And then I curled up and the shivering subsided and I went dark. Don’t even remember falling asleep, just went blank and woke with the loud chortling sound of water and the scream of a robber jay and the descending six note call of a canyon wren. I crawled out of the covered back of the truck and blinked. The sun streamed through the heavy branches of the juniper, already warm. The creek ran low in its bed and clear. Like nothing had happened, except that there was a pile of dead wood wracked against the bank on the far side, dropped there in the eddy that had formed where Jason might have died.

I didn’t give him a second thought, don’t know why, he didn’t seem right now my biggest worry. What was? I felt lighter, the way I had last night after burying the gun. Was that just yesterday? Already seemed like another life. Except that this time the relief wasn’t from getting rid of some hardware, some incriminating thing, this time I felt washed clean somehow and unburdened of something bigger.