by Peter Heller
Threats are threats, violence is violence. In my experience the two don’t go together more than half the time.
I shook myself off and drove slowly. I was in no hurry to get to Santa Fe. I was driving down the prettiest rolling road with the window down smoking a Cuban cigar. What the hell. It didn’t get better, not in my book. I mean if you weren’t looking too hard at what had just happened or who might be down the road or at some of the other stuff. Maybe living well is the art of not looking at that, at the other stuff, when you don’t have to. Or being okay with it. What the fuck do I know. I wasn’t sure that I was okay with much in my life at the moment, and I felt shaky, like when you haven’t eaten in a while, but I felt almost happy.
In no hurry. I wasn’t looking forward to the painting, the portrait commission. Not because the little girls I had met seemed mostly bewildered by the extravagant world of their father: I remembered them moving tentatively and always hand in hand, as if they were orphans brought into the great house straight from heatless dormitories—I wasn’t looking forward to it because I had gotten excited by painting outside. I had painted a lot of landscapes, had stood before many while they burned their remote beauty into my skin, but had never done both at the same time. Don’t know why. I was comfortable painting indoors and I liked best to retrieve those images from memory where they might be stained by awe and jumbled together with other things I loved. Now that I had tried the other, I wanted to do more. And I liked being on the road. The important thing was to be moving. As it had been so many times before. So after fishing with Jason I decided to take it slow, spend the night on the highway. Probably only four more hours to Santa Fe, but it was late afternoon by the time I got going again, and I figured I’d stop at some little town along the way. Also, it wouldn’t hurt to throw an unexpected stutter into my schedule in case some blue eyed trucker was waiting up ahead.
I drove down along the bulwark of the Sangre de Cristos with the sun riding the ridge, past the turnoff to Creede and out into the flat expanse of the San Luis Valley. I didn’t drive fast. The big pivot sprinklers were sending their jets out into the fields of garlic and peppers and the mile long rows strummed my vision as I passed and the sidelit plants throbbed green and the arcs of spray misted with rainbows. Almost stopped to paint again, look at me go, but I was too tired. Too pleasantly exhausted.
When I was young, just in grade school, growing up on the Oregon coast, I used to surf with my friends. I wasn’t the greatest surfer but I was unstoppable. I didn’t mind getting hammered. In fact, I actually loved getting tumbled and drubbed. Something about being lifted and slammed and wash cycled by such a force, such a force that was so powerful yet soft. I mean it wasn’t a rockslide. I loved it. We used to put on short wet suits—they should have been long and thicker than they were, but we were tough and turning blue seemed to be a badge of honor—and we’d go out before school. My friends called me Knotty. I guess I wiped out more than I rode. Knotty was the name of Lane’s retriever’s favorite toy, a long knot of rags the dog shook and shook until we thought he would dislocate his neck. That’s what the waves did to me. The name followed me to college and stuck until I dropped out, and friends there assumed it had to do with my muscles, or maybe some attribute of my private anatomy. The way nicknames are. Why did I start off about surfing? Oh, because one of the best things I remember about it was the pleasant exhaustion that could stick with me all day. Not pleasant, more than that. A muscle fatigue, a relaxation, a post-adrenaline wash that hummed in the body. Like an easy smile that ran through every cell. Often, if it wasn’t too windy, and even sometimes when it was, we would go out again in the afternoon, and then that physical well-being thrummed me to sleep. Now, driving down the wide green valley smoking the stogie with the warm air pouring through the open windows, having painted well, having fished, having met a man who could have been my friend, I felt almost like that. Almost as good as that tired teenager, but without the nibbling anxiety of wondering if Jenna Larson would go out with a fool like me, or what kind of music I would face for not doing any of my English homework. Instead I wondered if Jason or Grant were going to try to kill me in the next few days. What we give up, what we gain. For some reason, maybe the afternoon fishing, I didn’t feel consumed with dread.
Somehow the towns don’t make a big impression on me and I went through Alamosa almost without realizing it. Steeped in images of the fields and in a daze of memory. Thinking about surfing and my friends whom I left in eleventh grade for California, and Jenna who was the first girl I ever slept with. Which took three attempts, no shit, to figure out what went where and how to get everything there before it was over. There was a stupid joke going around then: What’s the secret to comedy? And before your straight man could get out an answer you interrupted: Timing! It was stupid and funny. Guess you had to be there. Anyway, after that first time making love she passed me a note in geometry that said Timing! And smiled with me as I read it, a goofy smile that I came to love more than anything on the planet.
She was a great girl with a big belly laugh, and what started as a crush became a real friendship and for me my first love. Timing! was our code for anything that didn’t quite work out. We would say it under our breath, a catchphrase for anyone who meant well and couldn’t help fucking up. Seemed to sum up most of the world. When I ran away to Santa Rosa, I swore I would sustain us and marry her once we got to the same college, and the night I was seventeen and called her from a pay phone in Monterey where I’d been surfing and Jenna broke up with me—it was the worst night of my life, till then.
Till then.
If we all knew what was coming, maybe we wouldn’t even stick around for it. Time present and time future.
The afternoon I heard Alce died, I was feeding her pig Mittens. He didn’t have mittens, he had a big dark stain on his side that I told Alce looked like Gondwanaland. She was about five when she first got him and he wasn’t much bigger than what she could cup in her two hands. He was a rescue pig. His mom had died of some hemorrhage induced by labor, had lived a couple of weeks very sick, enough to give her piglets a start, and then we adopted the little guy with the grayish saddle that seemed always to be slipping off his side, and Alce bottle fed him five times a day for a month.
“Why do you want to call him Mittens?” I said. “There is nothing on him that looks remotely like a mitten. He looks like a tiny ancient continent floating on a little ancient pinkish sea.”
Alce moved her mouth around the way she does and said that one of her friends had a huge fat red cat named Mittens and another had a horse called Socks. Well. That made enough sense to me. She bottle fed him in the beginning, and for a year I bought him feed, but once she was in first grade she stopped on the way home from school—we lived in town, on a dirt street with horses in the yards—and picked up slop from two restaurants. The girls at Chayo’s especially loved Alce, and they would sit on the back steps of the kitchen off the alley and smoke and gather around Alce and her bucket and show her all the special things they had saved for Mittens that day, like stuffed sopapilla and posole. The big girls with their dangling earrings and smokes huddled and squatting around the little girl with her bucket almost as big as she was, and Alce looked as excited at each bit of food as if she were going to eat it herself. It was at a time between lunch and dinner when it was very slow and almost always one of the girls helped her carry the bucket home and accompanied her to the back to meet Mittens where he would be waiting at the fence with an expression of delirious anticipation, I swear, snorting and squeaking, leaning into the wire fence, his big ears unable to stand and flopping in his eyes. We scolded her but Alce let him out often anyway and he followed her down to the creek behind the yard where they would both swim. She would swim, he would lie happily in a shallow pool in the gravel and snap at minnows. On several occasions it was suggested that it was time for Mittens to meet the fate he was bred for, he was getting really huge, but Alce always said she would kill anyone who harmed hi
m and I knew she meant it. She would try. So Mittens became family, the only one of us who could use his flat nose in the dirt like an excavator and loved mud and would follow Alce anywhere.
That week she hadn’t been home for two days, she had been suspended and she was very mad at me, me and her mom both, and I noticed Mittens was forlorn and agitated, and it occurred to me that no one had fed him. I went to the shed for a bucket of backup feed we kept in a trash can and when I came to the fence he saw it and surprised me by barely getting up from his wallow in back of the pen.
“C’mon, Mits, dinner time. C’mon.”
With great effort and grunting he finally roused himself and came to the fence head down like it took all his will, and when I lifted the bucket he looked up at me and I swear his beady black eyes looked like they were crying. There were no tears, but that’s how they looked. I dumped it and he looked up at me again and nosed the food and barely ate. I was turning back to the shed when I heard the tires on the gravel and the cruiser pulled in. It was Finn, the sheriff who had arrested me once before. He looked ashen, stricken, and he took off his hat and stood like a man who had been hit by lightning and was just coming out of it. I thought he might need help.
He really loved Alce. He was the one who had picked her up when she was caught shoplifting a few months before, and he was the one who told me that her boyfriend was distributing X and other pills to his friends, if not exactly dealing, he was worried about her. Everybody in town loved Alce. She loved to laugh with you and listen to what got you excited and then she got excited, too. She protected kids in school who got picked on. She gave away trout she caught to the old Chinese woman who lived alone down the block and couldn’t speak more than five words of English and looked forward to Alce’s fresh fish more than anything in her day or week. Alce was good to the bone.
He stood there in the yard and I asked him if he was okay and he said No, Alce is gone, and I said What do you mean gone? And he said she had been knifed to death trying to buy pot in the lot on Mission and I stood there then and couldn’t move. He put his hand on my shoulder, he tried to lead me inside but I was stone and he finally touched my beard, reached out and touched it the way a parent would and got in his car and left me in the yard. The next day I went out to feed Mittens, I wasn’t going to forget her best friend in my blind grief and he was lying out in the middle of the sunbaked pen, the part without shade where he never rested. Hey Mits, I said. Just the sight of him, her friend since she was little, was too much. I unlatched the gate and went over. He barely lifted his head off the dirt and he looked at me again, straight into my eyes, his eyes like wet black pebbles, like he was trying to speak to me, speak out of his animal muteness of something too big for his heart to bear and then he lay his head down again with a huff and he hardly moved the next day or the next, and two weeks later he died.
In Antonito there was a billboard for a railway trip along the Toltec Gorge, a painter’s rendition of a steam engine coming around a piney bend above a narrow rock canyon and it woke me up. Hey, hey, you are driving, it’s getting late, it’s dusk.
I had fished the Rio de los Pinos before. It’s the little creek that runs through the gorge. How those little streams make such a big impression. I had driven the long washboarded dirt road down off the plateau and parked at a little bridge. I had walked up into the walled canyon. I had fished with a peregrine gliding the wall just over my head, and later with the sun slanting down and backlighting the biggest hatch of mayflies I had ever seen, the light coming through a candescent mist of wings, and I caught more fish in an hour than I ever had before.
Some creeks you simply loved, and seeing the railroad sign with the craggy gorge reminded me that we can proceed in our lives just as easily from love to love as from loss to loss. A good thing to remember in the middle of the night when you’re not sure how you will get through the next three breaths.
I pulled off at the road I remembered and switchbacked down to the bridge and unrolled my sleeping bag just on the other side in some ferns. I fell into a dreamless sleep under a cloudy sky that smelled like rain. It sprinkled before dawn, barely wetting the bag. I folded the ground tarp over me and went back to sleep. Didn’t fish at daybreak. Threw my gear back in the truck and under a sky cleaned of clouds I drove to Santa Fe.
BOOK THREE
CHAPTER ONE
In Hostile Country
OIL ON CANVAS
20 X 24 INCHES
Once an interviewer on a radio show right on the dock in San Francisco asked me why, coming from a family of gypo loggers in Oregon, I had decided to paint. He was sitting on a stool beside me, and we were beneath a large window that looked from the Embarcadero out onto San Francisco Bay.
I used to get drunk before interviews like this, but this was eight a.m., a little too early for even me. The interviews tended to make me feel like a rabbit or a lamb caught above treeline at nightfall. Steve, who had just become my most important dealer and sort of my manager, swore he would cut me off and send my paintings back if I ever got drunk again on live radio or TV. So I was stone cold sober except for a one hitter I did openly in the green room with the window looking out to Alcatraz, and I shivered and tried not to follow the progress of a small white sailboat and a big white ferry moving obliquely toward each other on the choppy blue water—what a cool place to have a radio interview, right on the dock—and I tried to think seriously about the man’s question. He was a good interviewer, warm and really interested and he seemed to have actually read some of the coffee table book about me that I was now promoting. He must have looked carefully at the images of my work on the gallery’s website. I could tell by his questions.
But this question stopped my wildly beating heart for a moment and stiffened my bristles and raised hackles I suddenly discovered I had. Maybe I was not a rabbit after all. If I was a little stoned before, I was not stoned now. I blinked. I turned from the imminent and beautiful sea tragedy that was unfolding out the big windows and stared at the man.
“What did you ask? Why does the son of a simple logger paint?”
“Yes,” he said smiling. “Why choose to be an outsider artist with all the vagaries of a fickle art market, the stormy uncertainties of creativity? I mean it is practically asking to be poor, at least for a decade or two in the best case, isn’t it? And your family can’t have much money to help, I read that you grew up in a trailer in the woods. Why choose art when you might have a decent and rugged living as a logger like your father?”
I stared at him and thought about my father who died on a forty degree slope under five tons of Doug fir when a choke cable snapped. For some reason right then I thought about his red Jonsered chain saw which had a thirty-six inch bar. How he had set it down still running on a big stump and turned to lift a canteen filled with tap water when he died. What his buddy Egger told me as he handed me the saw.
“I sharpened it,” he said. I thought about that. All Egger could say after sketching the scene was: I sharpened the chain.
“I think a lot of our listeners would like to know,” the interviewer was saying. “It seems terribly brave. Or reckless? I mean where you came from. Your father was practically illiterate.”
That I could tell was the question of the day. Was it reckless for the son of a gypo logger to aspire to be an artist. It was the recklessness that informed this visceral, muscular, exuberant, outsider art. How he had described it in the intro. I got it. How the art world worked: it was okay to be an outsider as long as you carried your spear and wore your loincloth, stayed primitive. Didn’t get any uppity ideas. He widened his smile until it was pressing against his cheeks.
I looked at him. I knew he would never ask the same question of a RISD grad. I had spent nights in jail because of men like this, men who condescended, who impugned. Getting in fights. I had paid fines, been on probation.
I said, “Is this show live? It is, right?”
Now it was his turn to blink. He didn’t understand, I could
see it. But he held his smile.
“Yes, of course. That’s why we call it West Coast Live, ha!”
A flash of fear appeared in his eyes, there and gone, like the flank of a trout catching sunlight.
“Okay.” I nodded, in some kind of complicit agreement. I stuck out my hand, like for a handshake. He hesitated. He seemed relieved.
“Okay, a handshake,” he said. “Let’s shake on it. To the recklessness of the artist who is truly down out of the hills, and to the recklessness of live radio!”
He held out his long slender hand and I took it warmly like the fish that it was, and gripped it the way you grip a big brown to get the hook out, and then I squeezed. He chirped. Like a chipmunk. Then groaned. I squeezed.
He pulled away, then tugged, then he was half laughing half crying Owww!, okay okay uncle!, then he was kind of rearing back out of his stool and then he was howling and then I felt a bone snap, one of the knuckles in the first joint and he screamed, an unbridled uncensored live radio shriek, and in his panic he had knocked over the stool and two soundmen or whatever they were, stout guys in baggy jeans, shot across the floor and smothered me. They pulled me off and just half ushered, half shoved me out the double doors that led onto the bright atrium gallery and the wide steps. Nobody followed. No cops, nothing. I stood at the top of the steps with the blood pounding in my temples and looked down at the bustling crowd milling through the indoor market, the coffee shops and bookstores and restaurants, and felt the sun through the skylight warm on my shoulders and let the anger wash through me like warmed oil. A fine skim of anger on every working part until I didn’t feel it at all, except that I moved smoother, cleaner than I had in weeks.