by Peter Heller
He looked at me. He wheezed. “The painting is real sad. Kinda makes me choke up. Don’t even know why. Sign of a great artist.”
He was watching me. “Want to sit down?” In a reversal he was offering me the same chair.
“Yeah, sure.”
“Think there’s a Coke in there?”
“Probably.”
“We could use one.”
He went to the mini fridge, pulled out two Cokes, cracked them, handed me a blessedly ice cold can. I drank half of it in one gulp.
“Grant took off Tuesday. Headed this direction. Sheriff had him at the Delta County line, then a witness saw his truck going through Saguache. Hard to miss a diesel two tone blue F-250 with a gooseneck hitch and spotlight. No reason for him to come this way except to come after you. A dangerous man, very pissed off, already threatened you once. Why I’m here.”
“You’re worried about me.”
He smiled. “Right now I think I’m more worried about him. You look like you want to hurl. Want me to call reception and get you some Pepto?”
“No.”
“I take these.” He pulled a prescription pill bottle out of his jacket pocket, twisted off the cap, tipped the bottle up like a can and shook some into his mouth. “Sad thing is even a Coke can give me acid reflux. Sucks being fat.” He smiled.
“Mr. Stegner.”
“Call me Jim.”
“It can eat at a man. The stuff we do. Secrets make you sick, isn’t that what we say?”
“Being in prison makes you sick.”
He nodded. “You have no idea where Grant Siminoe might have gotten to?”
“Wherever it is, I’m sure it sucks. I’m sure it’s no fun at all within about a three mile radius.”
He nodded. He dug in the pocket of his overcoat, pulled out a piece of clear plastic. He held out his palm.
“This belong to you?”
It was a small Visqueen envelope with a dry fly in it. A number 18 hook, tufty elk hair wings and an orange body made with strips of baling twine. It was a Stegner Killer.
“Yes? Take it, take a closer look. None of the fishermen we interviewed had ever seen one in these parts, but somehow you’ve got a shitload of them in your fishing vest. Excuse my French. Ten or twelve. And a couple on your kitchen counter. Must catch a lot of fish.”
He stared at me.
“That yours, Mr. Stegner?”
“I’m not sure. Probably.”
He nodded.
“Think you can patent something like that? I mean if it’s just head and shoulders better than anything else?”
That twist in the guts. A sharp pain in my stomach that cut through the queasiness.
“Forensics found this by the creek,” he continued. “Right where Dell was bobbing in the water. They missed it the first morning, but there it was in the second sweep, wedged in the sand between two rocks, right there, like a marker.”
“I fish that stretch all the time,” I said weakly.
“We know that,” he said.
“It’s funny,” he said, standing, wheezing with the effort. “The longer I do this, the less I’m sure who the bad guys are. Ever feel like that?”
His candor landed on my shoulder like a lost bird.
“Not really. I have a pretty good idea who’s really bad.”
“I found something else in my travels,” he said. “Something I read.”
He brought two folded pages out of his inside jacket pocket. Handed them to me in the chair. I took them, my hand was shaking a little, I unfolded them, read:
She had the bag. I say to Hen, “Hey, Bug uses those black bags.” “Fuck Bug. Let’s grab it,” Hen says. I say, “You fucking grab it.” He says, “What’re you afraid of pussy? She’s about the size of a Chihuahua.”
I gagged. She was Alce. It was the transcript, from the DA in Taos. I’d read it before, three years ago. Alce coming at them with her bag of pot. I read it now. The whole thing. It was the last thing I wanted to do and I couldn’t help myself.
She went to buy an ounce of pot. Something any kid might do. That last year she started skipping school. Began dating a druggy. One afternoon the manager of the pharmacy off the plaza called to say that Alce was in the office, could I come pick her up, she had been caught shoplifting. Beto Salazar went to school with Cristine, he wasn’t going to call the cops, but could I please get the girl to just apologize. She never did. She walked out of there tight-lipped and proud. The next time the sheriff Finn drove her. Then the meeting with the vice principal, the slipping grades. Her smoldering silence. Cristine and I were too caught up in our own fighting and our own work to offer much in the way of radical change at home.
Then she came to me to ask if she could have a cell phone and I unloaded on her. Thinking about it later, I saw that she was trying to talk to me. Trying to tell me about her first boyfriend and the stuff they were into, trying to get me to help her sort it out, and I just unloaded on her.
That week she went to buy pot from Bug and there was another buyer in the parking lot, parked at the south end in the mouth of an alley. Two. Two men in their twenties waiting. One described the whole thing to the DA, the one who hadn’t been stabbing, he dished it for a lesser charge. The big one got out of the car and grabbed her bag and she wheeled and roundhouse kicked him in the face and he went berserk. He cut her all over. The coroner said her right hand was cut nearly in half: she had been holding the blade. The men fled and she bled out, there in the alley.
She died because she fought back. Like she’d seen me do her whole life. Throwing caution and sense away and hitting the fuckers. Like her old man. Fuck the fuckers, fuck the ER, fuck the cuts and concussions—strike. How else was she supposed to react?
She died because she was just like me.
And what if she’d had the cell phone she’d asked me for? What if she could have called for help from the alley? How long had she lain there? I always wondered. I could feel Wheezy watching me. I couldn’t read the rest and I couldn’t not keep reading. She died in the ambulance, what they told me. Choking and trying to tell them her mother’s phone number.
I let the pages drop.
“I get it,” Wheezy said. “Why you’d do almost anything to protect a little beaten horse. We hardly ever get it right the first time around. Don’t even kill maybe the one that really needs killing.”
Wheezy nodded, looked at me with real concern. “Thanks for the Coke. Don’t get up, I’ll let myself out.” He smiled sadly at me, wheezed.
“What we always say in the movies. Back to the script at the end,” he said and left.
Vertigo. What time was it? Would this day ever end? Time did that thing it does, when it uncurls and lengthens like a rattlesnake patiently sliding after a mouse.
I reached for a plastic lined wastebasket next to the wall and vomited into it. As I threw up I ejected the images. Shut and locked the steel doors behind them. What the fuck else did he know, Wheezy? He knew I had failed as a father, what else was there?
I leaned over and vomited again. Nothing but Coke. When the Coke was gone I gagged and heaved. The world splits open when you vomit, you kind of untether in space, get tiny as a mote. A baby. Why there is such an impulse to be held, held down, embraced. Well. There was no one here to hold me. I convulsed. Mom! A grown man still cries the word. That was something Mom always understood. When we threw up she just came behind us and cradled us in her arms and whispered it’ll be okay, it’ll be okay, and stroked our foreheads.
When my father died, I orphaned myself. My sister had already graduated high school, married her boyfriend, and moved down to Santa Rosa. Mom was tall and strong and people said beautiful. She loved my father fiercely I am sure and she cursed him his carelessness. How could he let himself be cut down in the prime of both their lives? It was the measure of her loss, I think, that determined the fury of her renunciation. I understand that now. But not then. She wept and cursed and drank and I came home from school on my bike one after
noon and found a big pickup in the yard. I was sixteen. I knew the truck. It belonged to Gus Hebert, Dad’s foreman. Not just the boss of the cutters, but the ops guy for an entire lease—roads, cutting, transport—a compact, hard man who had worked his way up from choke setter as a teenager. I’d met him before, and I could tell that if Pop didn’t exactly like him, he respected him.
They were drunk and half dressed—she in a robe, he in boxers and a t-shirt—when I came through the door. They were sitting on the couch in the trailer watching the cooking channel. The cooking channel. Instead of being abashed, Mom went after me, yelling at me for surprising her. I thought you were surfing, she yelled. I stammered that there was no swell, I was stunned, more than hurt by the whole scene. Gus watched me. I remember him blurry drunk, but there was something in his look that seemed sympathetic, like I have a clue what you’re going through and I’m sorry. I didn’t want his fucking sympathy, and I didn’t want my mother to be a slut and I didn’t want my father dead. Okay okay, I kept repeating and disappeared into my room, and filled a rucksack and said on the way out the door, I’m spending the night with Eddy. She came after me as I hit the outside steps, grabbed my arm, spun me. She was a strong woman, physically strong.
She said, “Jimmy, you—I—”
Her eyes were red rimmed and afraid. I remember thinking for the first time that she might get old one day. That scared me as much as the scene inside, and also how much I loved her. Way too much. I couldn’t stand any of it. I couldn’t take it all in and I tore myself from her grip and fled.
I didn’t spend the night with Eddy. I stuck my thumb out on Route 1 and I ran away. Is that what it is when you’re sixteen? I guess. Not really. I went to my sister Caila’s in Santa Rosa and when I told her the story she let me stay with her for the rest of the school year. Mom visited twice, she had cooled down, and she did not contest this strange custody. I wanted to tell her how much I loved her and didn’t know how. Truly, I was not myself that whole spring. I know what it means when they say beside yourself with grief. That’s what it felt like. Like I was standing always a few feet away from my body as I went through the motions. Remote. From my feelings, from a clear view of anything. All I cared about was reading and surfing and drawing. I turned seventeen and bought a motorcycle. I could carry my shortboard on it. Caila lived on the west side of town and it took about twenty-five minutes to get to a break, and I finished the year and dropped out. I had a clue enough to get my GED before I hit the road and went down to San Francisco. I thought of Mom often, I forgave her, I loved her more than I could bear, and she died in a car wreck on the Arch Rock Cliffs, drunk, before I could tell her any of that. I was shell-shocked. I was living with Caila and Silas and I wandered around like a zombie. I’d go down to the city and just walk and walk and get stoned. Two weeks after the funeral I got into a fight downtown and with my head pounding I wandered into the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and saw a painting on loan from Boston called The Fog Warning by Winslow Homer. It shocked me. This was a shock of life. The fisherman in his black slicker rowed through a rough gray sea, the stern of his little boat weighted down with a couple of huge fish. The man is in mid-stroke, climbing the back of a wave, and he cranes his head to get a better look at his distant ship and the coming wall of fog bearing down on it out of an ominous evening. He is completely alone and a little alarmed, and capable. If they—the ship, his rowboat—are overcome by fog before he can close the gap he may be lost at sea, forever.
I knew water. From years in the waves surfing I knew how it acted, how it felt. And I felt this windchop. And the groundswell underneath it, and the weight of the stern-heavy boat and how sluggish it would be to row. This sea was alive and the colors, they came through my skin and they were cold. The slates and silvers and grays. And how the man was pinned on the sea between life and death: his catch meant life, for him and his family. But it also weighed him down in a dangerous sea with the fog coming. He had nothing to do but put his back into it and pull another stroke, and another.
How I was feeling, I guess in my own life, why it hit me so hard. The fog meant oblivion, but it also meant respite. I was seventeen and I was already exhausted.
I leaned into the painting and placed a bruised cheek almost to the canvas and eyed along the brushstrokes, trying to fathom how he had done that, made the sea so cold and wet and dangerous with only swipes of pigment. I could feel too the almost metallic scaly cold of the fishes’ flanks. A guard in a blazer told me to step back. I’d had enough anyway. I’d only seen a few rooms and I’d seen enough. I wanted to do that. Make stuff come alive like that. With the wall of fog bearing down on my own life, that one painting gave me a reason to row like a motherfucker. Six weeks later I enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute. I didn’t graduate, I didn’t even make it halfway through, but I didn’t need to.
I finished gagging, the pages of the transcript on the carpet where I had dropped them. I sat in the wingback chair patterned with lilies that were no doubt supposed to rhyme with the Georgia O’Keeffe flowers, and I shuddered and breathed. Wiped my mouth on the back of my arm. Quivering. I felt empty, empty as a dead shell.
I should eat. No wonder I’d gotten sick, hadn’t eaten anything all day, and I had put my body through a bunch of stresses, including heat, Celia Anson naked, and interrogation. Hot bath, then I’d hunt something up for dinner.
I had a better idea. This was all on Pim wasn’t it? I pushed myself out of the chair, stood unsteadily, went to the phone by the couch. Picked it up, dialed zero. The front desk answered, it was Kimberly the smiling gringa. “Hi, Mr. Stegner!” she sang. “It’s Kim. What can we do for you tonight?”
“Is it night?”
“Nearly. Figure of speech I guess.”
“May I have room service?”
“Certainly. In the future just dial six. Or call me, anytime. I’m here for you.”
“Thanks.”
It occurred to me that one of the problems and the perks of being somewhat famous is that you are connected everywhere, to almost, it seems, everyone. Which is not as sweet as it might seem, when hardly anybody you are connected to really knows you. Seemed that with killing I felt a little more remote from the world. Isn’t that what Fatty said? Wheezy? Secrets make you sick? Well, they were already making me feel lonely.
CHAPTER THREE
Horse and Crow
OIL ON CANVAS
36 X 48 INCHES
I’m sure the designers of the Artist Suite didn’t intend for their patrons to actually paint there. But they must have had enough stained carpet that they wised up and left a circular patch of floor tiled beneath the cove window looking out on Don Gaspar Avenue.
I turned on the TV and watched a cop show, one of those reality deals with videos of car chases that usually end with the suspect crashing his vehicle and fleeing on foot across a median where he is leveled by a German shepherd or three beefy cops with Tasers. In the one I watched it wasn’t a shepherd but a big black Lab that took down our perp while he tried to get through a backyard cluttered with plastic playground equipment. He was a Hispanic kid in a white wife beater and neck chains and he vaulted a little slide set like a pro but the seesaw got him, tripped him headlong and then the Lab was on his back and tearing at his neck. I ate a bowl of tomato bisque and a slice of lasagna off the rolling tray as I watched, and drank a ginger ale on ice and felt a lot better. I didn’t know Labs had it in them.
Then I digested with a segment on the Military Channel where they pit a squad of virtual U.S. Marines, say, against a Roman legion. In this one they had a SEAL sniper team, just two guys, against fifty Comanches on horseback with Henry rifles and bows. The SEALs had to enter the camp and free a white woman captive. I can’t remember why they didn’t get to use their whole SEAL team of five men. They had some good reason. The episode made me sad. Half of the Comanches looked Chinese and none of the horses had the handprints and suns painted on their flanks, what the Comanches were famous for. Ther
e was a lot of mayhem in the final assault and the spotter got killed by an arrow as they ran across the shallow river with the girl. I turned off the TV. I set up the easel on the tiles by the bow window and took out another twenty-four thirty-six stretched canvas from the tarp-wrapped bundle, and my paints, and I painted a horse covered in blue and red fish and I put the horse on the edge of a cliff and I put a crow with a blue eye on a rock watching him. The crow’s bill was half open. That’s all. I liked it. The crow was not exactly disinterested, and though a dead horse would mean a big feast, a crow potlatch, the bird I think was telling the horse about choice, that he didn’t have to jump. The horse it was clear was supposed to jump for some reason and had never encountered the concept of choice. Everything in his life had come in a certain order and he had always been told what to do, or knew what to do in his bones, so choice had never come into it.
His instincts and what he was supposed to do were now at war and the crow was weighing in. I felt a little sorry for the horse.
I poured another ginger ale and thought about putting a coal train in the desert beneath the cliff but knew that was just a self-destructive impulse. It would add too many elements, complicate the simple proposition between the horse and the crow. I had fucked up all my life, especially when things were going well, going smoothly with a lot of clean light in the picture, but I had fucked up very few paintings. I seemed to always know just where to stop, I was not a painting wrecker at the end like a few other good painters I know.
Looking at the painting, I wasn’t sure the crow was doing the horse a favor. One of the things I had read about crows somewhere is that they are much smarter than their station in life. I mean, unlike other birds, it takes them about two hours every day to secure enough food to survive and the rest is play time, electives. They are so clever and they get easily bored. I had read about crows in California that ate the eyes out of baby seals and sea lions, for fun mostly. Because they could. Seemed more like something a person would do. I imagined Dugar, in the Big Sur landscape of his dreams, witnessing such a thing. So crows must spend a lot of the day wondering what they are supposed to do now, what they are here for, and that seemed like a cruel existential dilemma for anyone who didn’t have TV. It made me look at the painting in a different light: that the crow was more mischievous than he seemed at first. He was handing off this idea of choice to the horse the way the serpent handed off the apple. Poor horse. It was leap and die or live and be haunted by the ability to choose. Which when I think about it, might be one definition of consciousness. I pitied just about everybody.