The Painter: A Novel

by Peter Heller

  I went to visit my uncle and aunt in southern Vermont, I was maybe twenty-six, and one night I got drunk and walked up the road, just maple and birch woods on either side, fields, and came to Sam Frazer’s, a guy my age I’d known since I used to visit when I was a kid. An old farm house, the light in the front parlor was on and I knocked. He was a town selectman now, and his wife had just left him and he was glad to see me. He’d been drinking, too, and we got more drunk together, then drove into the field west of his house and I tried to shoot a buck in his headlights. I was so drunk that I’d duct taped a flashlight to the receiver of the little .30-30, and taped right around the lever so I couldn’t work the action. Well. I’m glad now that the whole herd ran off before I could get my act together.

  I imagined that Grant was much better at shooting things at night.

  There was no sound coming from the trucks and no shadowed figure moving between them or moving at all. He was waiting. He had broken the glass to draw me out of wherever I might be sleeping nearby and it had worked. Now he was crouched with some flat shooting rifle and a night scope and he was cursing himself for not getting a bead on the short stab of flame from the barrel of my handgun. He would wait. He would maybe expect me to work my way down, to get closer, and that would be fine because he would be scanning the hillside which was all open meadow between us.

  My heart was thumping against my ribs. Fuck. I knew, I knew there was a man down there waiting to kill me. I think I knew from the moment his truck stopped that certain distance back and froze my own pickup in his headlights. Something about the jerky rhythm of the spotlight, something about all of it that was malevolent and evil, and worse because it was practiced, because it was clear this sonofabitch had done this before and who knew how many animals he had killed this way, who knew even how many men. Because a man who burns down another man’s barn, a barn full of horses, seemed capable of most things.

  But this way, the coward’s way, in the dark from cover. Fuck. Which made us two killers. That occurred to me with a shock: we were two practiced killers squaring off in the thick of night, and it also occurred to me that I wasn’t certain he was a murderer but I knew that I was. How much less cowardly to jump out of a bush and surprise a drunk man with his dick in his hands and crush his skull?

  So it seemed to me that this was a fitting showdown. Two cowards in the cloaking dark, cloaking their shame which I was sure neither of us felt.

  I was pressed against the fragrant bark of the old ponderosa. My heart no longer hammered. Good. If I ever got close enough and had to actually shoot the bastard, being a little calmer would be helpful.

  I wouldn’t shoot him. One Siminoe was enough. Wasn’t it? What was I supposed to do now? He was trying to kill me. I was sure, I could feel it like the heat of an engine.

  I breathed. The crickets chirped. His idling truck down in the road was a low murmur, a faint ticking. Probably needed a valve job. Something rustled in the duff under the trees, a quick scratching that froze me. It peeped, sounded surprised, jumped, gone. Drama everywhere. Let out my breath, lay still, listened. Felt my phone bulging in my pocket, pressing my thigh, shifted it to the side. What if it rang? And gave me away like a beacon. It wouldn’t. Before I turned up the rancher’s road I had thought of Sofia, wondered where she was, and pressed on the phone to call and of course there was no reception. Not here.

  Okay, relax. He is a hunter as you used to be, he is accustomed to the Long Wait, probably enjoys it in some primal way.

  All he needed was one cough to hone in. Honed in he could probably keep the scope on the spot and wait for me to shift which I would eventually do, and bang. Not a good situation.

  I began to taste bourbon on my tongue. Jim Beam to be precise. I am not a hunter by nature, not this kind of hunter. I always moved. I liked to move through trees, to the edge of a meadow or rockfall, crouch, listen, wait a little while, get stiff while ungloved hands got cold, move on. Never had this kind of patience. Why I loved to fish creeks, it was a rhythmic enterprise, wading and casting, never still.

  After some time, maybe minutes, maybe an hour, it occurred to me that something needed to happen. If I waited long enough he would kill me. He had the rifle, I had a handgun. It was like a mismatched fight where one boxer’s reach is twice as long as the other’s.

  Fuck it. My worst bar fights came with this impulse to get it over with. Fuck it anyway. I had three shots left in the pistol, I’d have to get very close.

  I grasped the rucksack in one hand, backed on hands and knees further into the shelter of the trees and stood up. Go. I moved fast. As fast as I could. Came out of the grove at an angle to my right, out into the open meadow at a crouch, and ran. The pack was in my left hand. Zagged left, legs in freefall, stepped into a hole, prairie dog, stumbled almost fell, sear from the left knee, braced for the hot rip exploding my chest. Cut right again, almost falling down the hillside, a shadow a large shape in the dark fuck! humped—a humped giant, a rock, a boulder beside the road, I collapsed behind it. Thank you God for dropping a boulder in the middle of this valley. Breathed.

  Breathed. What must be the crack and echo of his shot reverberating down the valley, right over my head. But it wasn’t. Nothing. Quiet again, I made myself listen for more than the drum of my heart. There was no echo. Had been no crack of a shot. What the fuck? I peeped around the side. Two trucks, their shadows. Pulled back, lay on my side, breathed. The moon like an orange lightship was clearing a high wooded ridge back toward the highway. First time I’d noticed. Fuck. I scanned the slope I had just come down and realized that in the ruddy light he could have seen me easily without a night scope. Was he being perverse? Waiting for me to walk right into him?

  “Grant!” I yelled it. Risked the shout. My truck was only thirty yards away. He knew I was here, behind the rock. No way he didn’t know. Might as well talk to the sonofabitch.

  “Grant! You want to kill me? Like a night bear?”

  Silence.

  “Well come on!”

  As soon as I said it I thought, That sounds like a line from a movie. I didn’t mean it, not for a second. Why would I frigging say that? Movie script reflex. I would much rather have him climb in his truck and drive away and leave me alone.

  The grass heads stirred in a light breeze. The moon up there climbing the swell like the hull of a boat. Fuck it. I left the pack and crouched and ran. Straight at the grille of my beaten truck. Flung myself against it. Breathed in gulping rasps. Lifted the gun and pivoted around it.

  He was in prone position waiting. Oh shit. Wait. No rifle but the shank of a lug nut wrench inches from his fingers. Which were still. Flung on his back, eyes open and glassy, shining back the blood moon. A Siminoe, no doubt, the toppled bulk of him, shot in the middle of the forehead, like an execution. He looked like a bully even dead, even in the dark. The thrusting jaw, the grizzled fuck-you of the three day stubble, the hands of bone and wire.

  I felt dizzy, whiskey sick. I sat down, leaned against the front left tire, two feet from Grant’s exploded head. The back of it was. The blood pooled around it in a dark halo, seeped into the flannel of the shirt at his shoulders. Unbelievable. How many elk had I missed with a rifle at closer range than this? No way. Two hundred yards maybe, in the dark, with no sight picture only sound. No way.

  Way.

  “Unless you shot yourself,” I said out loud. “It was just too much fun smashing my windows, wasn’t it, and listening to my desperate warning shots, how could it get better than this? Bang.”

  No rifle. I killed a man for vandalism. I got up. Swayed on my feet. Almost vomited, didn’t, maybe I should. This killing stuff was getting old.

  I found the dirt with one foot then the other. Walked. The ground bucked. Wait. Stopped, swayed, turned my head to the side and gagged. Not much there, still. Felt better. I turned around and walked back to my own truck, opened the driver door and found the heavy LED flashlight under the passenger seat. Left the door open just like a drunk. That’s ho
w I felt, my head. Foggy like too many of the whiskeys I’d tasted before, too many beer backs, whatever’s on tap, just do another. Guts slithering around each other, not staying in place. I walked back to his truck, his driver door also open, and slid my thumb along the patterned steel of the flashlight, found the rubber button and clicked the light on. And there it was, leaning against the far seat, not leaning but strapped with a shock cord, butt on the floor, a ranch rifle with a night scope. And there it was again: a semi-auto, must be a .45, stuck barrel down in the middle console. He’d have one on him, too, I’d bet my barely used, newly abused truck.

  I was tempted to trot back and prove myself right, but you know what, I didn’t feel that good. Wanted to vomit and get it over with, stick my finger down my throat but didn’t. I sat, half leaning half sitting on his driver seat, and stared into the faintly lit night, let the exhaustion blur the farther woods beyond the creek at the lower edge of the meadow. The creek. There was one there, no doubt. Because the ground rose again on the other side of it, only one place for the water in this little valley to go. Just there.

  Made myself walk, made myself look. Stumbled over open ground. Tripped on a gnarl of sagebrush. It was a creek in a deep arroyo. I hauled myself up like a drunk at a busy crosswalk, prevented myself from taking another step over the edge. Thumbed on the flashlight and scanned across the gap, then down into the bottom where thick willows choked a thin dark trickle of water, probably fifteen feet down at least. It was a badly eroded wash with walls like crumbled cliffs. It was perfect. Damn, Grant. I will give you a burial-at-creek like your brother.

  I wasn’t wearing a watch but it was fast. If I were a betting man, which I am, I’d put money on less than thirty minutes. I dug out the work gloves from under my seat. It occurred to me that I should dig a shallow grave under the pines and try to get rid of his corpse for good, but it was also very clear that I didn’t have the time or the tools or the strength at the moment. I had a little folding army shovel and I was trembling with exhaustion. It also seemed to me that I was acting just like a bona fide murderer. I didn’t feel like a bona fide murderer is supposed to feel. Once the nausea passed, I was moving like a man with a mission. I pulled his truck past mine, then backed up to the corpse so I wouldn’t make a long slide. Learned my lesson about blood and stayed away from his oozing head, got his feet up onto the tailgate, etc. I felt, well, pretty good. Grant is, was, like his brother: he was a hurter. A guy who hurt people and animals and things. I just didn’t feel that awful that I had shot the sonofabitch by mistake. I was more worried about getting discovered by the rancher than by what I had done, which made me wonder for a second if I was a psychopath.

  His feet wouldn’t stay up on the tailgate so I got his lariat which was coiled and hanging from the rifle rack in his rear window and I hogtied his ankles and ran the rope through a tie-down ring in the front left corner of the bed and hauled, got him halfway there. I tied off the rope and walked back and lifted him by the shoulders and half slid half rolled him into his own truck like the carcass of an elk. There.

  I climbed in, pulled on the knob of the headlights and drove slowly up the road twenty feet and swung left, the beam cutting the field, and found the obvious clear path between the clumps of sage to the gap in the trees and came across. Easy. Into the faintest moon-shadow beneath the tall pines, and at the lip of the arroyo I slowed way down and shoved off the headlights and jerked the floor lever back into four wheel drive low and let her crawl, and I stepped out. That simple. Grant and his truck crawled to the black edge and toppled in. A crunch, shriek of bent steel, a bounce, glass and panels busted, a perforating pop like an exclamation point, then nothing. I walked to the edge. Grant’s truck was miraculously on its wheels but canted up on the edge of the bouldered bank, must have rolled once, and the man himself I didn’t see until I turned on the flashlight: down in the willows thrown, feet tied to the line, half on his back, one arm flung straight, mouth agape, he looked like a crazy person hailing a cab. To wherever the spirits of men like Grant go.

  The rest went faster and it was all practical. Glad I had the flashlight. There was blood on the hood and fender of my truck. I washed and scrubbed it off with most of the one gallon jug. I backed up my truck and lit the stained and scrabbled spots in the road and I took out the small army shovel and scraped dirt from ridged gravel on the shoulder and spread it over the pooled blood and the drag marks. Spread two dozen spadefuls and then kicked it around and smoothed it with my feet. When I was done it looked like: road. Okay. Moved fast. The solitude of the night couldn’t last forever, just a hunch. I stood off in the grass and stripped off my clothes. Everything. Got a clean flannel shirt out of a fruit crate I leave in the truck and rolled everything inside it, including my boots. Had a hole in the right toe anyway. Tied the bundle tight and hopped tender footed to the truck and set it in the bed just forward of the tailgate. From the crate I pulled out clean jeans, a paint spattered canvas shirt, and my surfer flip-flops and got dressed. Then I drove back up the road and when I got to the highway I turned left and drove back to Alamosa and slept in the front seat in a Love’s truck stop convenience store and at dawn I drove into a self-service car wash and power sprayed the whole rig, and stuffed the bundle of clothes into a mostly full restaurant Dumpster, down underneath a stack of flattened cardboard. I spent another two dollars using the soapy jet to fill my gallon jug and with paper towels scrubbed down my seats and dash. At eight sharp I found my phone under a cigar pouch under the passenger seat. The phone was set to hum and there were three messages from Sofia and one from Irmina and two from Steve. Good, Sofia was okay. Now was not the time to chat. I called a come-to-you auto glass company and told them to drive to the back of the car wash. In half an hour a young stoner—good—in a powder blue polo shirt installed my new windshield and by 9:10 I was on the highway again toward Antonito and New Mexico. Like clockwork, all of it. Like I’d done this before. That scared me as much as anything: that I seemed to know exactly what to do.

  I passed the ranch road, on my right. It ran off down a little open valley between wooded hills and it looked beckoning and half remembered like a dream.

  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 fa
ll. 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.