by Peter Heller
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 vacatio
n.”
“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.
There was a spot just south of the Ojo Caliente hot springs, a long quiet shady run under ancient cottonwoods that looked cool and dark from the road. But when I got there it was Indian summer hot and midday and I knew the trout would be in a trance, so I drove on.
There are two paintings in the Tate Modern in London that I saw years ago and that together made a deep impression on me. One is by Paul Delvaux and it depicts a milky nude stretched on her back on a divan in a courtyard surrounded by classical stone buildings. The light is sepulchral and ominous. The palest things in the picture are the girl’s skin and the cold columns of the mute buildings. Around and above the square are the bulwarks and cliffs of a severe mountain scape, a scape of the dead. Nothing is living up there in the gloam, no bird or bush or forest, nothing but a waxing sliver of crescent moon that can barely sustain the weak light it breathes down on this silent scene. Around the girl on the divan are: an erect skeleton who seems to be walking toward her, in no hurry—why would he hurry?—a pretty young lady in a red hat, expressionless, who is walking at the viewer and seems to be about to walk out of the frame without noticing, and another imploring nude, who is at the head of the divan and raising one arm emphatically and about to step into it as if she were calling a rescuer. Our heroine by the way is perfect. Every time I look at the thing in the big catalogue book I bought at the gift store I get the stirrings of desire. Her skin is flawless, her hips round, her waist small, her full breasts lifted and spread by her arms which are folded up behind her head. And her exposed armpit is shadowed, cupped by her breast and the lovely smooth muscles of her shoulder and upper arm. Whatever light there is must be coming from the skinny wan moon, but it must be magnified on the way down. There has been no attempt to hide her pubis. The hair there is the same color as in her armpit. One leg is stretched straight, the other hanging off the near side of the bed, half bent. It’s a sexy pose.
Is she dreaming? Doesn’t seem so. The deathlike quiet seems to extend to her spirit, her mind. She could be dead. The first time I saw it I had just galumphed through three galleries of paintings with barely a pause and I was suddenly transfixed. Was she? Dead? Or sleeping? I needed to know. Her skin, as I said, was flawless, seemed alive, did not have the waxy sheen or grainy gray of a corpse. Was it ruddy? No, that was the gloom. Okay, if she was not dead she was deathlike, she suggested death, as did the night, and whatever death was not yet here it certainly was on its way.
Standing before the painting I realized that I had been holding my breath, and that I was attracting stares. Well. I was right in front of it, and it was a graphic nude and I was an imposing man with a beard with flecks of gray. Dirty old man is what they must have been thinking, though why in this age of Internet and cheap nudie bars a dirty old man would go anywhere near a museum is a sensible question. I was not. I was not even old, I was maybe thirty-four. I had been asked to come to London to join an arts festival, I was staying in a four star hotel in Bloomsbury, and I felt like a king.
The painting disturbed me profoundly. I got the sense that the scene was taking place during a terrible war, a war that had left little in the world alive, but I couldn’t be sure of that, either. I couldn’t be sure of anything. What it made me feel in the end was something that was not fully realized until I saw the second painting.
This one was more famous, I think, the way the curator’s card spoke about it, and I was surprised that I’d never seen it. It was Picasso’s Nude Woman in a Red Armchair. The card said it was Marie-Thérèse, Pablo’s seventeen year old lover. Apparently he was head over heels in love with her. I could see why, even through the stylized geometry of her round and semi-reclining form. She was all round. She was in a red chair as advertised and she was frankly uncovered. Her tilted face was round. The sweep of the hair framing her face was round. Her head was leaning into her right hand, her other hand up to her chin in reflection, and her hands and her arms were round round round, and her ear, her hips, her thighs, and whatever thought she pondered was light and pleasant and round. Her pearls or beads. Everything about her, especially her breasts, which were circles, it all rounded and came back to her simple fresh beauty, as if the lines and the light could not bear to be anywhere else, everything was round but her lovely cat eyes and the V and crease of her vagina. Well. She made me instantly happy. Her contained exuberance was contained, barely, in the simple circle of her being. She also aroused me. She was not perfect like the other, not in a classical sense, her limbs were short, she was pudgy, she might even waddle a little as she walked. But. She was devastatingly sexy. That was it, maybe. The painting was so simple. Simple joy, simple sensual heat, simple love in her presence. I felt what Picasso must have felt. She was clearly an uncomplicated soul and I imagined that she reduced all the world before her to its simplest and most fiercely living elements. I imagined that the world talked back to her in the clearest colors, the cleanest music. How else to live in love?
Now back to the other, the dead or sleeping woman. I wended my way back to her through several large rooms. As soon as I caught sight of that pale form, the very realistic length of her limbs, her shadowed armpit, the closed but beautiful eyes, I was aroused. A much different arousal—dark, tinged with what? Guilt maybe. At the voyeurism of studying this woman who could not know I was watching. At the shame of being stimulated by a body that might be a corpse. It was a dark and groaning and maybe violent feeling, violent in the sense of being drawn, exquisitely, toward death and what it does to all things in its proximity. The way it both chills and sanctifies them. The way death is both near and infinitely remote, the way it freezes and somehow kindles the heat of something grotesque and maybe irresistible and sexy, which is life at its most desperate. Phew. What I realized standing there, is that this dark yearning is what happens when we idealize anything: the form of a woman, a landscape, a spiritual impulse. We move it closer to the realm of the dead, if not outright kill it. The living joyful exuberant woman becomes statue marble and dead, or pornographic and equally dead. The spiritual impulse becomes religion. And dead. To my mind.
That is when I decided that whatever I did as an artist, I would try to go toward the living and not away from it. Even, especially, in the most abstract paintings.
A funny memory to have as I drove that morning toward Santa Fe, me, the recent purveyor of death. I kept checking my mirror for a black El Camino, but the road behind
me was empty.
I wasn’t ready to go back to—what? Everything. Not right away. I checked into a Super 8 on the strip in Española and spent two days watching TV and napping and soaking in the hot springs, which weren’t that hot, and eating Chinese food. I let the phone run out of juice and didn’t recharge it. I didn’t drink. I wanted to. I kept an eye out for Jason and his car and never saw him. On the third day I drove at dawn into Santa Fe. Went straight up to the room, took the cell phone out of my coat pocket and left it on the charger. I went back downstairs and got in my truck. Fishing gear was still in back just in case and I drove out Washington past the pink church and north into the country toward Tesuque.
The road skirted the base of the mountain and dropped off the mesa. It narrowed and followed the creek. Along the stream the big old willows and elms, the cottonwoods grew over the road and their leaves were already starting to turn and some had already fallen. I could follow a road like this forever: narrow and winding, tunneled with old trees and littered with yellow leaves. Dappled sunlight slid up the hood and over the windshield. The morning was cool. Clouds massed in the west over the mountains, but here it was sunny. At the church I took a right and wound up into the juniper. Sad to leave the big twisted poplars and the stream, but. Pretty up here, too. The sky opened and I saw two hawks floating in it, big raptors. The road turned to dirt and leveled out and I downshifted and slowed. The washboards could loosen your teeth. The driveways along here led to double-wides, leaning barns, yards with rusted horse trailers, dirt corrals. At a mailbox painted with a leaping fish, my fish, I turned in to a sage field and wound toward a grove of piñons and a small adobe.
She was standing on the step, waiting. Smoke threaded from the chimney. The sun was behind me, rising into the morning, everything was full lit with a warm russet light. That time of day. Her long black hair was loose, hanging to her waist, the silver flashed at her ears, her eyes were sharp with concern. The sight of her. She was not tall but she looked tall. She stood with her arms crossed over her stomach, comfortable, waiting. She knew. She probably knew hours ago, days, that I would be here. She never claimed to be psychic, but she was. She knew things people shouldn’t know, like that a good friend would show up today.