Painted Truth

by Lise McClendon

  The truth was I had nothing against Republicans in general, as a group. I even voted for a few. It was the individuals I couldn’t stomach, and Buck Boyle was their king. He was cowboy through and through, from the shit on his boots to his old-time saloon complete with scantily clad dancing girls, around the corner from the Second Sun.

  I was shaking my head at Darlene when I spotted Boyle, towering in white straw hat and bulging pearl-button shirt on the steps of a pea green Victorian office building, looking down on his disciples, so beneficent. A man stepped up next to him. I craned my neck to see but knew that profile, that anvil shape of the head. Charlie Frye clapped his arm around Buck’s shoulders, they grinned at each other, and the crowd went wild.

  Darlene waved me around the edge of the people. As the Saab inched away, down the street, a piece of the puzzle clicked into place. Charlie Frye was smoothing over the investigation of Ray Tantro’s death because Buck Boyle was running for reelection. They were old cronies. Probably bowled on the same team. Belonged to Rotary, Masons, Elks. That was how Frye got appointed in the first place, a non-law-enforcement type heading the police department.

  It would look bad for an unexplained death to take place in our little burg right before the election. An arson investigation could take months, no one would blame Frye for that. But a homicide declared, then not solved? A black eye for Buck’s gang. With Frye at the helm, that possibility was brilliantly imminent. So call it suicide and bury it.

  For once, something made sense.

  7

  WEDNESDAY MORNING HAD a little trouble getting started. A low cloud cover filled the valley, promising a chill and showers. Eden looked so forlorn I invited her along with me to Star Valley. I could use the company, and besides, I wanted to check her out as a potential partner. I was trying to think positively about the whole thing. If Eden’s insurance came through, she could pay off at least part of what Paolo had invested in his half of the gallery.

  Last night Eden had seemed down. Evenings out with Paolo had made her forget her problems for a while, but my partner’s ardor had cooled. (Now that he’d broken his news to me?) The last two evenings he had found a rich client to entertain, one of the last merger-and-acquisition bankers on Wall Street and his glamorously thin wife.

  Now Eden slumped against the window of the car, staring silently at the limestone cliffs along the river as we wound south toward the Mormon town of Star Valley. I had spoiled our pleasant drive by asking her not to smoke in the car. She hadn’t spoken to me since. When I stopped at a gas station to ask directions to Esther Tantro’s house, she ran in and bought a can

  of root beer. She was slurping noisily on it as we wound up the dirt road east of town, into the rolling foothills where the sage grew tall and the grass had burned to golden straw next to the road.

  “Can I come in? Is it all right with you?” Eden whined as I stopped the Saab Sister in an overgrown driveway in front of the farmhouse. A decayed look permeated the place, the white paint cracked and dirty, a porch step broken, barbed-wire fence sagging and piled with tumbleweed. No animals grazed the dry pastures unless you counted prairie dogs.

  I sighed. “Do what you want, Eden. I asked you to come because I wanted you along. If you’d rather do something else”— I paused, trying to keep my tongue in check—“feel free.”

  I slammed the door of the car and examined the house. The heat rose from the pale dirt. The air was still, dead calm. Even the hardy Russian olive trees were twisted with sharp thorns where leaves should be. No clouds blanketed the wide-open sky here. I squinted up at the white-hot dome and remembered how dry and desolate Wyoming could be when you got out of the mountains.

  When I called Mrs. Tantro this morning she sounded weak and I worried about overtaxing her with questions. Yet Dr. Miller said she was a strong woman, and she had agreed to my visit when I complimented Ray’s work. I told her I was interested in seeing some of his paintings for the gallery. Strangely enough, this was true. I had three calls yesterday about Tantro paintings, all from people jolted by his death into finally taking an interest in the guy. Art ghouls, I called them. The human psyche is sometimes a strange, dark maze.

  Eden ran around the front of the car and grabbed my hand. “I’m sorry, Alix.” I thought she was going to cry as I pulled my hand away. “You’ve been so good to me. Forgive me?”

  “It’s been a rough week.” I headed toward the house. “Just let me do the talking, okay?”

  Eden skipped to keep up. “I won’t say a thing. It’s so good to get out of town for a few hours. I was feeling so cramped up in your apartment. I don’t know how you stand it. There’s no sunlight in there. It’s so dark. Oh, I don’t mean I don’t appreciate staying there and everything, it’s just my place was bigger and it made all the difference with the south windows.”

  Eden had to stop for a breath. Fortunately we reached the door then and I knocked. The door, like the rest of the house, was painted gray or faded to that color, with dirt and black boot scuffs of years duration. It opened, creaking, and Esther Tantro stood squinting at us. She was a big woman, with long gray hair that she wore loose, giving her a wild look. Her face was mottled with age spots, but her eyes were clear and dark as night.

  “Alix Thorssen from Second Sun Gallery in Jackson. Mrs. Tantro?”

  She smiled without moving her lips and stepped back to let us in. I introduced Eden, watching for a reaction to Eden’s name from the woman, but there was none. Ray must not have mentioned the name of the owner of the gallery where his new pieces hung. Eden shook Mrs. Tantro’s hand, something I had forgotten to do, and the old woman seemed to warm.

  “Would you like coffee? I made some biscuits yesterday I could warm up. Put a little honey on them. Be no trouble?” Her voice was pitifully urgent, and we felt obliged to accept. “Sit down, please. I’ll be right back.”

  Eden obeyed, choosing an overstuffed chair covered with flowered velvet cushions that emitted clouds of dust in the morning sun streaming through the east windows. The parlor, this room would be called, with fussy, uncomfortable furniture dating from the thirties, knickknack shelves, and lace doilies. Wallpaper graced the walls, an extravagance no self-respecting parlor could do without, although in this case it would have been an improvement.

  Over the small, cold fireplace with wooden mantel and shallow brick hearth hung a large oil painting. As I stepped up to it I knew immediately it was one of Ray’s. The colors in it were magnificently imaginative, similar to my small winter scene. His prairie, glowing with autumn-ripe wheat and a rainstorm threatening in the purple sky, evoked a sense of the wonder of the land. He had a sure hand, a confident stroke, sometimes precise and other times bold and loose. The date in the corner read “72.”

  “Did you see this one, Alix?” Eden whispered from across the room. Esther Tantro rattled pans in the kitchen. I turned and saw the painting Eden stood in front of, a small piece sitting on an easel on a tabletop in the corner. I crossed the faded oriental rug.

  “Why didn’t he do some like these for me? I could have sold these in a wink.” Eden folded her arms, a cross look on her face again, and turned to the big painting.

  I bent down to look at the little piece; it was equally gorgeous, a tiny still life of mossy rocks in a stream. I gave a low whistle and whispered to myself: “No shit, Sherlock.”

  Mrs. Tantro came in with a tray of coffee and warm biscuits. We sat and did polite, even though the biscuits were hard as hockey pucks. After chewing and smiling for a seemly time, I set down my coffee cup and wiped my mouth.

  “I’m sorry to bother you so soon after … all your trouble. We have had a number of requests for Ray’s work this week. This often happens when an artist dies. People get interested.”

  Esther nodded, smoothing back her gray hair that had tumbled into her coffee. “I understand. You know, Ray and me wasn’t too close these last years.” She stopped suddenly, a distance in her eyes that could have been sorrow or just regret.

/>   “It must be awful to lose your son,” Eden piped up. I glared at her. I didn’t want Mrs. Tantro to find out it was Eden’s gallery where Ray had died. Eden gave me a contrite look and folded her hands.

  “Do you know of any galleries that might have sold Ray’s work in the last ten years or even fifteen years, Mrs. Tantro?” I said. “So that I might locate some of his work?”

  Esther frowned into her lap. “Just that one where … in Jackson. He hadn’t had a show in, oh, I don’t remember the last one before that.”

  “He hadn’t been painting?”

  She shook her head. “He had, kind of, some problems. He couldn’t paint.” That would be booze and drugs. She went on, perking up in memory, eyes on the window. “He was so excited about the new show, his new paintings. I couldn’t believe he was painting again. But he did it.”

  Her voice didn’t sound proud, like a mother’s. Only the pain of his loss came through, in flat tones.

  “Do you have a picture of him, Mrs. Tantro?” The only picture I’d seen was the murky shot in the library’s faxed article.

  Mrs. Tantro was sitting in a straight chair, her head turned toward the window. The sun dusted her wrinkled features, sharpening the lines of sorrow. She turned to me, suddenly, as if from another world.

  “Why, yes. Of course.” She rose, moving not as wearily as before, and disappeared into another room. In a moment she was back with a large black-and-white photograph in a frame. She handed it to me.

  “He was seventeen then,” she said. “A long time ago.”

  The photograph was a group shot of the Star Valley basketball squad, circa 1966. They wore big canvas high-tops and loose sleeveless jerseys and grins as wide as childhood.

  “State champions that year. That’s Ray, there.” An arthritic finger pointed at the tallest boy in the center of the photograph. Eden came over to the sofa and sat beside me.

  Ray had a crew cut and a square jaw with small, wide-set eyes. I looked at Eden, who raised her eyebrows and frowned. Mrs. Tantro took the framed picture into her hands, smiled at it, and flattened it against her flowered housecoat.

  We stood. I took a last, covetous look at the piece over the mantel. I lingered, knowing the visit was over but hoping she would offer something, hoping she would remember where Ray sold his paintings, where he hoarded them, who had bought them, anything. I didn’t have the heart to ply her for information, the grief on her face as she stared at her long-ago teenage son still fresh in my mind. I couldn’t help but feel the awful shock it must have been to find him burned beyond recognition, a blackened, charred life-form that had once been a tall, proud basketball player, a successful artist, a son.

  “Will you have a service, Mrs. Tantro?” Eden said behind me.

  “Last night. We had it in the moonlight.” She walked to the window again, the photograph still against her breast. “We scattered his ashes there, on the hill.”

  Eden stepped next to her, gazing at the burned brown hills behind the house, the twisted apple trees with drooping leaves and deformed fruit.

  “Will you stay here?” Eden asked quietly.

  “This is my home,” the old woman said. “Ray is here.”

  Eden looked grief-stricken as she turned to me, her eyes filling. She dropped her head and started for the door. I turned to go too, when Mrs. Tantro spoke.

  “My nephew has some paintings. He helped Ray out during some bad spells.”

  “Your nephew?” I said after a pause, wanting to hear more.

  She set the photograph on the doily-covered table. “Wally. Wally Fortney. My sister’s boy. He works at the cheese factory.”

  AT THE CAFE in town, drinking weak iced tea and staring at Eden devouring a mound of grease-laden hash browns, I mulled the prospect of tracking down Wally Fortney. It was the middle of the day, twelve-thirty, and he would probably be working. The prospect of a cache of Ray Tantro paintings pulled at me like a drug. I shut my eyes for a moment and saw a room full of dusty canvases, all wondrous and full of light and color and feeling.

  I paid the bill and waited for Eden in the overheated car. The Saab had no air-conditioning. It was a rare day that I missed it, but this was one. I rolled down the windows, feeling the sweat begin to roll down my back. Eden emerged, red-eyed. Heading north into the Snake River Canyon again, I realized it was the day for my kayak lesson. I hadn’t called Pete to cancel. It had been in the back of my mind yesterday, nagging at me. I had put my wet suit and helmet in the trunk in case I changed my mind. But I was too busy, too preoccupied.

  The air cooled. The deep shade of the pine forest gave way to the narrow canyon with steep cliffs to the west. I was resigned to skipping my lesson, although I didn’t feel good about it. My nose was still sore though, and my eyes had faded to a pumpkin yellow. I concentrated on the road, winding along above the river, looking for Pete, wondering if he had called the gallery for me.

  Eden squealed, pointing out a deer along the riverbank. I glanced to try to see it and had to jerk the car back onto the road.

  “What’s that sound?” Eden asked.

  I listened. A faint bumping, an irregular sound, came and went. “Probably a rock in the hubcap.”

  I maneuvered the Saab Sister around a rock slide that littered the road with square chunks of debris. Last fall I got a flat tire in just such a slide, the sharp edges of a rock piercing a sidewall. I wanted no further bad tire karma with my new set of rubber.

  But after the rock slide the sound came back. Louder. Ka-thump, ka-thump, then rat-a-tat-a-tat, like a machine gun. It varied, got worse, then better, then terrible.

  “God, Alix, what is that?” Eden grabbed the dash. “Don’t you want to stop and check it out?”

  The shoulder on the right side of the highway was nonexistent. The rocky bank plunged thirty feet down to the river, broken only by a few pine trees and clumps of willows. The road curved and I drove on, listening to the rattle get worse and worse. I slowed the car, but it didn’t improve. If anything the sound got louder.

  At last a turnout ahead. The line of cars and pickups behind me would be happy. I slowed to pull over. As I did, the car suddenly felt wobbly.

  “Oh, God, another flat.” The car swerved and jerked as it dropped off the pavement onto the gravel. The steering wheel jumped out of my hands.

  Eden was out of the car before I killed the engine, as if it was going to explode. Her hands deep in the pockets of her shorts, she stepped back from the car, frowning at the front right tire.

  “There’s nothing wrong with it.” Eden frowned, baffled.

  I knelt next to the wheel. She was right. I felt the treads for nails. The tire was firm, completely inflated. I got the tire iron from the trunk and pried off the hubcap. As it fell forward into my hand, six lug nuts came with it, rattling against the metal cap.

  “Christ. They didn’t put it on tight.” Even as I said it, though, I knew they had. The boys at the Conoco station where I bought my tires wouldn’t have left the lug nuts this loose. If anything they would have put them on so tight that I couldn’t change the tire.

  I felt the remaining two nuts. One fell off into my hand, leaving one, also loose, holding the wheel on the car. My mind reeled. The desperately steep riverbank, hugging the highway, was a terrible panorama in my mind. I pictured the wheel rolling off, tumbling ahead of the car. Then the Saab crashing onto the axle, sparks flying and turning, turning onto its side and over and over down the bank.

  “Look at this.” Eden was standing by the rear tire, the hubcap in her hands. She knelt by the wheel and counted. “One, two, three, four gone.” She touched the remaining ones as if they were contaminated. “And the rest loose. What tire place did you say it was?”

  “It wasn’t them.” I slapped the tire iron against my palm, its weight reassuring, like Thor’s magic hammer.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Somebody loosened them.”

  Eden squinted at me, then at the wheel. “But why?”

>   I knelt by the front tire and began replacing the nuts. My hand trembled. Why had someone tried to kill me? That was the question Eden hadn’t finished. Articulating it in my mind made it more real suddenly. My stomach tightened, and I sat hard on the gravel and tried to concentrate.

  I moved to the rear wheel, taking two of the front lug nuts to hold it on until we got to town. What was I doing that would make someone try to kill me? I racked my brain for my faults, my curiosities, my deviant behaviors, and came up with a fairly substantial list. But only one thing made sense. Over the last week it had become my obsession, my morbid infatuation. And this attempt on my life made it all the clearer, my purpose sharpened and refined until it sparkled in the high mountain sun.

  Ray Tantro. His life and death had come to define, for me, the hazards of a life in art, a life devoted to beauty but doomed to personal tragedy. The contradictions and foibles of the sensitive soul. Was it possible to contribute to the greater glory of mankind through art and still be a whole human being? I had to know. This was Ray Tantro’s secret. A secret someone didn’t want me to find out.

  8

  UNDER THE STEADY gaze of the rocky crags of Teewinot and the frying-pan glacier of Mount Owen, back from the dirt road, behind a grove of aspens and over a small bridge sat the small log cabin. The sky glowed with summer heat, a red-tailed hawk circling on the thermals. In the yard, grown long with blue harebells and white yarrow, granite boulders and barn-siding birdhouses faded in the dappled sunlight.

  Down the dirt road the almost nonexistent community of Moose, Wyoming, just inside Grand Teton National Park, hummed with summer traffic. A restaurant, a climbing-gear shop, a general store, and king-sized parking lot surrounding tepees where tourists ate barbecue sandwiches—this was Moose. Above the Douglas firs and lodgepole pines you could see the tops of the mountains, scraped by recalcitrant snow and glittering gray against the cloudless sky. They looked distant today, unfriendly. As many times as I saw the Tetons, they never looked the same. The weather, or the glaciers, or the light was different, transforming the elegant up thrusts of granite from moment to moment like natural magicians.