The Painter: A Novel by Peter Heller Read Free Book Online Page A

could get Cristine laughing I was probably good for at least twenty-four hours.
    Anyway by then it was just the two of us and we needed a lot of space, from each other.
    Back then I went fishing. Every day. Alce was suddenly gone and I didn’t know what else to do. I fished the dawn and I fished the evening. Down in the canyon of the Lower Box. Down under the rushing drop where Pueblo Creek comes in. Down in the yellowing leaves of the cottonwoods, the box elders. Yellowing then falling leaves. Then the nights when my fingers got numb,and toes. The October cold numbing more than my hands. I cast way across the river and let the fly tumble down the edges of the far pools, pulling line off the clicking reel as fast as I could. So much line out, so much current it’s heavy against the rod, my arm, stop the line, let the fly swing across the current to the middle of the river. And—Bang! They hit.
    They were twenty, thirty yards downstream and mad and full of autumn vigor, sleek and fat with summer bugs, with crawdads, frogs, with colder water, and then I had to fight them against the current all the way back up, thigh deep in the dark water, sucking on the stub of cigar, not sure if it’s even lit, three stars, sweet smell of fallen leaves, raising the rod tip against all the weight trying to feel the limit, the limit of the tippet and the knots, the breaking point, then dropping the rod fast and stripping in the sudden slack, foot by foot, and the trout, if he was big, suddenly deciding too that that’s enough and putting on the jets, get the hell away from here and running
zing
, every foot I’d just fought for gone in a flash in the willed charge of a fast-tiring trout. Running with my line. The song of the reel. I loved this.
    I would be moving in the cold of the settling evening, the few stars in the chasm overhead, the only way I could still myself at all: move.
    The only time I could forget myself, forget Alce. Lost to anything but fighting the fish. And if I got him in finally and he had fought and fought and if he was beautiful which he always was I reached down and cradled him in the current with one hand and with one twist of the other slipped the hook out of his lip and cradled him some more. Cradled and watched him idling there, tail slowly finning while he caught his breath and strength. Like me, I thought. Idling, barely able to breathe. And then a wriggle and slip against my palm and he was gone, lost among the green shadowsof the stones and I said Thanks. Thanks for letting me live another evening.
    I drank sometimes. I had quit maybe two years, pretty much, off and on, but sometimes I went to the Boxcar and sat at the bar, sometimes the same stool where I had turned and shot Lauder Simms, maybe wishing the bastard was there again, insinuating the unspeakable things he wanted to do to my daughter. Wishing that I could shoot him again and relive a year in Santa Fe State, so Alce would still be here. I drank, drank steady like it was a job and Johnny nodded to Nacho and Nacho drove me home. More than once he carried me inside and laid me down on the couch and I remember him whispering
Dios, Jim, He is looking over you, you don’t need to join your daughter, not yet compa
. This from a cousin of Cristine’s who had spent more time inside Santa Fe than he had out, who
ran
the cell block when he was there and saved my life just by being incarcerated same time as me. God is looking over you. I remember it like it was whispered by an angel. And it didn’t feel like that, not one bit. Like anything else was looking over me, like some kind of bad weather.
    That engine. Grief is an engine. Feels like that. It does not fade, what they say, with time. Sometimes it accelerates. I was accelerating. I could feel it, the g-force pressing my chest. I wrecked my truck. Definitely a one car accident, nobody else to blame. Me and a rock. But somehow I was up to date on the insurance—because I had paid it all in a lump sum