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

that spring, sometimes I did that after I sold a painting—didn’t even know if I had insurance but I did, and the adjuster knew my work, had seen it in an airline magazine, a story about the art scene in Taos, and it turned out he had lost a son at four to a heart defect and he rigged it so the truck was covered, total loss, and I got a new one, and I knew that I would wreck that too, knew it like I knew winter would come and I didn’t care, and I drank and then one morning the door shovedopen and in walked Irmina carrying an overnight bag and a string of habaneras and an unplucked chicken carcass I shit you not and it was the only time since I’d left her house that we ever stayed together more than a few days.
    She stayed for three months. She rescued me. She made me go to AA meetings. She drove me and sat next to me at the open groups. She cooked me food so spicy every meal was some kind of battle. She made love to me again and again until I was sore and gasping like one of those trout, and then she cradled me like a trout and let me catch my breath and then she let me go into sleep.
    This is how I healed. Or didn’t. One evening I took her down to the river. We turned off the highway and rattled slowly up the gravel road and into the heart of the canyon. The walls closed in above us, the high blue of the sky deeper, deep and dark like a river is deep. The highest rock at the rim was a strip of fire, holding the last long sun. The old gorge was a vessel and it was filling with shadow, slowly, and with wind. We drove upstream. We drove with the windows down and the wind came down against us bringing a night’s cold and blowing the last rattling leaves off the cottonwoods. They blew into the river and floated slowly in the pools, pushed by the wrinkles of the wind, singly and in sad fleets. I pulled over when we got to the end of the road, where the creek poured in from above. Now we could see the first few stars above the walls, smell the smoke of some fisherman’s fire, someone who had hiked up into my favorite stretch and was unwilling to leave with the thickening darkness. Got out. Tang of smoke and the sweet decay of leaves. I could smell my past.
    These were the smells of a devotion and of a history and they carried the touch of my daughter. Her voice. The way she was when she came with me here.
    “Did I tell you that she was a better fisherperson than me? Would have been?”
    Irmina smiled at me in the dusk, breathed.
    Alce was curious, down at water’s edge faster than me, turning over smooth stones, looking for bugs, standing in the wind with her long dark hair blowing around her face and squinting at the hatch, the cloud of mayflies backlit like some blizzard, smiling like that, the pride of knowledge, knowing: that is a mayfly, maybe number 18, that is a stone fly, a gnat. Before I had even tied my shoes she would have decided on a strategy, what she would use and how she would fish it.
    Was I speaking this to Irmina or talking to myself or thinking it? Didn’t know.
    Now next to Irmina I stood on the high bank and smelled the dusk and watched the white thresh of the rapid pouring over the rocks that spilled out of the mouth of the creek. The thrashing water, the rush like some pounding prayer.
Deliver me, Oh God, deliver me, not out of but into, further into what is here
. I felt Irmina’s hand slip into mine and she was beside me, up against me but not leaning. Her hand was warm. We stood there. A pair of ducks angled fast out of a luminous sky, just shadows, veered hard last second and dropped into the long pool below. Their wakes silver on the dark water. Years of getting shot at. They waited until very last light and came in fast and turning.
    “We fished here together, here most of all.”
    “But she stopped fishing?”
    “Yes, the last year. Just after she turned fifteen she didn’t fish at all.”
    “She got angry?”
    “Unh huh. And I don’t know why.”
    I knew. I think I knew it was