The Painter Hardcover - 2014

Excerpt

BOOK ONE

Mayhem

OIL ON LINEN

40 x 50 INCHES

COLLECTION OF THE ARTIST

I never imagined I would shoot a man. Or be a father. Or live so far from the sea.

As a child, you imagine your life sometimes, how it will be.

I never thought I would be a painter. That I might make a world and walk into it and forget myself. That art would be something I would not have any way of not doing.

My own father was a logger, very gentle, who never fought with anyone.

I could not have imagined that my daughter would be beautiful and strong like my mother. Whom she would never meet. Or that one afternoon at the Boxcar in Taos I would be drinking Jim Beam with a beer back and Lauder Simms would be at the next stool nursing a vodka tonic, probably his fourth or fifth, slurping the drink in a way that made ants run over my neck, his wet eyes glancing over again and again. The fucker who had skated on a certain conviction for raping a twelve year old girl in his movie theater downtown, looking at me now, saying,

“Jim, your daughter is coming up nice, I like seeing her down at the theater.”

“Come again?”

“Long legged like her mom, I mean not too skinny.”

“What?”

“I don’t mean too skinny, Jim. I mean just—” His leer, lips wet with tonic. “She’s real interested in movies. Everything movies. I’m gonna train her up to be my little projectionist—”

I never imagined something like that could be reflex, without thought: pulling out the .41 magnum, raising it to the man half turned on the stool, pulling the trigger. Point blank. The concussion inside the windowless room. Or how everything explodes like the inside of a dream and how Johnny, my friend, came lunging over the bar, over my arm, to keep me from pulling the trigger again. Who saved my life in a sense because the man who should have died never did. How the shot echoed for hours inside the bar, inside my head. Echoed for years.

I painted that moment, the explosion of colors, the faces.

How regret is corrosive, but one of the things it does not touch is that afternoon, not ever.



CHAPTER ONE
 
I

An Ocean of Women

OIL ON CANVAS

52 x 48 INCHES

My house is three miles south of town. There are forty acres of wheatgrass and sage, a ditch with a hedgerow of cottonwoods and willows, a small pond with a dock. The back fence gives on to the West Elk Mountains. Right there. They are rugged and they rise up just past the back of my place, from sage into juniper woods, then oak brush, then steep slopes of black timber, spruce and fir, and outcrops of rock and swaths of aspen clinging to the shoulders of the ridges. If I walk a few miles south, up around the flank of Mount Lamborn, I am in the Wilderness, which runs all the way to the Curecanti above Gunnison, and across to Crested Butte.

From the little ramada I look south to all those mountains and east to the massif of Mount Gunnison. All rock and timber now in August. There’s snow up there all but a few months a year. They tell me that some years the snow never vanishes. I’d like to see that.

If I step out in front of the small house and look west it is softer and drier that direction: the gently stepping uplift of Black Mesa where the Black Canyon of the Gunnison River cuts through; other desert mesas; the Uncompahgre Plateau out beyond it all, hazy and blue.

This is my new home. It’s kind of overwhelming how beautiful. And little Paonia, funny name for a village out here, some old misspelling of Peony. Nestled down in all this high rough country like a train set. The North Fork of the Gunnison runs through it, a winding of giant leafy cottonwoods and orchards, farms, vineyards. A good place I guess to make a field of peace, to gather and breathe.

Thing is I don’t feel like just breathing.

Sofia pulls up in the Subaru she calls Triceratops. It’s that old. I can hear the rusted out muffler up on the county road, caterwauling like a Harley, hear the drop in tone as it turns down the steep gravel driveway. The downshift in the dip and dinosaur roar as it climbs again to the house. Makes every entrance very dramatic, which she is.

She is twenty-eight. An age of drama. She reminds me of a chicken in the way she is top-heavy, looks like she should topple over. I mean her trim body is small enough to support breasts the size of tangerines and she is grapefruit. It is not that she is out of proportion, it’s exaggerated proportion which I guess fascinates me. I asked her to model for me five minutes after meeting her. That was about three months ago. We were standing in line in the tiny hippy coffee shop—Blue Moon, what else?—the only place in town with an espresso machine. She was wearing a short knit top and she had strong arms, scarred along the forearms the way someone who has worked outside is scarred, and a slightly crooked nose, somehow Latin. She looked like a fighter, like me. Sofia noticed the paint splattered on my cap, hands, khaki pants.

“Artist,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

Her brown eyes which were flecked with green roved over my head, clothes, and I realized she was cataloguing the colors in the spatters.

“Exuberant,” she said. “Primitive. Outsider—in quotes.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I went to RISD for a year but dropped out.”

Then her eyes went to the flies stuck in the cap.

“Artist fisherman,” she said. “Cool.”

She asked how long I’d been here, I said two weeks, she said, “Welcome. Sofia,” and stuck out her hand.

I said I needed models.

She cocked her head and measured me with one eye. Held it way past politeness.

“Nude?”

“Sure.”

“How much?”

Shrug. “Twenty bucks an hour?”

“I’m trying to decide if you are a creep. You’re not a violent felon are you?”

“Yes. I am.”

A smile trembled across her face. “Really?”

I nodded.

“Wow. What’d you do?”

“I shot a man in a bar. You’re not going to back out the door like in a horror movie are you?”

She laughed. “I was thinking about it.”

“My second wife did that when she found out.”

She was laughing uninhibited. People in line were smiling at her.

“You’re married?”

“Not anymore. She ran off down the road.”

“I’ll do it,” she said. “For twenty-five. Danger pay.”

Took her a while to rein in her mirth.

“Nude modeling for a violent killer convict. That is a first. Twenty-five, right?”

I nodded. “I didn’t kill the guy, I just shot him. I was a little high and to the left.”

She was laughing again and I knew that I had made a friend.

Now she shoved open the door like she always did, like she was doing some SWAT breach entry. Tumbled into the room.

“Morning.”

“Hey.”

“Your muffler is getting worse.”

“Really? Tops is balking at extinction. Poor guy.”

She sat on a stool at the long butcher block counter that separates the kitchen in this one big room. I pushed aside a bunch of sketch paper and charcoal and the fly-tying vise where I’d been tying up some Stegner Killers, invented by yours truly, which the trout couldn’t seem to resist the past couple of weeks. I set a mug of coffee on the counter between us, poured myself another.

“What are we doing today?”

“An Ocean of Women. Something I’ve been thinking about.”

“An ocean? Just me?”

“On my way up here from Santa Fe a good friend told me I can’t always swim in an ocean of women. I saw it. Me swimming, all the women, the fish. I thought we could give it a try.”

“Forget it.”

I set down my mug. “Really? No?”

“Just kidding. Fuck, Jim, you ask a lot of a girl.”

“Want an egg with chilies?”

Shook her head.

“You just have to make like an ocean. Just once.”

She cocked her head the way she does, fixed me with an eye. The light from the south windows brushed a peppering of faint acne pits on her temple and it somehow drew attention to the smoothness of her cheek and neck.

“Stormy or calm?” she said.

I shrugged.

She leaned forward on the counter, her breasts roosting happily in her little button top.

“How about choppy and disturbed? Dugar told me yesterday he wants to move to Big Sur.” Dugar was her hippy boyfriend. “I’m like how fucking corny. Plus nobody lives there anymore, it’s so damn expensive. He read a bunch of Henry Miller. Are you a teenager? I said. You like read a novel and want to move there?”

She stuck out her mug and I refilled it.

“It wasn’t a novel it was a memoir, he says. Jeez. He says he is a poet but between you and me his poems are sophomoric. Lately, since he’s read up on Big Sur, they are all about sea elephants which he has never seen. I have and they are not prepossessing, know what I mean? They would never even move if they didn’t have to eat. I said there is no fucking way I’m moving to Big Sur with the sea elephants, or even the Castroville, which is like the closest place a normal person could afford to live. I mean, do you want to live in the artichoke capital of the world? Be grateful for what you’ve got right now, where you are right now. Then I unleash the twins.”

I am laughing now.

“That’s not fair, is it?”

“Not by a long shot.”

“I’m young,” she says. It’s a simple statement, incontrovertible, and it stabs me with something like pain in the middle of my laughter.

We begin. Sofia is a champ of an ocean, a natural. I paint fast. I paint her oceaning on her side, arched, facing and away from me, swimming down off a pile of pillows, breaststroke, on her back over the same pillows willowing backwards arms extended as if reaching after a brilliant fish. I paint the fish as big as she is, invoking him. More fish, a hungry dark shark swimming up from the gloom below with what looks like a dog’s pink boner. The shark has a blue human eye, not devoid of embarrassment. I am lost. In the sea. I don’t speak. Sofia has the rhythm of a dancer and she changes as she feels the mood change.

I love this. I paint myself swimming. A big bearded man, beard going white—I’m forty-five and it’s been salt and pepper since I was thirty. I’m clothed in denim shirt and khakis and boots, ungainly and hulking in this ocean of women, swimming for my life and somehow enjoying it. In my right hand is a fishing rod. It looks like the swimmer is doing too many things at once and this may be his downfall. Or maybe it’s the root of his joy. My palette is a piece of covered fiberboard and I am swiping, touching, shuttling between it and canvas, stowing the small brush with a cocked little finger and reaching for the knife, all in time to her slowly shifting poses. I am a fish myself, making small darting turns against the slower background rhythms and sway of the swell. No thought, not once. Nothing I can remember.

It is not a fugue state. I’ve heard artists talk about that like it’s some kind of religious thing. For me it’s the same as when I am having a good day fishing. I move up the creek, tie on flies, cast to the far bank, wade, throw into the edge of a pool, feel the hitch the tug of a strike bang!—all in a happy silence of mind. Quiet. The kind of quiet feeling that fills you all night as you ready the meal, steam the asparagus, pour the sparkling water and cut the limes. Fills you into the next day.

I wouldn’t call it divine. I think it’s just showing up for once. Paying attention. I have heard artists say they are channeling God. You have to have a really good gallery to say that. I am painting now without naming any of it, can name it only in memory, and I become aware of a tickling on my neck. Sofia is leaning into me, standing on her tiptoes and watching over my shoulder. I turn my head so that my bearded chin is against her curly head. She is wearing the terry cloth robe she leaves here. She doesn’t say a word. She is behind me, but I can feel her smile, a lifting and tautening of the pillow of her cheek against my chin. I was painting more fish, and women, and these crab-like things at the bottom that had men’s eyes and reaching claws, and had somehow lost the fact that my model had vanished in the tumult.

“It’s been three hours,” she whispers. “I’m gonna go.” I nod. She tugs my beard once and is gone. Somewhere in there among the ocean of women and the darting fish and a man happily lost at sea I hear wind over water and a heart breaking like crockery and the bleating roar of a retreating dinosaur.

II

I came to the valley to paint. That was four months ago and I am painting, finally. I came up from Taos which is getting more crowded and pretentious by the minute. I was looking to find a place that was drama free. I am pretty good, somewhat famous, which means it gets harder to be quiet. A quiet place. There are two books about me. One I admit was commissioned years ago by Steve, my dealer in Santa Fe, as a way to boost my cachet, and it worked: prices for the paintings almost doubled. That’s when I traded in my used van, the one with the satellite Off switch that the collection agency in Santa Fe could activate if I missed a payment. Leaving me stranded by the side of the empty desert highway.

The other book is a fine and true scholarly study of what the author calls a Great American Southwest Post-Expressionist Naïf. I’ve been called a lot of things, but naïve was never one of them. It must have been because I couldn’t stop painting chickens. Farmyard chickens in every frame: landscapes, adobe houses, coal trains, even nudes. There was a chicken. They make me laugh, their jaunty shape all out of balance—like a boat that was built by a savant boat maker, you know it shouldn’t float but the fucker does. That’s chickens. Naïf.

Media reviews

Praise for The Painter:

"The 45-year-old painter Jim Stegner, the title character of Peter Heller’s second novel, is a Renaissance man of the American West. He reads T. S. Eliot and listens to Tom Waits. . . He also has a bad habit, when his temper flares, of shooting at people and braining them with rocks. . . Jim’s life changes decisively when he comes upon a blustery stranger abusing a small horse. Suspenseful scenes with the local authorities and vigilantes of various stripes propel the novel. Mr. Heller’s . . . close attention to the natural world serves his fiction well. The Colorado and New Mexico landscapes evoked in The Painter give the novel a deeper than usual sense of place." — John Williamson, The New York Times

"Heller’s first fictional outing was The Dog Stars, a breakout post apocalyptic tale. His new book opens in rural Colorado where painter Jim Stegner — failed husband, grieving father and barroom murderer — is trying to glue his life back together when trouble strikes again." —Toronto Star

“Heller’s prose style . . . works brilliantly at allowing readers inside Stegner’s head to capture his often jagged thoughts. And Heller also does a wonderful job of evoking the process by which Stegner creates his paintings—a kind of furious inspiration that even he can’t always understand—and the different kind of release he finds in his beloved pastime of fly-fishing. . . The Painter is a strikingly complex character study, one that parcels out information about the details of Stegner’s back story while never building to an obvious cathartic revelation. Jim Stegner may be a mess of a man, but it’s fascinating watching Heller plumb his broken soul.” Scott Renshaw, Salt Lake City Weekly

“The settings he moves through during his time in Santa Fe are as recognizable as if they were pulled from a postcard . . . Heller’s novel also paints a recognizable picture of the local art scene and the art world in general . . . Heller’s men are manly — they’re fisherman, they’re comfortable with firearms, they lust after women — but they aren’t the clichéd macho types you might expect  . . . That’s what’s unfamiliar in Heller’s fiction, the unusual situations, the sense of being shadowed and stalked, and the gunplay that’s common to both novels. In this sense, the stories are of a classic type: unusual men, the kind we can identify with even if we’re not painters or pilots, thrust into unusual, even tragic situations. Yet at heart, these men are not so different than those we know.” —Santa Fe New Mexican

"The complexity of Peter Heller's characters, specifically Stegner, and his ability to integrate art with violence, poetry with addiction, and nature with deep introspection, makes The Painter an absolutely vibrant read. . . He is a Hemingway-esque character – outdoorsy, tough, alcoholic – but with a softer side . . . Heller's poetic language slows the narrative and gives it a quiet, peaceful feel, in between bursts of intense plot development that keep the story moving . . . Humanity, redemption, and forgiveness lie at the heart of the story . . . a thoughtful and deeply satisfying read. I recommend The Painter to people who appreciate the outdoors, to people who could spend twenty minutes contemplating one painting in an art museum, and to people who prefer gray spaces to black and white." —Elena Spagnolie, BookBrowse

“Meet Jim Stegner: mid-40s, a fly-fisherman, painter and killer. He is the masculine protagonist in Peter Heller’s new novel, The Painter. The opening line is masterful and captures our attention--45-year-old Jim reflects, ‘I never imagined I would kill a man.’ From then on, Heller holds us until the very last sentence . . . Rock solid prose . . . Whether you read this novel for the plot or appreciate it for poetic insights into the human condition, either way, you’ll be glad you did.” —Wichita Public Radio

“[A] carefully composed story about one man’s downward turning life in the American West . . . beautiful near-visionary descriptions . . . I read with great fascination.” --Alan Cheuse, The Boston Globe

“Following on the heels of his blockbuster post-apocalyptic novel The Dog Stars, Peter Heller descends into the murky realm of art, fame and murder in The Painter. Again Heller uses a charming first-person, fly-fishing narrator, this time to recount a taut tale of anger, revenge and inspiration . . . All the drama unfolds in the stunning landscapes of Colorado and New Mexico, which Heller portrays masterfully. . . One of the true charms of the novel is Heller’s ability to describe Stegner’s art, to make it vivid and real, and to place us in the head of an artist who feels himself both out of control and at the peak of his abilities . . . It’s a suspenseful, compelling read throughout, and ultimately, that redemption is well-earned.” —Dallas Morning News
 
“Heller . . . goes full speed ahead in The Painter. He catapults Stegner into attack mode in the first chapter, setting a pace that never lets up . . . With all the elements in place, Heller pulls the reader along at tremendous speeds, intercutting action and amazing descriptions of Stegner as he paints . . . Heller . . . draws Stegner’s surroundings in powerful, high-energy prose as, once again, he goes out with his rod and reel . . . Peaceful. Until it isn’t. This contrast between serene nature and extreme action made The Dog Stars such a sensation. Heller uses it again well in The Painter.” —Kit Reed, Miami Herald

"Offers modern twists on the ancient themes of family, duty, revenge, and justice . . . most anticipated. . . Heller creates in Stegner a more flawed, reflective, and fully realized protagonist than the pining loner at the center of his first novel." —Bruce Barcott, Outside Magazine

“Second novels are the test of a writer. Some novelists repeat themselves with diminishing returns; others strike out into unknown territory without an adequate map. Fortunately, Peter Heller belongs to a third group — those who stay grounded in what they know while expanding into previously unexplored terrain... The ghost of [Hemingway] drifts through the novel, in style and subject matter. Heller, however, has his own voice. Like The Dog Stars, The Painter is written in short, lyrical bursts, and the gaps between those passages are just as crucial as the words in them.” –Margaret Quamme, The Columbus Dispatch

"What do you get when you cross Ernest Hemingway and Jackson Pollock? Something like white-bearded Jim Stegner, the 45-year-old man's man of an artist at the heart of The Painter, Peter Heller's entertaining new novel. Heller's opening immediately grabs our attention: 'I never imagined I would shoot a man,' Jim tells us. He'll soon do much more than that . . . The ensuing chase scenes, unfolding through southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, are heart-thumping page-turners, culminating in an ingeniously played final twist. But what's better still in Painter is Heller's account of Jim's own struggle with the gnawing and growing guilt at what he's done . . . The clear literary precursor here — right down to a similar horse-beating scene — is Crime and Punishment." —Mike Fischer, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"A riveting second novel from the author of The Dog Stars . . . An artist settles into a quiet new life in Colorado after serving time for shooting a man in a bar fight--and reconnects with his old rage." —O Magazine 
“Meet Jim Stegner: mid-40s, a fly-fisherman, painter and killer. He is the masculine protagonist in Peter Heller’s new novel, The Painter. The opening line is masterful and captures our attention--45-year-old Jim reflects, ‘I never imagined I would kill a man.’ From then on, Heller holds us until the very last sentence . . . Rock solid prose . . . Whether you read this novel for the plot or appreciate it for poetic insights into the human condition, either way, you’ll be glad you did.” —Wichita Public Radio

“Following on the heels of his blockbuster post-apocalyptic novel The Dog Stars, Peter Heller descends into the murky realm of art, fame and murder in The Painter. Again Heller uses a charming first-person, fly-fishing narrator, this time to recount a taut tale of anger, revenge and inspiration . . . All the drama unfolds in the stunning landscapes of Colorado and New Mexico, which Heller portrays masterfully. . . One of the true charms of the novel is Heller’s ability to describe Stegner’s art, to make it vivid and real, and to place us in the head of an artist who feels himself both out of control and at the peak of his abilities . . . It’s a suspenseful, compelling read throughout, and ultimately, that redemption is well-earned.” —Dallas Morning News

"Right and wrong. Good and evil. Often, these are difficult distinctions to make, as we see in this second novel from the author of the acclaimed The Dog Stars . . . At times suspenseful, at times melancholy, at times spiritual, but always engrossing . . . Compelling . . . This novel embraces themes of personal loss and growth, drama and suspense, while also including plenty for those who enjoy art or nature fiction. Highly recommended." —Library Journal (starred)

"Jim Stegner, celebrated painter, ardent fisherman and homespun philosopher, narrates this masterful novel, in which love (parental and romantic), artistic vision, guilt, grief, and spine-chilling danger propel a suspenseful plot. . . Heller is equally skillful at describing the creation of a painting as he is at describing the thrilling details of a gunfight. Here, he explores the mysteries of the human heart and creates an indelible portrait of a man searching for peace, while seeking to maintain his humanity in the face of violence and injustice." —Publishers Weekly (starred)

"Heller’s writing is sure-footed and rip-roaring, star-bright and laced with ‘dark yearning,’ coalescing in an ever-escalating, ravishing, grandly engrossing and satisfying tale of righteousness and revenge, artistic fervor and moral ambiguity." —Booklist (starred)