The Painter: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

tobacco spit, blood. Well.
    The mare mews when I approach her. Doesn’t move just shakes. She’s cut, slashed across the back, a wonder he didn’t break her spine, and she’s cut deep, welted over ribs on her left side where the skirt of a saddle might lie. I speak just above a whisper, soft as I can and come slowly. She’s frozen in a paralysis of terror. When I touch her shoulder the quiver and tremor spread outward from the sweatsoaked hide, spread up and back like something seismic. She flinches away from my hand but doesn’t step. As if her hooves, small hooves, shiny and black, newly shod, are glued to the dirt. The lead rope hanging from her halter.
    I almost cannot contain—the rage and the tenderness together like a boiling weather front. I stand beside her and breathe. The two of us just stand there.

CHAPTER TWO

I
    The Digger

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    What I did was gentle her over to a tree by the pullout and tie her there and drive back out to the highway where I got two bars on the stupid phone. Called my neighbor Willy. He’s an elk rancher just east of me. Friendly but not intrusive, neighborly. Bachelor at the moment like me, maybe ten years younger. Told me when I first moved in: If I ever needed anything. Repeats it every time I see him. So I called the number I’d managed to store in my phone and he told me to wait and forty minutes later he pulled up in his own diesel pickup, his own blue six horse trailer, and when he swung down and saw the state she was in he went back to the truck and loaded a feed bag with oats and spoke to her gently like a person who has been aggrieved and injured, and got the bagover her ears and we leaned against my truck and let her eat and calm down.
    Willy was in no hurry and neither was I. Now that my chance at fishing was shot for the day. He didn’t seem like the other ranchers I’d met around here. He wore a twisted copper bracelet on his left wrist and he gave off the kind of intelligence of someone who might have read a shitpile of books but would never talk about it. We were in the cool shade of the spruce, smelling the breeze stirring downstream, and he told me he’d grown up in New Hampshire. He took off his raggedy straw cowboy hat and ran a scarred hand through his thinning hair.
    “When I first came out here I must’ve stuck out like a finger on a foot,” he said. “But I had good neighbors.”
    “New Hampshire? Never knew anybody from there.”
    “You can’t move to New Hampshire,” he said, “but you sure as shit can move out of it. First frigging chance you get. You can move there, but. My folks did. From Germany. Don’t ask me.”
    He coughed, spat.
    “State has a Berlin and a Hanover, maybe enough for them. You know what the closest neighbor gal told my mother when she saw her swelling with her first baby bump?
You can have kittens in the oven but that don’t make ’em biscuits
. Jeesh.”
    Willy said he went to Harvard for a semester, in engineering, he liked to build things, dropped out. Came west and built houses, then cabinets, bought a small farm here and supported it by building kitchens for rich people in Aspen.
    “Custom stuff,” he said. “How I got to doing that was I always loved horses. Wanted to be a cowboy all my life. Grew up in Sandwich, New Hampshire, reading those Louis L’Amour books. You know them? About the Sacketts and all? And I loved boats. Went out with some of my buddies and their families in the summer. I liked small sailing boats. How they were built, how everything fit together tight like a puzzle, a place for everything.”
    He laughed. Took a can of Red Seal chew out of his vest pocket and pinched a sizable dip, tucked it up under his upper lip, held it to me.
    “Thanks.” I waved it away.
    “That was gonna make life difficult, huh? Horses, mountains, cowboys and yachts. Never did make anything easy for myself I’ve come to find out.”
    He spat on the road, glanced to the mare who was