The Painter: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

finally eating. It was nice to stand there in the deep afternoon shade, lean against a truck, let things settle. I could hear the creek below and a deerfly buzzed around us. I didn’t mind.
    “I was a good woodworker,” he said. “Like my father, and I started out retrofitting big horse trailers, turning the forward end into living quarters, all finished wood, just like the cabin of a boat. Cherry, teak, walnut. Rich people were impressed. Figured I was house broke, I guess. Invited me in for a beer. Started asking could I make their kitchens like the inside of a yacht, too. There’s a dozen breakfast nooks over on the Roaring Fork with chart tables and dedicated weather radios I shit you not. So you can pretend you’re drinking coffee on your sloop. You couldn’t make up the shit I’ve seen.”
    “Weather radios?”
    “Yup. And VHF type radios, mounted overhead like in the nav station of a yacht, with mics on pigtail cords they unhook and call like the pool deck or the guesthouse or whatever. Everybody a captain in their own dream. Long as they pay me.”
    He spat. We watched the mare.
    “I’d like to see your paintings sometime,” he said. “Won’t hurt my feelings if that’s not something you do.”
    “You come over any time,” I said.
    Willy watched the little mare shaking the feed bag for the last oats, raising her nose.
    “Why don’t I take her for a while? Till you get set up. I got an empty stall, we’ll throw some hay down, let her heal up, calm down. Don’t want her getting excited and hauling the mail into a bunch of barbed wire. I got a bunch of horses, and I feed every day anyway. And you can sort it out with the outfitter. He’ll have to give you her papers or the brand inspector will be climbing your backside. Nobody wants the good Inspector Madriaga in their face.”
    “Dell,” I said. “His name is Dell. The outfitter.”
    Willy’s eyes went blank. His face got stony. He didn’t look at me.
    “Don’t know him,” he said.
    When it came time Willy talked to the mare and stroked her neck and she followed him up and into the trailer like a heeling dog. Go figure.

    I can’t get it out of me. My head. The heat of it in my blood.
    The picture of the man swinging the club. The man in the picture in my head much bigger than the little horse. The man swinging with a hatred, to kill or not he doesn’t care.

    I call Sofia tell her not to come tomorrow. I take the
Ocean
off the easel. The bearded man swimming happily with his fishing rod through an ocean of women, that seems like a different man than me. The swirling women, the fish, the glad waters, they are in another universe than the one I am in now.
    I think of
Guernica
, the painting. The knife in the horse. A story I read once by one of the Russians, maybe Chekhov, a man beating a horse. How seeing it happen is so much worse. A big man wreaking his anger on a tied horse who cannot even beg.
II
    The door of my bedroom opens onto the ramada. The clap of the screen door behind me and a nightjar, startled, flutters out of the little arroyo that feeds the pond. Flutters without sound into the light from the window and on into the dark. Love those birds. They fly up off the dirt roads at night through the beam of theheadlights, fly up from where they are roosting in the heat of the ground, a muffled rising like a giant moth, softer.
    I light a cheroot and smoke, listen to the burble of water falling through the crease. I was so rattled tonight. Didn’t eat. I followed Willy into his yard and helped him bed down the mare. She seemed to know. Willy handled her with such a sureness, so gentle, she seemed to know that this two legged at least would not beat her to death, probably.
    We cut the strings on two bales of musty hay and spread it on the floor of the box stall, gave her grain in a bucket and water in the cut round of an old tractor tire. Willy dabbed her cuts with a salve like auto grease and we left her to sniff out her new