The Painter: A Novel by Peter Heller Page A

couldn’t stand for us to leave. That I couldn’t bear.
    Felt Irmina’s hand again squeezing.
    “She can go wherever she wants now. If she is here it is because love holds her here. Because she loves it.”
    “Okay,” I said. The tears were streaming into my beard. We got back in the truck and drove home in silence. The next day Irmina left.

    That was the other lesson Irmina taught. It is okay for people you love to leave. For them to come and go. She taught it to me over and over.

    I stood on the ramada and smelled the rain that hadn’t arrived and thought about the little horse. I prayed she could recover. She would never be the same, certainly. None of us ever are, the same. I lit another cheroot. Smoking seemed to lessen Dell’s residual stench. I wished it would rain tonight. I felt what? Unmoored. Felt like I was just getting my feet. Like I had a friend, two, in town, had a good spot to fish mostly alone. I was just starting to work again, good work, which was anything I could get lost in. And then Steve called with his stupid commission, which meant climbing back into the truck and driving back to Santa Fe to paint something I didn’t at all want to paint. Two things. Two little girls, I’m sure were nice enough, I mean how bratty and screwed up could they be in six short years? Even in the House of Pim. And then the horse. The horse happened. Dell Siminoe happened, all over the road, all over the creek where I had found a certain refuge, all over me like a scum.
    Nothing ever happens just how you want it to.
III
    Next morning Sofia came over. I had told her not to come. We’d left it I would call her if I needed a little more Double U O M A N in the picture but thought I had plenty, more than enough. I said I needed maybe a giant halibut to model for a day. I’m not a funny person, have long accepted that. I was just trying to enjoy my first cup of coffee in the Adirondack chair on the ramada, the first little stogie, I felt hungover—I wasn’t—but groggy, edgy, and I heard Tops rumbling and coughing up the drive. Car door slam, counted to ten: front door flew in, could hear it hit the antique school desk where I drop my keys, heard a yell.
Hey! Where are you?
    “There you are! Smoking away your breakfast.”
    “How do you know I haven’t already eaten a stack of pancakes? Were you raised in a barn?”
    She pulled over the other chair, just scraped it over the rough rock, plopped down beside me. Tossed her curly hair off her face.
    “You mean not knocking? I’m always hoping I’ll catch you—what’s that Latin—
in flagrante delicto
.”
    “With whom?”
    “A muse. An angel maybe.”
    “You should knock.” And I thought to myself: If I were in a better mood that would be my next painting. Me in the arms of a muse. A dangerous proposition. I mean getting that close to the one who brings the gifts.
    She turned bodily in the chair and looked at me. Then prodded my calf with the toes of her sandaled foot. “You’re serious today,” she said. “What’s the matter?”
    I let out a breath, stubbed the cheroot on the stone. “I got in a fight. Sort of.”
    “Yeah? Like the Jim of old? The violent felon I’ve heard about?”
    “Kind of.”
    “Sorry. I don’t mean to joke. If you got in a fight you must have been really mad.”
    “I guess. I was blind. The way you get.”
    She shook her head.
    “Everything goes dark at the edges. Kind of tunnels down to the target. A good fighter, a real brawler has to open up that vision. Use the anger but open up the field of view and stay relaxed. My friend Nacho used to tell me that. Don’t just charge in swinging like a crazed bull, Jesus, compa, you are going to get yourself killed. That was never me. I was the one rolling around in the spit on the floor.”
    “Wow.”
    “That’s what happened yesterday.”
    “It did? Jeez.”
    I told her. The whole thing: Dell beating the mare, the rolling wet in the ditch, bloodying Dell’s nose, my talk