The Painter: A Novel by Peter Heller Page B

with Bob. I told her and we watched a harrier, a big hawk fluttering low over the sage, beating its wings over a bush, lift then glide, scaring up the mice, methodically hunting.
    When I was done she was looking at the mountain. A flash of blue and four small birds tore by the edge of the porch and down past the pond. Mountain bluebirds. Early to be here, maybe they just stayed all summer. When I was done I lit another cheroot. She didn’t say anything.
    “Don’t you want to kill the bastard,” she said at last.
    “It had occurred to me. Mostly I just want to get his stench out of my nose.”
    “No kidding. Fuck. I’m not even a violent felon and I want to tie him to a post and shoot him. How do people even get like that? Like a stain.”
    We sat side by side, watched the big hawk. It had a white rump that flashed as it rose. A cool morning, the sky over the mountains washed clean. Something touched my arm below the rolled up sleeve. Her hand. Her small fingers. Brushed the skin lightly and lay over my forearm. Don’t know why it surprised me. I watched them, her fingers, the way I had just been watching the bird, happy to see them there, a little awed.
    Her fingers migrated down toward my hand, rested on a scab of dried green paint, picked at it, moved on, covered my paint spackled knuckles, one finger sliding down over the stub end of my half finger. Resting there a second, pushing on the end.
    Slipping to the side, onto my thigh. I was wearing baggy khaki shorts, enjoying the chill, and her warm fingers wriggled under the hem and her touch on my bare thigh raised instant goosebumps. We were both watching the transit of her hand as if it were another animal. She stopped, let it rest and curl on top of my leg.
    “You see me naked all the time,” she said. “Does that do anything for you?”
    I lay the half cheroot down across a lip of flagstone for later. She was very pretty. Head tipped downward, quarter profile. The length of her eyelashes. Maybe the prettiest angle for a human head, a woman.
    “Yes.”
    “What?”
    Didn’t answer.
    “What?”
    “Sometimes I get— When you were a mermaid. Arching backwards and all.”
    “You get a boner.” She lifted her head and smiled at me, open, guileless, her eyes suddenly as faceted and sparkly as gems.
    I nodded.
    “You have a boyfriend,” I said lamely.
    She pursed and twisted her soft lips, like: That is really stupid.
    “Dugar is a certified airhead. The official documents just arrived. He wants to go live with sea cows or whatever they are. Plus, I have suspected for a while that he’s been banging the hippy girl from the orchard and now I know. I told him we were coasting, just coasting, no more gas. He asked me if he could use that in a poem.”
    Her hand stirred, woke up. Crept stealthily up under the loose leg of the shorts, worked inward, found me. I don’t wear underwear unless it’s like some formal event.
    My dick was as surprised as I was. Kind of embarrassed. She brushed it with the curled backs of her fingers then pounced. Squeezed and tapped. Amazing how fast an embarrassed cock, one with ethics, social sensibilities and all sorts of reasons to just stay home, amazing how fast it can forget everything and lunge for the prize at a hundred miles an hour. Must be how a venerable, canny trout feels when it triggers on an elk hair caddis—somewhere in its pea brain it knows,
knows
, this is probably not a good idea, but Fuck it.
Bang!
Also, she was—what? Ten years older than Alce would be, but still, she was young. I shuddered. She— It wasn’t right. Any of it.
    “Uhh,” I said.
    “I want you to see me naked. No painting. A person seeing another person.”
    “Uhh,” I said. “I haven’t had much luck lately.”
    “You don’t need luck, dummy. I just want you to look at me. C’mere.”
    She gave the head one more friendly squeeze and took my hand and led me through the screen door into the bedroom.

    Context is funny. How things hit