The Painter: A Novel by Peter Heller

you hit someone on the head, say, with a rock. A bloody nose rolling in a ditch would probably streak and smear, blotch. Well, you do the best you can. What if there were brain matter flecked there too? Well, I’d probably get good at learning how to order grease pencils and watercolor paper from Cañon City or Walsenburg, if they let you do that from max security. There wasn’t, wouldn’t be brains. Right Jim? Right. I’d hit him once with the flat side of a rock, hadn’t like smashed his head in, he probably died of drowning. Same as thwacking a trout: sometimes there’s a spray of blood, but never any brain. Probably because their brain is the size of a pea. Well.
    “Yes,” I said.
    Sport nodded, writing it down, taking me at my word, nobody lying yet except about when exactly we went fishing.
    “The girl?” he said suddenly shifting tack. “In the bedroom? She’s the model you mentioned you were painting Thursday morning before you went fishing? Let’s see.” Began flipping back the pages of his pad.
    “Sofia.”
    “Sofia, right. Last name?”
    “I don’t know.”
    He raised an eyebrow, wrote.
    “You said she left these premises some time around midday on Thursday, she was modeling for a painting and left, and when did she return?”
    “Yesterday morning.”
    “You called her?”
    “No.”
    “She came uninvited?”
    “Yes.”
    “Is that the painting?”
    “Yes.”
    “Can I take a look at it?”
    “Sure.”
    He got up. The young deputy got up. I moved around the counter fast, not sure why, to overtake them. Got to the easel first. Stood beside it like a kid at a judged show waiting for my ribbon. Sport smiled, genuine. His eyes moved over the canvas and I watched the picture overcome him, exactly the way the light that trails a cloud shadow overtakes a hillside. For a moment he was off the job, he was a spectator, an appreciator, he looked years younger. He smiled, said,
    “Have a name yet?”
    “An Ocean of Women.”
    Smile to a big grin.
    An Ocean of Women
was maybe a great painting. It took the viewer to a lot of different places at once which a great painting can do. The first impulse on seeing the painting was to laugh, but at the same time a queasy feeling rose out of the depths, rose with the big sharks, swimming up to the surface: a tinge of fear: would the man make it? He looked pretty happy swimming but he also looked lost. He looked very far from anything like a boat or a shore, he looked a little like a man taking his very last swim.
    The kid stood uneasily before the easel, his hand on his holstered gun, blinking. I could tell he wanted to laugh, maybe the first time he’d seen an original painting ever, one that wasn’t painted by an aunt that had taken a How to Paint a Western Landscape by the Numbers class and hung it in the den next to the flat screen, he glanced at his mentor and relaxed, twitched a smile, studied the painting, dove into it, couldn’t help himself, his eyes roved from woman to woman wondering maybe how many the swimmer could fuck and still tread water. A good picture should do all of that. Invite the viewer in from just wherever he stood, lead him on a different journey than the person standing beside him. I loved that, watching different people watch a painting at the same time. Because that’s what it turned into: in front of a fine painting a viewer stopped looking and started watching, watching is more specific, watching is a hunt for something, a search, the way we watch for a loved one’s boat on the horizon, or an elk in the trees. Before a good painting they started watching for clues to their own life.
    Abruptly Sport straightened, sort of shook himself off, took two steps behind me to the wall, bent down and lifted the turned-back canvas. Flipped it around and held it arm extended, nostrils flaring at the fresh paint. The man hunched and digging a grave, four vultures or ravens watching.
    “Wow,” he said. “Diverse. When’d you paint