Free The Painter: A Novel by Peter Heller Page A

enough, end of summer, but with a chill scent of fall. How can it be both? Cold and warm, I don’t know but it can. The five weight rod was in the back of the truck with the old felt soled boots, vest behind the seat, light waders over the side mirror where I had hung them yesterday. I felt between the front seats for a packet of Backwoods cigars, good, the foil pouch was fat, held four or five. I’d smoke them while I fished, one after another, and I looked forward to that as much as the fishing.
    Don’t remember much of the drive. Bumped over the railroad tracks at the edge of town. Turned along the length of the fruit packing shed. I remember glancing down Grand Ave, the short route out to the county highway, and that the digital bank clock read 11:32 and the town was dead. And I remember: straightening the wheel and continuing on, out toward the orchards. I shivered. I skirted the main street and instead went a mile further out of my way and took the black bridge over the river to the highway, took the windier, the prettier way around. Just wanted that certain quiet, I guess, that peace.
    There was one house along the road there, before the bridge, a big house, the doctor’s, and the rest was dark with orchards, and farms with long drives. The staccato tumps of the bridge a sudden drum-roll as the tires rolled over the planks, the sudden smell of water.
    That smell always stirs me. I felt excited the way I always am before a session fishing, also angry, also a little scared. What was I scared of? I would never say.
    In twenty minutes I turned off the highway and dropped down to the creek bottom where the lodge stood darkly, the reaching bear. Right there I turned off my lights. Because this is where the road turns to dirt and it gets beautiful, and there is the moon, and I like to navigate in natural light, acclimate eyes for fishing. Night vision. I also slowed, to make less rattle and rev, and I was careful not to touch the brakes, not to pulse the brake lights.
    Because at night there is a comfort in moving darkly. In slipping through, shadow to shadow. Can’t say why. Maybe because we were hunters, all of us. The way a cat moves in the shadows. Or a wolf. The instinctive safety in that. I know that when Alce and I went fishing at night I often did that: turned the lights off as we clattered along the river, eased off the gas. Maybe hoping to surprise a herd of bighorn or deer, or a great horned owl in the road.
    I wanted a drink. How many days, months now? I thought counting days in AA was obsessive, but could see that it might have saved my life. Well.
    The creek at night under the moon was just enough like the creek in daylight to be reassuring. There was the deadfall spruce that sieved the current with skeleton branches, churning a line of pale foam. There was the long pool above, a dark mirror of tree shadows and beacon moon. There were the gravel bars, chalky, shaped to the banks and swept into low moraines that divided the water. There the sky, softened as if by a thin fog of moonlight, filling the canyon.For a moment I forgot my preoccupation with the dark and drove up the road with that awe I felt before certain paintings in certain museums, the awe in which I disappeared.
    There was a pullout I had come to use when I wanted to fish this stretch of creek, just a widening of the road, but tonight I turnedoff just before it. I swung right into a rutted opening of thick willows into a small clearing where people had camped. Tonight I parked here, hidden, and tonight I pulled on waders and boots quickly and shut the door carefully with a quiet click. The warm comfort in moving like a ghost, being part of the night. Tonight I took the already strung rod out of the truck bed and barely checked the two flies, a Stegner Killer on top, a shiny copper John on the bottom, I didn’t really care. Pushed through the willowbrush holding the rod high over my head and out of the snagging branches like a brandished sword