The Painter: A Novel Read Free Page B

wants you to cut loose, Be Jim. Really be yourself. You know, throw in some chickens if you want. Or a coal train.”
    “For fuck’s sake.
Be Jim
? A coal train?”
    I was now officially steamed. Steve had already said yes.
    “I’m just getting to work here, Steve. I’m doing good work. Tell him another time. Anyway I need to get off now.”
    The silence now was stony. Slight clearing of the throat. “He has offered thirty-five grand. Since I made the commitment without asking you, I admit, I am willing to take a forty-sixty split.” His voice was cool the way it almost never is.
    “I’ll think about it. Gotta go.” I hung up before I could blow my top.

    I dug out a cigarillo from the foil pouch and stood out on the ramada. Cool wind now pouring down off the mountain, smelling of ozone and juniper. The way the clouds were. That’s how I felt. The mountain formed a long ridge, higher peak swooping to lower, left to right, east to west.
    The clouds massed in from the south, dark bellied and brooding. They hung against the ridge like a herd of deer afraid to cross a fence. How I felt. I lit and sucked on the stogie. If the anger I felt now—if I let it cross some line, let it spill, I probably wouldn’t have a gallery.
    The cigars are little rough-ended cheroots, made to look hand rolled like the stubs Clint chewed in
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
. Vanilla flavored and irresistible. Limit myself to two packs of eight a day. The wind tore away the smoke. Maybe too windy nowto fish the creek, I didn’t care, I’d go up anyway and get the fly into the water. I could always fish a weighted wooly bugger, let it drift down on the current and strip it back up like a wounded minnow. The thing was to get in the water, feel the cold press against my knees, smell the current.
    Steve, the fucker. I hated this part. Just when I am moving on something good and true he throws out some bullshit like a commission for two panfaced little girls in polka dots. And makes it clear that unless I spend a full agonizing week on the thing the guy writing the check won’t feel he’s getting his thirty grand worth. Thinks it’s okay because I have full creative freedom to throw in a chicken. Fuck. Fuck that. If I finish in a day they can take it or leave it.
    The
Ocean of Women
painting was the first big piece I had made it halfway through since I’d come up here four months ago. I’d made a bunch of smaller paintings, but it took so much energy in just figuring out who to pay for the water bill, etc., where to buy the cigars, find a model. Sofia was a good one, a great one. She didn’t need much direction, she was creative, she knew what painting was and she allowed for departure, the kind we had this morning, where eventually she disappeared. I loved that.
    I smoked and breathed. I was standing there. The floor of the outdoor ramada was rough sandstone flags, inexpertly laid by the poet probably, with sand between. Basic. The stones were reddish, ruddy to ochre. The roof just shade, latilla poles covered with a rush of young willows, haphazardly piled, tied down with cord. The simplicity. Something about the sincerity of this partial shelter. I was standing there and I thought of Alce, my daughter. That she would be eighteen, that she would be a better fisherperson than me now. Very damn good at fifteen. When I could get her to go out, get her away from that crowd. That she could have comewith me this afternoon, fished with me up into the night, the rain. Relax, Dad, she’d say. Steve is a pain but he loves you. I know, I know, she’d insist, the commercial part of your painting, what a pain in the ass, but relax. Everybody’s gotta serve somebody, right? Sometimes we just pay the piper. Get our meal ticket.
    She loved using a string of clichés, making them go where she wanted. Just one week, she’d tell me now. Finish this beautiful one you’re working on, then go down there. Go grateful. Grateful you have a job, doing what