The Rio Grande Gorges
Fifteen years Brandon had painted with the one-and-only Ray Campañol, and the guy still hadn’t filled the pothole in his pitiful excuse for a driveway. Out of habit, Brandon swerved in time to miss the yawning crater. He ground the gears on his rusted Jeep Wagoneer as it labored up the steep hillside covered with yellow chamisa to the adobe casa and was disappointed not to see Ray waiting for him. Part of the annual ritual was that Ray was supposed to be sitting on the rickety porch, cerveza in hand, eager to show off his latest masterpieces and critique Brandon’s paltry efforts.
The “paltry efforts” were attempts to capture the sky and the light of New Mexico, but never to Ray’s satisfaction. “If you do one more goddamn pink-and-blue sunset,” he’d told Brandon during one of their week-long painting marathons, “I’m gonna kick the shit out of you until you turn pink and blue.”
Brandon honked twice. “Yo, Ray, get out here! I’m thirsty!”
Still no sign of him.
The back of the Wagoneer was crammed with canvases he’d painted in the last year. He couldn’t wait for Ray to see one in particular. It represented, in Brandon’s humble opinion, a real breakthrough in style and technique.
He thought back to the plein-air painting workshop where they’d first met. Ray had taken a shine to him, and they’d done shots afterward. “Come back next year,” he’d said in a slurred voice. “I won’t be your nursemaid or father confessor, but you’ll get three hots and a cot and all the abuse you can stand.”
Brandon noticed something odd and walked over to the side of the house. Ray’s 1962 cherry-red MG roadster wasn’t red anymore. The car was the elderly man’s pride and joy, always kept in pristine condition, but now dust and grime coated it. A cold knot of dread formed in Brandon’s stomach. After receiving no answer to his knock, he entered the house and walked down the dark, narrow hallway to the studio.
His mentor sat facing the door, his back to the easel, his head tilted at an odd angle. His hair was much whiter and longer than a year ago. He had the wide-eyed look of discovery he always wore after a particularly good session of painting. There was a small, neat hole in his forehead. The canvas behind him had a larger hole, limned with lurid hues of red, bits of white bone, and gray brain matter.
An envelope labeled BRANDON sat on a table next to the bloody easel. Brandon jammed it in his pocket without reading it and ran out of the house.
#
After the coroner left, the Taos police took Brandon’s statement. One of the officers, a friend of Ray’s, said a caregiver had been assisting him after the stroke.
“Stroke? What stroke?”
“Happened month before last. Stopped painting after that. He was pretty much helpless.”
The authorities told Brandon to stick around for a day, even though Ray’s death was deemed a suicide, so he checked into a motel. A host of regrets robbed him of sleep that night. Most of all, he regretted his failure to live up to Ray’s expectations of him, which had to do with his inability to fathom the man’s obsession with the Rio Grande Gorge, a huge, jagged gash the Rio Grande River had carved in the high desert near Taos.
Ray had painted the thing dozens of times over the years, whereas Brandon hadn’t painted it once. When they set up their easels on the rim of the gorge, Brandon always focused on the sky and clouds, ignoring the play of sunlight and shadow rippling over the sheer granite walls that dropped hundreds of feet to the river.
“The point of painting the gorge over and over,” Ray had explained to Brandon five years ago, “is to understand how it changes over time.”
Brandon examined the paintings and shook his head. “It looks like the same thing, over and over. You have to clue me in.”
Ray pointed toward an early work. “Note the bird perched on the tree in the foreground. What kind of bird is it?” Brandon studied it and shrugged.
Ray nodded. “Exactly. Just a generic bird. I didn’t understand anything then. Now,” he directed Brandon’s attention to a more recent effort, “look at the Ferruginous Hawk flying over the gorge. Note the subtle twist in the wingtips in order to catch a thermal updraft, which puts the time around midday. You can tell by the coloring that this is a juvenile, recently fledged, which means the season is late spring or early summer.”
“So what?”
“So it’s a much more specific painting, a benchmark for assessing how the gorge can change and also be timeless.”
Brandon didn’t get it. Now cloud formations, like what he painted, they really were different, no two ever alike. He tried to explain this to Ray, who told him the clouds today have no connection to the clouds yesterday, so this wasn’t real change. Brandon asked him to elaborate.
Ray gave him a dark, unblinking stare. “How long have you been painting with me?”
“Ten years.”
“Wrong.”
Brandon mentally counted backward. “I’m sure of it, ten years.”
“No, you’ve painted for one year, ten times.”
This had deeply insulted Brandon, and he hadn’t mentioned the subject since then.
#
The next morning Brandon drove out to the gorge and parked at the overlook where he and Ray had painted. He wanted to summon up happy memories of his friend, but the chasm looked so empty, so desolate, that it pulled every feeling out of him until all that remained was immeasurable sadness.
He lowered the tailgate of the Wagoneer and removed the canvas he’d been dying to show Ray. Then he said, imitating Ray’s raspy voice, “Of all the worthless sunsets you’ve painted, this one takes the cake. You just repeat your mistakes over and over. Let’s call it Asswipe by Brandon Stevens.”
He threw the painting with all his might. It sailed out into void and hung in midair for a moment like one of Ray’s hawks before dropping out of sight.
“You know what, Ray?” he said out loud. “You were full of shit. I just threw the culmination of my life’s work into your precious gorge, and it isn’t one bit different. Damn thing never changes.”
He ripped open Ray’s envelope and pulled out a note written in a distinctly feminine hand. Ray must’ve dictated it to the caregiver.
Brandon felt overwhelmed by the confessional tone of the suicide note. It turned out that the annual painting sessions were the high point of Ray’s life. He went on at length about how much he valued their friendship. It dawned on Brandon that the crusty old fart had loved him like a son.
“After the stroke,” the note continued, “I had double vision and couldn’t grip a paintbrush. I tried to paint with a brush clamped between my teeth, between my toes, you name it. Nothing worked. I would’ve painted with my dick if I could still get it up. Now, there’s nothing left except to pull a trigger, which I think I can still do.”
Or maybe he’d had help. Brandon studied the feminine handwriting again.
A memory of the blood-spattered canvas made Brandon shudder. Ray had figured out a way to do one last painting after all.
“You are a gifted painter,” the note concluded, “but you see everything in unconnected snapshots. You have to learn to see how the world truly changes, how it’s the same but different every time you look at it, and then you will be a great painter. Goodbye, my dear friend.”
Tears ran down Brandon’s cheeks. He felt like his heart was going to burst. “Goddammit, Ray,” he whispered. “Goddammit.”
After skidding down a steep path that led to the bottom of the gorge, he searched until he found the discarded painting, wedged between two boulders at the edge of the river. A small animal, possibly a vole, was busily chewing holes in it. He shooed the creature away, then picked up the canvas and climbed back up the trail. When he reached the top, he studied the tattered painting, especially the views of the gorge afforded by the myriad holes.
He rummaged in the Wagoneer and pulled out his paints and easel. For the first time, he wanted to paint the Rio Grande Gorge. He knew it would have been pointless to paint it before now because he hadn’t known how. He still didn’t know how, not really, but if he painted it season after season, year after year, and experienced the continuous flow of time as it carved its way into ever deeper and darker places, perhaps he would learn.
John Christenson writes fiction for children and adults. He lives in Boulder, Colorado with his wife, who enjoys painting watercolors in New Mexico, and a cat who is fond of penguins. His short story “Today We Are Paisley” will appear in an upcoming anthology entitled False Faces.
Photo Credit: Edith Tarbescu