The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

Like Georgia O’Keeffe before me, I too grew disenchanted with my native Wisconsin. Taking a cue from my spiritual mentor, I too professed disdain for the gently rolling, ever-unsure contours of the land, and for the indecisive blur of green and brown below me. Paint such landscapes? Me? One look at O’Keeffe’s “Red Hill and White Shell” or “Pelvis With Pedernal” had this boy hooked; never mind those glossy fliers the New Mexico Tourist Bureau sent to me.

So, I left home, suitcase of art supplies and dufflebag of old clothes in hand, in search of the land which had inspired the most beautiful woman in the world to create the most exquisite artwork Pd ever seen—as she herself once proclaimed, “God told me that if I painted that mountain enough, I could have it.”

O’Keeffe was speaking about her beloved Pedernal, that flat-topped mountain not far off from Ghost Ranch, but in my case, “that mountain” was all of what I’d long dubbed “Georgia’s land.” The sun-whitened cow skulls and striated pale cliffs. The pink hills fuzzed with clumps of pinon trees. The hills, cliffs, and runneled dark mesas Georgia (later, Georgia and her companion Juan) had stared at, in search of what Art lay there. O’Keeffe had found that elusive Muse in this warm, dry place of singing color and clean colorless air, and I was determined to find Art there too.

As things turned out, I not only missed the opportunity to meet my mentor (the grand lady died five months before I arrived in the state), but, as I ruefully had to admit six months into my new New Mexico life, somehow I missed my meeting with Art, too.

For me, burnt umber and ocher only looked like . . . globs of brush-smeared burnt umber and ocher on poorly stretched canvas. What I had envisioned as a fresh view of Georgia’s land was only worth viewing when hung above the grease-dotted surface of a diner range-top. And those paintings were only hung there because I had put them there. My boss, the man who put fresh grease spatters on the chipped white enamel of the range with every flip of a burger, he didn’t mind my efforts to sell my work. As long as the dishes were washed, Duke didn’t care if I hung my paintings in the restrooms next to the machine that sold rubbers.

I came to Duke’s Burgers with a stack of paintings in the trunk of my rust-fringed Volvo (bought in Taos, the rust filagree attested to a previous owner in a more northern clime than barely-humid and certainly road-salt free Taos); aside from the vague hope that the owner would let me hawk my paintings there, I wanted nothing more than a cup of coffee and a place to relieve myself. I was wary of using the wayside between Talpa and Pilar; even the mere possibility of rattlers spooked me.

But after my second cup of watery java, Duke—I never have learned whether that dog-like name was given or adopted—shyly hinted that his top-of-the-building sign needed freshening. For a second I wanted to sputter, “Sir, I am an artist,” but my trunk full of semi-motel art made me reconsider.

Duke’s sign only needed so much touch-up work; after that, he found real work for me. And I never added any more paintings to my series, hell, there isn’t any more room above the range anyway. But I had the whole of the desert outside my above-the-washer window, and nothing—not lack of real talent, not missed opportunities, not even the loss of something so intangible that its loss was more of an inner sigh of relief (rest easy, Georgia-girl, this Wisconsin wanna-be wont steal your desert thunder)—could take the beauty of the desert away from me. True, nothing could make that same desert, that distant Pedernal give up its secrets to my now paint-stiffened brush, or to my now paint-free fingers, but I had resigned myself to what couldn’t be.

Another Wisconsinite had beat me to this place, the most beautiful woman God ever created to puzzle and delight man (if I were to say that back home, people would look at me funny-like; in Wisconsin a woman has to be hung on the back of a door wearing a suede bikini to be considered “beautiful” . . . diner-job or not, I’m glad I left).

Georgia had painted “that mountain” enough times that God gave the whole damned desert to her. But she earned every grain of sand, every sun-glinting chip of bone, seemingly forever.

Until her rival, her only real competition, arrived at Duke’s.