A dad she never knew

LAS VEGAS —  While Noelle Garcia was pregnant with her son, her mind often drifted to her thorny relationship with her father.

Garcia’s memories of him resembled a stack of old photographs: Many were blurry, and the most hurtful ones had been tucked away. Her father, Walt, had died years earlier, and she didn’t know much about him outside their fleeting interactions. A Halloween here. A birthday there.

It was 2007 and Garcia, then an aspiring artist, was 22. As a gift to her son, she began drawing him a coloring book, “The Legend of Walt,” whose cover depicts a brawny man in a baseball cap and sunglasses. She hoped it would give her little boy an understanding of the man who had shaped her work.

The book launched a journey both artistic and deeply personal in which Garcia dug into her father’s past, the subject of some unsettling family stories. In time, her understanding of him would change dramatically. So too would her art.

The book begins: “Walt was truely [sic] a legend.” He stands in front of a sign, “DO NOT FEED THE SQUIRRELS,” and a fence topped with barbed wire. Other pages show him taming a bronco and posing with Garcia as a diaper-clad toddler, the same fence looming behind them.

In each drawing, Walt has no facial features. There’s the hair, the ears, the jaw line. But at the center of the image, there’s just shadow.

One page says: “Walt was a family man, even from prison.”

Another page: “Some say he killed a man with his bare hands.”

Much of Walt’s adult life unfolded in prison, though Garcia didn’t really know why. Perhaps theft? Or a DUI?

Her family was so sprawling that, over the years, many things said about Walt were embellished enough to resemble a game of telephone. But Garcia never pressed her mother for the truth. “I was worried about upsetting her,” she said.

Garcia romanticized her father in a manner common to the children of absent parents. Walt’s buckaroo swagger helped. On the rodeo circuit, where he was known as “Choppo” or “Crosby,” he rode bulls and broncos.

At home, he was cowboy gruff, saying little and emoting less. But compassion slipped through: Though Garcia’s older half sister Sarah Ritch had a different father, Walt treated her as his own -- when he was around.

Walt married at least twice and fathered about 14 children with various women, Garcia’s relatives told her. His nickname for her was “Tuffy,” possibly because it sounded like “tough,” a quality he prized.

She and her three siblings were initially raised on the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony in northern Nevada. Every few months, they’d visit Walt in the prison yard, returning with the Polaroids Garcia replicated in “The Legend of Walt.” The photos show a man with leathery skin, a shock of black hair and a button-down shirt. In one photo, he balances an apple-cheeked Garcia on his knee.

“I was favored by Dad,” she recalled. “I got as many Cheetos out of the vending machine as I wanted.”

Whenever Walt was released from prison, he and Garcia’s mother, Rose, clashed -- sometimes violently -- over his drinking. Her mother moved the family to Las Vegas when Garcia was about 8, telling her Walt had died.

A few years later, Rose reversed course, saying Walt had actually been in prison again and would be released soon. Garcia didn’t question her mother’s about-face. She was too busy seething over her father’s return. “She was angry he hadn’t been there,” said Garcia’s husband, Shane Waters, whom she met in fifth grade.

An ailing Walt lived with the family -- his role more roommate than patriarch -- and then in his own apartment. He cleaned rooms in a run-down motel. He chain-smoked. He showered infrequently. A Native American, he burned sage outside as a blessing.

Yet, in his halting way, he would show affection. One day after father and daughter quarreled, he left Garcia a duffel bag packed with her favorite snacks: Pepsi and SpaghettiOs.

When Walt’s health worsened -- cancer had spread throughout his body -- he went to Oregon for medical care. As his final hours neared, his family drove up to say goodbye. Skeletal and barely lucid, Walt tried to smile at his 13-year-old daughter. “But,” Garcia recalled, “he didn’t have teeth.”

Walt died in 1999 at age 63. Brown cowboy boots were placed on his grave.

As Garcia studied art -- at the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she is pursuing a master’s degree -- she often re-created scenes from her youth with vibrant craft paint. Walt’s face, like those of her other subjects, was often left blank. No eyes. No mouth. It was done partly to give him an everyman quality. But it was also the result of time-fuzzed memories.

In 2006, the year before she made the coloring book, Garcia based a painting on a photo from a childhood Halloween. She is 3 or 4, and dressed as a clown: face white, lips red, ponytail long and shiny and black. She giggles while sitting on Walt’s lap and reaches for a green ball. Though his face is blurry, the image has the warmth of a holiday card.

The next year, she gave birth to her son, Sabastian. “I think being a mother allowed her to become more objective and look at who our parents really were,” said older sister Ritch.

Garcia, an emerging artist whose work has been shown in small galleries here, was invited in 2009 to draw something for “Drunk,” a book of alcohol-themed artwork. After some soul-searching, she decided to share a memory that had long tormented her. She sketched a comic strip, “Domestic Drunk,” that described Walt as “a great parent when he was sober,” and horribly cruel when he imbibed.

In the black-and-white comic, Walt returns home as rain pelts the windows. He is clenching a riding crop. His face still featureless, he yanks Garcia’s bawling younger sister off the floor by a pigtail and, when Rose threatens to call the police, storms off. Later, as Rose and the children prepare to flee town, Garcia pops open her piggy bank and is stunned. “I knew who emptied it,” she writes. “Desperate for a drink.”

Even after “Drunk,” Garcia thought of Walt as a tragic hero. But questions gnawed at her, and one night in March 2010, after Sabastian had dozed off, she emailed the Nevada Department of Corrections. She included Walt’s date of birth and offender ID number: 7773.

A response came the next day. Garcia opened the email, which clinically described Walt’s crime, and a lump rose in her throat. Later, with court records, she pieced together the details of what her father had done:

On Aug. 19, 1959, Walt was drinking with a man named Ernest Sam and some other ranch hands in Elko, a rural city in Nevada’s northeastern corner. Sam fell asleep in the car Walt was driving, a green two-tone Pontiac.

At some point, the men scuffled. They ended up at the city dump, where Walt tried to roust Sam from the car. When he wouldn’t budge, Walt grabbed a rifle and shot him in the head.

A few months later, a jury convicted Walt of second-degree murder. He was 24.

After Garcia unearthed the truth about her father, she cried. And moped. And fumed. As before, she channeled her feelings into art.

“I don’t think she had a choice,” said Kirsten Swenson, an assistant professor of contemporary art at UNLV and one of Garcia’s advisors. “She’s never questioned whether she should make art about something else. At the same time, she ties together her personal history with larger themes about alcoholism and poverty and the Native American experience.”

Inspired by a recent fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, where she had studied tribal artifacts, Garcia decided to portray Walt through objects: photographs, prayers scribbled on index cards, scrapbooks he made for his children, a navy blue ball cap from his final, sickly months.

She requested documents from the Klamath Tribes in Oregon, of which Walt was a member. She sifted through the tattered leather suitcase where Rose stashed her father’s things. Some discoveries were heartbreaking, like the medical records that said when she was 2, Walt singed her forearm with a cigarette.

In her exhibit “What You Left Me: Creating Dad Through Artifact,” which ran in Las Vegas though January, the picture emerged of a troubled man who was neither a god nor a monster.

In dredging up the past, Garcia finally made some peace with it. At least, that’s what her art suggests.

At a university gallery exhibit this month called “What I Leave,” Garcia displayed another painting inspired by the photo from that long-ago Halloween. There’s Walt in his ball cap. Instead of Garcia in her clown costume, there’s her son, dressed as Woody from “Toy Story”: cowboy hat, white shirt, sheriff’s star.

But this time Walt’s nose and mouth are more defined. He has a face, and holds Sabastian close.

They look happy.

ashley.powers@latimes.com