Light Action in the Caribbean (7 page)

I was certain I’d walked across parts of this same landscape earlier, but it seemed different to me now, the result of being up on the horse, I thought, and taking in more of a place at a glance than I would on foot. Or it may have been that with the horse under me, traveling seemed less arduous, less distracting. I was watering the mare at a pothole, one of many scattered over these grass plains, when another rider rose up from a swale astride a brown pinto. He did not at first see me. I had a chance to steady myself before our eyes met. The blue roan raised her head from the water but gave no sign of alarm. At her movement the other horse crow-hopped sideways. It took me a moment to separate horse and rider. The pinto bore yellow bars on both forelegs. A trail of red hoofprints ran over its left shoulder, and two feathers spiraled in its mane. The man’s dark legs were similarly barred, and there were white dots like hail across his chest. Above a sky-blue neck his chin and mouth were painted black. The upper right half of his face was white. From the left cheek, a bright blue serpentine line rose through his eye and entered his hair. The hair cascaded over his horse’s rump, its gleaming black lines spilling to both sides. The man held a simple jaw-loop rein lightly in
his left hand. In his right he held out a short bow and an unnocked arrow.

The bold division of his face made its contours hard to read, but the forehead was high, the nose and middle of the face long, his lips full. The adornment of horse and rider blazed against the dun-colored prairie. A halo of intensity surrounded them both, as if they were about to explode. I could read no expression in either face—not fear, not curiosity, not aggression, not even wonder. The man’s lips were slightly pursed, suggesting concentration, possibly amusement, as if he had encountered an unexpected test, a stunt meant to throw him.

Of the four of us, only my horse shifted. As she did so, the polished chrome of her bit and the silver conchas on her bridle played sunlight over the other horse and rider. The man’s first movement of distraction was to follow the streaks and discs of light running like water across his thighs.

In that moment I remembered enough from a studious childhood to guess the man might be Assiniboin. In the eighteenth century Assiniboin people lived here between the upper Saskatchewan and Missouri Rivers. He could be Cree. He looked half my age.

I turned my reins once around the pommel of the saddle and showed my empty hands, palms out, at my sides.

“My name is Adrian Whippet,” I said. “I am only passing through here.”

Nothing in his demeanor changed. I’d never seen a human being so alert. He slowly pursed his lips in a more pronounced way, but the trace of amusement was gone. Just then I smelled
the other horses, which I turned to see. Another man, his face cut diagonally into triangles of bright red and blue, sat a sorrel mare behind me. He led three horses on a braided rope—a pale dun horse with a black tail and mane carrying pack bags, a black pinto, and a bay with a face stripe. Their flaring nostrils searched the air, their eyes rolled as they took it all in. The second man wore a plain breechclout, like the first. He held no weapon, but studied me as if I were something he was going to hunt.

In a gesture made in response and without thinking, I raised my right arm to point beyond him across the prairie, as though I had something to show or was indicating where we were all headed. I turned the blue roan firmly and started in that direction. It was the direction in which my truck lay and seemed, too, the direction they were traveling. The skin beneath my shirt prickled as I passed before the second man, a chill of sweat. They drew up quickly on each side of me. I was surrounded by the odor of men and horses.

We rode easily together. From time to time they spoke to one another, brief exchanges, unanswered statements. I said nothing. The second man, about the same age as his companion, was leaner. His hair was cut off at the shoulders and raised in a clay-stiffened wall above his forehead. He wore ear pendants of iridescent shell. Wolf tails swung from the heels of his moccasins. I didn’t want to stare, but maneuvered my horse in such a way as to fall slightly behind occasionally so I could look more closely at them. From the number of things they carried, skin bundles and parfleches, I guessed they were coming back from a long trip. That would explain the extra
horses. Or perhaps they’d been somewhere and stolen the horses.

They, too, tried not to stare, but I sensed them scrutinizing every article of my tack and clothing, every accoutrement. I thought to signal them that we might trade horses, or to demonstrate for them the effect of my sunglasses on the glare coming from the side oats and blue grama grass. But, just as quickly, I let the ideas go. I felt it best to give in to the riding, to carry on with calmness and authority.

Eventually, we stopped glancing at one another and gazed over the country more, studying individual parts of it. In a movement so fast it was finished before I grasped it, the first man shot a large jackrabbit, which he leaned down to snatch from the grass without dismounting. He gutted it with a small sharp tool and spilled the intestines out as we rode along. His movements were as deft as a weaver’s, and I felt an unexpected pleasure watching him. He returned my look of admiration with what seemed a self-conscious smile. The harsh afternoon light silvered in a sheen on the horses’ necks and flanks, and I heard the flick of their hooves in the cordgrass and bluestem when we crossed damp swales. Hairy seeds of milkweed proceeded so slowly through the air that we passed them by. More often than I, the two men turned to look behind them.

I knew these people no better than two deer I might have stumbled upon, but I was comfortable with them, and the way we fit against the prairie satisfied me. I felt I could ride a very long way like this, absorbed by whatever it was we now shared, a kind of residency. It seemed, because of the absence
of fences or the intercession of the horses, or perhaps only as an accident of conducive weather, that we were traveling a seam together. There was nothing to do but ride on, marking the country in unison and feeling the inspiritedness of the afternoon, smelling the leather, the horses, the prairie.

When we came to what I recognized as the intermittently dry bed of Cut Bank Creek, I said the words out loud, “Cut Bank Creek.”

The second man said something softly. The first man repeated his words so I could hear,
“Akip atashetwah.”

I lifted my left hand to suggest, again, our trail. First Man mimicked the gesture perfectly, indicating they meant to go in a different direction from mine, north and west. We regarded each other with savor, pleased and wondering but not puzzled. I laid my reins around the pommel and pulled off the belt my father had given me as a wedding present years ago. I cut two of its seventeen sand-cast silver conchas free with a pocketknife. Dismounting, I handed one to each man. Second Man pulled a thin white object from a bag tied to his saddle frame. When he held it out for me, I recognized it as a large bird’s wing bone, drilled with a line of small holes. A flute. I remounted with it as First Man stepped to the ground. He lifted a snowy owl feather he’d taken from his horse’s mane and tied it into the blue roan’s mane.

We rode away without speaking. The first time I looked back, I couldn’t see them. I sat the horse and watched the emptiness where they should have been until dusk laid blue and then purple across the grass.

The girl’s problem appeared to be deafness, but deafness was only a pivot around which part of her psyche turned and an easy thing to notice. Once, standing on the porch of the hotel, I watched her move through a field of high grass below an abandoned pear orchard a half mile distant. It was a bright day in November and the grass was turning saffron and magenta in the sweep of the wind. She moved in such a tentative way down the hillside I thought her sightless. But I knew her to be the deaf girl from this place, and so imagined it was only how she examined the world that made her appear blind.

She was twelve, the lone child of parents who projected austerity on the street, one of perhaps eight or nine children around the town. Occasionally I saw her playing with another girl, older by a few years, but most often when I saw her she was walking alone. Her parents called out after her, “Delamina,”
but the name came to her in some other way, a vibration passing through her body, and she would turn. Closer in, she read the muscles moving in a speaker’s face.

I didn’t arrive in the town by accident, exactly, but initially it was not my intention even to stop. I drove out of Great Falls on the Missouri before dawn, late July, and headed for Williston in North Dakota. At Lewiston I turned north on the road for Malta. I’d crossed the river, and somewhere south of the Fort Belknap Reservation I turned east on a state road I thought would shorten the distance to Glasgow. North of the Fort Peck Reservoir, in a series of crests and troughs, the cottonwood draws and their bare hills, I became confused. After an hour of just pushing on regardless, I drove in to what I thought was Telegraph Creek, but it wasn’t, it was Gannett. A few storefronts and houses on its main street, a few standalone buildings, and a scatter of mobile homes at the end of dirt tracks splayed like tendrils away from the road, which ended here.

An old-fashioned two-story hotel, the Essex, stood in good repair and it was suppertime so I went in to eat, and then took a room when I learned from the clerk where I was, and where I had to go to get back on the road for Glasgow and U.S. 2 on in to Williston.

The town was an oddity in eastern Montana. Barely a sign of ranching and none of mining. No railroad. No Indian faces. It was agreeable country, the short-grass prairie appealing with its seasonal creeks and woody draws. It might have been homesteaded early on, but the sign of constancy in it was its flocks of crows calling, the pale sky and the short grama grass.

The meal was good and well served, the room comfortable, without a phone or television, without advertising or promotional circulars. The mood in the hotel was akin to that at some resorts, each thing perfectly tended to but the overall atmosphere undisturbed. Any inchoate threat of retaliation one might have experienced, or the weight of indifference known from moments lived out in airports and buildings among strangers, was absent here. I opened the sash-weighted windows and abandoned myself to a deep and dreamless sleep.

My obligations in Williston, attending to some details of my father’s will, were not pressing. I remained in Gannett for three days.

The single store in town, a kind of mercantile, had much to covet in the way of antiques—old carpenter’s tools, some well-preserved harness, equipment I recognized for candle-making, and about fifty running feet of old paperbacks. The first morning I went through the books title by title and bought two, but when I stepped outside again I realized that was where I wanted to be, out, on foot and looking up north past the orchard where the road didn’t go, where the land dipped into a swale and then rose into low curving hills and fell away again. If, in fact, it hadn’t been farmed it could have been for stones in the soil, some rock like flint that tore the plows apart. Standing in the street that morning I saw her for the first time, walking in from the hills and up to a white house with dark green trim, which she entered.

Who can say why a person or a place is attractive? I found Gannett and the hotel and the cant of the girl’s stride to be so, and stayed on the extra days to know why. I read one of the
paperbacks on the hotel porch, hoping the why of it would come over me, but it didn’t. A few people passed in and out of the store. Someone drove away south out of town. In the afternoon, I watched five children at play. They might have spent the morning in class together in someone’s home. Remembering those days now, it occurs to me that outside of ordinary noises—a door closing, an engine starting, the ticking of wood cooling in the hotel’s walls in the night—one sound hummed beneath it all, the streaming down of light from the empty sky.

I drove off early that last day and went on to Williston. It was a year before I returned, backtracking the roads from Glasgow. I had no other idea but to eat at the hotel and read. It was on that trip that I saw the girl wading through the waist-high grass in her black frock, like another sort of bare-limbed, rain-darkened tree, a cogitating body. The clerk at the Essex told me she’d lost her hearing in a shooting accident, but I guessed there was more than this and let our conversation go into awkward silences until he gave me the rest, that she ‘d been hit in the head by a stray bullet one night in Long Beach, that it had eclipsed the hearing in both ears, and the day she got out of the hospital her father moved them, straight to northeastern Montana from south L.A. The same day I saw her crossing the hillside, I passed her on the street. Her blue eyes were fierce as black jet; the determination in her face approached a leer. She didn’t even glance toward me.

The first time I returned to Gannett—and I came back only once after that—I was having an evening cigar on the hotel porch after a day of wind and rain, and in that baleful light I spotted a figure walking in from the north, a boy with a rifle
balanced across his shoulder, the barrel forward in his fist. I could tell it was a boy by the stride. As he came on I saw his silhouetted head was close-cropped and that his jeans bagged in a style popular in large cities but rarely seen at the time in rural Montana. A dog followed which looked pensive and dour and mostly bluetick hound.

The boy chucked his chin as he went by, but in a surly manner. The dog glanced up as he passed, but with no more interest than if he were taking in the familiar chair, occasionally occupied.

I smoked the cigar out, ate supper, and retired. I was reading a collection of unsettling stories I’d bought called
Jesus’ Son
. Its premises kept me awake until two, after which I decided to get up and go down to the porch and sit in the moonlight. A flaring match to light another cigar would have ruined the stillness, quite inseparable from the moonlight, so I only sat there in a jacket and my undershorts. I was not surprised when I saw a small figure walking the same path the boy had walked hours before. It was a continuation of a disturbance, one initiated by the boy’s passing, and it was this that had really brought me out onto the porch. I soon saw that it was the girl, and I could tell that it was bad, the lopsided way that she advanced, sweeping a hand in front of her to locate obstruction. I sat rigid, a motionless spectator.