Painted Horses (15 page)

“If I help you, it might come back to haunt me.”

“Miriam, I don’t know what to say. My own family hates it that I’m here, in the West I mean, working at what I’ve chosen to work at. Or my mother does, at least. I have a fiancé and he’s . . . trying, but he hates it too. I’m doing it anyway. It’s hard, but I’m doing it.”

“I’m not talking about family. Granddad wants me to go with you; that much is obvious. But just so we understand each other. If I help you, it might be more to help me.”

“Honestly Miriam? I wouldn’t want it any other way.”

Miriam looked again at the feeding sheep. “Then I’ll come with you.”

Catherine fought a sudden, ridiculous well of tears. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you so much.”

She waited in a kitchen chair while Miriam packed her clothes. The infant was in its cradle, quiet now and gazing intently at the bare overhead bulb burning pointlessly in the late noon light. Or, she thought, watching the transfixed baby, perhaps not pointlessly at all.

Miriam’s sister followed Miriam into her bedroom and shut the door. Catherine could hear the murmur of their conversation through the wall. At one point they appeared to be arguing in hushed tones. Soon even this diminished. Miriam emerged alone and announced she was ready. She seemed noticeably calm and by this Catherine perceived that inside she was anything but.

A claw hooked Catherine’s wrist as she exited onto the porch. She looked down at the blankets, at the toothless face peering out. “Blueshirt,” the crone urged again. “You know.”

The old woman held her splayed hand against Catherine’s, palm to palm, her skin as soft and pliant as the petal of a flower. The grip of her other hand remained surprisingly firm. “Blueshirt.”

Catherine saw then what the old woman saw across the yard. Yellow palm print, bright red door. “Blueshirt you know.” Did this frail creature know the man in the canyon? Was that even reasonable to wonder? Then again, after her own chance meetings maybe she had things backward. Maybe the more unreasonable things seemed, the more likely they actually were.

Miriam reached in and gently freed Catherine’s wrist. She held the old woman’s hands in her own. “We’re leaving for awhile, Grandmother. We’ll be back.”

“Be back.”

“Yes. We’ll be back.”

Miriam lifted her satchel from the floor of the porch. Catherine noted its newness, its unscuffed alligator border and clean white stitching, its brilliant brass hasp. Miriam took her new satchel and led Catherine down the walk. The goat watched as they passed.

2

John H walked out of the low stone house into the dim light of dawn, the noise of a horn in his ears and the hiss of a needle on vinyl, the murmur of an audience fading. He lifted his saddle from the rail.

The jazz in the house hit a bolder pitch and trickled out weightless as sea-foam, cool blue music that had in fact been captured within earshot of the Pacific, in a nightclub at Hermosa Beach, California, 1949. John H had never been there but he could imagine the place through the sound. The saddle in his hands had the balanced heft of a London bird gun and came from Miles City, Montana, built by Al Furstnow in 1915. This he had no need to imagine.

He was out of the canyon by sunrise, riding south toward Wyoming at an easy lope with the blue spine of the mountains rising before him from the plains. He was headed to a ranch owned by a friend, a Basque who would pay him with cash. He was out of money, low on bullets, out of food.

He skirted a sheer bluff with a crumbling lip and a network of cairns along the top, the cairns narrowing into a cunning and deadly funnel.

Hunting blinds. The work of ancient architects, in the eons before the horse. He imagined the whoops and blood-chilling cries, the snap of waved robes, flare of pitch torch and lunge of stave. He thought of the wild rolling eyes of the beasts and their headlong rush to escape these berserk creatures popping and popping from the rocks, thought of the great panicked animals spilling across the lip of the earth, their heart-shaped hooves flailing and pointless in the air. Dust and death at the bottom. Now the beasts had followed the ancients. Only the cliff and the stones remained.

The mare picked her way up through a boulder field, her own hooves dainty and hard as gunflints in the granular soil. John H heard the blow of her nostrils and felt the solid power in her shoulders. He leaned forward to ease his balance on her back, let the reins lie slack on her neck.

He’d stolen her from a holding pen near the Rosebud rail spur after he made it back from Europe. She was with a small band of mustang mares and yearlings, the herd stallion absent and probably shot dead. John H spotted them from the open door of a moving boxcar, the captives of three mustangers who drove them along with shouts and pops from the stock whips. The mustangs were a motley bunch, mean eyed and hammerheaded, every roaned and ticked and parti-colored combination imaginable, begrimed with dried mud and dried blood and tangled mats of mane and tail.

One young grulla horse stood out. A better head and straighter back than the rest. John H watched this horse drift in and around the others, watched it shy away from the drovers when they rode too close. He watched until the steady speed of the train left the horses behind.

An hour later the train stopped at a small depot consisting of a single grain elevator, a water tank, and a stock chute and network of empty corrals. John H threw satchel and saddle out of the car and then hopped down along the tracks himself. A brakeman spotted him and came down out of the engine, then spied the rifle in the scabbard in his hand. The brakeman climbed back aboard. John H shouldered his gear and set off into the sage.

Later after the train rolled on its way he watched through binoculars from a bluff as a whirl of dust shape-shifted into mustangs and drovers. The shouts and quirt pops reached his ears like the din of a distant brawl. He watched the riders herd their charges into the round pen, watched the horses lash against their vexing enclosure and when this failed run continuous desperate circles around the perimeter.

Eventually the horses exhausted themselves and reached a wary truce with the corral. They milled slowly and though they probably needed water they ignored the trough at one end. The mustangers unsaddled their riding mounts and started a fire for a coffeepot. John H leaned back against his own saddle a quarter mile distant and waited.

Finally when the sun began to redden the drovers stood in the long slant of light and tossed the grounds from their tins and started for the corral. The horses milled and stamped again. The mustangers pointed and conferred about something and John H knew what it was. Soon one man went around the corral to a gatepost and took up a station there. The other two climbed into the round pen with their saddle blankets loose and lazy in their hands. The horses shrank to the opposite side of the corral, bumping one another and holding frightened heads aloft and crowding. The men with the blankets closed in.

A sudden flap from the heavy cloth and the horses scattered pell-mell around the circuit of the arena until with a second shock they encountered the gate man. The horses flared anew and parted down the middle like the biblical sea, half washing one direction, half the other. The men with the blankets stepped into the void and flapped again, one pinning a group of horses away from the gate, the other urging the second back toward it.

A dun mare with one ear gone to the nub from another long-lost altercation and a coat white with age snapped with yellow teeth toward the man. The blanket snapped back. She shied away from the cloth and ran with her brood and the gateman swung the gate wide. The dun and the others with her ran through the portal into another pen. The gate slammed shut.

The men divided the herd again and yet again, wading in with flying blankets and forcing the horses apart until only two remained in the round pen, and then only one. The grulla mare with the head and the spine. John H peered through his German glasses and said, “You boys just made things a lot easier.”

The mustangers left the corral and kicked out the remains of their fire. They saddled their mounts and pulled the nosebags free and stood into their stirrups. John H watched them ride back the way they had come. He walked down off the bluff before they were fully out of sight.

With the fall of twilight he’d spent two hours in the round pen sitting sideways to the mare. He swept a flat spot in the churned earth before him and scratched scenes and figures into the ground with a cylinder made from the wing bone of a wild bird. He listened to her huff and harry the ground at her own end of the arena, watched her stamp and shuffle from the side of his eye. He never looked at her directly. Her erstwhile companions in the other corral would not come near. She was on her own.

By the time the big moon rose over the elevator she’d settled into a guarded quiet, the fatigue of the day creeping in with the dark and settling across her like a shroud. John H could feel her as she continued to watch him and he knew she was uncertain and forlorn and alone. He heard the sounds of the other horses as they began to crane their heads around the base of the corral posts to nip whatever scrap of vegetation might occur. Some chewed on the fiber of the wood itself. Nothing about this windless night with its shadows and its hush suggested the train that tomorrow would bear them away. Nothing suggested the abattoir.

After awhile John H stood up and stretched the life back to his limbs. His knee and its throb. The mare stepped a quarter turn and continued to watch, one ear rotated at him like the mouth of a shell, the other bent toward the herd. He glanced once at the arc of her rump in the moonlight.

He strode toward the water trough midway between them on the radius of the pen. He heard her take a step away and then stop and he knew her attention was entirely on him. He ducked toward the water and cleared the film from the top and splashed the back of his neck and ran the same wet hand along his scalp through his hair. He cupped water over his face and then walked to the center of the pen and knelt in the dirt. He felt the night air cold and shocking against the wet skin of his face, the wet dome of his head.

He was closer to the mare than he’d yet been and she didn’t move away but merely stood stock-still and stared at him. He didn’t look directly at her but in a low voice said, “Get some water, filly.” He stood and continued to a point exactly opposite the trough.

Later a breeze came in off the sage. He watched silver islands race across the white glow of moon, heard air whisper in the grass. Something metallic and dull banged up on the elevator. The horses in the other pen stamped and neighed and the mare neighed back at the night.

John H stood lazily, wandered just as lazily into the breeze. He reached a point upwind of the mare and raised his arms like wings and let the cool air move around him and carry his smell toward the horse, his smell that was the smell of a man but not exactly the smell of the men who had driven her into the cage and cut her from her herd. He watched her nostrils dilate and contract and he spoke to her again in a slow, steady voice. Told her they were going to get along fine. Told her she was going to be all right. He stood that way and he spoke that way for a long time.

Sometime in the night he heard her move across the corral and drink from the trough. He finally took a good direct look at her in the moonlight and when he did she jerked her head out of the trough and stared back. Water flashed from her muzzle like silver. Again he looked away. She went back to the trough.

She took on water like a boat torpedoed through the hull. John H listened to her suck and slurp. Her ribs heaved in the moonlight. She paused once to blow and breathe and then drank again. John H spoke to her and she looked at him as he moved in the direction of the water himself, not precisely toward her but toward the opposite end of the trough. She angled away two steps and stopped, not wanting to quit even yet.

John H trailed his fingers into the water and brought them up dripping. He wiped them across his face. The horse caved to her thirst and came back to the water. She was barely eight feet from him now. John H walked back to the center of the pen and sat and let her gorge.

Later he dozed off and then snapped awake at a new nervousness in the far pen, the horses roiling and stirring at some unknown force. The mare began to prance and stamp with her head up along the corral fence. John H wondered for a moment if the herd stallion hadn’t reappeared in life or in spirit to reclaim his harem. Then he saw an orb of light moving along the hills. A night train, too far off to hear. But the horses knew.

Eventually he perceived its roar and clack atop the blank desert air. The mare shied up and down the fence rails as the headlamp shot down the tracks. The engines ran on diesel nowadays, a different animal altogether than the sooty old coal-fired locomotives he’d jumped as a kid. The blare of the lamp lit the depot like a battle flare. The noise of the train drowned all other sounds and though John H couldn’t hear the distress of the horses he could plainly watch them crowd one another at the far side of the pen. He himself moved to a point farther from the train and the mare, unable to join her herd, joined him instead.

He took two steps away and she took two steps nearer. He stepped away again and still she followed. He didn’t look at her but instead watched the line of train cars and the diminishing glow of the lamp. When the final car passed and the noise began to recede he turned from the mare and wandered to the trough. She wandered with him.