Painted Horses (32 page)

“Who’s we.”

Allen’s lip curls, the only smile he owns. “That’s the spirit. I wrangled an order to run a mule train to a partisan outfit that’s playing hell with the Kraut supply line. They need guns and ammo. I can pick two guys and I figure you and this jack mormon friend of yours can at least ride and shoot straight.”

McKee is uncharacteristically reclined on his cot, cap pulled over his eyes. He lifts the brim with a finger and says, “Sign me up, hondo.”

They are driven at midnight to a requisitioned farmhouse, the barns in service as a remount station. John H lugs his Furstnow to the corral and saddles a bay mare in the torchlight. He checks the animal’s hooves, presses a thumb to its frogs. He blows air into each quavering nostril.

They wind up a path into the hills, storm clouds rimed in silver from a three-quarter moon. Jack Allen rides at the head of the column, McKee to the rear. John H drew a straw for point, steers out ahead of Allen and up off the trail entirely wherever he can. He stops and strains his ears against the night, cups his hands to his head against the creak of panniers. Once or twice he hears the drone of planes overhead.

They climb past the snow line in the dark. They wind through a notch in the rocks and cross a creek clouded with ice and the mare stops on her own at a break in the trees. He watches her ears train forward and he slides his rifle as quietly as he can from its scabbard. He turns his head and gives a low whistle, the displaced trill of a western meadowlark. He hears Allen rein up, hears again the whisper of a gunstock sliding through leather.

The mare wants to turn back and he holds her where she stands and catches movement in the trees. He levels the rifle and a creature materializes on the snow, four legged and large as a hound out of folklore. The animal freezes and John H sees the shag of its coat in the moonlight, the great whiskers of its jowls and the gleam of an eye. A second like animal appears and then a third and these lock up behind the first, noses pointing at John H and the mare.

Jack Allen slips alongside, silent as a ghost. Even his horse makes no sound. “What you got.”

John H stabs with his rifle. “See them?”

“I see ’em.”

A light pulses in the dark, a single pinprick. Allen fishes in his pocket, sparks his Zippo, snuffs it and sparks again. “This here’s our boy. Set tight. Keep your powder dry.”

Allen rides forward, rifle jutting off his hip. John H loses him in the dark, hears voices murmur. A moment later he rides back, followed by a man on foot and the bouncing forms of the beasts.

Dogs. Heavily muscled canines with wiry coats and docked tails, great wet mustaches drooping.

John H slides his gun away. “How much farther?”

“Beats me. This guy supposedly speaks American but I can’t gather it.”

They ride another hour. The guide leads them to the edge of a cirque and John H smells woodsmoke. The dogs bound ahead.

The light rises while they pull the packs from the mules. Five figures emerge from a low hut in the evergreens. None has recently shaved. Each is armed. They stand around smoking, eyes flickering over the crates on the mules.

The guide ushers them into the hovel. A figure crouches at the fire, men’s pants though clearly a woman’s bum. She straightens as they shuffle in, looks over her shoulder and though her face is sober she is young and despite the conditions quite beautiful.

“Ay Chihuahua,” breathes McKee.

“Cheese my sea stir,” says the guide.

McKee doffs his hat, offers a slight apologetic bow. The guide claps him on the shoulder.

They dish stew from a blackened pot, mysterious chunks of meat and mushroom caps in a thin broth. The three dogs crowd and whine and finally line in front of the girl.

“I see who the pushover is,” says McKee.

The girl smiles awkwardly, knows he is talking about her though she likely doesn’t understand him.

“Kinda dogs are they, some hound or something?”

She looks to her brother for help and the brother mutters some word, some appellation that sounds like
spin no neigh
, and John H glances at McKee and sees that McKee doesn’t get it either.

“Eh, ah, hunt air?” the guide continues. “Like cease?” He thrusts out his nose, raises one hand like a lifted paw.

“Huh?” says McKee. “You mean like a pointer?”

The guide grins hugely. “See best point air.”

“Hell’s bells, that don’t look like any pointer I ever saw. Most pointing dogs are sleek as a whip, even the setters.”

John H shakes his head. “No, he means it. I saw them point last night in the woods. All three of them.”

The guide nods. “See best point air.”

“Say luke for, ah, Nazis?” says the girl in her tremulous English, looking not at the Americans but at her brother who nods at her. “Say smell, see boots? See black?”

McKee thinks a moment, tries to puzzle it out. “The dogs smell black boots?”

“Mmm, no.” She finally looks McKee in the face, summons her most perfect elocution. “Thee boot. Black.”

“The boot black,” says John H. “They know the smell of German boot black.”

“
Si, si
,” she nods. “See office airs, eh, boot black.”

“The officers’ boot black,” McKee repeats. He grins at her and she beams back, as though together they’ve managed their own private victory. He says, “I reckon that would be some kinda bird hunt.”

They spend the morning schooling the partisans on the munitions, a slow process with the language barrier. How to set up the thirty-caliber gun. How to charge a detonator box. The girl observes from the periphery, minding the dogs and saying nothing. Her brother goes off to confer with Jack Allen and when they come back Allen tosses a leather cylinder.

“What’s this?”

“Maps of the German line.”

“You want me to stash it?”

“No. I want you to pack it down the mountain.”

“When?”

“Now.”

“Ain’t you going?”

Allen shakes his head, flashes his wolf’s grin. “I got further business with these gents.”

The same thought occurs to John H and McKee at once, finds the same voice at once. “What about the horses?”

“Horses stay. Mules too.”

“You mean we’re walking. Well. Aitch here has a bum knee.”

Allen shrugs. “Go slow.”

“And you couldn’t clue us down the hill so we’d know to bring spare mounts.”

“Wasn’t part of the marching orders.”

John H hoists his saddle over one shoulder, his rifle over the other.

“A hundred bucks says you ditch that rig before you’re half off the mountain,” says Allen.

John H doesn’t pause. “Not likely.”

“A hundred bucks.”

“How do I collect if you don’t make it back?”

“Ho ho. You worry about your own backside.”

McKee catches up, takes one wistful look back at the girl. He puts up his hand in a wave.

They follow the churned path back through the snow. John H lugs his saddle, McKee both rifles. They fort up under an overhang when night falls, spark a fire on the floor. When the flames lap up they see the ceiling is already black from other fires, other travelers in other times.

“I don’t know what’s gotten into me. Whole time we were there all I wanted was to put my head in that girl’s lap and sleep for about a hundred years. Before we got her to talk, even.”

“Ain’t a thing gotten into you. Makes more sense than anything else I’ve heard lately.”

“That damn Allen. You reckon he was jockeying for your saddle?”

“It occurred to me.”

“How’s your knee?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

They split a chocolate bar and a tin of Spam, the only food they have. Outside the shelter the snow sails again. They doze until the wood burns up and the cold seeps from the stone and they press ahead. John H again totes his saddle, McKee the rifles.

The snowstorm has obliterated the mule trail. After an hour’s slog in the dark they come down off the defile and enter an expanse of forest. John H trudges along behind McKee. Outside his week in basic training he has not traveled this far on foot in years and he concentrates on the flex of his knee at every step.

They pass below the snow line and McKee strikes his Zippo. The mule prints are gone.

“Reckon the rain washed ’em clean?”

“No. No way.”

“Think we’re on the wrong trail?”

“Yup.”

“What do you want to do?”

“What do you mean?”

“We can go back. Wait for light, see if we can get on the right track.”

“I don’t see how we’re going pick up that trail again. We rode up in the dark and now it’s buried in snow. For all we know it could be snowing up there right now. Let’s just keep moving west. We’ll get somewhere.”

“Want me to spell you on the kack awhile?”

John H shakes his head, shifts the saddle on his shoulder. “I’m OK for now.”

They drink at a stream in the dim light of morning. When John H rises McKee has finally taken the Furstnow. “Heavier’n it looks,” he says.

“You don’t have to.”

“You’re limping like a three-legged dog. I’ll let you know when I’ve had enough.”

An hour later the path crosses an open expanse of meadow, its boundary described by the staves and slats of a wooden fence. A roofline rises above the hillcrest.

McKee drops the saddle and takes his rifle back. They skulk down, pause, and crane their necks down the slope.

Not a quiet farmstead but an entire village, the nearest house emblematic of the rest with half its roof shot away. Broken furniture strews the mud, the stamp of tank treads like the bite of mighty teeth.

“I hope they left some grub,” McKee whispers. “I’m starving like I got ten tapeworms.”

They watch the narrow street.

“What do you think?”

“I think this whole place is about as empty as your noggin.”

“Yeah, that’s what I think. Let’s find some food.”

John H limps back for the meadow. He finds his saddle in the dead grass and bends to lift it and the mutter of a horse stops him short.

A gray dun peers from the tree line thirty yards off, mutters again and turns half-away. John H clucks at the horse. The dun takes a step forward, then turns away again. John H sees the solid architecture of its shoulders beneath a frost of winter pelage. He clucks again, pulls a fistful of grass. The horse takes another step.

McKee has found a great round block of cheese and he sits with his back against the wall of the cottage. John H walks up leading the horse. McKee swallows his mouthful of cheese.

“Aitch,” he says. “Where’d you get the Barb?” He carves off another slab with his knife, squints against the angle of the sun. “You got your paint tin? Ought to deck that pony out.”

“How’s that?” The horse already has its head over John H’s shoulder, already tries to nibble his clothes.

“You know, like the red devils done. Out on the plains, when the shaggies was thick. Rings around the eyes for magic vision, and all. Couple of palm prints here and there. Rattle ol’ Adolf’s cage. Put the fear of the US Cavalry into his sorry ass.”

Seven months later John H watches through the German glasses from the back of the same animal, as McKee and a few others charge a retreating rifle squad in the Arno valley. They race through an orchard, peach trees radiant with fruit.

All summer McKee has worn a battered Stetson doughboy in place of his helmet, a relic of the last war liberated from a junk shop in Rome. John H sees the flash of the pistol in his hand though with the fighting in all directions he is not able to distinguish the sound.

A phosphorous shell detonates in the orchard, green limbs and leaves and rank chemical fog. He hears the reaper-like whir of an MG42, sees its lightning tongue lap the smoke. Then the scream of the horses.

Somebody trips a mine and a fragment clips a notch in the gray dun’s ear and puts him into a bucking fit. John H takes his binoculars hard in the chin. He turns the dun’s head and rides the horse down the crumbling terraces to the road. A column of Shermans crawls through the smoke.

He spends most of the day riding point for a line of Algerian mule skinners, packing mortars and bullets and bags of transfusion blood into the catacomb rubble of a shattered village. Twice they are strafed from the air, not Hans at all but trigger-happy Yanks in Mustangs who don’t recognize the colonial uniform. Voices shriek for medics out of every rathole and cranny, a bouillabaisse of tongues with the same wailing edge.

He makes it back to the orchard at nightfall. The routing has moved north, faded with the day into the next line of hills. The horse shies within the trees. John H smells the meat of trampled fruit, but the horse senses blood.

John H dismounts and moves through the orchard with a flashlight. He finds a red smear in the grass, a little farther the mound of a dead horse with more blood in a fan around its head. Not McKee’s horse.