Painted Horses (38 page)

Somehow she’d crossed the river again though she didn’t remember doing it. Her feet inside her boots still sloshed. Her pants were perfectly dry.

The wall to the east stretched away in a series of palisades, sheer flutes towering hundreds of feet in the air. It seemed vaguely familiar, as though she’d passed here before. She wondered if she should look at the map but knew she’d encounter the food in her pack and knew as well she’d lose all strength of will. She checked her watch and kept walking.

She walked a long time, the palisades above her yet behind her now as well. Her brain swirled away on its own, gone for a spell and then back again. She checked her watch a second time and the hands hadn’t moved.

She felt a flare of rage, wanted to smash the lying watch with a rock. She forced herself to breathe, to ignore the watch. To march ahead.

Eventually the edge of the sun slipped below the canyon’s rim and she knew she would not make the draw before nightfall. This she hadn’t reckoned on. She needed to fort up for the night, needed food and a fire. She needed to change the dressing between her legs before the light ran out.

She allowed herself two quick swallows of peanut butter, enough to cut the fuzz in her head.

Before she knew it she was scraping the bottom of the jar, sitting beside her pack in the falling light. She peered in at the hollow glass, coaxed one last daub to the tip of the spoon before tossing the empty jar away. An artifact for the future. She still felt hungry.

She made for the timber at the base of a bluff. The sun had retreated beneath the high rock wall, the lowlands cast in shadow and the temperature plunging. She gathered downed sticks in the trees and dragged one sizable fallen limb to the edge of the sage. She yanked dry grass in clumps, wadded the grass and stacked twigs around the wad like a miniature tepee. She fumbled through her pack after matches.

The grass did not flare. A brief flame rose, then died to tiny tracers bright along the fibers. She blew into the tinder and the tracers raced into dead gray ash. She sat on her haunches and bit her lip.

Dusk was upon her, with little time to scavenge better tinder. She dug again in her pack after paper and found only the map. Not desperate enough to burn that, at least not yet. Her fingers closed around something else.

Sanitary napkins. Five remained, each in a small paper wrapper. She peeled the first wrapper and crumpled it and was about to peel the second. She had another thought.

She worked at the napkin itself, unwinding strip after strip of gauze into an astonishing pile. Who’d have thought it. She struck a match.

The flame climbed first through the paper wrapper and rose and lapped at the napkin. The diaphanous fabric went up like gasoline and the fire climbed through the twigs. She felt invincible.

Later in the dark she did not feel so at all. She’d removed her wet boots and socks to warm her feet, which looked in the beam of her flashlight like twin dead flounder. She kept the fire tiny out of caution for her wood supply and this alone required more or less constant attention. The larger limb she’d dragged from the trees was too stout to break, and still hadn’t burned in two.

Finally she pulled the boots back over bare feet, wincing at the slime-wet shock. She wobbled clammily by flashlight, the moon no more than a sliver. She feared breaking an ankle in the dark, or stepping on a snake, but she desperately wanted a larger fire, at least for a while. She twisted off dead sage limbs, a few of them stubborn as knotted rope.

Eventually she lugged another modest armful back and heaped the entire mass on the dwindling flames. The sage blazed up and she pried loose from the miserable boots again, like suctioning her feet out of cold wet clay.

She rubbed her toes in the glow, watched steam rise from the socks she’d dangled on a stick. The sage died quickly down but at least succeeded in burning her large limb in two. She adjusted one half across the other, tried again to settle in.

She got very cold as night wore on, her bare feet tucked stiffly beneath her. She had a wool sweater and a light jacket for a shell and with the fire low she sat with her knees pulled inside the sweater and tight to her chest, her arms pulled in from the sleeves to hug her shins and her head screwed down inside the collar. She longed for a veritable bonfire, then a sleeping bag, finally her own bed in her own room in her parents’ well-appointed Tudor. She tried not to think how far it might yet be to the draw.

The night wore on and her mind went everywhere. Self-righteousness, self-doubt. Self-pity.

She missed her dad she had to admit. Her mother wanted what her mother wanted and that had always been the case. A dress-up doll to show the neighbors. A perfect toy inside a perfect box.

But her father, that lover of actual toys, that buyer of cameras. That buyer of flowers, upon her very first period. Well. He wanted her happiness.

Catherine wanted to prove herself to him and she’d known it all along. She wanted to climb the mountain only to look back from the top and show him she’d done it. See me? Do you see? Of course he’d see, would have been there the whole time, watching. Her father had been ambitious himself and he had proven good on that ambition, but he was a dreamer too. She got it from somewhere. Dreams and ambition both.

Something rustled nearby. She tried to pass it off as her imagination, or maybe just the breeze. No, there again. She raised her head. A fawn, not ten feet off, staring straight at her. Catherine wondered if she was dreaming and realized she couldn’t be. Dreaming required sleep. She’d been awake all night.

She realized something else. She could see the fawn. Night had passed. She watched it in the cold gray light, watched it drop its head and crop grass and raise its head and chew while it watched her back.

The fawn’s mother began to bleat and the fawn turned. Catherine squinted in the light and saw the doe, just a dark silhouette with enormous ears up by the timber. The doe blew loudly and the fawn ran off. Catherine shoved her numb arms through the sleeves of the jacket and stood stiffly to her feet.

Her fire had long gone cold and she considered gathering wood for another but her fingers were dead with chill. She doubted she had the dexterity to unravel another napkin. She barely got her socks and boots back on, barely got the untied laces tucked down along her ankles. She shouldered her pack and went to the river.

Anyone with any sense would head straight to the Dodge. Regroup, form a new plan. On the other hand, time was not on her side. The opportunity to elude Jack might not present itself so easily again. Plus she might be closer than she realized. She made a deal with herself. She would walk until the sun came above the rim of the canyon. If the draw had not materialized, she’d turn back.

She was again painfully hungry, as though the peanut butter she’d devoured the night before never passed her gullet at all. She thought to eat some bread while she walked but when she tried to open her pack she found her fingers too frozen to unbuckle the straps. She shouldered the pack and kept on.

Her feet wrapped up in something and her head thumped on the ground and she saw stars. She sat up wincing, rubbed her eyes against the sparks.

She’d tripped over her shoelaces. She touched the tender spot on her skull. No blood.

She got her laces untangled and realized her fingers finally worked. She tied her boots and got back to her feet.

She could see her shadow. She looked at the sun, well into the sky already, far above the rim. She’d missed her cue, her self-imposed boundary. Or not—above her loomed a long run of flutes, towering blurrily into space. The same gray flutes as yesterday? They looked the same. She shook her swimming head against the blur. She’d lost her bearings, did not know which direction she’d been walking in relation to the river, not sure which side of the river she was even on.

She felt a prod in her thigh, her keys or her compass or a penknife, twisted in her pocket. She crammed her hand in her jeans and straightened the fabric and came out with the offending item.

Crane Girl’s stone. She’d kept it in her pack for a month, took it out from time to time as a reminder. She did not recall putting the stone in her pocket. She was tired, her legs heavy as lead.

Her stomach moaned like a sacrifice victim, a thing forsaken and abandoned for some greater good. She heard it from a distance, tried without much conviction to keep the distance. She wanted rescue, indulgence even, wanted to stuff her gut with every morsel she had. It was a test of will and as she verged on failure she heard another sound, something not unlike music though surely that was ridiculous, but there it spiraled on the air again and her eyes popped open.

She stared at the sky, was evidently lying on the ground. She wondered if she’d tripped again. Clouds raced, bellies pink as curling blood in clean clear water. The palisades were gone, the shadows stretched by the slant of evening. Did clouds have shadows? She could not conjure the answer. That noise again, that ethereal warble, trickling from the atmosphere.

She was on her feet running, chasing the crane behind Miriam and then remembering her pack, her camera, dashing back and jerking it from the ground. She rushed after the sound again, running alone now and tripping, barking her knees sharply, then up and scrambling once more.

She glimpsed the crane, or perhaps only its shadow, gliding along the face of the wall. Or thought she did. She raced toward the spot, dropped into a wash and crossed a sliver of running water and bounced like a jackrabbit up the other side. She froze on the lip, fighting to stifle a deafening gasp for air, the bang of her heart loud in her ears. She strained to listen.

She was not close to the river, could see its buffer of vegetation a half mile off, jade-like and luminous in the yellowing light. She shut her eyes against distraction and felt her equilibrium whirl, crouched woozily with her eyelids clamped together until her fists reached solid earth.

She braced the bones of her cheeks against the bones of her knees. When she steadied she heard it again, the chortle of the bird bouncing off the long wall behind.

Or emanating from it. She remembered the peals of the horses days earlier, originating so far as she could tell out of solid stone. What could surprise her now. She cocked her ear toward the wall. There again, fainter, and Catherine climbed to her feet and walked forward as though controlled by a hypnotist.

She did not notice her shadow, weaving like a drunk, did not notice whether her shoes still squished. She walked to the cone of scree at the base of the wall, stared straight up at the harsh dark edge racing hundreds of feet above her head. With her neck craned another dizzy wave crashed and she stumbled, regained her feet as the ground rushed toward her face and she saw with a start the water in the bottom of the wash.

She’d jumped across it a bit ago she remembered now. The water trickled from a thicket of willows, flowed through roots and moss and swimming green grass. She gave a second start, greater than the first. In the sand beside the water she saw the print of a horse.

She slid down into the wash and knelt and touched the track’s clean edge, the dent of the frog still damp in the center. She followed this print to another and to another beyond that, and saw that the trail of the horse vanished like the stream into the thicket of willows.

She stared into the green weave. At least she did not hear the mosquito buzz of the earlier thicket, only the murmur of water echoing against stone. That’s what it was. That sibilant warble.

The crane again, trilling in the willows like a wraith. Or perhaps just the spirit of a crane, teasing the leaves like a draft. She swore she saw them flutter and she would not have been surprised if the foliage simply burst like celluloid into fast green fire, spoke to her aloud in some archaic alphabet.

She felt the draft as well, lapping full in her face, not the lick of a dog but the lift of a wing. Air out of stone. How could that be.

She pushed into the willows and heard the bird again and she pushed some more. The water ran in its channel, the ground around low and swamp-like, the pocks of hooves seeping. She found herself on a trail, stepped around horse apples dropped in careless mounds. She came out of the low bog and squirmed through the fronds and exited into rock.

A crevasse barely wider than her outstretched arms, the firmament no more than a fissure far above. She walked over fine dry sand and clean gravel. Over hoofprints.

The seam squirmed like a serpent, twisted out of her sight just ahead and as she followed the curve she expected the crevasse to terminate in a spring, water flowing out of sheer stone wall. Instead she encountered a curve in the opposite direction, followed that around as well.

The birdsong had become a horn, fading in and out of her ears. She lost the sound of it, then gained it once more. She was in an alley leading to a souk, the horn humming to a snake in a basket. She teetered on a mystery.

Now the alley swarmed with horses, silent horses, horses like phantoms projected along the walls. She pranced like an equine herself, moved with their motion like a mare, swept up and stolen by wildings, giddy and glorious and free.

She would be famous, so famous, running with these horses.

She knew these horses, had seen them in pictures. Chinese horses with big yellow bellies and fine dark heads, red ocher horses, upside-down horses. Black legs and hooves, necks stretched in a gallop. A panel of yellow handprints. She was not in a crevasse and not in a souk either. She was somehow deep below the surface of the earth, in the vault of a cave in the south of France.