Painted Horses (43 page)

They bury them in a churchyard with graves going back centuries. The family buys a headstone and has it engraved with her name and when they ask the name of the child he tells them Jean Bakar. The baby was a girl. They don’t ask for an explanation.

He gives the city another month and maybe it’s not long enough but it’s all he can really take. Everyplace he goes he sees a possibility that will never come to pass. A culture of his own despair. He hears from her family and he knows he can go to live near them, knows they will take him as their own.

Something compels him not to. Maybe it’s the fact he’s put three people to rest in that country already, or maybe that he’ll always be there under some cloud of what could have been. Whatever the case, he gets it in his head to do what he’s always done.

One of her friends in Paris is a lithographer and platemaker who worked as a forger during the war. John H meets this friend at a café and when it becomes obvious what he is suggesting the friend stops him from talking in this public place and takes him back to his apartment and hears him out.

Three weeks later Elixabete’s friend delivers American entry papers bearing the name Borel. John H. Borel.

Horses

1

She cut his hair in the sunlight in front of the stone house, nervous at first and more dangerous with the scissors for her own caution but pleased he asked her. She had to stop and study from different angles, learning as she went, but his hair was fairly short anyway and there wasn’t much room for error. She was timid at first about adjusting his head. Soon she realized he would roll whichever way she wanted. His eyes were closed like a napping dog’s.
Snip snip.
Eventually she tilted him this way or that simply because she could.

“Do you ordinarily do this yourself?” she asked.

“No. I like to have a woman cut it.” Catherine felt a green flicker, wanted to suss out exactly whose handiwork she was following. He said, “So what do you think will happen when you come out of here with that camera?”

She stopped short, nearly jabbed him with the scissor. She had been consumed by this and then distracted away from it and now he snapped her right back like a thunderclap. “A few things, actually. Number one the Smithsonian or the National Geographic Society or the University of Pennsylvania or somebody will send a real team in here for a real survey. Who knows what else they might come up with, but honestly it hardly matters. The gallery alone will change the way we think about New World prehistory. It’s major, believe me, and there will undoubtedly be an injunction to stop the dam, which is going to be a great big bomb in Dub Harris’s face.”

She kept thinking, her mind finding fragments, putting them together. “It’s an irony, really. I’ve hardly been able to stare it down but I feel like I just pulled the sword from the stone and can finally wield the thing. I think he used his clout to get me assigned here because he thought I wouldn’t be serious. That I’d take one look at this gigantic wilderness, sniff my nose, and write a cursory if plausible report declaring it irrelevant. Which in all honesty was almost the case.”

“Guess you proved him wrong.”

“Guess so. Even proved myself wrong.”

She felt him smile. “You may never get hired again.”

“Oh I’ll get hired, all right. Just not by a dam builder. I’m a reverse failure. Proud to say.” She resumed her cutting but stopped short again. “Oh my God. I didn’t even think of it. This place will be ruined for you whether it’s flooded or not. Either the dam ruins it, or I ruin it.”

“Ruined for me and flat-out ruined are two different things.”

“I know, but still.” She put the tips of her fingers into the hair on the back of his head. He no longer felt so malleable. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.”

He reached behind and took her hand and pulled it around in front of him and put his mouth to the inside of her wrist. Pulled her thin skin to the tip of his tongue and studied the mark he made when he pulled away. He said, “Let’s take a ride. There’s something else you need to see.”

Two hours later they eased around the shoulder of a low butte, gingerly raised their eyes above the soft erosion of the grade. She saw a horse in the bowl, then another and another. She looked through the field glasses he’d handed her, caught the glint off their sleek summer coats.

Their own horses were a half mile back, tethered in the scrub along the river. He had his little carbine over his shoulder and they walked to where he’d glassed the herd, traveling in the low ground of the river bottom for a long way and then angling off toward the butte through the shallow contours of the canyon floor. She’d made love to him more or less all night long and then again after they slept in the morning, and then the wincing journey by horse, and she could relate to his limp because she had one too. She watched him pick his way with care through sage and strewn rock, watched the lovely flex of the seat of his jeans and she thought,
Oh well, at least mine’s worth the trouble
.

He had showed her how to adjust the lenses before they started out, how to close one eye and tune the diopter. The nearest horse sharpened magically into focus, the line of its back lit with a sort of nimbus of sunshine and impossibly precise against the clean air around it. She panned to another horse, a blood dun grazing a little farther along. She turned the focus to blur the horse and then brought it sharply back. Her father would love these glasses.

The rest of the herd had been tucked beyond the curve of the butte and a few drifted into view. The spring foals were twice their original size but gangly still, their tails like the sprouting feathers of a half-fledged bird.

She spoke in a whisper. “Jack Allen’s been looking for them all summer. He acts like they’re some kind of ghost horse, like they don’t really belong here.”

John H eased down below the grade. “He’s right and he’s wrong at the same time. Has he actually seen them yet?”

She crouched with him so she could speak above a whisper. “I’m not sure. I thought he found them a month or so back, but I guess he lost them again.”

“They’re not typical mustangs, cut and crossed with everything under the sun. These are straight-up Spanish horses. Barb stock.”

She wracked her brain and a light went on. A pair of old English portraits on the wall of her father’s study. Racehorses, their names in brass plates on the heavy wooden picture frames. “The Godolphin Barb,” she remembered aloud.

He nodded. “Right. One of the foundation thoroughbreds. You are something.” He tipped his head in the direction of the horses. “I chased mustangs over this country till hell wouldn’t have it, saw every combination and shape and size and color you can imagine. I mean thousands of horses. That mare you’re riding is one of them—what in a dog you’d call a mongrel and I don’t mean it as an insult. I wish every horse had some of her in it.

“But that red colt? He’s out of this herd, and this herd came off a Spanish boat somewhere five hundred years ago. Those zebra stripes on their legs, that black line down their backs. These horses are a time machine.”

“Jack said they don’t act like other mustangs, that they don’t live where you’d expect them to. He seems almost put out by it, outraged or something.”

“He either hasn’t actually seen them or he hasn’t figured out what they are. Or maybe he’s just missing the point. They’re a relic.”

“An artifact.”

“Right. Flesh and blood, but an artifact. Here because this canyon’s here.”

They eased up again and watched more horses move down to the bowl, watched them loaf and roll and shake dust and grass from their coats. “That’s the stallion,” he told her. “Two horses from the left, with the black legs. See the line down his back?”

She studied the horse through the glasses. Even she could see he was different from the rest, had a different carriage and a different manner. Warier, and prouder too. That long black tail. “The white whale,” she said aloud.

A little later they walked back the way they’d come and as they crossed up over a hump in the earth a jackrabbit sprang up and bounded ahead, cutting left then right through the sage, a hare the size of a dog with its great white feet flashing so brilliantly Catherine did not at first realize John H had shouldered his rifle. The animal stopped and rose on its hind legs to look back and the blast of the gun knocked it cartwheeling.

“Ohh. Did you have to?”

“Only if we want to eat.” He worked the Mannlicher’s slick action and picked up the empty case and they walked to the fallen hare. He lifted it by its great back feet, its head barely attached now. She touched its soft flank, tentatively at first.

She looked at John H. “He doesn’t intend to catch those horses, does he.”

Later he had the hare’s saddles carved loose and rolled in wild onion and mint, the legs and haunches in the bubble of a kettle. She told him about the piano and he put this record on, a jarring contrast indeed to stillness and horses and sky.

“It’s like a page full of math problems, converted to noise,” she said. “Can I follow it, yes, but I’d certainly never want to play it. I don’t even want to listen to it.”

“I can change it.”

“Well, don’t, on my account. But you asked my opinion and I’m someone who grew up playing Chopin and Beethoven, and that music is—wait, not even from that point of view. How on earth would a man and a woman ever dance to this?”

“I’m not saying I get it. That’s why I asked.”

If she heard him she didn’t pause. “How would you make love to this? My parents—I can’t believe I’m saying this—had every Duke Ellington record ever made.
It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing
, and he’s not just talking about music. If this were the score to my parents’ romance, I’m sure there would be no me. Who did you say this is?”

He reached for the jacket. “Thelonious Monk.”

She shook her head. “I hate math problems.”

She wakes him in the night, her mouth against his ear murmuring,
I think I’m a fiend
and
You’re the devil
and
O my God yes what have you done.

They rode out of the crevasse and back down the canyon before sunrise, gnawing cold biscuits from last night’s supper. She’d put off this ride, dreaded it even. She was distracted from work and she barely cared. She told herself and told herself that eventually, everything had to end. It didn’t help.

They heard the
whump
of the rotors and thought at first the airplane was back.

“It sounds different, though,” Catherine said.

Though the canyon remained in shadow the sun had risen in the east and the helicopter flashed like a beacon when it came into view. They reined up and watched it circle, then descend beyond the rampart at the top of the draw.

“They beat us to it,” he said.

They left the horses and went forward on foot and came up within sight of the mouth. He looked through his glasses and saw a highline between trees, four mules and a saddle horse tied off on leads. Nobody appeared to be around.

“Those are dynamite boxes,” he said. He handed the glasses to Catherine. “I’m guessing that big gray is familiar.”

“It’s his.”

“What I thought.”

“What do we do?”

“They didn’t have that whirlybird we could rustle the stock and let him walk out. That’d buy some time.”

Something else occurred to her. Miriam. “I need to get up there,” she said.

“I’ll go with you.”

“No,” she said. “No way. I think I’ve already gotten Miriam into some kind of trouble. I should have come back out here two days ago, shouldn’t have put it off when I was this—I’m sorry. I don’t mean that. It’s just—”

She tried to think. “Maybe we should go back to the Dodge. Maybe I should drive back to civilization and just report this thing.”

“They saw the Dodge from the airplane. They’ll be waiting.”

“Shit. Of course.” She looked at him. “I hate to get you involved in this.”

“I’m already involved. Just tell me what you want to do.”

“That time I saw you in Miles City. You rode there on the mare.”

“Yup.”

“I think we should get the camera as far away from here as possible.”

He let out the stirrups on the Furstnow saddle and tightened the cinch. Catherine wrote a New York address on a corner of the map and tore the corner loose. He turned to her. “You watch yourself up there.”

“It’s mine, not theirs. I’ll be all right.” She pulled herself into him. “Max Caldwell owns the service station in Fort Ransom. You can find me through him.”

“You have a gorgeous neck.”

“Max Caldwell. Say it.”

“Max Caldwell.”

“Find me.”

Fifteen minutes later she turned the colt loose like he’d told her to, yelled at it and quirted it back toward home with a length of rope across its haunch. She turned and started walking toward the quarry, running over and over in her mind what she might say when she arrived, things she knew she’d forget the second she climbed through the notch.