Painted Horses (6 page)

“Amazing what was lost,” said the youngest. “This”—he gestured around—“was from a V-bomb. Late in the game.”

“The Blitz, that was doable,” said another. “You could still find a party during the Blitz. Life went on. Those Vs were something else entirely.”

If Catherine looked confused, nobody remarked.

“Not to say there wasn’t a silver lining, a small sample of which you see here.”

“What is it?”

“Part of the Roman fortification, what they called Cripplegate. Second century probably, though we haven’t got an exact date.”

Catherine crouched toward the cold stones of the polygon. A shiver shot through her spine the instant her fingers touched it, this product of slave labor and Gauls, chiseled and hewn and fitted into a holy geometry that for all she knew channeled the harmony of the spheres. She’d never felt anything like it.

“That humble pile was likely the base of a turret. There and there are the north- and east-running walls. Londinium was sacked by revolt in the first century, burned to the ground. The original Blitz, I suppose. This was the empire’s response. Set in stone.”

“It’s amazing.”

“It is, really. Lost for so long under Saxon huts and medieval trash pits. Victorian warehouses. One giant curiosity chest, really.”

She’d walked back to her hotel in the London gloom with a headful of whirling images, centurions and Roman baths and slave ships. The cobbled mosaic of buried walls. The piano didn’t enter her mind
.

Now she was sure of it. Luck had withdrawn its fickle hand again. She’d resigned herself to the long walk out and had calmed considerably, no longer fearing so much for her safety but conscious entirely of looking like a fool.

Here on the canyonside in the high afternoon both the light and the land beneath the light had an alkaline whiteness, the bare ground in the distance powdered in chalk. She recalled not only damp London but the woods behind her parents’ Tudor in the spring, the high sycamores and squat blooming mayapples, daylight seeping through the canopy in a wan vegetable glow.

She craved something lush and she got it at the next switchback. The dirt track curved with the rounding surface of the world and opened another angle on the horizon. Farther up the hillside she saw a curious copse of trees, uniform and beautiful with pale bark and pendant-like leaves the color of tarnished green copper. The pendants fluttered in the breeze like waxwings around a berry bush, separate yet uniform, a mass of mesmerizing synchronous things. Catherine stepped off the track.

She had to sidehill her way up and across the grade, picking her way through clumps of spine-studded cactus plants—
first cactus outside a pot!
—and through a maze of low stone formations that appeared sculpted and shaped less by any random natural force than the industrious hands of elves.

A buck deer blasted out of the rocks, antlers stubby and blunt with spring velvet. He stopped and quartered many yards out, looking back. Catherine pushed on.

Apparently water existed beneath the ground because the trees did not have the features of the desert. They looked a bit like the silver birches in Maine where she had vacationed as a girl, only more massive. Trunks heavy as columns. From the edge of the copse she looked in and saw something else: script carved into the smooth surface of the bark.

She walked out of the sunlight and approached the letters, got distracted in midstep by a number on another tree, further writing on another. A carved picture on a fourth, a starlike assemblage of lines inside a circle. She turned back to the first tree.
Gora Euzkadi
. She wondered if it was some strange foreign name, perhaps a phonetic rendering of an Indian name. She walked farther into the shadows.

She had entered a living gallery of words and images, the trees covered like the tattooed arms of sailors. Pictographs of animals and unclear symbols, letters in a strange, strange tongue.
Alo gazteak zer diozue. Ni nas arsain pobre bat
.

Dates. 1901, 1909, 1924. Names in some offshoot of Spanish or French or both. Gilen Lafuente, Marc Laxague. Marcel Ithurralde.

None of the carvings appeared new. She saw no date as recent as the war, and the original cuttings had scarred darkly over. What on earth.

She walked around in the shade and stumbled on a depiction of vastly superior execution. A nude woman with heavy breasts and slender waist and long, graceful legs. Her face was turned slightly to the side, her features finely scribed and wistful. The carver had actually captured this. Hair in curls to her shoulders. It could have been a portrait of an actual woman.

A nearby tree had another carving in what looked to be the same hand, another nude though any sense of the wistful now resided with the carver. This woman reclined on her back, legs wide and nipples standing in the air. A natural dimple in the tree formed the slit between her thighs. Eros in a glade. She realized then what some of the other symbols were, semicircles overlapping in the middle to form a narrow opening, similar to the cave scribings Paleolithic scholars politely called Venuses. Catherine studied the reclining woman and raised her canteen to her lips.

“Hello there.”

She jumped and water sloshed down her chin. She whirled and felt her face go scarlet, felt water wet the front of her shirt. She wished she stood before any carving other than this one.

The speaker rode a horse, winding through the trees and still not near enough to determine what she was looking at. She stepped away.

“Is that your truck with the flat?”

The man from the park in Miles City. Same blue shirt, same smudge of paint. He rode up and reined his horse sideways and gave the horse its head to crop grass. The horse chewed around the bit in its mouth. The man had a short-brimmed hat pushed back on his head and stubble on his cheeks but a general calm to his movements. Catherine felt no such calm herself but then here she was, encountering a stranger in some mountainside paean to sex.

“It is. I had a little trouble.”

He grinned. “I guess you did. Figure on walking?”

She shrugged. “I guess I have to.”

“I admire your spirit, but I think we can get you back on the road.” He swung to the ground and offered his hand. She noticed the buttstock of a rifle, sticking above the saddle on the offside of the horse.

She shook his hand, her own still begrimed from lug wrench and jack. He didn’t seem to notice. She saw that sweat and dust streaked the lines on his neck, the cuffs and collar of his shirt frayed to little more than threads. “I’m Catherine. Lemay.”

He led the horse and she walked down with him through the carved trunks. He said nothing about the inscriptions and she wasn’t sure why but she said nothing herself. But the trees themselves. The trees were a different matter.

“You’re probably wondering why I left the road.”

He gave her a sideways look. “Not the smartest move, if you don’t mind me leveling with you.”

Given her predicament she chose to ignore this. “Where I come from everything’s green. I wanted to see these trees. Can you tell me what they are?”

“Quaking aspens.” They ventured again into the sage, angling again toward the dirt track road. “Most common tree in the mountains and maybe the most beautiful too. Not often those two overlap.”

So far he’d made no mention of their first encounter, in the park in Miles City. Surely it must be in his mind too. Only a few days had passed and how unusual they should encounter each other again in all this vastness. The coincidence alone was worth noting.

But she had been frightened then and he knew it and perhaps he didn’t want to frighten her now. She stole a glance at his horse, the cause of all the trouble. The painted stripes and chevrons had mostly faded or washed away. The palm prints as well.

“Thing about aspens. All those trees up there? They’re one tree. One giant life. Aspens in a grove sprout off the root rather than the seed. Hundreds and hundreds of them, all connected underground.”

She looked back over her shoulder, at the long streak of foliage smeared up the side of the mountain. All one tree.

“I can’t get used to the plants here,” she admitted. “Or to the land itself even. It’s so. Spare.” She wanted to say desiccated but wasn’t sure he’d know the word. “You can see forever but mostly because there’s nothing growing anywhere.”

They walked down the mountain across the great incline of ground, half bowl and half chasm, and in the past few moments the light had changed with the crawl of the earth. A gauze of clouds in the west tempered the whiteness of the afternoon. Over her shoulder the backstays of the sun pierced the clouds in shafts and she realized she was wrong, or at least not entirely right. In this light the land had its austerity, but it didn’t seem barren.

She rambled on, too aware of herself inside her own skin and unsettled by silence. Later she wouldn’t remember what she said, only that she blathered clear to the ambulance. He walked his horse and let her talk.

The Dodge in the ditch looked even less dignified with help at hand. She thought back to the filling station attendant, his avuncular warnings.

John H dropped the reins of his horse and leaned into the ambulance, tried to rock it in place. The massive vehicle rested like a shoaled boat. Not even a sway.

He opened the passenger door and climbed inside. He shook the gearshift around in neutral and clutched it into reverse. He set the brake and climbed out.

“The frame’s on the ground. The flat happens to be your drive wheel. We’ll change it and see if you can’t back out again.” He retrieved the jack from where it lay beside the spare and she took this cue to collect the lug wrench from its random place in the sage.

He took the wrench from her hand and placed it at ten o’clock on the first nut. “You want to set the brake and always block a wheel when you lift one of these things. And leave it in gear.”

He put his foot on the wrench handle and stood in the air. The wrench held him and he gave a little bounce and the nut squealed and turned slowly down. He looked at her. “Why fight it when you can just persuade it.”

He worked quickly and without much ado and she began to feel at ease as she watched. “Are you a cowboy?” she asked.

He looked at her with a sly little smile and drawled, “Nope.” That dragged-out
n
.

She caught right on. “Gary Cooper?”

“Yup,” he grinned, and she couldn’t help but grin back. She felt this swell of relief she could hardly explain.

“Punched cows when I had to but that’s about it. Never aimed to be the top hand. This was all horse country until fairly recently.” With the last nut broken he hoisted a rock the size of a bed pillow and blocked the opposite wheel. He went back to the flat, fiddled with the jack and set it in place.

She had another thought and was almost afraid to ask. “Are you a . . . a horse catcher?”

He wound the jack arm and the ambulance climbed and paused and climbed again. “Mustanger? Was. Before the war that’s about the only work we had out here.” The dead tire cleared the ground. “Which ain’t to say it didn’t have its thrills and spills.”

He spun the nuts from the studs and set them in a neat flat row on the running board. Catherine wheeled the spare down, braking it with her palms to keep it from running off pell-mell the way the ambulance had. He took the tire and roughed it into position and wound the nuts back into place.

Catherine looked at her hands. Blacker than ever, the stain spreading into the webs of her fingers, the shine of her ring like a glint in the dirt.

He set the Dodge on the ground and pulled the jack and ran the nuts down hard. He sent her to the driver’s seat and she knew she was not off the hook.

He climbed in and showed her how to engage the transfer case. “Start her up and take off the brake. Don’t worry. You won’t roll.” He told her to ease off the clutch, told her she might have to give it gas. “Not that much. Perfect.”

The clutch grabbed and the Dodge shuddered and began to lumber out of its berth, then lurched and stalled as the front wheels tractored up the edge of the wash. Catherine panicked and pounced on the brake and flung both of them forward.

“Whoa Nellie,” he said. His hands were on the dash but he didn’t sound alarmed. “More gas when she starts to climb. You’ll feel when it’s right.”

She did as he said and backed the Dodge onto stable ground. She could hug him, this person she didn’t know. She only sat there a moment, gripping the wheel with her blackened hands. What he had said a moment ago. Perfect.

He reached over and shook her shoulder. “Back in business.”

Catherine heard him throw the flat into the back. She stole a look in the side mirror. Now she was a mess, a black streak on her cheek where she’d hooked and hooked the same stubborn strand of hair behind an ear. Salty tracks of tears. No wonder he was being nice.

He came around and studied the logo on the door, the water droplet and the lightning bolt. He reached into his back pocket and removed a circular tin.

He smeared yellow paste on his palm and down his fingers and pressed his hand to the door. Fingers of paint atop the company marque.