The Horse Whisperer (15 page)

Tom’s mother said these things sometimes happened after a woman had a child and that maybe they should get away for a while, take a vacation somewhere. So they left Hal with her and flew to San Francisco and even though the city was hung with a cold fog for the whole week they were there, Rachel started to smile again. They went to concerts and movies and fancy restaurants and did all the tourist things too. And when they got home it was even worse.

Winter came and it was the coldest anyone on the Front could remember. The snow drove down the valleys and made pygmies of the giant cottonwoods along the creek. In a blitz of polar air one night they lost thirty head of cattle and chipped them from the ice a week later like the fallen statues of an ancient creed.

Rachel’s cello case stood gathering dust in a corner of the house and when he asked why she didn’t play anymore she told him music didn’t work here. It just got lost, she said, swallowed up by all the air. Some mornings
later, clearing the fireplace, Tom came across a blackened metal string and sifting on among the ashes he found the charred tip of the cello’s scroll. He looked in the case and there was only the bow.

When the snow melted, Rachel told him she was taking Hal and going back to New Jersey and Tom just nodded and kissed her and took her in his arms. She was from too different a world, she said, as they had always both known though never acknowledged. She could no more live here with all this windblown, aching space around her than live on the face of the moon. There was no acrimony, just a hollowing sadness. And no question but that the child should go with her. To Tom it only seemed fair.

It was the morning of the Thursday before Easter that he stacked their things in the back of the pickup to take them to the airport. The mountain front was draped in cloud and a cold drizzle was coming in from the plains. Tom held the son he hardly knew and would forever hardly know, bundled in a blanket, and watched Frank and his parents form an awkward line outside the ranch house to say their good-byes. Rachel hugged each one of them in turn, his mother last. Both women were weeping.

“I’m sorry,” Rachel said. Ellen held her and patted the back of her head.

“No, sweetheart. I’m sorry. We all are.”

   The first Tom Booker horse clinic was held in Elko, Nevada the following spring. It was, by common consent, a great success.

A
NNIE CALLED
L
IZ
H
AMMOND FROM THE OFFICE THE
morning after she got her message.

“I hear you’ve found me a whisperer,” she said.

“A what?”

Annie laughed. “It’s okay. I was just reading some stuff yesterday. That’s what they used to call these people.”

“Whisperers. Mm, I like that. This one sounds more like a cowboy. Lives in Montana somewhere.”

She told Annie how she had heard of him. It was a long chain, a friend who knew someone who remembered someone saying something about a guy who’d had a troubled horse and had taken him to this other guy in Nevada . . . Liz had doggedly followed it through.

“Liz, this must have cost you a fortune! I’ll pay for the calls.”

“Oh, that’s okay. Apparently there are a few people out West doing this kind of thing, but I’m told he’s the best. Anyway, I got his number for you.”

Annie took it down and thanked her.

“No problem. But if he turns out to be Clint Eastwood, he’s mine okay?”

Annie thanked her again and hung up. She stared down at the number on the yellow legal pad in front of her. She didn’t know why, but suddenly she felt apprehensive. Then she told herself not to be stupid, picked up the phone and dialed.

   They always had a barbecue on the first night of Rona’s clinic. It brought in some extra money and the food was good so Tom didn’t mind staying on, though he was longing to get out of his dusty, sweaty shirt and into a hot tub.

They ate at long tables on the terrace outside Rona’s low, white adobe ranch house and Tom found himself sitting next to the woman who owned the little thoroughbred. He knew it wasn’t an accident because she’d been coming on strong all evening. She didn’t have the hat on anymore and had untied her hair. She was in her early thirties maybe, a good-looking woman, he thought. And she knew it. She was fixing him with big black eyes but overdoing it a little, asking him all these questions and listening to him as if he was the most incredibly interesting guy she’d ever met. She had already told him that her name was Dale, that she was in real estate, that she had a house on the ocean near Santa Barbara. Oh yes, and that she was divorced.

“I just can’t get over the way he felt under me after you’d finished with him,” she was saying, again. “Everything had just, I don’t know, freed up or something.”

Tom nodded and gave a little shrug.

“Well, that’s what happened,” he said. “He just
needed to know it was okay and you just needed to get out of his way a little.”

There was a roar of laughter from the next table and they both turned to look. The donkey man was spinning some piece of Hollywood gossip about two movie stars Tom had never heard of, caught in a car doing something he couldn’t quite picture.

“Where did you learn all this stuff Tom?” he heard Dale ask. He turned back to her.

“What stuff?”

“You know, about horses. Did you have like, a guru or a teacher or something?”

He fixed her with a serious look, as if about to vouchsafe wisdom.

“Well Dale, you know, a lot of this is nuts and bolts stuff.” She frowned.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if the rider’s nuts, the horse bolts.”

She laughed, too enthusiastically, putting her hand on his arm. Hell, he thought, it wasn’t that good a joke.

“No,” she pouted. “Tell me, seriously.”

“A lot of these things you can’t really teach. All you can do is create a situation where if people want to learn they can. The best teachers I ever met were the horses themselves. You find a lot of folk have opinions, but if it’s facts you want you’re better off going to the horse.”

She gave him a look he guessed was supposed to convey in equal measure a religious wonder at his great profundity and something rather more carnal. It was time for him to go.

He got up from the table making some lame excuse about having to check Rimrock, who’d long since been turned out. When he wished Dale good-night, she
looked a little peeved at having wasted so much energy on him.

As he drove back to the motel, he thought it was no accident that California had always been the favored place for any cult that blended sex and religion. The people were pushovers. Maybe if that group in Oregon—the ones who used to wear orange pants and worship the guy with the ninety Rolls-Royces—had set up here instead, they’d still be going strong.

Tom had met dozens, scores, of women like Dale at these clinics over the years. They were all searching for something. With many it seemed in some strange way to be connected with fear. They’d bought themselves these fiery, expensive horses and were terrified of them. They were looking for something to help conquer this fear or maybe just fear in general. They might equally have chosen hang gliding or mountaineering or wrestling killer sharks. They just happened to have chosen riding.

They came to his clinics longing for enlightenment and comfort. Tom didn’t know how much enlightenment there had been, but there’d been comfort a fair few times and it had been mutual. Ten years ago, a look like the one Dale just gave him and they’d have been bowling back to the motel together and out of their clothes before you could even shut the door.

It wasn’t that nowadays he always walked away from such opportunities. It just didn’t seem worth the trouble quite so much anymore. For there was usually trouble of some kind. People seldom seemed to bring the same expectations to such encounters. It had taken him a while to learn this and to understand what his own expectations were, let alone those of any woman he might meet.

For some time after Rachel left, he’d blamed himself
for what happened. He knew it wasn’t just the place that was wrong. She had seemed to need something from him that he hadn’t been able to give. When he’d told her that he loved her, he’d meant it. And when she and Hal went, they left a space within him that, try as he might, he was never quite able to fill with his work.

He’d always liked the company of women and found that sex came his way without looking for it. And as the clinics took off and he traveled month after month around the country, he found some solace this way. Mostly they were brief affairs, though there were one or two women, as relaxed as he about these matters, who even to this day when he passed through, welcomed him to their beds like an old friend.

The guilt about Rachel however had stayed with him. Until at last he realized that what she had needed from him was need itself. That he should need her as she needed him. And Tom knew that this was impossible. He could never feel such a need, for Rachel or anyone else. For without ever spelling it out to himself and without any sense of self-satisfaction, he already knew he had in his life a kind of innate balance, the kind that others seemed to spend most of their lives striving for. It didn’t occur to him that this was anything special. He felt himself simply part of a pattern, a cohesion of things animate and inanimate, to which he was connected both by spirit and by blood.

He turned the Chevy into the motel parking lot and found a space right outside his room.

The bathtub was too short for a long soak. You had to decide whether to let your shoulders get cold or your knees. He got out and dried himself in front of the TV. The mountain lion story was still big news. They were going to hunt it down and kill it. Men with rifles and fluorescent yellow jackets were combing a hillside. Tom
found it kind of touching. A mountain lion would see those jackets from about a hundred miles. He got into bed, killed the TV and called home.

His nephew Joe, the oldest of Frank’s three boys, answered the phone.

“Hi Joe, how’re you doing?”

“Good. Where are you?”

“Oh, I’m in some godforsaken motel, in a bed that’s about a yard too short. Reckon I may have to take my hat and boots off.”

Joe laughed. He was twelve years old and quiet, much like Tom had been at that age. He was also pretty good with the horses.

“How’s old Brontosaurus doing?”

“She’s good. She’s getting real big. Dad thinks she’ll foal by midweek.”

“You make sure you show your old man what to do.”

“I will. Want to speak to him?”

“Sure, if he’s around.”

He could hear Joe calling his dad. The living room TV was on and, as usual, Frank’s wife Diane was hollering at one of the twins. It still seemed odd, them living in the big ranch house. Tom continued to think of it as his parents’ house even though it was nearly three years since his father had died and his mother had gone to live with Rosie in Great Falls.

When Frank had married Diane, they’d taken over the creek house, the one Tom and Rachel had briefly occupied, and done some remodeling. But with three growing boys it was soon a squeeze and when his mother left, Tom insisted they move into the ranch house. He was away so much of the time, doing clinics, and when he was there, the place felt too big and too empty. He would have been happy to do a straight
swap and move back out to the creek house himself but Diane said they’d only move if he stayed, there was room enough for all of them. So Tom had kept his old room and now they all lived together. Visitors, both family and friends, sometimes used the creek house, though mainly it stood empty.

Tom could hear Frank’s footsteps coming to the phone.

“Hiya bro, how’s it going down there?”

“It’s going okay. Rona’s going for a world record on the number of horses and the motel here’s built for the seven dwarfs but aside from that, everything’s dandy.”

They talked for a while about what was happening on the ranch. They were in the middle of calving, getting up all hours of the night and going up to the pasture to check the herd. It was a lot of hard work but they hadn’t lost any calves yet and Frank sounded cheerful. He told Tom there had been a lot of calls asking if he would reconsider his decision not to do any clinics this summer.

“What did you tell ‘em?”

“Oh, I just said you were getting too old and were all burned out.”

“Thanks pal.”

“And there was a call from some Englishwoman in New York. She wouldn’t say what it was about, just that it was urgent. Gave me a real hard time when I wouldn’t tell her your number down there. I said I’d ask you to call her.”

Tom picked up the little pad off the bedside table and wrote down Annie’s name and the four phone numbers she had left, one of them a mobile.

“That it? Just the four? No number for the villa in the South of France?”

“Nope. That’s it.”

They talked a little about Bronty then said good-bye. Tom looked at the pad. He didn’t know too many people in New York, only Rachel and Hal. Maybe this was something to do with them, though surely this woman, whoever she was, would have said so. He looked at his watch. It was ten-thirty, which made it one-thirty in New York. He put the pad back on the table and switched off the light. He would call in the morning.

   He didn’t get the chance. It was still dark when the phone rang and woke him. He switched on the light before answering and saw it was only five-fifteen.

“Is that Tom Booker?” From the accent, he could tell immediately who it must be.

“I think so,” he said. “It’s kind of early to be sure.”

“I know, I’m sorry. I thought you’d probably be up early and didn’t want to miss you. My name’s Annie Graves. I called your brother yesterday, I don’t know if he told you.”

“Sure. He told me. I was going to call you. He said he hadn’t given you this number.”

“He didn’t. I managed to get it from someone else. Anyway, the reason I’m calling is that I understand you help people who’ve got horse problems.”

“No ma’am, I don’t.”

There was a silence at the other end. Tom could tell he had thrown her.