The Shasta Gate

by Dick Croy

  “Please don’t give me any bullshit this time about not knowing till yesterday that you were going up there, okay?” Catherine gave him a quick look, then plunged again into the disorder of her packing, a little more grimly now. Bill had given way to an at once vivid yet vaguely detailed figure that she knew to be her father: her father as an adversary, with layer upon layer of hurt, anger, frustration and resentment built up like a photographic image somewhere behind her eyes. That’s where she seemed to see it, but the invasive image—or was she inviting it?—was burning a hole in her insides. She focused on her simple task as if it required the last ounce of her concentration.

  “Listen, I know I blew up at you last night, and I’m sorry about it. I wish we’d talked it over reasonably. We should have, instead of going to bed and making love as if nothing had happened. But since we didn’t, can’t we talk about it now, for Christ’s sake?”

  “You’re taking this as a rejection of you,” she said. “I knew you would. Everything’s always for you or against you. But the fact is, Bill, this is just something I want to do that doesn’t include you. It’s not a rejection.

  “This is the same thing we went through last year. I guess I just put it out of my mind, making a decision about whether or not I was going. I didn’t want the hassle.” Catherine had just gone from conciliation to exasperation, believing for a moment that she could actually reach Bill, and then—seeing his set jaw, the desperate anger in his eyes—feeling her own anger and frustration flood to the surface at being put on the defensive like this, being made wrong.

  There wasn’t anything wrong with her going away for the summer! It was really her knowing in advance that he would react this way, try to refuse her the right to live her life the way she damn well pleased, that had resigned her to the possibility of not returning to him. If somehow she could go up there and get this city and the rest of her frustrations aired out on Jebel Druze—restore herself in the serenity and solitude of that magnificent country under Shasta’s gaze, in her almost mystically intimate conversations with Ram—and then come back to Bill likewise freshened and renewed by a summer on his own, wouldn’t their relationship have been strengthened by the separation?

  But what connection was there between a fantasy like this and the real world, where problems only multiplied, mushroomed, never resolved themselves neatly through patience and tolerance—love? Couldn’t Bill see that they both wanted the same thing for themselves but that life, having merged their paths in the first place so that they ran along together for awhile, intertwined and mutually sustaining…this same relentless flow of life was now simply diverting these same paths—and there wasn’t a goddamned thing either one of them could do about it?

  She could just as easily rail at him for driving her away with his patronizing and superior attitude, his stifling possessiveness. Christ, her secure little world was disintegrating too, but she didn’t hold him responsible. It’s fucking life, man!

  Suddenly her eyes brimmed with tears. Both arms full, she stood there in the middle of the floor, unable to see, unable to wipe away the tears. Turning from him, she lowered her head and tried to hold in the anguish, the confusion. If she let go now…this obsessive packing was all that was keeping her together.

  “Oh, Katy…” Somehow Bill had unburdened her arms and enclosed Catherine in his own in one sweeping motion; she shrank gratefully into their strength and protection. He folded her deeper to his breast and, to each of them, it felt as if they were falling together from a great height. She could hold back her sobs no longer. They burst from her in a strange hysterical music, punctuated by great clumsy racking spasms from Bill. They cried for the hurt they had caused each other; they cried for their lost love and their loneliness. It seemed to them that they stood for all the helpless souls in the world and that all loves were destined to end this way: wells finally run dry, their last traces of water vanishing into soil as used up and dead as sand.

  Chapter 4

  Ram had risen at dawn. The crisp morning air as he walked across the paddock to the barn vaporized his breath even as the sun, still well below the horizon, was emblazoning the mountain’s snow-covered summit. But for this orange flame at its mouth—as if the ancient volcano had awaken at last and yawned now in fearsome anticipation of the day—the sleeping giant was cloaked still in darkness. The Indian gazed hard at its dim features as if to read in them the full meaning of his dream. He laughed to himself even as he did so; Shasta didn’t sleep that soundly.

  He turned and walked into the rich reek of the horse barn. The smells of horse, feed, manure and leather arose from the darkness to greet him, so strong they bled into his other senses. He seemed to see their exhalation in the dark, to hear the creak of leather in the tack room. The appaloosa heard his approach and neighed, thrusting his head over the stall, lifting his head attentively in greeting.

  “Tawahani,” the Indian grunted warmly, laying his thick hand gently on the horse’s nose. The appaloosa snorted and tossed his head, and the two of them shared an otherwise silent communion.

  “Catherine comes today, Tawahani. We must go out and bring in the stallion.” He opened the door to the stall and slipped on the rope halter hanging there. The horse accepted it unquestioningly and followed him to the tack room, eager for the exercise to come. Ram draped the worn but clean blanket across his back, threw on the saddle, and cinched it in a ballet of absolutely unwasted motion. It was a perfect mime of the operation, only the essentials, performed unconsciously out of long habit for the satisfaction it gave both him and the animal. The horse stood still under his hands, sides quivering, ears twitching.

  Mounting in the same precise, effortless manner, Ram merely touched the horse with his calves. They were in motion, gliding across the paddock, down the gravel drive which led to the highway. Then they were in open meadow, slipping through the gray morning as one.

  Ram gave the appaloosa his head, holding the reins loosely, musing still on the stallion and his role in the dream of the night before. He would be somewhere in the high pasture this morning, with his dozen mares and their ten foals. They had been put out just a few weeks earlier, as soon as the newborns were strong enough, to get as much of the spring grass as they could before the summer took its life. The harem would follow the stallion to the ranch and Ram would have to take them back out later without him.

  Eight years ago Jebel Druze had been her father’s gift to Catherine on her twelfth birthday. He was hers to ride in the summer, and the ranch’s champion stud the rest of the time. Her mother had been opposed to this arrangement in spite of the youngster’s precocious skill and cool head with horses. She had ridden stallions before, but to have one for an entire summer seemed to her mother an unnecessary provocation of fortune.

  “To give a young girl a horse like that is no better than gambling with her life at cards!” she had stormed in reference to her husband’s passion for losing an almost fixed percentage of their income as a preferred customer at one of the better-known Vegas casinos. He was a conservative and extremely successful man in most things. Perhaps his gambling allowed him to live more comfortably with that success, made it seem less automatic, somehow more earned and certainly more attractive.

  He had a need as well for the showpiece, the grand gesture. The breeding ranch was one of these and so probably was the striking young girl on the Arabian stallion. Over the years Catherine had had a few mishaps with the horse but nothing more serious than a compound fracture of her right leg when he fell on it in a ravine. That had happened three summers ago and had not diminished her enthusiasm for either riding or her beloved Jebel Druze. The accident had been her own foolhardy fault and had sobered her. Had it been Jebel’s leg, he’d likely have been destroyed. All she lost was a summer’s activity.

  Her father rarely visited the ranch. Just knowing it was there, that its reputation for quality enhanced his own, was enough. He knew that the Indian disapproved of him; that had had a lot to do with his being hire
d in the first place. The disapproval he had read in Ram’s eyes when introduced to the mediocre facility he’d been asked to build into a first-class breeding ranch confirmed a side of Conrad’s self-image that no one else had ever had the capacity to see—or at least to communicate to him. It censured without judgment, something Conrad was unable to manage, with himself or anyone else.

  The Indian was a mirror and the censure actually came from Conrad himself but unattached to blame and therefore unimpeded by defensiveness. He knew intuitively, although perhaps not consciously, that having Ram involved in his life in this way was of benefit to him. He could see into the mirror from a distance, at any time, from wherever he happened to be. To look into it directly was usually more than he could handle.

  Catherine didn’t give her father this much credit. She was aware of a more obvious way in which he used Ram, because it involved something she had inherited from him: a fierce love of the Western myth. To Conrad, a man of accomplishment, whose self-worth was measured by the things he did, or took credit for, the ranch and the long string of champion horses tied him into the winning of the West. They told him he’d have been just as successful when the frontier was being blazed, by men who loomed as giants in his mind. The Indian was the first to make that connection for him. Nothing and no one else had been able to do it.

  Since her graduation from high school, Conrad rarely saw his daughter. They were two independent souls who had never quite accepted that in the other. Catherine told herself that she respected this quality in him, not having learned yet that what she thought of as her father’s independence was her own mental abstraction. It put him in good company, conjuring up pictures of the stone-faced men of action and determination who had shaped the destiny of her land. What was real about this quality in him, of course, was his behavior, which had always shut her out of much of his life. She resented him for this—all the more deeply because, without realizing it, she was trying to honor him for it at the same time.

  What Conrad found disturbing enough in his daughter to make him increasingly more willing to follow her vindictive lead as they drifted further and further apart was another of those mirrors. This one indelibly retained impressions, reflecting a child’s lifetime of parenting. And this one, too, he found easier to deal with at a distance.

  …Morning was opening to horse and rider—the meadow was a carpet of light. Ram’s body resonated with the appaloosa’s tireless fluid canter like the chamber of a stringed instrument, calling forth a flood of vivid imagery from his past. As if he and the horse left a spangled wake behind them in the cool transparent morning: a bar of Ram’s music. He neither held on to these pictures nor resisted them; they simply flowed through him. He sensed they were part of an emptying or cleansing process, which had begun recently, to help free his soul of its earthly ties.

  While he moved through it, his eyes were constantly scanning the folds and ridges of the meadow for the horses. They’d be up here somewhere; he could feel them nearby. The mountain was fully lit now—its mystery, to the average eye, overwhelmed by a more ordinary reality. Below the snow-pack, suggestion and shadow had become sheer cliffs and ridgelines, forests scarred by deep canyons and vast fields of scree: the rock slide’s fury turned to rubble, frozen in time.

  A great billowing mass of cloud weighted the horizon, and the peculiar lenticular or lens-shaped cloud which often hovered over the mountain had begun to form. Later when the wind came up and the cloud mass left the shoulders of the land to stream across the sky, the mysterious ring around Shasta’s summit would hold, continually dissipating and re-forming in an illusion of permanency: a curious anomaly in the midst of an otherwise constant flow of thick cumulus past the peak.

  Suddenly both Ram and his mount heard the high-pitched neigh of a mare. They were upwind from the nervous warning; their scent or the sound of their approach had reached the horses.

  “They are in the arroyo, Tawahani!”

  The appaloosa needed no urging. The easy ride had warmed and loosened his muscles and he stretched them out now in fierce pride under his master. Feeling his excitement, Ram gave the horse full rein and they tore up the incline as if caught in a sudden updraft. Mane, tail, and the Indian’s long hair were taken by surprise and flew to catch up.

  Near the top of the slope Ram pulled the horse in so as not to come thundering over the rim of the gully; he had too much to do to spend the rest of the day rounding up the Arabians. When they did come into the herd’s view it was slowly, with an air of majesty—which the appaloosa affected as naturally, for the benefit of his brethren, as did the Indian. His ears and tail erect, his head held high, he snorted and pranced in short high steps to the side as Ram held the reins taut.

  “Look at the young A-rabs, Tawahani. The meadow gives them desert legs.”

  The weeks had done wonders for the once-frail and spider-legged foals. They owned the meadow now—although at the moment they weren’t too sure about the strange two-headed creature at the top of the arroyo. They trotted as a group over to the mares, on legs now firm and resilient. Their sense of security restored, they began to make individual sorties out away from the others, sniffing the air, their sharp pointed little ears working like antennae. Then something would spook them and they’d turn and scamper back to the safety of the others. To Ram, it was a circus. His keen and expert eye had quickly told him that all was well with the harem, and with the stallion. Jebel Druze stood haughtily at a distance. He recognized the intruders and waited to see why they had come.

  Ram greeted him in his mind and turned his attention again to the antics of the foals, who were becoming increasingly bolder. A colt with three stockings and a blaze, which he remembered as the most curious before they’d been put out to pasture, had actually climbed partway up the rocky slope and was looking around to make sure his brothers and sisters were watching. Ram’s amusement got the better of him and he laughed aloud. The youngster turned in almost a hop, tucking his butt under him and descending in a clatter of loose rocks. This spooked the rest of them and they milled excitedly about their mothers with falsetto little whinnies.

  Ram knew each mare well and noticed how they individually reacted, with some soothing their foal’s fears and others snorting reprovingly. Of the two who had not given birth, Serena, who was becoming something of an old maid, was especially caustic. She reached out to nip at the retreating Three-stockings, prompting a curt unmistakable warning from his mother.

  The cause of all this commotion in the first place, Ram decided it was time to ride in and settle things down. Stroking the appaloosa’s neck to reassure him that he had not been forgotten in the company of all these high-bred Arabians, he eased him carefully down the steep side of the arroyo. At this, snorting, the stallion finally cantered over to assert his leadership. The Indian laughed in a sort of shared male camaraderie as the magnificent animal sauntered up to them and stopped, barring their path to the harem.

  “You’re proud of your winter’s work, ay, desert chieftain? Well, soon we display your heirs for all Siskiyou County—all of California—to see. How about that?” As he spoke to the horse, Ram stretched his left arm out slowly and gently urged the appaloosa forward until he could almost touch the stallion’s nose. Then it was Jebel Druze who advanced a step, to investigate the carrot the Indian held. Nibbling the treat from Ram’s hand, he took it between his teeth and snorted while loudly munching the carrot. The sweet smell of his breath reached Ram’s nostrils. Then he tossed his head imperiously, lest the Indian think this stallion could be bought so cheaply. But he made way for them to pass.

  Ram wanted to examine the foals before leading them back to the ranch. The mares, who knew the Indian and his mount, nevertheless had their mothering instinct to contend with. These few weeks at pasture had sharpened it at the expense of their recognition and trust of the man. They were not hostile but wary.

  He spoke to the first of them in a voice full of conviction, less condescending in tone than an impatient
teacher might use with a slow student. “He is a fine colt, Lalla. It is not for nothing your mother is called the Golden Goose, youngster. She lays such beautiful eggs.” He slipped from the saddle and the colt, Three-stockings, approached him diffidently in a spiral of curiosity at war with fear. Finally Ram’s beckoning hand was too much to resist. It feels strange, but reassuring he said in every way but verbally as Ram ran his leathery hands over the youngster’s sleek quivering body.

  This taught the others to relax; in a moment the Indian was surrounded by the curious eager foals. “Hah, little ones, the spring grass feeds your spirit—especially you, little fox-ears! And what a croup you have,” he said to a dainty little filly who had danced up behind him to nuzzle his elbow. He lay the palm of his hand on her haunches in front of her tail. “Flat enough to set a meal on.

  “And look at you, with your eyes already bulging like a young sheik’s. Tell your sister the Unicorn to come here.” This filly, whom Ram had named for her particularly striking jibbah, the Arabian’s characteristic bulge at the brow, was the shiest of the foals. He wouldn’t be content until he’d shown her the gentleness of his ways. As with the stallion, Ram began to speak to her mentally—cajoling her, visualizing her coming over to be caressed, then feeling her lean lithe body under his hand, the softness of her chestnut coat over the contours of a splendid conformation. This little filly would not only be another champion but a fine brood mare. She cast him a sidelong look.

  Come, little shy one said Ram’s eyes, these hands will watch over you. They’ll help you grow and give you trust and confidence in man. The Unicorn whinnied softly and glanced nervously at the other foals. Ram knew that she felt threatened by this strange, alien presence in her mind.

  “You are tense and afraid,” he said gently. “Let me touch your fear. These are hands for taking fear away.” The filly whinnied again rather piteously and shook her head. Then she walked slowly up to him. Ram did as he had promised, his hands drinking the tension from her taut body until he felt the muscles relax beneath his fingers and his mind’s eye detected around her a shining, what most psychics would call an aura.