Painted Horses

by Malcolm Brooks

  She found the wit to step aside. One eerie blue eyeball strained in its socket to follow. The horse was tethered and saddled.

  “Not sure who spooked who, exactly.”

  Catherine jumped anew. A man came around the animal’s backside, sliding an open palm along rump and flank. The horse again shook its head. “Are you all right, miss? Miss?”

  She felt a spike of fury at her own fear. She knew she was shaking, the embarrassment nothing short of crushing. She stared at a smudge on his washed-out blue shirt. Paint.

  “I’m fine. Who’d paint a horse anyway.” Catherine wheeled and made for the street in a rushing walk, chin planted on her chest to avoid an outright run. Her heart banged against her ribs but she willed herself toward something like composure. She did not want to think of herself as fleeing, not when she’d barely arrived.

  She calmed by the time she reached the station. The wind blew with a real fury now, bending dead grass to the earth and slapping trash against the buildings. She hadn’t been around horses since the riding lessons her father insisted upon when she was a girl. Those were well-mannered stable horses, no malice whatsoever.

  The boy had returned from his private errand when she took her seat on the train. He seemed less inclined now toward either showmanship or conversation. His face had the red flush of a lamp.

  She watched the waning sun play with the colors of the rocks and the low broken hills, saw muted, shifting shades of green and gray. The sapphire sky went white, then pink in the west. By the time the train lurched forward, shadows crawled across the ground. Flecks of grit blasted against the glass.

  Not far down the line she saw a mounted rider in the open country to the south, loping toward a notch on the skyline. The blue-shirted man from the park. Catherine couldn’t imagine how horse and rider both didn’t cartwheel away in the wind.

  She took up her book again and studied the name on the spine. Robert Lowie was an anthropologist who had himself spent time in this country and almost certainly would not have fled from a horse.

  She had missed her opportunity. The scientist in her should have taken the cue to investigate. The historian should have unearthed a primitive meaning.

  Still, she was very far from home, and just now very aware of it. She had two final hours on the train and knew she should just slide back into sleep, knew as well this wouldn’t happen.

  She’d stay awake, and dreams would come anyway. She’d see a million black bison, flowing across the plains. She’d dream of mounted warriors, their painted horses.

  2

  He found the herd on the flat above the canyon, a stretch of land devoid of farm or fence. He’d come out to match on canvas the angle of the light on a batholith, thrusting through the earth like a breaching red whale. His own mare cropped bunchgrass while he mixed pigments, tested colors with the ball of his thumb. He heard her pause in her steady feeding, from the edge of his eye saw her head rise, her ears turn forward.

  A neigh like a plea rippled through the falling light. The mare nickered and neighed back and took two steps and John H came off the seat of his jeans, half stumbled on a sage root and felt lightning flash in his knee. He recovered and caught up the reins. She was a loyal horse but also a captive mustang. Loyalty to her own kind might prove the stronger. He whoaed her and checked the cinch and mounted. He left paint and canvas where they lay.

  He rode south across the flat at a lope and steered her into a northeast-running fissure, a wash cut by seasonal water through the time-heaped strata of the plains. He slacked the reins and let her pick her way through stalagmites of crumbling clay, weird impermanent formations jutting like teeth up the walls of the wash. The mare slipped in gumbo above the fissure’s wet floor, lurched in a jerk like the missed stroke of a motor. John H felt the shock of her unbalanced weight throb through his legs. He braced himself to ride out a fall.

  It never came. The mare caught herself heavily on her front feet and schussed to the bottom, hooves sinking in the muck from yesterday’s rain. He rode up the center of the wash. She found dry purchase in places but in others the walls of the wash bottlenecked to permit passage through wet mud only and here he felt the pull of her hooves against the suck of the earth.

  He reined up after five minutes and listened. A draft pushed down the draw, an omen of dark. Evening wind. He strained his ears and heard nothing though the mare seemed to sense something and she pawed at the muck with the urge to be on. He let her move. The light fell fast in the fissure but he looked up at the rim of the plain to see a lavender band on the lip of the sky. Daylight dying.

  He stopped again to listen. The breeze down the draw appeared to work in his favor though he knew full well the same breeze might climb the wall behind him in a swirl of betrayal, circle back to spook a dozen sets of nostrils. He figured more by intuition than any calculus that surely he’d gotten around the others, surely had narrowed the gap. In any case the head of the draw rose not far ahead. No choice but to show himself.

  A nervous nicker told him he’d guessed correctly. The mare snorted and neighed back and John H slapped down with the reins and put her into a gallop, straight up a ribbon of trail charted long ago by game or sheep or range cows.

  Or horses. They were running already by the time rider and mare burst out of the earth onto the plain. Wild as rabbits. He ran alongside at forty yards, tried to steer the mare closer but the herd drifted to the side as well. The light had gone bad and he could feel the rush of wind around him and he knew the danger for himself and also for the horse, but he loved her steady headlong pace, loved the way her neck lengthened and weaved. He loved her streaming mane.

  Not a century ago mounted hunting parties had run bison over this ground, Crow and Cheyenne like sorcerers with their arrows and lances and their own paint-smeared horses. European tourists also, princes and lords on blooded chargers, bored with their estates and killing for the joy of it and for the briefest moment he considered that in this way exactly the challenge of survival had twisted into the thrill of sport. Then the stallion peeled off and charged.

  John H saw him coming across the sage, head down and single-minded and enraged. He turned the mare sharply to the right as the stallion neared, and back to the left like a skier in a slalom, steering her more with his knees and the shift of his weight than with bridle and rein. She had the stick of a natural-born cutting horse though she’d never worked a cow in her life.

  The stallion slowed with the turns and ran a half circle with his head and tail in the air, veering back toward his harem. John H reined the mare and heard the drum of hooves fade in the twilight, pattering like rain in the big-leafed trees of his youth, like nothing that existed near here. The mare put up her head and neighed after them.

  3

  The attendant at the filling station told her he’d never seen such a little thing driving such a big thing.

  Catherine had already resigned herself to looking the truant. Her first morning on the job and already she’d found herself in a stare-down with her own vehicle, a converted Dodge army ambulance with a bright-red paint job. A logo glared in yellow on each door—Harris Power and Light, the words framing a water droplet bisected by a lightning bolt.

  She swallowed her trepidation and climbed into this tank-like machine with its waist-high wheels, gear levers sticking up from the floor like the legs of a spider.

  Her father drove mostly Oldsmobiles or more recently Cadillacs, every one with an automatic transmission, and Catherine rarely had reason to drive even these. David taught her to work a clutch in his little bullet-nosed Ford convertible on the back roads through New Jersey farmland a few weeks earlier, in preparation for this situation exactly. Such was the extent of her ability.

  She fiddled with the choke, pushed the starter button, and the big vehicle came to life, shaking as though she were parked atop an earthquake. For a long moment she just sat there and let the power of the thing rock around her. She was not in England anymore, not in New York and not N
ew Jersey either. She muscled the lever into gear and muscled the wheel around and managed to grind down the street to the gas pumps.

  She got to the point and asked for the simplest route to the canyon.

  “The canyon? The canyon’s even a sight bigger than your rig here.”

  She wasn’t tracking with the attendant’s sense of metaphor. “I realize it’s large but I still need to get there.”

  “Miss, it’s fifty miles long and deeper than Satan’s own appetites. And if you’ll pardon my say-so, it ain’t a place for a woman alone.”

  She caught herself in the side mirror. She had not put herself together the way she knew she was supposed to, and her own image was a little shocking after a single wrestling match with the ambulance. Unadorned green eyes and a hasty ponytail, half the contents of which had come loose in an electrified halo around her head. She wanted to shove the mirror the other direction. “I’ll worry about that.”

  He leveled the tank. “You have a spare gas can? Let me get you one. You can return it when you get back.” The attendant was himself probably her father’s age though he did not resemble him in the least otherwise, with stubbled jowls and a tractor cap and a greasy red rag sprouting from a pocket. But Catherine’s father was wrapped around her little finger and she’d always known it, would brag her up to anyone who’d listen. Perhaps this man missed the apple of his own eye.

  He shuffled into the station and back out with the can. He brought a map as well and spread it on the seat of the ambulance. “I can’t harp too much on how rough that country is, or how remote. You’ll be a long way from help. My advice is to go in here, on the southwest side. It’s farther to drive but the easiest way down. I don’t know how much time you plan to spend, but judging by the looks of your Dodge I’d guess a good amount.”

  She could tell he was curious but too polite to ask. “The Harris company did provide the car but I actually work for the Smithsonian Institution.” The words rang in her own ears, still soberingly official. “I’m to do a survey in the canyon. Look for historical sites, and so on.”

  He nodded. “I see. RBS?”

  River Basin Surveys. She felt herself blink. “Uh-huh. Forgive me if I seem shocked. I’d never heard of it myself until, well, recently.”

  “I’ve worked on a few dam projects, over the years. Been around archaeology, too. Maintain an interest.”

  “I’ll be here through the summer. So yes, I plan to spend, as you put it, a good amount of time.”

  “Take my advice. Don’t rush yourself. Ease in and get a feel for the country. Stay close to the road. You have water? You’ll need some. Extra clothes, too, warm coat, gloves. Matches and a candle to make a fire. Hope for the best. Plan for the worst.”

  She knew she looked as taken aback as she felt.

  “Pardon me a second time, but it’s a sure bet you’re not from around here.” He eyed the legend on the driver’s door, the lightning bolt on the company logo. “No doubt you’re a capable soul, but whoever’s sending you into that canyon alone is a liar or a fool. My opinion.”

  “Actually there is supposed to be someone, a horse wrangler or something, but it’s been two days and he hasn’t shown up yet.” She shrugged. “I have a job to do.”

  He nodded. “I expect you do. Never was one to shirk a task myself. Just know what you’re getting into. And watch for snakes.”

  Catherine towered in the driver’s seat, looking down on him now and feeling consciously tiny in the dim cab of the Dodge. Despite the glimmering exterior the inside was downright filthy, the coil of a spring protruding through the front seat and a mantle of dust on the dash and dials. Surplus grime from the late days of the war for all she knew, residue of Africa or Italy. The attendant closed the door for her. “My name’s Max Caldwell,” he said. “You can keep the map. Bring my gas can back.”

  “I will. I promise.” She looked out through the glass at the studded, stony terrain, jumbled lowlands leaping into unruly rises, new grass blushing the brown earth green and everywhere, that odd shrub. “What is that plant?” she murmured.

  “What plant?”

  What plant, she thought. “The shrub,” she said. “That gray shrub. It’s endless.”

  “You mean the sagebrush?”

  Of course. Obvious, now that he said it. “You’ll have to forgive me,” she said. “I’ve never been out of the East.”

  “Quite all right, miss. But so you know—to the people been living out here the longest, it ain’t just any plant. It’s a sacred plant.”

  She felt the word as much as heard it, felt an eerie shiver she’d come to acquaint with London rubble. The tips of her fingers on cold Roman stones.

  She pressed the starter button and the ambulance roared alive. Mr. Caldwell gave her a nod. She let out the clutch with her red sneaker, and she rolled away.

  She followed the road along the river where the land was not quite so empty. She passed ranch yards, islands of leaf-bearing trees with a frame house and a jumble of outbuildings, also long stretches of spring grass with horses and cows. Once she slowed for a herd of sheep in the roadway, stopping altogether until drovers on horseback and a swarm of snapping dogs steered the bleating animals to the ditch.

  The road climbed from pastureland to a raised plateau. A line of mountains jutted in the distance but otherwise the ocean of sage rose and fell in every direction, even her lumbering ambulance just a red speck upon it.

  Sacred. A word that seemed to follow her lately, a word she’d seized upon herself, not long ago. A word that got her to Montana.

  It was true she’d paid scant attention to New World archaeology before graduate school, a bias of interest that didn’t occur to her as bias at all until a classmate, a male, went on the warpath one day in a full lecture hall, ambushed her with his big brain and hostile glare. Also this repellent, preemptive arrogance.

  “Look, we get it, all right?” he said. She was midsentence and she stared at him. “You and London, you and Rome. We get it. We got it.”

  The professor went to say something and her antagonist ran right over the professor too.

  “You have this holiday abroad like a, a girl in a Forster novel or something, and now everything else, every other civilization in every other part of the world is just some infantile thing, some teleological footnote. You realize not everything started in Athens or Egypt or Rome, right?”

  “I’m sorry if I sound like a broken record, but—”

  “You sound like a cultural chauvinist.”

  “A what!”

  “What do you know about Sandia, anything? Chaco Canyon ring a bell?”

  She was about to bring up Gordon Childe, who she’d actually met once at a dinner in London, but the professor waved in and announced with clear relief that the hour had ended. Later she knew this was probably for the best—the Childe bit ran the risk of proving the boy’s point—so with that triumphant smirk, he got the last word.

  She left with her teeth set and her face burning, determined not so much to alter her field of interest as to correct the thing that really rankled—that this withering boy knew something she did not.

  Trouble was, compared to classical antiquity there was little in the published record to work with, and not much in the ground either. American archaeology didn’t and couldn’t deal with civilizations, not as she regarded the term. She had a vague sense of important prehistoric work going on in the Southwest, but the early Stone Age sites in Europe seemed to tower above even these and in any case, the Paleolithic was hardly her department.

  As far as she was concerned, the Egyptians invented beauty.

  The Romans owned the world.

  Still, she made an effort. Two days after the offending incident and wincing yet at the sting, Catherine glanced up from a manuscript in the research stacks and realized with a start she was not alone. A man she didn’t recognize loafed in a chair nearby, studying her as though she were an artifact herself, an amusing one. Her eyes darted back down.
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  “You’re mighty fidgety over there,” he told her.

  She looked back up. “I am? I’m sorry. Do I know you?”

  She did not. He said he was a field archaeologist out of a university in Texas, here for a week to assist with a donated southern Plains collection. He wore cowboy boots, badly scuffed, and a blinding white shirt with pearl snaps, six on each sleeve alone. Certainly not what one typically spied sauntering about in the U Penn halls. He told her he was keeping his eye on that there monograph she was choking the lights out of.

  She held it up. “This monograph?”

  “That very one.” Still with the lopsided smile.

  This man was older than she was by—ten years? Fifteen? With that particular brand of elegant, almost lewd Southern accent, no less. She considered she was playing right into something, considered also why men her own age could still seem so, well, snot-nosed.

  She frowned at the author’s name, in block letters on the front. “I’m supposed to be expanding my appreciation, but this—who’s it? H. M. Wormington?—he’s not got me hooked so far.”

  “You’re about as impatient as a racehorse in a round pen.”

  “So you’ve said.”

  “It’s she, by the way.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “H. M. Wormington. Hannah Marie.”

  Chastened yet again. “See why I’m trying to expand?”

  “It’s an engineered mistake, miss. You can bet the ranch on it. So what is it does grab your attention?”

  “Londinium,” she said. “Most recently.”

  He straightened in his chair, and she got the sense he at least missed a beat.

  “So you’re that one. Somehow I pictured a few more years on you.”

  She looked at him.

  “There’s a buzz in the offices about you, miss. You’ve even got the instructors green with envy. Can’t say I blame them.”