Painted Horses

by Malcolm Brooks

  “It was luck,” she told him. “A happy mistake. And not an engineered one.”

  “Well,” he told her, “all roads do lead to Rome. As they say. Just so you know, where I come from Hannah Wormington does what you might call definitive work. But when she started publishing she had to use her initials, so people would make the same assumption you did.”

  “That’s hardly fair. Now I actually need to give it a chance, which isn’t fair either. Is it.”

  “No, but I expect even Hannah Marie would tell you not to waste your time down that rabbit hole. She’d tell you not to waste your time, period. Just get your work done. Even if you do it under an alias.”

  Catherine only recently had an essay accepted to American Journal of Archaeology. Her first, due in the next issue. “Pieces of God—The Sacred and the Profane in Archaeological London.”

  He stretched out again. Assumed his ease. “You might consider pointing west yourself, Londinium. Still the frontier out there. Fortunes to be made.”

  What he said next did make her sit straighter. “Smithsonian’s desperate for summer crew around water projects, and there are plenty of those in the Missouri basin alone. I did some of that work myself, back from the war. Went on a long quiet campout in Wyoming, looking for tepee rings. ’Course I hate to say it—they don’t as a matter of custom let women into the field.”

  He chewed on this a minute, then reached for a battered leather bag, rummaged inside, and came up with a tablet. He flipped a page, scanned some scrawl, flipped another, and found a blank corner. He penned a name and address.

  “Corps of Engineers is rubber-stamping projects faster than you can scorch the hair on a dogie. Nobody can keep up with it.” He tore the corner loose. “I know for a fact River Basin Surveys is so short on hands it’s gone to using amateurs. Here and there. Volunteers. Local history clubs.

  “Write to this address; see if they’ve got anything over the summer you could sign on to. A dig, an appraisal, whatever. Play up what happened to you in London. Use my name. Tell them I referred you. That’s me, Hughes, at the bottom. Hell, miss, apply with your initials if you have to. You might get lucky twice.”

  Catherine took the paper scrap and went home for the weekend. By coincidence three advance copies of her first published credit had shown in the day’s mail. She spent half of Saturday composing and worrying over a letter, and sent it off with one of the journals on Monday.

  Two months later, long after she’d uncrossed her fingers and ceased to feel lucky at all, the telephone on the hall stand rang. She answered to a switchboard operator with long distance on the line, a gentleman from River Basin Surveys out of Lincoln, Nebraska.

  Now in Montana the state of her luck seemed again an open question. She was not off to the start she’d anticipated. Two days ago she expected to meet with the dam contractor in his office in Billings, but he turned out to be out of the country altogether. Dub Harris. He left a letter with his secretary, the phrasing of which had half whirled, half scraped through her brain ever since.

  As you are aware the Smithsonian Institution generally will not hire women for River Basin Surveys. However, because of your prior experience on a site that interfered with a development project, an exception was made. Welcome to the future, Miss Le Mat.

  You will work in a canyon south of Billings, on the Wyoming border. Though you will perform your duties as an agent of the RBS, you should regard Harris Power and Light as a natural ally. I am contracted with the Army Corps of Engineers to build a dam at the mouth of this canyon, a major hydroelectric dam, five hundred feet tall. I have agreed to provide the necessary ground support for the duration of your task . . .

  A portion of the canyon does lie on Crow Indian land. It may come to your attention also that a faction within the Crow is, to put it diplomatically, resistant to this process. This faction may tell you it regards the canyon as sacred.

  I myself possess a significant collection of Indian artifacts. Plains war shirts, kachina dolls. An important group of wooden masks from the Pacific coast. I’ve made my holdings available to museums for the edification of the public, and to academic departments as well. So I’m not without sympathy.

  Nor am I ignorant of reality. By modern reckoning the canyon is a wasteland and I intend to drown it, for the benefit of everyone including the Crow, whose schools and services and general opportunities to advance only stand to gain.

  You play a crucial role, Miss Le Mat. As you will see, the terrain at the canyon’s interior is nothing short of inhospitable. Even at their height the Plains tribes spent little time there, thus the relevance of the canyon if any must be understood as merely symbolic, a place of imaginary spirits and dim superstitions. Your work will illuminate the mission of progress.

  I expect you to go in after the Seven Cities, the Fountain of Youth. You will find neither, but you do need to try.

  Sincerely, the letter was signed, Dub Harris.

  He’d gotten her name wrong, addressed the letter to Miss Catherine Le Mat. She’d come a long way, and he’d gotten her name wrong. The part about the Crow was news, otherwise the information was little different than what she already understood about the project. But seeing the words on a page launched with this particular error dredged up some black streak she thought she’d put behind her in London.

  She forced the bile back down, scolded herself for being ridiculous. My name, she’d told the secretary, it’s Catherine Lemay, and the secretary made a note of it. Then a company driver whisked her to a house and an ambulance in Fort Ransom, an hour south of Billings, told her to wait to hear from her guide, and that was that. She was on her own. She stuck it out one full day, and by this morning found herself unable to wait any longer. She’d cut her archaeological teeth in London, a step ahead of the dozer blades. She felt the old urgency flooding back.

  She was chewing again on the word sacred when she topped a low rise and saw a sight that would disturb her sleep. A bloody man with leather chaps and a length of pipe battled a caged monster at the side of the road. She heard the scream of her wheels when her foot jumped by reflex on the brake, felt the wallop when the ambulance slammed to a halt.

  The cage was the back of a stake-side truck, the creature inside a deranged horse. She could not see the animal in full through the wooden stakes and battens but what she could see was bad enough. The horse bunched violently against the boards, head high in the air and lips peeled in a grimace, all four feet hammering the plank floor. Blood dripped like sap from its muzzle.

  The man swung the pipe hard against the corner closest to the horse shouting, “Down, get down you bitch, Alpo loves a dumb sonofabitch like you,” and the horse shied backward and somehow even in this compressed impoundment gathered the space to drive both back hooves into the boards behind it.

  Wood snapped like a lightning strike, shrapnel thumping against the ambulance. The horse bled all over, blood running from a gash in its head, blood in rivers on the insides of its legs.

  One rear hoof caught in the broken boards, like a monkey with its fist in a jar. This enraged the horse even more and it began to nod its head in mad slashing strokes, blood and snot catching light like jewels snapped loose from a chain. The truck bucked on its springs.

  The man with the pipe came to the back and swung at the trapped hoof. The pipe connected with a metallic thud, not at all the crack the same hoof made striking the boards a moment ago. The horse went berserk nonetheless and ripped its foot back through the boards with a heave, shattering more wood and shearing hide and flesh from its hock. The horse reared and slashed at the air with its front hooves, lunged forward and brought forefeet into the roof with a sound like a car crash.

  The horse tried to scramble over the cab but now the man appeared there, jumping onto the hood and bringing his pipe down across its snout. Another sickening thud. Catherine cringed in her seat.

  The horse rose again to escape and fell backward into the cage, toppling with a lack of grace that shou
ld have been impossible in so powerful a creature. The truck bounced, a child’s toy gone haywire. The horse’s four legs pawed the air. It tried to roll to its feet but couldn’t right itself in the cramped space.

  The man came to the back with a rope. He moved quickly but did not seem rattled, which seemed to Catherine a form of madness. He passed the rope through the lower slats at the rear of the truck, over the neck of the struggling horse and again through the slats. He tied the horse’s head to the floor.

  The horse panted now but lost much of its frenzy. The man climbed the outside of the cage, dropped a loop over one rear hoof and lashed the hoof to the sidewall.

  She’d pulled her limbs into her body, both knees and both fists tight beneath her chin. She forced herself to unlimber now, frantically pressed the starter button. The stalled Dodge jumped forward but failed to start. She stomped the clutch, slammed the shift arm back into first and hit the button again, heard the engine wheeze and wheeze and finally roar to life. A tire chirped as she took off, her foot heavy on the gas.

  She felt her pulse race, felt a hole in the pit of her core. She knew the blood on the man was not his own. He looked up at her as she passed, straightened a bit with what she prayed was not recognition. His aviator glasses had not shaken loose.

  By one in the afternoon her arms felt like appendages in mutiny. She was far into the canyon, miles she assumed, though stupidly she hadn’t checked the odometer when she turned off the highway.

  She’d come in on the narrow dirt track, crawling in the Dodge’s impossibly low gear across washes and fissures and bogs of spring mud. At this pace the truck was nearly impossible to steer and twice when the front tires caught and twisted in a cleft the wheel wrenched violently out of her hands, spinning like the blade of a saw. The first time she bruised the meat of her hand on a spoke, and the next she just hit the brakes and got out of the way. At least she had something to tear her mind from the man with the horse by the highway.

  Finally after an hour she bottomed out on a wide flat along the river. She stopped and set the brake and simply stared.

  She could see why Caldwell had directed her here. The road in seemed steep but it was nothing compared to the trench in the earth downstream, where the land at either side of the canyon simply vanished in a perpendicular chasm.

  Upriver the canyon floor broadened, hedged on either side by a jumble of cliffs, by ravines and hills with rounded tops and steep sides. Fir stands clung in green peninsulas. Here in the bottom it was all gray sage and rough crumbling rock.

  Nothing moved on the wide landscape. No wind blew. Stillness exemplified. In the distance on the far wall of the canyon she saw a geologic wonder, a series of stone flutes like organ pipes in the nave of a cathedral. Fifty, a hundred feet tall.

  Catherine pulled the door handle, heard the screech and pop of the latch. She felt the sand of the roadway through the soles of her sneakers.

  She went toward the water, the sky overhead the most undiluted shade of blue. She stepped around islands of rust-colored rock, wound through clumps of sagebrush and fingers of green spring grass. She saw pellet-shaped animal droppings, scattered and dry as the sand itself but nevertheless the first sign of warm-blooded life.

  A riotous clutch of birds erupted from the stillness like an act of nature, a freak storm or the jet of a geyser, rising in a roar of wings and throaty chuck-chuck-chucks nearly from beneath her feet. Catherine’s heart jumped. A tardy straggler got up afterward to follow the core of the flock. Catherine watched them wing down the canyon, several dozen at least, the white of their underbodies visible for a very long time. Her best guess some sort of oversized quail. Although the immediate foliage seemed spare indeed she had no idea the birds rested right in front of her, like chips of the landscape come violently alive.

  She tried to cram the terrain around her into some logical grid in her mind, a way to impose order on the most unruly, indecipherable tract of earth she’d ever seen.

  Howard Carter dug for five years in the Valley of the Kings before finding what he was after. She of course expected nothing like the famous tomb, but five years. And he had a logical place to start. That was all she asked for.

  She walked upriver to stretch her limbs. A gray rabbit broke from a sage clump, startling her less than the birds had. Coming here today had been a mistake. She needed someone who could give her a place to start. She needed an Indian.

  Minutes later any remaining optimism deflated along with the right rear tire. She muscled the steering wheel in a three-point turn to head back the way she’d come, heard the burst and pressured hiss. She put the gearbox in neutral and climbed out.

  A sliver of gray stone pierced the rubber tread like a spike. She stood there and watched the tire empty and for the first time since the day she watched the English coast recede behind her, felt as though she might break down and cry. She fought the tears until the wave passed.

  She’d never changed a tire in her life. She remembered a flat one Sunday when she was a girl, her father swearing by the side of the road, but that was years ago and she’d paid scant attention. She knew she could walk out if she had to but the prospect of this, the sheer humiliation, made her want to cry all over again.

  She freed the spare from its recess behind the driver’s door. It wasn’t light but she managed it to the ground, wheeled it to the rear of the truck. She found the jack and lug wrench but no instructions on their use. She fiddled with the jack, made it wind up and back down again and set it in what seemed like a logical place beneath the axle. She thought she had the jack securely placed but apparently not, for when she cranked the crippled tire off the ground the jack tipped and popped loose, and to her horror the Dodge rolled forward.

  She leaped out of the way. The ambulance heaved and picked up speed with the grade, the lug wrench whirling crazily with the rotation of the wheel and then sailing loose to bounce and ring along the ground.

  The front wheels hit a low wash crosswise to the river and the runaway truck crashed to a stop in a burst of debris. The ambulance rocked.

  Now she really did cry, a mixture of shock and self-reproach. She sat and bawled, not caring to quit until she considered she had no choice. She’d have to walk to the highway and she’d better get started. Five or six hours ahead of her at least. She sniffled and tried not to think about the hitchhiking that lay in her future.

  She forced herself out of the dirt and went to the ambulance. She wiped her eyes and her cheeks with the thin blue skin of her wrists, her fingers and hands black from the tire and jack.

  The ambulance seemed stable enough in its resting place, half in the ditch. She took her jacket and gloves from the front seat and her container of water and the ignition key. She followed the prints of the tires up the side of the canyon.

  4

  John H wormed to the edge and propped on his elbows in the sage. He raised the binoculars. The horses stepped from a chute in the canyon wall and he heard hooves on stone, heard pebbles shift from a thousand-year sleep. The pebbles bounced and gathered speed, spilled off a stone lip and settled again.

  The glasses came from Germany and bore Nazi stampings in the arbor, a swastika in a circle with an eagle up above. John H still had a bit-and-bridle rig he’d used before the war, the silver conchos disfigured with a tricorn file to obliterate other, ornamental swastikas after the Luftwaffe bombed Guernica, Spain, in 1937. Nearly twenty years ago now. He wasn’t twenty himself then, still young enough to think the teeth of a file might actually change something.

  The days had lengthened with the spring but the horses wore their winter coats and through the perfect prism of German glass he saw sunlight flash in the fibers along their backs. Twenty-eight horses emerged, seemingly from the cleft in the rock.

  Two were foals only, days old and knock-kneed, attached to their mothers by an invisible tether. Other mares heaved about with swollen bellies, ready to drop their own young at any moment, one in particular hanging off by herself with an amni
otic wash down the insides of her back legs. The herd stallion stayed to the rear. All had solid coats, bay and blood bay and chestnut and the stud horse himself, a dun the color of alfalfa honey with a black line the length of his spine. Not a piebald or roan among them.

  John H was less consumed by color than configuration, what his father and others in the thoroughbred world called conformation. He studied the way their wide skulls narrowed to a delicate muzzle, the way the nose in profile had a slight Roman curve. The shape of the chest had uncommon narrowness as well, forelegs meeting the body nearly at the same point, different from the solid, blunt boxiness of a quarter horse.

  He watched the stallion through the glass, watched him turn and test the air and shake his head hard, watched dust explode from his coat. Behind him the shriek of a hawk, somewhere in the wind.

  Last night on the flat he had a fair glimpse of the stallion when the horse turned out of his charge, thought he knew what he was looking at then and was sure of it now, studying through glasses in daylight. Those tapering muscles and heads. These may not be thoroughbreds or standardbreds or even predictable quarter horses, but nor were they any motley collection of hammerheaded feral mustangs. These horses had crossed northern Africa with the Berbers, carried warring Moors into Spain. Into the New World with Cortez, to put the fear of pale gods into the Aztec. Eaten by the Apache. Adopted by the Comanche. John H had heard the stories. He had not seen their kind in all his years on the sage.

  He watched from the rim for a long time. He wished he had materials along to sketch but he didn’t so he only studied the way they moved one among another, identifying their signs and signals and the language of gestures common to their kind, in Africa or Iberia or in a Kentucky bluegrass pasture. He noted the herd mare, a zebra dun with antique stripes on her legs and the stallion’s same dark dorsal line. She did his bidding while he hung on the edge, cropping spring grama and swatting flies in the sun.

  Once the stallion scuffled with and finally mounted another male horse, an unruly two-year colt that twice already had tangled with the herd mare. The stallion took him by the nape and began to use him like a mare and the colt fought it and scrambled away across the rocks. He shook this off but kept his distance and when he began to goad a foal the herd mare pounced, sinking her teeth and driving him away.