Painted Horses

by Malcolm Brooks

  His second day in the pastor’s home he returns from a new school and squats by a bare patch of dry dirt off the front stoop and sketches the profile of a horse with a twig. He sketches another in a second patch nearby, and several more from different angles in a larger spit of groomed sand.

  Cora’s heels tap up the walk from some errand and she stops by his first drawing. She studies it a moment and he feels a flush of embarrassment and looks away at the houses across the street. The twig dangles in his fingers.

  She moves among his handiwork like a vixen roused from sleep by a motion in the grass. She crosses the walk to view the array before him. “Gosh,” she says. “I wish I could draw like that.”

  He is restless at night in the strange bed even after a week. He hasn’t slept well since he left the carriage house and while there is plenty here to eat he knows he has lost some of his already piddling weight because his pants fit poorly. When he turns, the bedsprings squeak in the silence of the row house so he tries not to turn, then nods off and turns anyway and the squeak of the springs wakes him all over again.

  Cora appears like a shade. She wears a nightdress not much different from her daytime shifts, bare arms and bare shoulders and bare below the knees. “You can’t sleep can you,” she murmurs. “Do you want to come with me?”

  He is small yet for his age and he fits between Cora and the wall. She is warm as an iron, soft as summer rain. He falls in love with the smell of a sleepy girl, sleeps deeply now himself.

  Her principal ambition is to see a movie called Pandora’s Box. Louise Brooks has departed Hollywood for Berlin to make this film about a sensuous waif, a kitten-like provocateur. Cora has read about it but practically no one in the US has seen it as the movie is widely censored and pilloried on moral grounds. Brooks is accused as well of not acting, of merely sleepwalking through her soundless role in this era of exaggerated, hand-wringing melodrama. The movie’s few proponents argue that she in fact presages the latest advance in filmmaking, an advance that renders histrionics obsolete.

  John H has not seen a talking picture. On a Saturday, Cora takes him downtown to a movie house, a moderne concoction of sleek curves and buttresses and a brilliant marquee in the shape of a shell. First they watch a silent showing of a zany comedy featuring W. C. Fields and Cora’s idol. John H thinks she is indeed beautiful with her large, dark eyes, though not as beautiful as Cora herself.

  She has really brought him to see the main feature, for two reasons: horses, and sound. The film is The Virginian, an exciting adaptation of a Western novel starring a lanky, broad-shouldered gent named Gary Cooper. John H knows nothing about him except that Cooper is a legitimate horseman. He has an easy familiarity around his mounts, has a seat like glue while most of the other actors bounce around like balls on a tabletop.

  The innovation of sound plays obversely to the Virginian’s persona. Despite the glorious presence of thundering hooves and crackling gunplay, Cooper himself remains practically wordless. Just nope and yup, otherwise a silence that roars. John H sits entranced, transported to a different world where capable men act rather than talk and horses still matter. When he fled from the stable he could think only to ride west. Now he thinks he knows why.

  Things go to pieces in the coming week. Cora catches wind of a showing of Pandora’s Box at a sleazy theater in Philadelphia and persuades her beau to drive her there.

  On the way home they are involved in a wreck, not a very major one although illegal liquor is apparently a factor. Cora’s father and her older brother travel to New Jersey to retrieve her, while her beau is jailed in violation of both the Volstead Act and something called the Mann Act, which John H gathers to be an even graver charge.

  A tear-stained Cora returns to find her shifts and shoes and lipsticks and movie rags and imitation strings of pearls in the trash along the curb. Her normally sedate mother has flown into a rage, cleared out her wardrobe in her absence. A shouting match ensues in the front room, one John H does not witness from his bed but can hear through the floor as though the floor were not there at all.

  How can you do this to me.

  How can you do this to me?

  You’re a hussy and you’ve broken your father’s heart—

  You can’t throw away my things, I won’t dress like some frump from 1910—

  No picture shows. No radio. No suitors.

  I hate you I hate you I hate you.

  No—

  It goes on for awhile, round and round and one over top of the other.

  Your father is a minister and you have no respect for that—

  You don’t understand me for who I am—

  This family has a reputation that you need to consider—

  I’ll run away I swear I’ll run away—

  We didn’t raise you to tramp around and drink and dress like some Ziegfeld tart—

  You’re a bitch.

  With that there’s a brief scuffle and a slap and then two sobbing women, one flying up the staircase and into her room with a door slam that shakes the wall. The minister and his wife go on in hushed voices, punctuated by occasional flares of emotion. Cora cries through the plaster.

  When he returns from school the next day a trunk has been placed on the porch. Her parents have decided to ship her off to a spinster aunt’s in Ohio for the remainder of the school year, though she may be called back to testify against her beau.

  Cora is in the front room, dressed to travel and looking like a flower needing water. She waits with a pad of paper and a scribe. She unstops an inkwell. She says, “Draw me a picture.”

  He stares at the paper, then dips the scribe and begins his series of hills, a line of them from one edge to the other. The hills become the spines of horses, galloping and racing, impossible to tell where one ends and the next begins.

  He recalls a book he noticed in her room. He paid no attention to the title but he was drawn to the art of the jacket, a great pair of disembodied female eyes floating atop the lights of a city. Above his horses he draws from memory in black ink the detached black eyes of Louise Brooks. He hands her the picture.

  Choose your time to run. That night with the house dark and Cora and Cora’s father traveling to Ohio, John H slips out of the sheets fully clothed and slides a pack from beneath the bed. He steals to the doorway and listens down the hall. After last night’s turmoil Cora’s mother is now deep in slumber, her breath climbing and falling in a quiet snore.

  The minister is no handyman. John H has tested the doors in the house and knows they whine on ungreased hinges. He knows the creaks in the hall and on the narrow staircase. He slides down the wall to Cora’s room, which overlooks the street, slides across the room, and raises the window as silently as he can. The sash weights bump inside the wall. He takes his Barlow knife and cuts the screen along one side and across the bottom and eases his pack out onto the roof of the porch. He is about to climb out himself when something occurs to him.

  John H moves to her bed. He brings her pillow to his face with two hands and breathes in, as deeply as he can. He shucks the pillowcase loose and stuffs it into his shirtfront and goes back to the window.

  Two hours later he has walked down the train track to the B&O yard. He’s apprehensive about both railroad bulls and hobos but nobody seems to be around. A big steam engine idles loudly on a track across the yard, its firebox issuing burning cinder and smoke into the cool night air. Though a little turned around John H figures by his best calculation the engine more or less points west.

  He makes his way in the dark down the length of freight cars until he finds an open door, higher off the ground than he would have imagined but then he’s been mounting horses since he was knee-high to a horsefly. He listens for a moment, can hear nothing above the pop and chug of the engine, the occasional hiss of the boiler. He pitches his pack through the door’s dark maw and places his hands on the threshold and springs up and inside, skittering quickly around to the dark wall beside the open doorway.

&
nbsp; “Hey there,” he says. No answer from the darkness, just a reek of pine pitch and creosote. He stretches a leg and hooks the strap of the pack with his foot and draws it near. He can’t see a thing in the interior of the boxcar. He hugs the pack to his chest and he waits.

  A little later he hears doors rolling closed down the line, closer and closer. A flashlight beams into the interior briefly, just long enough to give him a look at the wooden crates stacked around him. The door slides closed and latches shut. A little after the train lurches into motion and he thinks, Track me with your hounds on this horse.

  He gets very cold in the night and thinks sleep is out of the question but apparently he dozes off because the screech of the wheels slowing against the rails snaps him awake. Feeble gray light filters through chinks in the walls. John H stands and pops the latch on the door and the door takes off sliding with the motion of the train and bangs to a stop in its open position.

  He sees a row of brick bungalows across a road running parallel to the tracks. The edge of some town, kitchen lights cutting through the dawn. He leans out and looks ahead, recognizes a train depot not far down the line. The cars have slowed considerably, rolling no faster than some of the horses he’s fallen from. He tosses his pack and hops himself into the racket put up by the wheels.

  A week later he’s an expert at this mode of travel, realizes also the uncharacteristic ease of his first night on the rails. He has since suffered competition from other riders, which makes boarding in a train yard next to impossible. Hundreds if not thousands of unemployed men and boys are heading someplace else, someplace better, anyplace but here. With the presence of so many vagabonds the only way to avoid the yard detectives is to board while the train is in motion, a risky endeavor at best. But underfed or not he’s quick as a fox and can run down a departing train before it’s up to speed. He can latch on to an iron ladder like a tick, let the train lift him away like an eagle.

  He’s been shaken down by railroad bulls who find he has nothing and turn him loose with threats he ignores. He rides across West Virginia and southern Ohio. Cora is here but he does not know where. He finds a soup kitchen in Richmond, Indiana, and eats until he could burst though the actual amount is surprisingly small.

  In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he and twenty others slip into the rail yard at dawn and run smack into three bulls on horseback, charging down and shooting pistols in the air. The free riders disperse in a panic. John H goes under a train car and out the other side. He can see the shadowy forms of horses and fleeing people through the ventilation in the cattle cars but he is alone on this side of the train.

  He runs down the cars toward the caboose and the train jolts and clanks to life and begins to travel. John H grabs the rungs of the nearest ladder and goes up the side like a rat up a hawser.

  He rides on the roof’s wooden catwalk, prone on his belly while the last pistol shots pop in the yard. He lifts his head to the sunrise, coming in over the farms and the town and the flat winking rivers. He sees no one else at first, then watches a solitary figure clamber up many cars ahead, a single full-grown man.

  Two evenings later he’s in the West. The realization dawns with the sunset, which he can see magnificently from the roof of yet another boxcar. He’s somewhere in South Dakota. A line of severe hills like the teeth of a saw blade rises massively in the distance. The sun pools like a molten ingot and then drips progressively away, its color changing as it descends and changing in turn the hue of the sky around it. The stripe of clouds above the hills gathers amber then purple then blue. If not for the mountains he knows he would see forever.

  In the middle of the night he startles awake to sour breath on his face, a rasp of stubble against his cheek and neck, a foreign hand sliding under his clothing across his boy’s belly and then down to the warmth of his groin.

  He panics and tries to calculate at the same time. He’s in a boxcar half filled with hay bales he jumped at dusk. He can look over at the open door of the car and see the curve of the moon now. Another rider hopped in after him, a gaunt man perhaps the age of his father wearing a worn-out suit jacket over a pair of coveralls. The man shared a can of peaches as evening limped toward dark, let John H sample a cigarette that made his head swim.

  For a long second he is paralyzed with fear. Then he feels the rough cob of the man’s hand clasp his genitals.

  John H flails out with his right arm, his left pinned beneath the weight of this body that is now moving against his own. He hears the same sour voice breathe at him to lie still, that this won’t hurt, and then his fingers close around a solid object, a cold handle, smooth steel.

  A bale hook. He saw it earlier on the floor of the car but paid little attention. The man is now propped above him, fumbling with the buttons on his pants, a solid blank spot in the dark. With the weight away from his arm John H lifts himself in one motion and swings for all he’s worth.

  The hook’s steel point strikes solid flesh and for all he knows bone as well, strikes with a sickening thud. The man roars in pain and his lust goes to rage. He strikes out at John H with a sort of berserk blizzard of movement. One fist glances off the boy’s cheek and the other lands solidly on the front of his shoulder, which causes the hook to tear through flesh like a dull knife through a roast. He roars again and John H rips the hook free.

  Now John H is on his feet, now skipping to his right on the wooden floorboards. His pants are half-undone. The man silhouettes himself in the open door and John H swings again, a real roundhouse. The hook sinks again, this time deeply. He can feel it. The man shrieks, a sound from some reservoir of sounds not ordinarily summoned by grown men. He staggers backward. Something hot and wet slaps John H in the face and he releases his grip. The man spins in the opening against the night sky. John H glimpses the black shadow of the hook, swinging from his neck.

  The man collapses on the floor where he gurgles and writhes. John H feels a new surge of panic and without thinking at all he jumps past the body on the floor and through the open door.

  He feels a rush of air and the ground swings up beneath him like a giant club. The impact comes quickly and feels as though it will knock him limb from limb. His left leg jams at the knee in a jolt of biting pain and he is flung like a page in the wind, bouncing and rolling crazily down the side of the railbed. He meets a rough stop against the poke and prod of a wire-limbed shrub. He feels like one massive, bleeding scrape, the last breath he took ripped by force from his lungs.

  The train clacks in the moonlight. The last car passes, the long wall of noise shrinking in the distance. He realizes the train is by chance chuffing up a long grade, not as a result moving at its usual travel speed. Otherwise he would likely be dead.

  When his breath returns he moves his limbs, rotates his feet and hands. Every inch of him hurts, but everything seems to work. He rises slowly and rubs his knee for a minute, fastens his pants and limps up the side of the railbed to the tracks. He feels cool air fan his face and remembers his face is wet. He touches his finger to the stickiness on his cheek. Blood he knows is not his own.

  He left his pack on the train and now has nothing but what he wears on his back. He looks out from the elevated railbed. Beneath the white moon the landscape appears itself fully lunar, empty and open and spare. A creature yips in the distance, then howls. Another of its kind howls back.

  He walks through the night to keep warm, following the twin gleam of the rails for hours. His jammed knee throbs but he ignores it. At one point far out in the distance he can see a pulsing dot he takes for a campfire. He sticks to the railbed.

  By daylight he’s nearly faint with hunger. He crosses a creek on a low trestle and peers into the water. The creek runs clear. He stumbles down and drinks, figuring through the ravenous fatigue that unclouded water can’t be any worse than some of the food he’s recently eaten. The water is shockingly cold and he swallows only two or three mouthfuls. Even this amount sloshes in his belly like a frigid wave. He forgets to wash his face. A blast of
pain shoots through his knee when he stands.

  An hour later he sweats out the water as he walks, the morning sunshine burning the chill of night fast from this shadeless environment. Though he believes this is still the month of May the sun beats down with the intensity of high summer. He has no hat and he can tell he will need one.

  The vegetation is sparse, consisting mainly of a species of spindly shrub with narrow gray-green leaves and scattered clumps of short-stemmed grass. The landscape dips and climbs, low-lying flats abutting chaotic jumbles of stone and long fissures rending the earth in two. He spies a band of horses, a large band, running before a great cloud of dust in the distance. He takes this as a single, favorable sign.

  He retreats into the fog of his mind for long stretches of time. His legs follow the tracks but his brain is nowhere around.

  He is with Cora. He catches himself mumbling to her.

  A chime seems to follow him and he thinks this is not real either. Or perhaps it is the chime of an angel, come to claim him.

  At the moment he barely has the ambition to be afraid.

  He is starving and his very brain throbs.

  The chime continues and he dully understands it rings not behind him but up ahead. He plods on, listening as the chime fades out and then sounds again. He passes through a narrow wedge between two raised tables, walking up through a shallow trough in the land. Midway up the trough a narrow gully cuts through crosswise, dropping downhill to his left through a chute studded with rocks. The sound of the chime carries through the chute like a draft through a flue.

  The chute opens to a flat plain and the floor of the plain appears to move. It shifts and writhes and he thinks he must be seeing things but the chime rings again and he figures it out. Sheep. He’s seeing a flock of sheep, milling and moving on the desert. He has been hearing the chime of a bellwether. Perhaps there is a farm. With food.