Painted Horses

by Malcolm Brooks

  “That did occur to me.”

  Miriam scanned the ridgetops far above, the tips of the pines thrusting into the sky. She began to shake her head, and Catherine could tell that the enormity of what lay before them was just beginning to settle.

  They wandered the floor of the draw. The creek twisted through a cutaway channel in the earth, three feet deep and sheer sided, a miniature of the larger canyon around them. Gnarled trees rose here and there along the valley floor, some spindly branched and peeling and dead, others green with new leaves. Otherwise just sagebrush and raw stony earth.

  Miriam moved in a way that reminded Catherine of a hunter. She walked slowly, studying the ground before her with roving eyes, then paused here and there and raised her head to take in the country around her. Catherine followed behind. They moved this way up the open floor of the draw.

  Eventually they angled away from the creek and when they did Catherine thought she heard another sound within or above the rush of the water, intermittent warbling rising and falling on the sough of the breeze. She strained her ears and heard it no more and thought she must be imagining things.

  She heard it again. A wobbling treble, like the watery chortles of sprites. Only mournful.

  Miriam stood stock-still and Catherine knew she could hear it too. “What is that?”

  “I know what it is,” said Miriam. “Come on.”

  She broke into a leggy, reckless gallop, charging headlong through clawing sage and across loose stone that shifted and flew from her feet.

  Catherine tried to keep up but her rucksack bounced on her back like a tourist on a camel. She thought of the expensive camera inside and reached around to hold the pack tightly to her body. Miriam began to outpace her.

  The chortling became louder. Catherine heard it plainly, even above the jostle of her rucksack and her own exerted breathing. Up ahead the open floor of the draw appeared to bottleneck to a conclusion between two opposing mountainsides, dark and somber with pines, but this turned out to be a trick of perspective. Miriam ran around the broad base of the left incline and momentarily vanished behind the low hump of hilltop, and when Catherine rounded the same she saw that the narrow draw turned with the creek and opened into a wide lowland. Aspens shimmered in the distance. She looked overhead, to the source of what at this proximity had amplified to all-out racket.

  A vortex of skeletal birds, hundreds of them, winding like a lazy cyclone in the sky. Miriam shielded her eyes from the sun. Catherine stepped up beside her, gasping for breath.

  “Cranes,” said Miriam. “Migrating north to mate.”

  For the first time in a while Catherine found herself spellbound, detached and delivered from the passage of time. She saw the birds the way an audience volunteer sees a hypnotist’s watch, saw their trailing legs and reptile feet, the prehistoric taper of their necks. They did not look as though they could be graceful, but they were.

  Though the birds appeared to whirl in circles the mass of them nonetheless drifted cloud-like across the sky. A moment more and they would disappear behind the mountain. She peeled out of her rucksack and hurried to unbuckle the clasps. The noise the cranes made diminished, tapering to a sound like crickets in the grass on a summer night.

  Catherine pulled the camera and popped the lens cover, wishing with a flare of annoyance she’d taken more time to learn the workings of the thing. She held it to her eye and found the last of the swirling birds in the viewfinder. She pressed the shutter button. Nothing happened. The cranes vanished.

  “Damn,” she said. She lowered the camera. “Damn.”

  Miriam turned. “That’s what I’ll miss,” she said. “If I ever do leave. That’s what I’ll miss.”

  She started back and Catherine shouldered her pack and followed. She kept the camera uselessly in hand, its lanyard looped around her wrist. Tonight she would teach herself how it worked. No excuses.

  They found Jack Allen in the creek bottom down the draw. He stood with his hands on his knees, studying something in the mud at his feet. He didn’t say whether he saw or heard the cranes but he did point to something else. Hoofprints, hundreds of them, pocked in the wet earth like piercings on the tin of an antique lamp.

  “Unshod,” he said. “Every one of them.” He looked up and Catherine saw mirrored twins of herself, his own gaze inscrutable as ever behind the glasses. “I was all set to pass this whole thing off as a harebrained little pipe dream, darlin’. I don’t say this often but could be I was wrong. Could be this little treasure hunt of yours gets good and goddamn interesting. There’s a wild horse herd in here.”

  Miriam squinted again at the sky.

  “When Grandmother was young the soldiers called her Crane Girl. At Fort Fetterman. She was fourteen, fifteen years old. Her husband was an Absaroka scout for the US cavalry.” Miriam sat across the table in Catherine’s tiny kitchen, elbows on the Formica top and chin drooped onto the knuckles of her hands. She looked as exhausted as Catherine felt.

  “Your grandmother,” said Catherine absently. She tried both to listen and decipher the movie camera at the same time, camera body and film reel and instruction manual arrayed on the table before her. The manual kept folding shut on its own and she’d pinned one corner with a beer bottle, two-thirds empty now but sweating a ring onto the page. Some local concoction called Highlander. She snapped to attention. “Your grandmother. The woman on the porch.”

  Miriam nodded. “Actually great-grandmother. She’s old as the earth now, and not always clear. But she remembers the buffalo. Remembers famous generals, Custer and Crook and so on. Her husband—my great-grandfather, I guess—was at Rosebud Creek.”

  Catherine shrugged to show she didn’t understand.

  “It was a fight, just before the Greasy Grass, what you call Custer’s Last Stand. In a canyon over east, by the Cheyenne rez. We were enemies then. Mortal enemies.”

  Catherine picked up her beer, let the manual fold. “I’m not following. Who were enemies?” She knew she should eat but she was too tired to think about cooking. Plus she had next to nothing for groceries.

  “My tribe and the others. The Sioux bands, the Cheyenne. The Blackfeet and Piegan from the north.” Miriam smiled, a little ruefully it seemed. “This was a battleground long before the blueshirts showed up.”

  Catherine started. That word again. She wanted to jump in but Miriam kept talking. “I really don’t know all that much. Just what I’ve pieced together from listening to my grandfather and he missed it by a generation himself. But yeah—out here, people have been killing each other for a really long time.

  “The Crow figured out early it paid to make a deal, that you palefaces—isn’t that what they say in the movies?—were like a river with no end. So they sided with the army, before the Sioux and the Cheyenne thought to.”

  Catherine let this auger into her brain. Eight hours on horseback and the slosh of cold beer on a hollow stomach did not have her at her sharpest. Finally she said, “Your grandmother must be what, ninety years old, or something.” She remembered the woman’s arthritic hands, her skin like frail paper.

  “More like a hundred,” said Miriam. “Give or take. I don’t think even she’s exactly sure.” Miriam had her own beer, which she sipped from only now and again. It struck Catherine that this could be the first drink Miriam had ever had. “She lived in a lodge and wore skins and spoke only the old language for a lot of her life. Twice my age at least before she set foot in a real house.”

  “And her husband—your great-grandfather—led Custer?”

  Miriam shook her head. “Not exactly. He was with Crook. The mule rider? Less flashy than Custer so not as famous. But I guess, how you call it . . . dogged. And crafty. He knew the way to catch an Indian was with an Indian.” Miriam took a drink, sloshed a little beer on her chin and wiped it on her shoulder. “I need to eat. This is going to my head. No, Crane Girl’s husband—yes, I guess, my great-grandfather—was dismissed by Custer the morning of the Greasy Grass. He and some o
ther scouts. Probably quite a humiliation, given he was a warrior and all. But it kept him alive.”

  Catherine tipped her bottle to her mouth and found she’d already drained it. The magic of the past, luring her from the here and now, the same delicious sensation that felled her as a girl when she’d bury herself in a book about Egypt and go stone-deaf to the dinner call. Miriam, she thought, you’re a genius.

  She took another beer from the icebox. “Why was he dismissed by Custer?”

  Miriam rubbed her eyes. “Now I’ll make a deal, paleface. I’ll tell you if you’ll find me some food.” Catherine set the beer back and latched the icebox door.

  They went out into the dark and up the street toward the town’s brief collection of business fronts, most of them hollow and unlit though the yellow sign above the roadhouse shone like a second moon. Catherine stepped gingerly, her seat and the insides of her legs raw and mutinous with movement. Music trickled into the street, some whining hillbilly number about a woman and her cold, cold heart. A short line of pickup trucks and a couple of cars nosed against the walk out front. Two vehicles had the Harris logo.

  “Catherine, this might not be such a hot idea,” said Miriam.

  Catherine looked at her. “What do you mean?”

  “Um, you know segregation? In the South? This is a white saloon.”

  Catherine wasn’t sure what to say. “Are you telling me it’s dangerous?” She knew she sounded incredulous and instantly hated herself.

  Miriam shrugged. “I don’t know about that, but it might be unpleasant. They might ask me to leave.”

  Catherine wasn’t sure which was more astonishing, Miriam’s point, or her equanimity as she made it. Of course she knew about segregation but it remained an abstraction, regarded with the same detachment as the historical fact of slavery. Her mother’s housekeeper was a Negro lady, but other than that her interaction with colored people in general remained limited. She saw in a sad flash this surely proved Miriam’s point. She said, “We have to eat and I think this is our only option. I’ll be unpleasant myself, if it comes to that.”

  Miriam nodded. “All right. I just wanted you to know.”

  Catherine went first and Miriam followed. A handful of work-begrimed men sat at the bar or stood around the pool table in back, cowboy hats or tractor caps pushed back on their heads. One pair in business slacks and trim little Borsalinos kept seemingly to themselves. Catherine could sense a general pause as she and Miriam crossed in the dim light to the nearest unoccupied table.

  They waited through two more hillbilly numbers from the Wurlitzer and when nobody crossed the room to help, Catherine had the sinking feeling Miriam might be right. Then she became very aware of her empty stomach, and she thought of Miriam running like a gazelle that afternoon, and her ire flared. She fixed her eyes on the bartender, a woman with iron-gray hair and what might be construed as a clench to her jaw. The bartender met her glare and looked away, and Catherine felt herself push up out of the booth and stride to the bar. She wanted Miriam to eat. She wanted Miriam to keep talking. The conversation around her paused again.

  “Excuse me, are you still serving food?”

  “That an Indian girl, miss?”

  “No.”

  The bartender dried a rocks glass on a towel. She held it up to the light from the pool table as though to check her progress. “I guess I know an Indian when I see one.”

  “Have you been, then?”

  The bartender frowned. “Been?”

  Catherine cocked her head. “Bombay? Calcutta? You know—India. Have you been to India.”

  The bartender’s eyes shifted to Catherine and she shook her head. She still held the glass into the light and Catherine saw the beveled edges divvy the colors in the room like a prism, green from the billiards cloth and blue from the Wurlitzer. Red from someplace else. “Aren’t you the funny one. I know who you are, by the way.” The woman set the glass atop a pyramid on the back bar. “Dub Harris owns a lot of things, but he doesn’t own everything.”

  “She’s been working all day and she’s hungry. So am I.”

  The woman reached around and slapped two menus on the bar. “Keep her in line, and I’m not going to say it twice. India, for Pete’s sake.”

  They waited for their food to come and Miriam ate peanuts in a bowl from the bar and talked while she peeled the shells apart. “After the Rosebud battle Crook pulled his soldiers and scouts back and regrouped to follow the creek north, to find Custer’s army. But his Crow scouts refused, for a reason that may not have been clear to the ordinary white person. Crook, he may have understood it, but someone like Custer? Probably not.”

  “What was the reason?”

  Miriam nibbled the tip from a peanut, like a rabbit testing a carrot. “Fear, in a way. But not unreasonable fear. The scouts saw something along the Rosebud they hadn’t seen before and it gave them pause, just as it should have. A week later Custer made the same discovery, only he found out the hard way.

  “My tribe had been warring with the Cheyenne and the Shoshone and Lakota and Blackfeet for years. I guess hundreds of years. The wars were bloody, but they weren’t like white wars. I don’t think there were organized battles, with armies and sieges and things. More like endless raids to steal horses and, well, women, tribe against tribe against tribe.

  “Rosebud Creek was new. Sioux and Cheyenne and Shoshone all fighting together, like three red rivers in one roaring flood, and the Crow saw that and knew it meant trouble, enemies in numbers they’d never dealt with before. So they refused to move without a better idea of what they were up against.”

  “Sounds reasonable.”

  “Probably General Crook thought so too, or he wouldn’t have stood for the, what’s the word? Not disobedience.”

  “Insubordination.”

  “Right. So he sent some scouts ahead to find Custer. One of them was Grandmother’s husband.”

  Miriam’s handful of peanuts seemed to course in her blood like caffeine. She’d grown more animated as she spoke, gesturing and emphasizing with her hands. Catherine saw her eyes dart toward the door at Catherine’s back, then track something across the room.

  “When they found Custer the scouts took him to the top of a stone butte and showed him the Cheyenne camp in the distance. They showed him the size of it, the smoke from the lodges, like a hand with a thousand fingers, but Custer wouldn’t or maybe couldn’t see what was right in front of him. He wanted surprise on his side. He wanted to attack.

  “They came down off the butte and the scouts began to strip out of their trousers and boots and bluejackets, began to paint themselves and dress themselves in war shirts and bonnets. Custer wanted to know what they were doing. One of his interpreters told him, ‘They plan to die today, and they don’t want to enter the afterlife in the uniform of the US Army.’ Custer got, how you say it, riled up, and he ordered them out of the camp. Tossing away able-bodied warriors, maybe his last extravagance. A few hours later he was dead himself.”

  Miriam’s eyes went again to a point beyond Catherine’s shoulder, as though to gather her thoughts outside the sphere of another’s influence. “I’ve spent my entire life within a few miles of that battlefield. I’ve seen historians from the East wandering through the gulches, analyzing the positions of the grave markers to try to figure out why Custer lost. I have my own idea. What he didn’t figure—couldn’t imagine, I guess—was even we have the ability to adapt.”

  “And his luck ran out. No doubt the surprise of his life.” Mr. Caldwell, speaking from behind Catherine’s chair. She started at his voice, wondered how long he’d been standing there. He stepped up alongside the table and looked down at Miriam. “Bravo, miss. Enjoyed the retelling. I’m not sure if you remember me.”

  “I remember,” said Miriam.

  He turned to Catherine. “I stopped by your house trying to find you. I’ve got to make a run to Billings tomorrow and wondered if you’d like to come along. There’s something up thataway you mig
ht want to see. In regards to your work.”

  “Tomorrow . . . I want to say yes but I don’t think I can. We spent the day in the canyon with Jack Allen and we’re supposed to go again tomorrow. He’s already made a plan.” Catherine looked at Miriam, who rolled her eyes in a fuss of exasperation both mock and real. “What?” said Catherine.

  “Oh, nothing. I’m hungry. Five o’clock tomorrow morning I’m sure it will all seem better.”

  Catherine looked at Caldwell. “I think he’s trying to test our mettle. Or mine, at least. I haven’t been on a horse since I was a girl. I’m in agony right now, and I’m sure he’d love to hear me plead out of another four-hour trail ride with a whimper and moan.”

  Caldwell frowned. “Five A.M.’s gonna come awful early.”

  “I know it. This morning was bad enough, although it entailed springing Miriam on him. If I surprise him two mornings in a row he’ll probably choke me.”

  “Well he works for you, don’t he?”

  This she hadn’t considered. “In a fashion.”

  Caldwell wiped the lenses of his wire spectacles on a table napkin. “Do you feel like you have a clear sense of what you’re looking for in that god-awful gorge? Do you feel like you were fully informed before you come clear out here?”

  Catherine wondered if Mr. Caldwell had somehow had a conversation with David. She dismissed this as ridiculous, possibly even paranoid. “I don’t. On either count.”

  “Then I can help, but you’ve got to come with me. Tell Allen the plan’s changed. Tell him tonight.”

  “I don’t know how to contact him.” Totally untenable, it was true.

  Caldwell only grinned. He returned his eyeglasses to the bridge of his nose. “I do.”

  Catherine looked at Miriam. “What do you think?”

  Miriam shrugged. “Like he said. You’re the boss.”

  Catherine looked back at Caldwell, saw the light reflect on the lenses of his eyeglasses and in a hunger-fueled flash saw instead the mirrored Ray-Bans worn by Jack Allen. Where was their dinner. She tried not to appear as nervous as she suddenly felt.