Painted Horses

by Malcolm Brooks

  “All right,” she said. “The plan’s changed.”

  Later she lay in bed beside Miriam in the dark of the house and remembered the pajama parties of her childhood. Giggling and fending off sleep while the warmth of the little friend alongside pulled you under like a current.

  Miriam had chattered for a while about the bathtub and its modern showerhead, evidently quite a novelty by reservation standards, but before long her voice tapered off. Catherine heard the rhythm of her breathing deepen and fall. Catherine’s hair was still damp from her own shower. The day had certainly been long.

  She slid toward the darklands herself. Headlights moved like a wraith across the wall and in the fan of shadows she spied the image of a hand and she jarred awake again.

  “Miriam? Miriam.”

  “Mm.”

  “Are you asleep?”

  “Mmnot anymore.”

  “Do the words ‘blue shirt’ mean anything to you?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “Listen to me. It’s something your grandmother kept saying, the other day on the porch. Over and over, like I’d understand what it meant. Blue shirt.”

  Miriam huffed a little in a half-fraudulent show of exasperation. Finally she settled back into the blankets. “The army in the Civil War? Wore blue? They wore the same uniform out here to chase Indians around. Bluecoat, bluejacket, blueshirt—all Indian words for soldiers. Cavalrymen. Okay?”

  “Why would a handprint make her think of a blue shirt?” Catherine murmured.

  “Catherine I just want to sleep—”

  “Does a yellow palm print mean anything?”

  “I don’t know, maybe.”

  Catherine bit her tongue in the dark because she wanted to ask Miriam something else, something she should have asked already. She wanted to know if Miriam had ever heard of the man who helped her in the canyon.

  Miriam had again fallen away. Catherine stared at the ceiling, too aware now of the ache from the saddle. Too aware of her own wish for sleep.

  They drove toward Billings in Max Caldwell’s fifteen-year-old Ford pickup, a vehicle with as many rattles and squeaks as dings and dents. Catherine sat in the middle so she could communicate and still practically shouted to be heard.

  “Doesn’t this strike you as ironic?”

  “What, that I can help you with archaeology?”

  “No, that your truck is so . . . forlorn. You being a service mechanic, I mean.”

  He laughed. “You can always tell a painter’s house. It’s the one needed a whitewash twenty years ago. Don’t worry about the truck. We’ll get there all right.”

  He leaned forward to see around Catherine and asked Miriam if she’d been to Inscription Cave. She hadn’t, though she knew what it was.

  “What’s Inscription Cave?” Catherine asked.

  “It’s where we’re headed.” He gave her a look out of the corner of his eye, and the eye seemed to twinkle. “You’re lucky you stumbled on to me. I’m more of a sympathizer than you know.”

  He paused a moment. Catherine said nothing. She was trying to learn to wait.

  “My clan’s from the Ozarks but I spent part of my boyhood in Ohio. Farm country. We had cigar boxes full of arrowheads. Used to wash up in the plowed fields after a rain. Great Serpent Mound wasn’t too far away, other mounds as well. Got to think of myself as a fairly efficient relic hunter. Certainly an enthusiastic one. Who knows. Life had gone different I might’ve studied it for real, gotten into your line of work even. I envy you, missy.”

  He told them he’d come to Montana more than twenty years earlier, also to work on a dam project, but he broke his leg and wound up in the hospital in Billings. While on the mend he heard about an honest-to-god excavation outside town. He managed to hire on. “Finest days of my life,” he declared.

  “We found all manner of things. Project was conducted by two fellas from the school in Bozeman. Professors. First official dig in the state, which even I didn’t realize at the time. Found a bunch of burial remains. Older’n the hills, of course.”

  They were not far outside Billings now, the morning sunlight flashing on zooming windshields, glinting from the downtown buildings. The cliffs loomed as always at the edge of town, but Mr. Caldwell turned off on a muddy, heavily rutted road. The tail of the pickup swerved in the mire and he twirled the wheel and gunned the gas to straighten them out again. Catherine felt a spasm of alarm. Miriam never twitched.

  Caldwell kept talking, quieter now with the wind noise down. “Used to be a little museum out here with artifacts, until some fool burned it down. During the war, a lot went to seed. That old story.”

  Catherine found her voice again. “Are the professors still around?”

  Caldwell shrugged. “It’s been so many years. Truth be told, what’s left is in fairly sorry condition at this point, as you’re about to find out.”

  Catherine saw what he meant. The charred stone walls of the tiny museum slumped at the base of the hillside, windows knocked out and roof burned away. Trash everywhere, mainly crumpled beer cans. The long, lateral mouth of the cave opened darkly beneath a shelf of moccasin-colored rock up above.

  She and Miriam followed Mr. Caldwell up, past the pocks of old dig stations scattered in the shallow soil. In the mouth of the cave were bonfire remnants, obviously recent, and more beer cans.

  “Kids,” said Caldwell. He fished in a pocket of his coveralls and came up with a plug of Days Work tobacco, sliced a chew loose with a jackknife. “This is where they come for a lark.”

  The cave itself was more a pronounced overhang than an actual cavern. The paintings occupied a long rock panel on the rear wall, above a natural ledge perhaps eight feet above the trampled dust of the floor. At first she could make out only a few random designs atop the mottled rock wall, shields and stick figures, but as her eyes adjusted she began to see more. A bow-wielding shaman, the simple outlines of animals. A row of red rifles.

  “Wow,” said Miriam.

  “These can’t be very old,” said Catherine.

  “Depends on which you’re looking at. There’s a figure on horseback there on the left wouldn’t be more’n a century or two, and the rifles. But some of these were dated at four thousand years.”

  Catherine fought her own skepticism. Dated by whom, she thought. She hated to admit anticipation had set her up for disappointment. She’d hoped for the old Londinium jolt, wound up instead with a handful of etchings at a high school party spot.

  Mr. Caldwell didn’t seem to notice. “We dug down five feet in places. Come up with twenty thousand artifacts. Had work for fifty guys out here at one point.”

  “Where’s the catalog now?”

  “Catalog?”

  “The artifacts. The catalog of artifacts.”

  “Imagine the professors have a good bunch. And a lot were carted off by vandals, before the museum burned. Scattered to the wind.”

  Professional, Catherine thought. She was half-exasperated, half-irritated with herself for losing perspective. Caldwell snapped her back to attention.

  “We dug up a set of harpoon points. Made of caribou horn. Professors figured they come from an arctic culture.”

  Catherine processed this. “Why did they arrive at that?”

  “Because there are no caribou around here,” Miriam said. Catherine and Caldwell both looked at her as though they’d forgotten she was even there. Miriam added, “Just a guess.”

  “Well you’re right,” Caldwell said. “More or less. The caribou’s an arctic animal. Haven’t been any in these parts since this was the arctic. Plus the style of point—more what the Eskimos make than the Plains tribes. Things were all different, in the Ice Age. I expect you know that better’n I do.”

  Catherine softened and gave him a smile. “To be honest, it’s less and less clear to me what I know. About anything.”

  A little later he asked whether the time she’d spent in the canyon had given her a sense of what she was up against. A question wit
h its own sharp point.

  “Are you asking if I’m daunted?”

  “Maybe. Don’t take it wrong.”

  “I guess I am,” she admitted. “I’m used to thinking on a bigger scale. Not bigger in size, but bigger in . . . something.” She looked at Miriam. “I don’t for a second want you to think I’m not taking this seriously. But I really do feel like I’m starting totally from scratch. I’m used to temples, fort walls, antiquities.

  “Two years ago I worked in London, excavating in the bomb damage. Break through a Victorian basement and you’re right into a medieval layer, with pottery and chess pieces and gosh, intact skeletons even. Then under that it’s Londinium. The Roman occupation, with mosaic floors and statues and—well, here it’s just this.” She gestured at the far-off cliffs, bright with light beyond the shadowbox frame of the cave.

  Caldwell’s eyes roved around the dirt floor of the shelter, resting here and there on the clefts and depressions left by shovels and picks, in his hands and others, twenty years before. He had his own catalog, burned into his brain. She knew the sensation. Finally he looked again to her. “Know why I brought you here?”

  “Not merely to look at rock pictures, I guess.”

  He nodded, spat a stream of tobacco juice into the weeds. “This country renders things temporary. Weather, flash floods, lightning fires. Everything erodes. The rivers change direction. But some things do stay the same. A good campsite nowadays was likely just as good a campsite a thousand years ago, and there’s layers in those places too, if you scratch the surface.

  “The Crow have been here maybe two centuries. Give or take. Long enough to establish a way of life. Horsemen in their glory. But I brought you here so you can maybe see beyond the Crow, the way the Crow could see beyond themselves.”

  “How do you mean?”

  He pointed at the dirt. “Eskimo points. Four thousand years old.” He shook his head, scratched his grizzled chin. “Down south of here, way up in the Big Horn Mountains, say ten thousand feet, there’s a rock wheel. Looks like a wagon wheel lying flat on the ground, spokes coming out from a hub, rim around the outside. Maybe eighty feet across.”

  “Been there,” Miriam chimed in. “With my grandfather. Something about it gives you the creeps.”

  He nodded. “Spookiest thing you ever saw, way up in this mountain saddle. Old, spooky old. It is to the Crow and the Sioux what I guess Stonehenge in England probably was to your Romans. Point is, the modern tribes think it’s sacred. They have ceremonies attached to it, even though it was here before they were. They don’t know a thing about whoever it was built it, not when nor why. They only know it’s part of those who went before. Mystery people, gone forever, except for the stones on the ground, and maybe the spirits inside the stones. You get that sense when you’re up there, hearing nothing but the wind humming in the rocks.

  “Not long before they battled Custer, the Sioux and Cheyenne held a sun dance, at a place down along the Tongue River. A different collection of stones, jutting off the ground like crooked teeth, maybe forty feet tall. The rocks all around have been etched and scratched. Unknown inscriptions left by unknown bands, signs and symbols whose meanings were lost a thousand years ago. A place with its own spooks. Its own medicine, if you will.

  “One of the chiefs sought a vision at this dance and he prayed to whatever spirit he prayed to for a sign that would deliver his people from torment. Finally he cut off one hundred pieces of his own flesh. An offering. With this done he saw the bodies of his enemy, clad in blue and falling from the sky, tumbling into a ring of tepees.”

  “Sitting Bull,” said Miriam.

  He nodded. “Sitting Bull. He scratched the scenes of that vision into the rocks and not long after, Custer went to his doom.

  “When I was here digging with the WPA we had an old Crow come out to explain some of the symbols. His father and his uncles were also with Crook, there for the Rosebud fight, no doubt knew Miriam’s relation. He told us something then that you should know now. When he was a young man, say eighteen eighty-five, ninety at the latest, with the old ways nigh to gone and the buffalo gone and the tepee villages not long for the world either, he was taken into the canyon by some elders. Two days by horseback. He was made to sing and chant and fast, made to wear himself completely down in order to conjure his medicine totem. His animal guide from the spirit world.”

  “A vision,” said Miriam.

  Caldwell nodded. “Sure enough.”

  “Did he have one?”

  “Beats me. Anyway it ain’t the point. Reason I bring this up is because of where in the canyon they took him. A nest of rocks, he said, with a black braid through the stone, in the shadow of a spear with a broken point. That’s how he said it, and at the time I reckoned that was what he meant—the shadow of a spear. Some color of speech beyond the white man’s grasp.

  “I’ve since come to think otherwise. Spire, is what he meant. A rock formation. A nest of rocks beneath a spire with a black braid in the stone. I’ve pondered on that one too. I think he was describing a flint deposit—an ancient quarry.”

  Catherine began to shake her head, almost against her will. “That’s pretty anecdotal,” she began.

  Caldwell stopped her with a look. “Wait. Don’t be impatient. You’ll see what I’m getting at. He told us the rocks around this braid had been adorned with a record of strange critters, scratched and pecked into the surface of the stone. A menagerie of animals from another world gone. Elephantine beasts with trunks and tusks, cats with blades for teeth.”

  “Mastodons. Or mammoths. Saber-toothed tigers.” She didn’t have the heart to tell him this had to be a fiction, that nothing remotely similar had been found in the Americas.

  Caldwell nodded. “Those at least. Who knows what else.” He gestured with his chin at the panel on the wall of the cave. “One thing’s sure—if what he was describing is really there, it would make even the oldest of these look downright recent by comparison.”

  They studied the glyphs before them in silence for a spell, wandering past one another and pausing and then moving on to pass again. Many of the figures had been washed and faded by time into mere shadows, suggestions of shapes and symbols, and some were overlapped one atop another and obscured even further. But after awhile Catherine formed the first vague image of who these people were, imagined them climbing into the cave from the valley floor with their coarse pigments and their torches, imagined a different tribe a thousand years later making the same steep climb. Other visions. Other symbols.

  She swung her pack to the dirt floor of the shelter and undid the buckles. She pulled the camera free and set the aperture for the shadowy light of the cave. She thought she understood now how the camera worked and she brought the camera to her eye, gave a start at the image she saw through the lens. Splayed, painted fingers of a human hand.

  She pushed the shutter release. The gears inside whirred to life.

  John H

  II

  Sometimes he sees horses in the distance, running on the plains before drovers on their own soaring mounts, manes and tails flowing like fire. Sometimes he rides over a lip in the land and startles a wild herd into flight, the horses spooky and skittish as birds. And sometimes, with the wind right and his wits in order, he catches them undetected while they graze. He bellies as close as he can and simply watches.

  They are like the nation itself a mixed-breed bunch, derived and descended from scattered Indian ponies, escaped cavalry stock from the remount at Fort Keogh (once John H spies a grizzled, gray-flecked old bay, the letters US ghostlike beneath her hip), Percherons stolen from the honyocker’s plow and cow horses from the rancher’s remuda. Every color under the sun. They are not fine limbed and leggy like the thoroughbreds he grew up with but they are tested by weather, selected by climate. Tough as a scar.

  He trails sheep that first spring with Jean Bakar Arietta, in the cinder cones and red scoria of the Powder River badlands. John H is little interested in the bl
eating, milling sheep but he loves the sapphire sky, the smell of sage and damp stone after a rain, the raw and endless ground.

  Jean Bakar shepherds for the Meyer outfit out of Miles City. He makes it to town only twice each year so for months nobody realizes the old man has adopted an understudy.

  In June the shearers come. A company foreman rides out and locates Jean Bakar’s camp in the desert west of Ismay. John H sees him coming on a buckskin quarter horse, sees the holstered revolver and fears he has been tracked even here. He bolts for the wagon, knocking over a stack of clean tin plates.

  Jean Bakar stands from the fire, his slim little shepherd dog springing from the shade with her ears pricked. He speaks to her in Basque, then sticks his head inside the wagon box. The boy is on the front bunk, poised to dart through the driving window.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Rider coming.”

  Jean Bakar withdraws and looks around, sees the foreman nearly to them. He peers back inside and holds his hands in the air, a show of rhetorical exaggeration.

  “Might be coming for me.”

  “Ten riders, that you worry about. Not this one rider. Come out here, please.”

  John H gives a resolute shake of the head.

  “Trust me, rubio.”

  John H looks at him intently. Those quiet brown eyes, clear as amber, solid as the side of a mountain. He climbs down from the bunk.

  Two days later they drive the sheep to the ranch. Jean Bakar is summoned to the offices. John H sits in the kitchen with a piece of pie in front of him, an audience of giddy little girls in the doorway. He is jittery as a bat and he barely tests the pie. From outside he hears muffled swearing, a male voice at wit’s end, the thump and drum of an obstinate horse. Thwack of coiled rope.

  Soon the walls and the low ceiling are more than he can bear. He has not been in a room without wheels in months. He pushes back the chair and strides for the back entry. Behind him the little girls giggle at his tattered shoes, the cuffs of his pant legs too short by an inch or more. The screen door bangs shut behind him.