Painted Horses

by Malcolm Brooks

  Minutes later he opens his pants for the madam in an alcove at the foot of the stairs. His pecker seems practically to have climbed inside his body for warmth. Even the madam seems amused and surely she’s seen it all. She gives it a tug, peels back his foreskin, scrutinizes what little there is to see. “When’s your last bath, cowboy.”

  John H finds his voice, which sounds about as tiny as his manhood. “Two hours ago.” Bakar had insisted.

  “Good for you. Lily’s got the pick of the litter. This from the whiskey, or are you just shy?”

  “Haven’t had any whiskey.”

  She presses something into his hand, a small square like an aspirin tin. “Run along. Don’t be too long about it.”

  The girl with the bob leads him up the stairs through the dusky light of the sconces. John H watches the sway of her backside, the bones in her shoulders.

  She guides him to a room and sits on the edge of the bed. He holds the beer stein in one hand, the tin in the other, both slippery as eels. He looks at the tin. Silhouette of a Roman soldier. “What’s this,” he asks.

  She narrows her eyes. “That’s what you call a prerequisite. Don’t even think about coming over here without it.”

  He sets the mug on a dresser and pries the lid of the tin. A rolled rubber ring.

  “Can I have that?”

  He looks at the cup of her hand, and up the sculpted limb to a second cup beneath her arm, smooth and bare as ivory. He feels himself stir.

  She sets the tin on the bed and turns to him. She stretches her arms for the ceiling and for some reason it is not the sight of her nipples tight against her shift but merely this view of her underarms that triggers a swell of pure desire. His cock goes from groundhog to battering ram, like it might in the speed of transformation tear right through his pants.

  She lowers her arms, studies him with an almost imperious satisfaction. “You’ve never been to bed with a woman, have you.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Have you kissed a girl?”

  He shakes his head. “Been in love once, though. She was sixteen. I was twelve.”

  This seems to startle her, unnerve her even. She thinks a moment, curls her lip in a triumphant smile. “Let me guess. I look just like her. Enough to be her sister.” She has without appearing to move allowed the flimsy black silk of her shift to slouch down the slope of one breast, the slight peak of her nipple rising at the edge of the cloth.

  John H concentrates. He shakes his head. “Nope.”

  “Liar.” She feigns petulance. “I don’t believe you.” She pulls her garment over her head and lets it trail from her fingers. A mermaid rising from the sea. She sits in her garters with her head high, beckons him with crook of a finger.

  She pulls his boots from his feet, pops the snaps on his shirt. Hat tossed to a chair.

  “Can I touch you?”

  She laughs. “You have to, if you want to get this done.”

  He puts a tenuous hand on the curve of her shoulder, the other on the opposite knee. She covers his hands with hers.

  He runs his palms across her like a blind man. A moment later she leans and puts her lips against his cheek, then against his chest in two places, finally against his own mouth, which is dry as the floor of a desert. Her tongue like warm summer rain.

  She frees herself and lies back against an incline of pillows. She seizes his gaze with her stare, a hypnotist or a siren. Her legs fold apart like the bloom of a flower and he knows the soft curves of her seat, the slim secret groove at her center. He sees the carving in the trees.

  The next day he takes his wages to the Furstnow shop. He does not have enough for a brand-new saddle but the proprietor disappears into the back and lugs out a reconditioned mustanger’s saddle, deep-seated and lightweight.

  “Probably twenty years old. Built by the man himself. I just took it on trade, replaced the seat and restitched where it needed. Already broke in, should be comfortable as a feather pillow.”

  John H hefts the saddle in his hands, glances at the star stamped into the back of the cantle. “Throw in a blanket?”

  A little later with the saddle over his shoulder he walks into the rear of the building where the Chappel Cannery keeps its office and hires on as a horse hunter. He’s given the complete lecture on what he’s in for—eighteen-hour workdays, seven days a week for which he will receive nearly twice the average cowpuncher’s salary, plus meals. No drinking, no fighting, no shirking. No excuses. No more warnings.

  Though Chappel collects horses clear to Fort Belknap in the north John H is assigned to the outfit out of Sweeney Creek, fifteen miles west of town, to work the same southern range he traversed in the sheep wagon.

  Before departing he meets Bakar in the 600 Café for lunch. He considers as he lugs the saddle through the door that he has taken every meal with this man, morning, noon, and night, for better than a thousand days. This kitchen is the end of the line.

  “Is a good saddle, rubio.”

  “It’s twenty years old. Guy in the shop said old Al Furstnow built it himself.”

  Bakar looks into his cooling coffee, pushes his potatoes with a fork. “How do you think it would be if I went back? To home.”

  John H’s own fork stops in midair. “Spain?”

  Bakar has molded the potatoes into a mountain range. He smashes it back again. “See who’s alive, who’s dead. See who wed who.”

  “For good?”

  Bakar gives him a weak little smile. “What’s for good? Who’s to say?”

  “You want me to go along? Keep you company? I will. You know that. Got nothin’ here.”

  “No, no, this is old man’s talk. I’ll never do it. Never do nothing.”

  “I’m about to be pretty scarce until winter sets in. I don’t want to come off the range and find you’ve lit out without me.”

  Jean Bakar pats his hand across the table, his own knuckles twisted and knobbed like the base of a tree.

  John H grinds through another bite. “I mean it, mister.”

  Bakar nods.

  “I’ll cash a fat paycheck come December. You hang on to then, we’ll sail to Spain.”

  On the walk out front John H presses a roll of bills into Bakar’s hand, the balance of what he has earned and tucked away these last years. When Bakar tries to resist, John H physically folds his ragged brown fingers over the roll. “Uh-uh. You take it, and you use it. I’ll be back by winter.”

  He can see the old man choking up, and he can see other people coming out of the café and still others strolling down the walk. He thumps Bakar twice on the shoulder and he hoists his saddle and walks away.

  He thumbs a ride to Sweeney Creek and then lugs the saddle down the rutted dirt road until a ranch truck rattles out and meets him. He rides in the back without company, counting the weathered crosses of the telephone wire stretching back to town.

  In the morning he is assigned a string of saddle horses and told to drive them out to the junction with the Tongue and find the southside wagon outfit. He eyes his charges in the rope pen and walks into the throng and takes a dun gelding by the halter. He finds a bridle in the tack room, a thirty-year-old rig with swastikas chiseled in the conchos along the cheek straps. He swings into the Furstnow saddle for the first time.

  A week later it occurs to him to give thanks his saddle has been broken in by another, for he has spent more time on horseback than he has sleeping, eating, and walking around combined.

  The riders rise at three each morning, clear their heads with coffee hotter than a scorned girl’s slap, fill their bellies with as much bacon as they dare before a ten-hour stretch in the saddle. By five they ride like cossacks, dispersing in pairs and trios for the watering holes and the sere high buttes, scanning the ground for the track of unshod hooves, the breeze for a tint of dust.

  They find bands of horses in the coulees and on the low, grassy plains, some unbranded and unclaimed and some already bearing the cannery mark from the year before. Where the
lay of the land works in their favor the hunters approach like snakes in the grass, sneaking close behind the cover of trees or skulking ever nearer beneath the lip of a wash, saddles winnowed of anything that might click or scrape or squeak. They divide when they can and approach from different directions, or one rider might show himself and start the horses toward his hidden partners.

  The horses explode like quail, always. The riders chase them into gumbo badlands and hawthorn draws, across miles of stunted blue sage. Whatever it takes.

  Eventually they rope the brood mare and drive the others toward the wagon camp, or chase off the stallion and force his herd to turn. And eventually, a dozen or twenty lathered horses find themselves harried into a corral, roped and thrown and slapped with a hot iron. A few are turned back for seed. Most won’t soar like the wind again.

  The horse thrives on this broad and wind-scoured waste the way bison and pronghorn and deer once did. Sometimes John H will glance into the bottom of a dry creek and catch the hollow eye of a buffalo skull staring back, giant molars gnawing nothing but sand. He sees deer now and again in the evenings, more rarely the remnant bands of white-rumped antelope, these last invariably speeding for their lives as though some dire invisible creature snaps yet behind their hocks.

  Once he talks to a toothless old hermit in a flea-bitten dugout who remembers the last free Sioux village along the Tongue River in 1878, remembers the buffalo like a black carpet and the antelope thick as flies, elk in the river bottoms and the occasional grizzly lumbering over the plains. John H can scarcely imagine it, so thoroughly have livestock and mustangs and the tedious bite of the plow displaced everything that thrived before.

  He lives in his saddle right through autumn and into the turn of winter, the seat of his britches in tatters by the time the wagon packs in for the year. At times he’s ridden south nearly to Wyoming, and once trailed horses so far west the landscape itself simply vanished before his eyes.

  He’s heard talk of the canyon for years but no amount of campfire bombast or even sober description could prepare him for the immensity of the thing, the sheer geologic wreckage. His saddle horse dances along the lip of a cliff dropping hundreds of feet to the bottom, rising again in broken ravines far across the chasm. Black pines on the opposite cliff look no bigger than bottle brushes, the glint of the river like a strand of Christmas garland.

  Ordinarily he trusts this horse’s sense but one slippery step and they are goners. He backs from the rim, then swings to the ground. He ties the reins off and by the time he’s got the horse secured he’s already unconvinced of what he just saw.

  He steps back and again goes agog. To the north the canyon curves so he can see only the blackness of its depth, the sun low with the onset of winter and at no angle to strike beneath the rim. Southward the canyon yawns like the mouth of the world, bored by its own magnitude.

  John H picks up a rock the size of a baseball, pitches it into space. The rock floats more than falls, shrinking to a speck until he simply can’t see it any longer. He thinks he hears it strike a second later though he is not wholly convinced. He is however certain this tract of land belongs to God Almighty, a testament to the everlasting limits of man. No railway will cross this expanse. No city will rise.

  He swings back to the saddle and only then does he realize he’s lost track entirely of the herd he trailed, not a hoofprint in the sand or a snapped twig to guide him. Vanished into thin air like the rock he threw from the rim. He turns back toward camp.

  He and the other riders exit the range under leaden skies, the wind hurling hard bits of snow. At the ranch on Sweeney Creek he’s offered a hot bath and a bunk but he has nothing to change into and he’s urgent to track down Bakar.

  Night falls fast when the station wagon glides to the curb in Miles City. John H and two other riders retrieve their gear from the back. The Furstnow shop is closed for the day, which means they’ll have to come back in the morning to collect their pay. John H hasn’t a red cent on him though his buddies have a little cash between them, enough for a meal and a roof.

  Or a few rounds. They ease down the walk carrying saddles and stow bags, watching for slicks of ice in the splashes of electric light, the concrete beneath their boots as foreign as the craters of the moon.

  They clatter into the Montana and every head turns and when John H sees himself in the mirror he understands why. Straggly blond beard, bony cheeks, hat like it’s been through a cow’s five stomachs and out the other side. His companions look equally rangy though this hadn’t occurred to him until now.

  The barman ambles down. “Well if you all ain’t rode hard and put up wet. CBC?”

  “Yeah, off Sweeney. We quit shavin’ when the first norther blew in.”

  “I see that.” The bartender lines up three mugs and before John H touches his he inquires about Bakar. The bartender doesn’t know but gives a general shout and a guy in back tells him to check at the Bison. John H swallows his beer in two long gulps and heads for the door.

  At the Bison two Basques tell him Bakar is in town, living in a flophouse on a back street several blocks away. They try to give directions and finally give up and just walk there with him.

  Jean Bakar can’t stop touching him, his hand endlessly on his shoulder or patting his back as though John H might up and disappear. He says he found work through the fall on a fencing crew, quit when the ground froze. Now he’s taking whatever job he can hustle, mucking out this or sweeping that. He seems to have aged more in the past months than he had in the prior four years, and he is not the only one. Once John H has soaked in a hot bath and carved the beard from his face, he sees that he himself no longer resembles a boy.

  After four Spartan decades in a wagon Bakar has become a devotee of a single modern luxury. He shows John H his radio, a cathedral-topped RCA Victor that on certain nights can pick up broadcasts as far away as Chicago. He listens to live orchestras and radio dramas, and it is by way of this technical marvel that he learns of the discontent rumbling through his homeland like a runaway train.

  John H has come off the range fully prepared to collect his pay and travel across the ocean. He has no reason not to, no family to anchor him and no sweetheart to hold him.

  He’s listened ten thousand times to Bakar’s wistful stories about the wild mushrooms in the Irati forest. He’s heard about the trout fat in the mountain streams, the five-hundred-year-old farmhouses in the valleys. He thinks if he takes his own youth back to Euskal Herria, his mentor’s life will come completely around to a happy twilight. He thinks Jean Bakar is as deserving of this as anyone.

  The radio tells its own story. Spain is pushed from ten directions at once, fracturing from the center like glass around a bullet hole. Labor unrest, divisions in the Catholic Church. Landowners clinging desperately to feudal holdings, peasants equally desperate to climb from the dirt. Street demonstrations turn violent, two armed workers’ rebellions crushed in the last month alone.

  Though the Basques in their fiercely independent way have tried to remain neutral, much of northern Spain is now under martial law. Hundreds have been shot, thousands imprisoned, and the radio relays these events practically as they happen, with little margin for exaggeration. Jean Bakar is now afraid to go home. He pats the magic radio. “She’s saving us from danger, rubio. We listen through the winter, maybe go in the spring.”

  But six months later Spain is still in a roil and John H heads out again with the cannery wagon. Bakar finds work again with the Meyer outfit, tending sheep on a lease along Cherry Creek north of town, a bittersweet assignment without the boy.

  John H comes in the following November to find Bakar busted to pieces, infirm in the Meyer bunkhouse after a horse wreck a month earlier. John H never gets the full story, only that Bakar’s mount somehow rolled on him, crushing ribs and breaking the clavicle. The old man had to get himself back on the same horse and ride to the nearest road to find help. The doctor tells him he’s lucky to be alive, that his shattered ribs mig
ht have pierced his lungs or his heart. From Bakar’s perspective, the worst of it is his radio won’t tune a signal out at the ranch.

  They winter again in the boardinghouse in town. John H works at the stockyard across the river. Bakar insists John H attempt to contact his father and despite his old childhood sense of fugitive anxiety he finally concedes, writes letters of inquiry to the state of Maryland and city of Baltimore.

  They still kick around their journey though Bakar takes a long time to heal and the troubles in Spain appear far from resolved. When John H heads back out for the cannery in April, his letters east have not yet received an answer. When he comes in off the range after this third season, a reply from Maryland informs him that his father’s 1930 arrest and subsequent court fine are the last-known record of his whereabouts.

  Across the ocean, full-scale civil war scorches Iberia like a brush fire. The Basque Country has been goaded into the conflict as well, her seaports blockaded and her borders encroached. Jean Bakar follows the drama as closely as he can, and John H can’t help but follow it too. The whole world in fact seems engrossed, as though the bloodletting in Spain is but a stand-in for some larger and more ominous thing. Italy and Germany and Britain and France hover like seconds at a duel. Soviet Russia ferries aid to the Republican army. Artists and writers around the world take up the cause for one side or the other.

  In March, German warplanes bomb Durango, a sleepy little Basque mountain town of no strategic importance. Two hundred are killed. Though Nazi bombers have been flying under the Nationalist banner for months, this small event marks a departure that comes full circle four weeks later.

  John H has been to the CBC office for his marching orders. Ordinarily the wagon outfits are on the range already but the market for horsemeat is down, the cannery cutting back. This will be a short season, requiring fewer riders and starting later. Thus on April 26 he is still in town when Bakar hears on his radio that Guernica has been bombed.

  He comes into the little house they are renting and senses a tension. Outside the air is warm after a week of spring bluster, sunlight coaxing the buds on the elms, sunlight exploding through the glass in the kitchen. The radio is louder than usual, a man’s voice blaring through whines and yelps of static. Bakar sits oddly in a kitchen chair, hands clutching his knees.