Painted Horses

by Malcolm Brooks

  He’d thought of her since. Catherine Lemay, plainly not from around here. Despite the French name he caught vestiges of a proper British lilt to her speech, or parts of it at least. Words such as ought and been. He wondered at this. English parentage maybe, diplomats or professors transferred across the pond. He knew the second he’d ridden up on her in the trees she was the same girl he’d startled along the river in Miles City.

  In Paris after the war he’d known acolytes of Jung, painters and café intellectuals who welcomed him into their fold as a kind of noble primitive, a notion they all seemed highly enamored with. They saw archetypal images in his paintings and assumed he tapped some conduit to the primeval soul. John H went ahead and let them think so.

  They talked about the eerie synchronicity of coincidence. Encounter an odd word in print and an hour later someone else speaks the word in conversation. Though oftentimes they blathered in vague philosophical abstractions, tossing around difficult ideas made more difficult by his less-than-perfect French, the sensation of synchronicity he understood, perhaps better than any of them. The fact they’d christened it with a name was enough. He had a feeling he’d see her yet again.

  She did something with Harris Power and Light. A part of him had already acknowledged, half in jest, that his own interests might better be served had he left her to hike out on her own. Except she clearly had no idea what she was doing and never should have been sent here. Not by herself, anyway.

  Later with the clouds dumping buckets of rain he saw the stone flutes rising in the mist, his marker toward home. The mare pushed through the willows and entered the seam, the red horse trailing by barely a hundred yards. John H sat up straighter in the saddle for the first time in an hour. He’d ache for three days after this one. Then again, so would the mare.

  The walls angled pink and sheer on either side, the sky thin as a crack overhead. The gorge snaked and sidled like the forces of wind and water that carved it, twisting this way and that, its sandy floor littered with rocks calved loose and toppled from above. Along its many miles the stem of the canyon connected with any number of smaller branches, channels that once held mighty volumes of water and likely would again. Only this time, not by the random whims of nature and weather and river.

  One final curve and the aperture of the gorge opened to a bowl bored deep into the ring of red cliffs, a natural cirque a quarter mile across with grass in the bottom and a cluster of trees at one side where water burbled from the ground. The low stone house slouched like a feature of the rock itself, all but invisible against the base of the cliff, like a game bird melting into habitat.

  John H shucked the rifle and reined the mare and was already dismounting before she’d pranced to a stop. He whacked her wet rump with the gun barrel and h’ya’d to send her on and she jumped forward into the grass with her ribs heaving and her ears up, head turned back to the gorge. She was drenched from rain, looked less horse than drowned rat.

  The red colt appeared and John H held motionless, splayed tight to the wall not four feet away. The colt paused like a wary deer, testing the wet air with his nose and nickering at the mare. The mare nickered back. The colt took two steps forward. John H moved from the wall and though the horse caught this as nothing more than a flicker at the edge of an eye he jumped forward in a shock of fear, tucking his croup and humping his back like a dog startled up with a kick. The red horse wheeled and got his first hard look at a man. He bolted headlong across the cirque.

  John H dragged the strung wires of a poor-man’s gate across the mouth of the gorge. He braced the gatepost against one shoulder and leaned into the wire to stretch it taut, then dropped a chain set in the stone down over the top of the post.

  He took up his rifle and turned back to the bowl. The red horse ran along the base of the far rock wall. He traced a steady line around the perimeter and reached the alien symmetry of the pole corral and the barn and shied anew, running back along the wall the way he’d come.

  The mare watched the red horse dart around but made no move to follow. John H stepped up and took her bridle. “Seems he’s forgotten all about you,” he told her. “For the moment.” The noise of his voice seemed to vex her and she shook her head against the grip of his hand, a wet corona blasting from her skull. He led her across the bowl toward home.

  2

  One evening in the middle of June Catherine glanced at herself in the bathroom mirror and felt her breath catch at the stranger she saw: green eyes glittering between lashes bleached nearly white by the sun, face burned brown as a nut, oily blonde hair plastered to her head and pulled into a ragged ponytail. The hard features of the ground she’d scanned and scoured and crawled across these last days had stamped a mark upon her. Her face had itself become a mirror.

  After a series of frustrating day-trips she began to suspect Jack Allen of something not unlike subterfuge. He seemed to apply neither rhyme nor reason to whatever location he chose for the day, and Catherine’s sense of direction was so skewed by the gulches and gullies and endless mountains of stone that it took awhile to understand how erratic he actually was.

  Finally in the evenings she and Miriam began to retrace each day’s route on a map. After a few days they had a sense of things.

  “Yesterday we rode in on this trail, over on the reservation side,” Miriam said. “Remember those benches across the river, the ones you said looked like elephants’ backs? Those are these wider lines here. Now today we went in clear over on this side.” She ran her finger along a series of hashes on a different fold of the map. “That’s like, ten miles away. It’s been that way every day. There are huge gaps of ground we never see at all.”

  Catherine had just realized something else, something sort of marvelous. Her thighs and bottom and back no longer ached from the days in the saddle. She hadn’t noticed before.

  “Catherine, are you hearing me? I think he’s wasting a lot of time for you here.”

  She came back to herself. She felt very calm, as though she’d swallowed a sedative that eased her mood but somehow sharpened her mind. “I hear you fine.” She leaned closer to Miriam across the map, studying the endless ridges and whorls of elevation, also the colloquial appellations scrawled across peaks and valleys and streambeds. Some were totally outrageous by modern standards—Bloody Dick Peak, or Boner Knob, which Miriam could really go on and on about. And far upriver, a swatch of ground where names and prior knowledge fell away altogether, a wide brown blotch labeled simply Unexplored Territory.

  She looked at Miriam. “It’s still pretty hard just to know where to begin, isn’t it. No wonder we can’t come up with anything.”

  “Do you remember what Mr. Caldwell said in the cave that day? About campsites?”

  “Vaguely. Say it again?”

  “He just sort of threw it out, that a good place to camp today was probably a good place a thousand years ago, or something to that effect.”

  “Miriam, I’m an idiot. You’re right; it’s staring us in the face. You would know good places to camp, I guess?”

  Miriam wrinkled her nose. “Not necessarily. But I bet we can think of someone who does.”

  “We’ll manipulate him right back. Right under his own nose.”

  “I can hardly wait.”

  They crossed their bottles like sabers.

  “Camping. With the two of you.” He reined the gray in the middle of the narrow trail and in one fluid motion turned the dappled horse to face her. He did have a flair for the dramatic. Catherine’s own horse shuffled to a confused stop, and Miriam’s behind her. “No bathtub, no toilet, hot curlers, and so on. This is what you think you want.”

  “I’ve never used a hot curler in my life.” Not true, but Jack Allen certainly didn’t need to know it.

  “Pocahontas back there, that I can picture. She’s only one generation out of the wigwam anyway.”

  “Three, actually,” said Miriam. “And it’s tepee. Get it right.”

  Allen ignored her. He looked at th
e setting sun. “A whole week? You positive? Because if I go to the trouble for that sort of shindig, I’m not liable to tolerate any whining, griping, or otherwise calling it quits early.”

  “And when have I complained? Not at five A.M., ever. Not when you waltzed off with the tire to my car, which you have yet to return by the way. Not even when you’ve spent hours looking for horse tracks instead of helping me to find a single thing of value.”

  He held up his hands. “Don’t get your panties in a wad. A week it is.” He turned his horse again and nudged on up the trail. “Just be careful what you wish for, missy. All I’m saying.”

  In truth he had a point. Catherine hadn’t camped since she was a kid and the sum total of that experience—four summers at Camp Wicosuta, a well-appointed girls’ sleepaway in New Hampshire—barely counted.

  Still, her early riding lessons had indeed not been for naught. Ambitious, aggressive, and anxious to please had evidently been about right. She was riding well, and truly hadn’t complained once. Surely she could handle six nights on the ground.

  She and Miriam drove to Billings on a Saturday with a checklist of provisions penciled in Jack Allen’s surprisingly tidy hand. Tent stakes, sleeping roll, ground cloth. Coffee, 1 lb. Oatmeal, peanuts, raisins, 5 lb. Bacon, beans. By midafternoon they’d stopped at five different stores and had an unruly mountain of supplies piled in the rear of the Dodge.

  On the way out of the city she got going down a one-way avenue and missed the turn toward the highway. Miriam had to lean out the passenger window to see if the lane was clear to merge and when it wasn’t, Catherine made a snap decision to turn left instead. Somebody leaned on a horn she presumed at her, although she couldn’t imagine what she’d done wrong, and impulsively she let off the gas pedal. The Dodge began to lunge like a balking mule and she panicked, stamped the brake and stalled out yet again with a slam.

  Miriam roared with laughter beside her. Another horn blared. “Just clutch it when that happens,” she wheezed. “Your gear was too high.”

  Catherine gave a stricken glance at a line of onlookers on the sidewalk and her mind saw again the throngs queued and shouting during those last weeks at Walbrook, the flashbulbs popping once the newspapers got hold of things and the pandemonium and the eyes of all Britain cast upon them, frantically digging away, frantic in the dirt. Audrey Williams laughing, she could hear it like she could hear Miriam now, telling Catherine she might be a bit of a Bolshevik. The tidal scent of the Thames on the autumn air—

  The horn blasted again. The crowd on the sidewalk was in fact the line at a ticket booth. She had stalled in front of a theater. She glanced at the marquee and gave a second start. Blackboard Jungle. She and David never had gotten around to seeing it.

  She looked at Miriam. “Is rock and roll here yet?”

  Miriam had caught her breath. “Um, maybe? I know I’ve heard of it.”

  Catherine shoved in the clutch and pushed the starter.

  Fifteen minutes later the lights dimmed in the theater. They sat through a newsreel and a trailer for a Western movie with gaping color vistas not so unlike the terrain of the canyon, but also Indians in headdresses being shot off their horses, which made Catherine cringe. But Miriam seemed unaffected, or at least unsurprised.

  The screen went dark and the head of a lion appeared with his grunt-like roar, and as the animal melted away again his voice merged with a rising military drumbeat, which rat-a-tatted along before half veering, half morphing into something more along the line of bass-bomb inflected bebop. Then out of nowhere a hard, sharp jolt when the sticks ka-kack-kacked against the steel rim of a snare and a voice like a threat went, “One two three o’clock, Four o’clock Rock,” and Catherine felt Miriam and somehow half the audience flinch like they’d been electrocuted.

  She leaned into Miriam’s ear. “This is it. Rock and roll.”

  The song wound on, punctuated by a sort of jabbing saxophone break and then again by a guitar part, which Catherine despite herself could only regard as perfectly delivered, all racing downscale runs and wailing, bending notes.

  “Is there more music like this?”

  “More and more. This movie sort of started it.”

  Somebody threw an ice cube, which bounced off Catherine’s seat. Somebody said, “Shut up over there.” She leaned again toward Miriam and whispered, “It’s known to bring out the worst in people.”

  “It’s really what’s called a twelve-bar blues, or built around that, anyway,” Catherine said. They were driving now, the day later along than she would have guessed but somehow still brilliant and ripe with sunlight. “But it blends these other elements, from all around—hillbilly twang and boogie-woogie and swing. The guitarist is obviously a jazz player. So it’s sort of nothing but everything, all at once.”

  “Does everyone from the East know this stuff?”

  “What, rock and roll? That’s just a fad, for teenagers, because of the movie. The latest thing, you know? It’ll be something else, tomorrow.”

  “No. I mean yes. That, but all the stuff you know. All the twelve-bar this, and Wedgwood that. I’ve read half the books in the Hardin library and I feel like I don’t know anything.”

  “Miriam, I recently had it demonstrated to me, rather frighteningly, that I can’t change a tire. You’ve seen me. I can barely drive a clutch.”

  “You’re learning, though.”

  “So are you.”

  They rode along to the grind of the ambulance’s gear, to the noise of the wind around the seals in the doors. Catherine wished they had a radio now, wished she could bring the whole wide world through that whistling air and right into Miriam’s ears. Not only more of this kid’s-stuff rock and roll, or rhythm and blues or whatever it was, for currency, but every worthy string of notes in the galaxy.

  Her parents’ elegant Glenn Miller records.

  Tchaikovsky’s nocturnes, a few of which she herself could play by rote on the spot should a piano suddenly present itself. A record player—she’d buy Miriam a record player, before the summer was out. And records. And books.

  The light came across the plains at a cast that made the spring green shimmer on the hills, made the arcing red stone of an anticline across the valley nearly radiant with color. Black cows, glistening like lacquer. Miriam said, “Is the city really all dirty and dangerous, like in the movie?”

  It had been a harrowing tale, with a rape attempt on a teacher by a student, knife fights in class, and threats against an expectant mother. “In places, I’m sure, although probably compressed and sensationalized for the movie. That was supposed to be a vocational school, in a tough part of New York. Poor kids.” She immediately regretted this last. “You know what I mean.”

  “You don’t have to explain. Not to me. But remember how I was saying the people in New York, or Chicago, think of us in a certain way? When we were in the movie I realized the opposite is true, too. Out here, we think of everyone back in those places as having, well, your sort of life. And I guess that’s not the whole truth.”

  “No, it isn’t. There are all kinds of lives. There always have been. I’m just a product of circumstance, like anyone else. I got plunked in front of a piano when I was four, with a tutor, and I soaked it up like a sponge, without any thought at all. It was expected of me, and I did it. I was expected to practice, and I did. And there was always a certain amount of money around, and a certain consciousness about taste, and I was an only child raised around pretty sophisticated adults. Or educated at least, if not actually sophisticated. So I . . . became what I became. Even when I decided to become something else.”

  “But I think you’re more than what you say. You, in particular.”

  Catherine gave her a sidelong look.

  “A product of circumstance, I don’t think that’s true at all. I think you made yourself more than that.”

  “Oh, you know. I got to a really obvious fork in the road and I went down the path that looked more interesting. Even then I had some p
retty respectable people giving me permission. It wasn’t all that bold, not really.”

  “The other day you said London saved your life.”

  “And I’ll go on saying that until I’m dead I’m sure.” She peeled her eyes from the road for just a second now, looked at Miriam face on. “But you know what can truly save your life? Literally, truly save your life?” She looked back to the highway. “Knowing how to change your tire.”

  On Sunday, Jack Allen arrived at the house with an assortment of ropes and panniers and canvas sheets and with martial efficiency proceeded to condense both equipment and food into loads of cargo for three packsaddles. He hung a spring scale from the limb of a tree and checked the weights of the packs, shifting contents from one to another. When he was satisfied he marked a code on each with a stub of chalk.

  The next morning they bounced in the gray dawn over a rutted road through an empty stretch of country. Catherine towed one stock trailer with the Dodge, following the lights of another trailer pulled by Jack Allen’s battered truck.

  When the sun showed above the horizon they parked along the river, the wide mouth of the canyon yawning darkly a mile off. Allen offloaded the pack animals from Catherine’s trailer—three long-legged government-style jack mules, comical looking animals with oversized ears and skulls curved like the blade of a pickax. Catherine and Miriam together carried the loaded panniers from the rear of the ambulance, Catherine at least struggling with the weight and trying not to show it. Allen lashed the cargo to the saddled mules, slinging rope around like a spider, his nimble fingers building hitches as intricate as the structure of a snowflake. He loaded two of the mules with the packs and panniers, the third with a pair of bundled hay bales and a sack of grain.

  They were riding upriver in less than an hour, Catherine and Miriam mounted on horses new to both of them and Jack Allen as always astride his magnificent gray. (Miriam: “Doesn’t that horse ever get tired?” Jack Allen: “Nope.”)

  The mules trailed behind. When Catherine looked back at the string of them lumbering beneath their loads she remembered again the map in her kitchen, that brown blotch of land. She had a vision of themselves as fortune seekers, delicious as it was forbidden in modern, matured archaeology.