Painted Horses

by Malcolm Brooks

  The past week had given her one thing. By force of circumstance she’d gotten over her trepidation at drinking out of natural springs and even the tiny free-flowing creeks that burped and trickled through the runnels. Jack Allen and Miriam showed no compunction about refilling a canteen from whatever source they happened upon. To Catherine this seemed not simply unsanitary but flat uncouth, something her mother would find as appalling and low as dirty underwear, or girls who didn’t mind the stubble beneath their arms.

  Then she got truly thirsty. She emptied the canteen she’d brought from home the first morning out of camp and by afternoon her parched tongue felt like a fat slug in her mouth. She and Miriam had spent much of the day climbing around a small, rock-studded cirque up at the high head of a draw, the breeze blowing endlessly, the sun bright as chrome. A band of snow lingered like dirty meringue in the shade on the north side of the bowl. A ribbon of water trickled through the cirque, and Miriam filled her own canteen from a spillway and pulled from it at regular intervals with no apparent effect.

  Eventually Catherine couldn’t take it anymore. She made her way back to the same spillway, put her fingers tentatively into the flow and plunged the mouth of her canteen under. She let it fill partway and took her first forbidden taste. It was shockingly cold, cold as a windowpane on a winter’s day. But it was water and nothing more. She filled the canteen to the top and drank until she thought she’d burst.

  Five days and innumerable creeks later she and Miriam rode upriver in the morning and walked on foot into a narrow gorge, through clumps of sage in the gouged and broken bottom. They aimed for a splash of green up a slope, perhaps a mile ahead.

  They each took a side and walked slowly into the sun, scanning the ground and the uneven pitch of the gorge. Catherine saw the odd ribs and skull of some smallish animal with pincerlike teeth, and farther along a ruffle of feathers where a bird met its end. What she wished to see was a glyph pecked into stone, or an old ocher smear washed and faded with time. She kept moving.

  They found a spring in the vegetation, a piddling trickle oozing out of moss and rocks and the gnarled wet roots of trees and seeping into a narrow fan of lush green grass on the hillside. Catherine uncapped her canteen and made to hold its mouth into the runnel and when she leaned over the tiny pool with its clean band of gravel her eye caught an unnatural symmetry in the stones. An arrow point, shimmering through the water. She heard a sharp suck of breath and realized it was her own. If she didn’t know better, she would say the point had been placed just so.

  She instinctively thought to grab it up but the sight of her own hand refracting in the water brought her to her senses. She withdrew her dripping fingers and called to Miriam.

  “What?”

  Catherine gestured furiously. “Can you bring my bag?”

  Miriam hefted the leather rucksack and hurried over.

  “What? Oh, I see. A bird point.” She knelt down, her gaze still locked on the little tan stone. “I knew it was something interesting because your eyes were big as saucers.” She looked at Catherine. “Still are, actually. What do we do now?”

  For the next hour Catherine worked to document the location of the point in situ. She made a film of the spring and, she hoped, the stone itself through the shimmer of water, and with Miriam’s help located and marked the position of the spring on the topographical map. She jotted some notes in her journal, the first entry in a while that reflected something like optimism.

  “What did you call it? A bird point?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What’s the meaning of that?”

  “Uh, it’s for killing birds? This is actually a typical place to find that point. Big ground birds like grouse and prairie hens come to water at spots like this. Some old relative of mine probably ambushed a bird for his dinner right on this very spot.”

  Catherine looked at her. “So for some reason, at some point—a hundred years ago, or a thousand?—a hunter ventured all the way up here and crouched by this spring and shot a bird.”

  Miriam nodded. “Shot at a bird, anyway. Or a bunny. Or who knows, a chipmunk, maybe. Probably depends on how hungry he was.”

  For a while they walked on separate concentric paths, around the spring and around each other, eyes stuck to the ground, on the chance another point might appear. None did.

  Eventually Catherine went back to the water. She reached into the puddle, let her fingers close around the meticulous edges of the prize. She brought it up and held it wetly in her palm. She studied its pocks and pecks and serrations, the worked surface no wider than a dime but in its own way as stunning as the muscle and grimace of a Rodin.

  She filled her canteen, and she drank.

  Two afternoons later she studied her copper-colored face in the bathroom mirror. She considered what she might do with herself, found herself sort of shocking to look at. She hadn’t worn eye makeup in weeks and her pale, unadorned lashes gave her a look of wide-eyed innocence. Fifteen years old, never been kissed. No wonder Jack Allen seemed so condescending, Mr. Caldwell so avuncular. Even Miriam coddled her. This plainly wouldn’t do.

  When they came out of the canyon Miriam promptly returned to Agency, the first time she’d been home in a month. The Crow tribe was about to throw a celebration.

  “It’s not the big fair, where everyone brings out their squashes and tomatoes and all,” Miriam explained. “That’s in August. This is going to be more old-timey, kind of a revival.”

  Catherine wasn’t sure what to expect, although Miriam insisted she come. “If you really want to learn something, this is a golden opportunity. And don’t worry. You won’t be the only white girl.”

  Looking at herself now, she considered with a sort of odd pride that she might for the first time in her life pass for something other than a white girl, at least from a distance. She was also torn between two impulses: after a week without a bath she felt a powerful urge to look pretty, but with the recollection of her last trip to the reservation not stale in her mind, an equally powerful instinct for anonymity.

  She’d brought one dress from the east, a halter-strapped number with a pleated skirt that would no doubt attract attention. She gave it a cursory glance and left it on its hanger, pulling herself instead into black pedal pushers and a blue-checked blouse. She looked in the mirror, tried knotting the blouse like Audrey Hepburn but frowned when she instead saw Daisy Mae. She tossed the blouse on the bed and tried another, a sleek lamé top with a trim little Asian collar.

  A gift from her mother, arriving by mail three weeks ago with a note (I found this in the city yesterday, thought it would look so good with your new RING, blah blah blah). Catherine couldn’t imagine where she’d wear such a frivolous thing and it seemed a little snug in any case, but when she tried it on now she found it fit nearly as though tailored to her body.

  Pretty indeed, but a little highfalutin. She looked for some accessory that might tone things down and right away found Miriam’s black-and-white saddle shoes, kicked into a corner and left behind in her haste to get home. Scuffed a little here and there and all the more perfect. Catherine tied them on and looked in the mirror. Now she was a contradiction. Adolescent at head and toe, all grown up in the middle. Her eyes still bothered her.

  She pulled her suitcase from under the bed and rummaged through the things she’d never bothered to unpack. There in the bottom under her winter coat she unearthed what she was looking for, a flat tin with a lid. She twisted the lid and peered at the contents.

  In the seventh grade for a class history project Catherine researched and manufactured her own kohl. She learned that at the height of the Egyptian kingdoms the mineral ore galena was quarried near the Red Sea and carried to the cities, crushed on a pestle and cut with oil to make a paste to line and lengthen the eye.

  She looked and looked in art-supply stores and science catalogs and even odd little curiosity shops to find galena ore and she came up with nothing. Finally as the due date of her project came near sh
e cajoled her father to take her along on a business errand he had in Manhattan.

  At the Explorer’s Club a kindly old duffer who’d been in India and Arabia told her of another method altogether. A clean linen cloth was burned slowly in a covered pot, the smoky residue collected from the lid and blended with castor oil. He found a nineteenth-century biblical reference encyclopedia with a description of the process, instructions for its application to the rims of the eyes in another. Catherine eagerly copied both in her half-formed schoolgirl’s script while her father wandered like a kid himself through the stuffed bears and African masks on other floors of the clubhouse.

  She realized much later that the wandering Israelites were as incensed by cosmetics as any Victorian matron. She transcribed verbatim the words harlot and wanton without quite knowing what they meant, though a reference to Jezebel painting her eyes before a violent demise struck a small chord.

  Back at home Catherine followed the recipe as closely as she could. She succeeded on her second attempt to produce a fine, almost powdery paste that clung to the rounded tip of a safety match like fuzz on the skin of a peach. She pinched the lashes of her eyelids between the finger and thumb of her left hand, pulled both lids outward and inserted the head of the match between them. She ran the match corner to corner. She aged five years and three millennia in a single blink.

  The true power of this chemistry came to her in short order. She gave her class presentation a day later, describing the significance of kohl in ancient Egypt and passing around pictures of hieroglyphs. She described her trip to the Explorer’s Club, and her experience making her own kohl.

  For the finale she dipped her match into the paste and applied a line to each eye, looked out at her audience with the stare of a falcon. Dead silence for a long moment. Then a bold boy in back whistled, and the rest of Catherine’s face went scarlet.

  So kohl became her weapon, deployed when she needed an aura, mostly at school dances and social functions to which she’d been dragged. In college she evolved the look with a band of white eye shadow, drawn out like the tail of a comet beyond the corner of her eye socket. Ordinarily the white makeup was barely perceptible against her own white skin, serving mainly to pronounce the effect of the kohl, but now with her sunburn the eye shadow flashed like silver foil. When she left the house she looked neither fifteen nor anonymous any longer.

  She drove to Agency in the evening light, the shadows flattening along the plains but the sun still hours from exit. She joined a caravan of cars as she drew close to the town, following the cars to a field behind a church with a sort of underfunded, vaguely Catholic look. She killed the engine and opened the door to the long roll of thunder. She looked up, squinting against the glare. Not a cloud. She climbed out and gently latched the door.

  Not thunder. Drums. She knew it now, recognized the throb and beat of taut hide and hewn barrels and the slap of rapid hands, recognized it though she’d never actually heard anything quite like it. People migrated toward the line of trees along the river, both white and Indian men in Stetson hats and pressed pants, women in skirts or summer dresses and sandals. Catherine drifted with the flow.

  The thump of the drums climbed as the distance closed and Catherine settled into the pattern as she walked, thought to herself that such a sound inside a real concert hall with real acoustics might nearly have the power to deafen. She allowed her brain to drift up and up into the summer sky where she imagined the sound might simply travel forever into space, and that some part of her consciousness should try to follow except the first piercing cry of native voices in an eerie syncopated chant surged up even above the drums and knocked her tumbling back to earth. A shiver raised every filament on her body. The voices HI-YI-YI-YI-yi-yi-yie’d away. The drums boomed.

  The drummers circled on a baseball diamond behind the schoolhouse, the rickety stands already packed with spectators. Earlier Catherine feared a self-consciousness, feared she might stand out like a naked person on a stage. Now she rounded the end of the bleachers and got her first look at the dancers, and knew she was not likely to become the center of attention.

  The dancers appeared solely female, mostly young women but a few small girls as well, whirling and prancing in a blur of fringe and sailing braids and with the shimmer and flash of adornment. The haunting, wailing cry went up again, shouted by the drummers and others who knew the tongue in the crowd. Catherine shivered again.

  She tried to find Miriam among the dancers and found this impossible, her eye racing from one kinetic figure to the next, then wrenched elsewhere by sunlight glancing from silver or chrome. The costumes varied, some constructed of pale buckskin and others of red or black cloth, some beaded in geometric patterns and others accoutered with all manner of dangling ornaments, tiny jangling bells or rows of cowrie shells, the sawn tips of antlers or feathers plucked from birds. One girl fairly glimmered with dozens of jumping brass rifle cartridges.

  On and on they went, sometimes rotating in tilting, marching circles with their arms outstretched, sometimes hopping in a line, but always full of motion. Catherine couldn’t imagine how they didn’t drop from exhaustion, but even the little girls never seemed to tire.

  Once for an exercise in polytonality a piano teacher made her learn part of The Rite of Spring, and in typical fashion she found herself more interested in the surrounding legend than the actual music. The original ballet choreography was of course long lost, but it struck her now that primeval dances such as these were what Nijinsky must have summoned out of some haunted and time-shrouded netherworld, and so turned his own staid discipline inside out. The premiere in a Paris theater famously sparked a riot, with punches thrown and the police called.

  Here, with the contoured hills slinking into shadow and the thump of drums like the pulse of the earth, she didn’t know what might force a riot. A pink tutu, maybe.

  The dancers shuffled off and the drums shifted, assumed an ominous drone, on and on until finally a single, hunched figure danced into view, a man with bare legs and a tremendous feathered headdress swaying down his back, chains of bells chiming at his ankles. He let out a long whoop and got an answer out of the air itself, the same blood-freezing cry as before only this time rising and falling and rising again, pausing a long moment and finally resuming in the same matchless, mysterious instant, as though many voices from many directions had been possessed by the same shrieking spirit.

  The song rose like a fever, horrifying and beautiful at once, an ancient thing with ancient meaning and ancient power utterly intact. Other dancers joined the first, all men, some shaking rattles or blowing whistles and some nearly naked save for breechclouts and face paint, some with breastplates fashioned from thin bone cylinders and others bare chested and scribed with geometric lines.

  A war chant, that’s what it was, and could be nothing else. A song of glory and mourning and revenge, with drums bashing like the blows of a club and voices like women hysterical with loss, other voices like souls wailing back, across a chasm that couldn’t be crossed. She thought if hell were real and Custer had gone there, he doubtless heard something like this now, and always, and forever.

  As for Catherine, eventually all she could hear were bells. Hundreds of them, shaking with the movement of so many dancers, the collective sound saturating the air like the shimmer of a cymbal.

  It was true she possessed a developed ear, could hear the faint tick of her nails on the ivories when they grew too long, could sequester instruments in an orchestra. Fifteen years at a keyboard and it was second nature. The voices and the drums kept on but she allowed these tiny tinkling bells to lure her away, half in shame because they were a bridge to her own culture, her own century, knowing such a sound couldn’t have been part of this world originally. Then again, neither had horses.

  She was next aware of the drums by their absence, twenty of them vanished on a single shattering beat and the voices gone with them, a silence the depth of a fathom hanging in the air. She caught the gleam of fir
elight on elk’s teeth and silver bracelets. Uneven illumination danced against the ground. Night had descended. A bonfire burned.

  The bleachers and the outer dark came alive with applause and the drummers stood from their drums. Dim figures moved in the light and once when the fire flared she glimpsed a rider on a horse, skirting the far side of the field. She rose unsteadily herself.

  She was nearly to the church and just within the cone of light from a yard lamp when her name came out of the darkness. Catherine stopped. “Miriam?”

  “Here. I’m right here.” Miriam emerged from the night as from a different century. She wore dancer’s attire, beaded moccasins on her feet and a red broadcloth overshirt. Her hair hung in two straight braids, bound in silver wire. She fumbled for her glasses in a fringed bag and put them on and her eyes and mouth went wide. “Look at your eyes! I haven’t been able to see all night. I almost missed you just now. Look at that little top!”

  “Were you dancing?”

  Miriam nodded. “Were you in the audience?”

  “I was. I tried to find you but I guess I didn’t come close. For awhile I thought it was you with bullets all over your dress.”

  Miriam laughed. “God no. That was Alma Pretty Shield. She and I don’t even resemble each other.”

  “Oh. Oops.”

  Miriam shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. We think all you whites look alike too.”

  A fiddle sawed in the street beyond the church and Catherine could see light coming from there too, and hear the mild din of a crowd. “What’s going on?”

  “Street dance. You should go.”

  “Oh I don’t know, Miriam, I’m not going to know anybody. Are you going?”