Painted Horses

by Malcolm Brooks

  A wan drizzle displaces the thin light of morning and the order comes to mount up and fall into formation. They ride out seventy-five strong under a cloak of watery fog, silent save the creak of tack and the suck of hooves.

  They divide into four parties and ride cross-country in different directions. John H is not entirely clear what it is they’re supposed to be doing. Throughout the day they hear the far-off crackle of rifle fire, the distant thump of mortars.

  The rain lifts in the afternoon. They sit their horses at the edge of a meadow, the tall grass bejeweled in the new shine of the sun. Across the meadow an orchard rises behind an uneven stone wall, a farmhouse and barn of similar construction nearby. Nothing about this scene suggests carnage.

  The officer in charge, a lieutenant named Foy, shouts toward the house to announce the presence of the US Army.

  The house remains silent. Foy says, “Any of you guys speak Italian?”

  John H looks around. “Negatory,” says McKee.

  “Who the hell’s running this outfit,” the officer jokes. He signals two others toward the house, then points at John H and McKee. “You and you, go check the barn. We’ll cover you.”

  The two dismount and McKee waltzes right into the cool interior, strides across the earthen floor.

  John H has just stepped even with McKee when the wheeze of a mule explodes in this cave-mute air. He flinches as though he’s been shocked. A flapping erupts overhead.

  McKee studies him. “Jumpy?”

  The mule occupies a stall at the far end. It flattens its ears when they approach, bares its yellow teeth. “Reckon he don’t like strangers,” says McKee. They hear the burbling again, the rile of wings. John H climbs up and pokes his head into the loft.

  A dovecote, protruding through the roof. The pigeons flap to life at the sight of him, collide with the wire walls of the pen. John H descends to the floor.

  McKee has wandered to a wall where he runs his fingers along the seam of two angular blocks. “I don’t think there’s any mortar in this thing. Just hewn rock. Hell, you couldn’t get a cigarette paper in there.” He looks at John H. “Now that’s a barn.”

  John H points to the ceiling and says, “Pigeons.”

  They rejoin the others around back. Foy scans with his field glasses. “Well looky here,” he says, and John H follows his point across the valley and gets his first view of the men who will cheerfully blow off his head. A canvas-topped personnel truck crawls down a road on the hillside, passing in and out of the trees. A tank emerges, the clank of great treads faintly audible a mile away.

  “Panzer,” says Foy. “That is exactly what we’re looking for.”

  The vehicles roll into the trees. Foy and two others pore over a map. McKee continues to glass, not with binoculars but with a collapsible brass telescope he picked up in Sicily.

  He nudges John H. “See that dead snag just by the bend there? Look about fifteen yards east. That netting?”

  Foy comes up. “I see it. All right, that cluster of brush—see the color of the leaves? Those are cutoff tree limbs. See the cannon tube, just left of center? Dollars to donuts, they’re set to ambush that bridge down the valley there.”

  He goes back to the map, marks the bridge with a grease pencil. McKee studies the slope, and from the corner of his eye John H sees him straighten up. With his own unaided eye John H sees a wink of light.

  “Boys,” says McKee. “We done been made.”

  The words are barely out when a bloom of smoke opens in the trees. “Duck,” says Foy, but nobody has time before a black comet screams over like a thousand penny whistles, blows the dovecote to bits on the roof of the barn. Splinters of wood and slate roofing and parts of birds rain down everywhere. Two lucky pigeons flap through the hole and depart.

  John H finds himself in a mad run with the others, helmet banging, every one of them laughing with something near to delirium, swinging into saddles and galloping back through the orchard. Behind them the mule trumpets.

  The rain sets in for keeps a few days later. The trails turn slime-slick with mud, creeks and rivers rising like a tide that never rolls back for the sea. John H and the others spend six straight weeks in the saddle, along and sometimes beyond the front line, tracking artillery placements.

  At night they pack the horses’ feet in straw to fend off hoof rot, bivouac in clammy canvas tents. They are issued condoms with their kits and there are no women here anyway so they roll the condoms over the muzzles of their gun barrels, to keep rain from rusting in the bores.

  They ride through shelled villages that hiss and steam in the rain, more than once stumble on the mutilated bodies of partisan fighters garroted or impaled or hanged with necks bizarrely stretched from a lamppost. They see the doomed parade of refugees, young girls gang-raped and screamed voiceless and mothers guilt-wracked and helpless, little brothers eight or ten years old and murderous with rage. Old men only, for the able-bodied have been pressed into work details hither and yon.

  The first time John H rides into a firefight he all but forgets to be afraid. It happens that quickly. The autumn leaves are turning and he and twenty others wind single file through a copse at the base of a hillside. The sound of a gun bolt clanks, the branches above their heads snapping and flopping like severed wires before the gun’s report has yet reached their ears. A machine gun nest, burrowed into the rocks up above.

  They run their horses into the copse, bullets cracking through the trees. Two horses are hit, one in the lower spine. It shrieks when its back legs collapse, tries to pull itself along with front legs only. The other horses jump and fidget at the iodine odor of fresh blood, sharp and elemental as a coin.

  Seventeen of the twenty including John H take their thirties and under the smoke of a phosphorus grenade creep back and dig in at the base of the hillside. They draw the fire of the gunner in the rocks, fire back with their small-bore carbines. They actually hear the laughter of the Germans up above, the amusement at the puny reports of these fey little guns. Some derisive comment rolls down the hill in the harsh cadence of the Kraut tongue, some insult involving the word jungfraus.

  They don’t laugh long. While the seventeen present a distraction three others loop ahead through the trees and edge onto the hillside with a mortar. The machine gun has again commenced its chatter and John H has his head tucked in like a turtle, but even so he faintly hears the pneumatic whump of the mortar tube, ticks off the hanging seconds while the projectile scribes its lazy trajectory.

  The shell bursts on the rock with a wallop that shakes the ground. A miss, but not by much. German shouting and the sounds of a confused scramble cue the seventeen and they cut loose with another volley. The German gun starts again and from the noise of the report John H guesses it’s trained now in a different direction, the mortar’s position made, and he steadies his carbine against the corrugated bark of a tree and squints through the halo of the sight, and he can just make out the flat gray dome of a helmet in a notch through the rocks, holds a little high against the distance, tightens his finger on the trigger.

  The sear is about to trip when the second mortar round scores a hit. His target vanishes in a gale of flash and debris. A cheer goes up all around, the involuntary reckoning of relief. He eases off the trigger, breathes like he’s never breathed before.

  They walk up on the rocks like hunters of dangerous game. The machine gun lies upended, tripod in the air like the bent legs of a mantis. Only one German soldier remains alive and he’s bleeding out the ears and owns a mangled leg. His two companions are dead, their uniforms smoldering, blood like sprayed paint all around. John H rolls one over to be sure, looks away from the damaged face and sees binoculars on the ground, the tether clutched yet by lifeless fingers.

  He tugs the binoculars free and studies them. They appear unharmed. He raises the lenses to his eyes, looks downhill toward the horses. Adjusts the focus slightly and McKee crystallizes sharply into himself, clear as life and peering back through his telesco
pe. He gives a jaunty wave.

  John H lowers the glasses and studies the German maker’s name and thinks, No wonder they’re so high and mighty. He slips the glasses into the bib of his shirt.

  By November the forward line has crossed the Volturno River. The rain turns to snow and the horse units pull back toward Naples. They ride all day in the weather, past infantry heading out along the muddy roads, past tanks with bulldozer blades welded to the fore. They see an intimation of what they themselves have become in the sober eyes of the freshest recruits, know they must look like a ghost brigade out of every war that’s ever raged in five thousand years of civilization.

  They ride to a barracks at Naples and before they’ve had a hot meal they learn that gonorrhea has swept the occupying army like a brush fire. The city’s brothels have been placed off-limits.

  McKee in particular finds this irksome, complains that the only thing keeping his chin up in that godforsaken wilderness was the garden of earthly delights awaiting him in this here Deseret.

  “Keeping your chin up, or keeping your pecker up,” someone catcalls from the back.

  “Is there a difference?” McKee shouts back.

  Naples in fact is far from a paradise of any sort. The retreating Germans have surrendered it with all the dignity of a dismembered hostage, burning the civic buildings, blowing up the post office.

  Now things have been quiet for weeks. Maybe too quiet—many of the recon soldiers find themselves resistant to laxity, restless as animals only recently brought to the cage. John H knows McKee is awake at all hours, knows because he himself sleeps practically with one eye open.

  McKee never seems stuporous. He frets over the tack and the stock, shoes horses, any task to stay ahead of the tedious crawl of time. At moments he seems half-deranged with boredom or craving or both.

  John H has a sketch pad and some charcoal sticks, traded away from some ragamuffin kids in the streets. He reconstructs the ruins outside the city from memory, the fog-wet walls and shadowy portals.

  One day when the rain thuds in off the ocean the door bangs open and a figure stomps in like a force of the weather itself.

  Jack Allen. John H knew him in the CBC, was unsurprised to encounter him in the army. Allen had a genius for capturing horses to rival John H’s skill at taming them, a sort of raptor’s view of the universe and the infinite sum of its tiniest parts.

  “Ladies. How’s the scribbling?”

  John H looks past the edge of his paper. “Beats getting shot at.”

  “That a fact.” Allen scans the room, takes in the pinups on the walls and the card games and the letters from home. “What say we get out of this knitting circle and back in the game.”

  “Who’s we.”

  Allen’s lip curls, the only smile he owns. “That’s the spirit. I wrangled an order to run a mule train to a partisan outfit that’s playing hell with the Kraut supply line. They need guns and ammo. I can pick two guys and I figure you and this jack mormon friend of yours can at least ride and shoot straight.”

  McKee is uncharacteristically reclined on his cot, cap pulled over his eyes. He lifts the brim with a finger and says, “Sign me up, hondo.”

  They are driven at midnight to a requisitioned farmhouse, the barns in service as a remount station. John H lugs his Furstnow to the corral and saddles a bay mare in the torchlight. He checks the animal’s hooves, presses a thumb to its frogs. He blows air into each quavering nostril.

  They wind up a path into the hills, storm clouds rimed in silver from a three-quarter moon. Jack Allen rides at the head of the column, McKee to the rear. John H drew a straw for point, steers out ahead of Allen and up off the trail entirely wherever he can. He stops and strains his ears against the night, cups his hands to his head against the creak of panniers. Once or twice he hears the drone of planes overhead.

  They climb past the snow line in the dark. They wind through a notch in the rocks and cross a creek clouded with ice and the mare stops on her own at a break in the trees. He watches her ears train forward and he slides his rifle as quietly as he can from its scabbard. He turns his head and gives a low whistle, the displaced trill of a western meadowlark. He hears Allen rein up, hears again the whisper of a gunstock sliding through leather.

  The mare wants to turn back and he holds her where she stands and catches movement in the trees. He levels the rifle and a creature materializes on the snow, four legged and large as a hound out of folklore. The animal freezes and John H sees the shag of its coat in the moonlight, the great whiskers of its jowls and the gleam of an eye. A second like animal appears and then a third and these lock up behind the first, noses pointing at John H and the mare.

  Jack Allen slips alongside, silent as a ghost. Even his horse makes no sound. “What you got.”

  John H stabs with his rifle. “See them?”

  “I see ’em.”

  A light pulses in the dark, a single pinprick. Allen fishes in his pocket, sparks his Zippo, snuffs it and sparks again. “This here’s our boy. Set tight. Keep your powder dry.”

  Allen rides forward, rifle jutting off his hip. John H loses him in the dark, hears voices murmur. A moment later he rides back, followed by a man on foot and the bouncing forms of the beasts.

  Dogs. Heavily muscled canines with wiry coats and docked tails, great wet mustaches drooping.

  John H slides his gun away. “How much farther?”

  “Beats me. This guy supposedly speaks American but I can’t gather it.”

  They ride another hour. The guide leads them to the edge of a cirque and John H smells woodsmoke. The dogs bound ahead.

  The light rises while they pull the packs from the mules. Five figures emerge from a low hut in the evergreens. None has recently shaved. Each is armed. They stand around smoking, eyes flickering over the crates on the mules.

  The guide ushers them into the hovel. A figure crouches at the fire, men’s pants though clearly a woman’s bum. She straightens as they shuffle in, looks over her shoulder and though her face is sober she is young and despite the conditions quite beautiful.

  “Ay Chihuahua,” breathes McKee.

  “Cheese my sea stir,” says the guide.

  McKee doffs his hat, offers a slight apologetic bow. The guide claps him on the shoulder.

  They dish stew from a blackened pot, mysterious chunks of meat and mushroom caps in a thin broth. The three dogs crowd and whine and finally line in front of the girl.

  “I see who the pushover is,” says McKee.

  The girl smiles awkwardly, knows he is talking about her though she likely doesn’t understand him.

  “Kinda dogs are they, some hound or something?”

  She looks to her brother for help and the brother mutters some word, some appellation that sounds like spin no neigh, and John H glances at McKee and sees that McKee doesn’t get it either.

  “Eh, ah, hunt air?” the guide continues. “Like cease?” He thrusts out his nose, raises one hand like a lifted paw.

  “Huh?” says McKee. “You mean like a pointer?”

  The guide grins hugely. “See best point air.”

  “Hell’s bells, that don’t look like any pointer I ever saw. Most pointing dogs are sleek as a whip, even the setters.”

  John H shakes his head. “No, he means it. I saw them point last night in the woods. All three of them.”

  The guide nods. “See best point air.”

  “Say luke for, ah, Nazis?” says the girl in her tremulous English, looking not at the Americans but at her brother who nods at her. “Say smell, see boots? See black?”

  McKee thinks a moment, tries to puzzle it out. “The dogs smell black boots?”

  “Mmm, no.” She finally looks McKee in the face, summons her most perfect elocution. “Thee boot. Black.”

  “The boot black,” says John H. “They know the smell of German boot black.”

  “Si, si,” she nods. “See office airs, eh, boot black.”

  “The officers’ boot black,” M
cKee repeats. He grins at her and she beams back, as though together they’ve managed their own private victory. He says, “I reckon that would be some kinda bird hunt.”

  They spend the morning schooling the partisans on the munitions, a slow process with the language barrier. How to set up the thirty-caliber gun. How to charge a detonator box. The girl observes from the periphery, minding the dogs and saying nothing. Her brother goes off to confer with Jack Allen and when they come back Allen tosses a leather cylinder.

  “What’s this?”

  “Maps of the German line.”

  “You want me to stash it?”

  “No. I want you to pack it down the mountain.”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  “Ain’t you going?”

  Allen shakes his head, flashes his wolf’s grin. “I got further business with these gents.”

  The same thought occurs to John H and McKee at once, finds the same voice at once. “What about the horses?”

  “Horses stay. Mules too.”

  “You mean we’re walking. Well. Aitch here has a bum knee.”

  Allen shrugs. “Go slow.”

  “And you couldn’t clue us down the hill so we’d know to bring spare mounts.”

  “Wasn’t part of the marching orders.”

  John H hoists his saddle over one shoulder, his rifle over the other.

  “A hundred bucks says you ditch that rig before you’re half off the mountain,” says Allen.

  John H doesn’t pause. “Not likely.”

  “A hundred bucks.”

  “How do I collect if you don’t make it back?”

  “Ho ho. You worry about your own backside.”

  McKee catches up, takes one wistful look back at the girl. He puts up his hand in a wave.

  They follow the churned path back through the snow. John H lugs his saddle, McKee both rifles. They fort up under an overhang when night falls, spark a fire on the floor. When the flames lap up they see the ceiling is already black from other fires, other travelers in other times.

  “I don’t know what’s gotten into me. Whole time we were there all I wanted was to put my head in that girl’s lap and sleep for about a hundred years. Before we got her to talk, even.”