Painted Horses

by Malcolm Brooks

  “An artifact.”

  “Right. Flesh and blood, but an artifact. Here because this canyon’s here.”

  They eased up again and watched more horses move down to the bowl, watched them loaf and roll and shake dust and grass from their coats. “That’s the stallion,” he told her. “Two horses from the left, with the black legs. See the line down his back?”

  She studied the horse through the glasses. Even she could see he was different from the rest, had a different carriage and a different manner. Warier, and prouder too. That long black tail. “The white whale,” she said aloud.

  A little later they walked back the way they’d come and as they crossed up over a hump in the earth a jackrabbit sprang up and bounded ahead, cutting left then right through the sage, a hare the size of a dog with its great white feet flashing so brilliantly Catherine did not at first realize John H had shouldered his rifle. The animal stopped and rose on its hind legs to look back and the blast of the gun knocked it cartwheeling.

  “Ohh. Did you have to?”

  “Only if we want to eat.” He worked the Mannlicher’s slick action and picked up the empty case and they walked to the fallen hare. He lifted it by its great back feet, its head barely attached now. She touched its soft flank, tentatively at first.

  She looked at John H. “He doesn’t intend to catch those horses, does he.”

  Later he had the hare’s saddles carved loose and rolled in wild onion and mint, the legs and haunches in the bubble of a kettle. She told him about the piano and he put this record on, a jarring contrast indeed to stillness and horses and sky.

  “It’s like a page full of math problems, converted to noise,” she said. “Can I follow it, yes, but I’d certainly never want to play it. I don’t even want to listen to it.”

  “I can change it.”

  “Well, don’t, on my account. But you asked my opinion and I’m someone who grew up playing Chopin and Beethoven, and that music is—wait, not even from that point of view. How on earth would a man and a woman ever dance to this?”

  “I’m not saying I get it. That’s why I asked.”

  If she heard him she didn’t pause. “How would you make love to this? My parents—I can’t believe I’m saying this—had every Duke Ellington record ever made. It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing, and he’s not just talking about music. If this were the score to my parents’ romance, I’m sure there would be no me. Who did you say this is?”

  He reached for the jacket. “Thelonious Monk.”

  She shook her head. “I hate math problems.”

  She wakes him in the night, her mouth against his ear murmuring, I think I’m a fiend and You’re the devil and O my God yes what have you done.

  They rode out of the crevasse and back down the canyon before sunrise, gnawing cold biscuits from last night’s supper. She’d put off this ride, dreaded it even. She was distracted from work and she barely cared. She told herself and told herself that eventually, everything had to end. It didn’t help.

  They heard the whump of the rotors and thought at first the airplane was back.

  “It sounds different, though,” Catherine said.

  Though the canyon remained in shadow the sun had risen in the east and the helicopter flashed like a beacon when it came into view. They reined up and watched it circle, then descend beyond the rampart at the top of the draw.

  “They beat us to it,” he said.

  They left the horses and went forward on foot and came up within sight of the mouth. He looked through his glasses and saw a highline between trees, four mules and a saddle horse tied off on leads. Nobody appeared to be around.

  “Those are dynamite boxes,” he said. He handed the glasses to Catherine. “I’m guessing that big gray is familiar.”

  “It’s his.”

  “What I thought.”

  “What do we do?”

  “They didn’t have that whirlybird we could rustle the stock and let him walk out. That’d buy some time.”

  Something else occurred to her. Miriam. “I need to get up there,” she said.

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “No,” she said. “No way. I think I’ve already gotten Miriam into some kind of trouble. I should have come back out here two days ago, shouldn’t have put it off when I was this—I’m sorry. I don’t mean that. It’s just—”

  She tried to think. “Maybe we should go back to the Dodge. Maybe I should drive back to civilization and just report this thing.”

  “They saw the Dodge from the airplane. They’ll be waiting.”

  “Shit. Of course.” She looked at him. “I hate to get you involved in this.”

  “I’m already involved. Just tell me what you want to do.”

  “That time I saw you in Miles City. You rode there on the mare.”

  “Yup.”

  “I think we should get the camera as far away from here as possible.”

  He let out the stirrups on the Furstnow saddle and tightened the cinch. Catherine wrote a New York address on a corner of the map and tore the corner loose. He turned to her. “You watch yourself up there.”

  “It’s mine, not theirs. I’ll be all right.” She pulled herself into him. “Max Caldwell owns the service station in Fort Ransom. You can find me through him.”

  “You have a gorgeous neck.”

  “Max Caldwell. Say it.”

  “Max Caldwell.”

  “Find me.”

  Fifteen minutes later she turned the colt loose like he’d told her to, yelled at it and quirted it back toward home with a length of rope across its haunch. She turned and started walking toward the quarry, running over and over in her mind what she might say when she arrived, things she knew she’d forget the second she climbed through the notch.

  She should have said it to him before he rode away from her. You shouldn’t blame yourself, you know, you only fell asleep. The one comfort you had and no one would fault you. You couldn’t have saved them. You couldn’t. Not by staying awake, not by passing some test. You shouldn’t blame yourself. It’s only sleep.

  2

  He saw the helicopter again when he cleared the rim of the canyon, whirring like an insect across the steppe a mile or more away and all the more menacing for its novelty. He pulled the mare sharply left and put her into a run, reined to a stop in the mahogany. The helicopter continued its slow course, angled north and west and then made a slow bank around and disappeared behind a butte. John H clucked at the mare and rode out over open ground.

  He gambled the pilot wouldn’t swing back in the time it took to cross the flat and get into the low hills and he put the mare into a dead gallop, a pace he dreaded but couldn’t avoid.

  Before he lit out he’d asked what day it was and she had to think a minute before she said Friday and he thought, You’re right, we should have come two days ago.

  He made the hills and went up into a draw and stopped shy of the open saddle at the top. He sat the mare and looked back. The plunge of the canyon ran like a crease in the palm of God, north and south as far as he could see. Way out in the distance the blue line of mountains. He looked for the helicopter and he couldn’t see it anywhere though he thought he could pick up its foreign noise in the stillness. He tapped the mare and rode over the saddle.

  He went for miles at a canter over open range, crossed a single dirt road with tire tracks in a crust of dried mud. He passed bands of cattle across the waste, many of them dull and chewing in place but others skittish and wild-eyed, fleeing like deer at the sight of a man on a horse.

  He spied the turn of a windmill by a brief stripe of alders and pointed the mare toward it, could see at a distance the dark stain on the ground where the tank spilled. He rode up through the prints of cows and the daintier tracks of pronghorn and let the mare water at the wooden tank, dismounted and stretched for a moment listening to the squeak of the sucker rod and the fast click of the blades and the pour of water dumping endlessly out of the pipe. He check
ed the cinch and rode again.

  He came to a four-wire fence with the silver strands stapled taut and turned the mare north along it until he reached a two-track with a poor-man’s gate lying jumbled in the dirt. He steered through and ran along the track until the ruts veered south around a table. John H pointed the mare up and she powered through the loose scree and slough near the top and scrabbled onto the flat.

  The sun was high now and the shadows short across the open ground and he could see a very long way and knew he still had a long way to go. He knew the mare would tire, knew as well he wouldn’t back her off. He was in now and he’d put her in too and the only thing to do was stay until the end. His eye caught a wink in the north and he fished out his glasses and saw silos glinting, a ranch sprawled across the low ground of a river bottom. Alfalfa like a strip of green felt. Beyond that a tractor trailer crawled along the highway. He rode down off the table.

  With her hair pulled back Catherine’s ears stuck out too far from the curve of her head, stuck out like delicate little shells. Priceless little ears. He could be charmed by any number of things. He was crushed by her ears.

  For years he had imagined the permanence of the land around him, the endurance of stone through the crawl of time. When he landed in this country he dropped as well into a myth the earth itself knew nothing about, a transitory pageant performed on horseback and with branding iron and with shooting iron against a screen of weather and river and automatic vegetation. Now a woman barely out of her own youth and in love with Egypt had led him back beyond what he could otherwise imagine.

  He missed the buffalo herds by fifty years and missed the encampments that trailed the herds, their meat racks strung with tongues and drying flesh, woolly hides staked to the ground and smeared with the animals’ own mashed brains. But he saw the record of this older pageant in bones jutting out of the sand, in cairns along the tops of cliffs, in a ring of stones that once described the circular border of a lodge.

  “We looked for tepee rings,” Catherine told him. “Looked and looked.”

  “Find what you were after?”

  She shook her head. “No.” Her shy, sly grin. His fingers in the dish of her back. “I mean yes; I certainly did, sir. But not in the form of rock circles.”

  “There are a few down in here, by river crossings. Nothing like you see out on the plains.”

  “That’s what Miriam says, too.”

  “Who?”

  Catherine shook her head. “Later. You talk. Tell me things.”

  He knew of monuments left by people whose wanderings had long ceased, messages pregnant with lost meaning, shields and symbols etched into the stone face of a jump or rendered in fading paint on the wall of an overhang. Arrows, chevrons. Palm prints from hands long ago.

  He’d studied chips of flint scattered in the sand like shards of memory itself, tea leaves testifying to long-lost arts. The coaxing of a tool from a stone, lethal and beautiful and truer for the both. A blade, a notched point. He had many things to show her.

  He described a seam in the earth, scraped and gouged for its mineral pigment. “Nearby there’s a rock shelter, a slash in the stone with a hearth on the floor. The ceiling sooted black and lines rubbed into the soot. Who knows what they mean.”

  She told him he saw the world with the eye of an artist and so could isolate beauty from the terror of existence. She said she envied him, said she would kill to see this way too.

  She described great walls of ice pushing the earth like machines, splitting entire mountains, patient ice with no notion of time passing while its slow bite prevailed, ice whose purposeless crawl carved moraines of soil and arteries of water enduring to the present and beyond.

  She saw the sage country as a vast mammoth steppe, windswept tundra with the ice sheet retreated and a band of hunters infinitesimal upon it, equatorial outliers whose capacity for something like yearning had propelled them to a latitude where they had no organic defense, their survival wholly reliant on the fat of the beasts native to the tier and so reliant on their own evolved cunning to topple these beasts that could not be toppled by force alone.

  And so out of yearning and cunning sprang tales of their own dimly recalled beginning, songs musing of the struggle of existence and the gods of the land and whatever eternity owned the glittering stars, legends of children birthed during astral events, under tailing comets or while red-and-green mists glowed weirdly in the northern sky, and the tales and the songs would pass down and pass down again and inspire ceremonies and rituals to ensure the arrival of migrating animals, the arrival of offspring, or to predict the lengthening of days into summer, and the rites would in turn compel one of them gifted with an impulse not unlike his own to create with his hand, his magical hand, images of the world in which he dwelled, a world and the beasts that occupied it now utterly gone save a single remnant etched in stone, deep in the heart of a canyon.

  “The hand and the mind that moved the hand survived. They were us,” she told him. “We’re them. Same yearning, same cunning. Same longing to transcend what we can’t even perceive. We think we’ve changed. I don’t think we really have.”

  She rattled this like a priestess swept into her own mystic vision, like an auteur with a film in her head and in the fever of her telling, he had himself been borne away. He looked at her and she gave him a flushed little beam. He wondered if a man with a spear ever glanced at a girl by a fire, caught the curve of an ear through a shimmer of air and found himself instantly, hopelessly crushed.

  In the middle of the afternoon he came up into the bottomland along the Tongue River, prime farming ground he’d known since his youth. Back then the fastest way to Miles lay up through the breaks on the west side of the river and then overland due north through the sage, but the last time he’d tried it he found that country so heavily fenced a direct run was no longer possible. He rode instead around an irrigated oat field tucked in an oxbow of the river, put the mare across a shallow riffle and up toward the county road. A ranch hand pulling a hay rake behind a tractor waved.

  He judged the angle of the sun at about three o’clock and he put the mare into a run along the roadway, passed newly mown hayfields by the river and dryland wheat on the tables above. Every few miles a lane branched off the gravel road to a cluster of barns and corrals, a ranch house in the cottonwoods.

  A brown cloud rolled off the road a long way out and billowed in size as the vehicle that raised it barreled ever closer. He had a flash of panic and began to glance around for the helicopter and finally out of caution turned the mare down off the shoulder where a wooden bridge spanned a wash, the only cover to be found. The mare at her sudden rest stood there panting, lathered in sweat from her neck down her flanks and expelling hot wind like a furnace. Up on the road the truck roared closer and its tires hit the tread boards with the bang of a grenade, the mare shying wild-eyed. A two-ton GMC pulling an empty stock trailer. John H rode into the swirl of dust and put the mare back to a run.

  He came up on the twelve-mile dam and knew he was racing the clock now, turned the mare at the junction onto the road running north and urged her on. He hadn’t eaten since first light and he could feel hunger creeping in on him and he felt a twinge of guilt for acknowledging it. He wished a horse had the will to refuse a man out of self-interest. He wished this horse would refuse him now. He knew she couldn’t.

  The gravel turned to tarmac and from a distance he saw cars on the city streets, saw an island of shade trees in an ocean of sage. He came down off the roadway and when the mare slowed to skirt the cottonwoods along the river he felt a sort of falter in her gait and he knew if she stopped now she’d never start again. He gouged hard with his heels and she heaved insanely forward. He told himself and told her too if only she could make this one last dash, if only she could finish, he’d never ask a thing again.

  She thundered beneath the railway trestle and he caught the burn of diesel on the air and turned her up out of the floodplain and down an unpaved alle
y at the edge of town. They galloped onto Pacific Avenue, her hooves clattering on the paving all the way to the veranda on the train depot. A handful of loiterers turned with their jaws agape.

  He swung down before she’d come to a stop, jerked the slipknot on the cinch, and hauled the Furstnow free of her back. She looked like a whipped wet dog, head hanging and legs spraddled, blood on her breath tinting her muzzle pink. He pulled his rifle and the camera and film reels but left saddle and pad in a heap on the veranda. He strode up under the big half-moon windows and into the depot.

  He heard the huff of an idling train from somewhere outside. Otherwise the station had a dinnertime stillness, the week’s work done and no one around. John H went for the postal window and hammered on the bell. The round dial of the clock read ten to five.

  The attendant emerged from the back with his apron untied at the waist and dangling from his neck only. Instead of hands he had metal hooks with an articulated metal thumb that opened and closed on a thin strand of cable. He was around the same age as John H, maybe younger.

  He placed his hooks in the air when he saw the rifle. “You’re the boss, fella. Don’t get yer dander up now.” He burst into a guffaw.

  John H set the camera on the counter. “I need to send this east.”

  “East where?”

  He fished from his pocket the corner of the map. “New York. Manhattan.”

  “I can get it out Monday, fella. Train’s done loaded. About to leave on out of here.”

  A ruckus went up out front, a muted but frantic thumping and alarmed shouts. Two men in suits and dress hats ran down the veranda past the windows, followed by a third in coveralls.

  “That there a bring-back?”

  A tension crawled across his skin, a burn at his collar like a breath down his neck.

  The postman gestured with a hook. “Your gun. Mannlicher, am I right? A real one. You bring it back?”

  He connects the dots and remembers something, unslings the gun from his shoulder. He flips the trap in the butt and lifts out a flattened roll of bills. “This is two hundred dollars, or close to it. I rode a hundred miles today to get this camera on that train. I have to get it on the train.”