Painted Horses

by Malcolm Brooks

  “Think of it. My grandfather drove an ice wagon pulled by a mule in Albany, New York. He cut blocks from a lake in winter, packed the blocks in sawdust to sell the next summer. Today he’d be out of a job, but then he couldn’t conceive of today. I’ll make a prediction. In five years, every living room in America has a television. My grandfather? Couldn’t conceive of television.”

  “I would like,” she said, “to talk to Miriam.”

  “That’s good, miss. That’s good. Your first concern is your friend and that gives me encouragement. Makes me think surely we will come to some rational agreement. But bear with me, please, because I think you misunderstand the nature of what is happening.

  “You’ve been to a nineteenth-century graveyard? They’re full of little kids. People in their prime. Eighteen-year-old girls struck dead during childbirth. Entire families sliced down by fever, wrenched away by plague. Today we have penicillin, sterile surgery. Caesarean section. The X-ray machine. Everything we have, everything we depend upon, everything every one of us takes for granted every single day is surrounded by a field of power. It runs through our walls, through our floors, over our heads to the bulbs in the ceiling. Power spans the continent. It connects the coasts. Power, Miss Le Mat, is possibility, but what nobody remembers is that power doesn’t simply occur, like some universal birthright. Power is produced. I produce it, out of nothing when I have to. And this canyon, Miss Le Mat, this canyon—it’s a whole lot of nothing.”

  “That canyon could in fact rewrite history. Does rewrite it. Are you aware of that?”

  He drummed his pinkies rapidly on the tabletop, never taking his eyes from her face. She could taste the blood in her mouth, knew she looked like a real wreck. “I’m aware you are only privileged to sit here because of your own moment in history. And by you, I mean a woman.

  “I don’t say this with condescension. You have clearly exceeded expectations and I will admit to the egg on my face. In London I know you were not on the side of the developer. I actually find this commendable. The truest results derive from passion and passion is not the purview of a yes-man, in your case a yes-girl.

  “On the other hand, your moment is again a luxury, underwritten by power. You’re what, twenty-three years old? My grandmother had three children already, a fourth on the way. She may have had great dreams too. I don’t know and it wouldn’t have mattered because she didn’t have the luxury of power, hence the luxury to chase her dreams. She did her wash by hand, not in a Maytag power wringer. Before she baked a loaf of bread she had to split wood with a maul for the stove. She did love to read, I do know that, but lacked the light in the evening to read very long. Plunged right back to the dark. Kerosene not growing on trees.”

  Catherine chose her words carefully. “Objectively I can see your point, Mr. Harris, and I generally feel very fortunate to occupy this moment in history. However, if someone were to look in from the outside I am quite sure I would not appear the luckiest person in this room.”

  There was a reaction. She felt as much as observed it, like a stir in air. More than one shifted in his seat.

  “With all due respect, you brought that on yourself.”

  “You talked a bit ago about brutes coming out of their caves, about mastering some metaphoric dark. Achieving enlightenment. From where I sit I have to wonder if what we think of as civilization isn’t considerably more barbaric.”

  “You’re angry and I understand that. I myself would—”

  “Do you have any idea what those glyphs are?” She felt the flush rise in her face. “Do you? Of course you do. Why else would I be here against my will while you’ve got a jackhammer up there? Of course you know full well what they are. You collect this and you collect that, and you lend it all out for . . . for edification, I think was the word . . .”

  “Plumb, level, and square, Miss Le Mat.”

  “. . . like some, demigod, or some . . . Ozymandias. I was in London. I was in bomb craters, made by German rockets barely ten years ago, do not LECTURE ME ABOUT ENLIGHTENMENT . . .

  “Plumb—”

  “WHERE IS MIRIAM?”

  “—LEVEL, AND SQUARE, Miss Le Mat I need you to calm down, I know about you and Egypt. I know about you and Rome.”

  The pitch of her own voice had been a shock and that and the thud in her chest choked her up. It flashed in her mind she might be having a heart attack. Twenty-three, was it possible?

  She was hyperventilating. That was the problem.

  “I know about you, Miss Le Mat. You worship civilization and you always have. Get her a bag. Goddammit, you—get her a paper bag.

  “You have looked into the all-seeing eye, puzzled over it the way I have. That view across cultures, across religions, across the automatic crawl of time, depicted within a pyramid because at its essence, civilization is indeed built around a holy trinity. Are you better? You can breathe? Okay.

  “Plumb. Level. Square. The trinity by which man defied nature to make timber and stone into more than the sum of raw and irregular parts. The pyramids of Giza, the Roman aqueducts. Monuments to order over chaos, engineered by a purity of logic that is itself a form of magic. Out of humanity’s craving for meaning, its craving for order. And order, Miss Le Mat, is power.”

  The bag had never materialized but she could breathe again and her mind raced through a set of marching orders, over and over. Let him think he’s won get through this lecture check on Miriam get to the camera. Let him think he’s won get through this lecture . . .

  “The western tribes are only now coming to modernity, only lately grappling with things the European mind has assumed for five thousand years. Science, mechanics, above all economics. A few very powerful members of the tribe are putting up a hell of a resistance. Why?” He shook his head. “Why else? Money. Resistance is a demonstration, a show of autonomy by what is at its own insistence a sovereign nation. A sovereign economic nation.

  “Meanwhile the members of that nation live in housing supplied by us, send their kids to schools run by us, eat blocks of cheese delivered by us. They drive Pontiacs, produced by us. Ford pickups. They also retain the right to vote alongside us in our own political process. One foot in each world, Miss Le Mat.”

  “And you’re what, afraid they’ll somehow use your own system against you? I’ve been in cafés with Miriam and she can barely get served a hamburger.”

  “Your idealism has a certain charm, I’ll admit.” The man beside Harris, the first time someone else had spoken. He appeared older than Harris though not by much and he returned her gaze with a blankness that made him sort of inscrutable. She realized he was probably legal counsel.

  He went on. “The tribe—the organized, political tribe—wants this dam so bad it can taste it. That tribe is a business like any other, with assets, liabilities, and shareholders. Its leaders know full well this dam equates to a mountain of cold hard cash.”

  “Do you believe,” Harris cut in, “a tribal lawyer had the audacity to suggest I lease the land from them? In perpetuity. My dam. Lease it. The audacity.”

  “Sacred is and always was a card to play,” said the lawyer. He continued to look at her, smiling now, the blankness gone from his face but still somehow fully present, a mask atop a mask. “A mythology to exploit toward an economic end. A claim to stake on something that never was nine-tenths in possession.”

  She thought back to the letter, to her misspelled name. Go in after the Seven Cities, the Fountain of Youth. You will find neither . . .

  She heard David’s voice again, underwater on the phone. Better if you find nothing . . .

  “What you found up in those rocks was never theirs and they wouldn’t claim it now if you tried to make them. Oh there are divisions, sure, River Crow, Mountain Crow, old, young, the half-dozen purists you think you’re allied with, speaking their useless dead language. But the leaders, the politicians? Not a snowball’s chance. There’s redskins would tote a jackhammer in there by hand if that’s what it took.”


  “Interesting you should say that, because I don’t believe those pictures belong to the Crow any more than they belong to you. Or to your company, or the government, or any race, tribe, scholar, museum, whatever. None of that’s big enough. You talked about humanity’s craving for meaning a bit ago and yet here you are, missing your own point.”

  Harris backhanded the air in front of him. “We’re pretty far around the bend from any of that. This is a whole other Pandora’s box.” He leaned back and put both hands casually behind his head, but his eyes bored right into her. “The last thing anyone is going to stand for—me, the Crow council, the state, the Bureau of Reclamation, any of us—is a bunch of bleeding-heart romantics in New York and Chicago waving their arms about preservation because you found some supposed sacred cow in the middle of nowhere.”

  For an instant she was back in London, the smell of the mud in her head, the energy rippling off the spectators and tickling the back of her neck. The click of the camera in her hand. Out of all the tools we have, this might be the one that stops us in our tracks.

  Let him think he’s won. Get through this lecture.

  “Sacred is a card to play,” the lawyer repeated. “A powerful card. A paradise lost. It’s human nature.”

  The painting on the wall. Two brown women beside a palm. One had a large flower in her hair. She knew she should keep her mouth shut.

  “You think I worship civilization, and I can see why you would. I guess in a roundabout way you are even right, because we do see eye to eye on one point.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I am beginning to think, sir, that civilization itself is mass delusion.”

  He cocked his head a little. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to elaborate.”

  “What is the point of owning a Gauguin if you can’t recognize beauty when it’s right in front of you?”

  She was still looking at the painting when he jumped up and hurled something at her. His chair hit the wall behind him and a split second later a metal tin bounced off her chest. The tin clattered on the table and she looked down with more cool than she would have thought possible, took in a film canister from a home movie camera.

  “Enough,” he barked. He was pointing at her again, his face scarlet from the roots of his hair to the edge of his collar. “Enough. You have stepped way over the line and I will not have this mucked up by infantile scribbling on rocks I don’t care how historical you think it is or how academic or how big a feather in your cap you report to me you do not go around me. Get it?

  “I know about you Miss Le Mat. I know you have a camera and I know what you filmed with the camera the same way you know exactly where this canister came from. I know you didn’t bring the camera on the helicopter. Where is the camera Miss Le Mat.”

  “Lemay,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You keep saying you know me, but my name. It’s Catherine Lemay.”

  “Your name is the least of your problems. Camera.”

  “I guess this is a dumb time to ask if you’re threatening me.”

  Harris said, “Bert.”

  Poker Face flipped a folder. “Let’s see, May of 1943, this fugitive sweetheart of yours is jailed in an army brig for assaulting a commanding officer. November of ’44, he deserts in Italy in reaction to an order he doesn’t care to follow. Unfortunately for him the officer who gave the order takes it personally, files a whole report. This officer distinguished himself at West Point, distinguished himself in the tank corps in the war. He’s currently instructing at Fort Bliss and he is available—eager, actually—to testify.”

  “You forgot to mention his father is a senator,” said Harris. “You get the picture, Miss Le Mat. Where’s the camera.”

  “Jack.” Goddamn Jack.

  “We will make his life hell.”

  She sat down on the floor, disappeared beneath the plane of the table. She held her head in her hands and tried to think. If she looked straight ahead she could see their knees, their black socks and shoes. One wore cowboy boots with his suit.

  “Yesterday a guy with a rifle and a limp left a dead horse in front of the Miles City train depot. A dead painted horse. Where’s the damn camera.”

  Her windpipe seemed to choke off again and again her brain clawed for air. Surely she could find the pathway out of this, could find the route to all possible worlds if only she could breathe. She could save her first true lover, save as well her first true love. Shouldn’t they be one and the same anyway?

  She wanted too much. That had always been the problem. She wanted everyone to see things her way, wanted everyone to see she was right, even the ones who in a million years never would. She was a spoiled brat, with her righteous conviction. She was a whining absolutist. What’s that line in the papers? Preservation by record? A notion she’d spat upon at the time, but a deal she’d die for now.

  She realized she was holding her breath, felt the pressure of her blood in a vise against her face.

  She stared at Harris’s legs, the sharp creases in his trousers. His right knee bounced like a machine, like a bored schoolboy’s knee. She remembered those days when boys only noticed girls to torment them and God how she’d been teased, an easy mark, quiet and shy with her books and her wonder, and in a murderous flash she thought she’d like to ram that canister down his throat, hurl his typewriter at his head.

  Plumb, level, and square, he had said, and she thought of Pitt-Rivers, his mathematical efficiency and his grids. She wished she could conjure the general now for she was certain he’d run this son of a bitch through with the nearest sharp object.

  I could do it, she told herself. I could set my jaw and let them beat on me all over again, but no sooner had the thought occurred when the constriction on her throat became a hangman’s rope, her damaged neck not her own at all but the sunburned neck of another, his blue shirt down below and his blue eyes straining in his skull, and there she’d be while he hanged, triumphant and cruel with her camera.

  She remembered Orion hunting across the sky that night in the canyon, the streaking comet and her sweet wish, her little girl’s wish. For once she thought it might come true. But in a hundred years would it matter, even in fifty? Would anyone care other than her, a bitter old woman by then? Even now, with her head below the table and her seat sopping wet from the flood in the suite, she wasn’t a little girl anymore.

  Orion would hunt yet. The planet would twist yet, into another era, another age. And one way or another, you will kill what you love.

  She let out her breath. She forced herself off the floor. “What if I get it for you.”

  “This never happened. We never heard of him. Hell, we never heard of you.”

  She looked at the painting, looked at the ceiling. She thought she might hyperventilate again and she took in big draughts of air, choked down whatever it was welling inside her. “I’ll need to make a call.”

  Harris relayed the number to the operator and they passed the phone to her end of the table.

  She heard the voice at the other end of the line and she put her hand over the receiver and looked across the table. “One more thing. I want to talk to Miriam. I want to talk to her today.”

  He waved his hand as though shooing flies. “Fine. Whatever.”

  She took her hand away. “David, it’s me. I know, I’m sorry, look I can’t . . . talk right now. Yes I’m fine but I need you to do something, something important. There’s a package coming from out here. I need you to take it to an office in the city. No, don’t open it. Don’t open it. Just take it and deliver it, as soon as it gets there.”

  She relayed the address from the paper Poker Face shoved in front of her. She said she’d call again when she could.

  He spoke to her once more as Lewis and the bull escorted her from the room. “Miss Lemay. For what it’s worth the pictures are gone now. Like they were never there.”

  She could feel where the film canister hit her in the chest. That empty little thud. Th
at wind of a dream, knocked right out of her.

  He said, “I guess you already knew that.”

  To her surprise the bull did in fact drive her to Agency. He made her sit in the passenger seat beside him, another man riding in back. Lewis had gone to have his hand stitched.

  The two talked about fishing for most of the trip. They ignored her completely, and she stared out the window as the pastures rolled by and felt the steady ache in her bruised and wrenched arm and a worse ache in her heart. She thought about the mare and hoped it wasn’t true though probably it was, and for what. She knew he was out there somewhere and that he was sad and this made her sad, and as they clipped along she put her temple against the cool of the glass and let herself list toward outright despair because none of it was fair and none of it could be fixed.

  The bull didn’t know where to go when they got to Agency. Catherine didn’t expect this, didn’t expect to have to talk to him at all. She sat up in the seat as they passed the cemetery, the rusting fence fairly alive with fluttering feathers and ribbons and mysterious small bundles, sprigs of sagebrush and strands of horsehair. She knew what they were, why they were placed and for whom. “Drive past the houses,” she said. “Turn across the bridge.”

  Two bison skulls and two horse skulls hung from the yard gate, the bleached white bone painted with stripes and dots in red and green. Geese and goats wandered around beyond. Catherine climbed out and opened the gate. The skulls wobbled and knocked on their thongs.

  “Don’t wander off,” said the bull.

  She stopped midstride, tried to think of a suitable retort, tried to think of what Miriam might say. Finally she walked on.

  The front door bounced in the jamb and the knob bounced in the door when she knocked. No one answered. She knocked again and finally just stuck her head in and called out and the hollow sound of her own voice convinced her the house was empty. She walked back out into the yard and went around the house and when she passed through the shade she got a sudden chill, not a foreboding but an actual undercurrent to the air in spite of the long August light. She knew what it was. John H had told her this would happen, that one day late in the summer, she would feel the breath of winter.