Painted Horses

by Malcolm Brooks

  She heard a yell from beyond the barn, and the bang of a gate and a whistle and another yell. She heard the bleat of sheep, sensed their panic. She walked down and saw a swarm of them ganged in a rickety wooden pen, climbing atop one another, heaving against the fence slats.

  Across the pen Miriam had a second bunch crammed into a chute, her knees against the backside of the last in line, knuckles tight around the rails. At the head of the chute Miriam’s grandfather reached in and struggled with the black face of the first beast, performed some ministration against the animal’s fight. He moved back to the next in line.

  Miriam glanced over and saw her and Catherine could practically watch her heart miss. A cloud of dismay crossed her face.

  “Oh my God, Catherine, what happened?” She loosed her grip on the rails and the sheep pushed back and knocked her down and bolted around her with astonishing speed, back toward the throng at the other side of the pen, and Miriam scrambled out of the muck and jumped against the next sheep and held the line.

  Grandfather had straightened to squint at her and he took her in for a second and beckoned her toward him. He had iron-gray hair cropped short on the sides, skin the color of Miriam’s. He was not young and his knobby hands were not young but he had a young man’s shoulders, cords of muscle in his forearms. Catherine walked over.

  His eyes were on her neck, on her arm below the sleeve. On her mouth. “Some man do that to you?”

  Catherine tried to smile without revealing her teeth, tried to talk without showing them. “It’s not as bad as it looks. Honest.”

  He nodded. “You like to show up in the nick of time. It’s a good quality.”

  He showed her how to fill the syringe with serum, how to mark an inoculated ewe with a blue grease pencil. He climbed over the chute and balanced above the bawling line of sheep with his rubber boots on the rails. He took the syringe from her and bent the head of each animal up with his hand around the snout, shot foamy yellow ooze between rubber lips and moved one sheep back.

  Catherine fell into the rhythm of it. She drew serum from a brown bottle, reached between the rails to make a blue slash. When they’d finished, Miriam’s grandfather came out of the chute and showed her how to open the gate with a lever. To her surprise the sheep did not gallop out, only stood there. Miriam shoved and yelled from the back of the line and the sheep at the rear scrambled and crowded and climbed, and a ripple of momentum went through the line. Miriam’s grandfather pulled the first stalled ewe by the ear and she jumped free of the chute and the rest stampeded behind her in a rush of wool and blue grease and flying mud.

  Miriam’s grandfather told her to shut the head gate. She pulled the lever, felt the resistance of moving parts in both bruised arms. He and Miriam cut out and cornered another passel of animals from the holding pen and hemmed and goaded them into the chute and Miriam’s grandfather climbed back onto the rails and the process began again. Midway down the line while she filled the syringe he grinned down at her with a gold tooth flashing. “You learn fast, daughter. I can get you a lot of work doing this.”

  “I may take you up on it,” Catherine told him.

  He took the syringe and tipped it upside down and adjusted the plunger. “Those fellas with you?”

  Catherine looked back behind her. The bull and the other man stood near the barn, trying to keep their wingtip shoes and pressed trousers out of the mud. “In a manner of speaking.”

  They went back to their work and when Catherine looked around again the bull and the other man were gone. When the last of the sheep ran through the chute Miriam got out of her coveralls and rubber boots in the barn and Catherine walked with her down toward the river, the treeless yellow hills rising off the green lowland and flowing endlessly away. A low line of mountains rose dimly in the ozone, out at the white edge of sky.

  “Your neck looks terrible,” Miriam said. “Did one of them choke you?”

  “I think. I blacked out at one point, or nearly so. It’s been a crazy day.”

  “Catherine, I’m sorry. I really messed up.”

  “No you didn’t. I’m just glad you’re all right. I was afraid I’d find you in the same condition I’m in. Or worse.”

  “No, you don’t understand.” Miriam took a breath. “He didn’t have to force it out of me.”

  Catherine let this soak into her tired brain. “Oh Miriam.”

  “I know. You warned me. I know.”

  “Oh honey.”

  “I told you. I messed up. Not that it’s an excuse but he showed up right after the funeral, when I was pretty upset. He said you had sent for me and I hardly believed him but I went with him anyway. I just wanted . . . something, I guess. His attention, I guess, someone’s attention, maybe that’s all. He had whiskey and that’s no excuse either but it’s part of what happened.”

  Catherine rubbed her eyes. She realized she ached all over, the separate parts of her body united as much by contusion as by muscle and bone.

  “That’s where you were, isn’t it?” Miriam said. “In the rocks, with the pictures?”

  Catherine ignored this. “Is there a chance you’re pregnant?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Did he use something? You know . . . to make sure?”

  “No, he just sort of pulled it out.”

  Pot, meet kettle. “That’s really . . . better than nothing.” She knew she should tread lightly, knew Miriam had been a virgin and she would not, she would not, become her mother. “Did he hurt you? Physically, I mean?”

  “Well, like I said, he didn’t have to force me, if that’s what you’re asking. Yeah, it was kind of rough, but isn’t that kind of normal?”

  Catherine thought of herself in the stone house, legs bent up over her head.

  “I mean, it was nothing compared to horses. To tell you the truth I’m not exactly sure what all the fuss is about.”

  They were sitting on a bleached log, watching the river bend. Catherine flicked the empty husk of a stonefly off the log into the sand. She reached over and squeezed Miriam’s hand. She could smell the sheep on her. “That’s also kind of normal. It takes awhile to figure out.”

  Something within Miriam seemed to teeter on a point for a moment, and finally topple. “Catherine, this has been really hard for me to muddle through. I don’t know how to feel about anything. Those pictures are beautiful, and I know they’re important and I don’t want to disappoint you or ruin something great, but I also don’t know what I’m supposed to want . . . Most of the people here want the dam in some way, shape, or form. I mean look around. Why wouldn’t they? Why shouldn’t I? And the old people are dying off, and we need cars, and we need houses, and just hope, I guess—” Miriam’s face was a mask of distress now, and she wept, and she went on, “But honest to God I didn’t know anyone would hurt you. I never would have told him. I never would have.”

  “I know. I know.”

  “And I know he just used me, and I guess that’s what I have coming because I betrayed you, and now look at your pretty face.”

  Miriam wiped at her eyes, and Catherine had her arm around her, and she couldn’t bring herself to tell her own deep secrets. She only told Miriam to hush; the past was the past. They couldn’t will it to change. “Anyway, I’m only here because I’m a girl, really.”

  Miriam narrowed her puzzled eyes. Catherine stared straight to the sky.

  “He thought I’d be easier to manage,” she murmured. “Easier to steer to the outcome.” Her breath caught, a gasp or a small laugh. The girl beside her couldn’t tell. “And he was right.”

  “Are you talking about Jack?” Miriam asked.

  Catherine came back to her, there on the log. “What? No. Not about Jack. Don’t worry love. Just don’t.”

  Miriam straightened up. “So what happens now?”

  Catherine shook her head. “The coming flood, I guess. Power. Light.”

  “The pictures, though. What about the pictures? They’ll be studied first, won’t t
hey?”

  For the briefest moment Catherine considered lying, considered another sin of omission. But that’s what led her here in the first place. “They can’t be. They’re not there anymore.”

  Miriam looked at her, a mix of confusion and dread.

  “Dynamite,” she said simply.

  Miriam let out her breath. She looked at the sky. “You can’t win against them, can you.”

  They walked to the house. In the shade in the yard Catherine again felt the chill. Miriam’s grandfather was in back, palming scratch to a brood of pecking hens. A great red rooster with a lizard-like eye and a comb like a starfish lurked along the lilac bushes. He flared when the women drew near and he made a rush, and Miriam stomped her foot and lunged at him and he stood down, skulked and jerked uncertainly to the far side of his hens.

  “How about I send them fellas packing?” said the grandfather. “Run ’em off like that ’air rooster. Me and Miriam, we take you where you need to go.”

  Catherine smiled at him before she remembered her teeth. “I’ll be all right. The worst of it’s over.”

  “Are you sure?” Miriam said.

  “I need to stay with them a little longer. It’s complicated.”

  Miriam looked at her strangely, but she let it pass. She walked with Catherine toward the car but stopped inside the gate. Catherine half expected her to shoot some stinging remark or at least fix the bull and the thin man with a glare, but she didn’t. She kept her eyes averted, kept her tongue in check. Catherine swung the gate. The skulls knocked.

  4

  He walked down the river bottom in the evening toward the breaks of the Yellowstone and circled around to the back of the stockyard, hoping to find a train pointed west.

  Instead he found the yard nigh to deserted, the offices closed for the week and the only sign of life a tractor trailer with a Yankton address on the door idling in the turnout. The driver had come around to the passenger side of the rig to relieve himself with the front of the truck between him and the road. He seemed to have some trouble getting started but once he got going he loosed a lengthy stream into the oyster shell by his tire. John H stole around to the road and waited for him to finish.

  The driver did up his fly and began to check the turnbuckles on his freight, what appeared to be parts to an oil derrick. John H called to him out of the dusk and the driver looked up.

  “You going west? I can pay for a lift.”

  “Son, I left out of Rapid City six o’clock this morning, nothing but a long stretch of highway and my own yelpin’ for distraction and believe you me I am no Bob Wills. I’m not even Bob Wills’s dog Spot. Long about now I’d practically pay you to hop aboard. Stow that saddle on the trailer.”

  The driver was headed for Billings but he detoured south to Hardin purely for the joy of conversation. Pulled to the side of Center Avenue, he told John H he’d enjoyed the company, told him if he didn’t have time to make, he’d just go ahead and drive clear to wherever it was John H wanted to go.

  “I envy you, son,” he said. “Out here with your saddle and your rifle, and no place you gotta be. I envy you.”

  A handful of bars and cafés had a Friday night buzz with their neon lights aglow and music trickling out of the jukeboxes into the street. John H stood on the sidewalk and watched a cat dart from beneath a parked car through the dull wash of a streetlamp into a dark alley. He hadn’t considered his appetite in hours but he caught a whiff of fry grease from one of the cafés and felt his stomach leap, felt his head begin to swim with hunger at the least and probably exhaustion too.

  He walked to the nearest diner and went in and set his saddle and the rifle in its scabbard on the floor by a booth and then slid in behind the table. He could sense the curiosity in the room and he made eye contact with a few people and one or two of the men nodded but most just went back to eating. John H knew he was glazed with stale dried sweat and the dust of the day and knew his hair was a dirty mess beneath the battered campaign hat but there were women and families present so he took the hat off anyway.

  He ate a chicken-fried steak dinner and ordered another and ate half of it as well. The waitress was a polite little wisp of a girl who looked barely old enough to be out past dark. She commented on his saddle and asked him where his horse was. He told her he was in the market for one.

  She said that makes two of us. She loved horses but lived in town and her father had told her if she saved half the money he’d spring the other half and buy her a horse she could board at a friend’s ranch. She said she hoped to find a thoroughbred. At school the other kids teased her because she wanted to ride English. He left her a twenty-dollar tip.

  He made his way to a bar down the street with a line of pickups out front, spoke softly to a nervous stock dog in the back of one and saw irrigation boots and a muddy shovel in another. He went into the bar and fed the jukebox with his change from the café. He left his hat on his head.

  He drank a beer at the bar and fell into a conversation with two young cowpunchers from a ranch thirty miles south.

  “We’re only up to Hardin to fetch a tie rod end for the tractor,” one explained. “Numb nuts here run her into a badger hole cutting alfalfa, busted the linkage all to hell.”

  “Huh,” said the other. “You look on the bright side now, Charles. Weren’t for that wreck, we’d still be settin’ out there on a Friday night playing mumblety-peg over the last can of the old man’s three-two beer.”

  “No, no, that ain’t the case, Ronald. We would be in Billings right now chousin’ tail, because there wouldn’t be forty acres of alfalfa blowin’ in the breeze. Instead we get to play mechanics on Saturday and greenskeepers Sunday.” He looked at John H. “Whoever called this cowboyin’ ought to get kicked in the head.”

  John H bought a round, then Charles bought one and when the cowboys stood to leave they offered him a lift as far south as the ranch cutoff. John H bought two six-packs of Great Falls Select for the road, two bags of peanuts, and a full jar of pickled eggs. He put the Furstnow saddle in the back of the pickup with the fencing and the shovel and slid onto the seat.

  They lacked a church key so they pierced the cans with a screwdriver, dented and pitched the empties into the slipstream to land clanking in the open bed. They had six beers remaining when they reached the cutoff road and Charles didn’t even slow, just muttered something about being two hours late anyway and kept right on driving, one headlight beam askew and panning across the sagebrush and the bright-faced cattle at the side of the road.

  They let him out at the edge of town with three beers remaining, tried to send one with him but he declined. “You boys split it,” he said. “Least I can do.” He held up his pickled eggs. “I’m set. Hope you’re not in any trouble on my account.”

  Charles waved a hand. “Nothing we ain’t talked our way out of before. You get to looking for work, come find us out Beauvais Creek. Old man takes one look at that saddle, he’ll hire you on the spot.”

  John H stowed his gear behind the service station and spent an hour skulking in the alleys behind the company housing. The lights were on in a few places and he peered through curtained windows from a distance to see if he could spot her but he struck out. He studied for some clue that might indicate which house belonged to her but the houses were nearly identical, same pitch to roof and porch and same guy-staked seedling in every selfsame yard. The lights at the tavern went out down the way. A car started up, its bright beams swinging out of the lot.

  He built a fire in a nest of boulders beyond the hilltop back of town, leaned against his saddle and as he covered his upper body with the blanket he caught the smell of the horse and felt it like a kick in the groin.

  He slept on and off and came fully awake toward dawn with his carcass in bloody revolt, sweat chafed and burning inside his thighs and in the cleft of his backside, muscles and joints and every bump of his spine stiff as the ground he lay upon. He hobbled up and limped around the rocks, then climbed ahead of the s
un to the dome of the hill with his glasses and his pickled eggs.

  The lights were on in the service garage though the bay doors were still closed. He saw movement behind the windows, watched a man in coveralls shuffle out to the pumps with a bucket and squeegee. The man walked back to the shop and emerged again a moment later with a push broom. He began to sweep.

  He’d worked his way out past the pumps twenty minutes later when Catherine’s dusty red Dodge trawled around the bend and lumbered toward town. John H followed with his glasses and tried to make out who was driving but the new sun hit the windshield like the pop of a flashbulb and he winced away with spots in his eyes. When he looked back the Dodge was angled away from him, nearly past the service station. The man in the coveralls leaned on his broom and watched it travel by.

  John H went back to the rocks and hoisted saddle and rifle and picked his way down off the rise and across the flat to the garage. The lot was empty when he rounded the corner but the office door stood ajar. He pushed it open, the swing of the door setting a bell to tinkling beneath the transom.

  The sweeper stood behind the service counter studying a calendar. He looked at John H, eyed the saddle across his shoulder.

  “We don’t service horses.”

  “Max Caldwell?”

  “Last I checked.”

  He swung the saddle down. “I’ve been helping someone and I think you know her. Catherine Lemay. I’m trying to find her.”

  “Well sir. I’d some like to know where she is myself.”

  “Not in her car then, I take it.”

  Caldwell shook his head. “Not that I could see. She’s been gone more than a week, just up and vanished. You seen her in that time?”

  “She was with me until yesterday morning.”

  “Well how’d you lose track of her yesterday morning? Who are you, mister?”

  John H stood there, still holding his saddle, his rifle hanging awkwardly in its scabbard. “I’m a guy who’s on her side. She told me to find her through you.”