Painted Horses

by Malcolm Brooks

  Caldwell studied him a long moment. Finally he turned to a coffeepot on a hot plate on the cluttered desk behind him. He poured a cup and extended it across the counter. “If you don’t mind my say-so, you look like you could use this. Maybe a shot of morphine to boot but that I can’t help you with.”

  John H lowered the saddle to the floor and took the cup, raised it to his lips. He felt the hot wash of it down his gullet, felt it spread in his core like a merciful fire.

  Caldwell went on. “At first I thought she’d maybe gone to Agency with her friend and I didn’t think much of it. Then a buzz started up four or five days ago, some hush-hush operation out of the company garage. One a them ’copters in and out, a bunch of suits down from Billings. Phone lines jammed up but nobody saying boo to let on what it was all about.

  “Now I know they were flying back into that canyon. I know too they were driving in on the access road, and that a fella by the name of Allen hauled a pack string over thataway. Nothing unusual in that except for one obvious omission, and if I’ve got my math right, she was already two jumps ahead of them.”

  He poured John H more coffee, poured some for himself as well. “Girl went and found what she was looking for, didn’t she. Way back in that hellforsaken haystack.”

  John H looked into his coffee, black as to appear bottomless, his own apparition vaguely on the surface. “She seems to have a knack for that sort of thing.”

  “I’ll be a Missoura mule. I wish she’d told me.” He straightened up, set his mug on the desk, and came around the counter. “We’d best see if she rode back in that rig, otherwise get to the bottom of where exactly she’s ended up. I maybe should’ve realized a long time ago. She finds what she’s after in that canyon, it may not bode real well for her.”

  He moved past John H, flipped the sign around on its chain in the window and stepped for the door. He paused and looked back. “You coming?”

  John H sipped his coffee. “I go down there, it won’t bode real well for any of us.”

  Caldwell seemed to take in what he was seeing for the first time, from the saddle and rifle on the floor to the frayed blue shirt and battered hat. The jar of eggs. “Son, I don’t know much and I don’t know you at all, but I figure this outfit she’s hooked up with for pure D skunks. You’re on the outs with them, I reckon that’s a point in your favor. Wait in the shop. I’ll be back quick as I can.”

  Two cars pulled in to the pumps while he was gone, the driver of the first getting out and looking around in puzzlement when no one appeared. From the shadows in the garage bay John H watched him approach the office and scrutinize the closed sign. Finally he tucked a folded bill into the doorjamb and went back and pumped his own gas before driving off. The second driver never got out of his car, merely rolled his tires forward and back over the service hose a few times and finally sped away when no one appeared.

  Caldwell returned after half an hour. He looked John H in the eye and shook his head. “No sign of her. House is empty, rig’s down at the company garage.”

  “Who’s driving it?”

  “A guy I recognized up close, used to do blasting for the state highway commission. Guess Power and Light pays better.”

  “He know anything?”

  “Said she’d gone to Billings, sent there by the muckety-mucks. Hold on.” He picked up the telephone handset and told the operator he needed Harris Power and Light. A moment later he talked to a receptionist. Heated words ensued. “Her father,” Caldwell barked.

  The receptionist transferred him to someone else with the same result. Finally he hung up. “Said they don’t have an employee by that name and even if they did they won’t give out information on personnel. Said it’s confidential.”

  John H walked around to the hot plate and helped himself to more coffee. “Probably she’s there, though.”

  “Yeah, I expect. Probably.”

  He downed the cup as quickly as he could, burned his tongue in his haste. “There’s one other place she might be.”

  An hour later Caldwell turned off the pavement onto the access road, barreled through the sage on the rutted two-track as fast as he dared. The pickup jumped like a bronco, yelped as though pieces might fly off. They passed a parked stake-side truck with a bashed-in roof and a long stock trailer at the top of the descent, the windshield frosted with pollen. Caldwell jerked a thumb and said, “Allen.”

  He had to slow on the downhill grade. With the truck quieted he began to talk. “Road was a WPA project in ’35, ’36. They were talking about a dam clear back then, maybe even before. ’Course, they only needed the flimsiest reason for any kind of water project in those years. Half the country starving, cropland baking with drought. If the Japs hadn’t bombed Pearl, I expect we’d be driving underwater right now.

  “I started at the Peck dam in ’34, when the first steam shovel fired up. Wrenching on equipment, which I’d gotten mighty adept at, growing up on a red-dirt farm.

  “That Hi-Line country had a passel of Wobblies, had red newspapers and radicals though by the time I got there it wasn’t a thing like it had been. They had their stories, though—organizing, marching for the cause. They talked about their Battlin’ Bobs and Red Flag Taylors like those guys were Robin Hood.” He laughed. “We was all united by then anyway—united by hunger. Equally out of work and happy to sign on for the man, so long as he went by the name Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  “Pride didn’t much come into it at first so much as desperation although we all caught the fever of it, knew we were working on a wonder of the modern world. Those dredges went into place and that river bent to our will, and we simply owned it. We were part of the biggest civil project in the history of the world.

  “I’ve stewed for twenty years and I guess what I’ve come to is this: greatness gets built on destruction. That’s why the lack of greatness is no character flaw, not in the final tally. The great body of the human creature ain’t got the stomach to cash in on destruction. Requires not indifference so much as a coldness so complete as to remain unaware of the destruction at all.

  “There’s a type out there sees an architect or an engineer, an industrialist, as a sort of titan. A god among men. I don’t figure the titan thinks much about it. I think he’s a freak of nature, got eyes like steel, got a bulletproof heart. Guys like that don’t compete with each other, they compete with all history and all the future too, and they do it with ice water in their veins. Maybe they’re right, to waste not a minute wondering whether they might be wrong. How would them pyramids have come to be, weren’t for slave drivers and forced labor?

  “When the gates closed at Peck and that river backed up on itself, what got flooded was mile upon mile of prime bottomland. The only farm ground that country had, and most of it was Sioux Indian land. We put ’em there to make farmers out of ’em, then went and drowned the durn farms.

  “Tell me what kind of sense any of it makes. Who’s got it right and who’s got it wrong, because I sure don’t know. You’d think a thing the size of this canyon, this grand, would be as permanent as anything. Turns out it’s not, when the man with the machines says otherwise. Huge as all this seems.”

  He shook his head. “Huge as all this seems. I think the world finally done shrunk.”

  The road tapered onto flat ground at the bottom and Caldwell drove to within twenty feet of where Catherine’s Dodge had stranded in the wash, the scars still plain in the skin of the earth. John H got out of the truck. The grass around the road lay flat and even the nearby clumps of sagebrush had a blasted look to them, and he knew the helicopter had been here.

  “How far you have to walk?”

  “A ways.”

  “You gonna manage it?”

  John H shrugged a shoulder. “I have before.”

  Caldwell ducked beneath the windshield visor and looked down the length of the canyon. Clouds in a wrack moved across the sky, shadows plunging down the walls. “I’ll give it a day. If she doesn’t turn up by morning, I’ll rep
ort her missing and get the durn state militia in here if I have to.”

  “All right.”

  “Son, if I had a daughter wanted to take on a crazy project like this, my gut instinct might be to put her under lock and key.”

  John H nodded. “Probably only natural.”

  Caldwell grinned, reached across the seat, and extended his hand. “I hope she proves me wrong.”

  John H watched the truck retrace its path through the sage and start up the mountain, could hear its diminishing grind as he walked downriver, listened until it vanished beneath the water.

  He walked an hour and wished he had only a bad knee to contend with. Finally he stopped at a pool in the river where it filled green and deep beneath a natural spill and he stripped and went in and washed the layers of grime and sweat from himself, washed his shirt out and wrung it and put it on damp. He ate two pickled eggs and when he started again he felt better.

  He went away from the river to get the noise from his ears. It crossed his mind to stash the saddle and come back later but he held on to it anyway, tried to stay to the flat ground and tried to move faster.

  He crossed the tracks of the horses where they’d grazed through a wide shallow bowl, flies humming up off mounds of fresh dung when he passed. He walked through faint craters where they had lain and rolled, followed the flow of hooves, here and there the sharp little pocks of foals.

  He felt the tickle on the back of his neck an instant before the sting and he tried to swat with his open palm and glanced off the saddle instead, and with his nape smarting he watched a horsefly the size of a cocklebur whiz off toward the river. He rubbed his neck, looked at the blood on his palm. Sweat rolled from his hat. He kept walking.

  He heard the blow of a horse and he stopped and held still, and a moment later a harried neigh blared like Gabriel’s trumpet down from the trees on the slope. John H cupped his ear with his free hand and when he heard the manic shake of a bridle he had a poisonous delusion of soldiers skulking in the forest, thought he detected movement. No, only a trick of the eye, dapples of light among the leaves. No, there it was again and he half anticipated the bright stab of gunfire out of the shadows. He had watched guys new to the action and paralyzed by terror simply stand there until the bullets found them although he himself had always been able to move, and he stole back now in the direction he’d come.

  He lowered his saddle and moved with his rifle to the trees. He came up against the white bark and adjusted his glasses. He watched for movement and saw nothing. The horse neighed again and he moved forward again, stopped and studied and spied its hock in the tangle of limbs and leaves.

  Allen’s gray. He shifted to see better and the horse shrieked yet another time and he knew Allen wasn’t with it.

  He quartered through the trees and he spoke to the horse, and the horse and the four mules strained against their leads and eyed him as he came forward. The gray shifted uncertainly. One of the mules brayed at him, grimaced around its long yellow teeth. John H put his hand on the horse’s hip, slid forward shoulder to neck to nose.

  The gray had a stallion’s build and a stallion’s manner, also a dished skull and a tail like the flag of a setter. A Bedouin’s horse, a djinn descended through time’s shifting sands. Its reins were tied with a slipknot to a limb, the cinch still tight and the scabbard for a scoped rifle empty. He thought of the flow of prints down below, heard again Catherine’s voice in the warm still air. He doesn’t intend to catch them.

  Does he.

  John H settled the horse with his hands and with the low coo of his voice. The horse had its wary edge but it nudged him with his head. He kept one eye out for Allen, one ear cocked for the crack of the rifle.

  He uncinched Allen’s saddle and set it on the ground, went to the mules and fed a fistful of green grass to each. He loosed the empty panniers from two of the jacks and the loaded Decker saddle from the third and set these on the ground as well. He grit his teeth and hove back for the Furstnow. When he returned the gray was angled around watching.

  Before he jerked the reins he knelt with the round tin and smeared yellow paint across his palm, up the underside of each long finger. Halfway through, another thought occurred to him and he held three fingers down with his thumb and painted there. He pressed a one-digit salute smack in the seat of Jack Allen’s slick fork saddle.

  He rode the gray stallion out of the trees with the mules strung behind. He went for the river, splashed through a riffle and up into the rocks on the other bank. He swung down and cut the mules loose and shucked their halters. He tossed the halters into the weeds and tightened the cinch on the gray, and when he put his heels to the horse a moment later and lit out in a jump the mules just shied back and watched him shrink. The way he saw it, Catherine had it only partly right. Allen did intend to catch these horses. All except one.

  He ran the gray hard along the base of a high bluff, skirted wide around a cattail bog and a long seep of willows, and then cut back over and urged the horse up through the limber pine to the high ground at the top. He reined to a stop and tried to glass the floor through the stallion’s jitter and jump. Finally he dismounted and sat and steadied his elbows on his knees and he did not see the horses and he did not see Allen and he did not think he’d overshot either of them. He swung back up and rode along the top of the bluff and stopped again in the trees where the long wall of earth plunged down and away to taper into the sweep of the river. He saw the haze of dust first, hanging in the air like smoke. He saw the horses.

  Four of them with their heads up and their ears up, every one quartered away from him and looking back upriver. A young dun mare stamped and angled nervously and looked upriver again. He craned forward in the saddle and tried to spot the rest in the contoured ground below.

  He dreaded a rifle shot and wished he could see the herd stallion. The dun mare and the three horses with it began to drift along, not hurrying but not lingering either, and others began to appear out of the broken features of the ground, mares pushing bony foals, last year’s colts nervous with the same premonition. Now and then one or more would stop to look back.

  The edge of his eye caught a flash of light in the boulders to the south and he flinched in advance of a report that never came. He looked hard and saw the flash again, bright as a signal mirror. He threw his glasses up and found Jack Allen slithering across the flat top of a boulder on his elbows, trying to get into a position to shoot, rifle balanced crosswise in his hands. The sun winked off the lens of his riflescope.

  John H strained to find the stallion below. Horses continued to emerge, appearing from folds and tucks in the land as though spawned fully formed out of the arid earth itself. He looked again at Allen, his rifle sling looped tight around his upper arm now and his head behind the glass, aiming at something John H couldn’t see, something beyond a fin of bare stone breaching the sage along the river like the keel of a capsized boat.

  He yanked the Mannlicher out of the scabbard and reined the gray’s head out of the way. He flipped the leaf on the rear sight and threw the buttstock to his shoulder. The short-barreled blast boomed through the trees and receded and the gray jumped and steadied, and he heard the bullet whack the stone fin below and deflect away with a long ringing whine.

  Horses milled into the open like hornets out of a nest, the lineback stallion weaving and snapping and goading the others along. With his bare eye John H watched Allen rise to his knees, through his glasses watched him scan down the bluff with the lens of the rifle. John H watched him react to something, watched Allen scramble to his feet and launch off his perch like a man fleeing a fire. He ran gun in hand for the floor of the canyon.

  The jacks. John H saw them too, coming fast up the river bottom at the sound of the shot, castaways with no head for freedom. The Barb stallion heard or winded or otherwise sensed them down below and he trotted back in a half circle, tail and head in the air.

  John H shoved the Mannlicher in the scabbard and shoved the glasses dow
n his shirt. He’d lost Allen in the breaks, knew he might be trying to head off the mules but more likely was still gunning for the horse. He took the gray up through the pines to the flat ground on top and ran back down the bluff, crossed a game trail and wheeled onto that and had to hold the gray back on the steep drop down.

  He felt the saddle ride up the horse’s withers and he knew the cinch had stretched. The horse picked his way down the groove in the face of the bluff, the hillside sheer enough beneath them that John H’s boot and right stirrup hung into space. The groove dipped into another scatter of trees clinging strenuously to the hillside. The gray slid in the loose duff and the saddle hitched a little and the horse caught itself. John H jerked with his weight and righted the saddle again, and when they came off the steep ground he slapped the reins down and let the horse have its head.

  They blasted over a berm in the land throwing red earth out behind and came down onto the lowland with the horse’s long neck and forelegs stretching even with the ground, its mane leaping on the air, the fire of the desert leaping in its blood.

  The mules heard the irons crack against the cap rock and they veered, and horse and rider drew alongside and gained two lengths in the twitch of a heart. The mules fell into their natural line behind the horse and this formation exactly streaked by Allen in the sage a moment later, wet to his neck from where he’d slipped fording the river and a mask of incredulity on his face, the scoped rifle jinxed and dripping in one hand. John H flashed a painted wave as he passed.

  The wild horses had taken full flight now, even the stallion unsure of these odd beings with their warped chromosomal skulls. Chimera of unknown intent, but a devil for certain in the lead. A two-headed devil.

  The dust of the herd twisted and seethed like a ghost of the herd, flying not across the ground but up and up, into the thin air of the sky.

  John H rode out of the ghost. His shadow crossed the stone.