Painted Horses

by Malcolm Brooks

  Power and Light

  They kept her a prisoner in the house in Fort Ransom for two days, a man in a car out front at all times. Sometimes she’d look out and the car would be different, the man different, but always there was someone.

  Max Caldwell came to the door within an hour after the bull brought her from Miriam’s. The man in the car did not move to stop him because Caldwell carried an enormous double-barreled shotgun. Catherine talked to him on the porch.

  “My knight in armor,” she said. “I don’t think they’ll let me go without a fight, though.” The man in the car was speaking into a police radio.

  “No, I don’t expect they will,” said Mr. Caldwell. “But I told a guy I’d check on you.”

  “Is he here?”

  “He’s not.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “He’s in better shape than you look to be, missy. That the guy done it?”

  She shook her head. “They left. I don’t know this one.”

  “Guess it’s his lucky day.”

  “Is he all right?” she said again.

  “Rode hard and put up wet, tell you the truth. Worried over you, too.”

  “He killed his horse for me. His good little horse. For nothing.”

  “He didn’t say nothing about that. Didn’t seem foremost in his mind.”

  “I’m kind of sick about it.”

  Caldwell nodded. “What’s going on here, Catherine?”

  Another car pulled up and stopped in the street.

  She looked at him. “You should go. Don’t get mixed up in this. I’m all right.”

  “Your phone’s dead, ain’t it.”

  She nodded. “It was out when I got here.”

  “Why don’t you come with me right now. We’ll hole up in the gas station. I got a shortwave radio and a gas generator. Even if they cut the phone line I can get fifty guys down here with their squirrel rifles, not to mention bulldozers, backhoes, maybe a crop duster. Enough to put up quite a ruckus.”

  “One if by land, two if by sea?” The man in the second car opened the door and swung out. She didn’t recognize him.

  “Something like that. We can go national with this thing in a pure D minute.”

  She shook her head. “You don’t understand. I know you want to help me but attention is the last thing that’s going to help me. I made a deal with them. I had to.”

  Caldwell turned and looked at the men. The driver of the second car had crossed the asphalt and leaned into the passenger window of the first, talking with the other driver. Caldwell stared until they stared back. He launched a stream of Days Work in their direction.

  “You ever fired a shotgun?”

  “What? Yes, actually. My dad has matched Purdeys. I’ve shot clay pigeons with him.”

  Caldwell had a wry look. “This old blunderbuss ain’t all that, but it’ll flatten a skunk like God’s own fist. Or make the skunk think twice before it goes beatin’ on a woman.”

  She tried to decline, tried to tell him the worst of it was over.

  “You take this gun and I guarantee you the worst is over.” He showed her where the safety was, told her it was loaded. Finally she took it from him. The men at the car stared.

  “How long they planning on keeping you like this?”

  “A day or two. Not long.”

  “They’ll be watching you, but I’ll be watching them. If this is still going on after two days I’ll get some help in here.”

  “Make it three,” she said.

  He walked down off the porch and she spoke again. “If he comes back, tell him to stay away. Tell him I said so.”

  She watched Mr. Caldwell shuffle to the car, heard him light into the two men with all the hellfire and damnation of a blacksnake whip, his crooked finger jabbing like a bayonet. The men just stood there and took it, even when Caldwell loosed another vile brown stream across the windshield, tobacco juice running like diarrhea down the glass. Finally he turned and stomped off toward the service station.

  Catherine carried the shotgun inside. She removed the blunt red shells and set them on the counter.

  For a while she picked up the handset compulsively every ten or fifteen minutes, hoping against all reason that the line would somehow be alive. After the umpteenth time she felt a surge of rage, could visualize herself stuffing the shells back into the gun and giving the dead phone both barrels, just to teach something a lesson. She got ahold of herself. She didn’t pick up the phone again.

  The house became infernally hot in late afternoon, the thin curtains lank and still in the windows and doing nothing to shield the glare. Summer did not seem to ride dreamily into the sunset in these parts. Catherine paced room to room, sweat in her hair and the skin clammy and damp and dirty in the webs of her fingers and toes.

  The doors were shut but somehow there were flies in the house anyway, lots of them, zipping around in the heat, batting against the screens, crawling on walls and counters and harrying her head as though they could sense the damaged flesh, perceive something they might exploit.

  She went on a killing spree with a rolled newspaper and took an almost narcotic glee in each solid thwack, the mounting body count, until with fifteen or twenty notches tallied she dripped with sweat and had to sit down. The remaining flies let her alone, began to feed on their comrades.

  She took a cool shower and wrung her hair and lay on her sheets in the bedroom after the sun went down. The house began to tick and groan around her, siding and framing relaxing in the darkening air. A cross breeze quickened the curtain like a godsend. Once when she got up to pee she peeked through the slats of the jalousie and saw chrome glint at the curb, saw a cigarette burn like a firefly.

  In the bed her pillow was still damp from her hair. Finally after hours of craving sleep she did something she’d never done before, licked two fingers and made herself wet, opened her legs and shut her eyes. She writhed against her own pressure and felt a tremor begin to mount, and she tried to locate the epicenter of the tremor and she found it, until a single bang of the headboard made her violently aware of the screeching bedsprings and the horror the guard out front might hear. She slowed herself down.

  The finish was not what it could have been and she felt no relief in the aftermath, only the same restless emptiness and now it verged on despair. She got a breath of her own littoral scent on her fingers and she shoved her hand under the pillow. She found herself bargaining with God.

  She woke in the gray dawn with the room like an icebox, curled tight as an embryo. She forced herself to shut the window against the draft, pulled the covers onto the bed from the floor and curled up again.

  Early in the morning she made a pot of coffee in the kitchen and started writing, for real this time, a longhand account that could not be told except in the reckoning of bits and pieces, small lives and lonely small struggles, random beings colliding in sparks and sintered into other things entirely.

  Who would a person love. When would death knock. Mysteries like the wheels of a gear regulated in turn by wars and invasions, earthquakes and famines. In the end the magic of being alive was both created and destroyed by a velocity not perceived but present, each lifetime hurtling toward a light so bright you could but glance before you were forced not only to look away but to forget you ever saw it, for meaning itself was no more than a cipher within that light.

  She used to think the cipher owned a great and abiding beauty, and if she tried hard enough, squinted against the light long enough she would glimpse this beauty, and know the secret at the heart of the world. Now she wasn’t sure. When she got up to adjust the blind against the slant of the sun she saw through the window why she’d been cold in the dawn, the world outside white, glittering with the year’s first frost.

  In another hour her hand began to cramp around the pencil and she flexed her fingers and wished she had the typewriter, wished she hadn’t sent it through the air to its doom. She tickled the space above the page with the fingers of both hand
s as though to strike a set of keys, and suddenly she did not want a typewriter at all. For the first time in years, she wished for a piano.

  Her arm was still tender the next day when one of the men knocked at the front. The bruising on her throat had faded from ripe purple to a sickly iridescence, uric yellows and greens and a bad shade of blue. She opened the door.

  He seemed almost embarrassed to have to look at her, morbidly fascinated as well. He tried to maintain eye contact and couldn’t, his focus darting to her throat. “You’re to have your things together in an hour,” he said. “We’ll put you on the train in Billings.”

  “All right.”

  “You can call to make arrangements.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The telephone. You can call out east. So they know you’re coming.”

  “All right.” He was still standing there holding his hat when she shut the door.

  She went to the kitchen and lifted the handset and she realized she was shaking, afraid he’d lied, that the wire would remain a blank line to nothing.

  The operator came on and Catherine asked for long distance. She gave the number and heard the switches linking up. One full ring and an answer.

  “Mama?” she said, and her voice broke. “Mama it’s me.”

  Epilogue

  Twilight falls and the man walks into it, into the cold blue wave of it, toward the last bright blush at the edge of the sky. Astral ghosts twist in the north, emerald and red. Colors like creatures, rising with the dark.

  The fog off the river has settled into the grass and he feels the kiss of water as he walks, legs drenched to his knees before he’s gone ten paces. Overhead a nighthawk dives, its war whoop close. The man never sees it.

  Tonight he fed on deer, a doe felled at a seep as she dipped her head to drink. She jumped at the strike and humped up her spine, tottered two steps with her muzzle dripping and collapsed.

  He seared her haunch over coals from the core of the fire, rendered white marbles of kidney fat over the same fire and poured the clear hot tallow into lamps, which he carries now unlit in his hand, moving across the open expanse by memory and by the cool pale gaze of the moon.

  The long wall ahead looms like a reverse of what it is. Not an immovable object but an unknowable void, a monument to absolute dark. He scans the black line of ridge for the notch, moves forward and crouches far beneath it.

  His kit contains a wad of moss, which he peels like rare fruit to expose the ember inside, its orange energy damped down and dormant though volatile yet. He bunches the moss into a nest and dribbles pine splinters heady with pitch, and working fast lest the ember wink out he cups the nest and holds it to his mouth and he breathes.

  The ember pulses, sends hot tracers into the fibers. He breathes again and the tracers find the pitch. The nest flares in his hands. He sets the flaming ball on the ground and raises the light with twigs and from somewhere in the outward dark comes the mutter of an animal, the nervous thump of a hoof. The nighthawk dives again.

  He holds a burning twig to each coarse wick and the lamps begin to sputter and glow. He has fuel for an hour, maybe more. He rises with a flame in each hand and moves toward the wall, and though the dark void vanishes at the stab of light the portal in the stone gapes black as ever, a mystery of eternal midnight. The open flames twist and bend. The stone walls close around him. The sounds of night fall away.

  The air inside the passage is warmer than the air outside, steadier, though when the man pauses to listen the flames right themselves a moment and bend again, so he knows there is a draft though he cannot feel it. Out of deep silence comes a single drop of water.

  He moves again and a few feet along, the walls begin to stir in the glow of the lamps, the contour and bulge of the stone assuming the quiver and flex of muscle and flesh, the red figures of horses galloping as he passes. He wanders through a herd, each animal moving as the corona moves until in a mere second each falls back beyond the reach of the lamps, like horses darting through a dream and then gone.

  He passes handprints, pressed onto the stone, passes more horses and comes finally to a blank place on the wall, a ripple of bare rock with a convex bulge that to the right eye possesses exactly the proportions of the shoulder of a running horse.

  He sets one lamp on the floor beneath the wall, the other on a ledge. He angles his kit into the light, reaches in and finds lumps of charcoal, clumps of lichen, casings of pigmented paste. He lays the casings on the ground, finds the right one and opens the end. He daubs into soft black ooze.

  Somewhere in the dark, water drips again. He presses his thumb to rough brown stone. He starts a line.

  She travels home and carries not a thing back with her, not the delicate flint point she found in the creek, not Crane Girl’s smooth stone. But she can’t leave behind the battering she took, the bruises green-black on her throat as though her corpse has somehow returned from a garroting. Her father half turns from her in the train station, the first time she’s seen him actually struck dumb. Catherine holds her own silence, bites her tongue, and buries her secrets. She keeps her word. She gives no one up.

  She fully expects to retreat to her room and cry her eyes out for a while, to hide like a spinster until the marks fade. She surprises herself. She doesn’t cry, not much at least, and she can’t bear her own bookshelves with the neat and familiar spines, can’t even look at her bust of Nefertiti and its ageless unblinking stare.

  Once upon a time the books were like ships, her passage to the great wide world. Description de l’Egypte. Seven Pillars of Wisdom. On her second day home she turns Nefertiti toward the wall. Over her mother’s protest, she drives downtown.

  She wanders the sidewalk past the soda shop and the five-and-dime. She can sense people staring. Many of them recognize her, know she’s her father’s daughter, the one who tossed away her own bright future and now look at her. A girl beaten. She meets their eyes just to watch them look away.

  She spies a girl she went to school with, emerging from a shop with a child in tow and another on the way, a polite enough girl who will force herself not to stare, force herself to make conversation, and now it is Catherine who hurries off. She crosses the street and finds herself gazing through a display window into a color television set, her first glimpse at this latest example of progress. The Lone Ranger gallops into view, his shirt electric, bluer than life. She turns again for home.

  Progress. She wishes now for the first time in her life to launch ever forward, away from that wild country where scalpings and shootings may as well have happened yesterday, the war chants and bullets slicing yet beneath the rustle of grass.

  A few days pass and she agrees to see David. She owes him that at least and anyway, she needs to return his ring. She never comes down from the front step, and he never makes it off the walk. When he sees he’s getting nowhere he suffers the formality and asks if there’s someone else.

  She doesn’t answer, can’t force the eyes she knows he loves even to look at him.

  He presses into darker territory, averts his own stare from her throat and asks if she’s been, you know, violated, as though his mouth simply won’t form the word he’s actually thinking.

  No, she tells him. Not the way you mean.

  Time passes and she falls in with other lovers, one a professor of antiquity who’s written an influential book she’s unable to finish, another an ad writer who pursues her at a cocktail party she gets dragged to by a friend. She goes out a few times with a young electrician who answers a service call. Nothing lasts. She avoids cops and engineers, artists as well.

  Months then years come and go and she floats along on work and on life. She keeps herself busy, becomes a master of immersion into bits of arcana that hardly matter outside an academic sphere and in this way she makes a barrier against her own first love, because what she loves has become a betrayal. The most vicious way she knows to stifle it is with a fine-tuned boredom.

  She hears from Miriam from time
to time, a few long letters early on and later mainly holiday cards after Miriam goes off to veterinary school in Idaho. Miriam becomes engaged to a fellow student in her second year, sends Catherine an invitation to a June wedding that Catherine agonizes over for a month before finally responding with regrets and a large wooden packing crate. Wedgwood pottery, out of her parents’ collection.

  Sometimes Catherine thinks her mother has never forgiven her for not marrying when she had the chance, knows her father would like grandbabies and knows he would be good at it too. Sometimes when she is on the boat with him off Cape May in the summer with the lighthouse on the point and the whitewashed Coast Guard buildings gleaming she’ll let herself go and imagine she is not herself at all but her own child, spoiled as the princess he always desired, which she always resisted. He deserves it; she knows that. But they never bring it up to her, not anymore.

  In 1961 she is offered an advisory role on a minor dig in Israel, a small temple believed to date to the early Roman occupation. She still carries a bit of notoriety in the right circle, people who know she was in London, people who would yank their own eyeteeth with pliers to have been there themselves. A former classmate tracks her down, also a woman and now a PhD, with learning and determination but little practical experience.

  Catherine turns her down by rote but this friend who has not seen her in years seems possessed. She tries again with a long letter, says she does not mean to pry.

  Something happened, didn’t it? Something that summer. I could see it in your eyes, read it between the lines in your work that last year. The Catherine I knew had so much wonder, like a little girl giddy with life itself.

  I guess it’s not my place to cajole you. I’ll be blunt, because I’m selfish and I need your help but hopefully for greater purpose as well: neither is it within my abilities to accept you as a lobotomized shell . . .

  Catherine feels her blood boil and she comes close to tearing the pages to shreds without finishing, but she reads on for no other reason than to fuel her own fury and this turns out to save her. By the coda she weeps because she knows her friend is right. Catherine holds up her hands, squints at her clean little nails.