Chasing Painted Horses

by Drew Hayden Taylor

  Tye had stopped to admire it once, making a comment about how it seemed like its eyes were watching him. Tye acknowledged that he had no artistic appreciation for anything that ventured beyond his comfort zone, which included the music of a steel guitar and television commercials that made him laugh. Even though he would deny it if asked, he had to acknowledge to himself that there was something about the Horse, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

  On Tuesday night, with the wind howling outside, the denizens of the Everything Wall became extinct, rendered so by an energetic Liz, a rag, and a pail of soapy water, which proved as effectively genocidal as any large comet — with one notable exception.

  THE NEW WEEK brought several juvenile etchings, which had already popped up here and there across the Everything Wall. It was the usual menagerie of expected depictions, none approaching the artistic quality of the Horse and its effect upon its viewers. It was obvious some form of intimidation had made its way into the drawing ability of other young residents of Otter Lake. In this second week, most drawings were small, half-hearted, simplistic, almost as if no one wanted to put the necessary effort into anything that might be compared to the Horse. As the saying goes, it’s hard to shine when you’re standing next to the sun. Only in its sophomore week, the Everything Wall was becoming anemic.

  “Danielle did that?!” was the common refrain from most of Shelley’s and Ralph’s friends when they saw the drawing that was still on the Everything Wall. “Geez, that’s pretty good” was a popular response. “Wish I could do that” was equally frequently heard. Very few echoed William’s assessment of “Weird.”

  Wednesday afternoon quickly became a reality. Temperatures outside were a serious deterrent to most outdoor activities, regardless of how many layers were worn. Life moved indoors. It was in the midst of yet another card game that consisted of seventy-five percent card playing and twenty-five percent arguing that Shelley somehow, above the din of William’s alternating protestations of anger and innocence, heard a familiar gentle tapping at the front door.

  “Did you hear that?”

  “Nope. Hear what? Wait a minute, I think I’m missing a card.” William began looking under the table.

  Ralph was thinking the same thing as his sister. “Do you think?”

  “I don’t know. Last time, we barely heard her when she knocked.”

  “Big deal,” was William’s second contribution to the developing conversation. He was doubly irritated. If Danielle was at the door, waiting to be invited in, it meant potentially another amazing animal would prevent him from winning the drawing contest. In fact, so far this week he had not contributed anything to the Everything Wall. He was waiting to see what the weird little girl would do. He would wait until then to see what kind of master stroke he would need to pull out of his hat to combat this unexpected and slight foe. Now she was here to do draw again.

  Bring it on, he thought.

  He was about to win this card game — the card he was searching for was not exactly lost, just relocated — and Shelley and Ralph had obviously lost interest in the game. Their focus was on the girl at the door and not the cards in their hands.

  Hurrying across the kitchen, Shelley opened the door, revealing on the other side a very chilled Danielle, looking smaller and colder, if possible, than last time. “There you are. I was wondering if you were going to show up again.” Shelley could feel the cold coming in through the mud room, refusing to release its tendrils from the little girl’s arms. Ralph showed up on Shelley’s right, leaving William leaning against the doorway between the living room and the kitchen, trying to act nonchalant. Danielle gave the older girl a small, shy smile.

  “Can I …?” Her voice trailed off. Danielle seemed too shy to even finish her sentence.

  “Yes,” said Shelley, standing aside and holding the door for Danielle to walk through. She closed it when Danielle was fully in the house, standing in the warm kitchen. “So, you want a pop or anything? I think we have a Coke somewhere, if It didn’t drink it already.” She gave William a menacing glare as she opened the refrigerator door, but he didn’t see it. Or possibly he didn’t care. He was too busy watching Danielle, who gently nodded her head in response to Shelley’s offer.

  “Can I take your jacket?” asked Ralph, giving her his best welcoming smile. Danielle nodded and started to take off her winter jacket. Taking it, Ralph noticed it was too small and surprisingly thin, with two small rips in the lining. The Thomas clan was by no means wealthy, but Ralph could not imagine his mother letting him or Shelley out in the Otter Lake winter wearing an inadequate coat like the one he was holding in his hands.

  The frail young girl they had all met only a handful of times at school, eating potato chips and poorly dressed, seemed excited, almost animated to be in the house with them, a distinct change. As she progressed deeper into the kitchen, the creator of the Horse suddenly stopped moving, her feet fixed. Blinking rapidly, she was staring at her artwork on the Wall, the one she’d created less than a week before.

  Ralph noticed her change of expression immediately. “Danielle, what’s wrong?”

  Shelley, hearing Ralph, suspended her search for a soft drink in the refrigerator door and looked around, curious.

  Danielle was standing in the centre of the kitchen, still shivering from her sojourn in the Canadian winter, displaying a peculiar look of puzzlement and a dash of frustration. William leaned further into the kitchen to try to see what was drawing Ralph and Shelley’s attention.

  “Danielle?” voiced a worried Shelley.

  “It’s still here,” she said.

  They all looked at the Horse on the Wall, not comprehending what the problem was. “Oh, yes,” said the older girl. “We all loved it so much, it’s so beautiful, we didn’t want to wash it away. Our mom totally agreed. We left it up so we could look at it some more.” She looked nervously at her brother, “We thought you would be … I don’t know … flattered.”

  It did not appear that Danielle was flattered. In fact, she was close to tears.

  “But … but you said … you said you would get rid of it every week, so other kids could make new drawings. It’s not supposed to be here. This isn’t right.”

  This caused serious confusion amongst the three. Shelley, always the better communicator, tried to pilot their ship through Danielle’s sea of confusion. “I’m sorry, but we thought —”

  “It’s supposed to be gone,” Danielle said a second time. As if desperate, she turned to Ralph. “Isn’t it? Why isn’t it?”

  This was the most all three of them had heard the little girl talk, collectively, in quite probably their entire lives. Even William was struggling to grasp what the girl was telling them. “But that’s your Horse. I don’t get it. Don’t you like it anymore?”

  Then, like a bucket of water thrown on to a campfire, Danielle reverted to the fragile thing they remembered from school. She looked down at the ground. “I’m sorry. I’m being rude. It’s just …” She swallowed, then grabbed her coat from the confused Ralph. Quickly donning her coat and zipping it up, she announced, barely above a whisper, “I have to go.” Not looking at anyone, she scurried to the door, faster than any of them had seen her move, and was out into the cold before any of them could react. One by one, their gazes returned to the Horse on the Wall. Each of them replayed the last five minutes in their minds.

  “Man, if I thought she was weird before, I think she’s even more weird now, if that’s possible,” offered William. Then, without another thought, he returned to a far more pressing matter. “Are we gonna finish this card game or what?”

  Shelley was about to tell It to shut up, but lost interest as she continued to study the Horse. Just short of thirteen years of age, she knew there was more to this Horse than a thin layer of coloured chalk on a black wall. No one could put that kind of love and devotion — if she were older, perhaps she would
have added the word soul — into the drawing she was looking at and then react so severely for some as-yet-unknown reason and not have it mean something above and beyond a mere child’s drawing.

  Ralph knew, and, though he wouldn’t admit it, William also knew there was a special significance to what was on the Wall three feet away. They both felt this somewhere deep inside, but they just didn’t want to know. On some level, William was aware that the more he understood this girl and her Horse, the more difficult it would be to be jealous of her.

  Ralph turned to his sister. “Now what?”

  ON HER WAY home through Otter Lake’s snow-covered and chilly streets, Danielle tried with little success not to cry. She wasn’t sure why she was crying. In the cold of the winter, the tears that managed to escape stung her cheeks, practically freezing instantly. She shivered in the growing darkness but was completely unaware of it. She thought only of the Horse and the lost opportunity. Danielle knew the Horse wanted to come out so badly, and she wanted to let it out equally badly. There was something about that house, that home, that made Danielle feel she could draw the Horse there over and over. It felt safe, where the Horse could grow and be healthy and free. Those were good things. Not like the place her mother told her was home. She couldn’t let the Horse visit or live there. She’d tried several times, but had got into deep trouble for her efforts. The last time really badly. No Horse could come and visit her. It couldn’t thrive there. She knew there had to be other places where it could develop and run free. The Thomas house seemed to be just such a place.

  Now she worried that she had been quite rude to Shelley and Ralph, that she had been a rude guest in their home. She was sure of it. Her father, when he’d been alive, had tried to teach her about politeness and the dangers of being rude. Upon reflection, she shouldn’t have acted the way she had. It was wrong. Danielle was sorry now. She wished she could tell all of them she was sorry. Everybody there had been so nice to her. Her father would not have approved of the way she’d acted or how she’d left her new friends’ house. Could she call Shelley and Ralph and William new friends? She’d have to try to be nicer from now on. If there was to be a now on.

  It was so seldom she’d think about her father. Occasionally she dreamed of him, but that was becoming less and less frequent. Mom never mentioned him, especially with her new boyfriend. In some ways, it was like the man whose lap she’d found so warm and comforting, making her fall asleep, had never existed. Danielle no longer missed him with the deep, painful aching that she’d had since he’d died four years ago. It was now just a dull ache. She guessed that was good.

  Turning left at the stop sign, she stuck her hands as far down into her pockets as they could go, dangerously straining the stitching inside. Momentarily her finger popped out one of the rips Ralph had noticed earlier. Danielle was used to the cold, but today she seemed lacking in her ability to ignore or fight it.

  The house where Ralph and Shelley lived seemed a perfect place for her friend to visit, and today had been the day she was going to draw it again and let it run free. But the old Horse was still there. That was last week’s Horse. That wasn’t right because her Horse changed. It grew, evolved. Just like people. It needed to stretch and become what it wanted to become, not what it was, and that couldn’t happen when the old Horse was there. It had to go. Shelley and Ralph were such nice people, they meant well, and Danielle knew she shouldn’t have acted so badly, but she was disappointed. Why had they lied to her? She couldn’t understand why they’d said they would make room every week for a new Horse and then hadn’t done that. It wasn’t fair. Nothing much was fair in her life, but for some reason this felt more unfair than anything else.

  The tired and worn wooden steps of her trailer creaked beneath her tiny feet as she climbed the stairs to the front door. She and her mother and her mother’s boyfriend lived here. Danielle could remember when the trailer had been a much happier place and she would run home excited. Now she looked for excuses to stay away. But today she was out of excuses, and it was getting really cold, making her teeth chatter. Add to that she was hungry, tired, and had no place else to go. She turned the knob and entered as the warped door scraped open.

  “There you are. It’s about fucking time. Carla phoned and said she saw you wandering the streets. Get in here, you’re making us look bad. I suppose you’re hungry too. I made some Kraft dinner for lunch. You can have what’s left, on the stove.”

  The door and the world closed behind her. No Horse would want to live here.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “I WANTED TO become a cop because …,” Ralph stopped midsentence. It had been a long time since he’d had to justify or even explain his career choice. “And what does this have to do with that thing over there?” The Tim Hortons was bustling. The lunch rush was just ending, but the cold was forcing the street people and regular customers alike to search for alternative methods of keeping their bodies warm.

  Denizens of Canada’s largest city passed their table, throwing the occasional puzzled look in their direction. A noticeably down on his luck, aged man sitting across from a youngish police officer, deep in conversation. For some observers, it was just another example of the egalitarian nature of Tim Hortons across the country.

  “I asked you this before, and you didn’t answer. Do you know the person who drew that Horse? I’d like an answer.”

  Harry drank his third ... or was it fourth, possibly fifth coffee of the morning, realizing the Western concepts of quantity were seldom relevant on a morning like this, all the time measuring the immediate scalding nature of the cup’s contents against the slow burn of the season’s cold bit, waiting outside the franchise’s doors. To him, they were two sides of the same coin. “You’d like an answer, would you? Everybody wants answers, but very few would think I have them.”

  “You keep evading the question.”

  “Maybe you keep asking the wrong question.”

  Clearly frustrated, Ralph leaned back in his chair and then, just as quickly, leaned forward until he was centimetres away from Harry’s face, almost completely across the Formica table. “What question should I be asking, then?”

  A few seconds passed as Harry looked deep into his double-double. For a moment, Ralph thought he’d lost the man in whatever world some street people occasionally lived in, but Harry looked to their right, at the table near the bathroom. A woman was sitting with a younger man, probably her son, talking animatedly. Harry watched them for a second, as did Ralph, trying to figure out what was so interesting about the couple that would draw Harry’s attention. The constable was about to inquire when Harry broke the silence between them.

  “That woman. Had a very bad childhood. There’s a war constantly happening inside her between what happened to her and how it sometimes affects her own life as a mother. Always on the edge of letting the dam she built up break and becoming her own mother. I see that all the time in people. Who they were and who they are. Who they’re struggling to be. People can be really fucked up.”

  The woman looked normal and fine to Ralph. “How do you know this? Do you know her?”

  Putting on his best are you kidding face, Harry laughed. “You silly man. How would I possibly know her?”

  “Then how do you know what you just told me?”

  Returning to the woman, Harry sipped his coffee. “That man, I think that’s her son. That’s the connection I get. At times, I see tentacles and tendrils coming out of her, wanting to hurt him, but they never quite reach him. It’s like she’s shadowboxing with him. Throwing punches that will never hit. Odd way to live, huh? She wants to be a good mother, but something inside doesn’t want her to be. It’s a constant battle.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Why did you become a cop?”

  This man, this Harry whatever-his-last-name-is, was truly a frustrating individual. It’s a game, thought Ralph. The man was lonely, on
the fringes of society, wanting to talk to somebody, maybe even pull a trick or fool a police officer. It made sense. Quite possibly, he knew nothing of the Horse and who had painted it, re-created it, on that brick wall. What an idiot I am, concluded Ralph. Well, enough of this. Putting his hands on the table, Ralph got up, more frustrated with himself than with Harry.

  “Okay. I’ve had enough.”

  “Enough? We haven’t even started.”

  Shaking his head, Ralph turned towards the door. This morning hadn’t turned out quite the way he had anticipated. The Horse was just a coincidence. It had to be. He’d read in school that Isaac Newton and a second, less famous man had both developed algebra at the same time in different places, and that Darwin wasn’t the only person to come up with the theory of evolution. Darwin published his book before Alfred Russell Wallace did, so the former was remembered and the latter forgotten. It followed that if complete strangers in different countries had separately come up with a complicated language like algebra, or something requiring years and years of research, like evolution, how much higher was the probability that two people more than twenty years apart could draw a very similar, though striking, image of a horse. With the same carbon copy image of a girl’s hand on the shoulder. The more Ralph thought about it, the sillier he felt. Under his breath, he even chuckled to himself. It was time to go home.

  Looking out the window at the distant head of the Horse, Harry crumpled the empty coffee cup in his hand. “It was a woman. A girl. Actually, not a girl. It was the Horse. The Horse drew itself. But I’m pretty sure it was once a girl. It’s kind of hard to hide that. But I don’t think she exists anymore. And, how about this, she had the same colour as you.”

  The world in the Tim Hortons stopped for Ralph. Sounds and people disappeared. The words Harry had said raised a lump in Ralph’s throat.