Painted Horses (13 page)

Her insides went raw. She gritted her teeth to keep from screeching and clenched the bed sheet in each fist. She lay as still as possible and knew with a sadness underlying the physical pain that this was not what men wished for in a lover. He finally finished with a series of sharp animal breaths and a low, lazy moan. His weight went dead and pressed her into the bed.

She was bleeding and in pain where before she had only been restless. He told her it was wonderful.

Catherine came awake, a battering at the front door rattling the panes in the window above her head. The little bedroom was a blare of sunlight. She wasn’t sure what time sleep finally took her but now with the morning clearly advanced she could barely get her eyes open.

She’d overheated and shed her pajama bottoms, had no recollection of this. She found them wadded in the sheets by her feet and pulled them on. The front door boomed again.

She parted the metal blinds in the living room. A man on the front porch peered back. He raised his eyebrows as though he really didn’t have time for this. Catherine opened the door.

“You the archaeology girl?”

He had cowboy boots and a long frame and the hotshot insolence of a fighter pilot. Catherine became highly conscious of her pajamas. “I’m Catherine. Lemay. You must be the wrangler.”

“I must be the wrangler. Otherwise answer to Jack Allen. Looks like you’re getting a fine early start to your day here in the great American West.”

“I had some trouble sleeping last night. Not quite settled in. I had a long day yesterday.” She wondered why she was explaining herself to this person she didn’t know.

“I guess the fat man told you to expect me.”

She assumed he meant Dub Harris. “His secretary said you know this country well. That you could guide me if I needed a guide.”

“That’s two for two. I know this country, you will need a guide. Ride horses at all?”

“I haven’t in years.”

“That’s gonna change. That Dodge of his can only get you so far.”

“So I found out.”

He narrowed his eyes at her and she saw faint crow’s marks appear, eroded remnants of wind and rain and sun. He was as lean and as wiry as the man in the canyon. “You found out how.”

She shrugged in her pajamas and she saw his otherwise unwavering eye flick to the fold of her neckline. She wished she could adjust her top without appearing to. “I drove into the canyon yesterday. To the river. Got a flat tire in the process, which I suppose proves your point.”

“You went alone?”

She shrugged again and slid her neckline farther north. “I had no idea how to find you. I didn’t even know your name. I didn’t want to wait to get started.”

He looked at her thin form swimming within folds of silk, at her green eyes and her hair pulled into a ponytail behind her face. He pointed at the ambulance in the drive. “You drove that into the canyon. By yourself.”

“Yes, by myself.”

“You got a flat and still made it home again.”

“Yesterday.”

He said, “Where’s the flat now?” But before she could answer he was already striding off the cement porch and across the ground toward the ambulance. She felt as though her story were being checked for veracity before her very eyes and she stepped out of the house and after him in a flash of indignation. Her bare heel found something sharp in the grass, something that smarted like a hornet’s sting.

Jack Allen sprung the latch on the rear doors of the ambulance and swung them wide. He observed the tire, pierced and impotent on the floorboards. “I may have been wrong about you, Miss Lemay.” He squinted at her. “Silk pajammies or not.”

“What do you know about the Crow Indians?”

“What do you need to know?”

“Where to look in the canyon, for starters. Frankly to my eyes it doesn’t appear very habitable but supposedly it’s special to them. Sacred, I guess. If I learn why I might have a place to begin.”

“Reckon you’ll have to get yourself an Indian to figure that one out. Provided you can peel him off his barstool.”

She cocked her head.

He pulled the flat from the rear of the Dodge. “Feds lifted the prohibition on Indian liquor sales three years ago. Tavern’s the only thing most of them find sacred these days. Nothing against taverns, of course.”

“What are you doing with my tire?”

“Taking it. I’ll drop it to get fixed.”

“I can drop it myself. I know the service station attendant and I need to take his gas can back anyway.”

Jack Allen shook his head. “Fat man has his own garage. I’ll handle it.”

She didn’t press the issue although she knew she was effectively barred from the canyon until he brought the tire back. At his mercy. Maybe that was the idea. She would not go down without making a nuisance of herself. “I’m going to need to get back into the canyon. Obviously.”

“Obviously. When.”

She looked down the street, at the line of newish, smallish houses that so resembled her own. The homes of roughnecks and drilling engineers. Company people, riding for the brand. But she could not imagine Jack Allen as a neighborhood denizen. “Soon, within the next day or so.”

“Tomorrow, then. I’ll be here at five. With horses.”

“
A.M.
?”

She swore he smirked. She got the sense he was baiting her for a protest. “What should I bring?”

He balanced the tire on a knee and fished something out of his shirt pocket. Aviator glasses. He settled them on the bridge of his nose and she knew in a flash Jack Allen was the man with the pipe by the side of the road. The mustanger. He fixed his mirrors upon her and she saw distorted twins of herself, misshapen and ridiculous in her pajamas in the yard. He said, “Boots and a big hat. Warm clothes. I’ll have rain gear for you.”

He seemed about to go on but then he glanced at the lettering on the door and now it was his turn to appear flummoxed. He pointed at the yellow palm print, its fan of fingers across the company logo. He said, “Who did that.” He dropped the tire to the ground and stepped closer. He looked back at her.

Catherine was hugging herself, her own hands tucked beneath each opposing arm. Her feet had gone cold but her heel still stung.

“Not you,” he said. “Not any woman. This is a man’s hand.” He put his own outstretched fingers atop the paint for illustration. “Knew a guy in the war used to do this. Carried a tin of paint, everywhere he went.” He looked at her, or perhaps beyond her. She couldn’t tell which. “We called these rigs meat wagons.” He laughed a little. “Takes me right back to Italy.”

Jack Allen went back to the fallen tire and set it again on edge. He wheeled it for the street and she noticed then his stake-side truck parked at the curb, roof still crumpled from the hooves of the horse. How had she missed that.

He looked back at her. “Five,” he said. “Don’t be in bed.”

Catherine went for the house.

She set out for Agency later that morning. Such a stark name for a town. She debated swinging by the service station to fish for some notion of what she might expect, but a surge of self-consciousness caused her to drive on by. She saw Mr. Caldwell in his coveralls, dispensing fuel into a Mercury sedan. Once past she remembered his gas can and swung around at the next crossroad.

The Mercury had pulled away by the time she drove in. Catherine steered to a stop and looked out at Mr. Caldwell. He said, “You made it.”

“I did.”

“Find anything?”

She thought of the aspen grove, its gallery of carvings. “Nothing I was looking for. I got an idea of the landscape, though. You’re right—it’s big and it’s deep.”

“You seem undaunted.”

Catherine was secretly pleased.

“I like a girl with some sand. I’ll say that.”

She shook her head. “Sand?”

“You know,
grit.
Gumption.
Pluck.
”

She felt her blush rise.

“I hear Jack Allen’s been to see you.”

“Well. I guess what they say about small towns is true.”

He gave her a half-rueful smile. “News does fly like a bullet.”

“Since we’re on the topic, what can you tell me about Mr. Allen?”

Caldwell squinted through his wire glasses at arm’s length, then wiped the lenses on a folded hankie. “He’s what you might call unreconstructed. Eighty year ago he’d have made a crackerjack buffalo killer. Or wolfer, more recently.”

“Wolfer?”

“Trapper. When I was a kid the government had a bounty on all manner of critters but wolves occupied a class all their own. Something about that particular beast brings out the dark genius in men.

“Most who are drawn to these parts have a taste for hunting. A proper fixation with blood sport, with the patterns and habits of game. Comes with the territory. The trapper has this taste on a whole other level and the wolfer, well. The wolfer is himself half canine.”

Catherine hesitated, her voice actually sticking in her throat. “I saw him, the other day. With a mustang, by the side of the road. I mean the horse—it was in his truck somehow and it was just . . . good God.
Bloody
.”

Caldwell nodded. “Not what you’re used to seeing, I expect. Bound for the slaughterhouse.” He was nodding at her, head bobbing like an automaton. “Those horses escaped cultivation and I guess that attracts its own dark genius. The one exists, so the other has to try for it. No choice in it.”

“Kill what you love?”

“Something like that. You’re a quick study, miss.”

He returned his spectacles to his nose and glanced at the door on the Dodge, glanced away, and then looked again. “He followed the rodeo circuit for a year or two, after the war. Hear he got bored with it. He was a cavalryman, and I don’t mean mechanized cavalry. I mean mounted cavalry. Hunted Nazis in Italy. On horseback.”

“He mentioned something about that. He’s taking me by horseback into the canyon tomorrow but to be honest I don’t think he’ll be much help outside basic navigation. He seems to regard me as an irritant.”

If Caldwell had an opinion he didn’t offer it.

“I thought I’d head up to Agency to see if I can find an assistant. Somebody who knows the canyon.”

“I hate to say, miss. Nobody really knows the canyon, not anymore. Jack Allen probably has as good a sense as anyone around these days, but I doubt even he’s spent much time there.”

“Right. As I said, he seems annoyed with me. Plus I don’t think we’ll quite be looking in the same direction. I need to find someone who has a different sort of . . . intuition.” She struggled to come up with the correct appellation.

“You mean you want a native.”

“Correct. Do you know anyone I might enlist?”

“In Agency? That’s a tall order—tough to say who’d cooperate.” He looked at her above the wire of his glasses. “Hardly your concern I know, but this dam’s got the pot stirred up. Best bet might be a young person. I take it a gal would be acceptable?”

“Preferable, actually.”

“A year or two back I stopped on the highway, help out a fella in a broken-down farm truck. Crow, hauling goats, threw a rod near the highway junction. Bad day for it too, snow and wind and what all. Fella had his granddaughter along. Told me she knew the truck had one dead cylinder to begin with. I wound up driving them back to their place outside town. She’s a bit younger than you but sure enough sharp. Her granddad told me she’d taught herself to read before she started grade school. Maryann, I believe. No. Miriam. Miriam.”

“Perfect. How do I find her?”

“Drive through Agency on the main road. Just past the schoolhouse you’ll see a dirt lane to a log bridge crossing the river. That’s where I dropped them.” Caldwell worried at his lip, appeared to ruminate. “One more thing. The reservation probably ain’t what you’re accustomed to, either. If you sense trouble, drive to the battlefield. You’ll see the signs. There’ll be government people.”

“Trouble?”

He held up his hands. “Not trying scare you, miss. It’s a different world.”

Catherine tried to return his gas can. He told her to keep it. Two minutes down the road it struck her. She should have inquired about the man in the canyon.

She drove off the plains into Agency. Catherine was unsurprised to learn Jack Allen had been a rodeo rider, also not surprised even this hadn’t proved exciting enough. She knew the war had changed its conscripts in unpredictable ways. True, most returned home and folded themselves into domestic quiet with as little ruckus as possible. But others came back restless, tuned to the pulse of combat and disinclined toward sleepiness ever after. Former Mustang pilots were motorcycling around the countryside in packs. Veterans of Guadalcanal or Riva Ridge were breaking land-speed records in the Utah deserts, or scaling granite walls in Yosemite.

A row of clapboard houses lined one side of the town’s only paved street. Though modest the houses had the bygone Victorian flourishes of their era, with spindles and moldings and leaded panes in a few of the windows.

Each was a sorry shell of its original self, the bleached grain of raw siding showing beneath curling paint and the decorative spindles loose and erratic in their frames. All manner of debris across the yards. Car bodies outmoded by decades, farm implements by a full half century. Stacks of tires and discarded iceboxes. She slammed the brake when two children darted across the road.