Painted Horses (26 page)

“Maybe to hunt wild sheep like we saw last week. That would be the obvious thing. Elk and deer too, we’ve seen those, but more of those lived out on the plains with the buffalo. Maybe like Mr. Caldwell said, they came after flint to make tools, or maybe just to see it. Or maybe no one ever did come. That almost seems like the story so far.”

They made their way down again through time’s long slough to the grass in the plain, and when she’d jumped from the edge of the talus and hit the ground Catherine spun too quickly to watch Miriam jump, and her eyes whirled past the flashing sun and went careering up the soaring wall at Miriam’s back to collide far above with the infinite blue, and her mind went dizzily aslant. She felt her legs weave.

“Church,” she said. “Maybe they came for church.”

Miriam landed beside her. “Now that makes more sense than anything we’ve thought of yet.”

“Remember the rock wheel in the mountains Mr. Caldwell talked about? How strange he said it is?”

“Spooky, I think was the word.”

They had retreated out of the meadow after walking in a grid through the afternoon, still hoping to find the telltale markers of a campsite. Nothing materialized. Now they made their own rock ring, out in the open beyond the trees and the tarp, to have a place for a campfire.

“It was, and it is. And some of the old traditional people still go there for ceremonies because it’s like you said, a church, in a way. I sort of overlooked this until now but it’s got these little U-shaped rock piles around the outside of the wheel, just big enough for a person to sit in. No roof, but tall enough to keep out the wind. That’s where a warrior or a young person would wait for a vision.”

Catherine had just settled a stone the size of a cinder block into place. “Like rocks this size?”

“Roughly, yeah. Bowling-ball size, bread-loaf size. Whatever was handy, I guess.”

“How big are the piles, exactly? Use the fire ring for comparison.”

“Take this half of the ring. Set it on top of this half. Maybe build it up with another layer or two.”

“Does anyone talk about that . . . phenomenon nowadays? Visions? Or actually seek them out? I’ve read about them sort of anthropologically—deprivation and starvation and whatnot triggering what a scientist or a, well,
rationalist
would probably consider a hallucination. What’s called a fugue.” A music term as well. Her own skulking, shadowing spook.

“Honestly Catherine it’s kind of a difficult thing to talk about. Those old mysterious ways were really stifled, way before I came along. But the stone walls are still there, and the place still has this power, somehow. I can say that.”

“Did girls have visions?”

“Well obviously I didn’t, but in the old days I guess some did. Grandmother, maybe. Sometimes around a girl’s first period, I think? I don’t know how it really worked. The main reason I bring it up at all is the Medicine Wheel is way out in the middle of nowhere, this hard-to-get-to place for ceremonies and visions.”

Catherine swept the air theatrically with her arms, at the totality of their surroundings. “Sort of like our home away from home, is what you’re saying.”

“Yes. Maybe. Just an idea.”

Catherine swept the air again. “Church.”

“Yes,” said Miriam. “Maybe.”

For the next five days they ventured from camp in the cool of the morning, on foot at first but then in the latter part of the week by horseback, riding beyond the edge of what they’d already explored and then walking farther yet. They climbed into rock formations on their hands and knees, followed narrow pathways that vanished into sage. They found nothing.

Jack Allen made himself scarce, pursuing his own mission, which he didn’t talk about. Once in the afternoon they glimpsed him far off on the other side of the canyon, squatting by the gray horse on a stone outcrop. They saw the flash of a lens in the sun and Catherine realized this wasn’t from his glasses but from binoculars. A moment later he stood and swung into the saddle. He rode out of view.

“I wonder if he saw us,” she said.

“Bet on it,” Miriam answered.

Usually they beat him back to camp by an hour or more though one day they came in to find him not only returned but wastrel-drunk on a bottle of whiskey. He lay back against his bedroll with his boots off and his shirt opened against the heat, wiry abdomen fish white beneath the copper V of his neck.

“’Fraid you girls is gonna have to cook tonight,” he said. “I’m drunker’n ten Indians.”

“Did you drink that entire bottle?” Catherine asked. She was more curious than reproving.

He held the bottle up by the neck and studied it at arm’s length, like a farsighted schoolmarm trying to read some childish scrawl without eyeglasses. About two fingers remained of what had been a fifth. “Not yet.”

“You better not try to take advantage of us in your depleted state,” said Miriam. Catherine shot her a look.

Jack Allen laughed. He waved at a fly. “Darlin’, right now I couldn’t take advantage of a two-dollar whore with a ten-dollar bill. But don’t let on.”

The next morning he turned out of his bedroll bleary and green. He shuffled a few feet into the trees, popped the buttons on his fly and relieved himself with a monumental piss. Catherine and Miriam looked at each other across the map on the table, the corners weighted with stones against the breeze. Miriam snickered. Catherine grinned in spite of herself.

Jack Allen walked stiffly back, barefoot and entirely shirtless now, wincing as though the very daylight were a source of indescribable pain. He found his canteen and tilted his head and poured massive gurgles down his bobbing gullet. Water sloshed across his chin and down his chest, which he ignored. He exhaled a blast of wet air when he finished and without so much as a glance wandered over and dropped heavily to a canvas stool. He rubbed at his eyes with a thumb and index finger.

He remained in that position fifteen minutes later when they left for the day, heading for a side canyon they stumbled upon the day before. Catherine fully expected him to languish there yet when they returned at dinnertime, but his horse and saddle were sure enough gone.

“Surely he’s ridden off for effect,” she said. “Probably left half an hour ago. As sick as he looked this morning, I can’t imagine he’s been gone the entire day.”

Miriam thought for a moment. She said, “I can.”

Whatever the case, he hadn’t returned by nightfall. They dunked themselves in the cold water of the river, ate a Spartan meal of canned beans and tomatoes, and sat by the fire later than they ordinarily did. Catherine tried to ignore the fact he hadn’t appeared. She blathered about everything and nothing until finally the fire died and they had no more wood gathered to keep it going.

“If he isn’t back by morning, we’ll ride out downriver and go for help.”

“He’ll be back,” said Miriam. Then she laughed.

“What?”

Miriam stood up. “Nothing. It’s just amusing you’re worried about him.”

“I didn’t expect he’d just disappear,” said Catherine. She felt almost sheepish. “No note, no nothing. He could be half dead out there for all we know.” Or actually dead.

“Don’t get yourself too worried,” said Miriam. “I’ve got dibs, remember.”

“Well the irony there is, you don’t seem all that worried yourself.”

Miriam laughed again.

In their sleeping bags a little later Miriam brought up another of Catherine’s looming fears. “Are you still awake?”

“Uh-huh.” She heard Miriam rustle onto one elbow in the dark. The pale glow of the galaxy butted abruptly into the solid black line of the canyon’s rim. To her delight, a comet streaked quickly across an inch of sky, an instant of pure transport in which worry and fatigue and even Jack Allen himself did not exist at all.

“What if we don’t find anything down here?”

She took a deep breath. “It’s all right if we don’t find anything. As long as we take an honest look, we can’t will history to change itself. We can’t find what was never here to begin with.”

“What about Mr. Caldwell? His ‘black braid in the stone,’ and all?”

Another, bigger breath. “Right. That. Part of me wishes he’d never said anything, though of course I’d love for it to be real. But rationally? Pleistocene art doesn’t exist in the New World. Or at least, no one’s found any yet. Odds are, we stand far more to find nothing than to find pictures of extinct animals.”

“I was afraid you’d say that.”

She shouldn’t give voice to it but she did anyway. “In Europe it’s almost its own separate field, you know? Hardly even archaeology. You know about the painted caves?” She didn’t pause. “Thousands of years old,
tens
of thousands. We think of the Bible as old, or Egypt. The Fertile Crescent. That all falls into the category of history. This is
pre
history. Animals that haven’t existed in many thousands of years, painted deep underground. Preserved against all time.”

She rattled away, into the dark, talking to the stars. “I mean yes, it should be possible.
Should
be
. There’s work going on in the Southwest that says humans have been here for many thousands of years, too.

“You know about the land bridge? Between Russia and Alaska, during the Ice Age? That’s how
bison
got here. Humans, too. Your ancestors. When there were still mammoths, ancient camels, whatever. Horses even, once upon a time, before the ice thawed and it all just died. But it
should be
possible that a human, someone who could talk and think and wonder just like you and me, recorded those animals here.”

“So it is, then? It’s possible?”

“Oh, honey. It’s sort of a cheap way out, but anything’s possible. Martians from outer space are possible. But Miriam? It will not happen. I promise. We might find tepee rings, or some pictograph of a shield or red rifles or something, but we will not find what Mr. Caldwell was talking about,” and this last got lost in a yawn she couldn’t fight, and she knew again how late it was, and wondered again what on earth had become of Jack.

Minutes passed and she thought Miriam must have dozed off. A relief to be wrong.

“Catherine?”

“I’m awake . . .”

“What was London like?”

How to answer. “Muddy.” She laughed into the night. “A wonderland. A classroom I never wanted to leave. A place where I got to live inside a dream.” She tried to describe just a single day’s unfolding, not during those few weeks of Walbrook fame and riot but before that, or after, when she’d known for the first time in her life how it felt to be among her own kind. Her own tribe.

Audrey Williams called her love and the men all called her Yank, called her Mate.

They uncovered stairways leading to the tiles of a Roman bath, sifted medieval trash pits for daggers and shoes. She tried to describe what it was like to turn up a ceramic pot with its handle intact, or the stare of a statue buried two millennia.

She described the chip shops and pubs, the damp in the winter and the glorious warmth of builder’s tea to cut it.

“Remember when Mr. Caldwell said those days in the cave were the finest of his life? That was London. For me.”

A place where she knew giddiness and peace at once. Then she took a breath, considered she may as well tell everything.

“But it was a disappointment too, in a way. I sort of had my heart broken, had to watch something not only genuinely significant but also personally very valuable sacrificed for progress. That part still tears at me. Drives me, too.”

Miriam let this sink in a moment. “What will happen if we do find something big in here? Just suppose.”

“Well, for the sake of argument, it depends on how significant it might be. Something really amazing, say, cliff houses, like in the Southwest? At the very least that would delay the dam. Actually, that might trump the dam altogether.”

“Shut it down?”

“Yes. Much to the dismay of the man who owns our trusty red ambulance. But some things really are that important.”

They went quiet again, listening to the rhythm of the river, the pop of embers in the fire. Orion peeped over the edge of the chasm, his head and raised arm only. When Catherine spoke yet again it was nearly against her will: “God I wish he’d get back. I hate to admit it, but I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep. I thought I was tougher than this.”

“It’s okay,” said Miriam. “I’ll be tough for you,” and she reached over and held Catherine’s hand in the dark.

Catherine lay awake for what seemed like an eternity, long after Miriam dropped off and her hand fell away. She stared at the glittering sky and saw one other falling star, saw the sliver of moon travel sideways. The entire world seemed to be in a space frenzy these days and for the first time she actually felt a little of the fever herself. Eisenhower hoped to have a man-made satellite carried up there by a rocket within a year, and everyone knew the Russians were building one too. She wondered if these things would actually appear in the sky, if they would also look like shooting stars that simply never, ever burned out.

She did finally sleep, and Jack Allen did finally make it into camp. Catherine stirred awake at the sound. Hours had passed, Orion now fully revealed and tilting crazily in the sky. Allen picketed his horse and Catherine pretended to slumber while the horse crunched on grain. Allen himself ate in the dark with the appetite of a dire wolf. She resolved to give him a piece of her mind first thing in the morning, remind him of who exactly he worked for here. With that, she fell back to a proper sleep.