Painted Horses (31 page)

He claims as a child to have known the famous arms designer John Browning, or as McKee refers to him, John Moses.

As in, “John Moses would shit bricks if he could see the way we’re defiling this here masterpiece of his.” He refers specifically to the 1911 automatic pistol, the standard-issue sidearm. Army protocol mandates the pistol be carried decocked, its hammer on an empty chamber.

McKee disapproves mightily, expounds at length in the barracks one evening, a dissertation accompanied by a lot of arm waving. “It’s a durn travesty. It’s an insult to the idea. A mustache on the
Mona Lisa
. Why even have a repeating pistol?”

McKee’s eyes flash around his audience and he drafts the first three who happen to be wearing holsters. “You, you, and you—line up there and throw it down.”

The three look at him warily, wondering if nutty McKee has finally cracked altogether. “What are you talking about,” says one.

“Fill yer hands. You know? Draw?”

“Come on Yak. Three against one? You don’t stand a chance.”

“Try me.”

The three drag themselves over to humor him, also to put an end to this ridiculous tirade. “When?” says one.

“Whenever.”

One undoes the flap and begins to pull his pistol, and the others duly prodded pull theirs as well. McKee hasn’t moved.

“Looks like we got you.”

“You gonna rack a round into those chambers? Otherwise you got nothing.”

The three look at each other uncertainly, and then one shrugs and moves to work the slide.

McKee’s gun clears its holster in a blur and when it comes level John H can see the hammer is already drawn back, McKee’s thumb already flicking the safety off. He says, “Bangbangbang.”

After that, everyone in the unit carries his pistol with a round already chambered, hammer cocked and safety locked in the manner of God, John Moses, and Yakima McKee.

In September the horse and pack units unload from a transport vessel on the Salerno beachhead and grind inland at midnight in a convoy. They see splinters of light in the mountains and surmise a storm, then realize they’re seeing the muzzle flash of guns. A sergeant from a different division walks out of the darkened village and tells them to watch what they touch and where they walk, that the retreating Krauts have mined the bridges and the roads and every other goddamn thing as well.

A wan drizzle displaces the thin light of morning and the order comes to mount up and fall into formation. They ride out seventy-five strong under a cloak of watery fog, silent save the creak of tack and the suck of hooves.

They divide into four parties and ride cross-country in different directions. John H is not entirely clear what it is they’re supposed to be doing. Throughout the day they hear the far-off crackle of rifle fire, the distant thump of mortars.

The rain lifts in the afternoon. They sit their horses at the edge of a meadow, the tall grass bejeweled in the new shine of the sun. Across the meadow an orchard rises behind an uneven stone wall, a farmhouse and barn of similar construction nearby. Nothing about this scene suggests carnage.

The officer in charge, a lieutenant named Foy, shouts toward the house to announce the presence of the US Army.

The house remains silent. Foy says, “Any of you guys speak Italian?”

John H looks around. “Negatory,” says McKee.

“Who the hell’s running this outfit,” the officer jokes. He signals two others toward the house, then points at John H and McKee. “You and you, go check the barn. We’ll cover you.”

The two dismount and McKee waltzes right into the cool interior, strides across the earthen floor.

John H has just stepped even with McKee when the wheeze of a mule explodes in this cave-mute air. He flinches as though he’s been shocked. A flapping erupts overhead.

McKee studies him. “Jumpy?”

The mule occupies a stall at the far end. It flattens its ears when they approach, bares its yellow teeth. “Reckon he don’t like strangers,” says McKee. They hear the burbling again, the rile of wings. John H climbs up and pokes his head into the loft.

A dovecote, protruding through the roof. The pigeons flap to life at the sight of him, collide with the wire walls of the pen. John H descends to the floor.

McKee has wandered to a wall where he runs his fingers along the seam of two angular blocks. “I don’t think there’s any mortar in this thing. Just hewn rock. Hell, you couldn’t get a cigarette paper in there.” He looks at John H. “Now that’s a barn.”

John H points to the ceiling and says, “Pigeons.”

They rejoin the others around back. Foy scans with his field glasses. “Well looky here,” he says, and John H follows his point across the valley and gets his first view of the men who will cheerfully blow off his head. A canvas-topped personnel truck crawls down a road on the hillside, passing in and out of the trees. A tank emerges, the clank of great treads faintly audible a mile away.

“Panzer,” says Foy. “That is exactly what we’re looking for.”

The vehicles roll into the trees. Foy and two others pore over a map. McKee continues to glass, not with binoculars but with a collapsible brass telescope he picked up in Sicily.

He nudges John H. “See that dead snag just by the bend there? Look about fifteen yards east. That netting?”

Foy comes up. “I see it. All right, that cluster of brush—see the color of the leaves? Those are cutoff tree limbs. See the cannon tube, just left of center? Dollars to donuts, they’re set to ambush that bridge down the valley there.”

He goes back to the map, marks the bridge with a grease pencil. McKee studies the slope, and from the corner of his eye John H sees him straighten up. With his own unaided eye John H sees a wink of light.

“Boys,” says McKee. “We done been made.”

The words are barely out when a bloom of smoke opens in the trees. “Duck,” says Foy, but nobody has time before a black comet screams over like a thousand penny whistles, blows the dovecote to bits on the roof of the barn. Splinters of wood and slate roofing and parts of birds rain down everywhere. Two lucky pigeons flap through the hole and depart.

John H finds himself in a mad run with the others, helmet banging, every one of them laughing with something near to delirium, swinging into saddles and galloping back through the orchard. Behind them the mule trumpets.

The rain sets in for keeps a few days later. The trails turn slime-slick with mud, creeks and rivers rising like a tide that never rolls back for the sea. John H and the others spend six straight weeks in the saddle, along and sometimes beyond the front line, tracking artillery placements.

At night they pack the horses’ feet in straw to fend off hoof rot, bivouac in clammy canvas tents. They are issued condoms with their kits and there are no women here anyway so they roll the condoms over the muzzles of their gun barrels, to keep rain from rusting in the bores.

They ride through shelled villages that hiss and steam in the rain, more than once stumble on the mutilated bodies of partisan fighters garroted or impaled or hanged with necks bizarrely stretched from a lamppost. They see the doomed parade of refugees, young girls gang-raped and screamed voiceless and mothers guilt-wracked and helpless, little brothers eight or ten years old and murderous with rage. Old men only, for the able-bodied have been pressed into work details hither and yon.

The first time John H rides into a firefight he all but forgets to be afraid. It happens that quickly. The autumn leaves are turning and he and twenty others wind single file through a copse at the base of a hillside. The sound of a gun bolt clanks, the branches above their heads snapping and flopping like severed wires before the gun’s report has yet reached their ears. A machine gun nest, burrowed into the rocks up above.

They run their horses into the copse, bullets cracking through the trees. Two horses are hit, one in the lower spine. It shrieks when its back legs collapse, tries to pull itself along with front legs only. The other horses jump and fidget at the iodine odor of fresh blood, sharp and elemental as a coin.

Seventeen of the twenty including John H take their thirties and under the smoke of a phosphorus grenade creep back and dig in at the base of the hillside. They draw the fire of the gunner in the rocks, fire back with their small-bore carbines. They actually hear the laughter of the Germans up above, the amusement at the puny reports of these fey little guns. Some derisive comment rolls down the hill in the harsh cadence of the Kraut tongue, some insult involving the word
jungfraus
.

They don’t laugh long. While the seventeen present a distraction three others loop ahead through the trees and edge onto the hillside with a mortar. The machine gun has again commenced its chatter and John H has his head tucked in like a turtle, but even so he faintly hears the pneumatic
whump
of the mortar tube, ticks off the hanging seconds while the projectile scribes its lazy trajectory.

The shell bursts on the rock with a wallop that shakes the ground. A miss, but not by much. German shouting and the sounds of a confused scramble cue the seventeen and they cut loose with another volley. The German gun starts again and from the noise of the report John H guesses it’s trained now in a different direction, the mortar’s position made, and he steadies his carbine against the corrugated bark of a tree and squints through the halo of the sight, and he can just make out the flat gray dome of a helmet in a notch through the rocks, holds a little high against the distance, tightens his finger on the trigger.

The sear is about to trip when the second mortar round scores a hit. His target vanishes in a gale of flash and debris. A cheer goes up all around, the involuntary reckoning of relief. He eases off the trigger, breathes like he’s never breathed before.

They walk up on the rocks like hunters of dangerous game. The machine gun lies upended, tripod in the air like the bent legs of a mantis. Only one German soldier remains alive and he’s bleeding out the ears and owns a mangled leg. His two companions are dead, their uniforms smoldering, blood like sprayed paint all around. John H rolls one over to be sure, looks away from the damaged face and sees binoculars on the ground, the tether clutched yet by lifeless fingers.

He tugs the binoculars free and studies them. They appear unharmed. He raises the lenses to his eyes, looks downhill toward the horses. Adjusts the focus slightly and McKee crystallizes sharply into himself, clear as life and peering back through his telescope. He gives a jaunty wave.

John H lowers the glasses and studies the German maker’s name and thinks,
No wonder they’re so high and mighty
. He slips the glasses into the bib of his shirt.

By November the forward line has crossed the Volturno River. The rain turns to snow and the horse units pull back toward Naples. They ride all day in the weather, past infantry heading out along the muddy roads, past tanks with bulldozer blades welded to the fore. They see an intimation of what they themselves have become in the sober eyes of the freshest recruits, know they must look like a ghost brigade out of every war that’s ever raged in five thousand years of civilization.

They ride to a barracks at Naples and before they’ve had a hot meal they learn that gonorrhea has swept the occupying army like a brush fire. The city’s brothels have been placed off-limits.

McKee in particular finds this irksome, complains that the only thing keeping his chin up in that godforsaken wilderness was the garden of earthly delights awaiting him in this here Deseret.

“Keeping your chin up, or keeping your pecker up,” someone catcalls from the back.

“Is there a difference?” McKee shouts back.

Naples in fact is far from a paradise of any sort. The retreating Germans have surrendered it with all the dignity of a dismembered hostage, burning the civic buildings, blowing up the post office.

Now things have been quiet for weeks. Maybe too quiet—many of the recon soldiers find themselves resistant to laxity, restless as animals only recently brought to the cage. John H knows McKee is awake at all hours, knows because he himself sleeps practically with one eye open.

McKee never seems stuporous. He frets over the tack and the stock, shoes horses, any task to stay ahead of the tedious crawl of time. At moments he seems half-deranged with boredom or craving or both.

John H has a sketch pad and some charcoal sticks, traded away from some ragamuffin kids in the streets. He reconstructs the ruins outside the city from memory, the fog-wet walls and shadowy portals.

One day when the rain thuds in off the ocean the door bangs open and a figure stomps in like a force of the weather itself.

Jack Allen. John H knew him in the CBC, was unsurprised to encounter him in the army. Allen had a genius for capturing horses to rival John H’s skill at taming them, a sort of raptor’s view of the universe and the infinite sum of its tiniest parts.

“Ladies. How’s the scribbling?”

John H looks past the edge of his paper. “Beats getting shot at.”

“That a fact.” Allen scans the room, takes in the pinups on the walls and the card games and the letters from home. “What say we get out of this knitting circle and back in the game.”