Painted Horses (46 page)

“The human mouth is the filthiest thing in the world,” Catherine told him. “Hopefully, you’ll get gangrene.”

The bull kept her arm locked, but he laughed.

“I hope there’s shit on that towel from the toilet.”

“Shut up,” said the guy with the hand.

They exited the elevator in the basement and walked through a utility corridor past steam pipes and ducting. A bare bulb dangled from the ceiling every twenty steps, each throwing a grimy wash of yellow light. Catherine was certain they had left the hotel entirely, traveling now beneath other buildings, perhaps even under the street.

They turned at an intersecting passage and emerged into another basement. The bull and the man she’d bitten squeezed into a service elevator with Catherine between them. The third man stayed behind.

The elevator carried them up four flights and opened into a hallway. The green carpeting looked familiar. So did the wainscoting. They went around a corner and into the reception area of Harris Power and Light.

“They’re waiting,” said the secretary.

The hotel detective ushered her through a set of doors into a boardroom. She made eye contact with Dub Harris, sitting at the head of a massive oak table, flanked on each side by a pair of men. Everyone wore a suit.

“I’m gonna turn you loose,” the bull told her. “Behave yourself.”

In truth her arm had gone blue with numbness long before. She could barely move it from behind her back and she winced when she tried.

“Miss Le Mat. You have blood on your teeth.”

“She bit the shit out of Lewis.”

“So I heard.” He leaned back in his chair, crossed his hands behind his head. He looked both younger and bulkier than she remembered from the Crow street fair. Nascent double chin. Despite this he retained a sort of leonine athletic grace; she could tell that even now. “Jack Allen said you could be a real spitfire.”

“I would like to talk to Miriam.”

“Ah. Miriam. Your Indian friend.”

“You know her.”

“Of course. She’s the one who gave you up, Miss Le Mat.”

“That ain’t all she gave up,” said one of the others. This got a snicker all around.

“For practical purposes you may regard yourself as a subordinate of this company. Your work, your ideas, your conclusions. That will end very soon, for the benefit of everyone I’m sure. In the meantime, what you would like is of very little consideration.”

“Except I am not subordinate to you or your company. Ask the Smithsonian.”

He laughed, flicked the air with a hand. “Maybe you should ask the Smithsonian for a list of major donors.”

“I would love to. We can explain together what’s going on here. In the meantime the police are on their way.”

“Oh?”

“Underground tunnel or not, the typewriter had a message in it. I used your name.”

“Thought of everything, did you. All right.” He buzzed an intercom and said, “Phone city hall for me. Chief of police.” His eyes never wavered.

“Don’t bother,” said Catherine. “I get it.” She tried to return his stare and found she couldn’t, her eyes fleeing the way the rest of her wanted to flee. His eye was like the eye of a tornado, a calm at the center of carnage. She latched on to the painting on the wall behind him, tried to escape into it. Palm trees and Tahitian nudes.

“I guess you’re not as stupid as you’ve been acting,” he said. “Welcome to the future, Miss Le Mat. What do you know about power?”

She kept looking at the painting, its dreamlike world of purples and greens. Bright bursts of red. She could see the marks of the brush.

He didn’t wait for her to answer. “I’ve made a business of power. Power and light. Fifty years ago we stuck a knife in the greatest enemy mankind has ever known: the dark. We came out of the cave. We mastered the night.”

Lemay
, she thought.

“We live in a fantastic time, an amazing Technicolor age. What we presume now was unimaginable half a century ago, the same way your generation has no grasp of a world without the flip of a switch or the spin of a dial.

“Think of it. My grandfather drove an ice wagon pulled by a mule in Albany, New York. He cut blocks from a lake in winter, packed the blocks in sawdust to sell the next summer. Today he’d be out of a job, but then he couldn’t conceive of today. I’ll make a prediction. In five years, every living room in America has a television. My grandfather? Couldn’t conceive of television.”

“I would like,” she said, “to talk to Miriam.”

“That’s good, miss. That’s good. Your first concern is your friend and that gives me encouragement. Makes me think surely we will come to some rational agreement. But bear with me, please, because I think you misunderstand the nature of what is happening.

“You’ve been to a nineteenth-century graveyard? They’re full of little kids. People in their prime. Eighteen-year-old girls struck dead during childbirth. Entire families sliced down by fever, wrenched away by plague. Today we have penicillin, sterile surgery. Caesarean section. The X-ray machine. Everything we have, everything we depend upon, everything every one of us takes for granted every single day is surrounded by a field of power. It runs through our walls, through our floors, over our heads to the bulbs in the ceiling. Power spans the continent. It connects the coasts. Power, Miss Le Mat, is possibility, but what nobody remembers is that power doesn’t simply occur, like some universal birthright. Power is produced. I produce it, out of nothing when I have to. And this canyon, Miss Le Mat, this canyon—it’s a whole lot of nothing.”

“That canyon could in fact rewrite history. Does rewrite it. Are you aware of that?”

He drummed his pinkies rapidly on the tabletop, never taking his eyes from her face. She could taste the blood in her mouth, knew she looked like a real wreck. “I’m aware you are only privileged to sit here because of your own moment in history. And by you, I mean a woman.

“I don’t say this with condescension. You have clearly exceeded expectations and I will admit to the egg on my face. In London I know you were not on the side of the developer. I actually find this commendable. The truest results derive from passion and passion is not the purview of a yes-man, in your case a yes-girl.

“On the other hand, your moment is again a luxury, underwritten by power. You’re what, twenty-three years old? My grandmother had three children already, a fourth on the way. She may have had great dreams too. I don’t know and it wouldn’t have mattered because she didn’t have the luxury of power, hence the luxury to chase her dreams. She did her wash by hand, not in a Maytag power wringer. Before she baked a loaf of bread she had to split wood with a maul for the stove. She did love to read, I do know that, but lacked the light in the evening to read very long. Plunged right back to the dark. Kerosene not growing on trees.”

Catherine chose her words carefully. “Objectively I can see your point, Mr. Harris, and I generally feel very fortunate to occupy this moment in history. However, if someone were to look in from the outside I am quite sure I would not appear the luckiest person in this room.”

There was a reaction. She felt as much as observed it, like a stir in air. More than one shifted in his seat.

“With all due respect, you brought that on yourself.”

“You talked a bit ago about brutes coming out of their caves, about mastering some metaphoric dark. Achieving enlightenment. From where I sit I have to wonder if what we think of as civilization isn’t considerably more barbaric.”

“You’re angry and I understand that. I myself would—”

“Do you have any idea what those glyphs are?” She felt the flush rise in her face. “Do you? Of course you do. Why else would I be here against my will while you’ve got a jackhammer up there? Of course you know full well what they are. You collect this and you collect that, and you lend it all out for . . . for
edification
, I think was the word . . .”

“Plumb, level, and square, Miss Le Mat.”

“. . . like some, demigod, or some . . . Ozymandias. I was in London. I was in
bomb craters,
made by German rockets
barely ten years ago, do not
LECTURE ME ABOUT ENLIGHTENMENT
. . .

“
Plumb—
”

“
WHERE IS MIRIAM?
”

“—
LEVEL, AND SQUARE, Miss Le Mat
I need you to
calm down, I know about you and Egypt. I know about you and Rome.”

The pitch of her own voice had been a shock and that and the thud in her chest choked her up. It flashed in her mind she might be having a heart attack. Twenty-three, was it possible?

She was hyperventilating. That was the problem.

“I know about you, Miss Le Mat. You worship civilization and you always have. Get her a bag. Goddammit, you—get her a paper bag.

“You have looked into the all-seeing eye, puzzled over it the way I have. That view across cultures, across religions, across the automatic crawl of time, depicted within a pyramid because at its essence, civilization is indeed built around a holy trinity. Are you better? You can breathe? Okay.

“Plumb. Level. Square. The trinity by which man defied nature to make timber and stone into more than the sum of raw and irregular parts. The pyramids of Giza, the Roman aqueducts. Monuments to order over chaos, engineered by a purity of logic that is itself a form of magic. Out of humanity’s craving for meaning, its craving for order. And order, Miss Le Mat, is power.”

The bag had never materialized but she could breathe again and her mind raced through a set of marching orders, over and over.
Let him think he’s won get through this lecture check on Miriam get to the camera. Let him think he’s won get through this lecture
. . .

“The western tribes are only now coming to modernity, only lately grappling with things the European mind has assumed for five thousand years. Science, mechanics, above all economics. A few very powerful members of the tribe are putting up a hell of a resistance. Why?” He shook his head. “Why else? Money. Resistance is a demonstration, a show of autonomy by what is at its own insistence a sovereign nation. A sovereign
economic
nation.

“Meanwhile the members of that nation live in housing supplied by us, send their kids to schools run by us, eat blocks of cheese delivered by us. They drive Pontiacs, produced by us. Ford pickups. They also retain the right to vote alongside us in our own political process. One foot in each world, Miss Le Mat.”

“And you’re what, afraid they’ll somehow use your own system against you? I’ve been in cafés with Miriam and she can barely get served a hamburger.”

“Your idealism has a certain charm, I’ll admit.” The man beside Harris, the first time someone else had spoken. He appeared older than Harris though not by much and he returned her gaze with a blankness that made him sort of inscrutable. She realized he was probably legal counsel.

He went on. “The tribe—the organized, political tribe—wants this dam so bad it can taste it.
That
tribe is a business like any other, with assets, liabilities, and shareholders. Its leaders know full well this dam equates to a mountain of cold hard cash.”

“Do you believe,” Harris cut in, “a tribal lawyer had the audacity to suggest I
lease
the land from them? In perpetuity. My
dam
.
Lease it. The
audacity.
”

“Sacred is and always was a card to play,” said the lawyer. He continued to look at her, smiling now, the blankness gone from his face but still somehow fully present, a mask atop a mask. “A mythology to exploit toward an economic end. A claim to stake on something that never was nine-tenths in possession.”

She thought back to the letter, to her misspelled name.
Go in after the Seven Cities, the Fountain of Youth. You will find neither
. . .

She heard David’s voice again, underwater on the phone.
Better if you find nothing
. . .

“What you found up in those rocks was never theirs and they wouldn’t claim it now if you tried to make them. Oh there are divisions, sure, River Crow, Mountain Crow, old, young, the half-dozen purists you think you’re allied with, speaking their useless dead language. But the leaders, the politicians? Not a snowball’s chance. There’s redskins would tote a jackhammer in there by hand if that’s what it took.”

“Interesting you should say that, because I don’t believe those pictures belong to the Crow any more than they belong to you. Or to your company, or the government, or any race, tribe, scholar, museum, whatever. None of that’s big enough. You talked about humanity’s craving for meaning a bit ago and yet here you are, missing your own point.”

Harris backhanded the air in front of him. “We’re pretty far around the bend from any of that. This is a whole other Pandora’s box.” He leaned back and put both hands casually behind his head, but his eyes bored right into her. “The last thing anyone is going to stand for—me, the Crow council, the state, the Bureau of Reclamation, any of us—is a bunch of bleeding-heart romantics in New York and Chicago waving their arms about preservation because you found some supposed sacred cow in the middle of nowhere.”