Painted Horses (47 page)

For an instant she was back in London, the smell of the mud in her head, the energy rippling off the spectators and tickling the back of her neck. The click of the camera in her hand.
Out of all the tools we have, this might be the one that stops us in our tracks.

Let him think he’s won. Get through this lecture.

“Sacred is a card to play,” the lawyer repeated. “A powerful card. A paradise lost. It’s human nature.”

The painting on the wall. Two brown women beside a palm. One had a large flower in her hair. She knew she should keep her mouth shut.

“You think I worship civilization, and I can see why you would. I guess in a roundabout way you are even right, because we do see eye to eye on one point.”

“What’s that?”

“I am beginning to think, sir, that civilization itself is mass delusion.”

He cocked his head a little. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to elaborate.”

“What is the point of owning a Gauguin if you can’t recognize beauty when it’s right in front of you?”

She was still looking at the painting when he jumped up and hurled something at her. His chair hit the wall behind him and a split second later a metal tin bounced off her chest. The tin clattered on the table and she looked down with more cool than she would have thought possible, took in a film canister from a home movie camera.

“Enough,” he barked. He was pointing at her again, his face scarlet from the roots of his hair to the edge of his collar. “Enough. You have stepped way over the line and I will not have this mucked up by infantile scribbling on rocks I don’t care how historical you think it is or how academic or how big a feather in your cap you report to me you do not go around me. Get it?

“I know about you Miss Le Mat. I know you have a camera and I know what you filmed with the camera the same way you know exactly where this canister came from. I know you didn’t bring the camera on the helicopter. Where is the camera Miss Le Mat.”

“Lemay,” she said.

“What?”

“You keep saying you know me, but my name. It’s Catherine Lemay.”

“Your name is the least of your problems. Camera.”

“I guess this is a dumb time to ask if you’re threatening me.”

Harris said, “Bert.”

Poker Face flipped a folder. “Let’s see, May of 1943, this fugitive sweetheart of yours is jailed in an army brig for assaulting a commanding officer. November of ’44, he deserts in Italy in reaction to an order he doesn’t care to follow. Unfortunately for him the officer who gave the order takes it personally, files a whole report. This officer distinguished himself at West Point, distinguished himself in the tank corps in the war. He’s currently instructing at Fort Bliss and he is available—eager, actually—to testify.”

“You forgot to mention his father is a senator,” said Harris. “You get the picture, Miss Le Mat. Where’s the camera.”

“Jack.” Goddamn Jack.

“We will make his life hell.”

She sat down on the floor, disappeared beneath the plane of the table. She held her head in her hands and tried to think. If she looked straight ahead she could see their knees, their black socks and shoes. One wore cowboy boots with his suit.

“Yesterday a guy with a rifle and a limp left a dead horse in front of the Miles City train depot. A dead painted horse. Where’s the damn camera.”

Her windpipe seemed to choke off again and again her brain clawed for air. Surely she could find the pathway out of this, could find the route to all possible worlds if only she could breathe. She could save her first true lover, save as well her first true love. Shouldn’t they be one and the same anyway?

She wanted too much. That had always been the problem. She wanted everyone to see things her way, wanted everyone to see she was right, even the ones who in a million years never would. She was a spoiled brat, with her righteous conviction. She was a whining absolutist.
What’s that line in the papers? Preservation by record?
A notion she’d spat upon at the time, but a deal she’d die for now.

She realized she was holding her breath, felt the pressure of her blood in a vise against her face.

She stared at Harris’s legs, the sharp creases in his trousers. His right knee bounced like a machine, like a bored schoolboy’s knee. She remembered those days when boys only noticed girls to torment them and God how she’d been teased, an easy mark, quiet and shy with her books and her wonder, and in a murderous flash she thought she’d like to ram that canister down his throat, hurl his typewriter at his head.

Plumb, level, and square,
he had said, and she thought of Pitt-Rivers, his mathematical efficiency and his grids. She wished she could conjure the general now for she was certain he’d run this son of a bitch through with the nearest sharp object.

I could do it
, she told herself.
I could set my jaw and let them beat on me all over again
, but no sooner had the thought occurred when the constriction on her throat became a hangman’s rope, her damaged neck not her own at all but the sunburned neck of another, his blue shirt down below and his blue eyes straining in his skull, and there she’d be while he hanged, triumphant and cruel with her camera.

She remembered Orion hunting across the sky that night in the canyon, the streaking comet and her sweet wish, her little girl’s wish. For once she thought it might come true. But in a hundred years would it matter, even in fifty? Would anyone care other than her, a bitter old woman by then? Even now, with her head below the table and her seat sopping wet from the flood in the suite, she wasn’t a little girl anymore.

Orion would hunt yet. The planet would twist yet, into another era, another age. And one way or another, you will kill what you love.

She let out her breath. She forced herself off the floor. “What if I get it for you.”

“This never happened. We never heard of him. Hell, we never heard of you.”

She looked at the painting, looked at the ceiling. She thought she might hyperventilate again and she took in big draughts of air, choked down whatever it was welling inside her. “I’ll need to make a call.”

Harris relayed the number to the operator and they passed the phone to her end of the table.

She heard the voice at the other end of the line and she put her hand over the receiver and looked across the table. “One more thing. I want to talk to Miriam. I want to talk to her today.”

He waved his hand as though shooing flies. “Fine. Whatever.”

She took her hand away. “David, it’s me. I know, I’m sorry, look I can’t . . . talk right now. Yes I’m fine but I need you to do something, something important. There’s a package coming from out here. I need you to take it to an office in the city. No, don’t open it. Don’t open it. Just take it and deliver it, as soon as it gets there.”

She relayed the address from the paper Poker Face shoved in front of her. She said she’d call again when she could.

He spoke to her once more as Lewis and the bull escorted her from the room. “Miss Lemay. For what it’s worth the pictures are gone now. Like they were never there.”

She could feel where the film canister hit her in the chest. That empty little thud. That wind of a dream, knocked right out of her.

He said, “I guess you already knew that.”

To her surprise the bull did in fact drive her to Agency. He made her sit in the passenger seat beside him, another man riding in back. Lewis had gone to have his hand stitched.

The two talked about fishing for most of the trip. They ignored her completely, and she stared out the window as the pastures rolled by and felt the steady ache in her bruised and wrenched arm and a worse ache in her heart. She thought about the mare and hoped it wasn’t true though probably it was, and for what. She knew he was out there somewhere and that he was sad and this made her sad, and as they clipped along she put her temple against the cool of the glass and let herself list toward outright despair because none of it was fair and none of it could be fixed.

The bull didn’t know where to go when they got to Agency. Catherine didn’t expect this, didn’t expect to have to talk to him at all. She sat up in the seat as they passed the cemetery, the rusting fence fairly alive with fluttering feathers and ribbons and mysterious small bundles, sprigs of sagebrush and strands of horsehair. She knew what they were, why they were placed and for whom. “Drive past the houses,” she said. “Turn across the bridge.”

Two bison skulls and two horse skulls hung from the yard gate, the bleached white bone painted with stripes and dots in red and green. Geese and goats wandered around beyond. Catherine climbed out and opened the gate. The skulls wobbled and knocked on their thongs.

“Don’t wander off,” said the bull.

She stopped midstride, tried to think of a suitable retort, tried to think of what Miriam might say. Finally she walked on.

The front door bounced in the jamb and the knob bounced in the door when she knocked. No one answered. She knocked again and finally just stuck her head in and called out and the hollow sound of her own voice convinced her the house was empty. She walked back out into the yard and went around the house and when she passed through the shade she got a sudden chill, not a foreboding but an actual undercurrent to the air in spite of the long August light. She knew what it was. John H had told her this would happen, that one day late in the summer, she would feel the breath of winter.

She heard a yell from beyond the barn, and the bang of a gate and a whistle and another yell. She heard the bleat of sheep, sensed their panic. She walked down and saw a swarm of them ganged in a rickety wooden pen, climbing atop one another, heaving against the fence slats.

Across the pen Miriam had a second bunch crammed into a chute, her knees against the backside of the last in line, knuckles tight around the rails. At the head of the chute Miriam’s grandfather reached in and struggled with the black face of the first beast, performed some ministration against the animal’s fight. He moved back to the next in line.

Miriam glanced over and saw her and Catherine could practically watch her heart miss. A cloud of dismay crossed her face.

“Oh my God, Catherine, what happened?” She loosed her grip on the rails and the sheep pushed back and knocked her down and bolted around her with astonishing speed, back toward the throng at the other side of the pen, and Miriam scrambled out of the muck and jumped against the next sheep and held the line.

Grandfather had straightened to squint at her and he took her in for a second and beckoned her toward him. He had iron-gray hair cropped short on the sides, skin the color of Miriam’s. He was not young and his knobby hands were not young but he had a young man’s shoulders, cords of muscle in his forearms. Catherine walked over.

His eyes were on her neck, on her arm below the sleeve. On her mouth. “Some man do that to you?”

Catherine tried to smile without revealing her teeth, tried to talk without showing them. “It’s not as bad as it looks. Honest.”

He nodded. “You like to show up in the nick of time. It’s a good quality.”

He showed her how to fill the syringe with serum, how to mark an inoculated ewe with a blue grease pencil. He climbed over the chute and balanced above the bawling line of sheep with his rubber boots on the rails. He took the syringe from her and bent the head of each animal up with his hand around the snout, shot foamy yellow ooze between rubber lips and moved one sheep back.

Catherine fell into the rhythm of it. She drew serum from a brown bottle, reached between the rails to make a blue slash. When they’d finished, Miriam’s grandfather came out of the chute and showed her how to open the gate with a lever. To her surprise the sheep did not gallop out, only stood there. Miriam shoved and yelled from the back of the line and the sheep at the rear scrambled and crowded and climbed, and a ripple of momentum went through the line. Miriam’s grandfather pulled the first stalled ewe by the ear and she jumped free of the chute and the rest stampeded behind her in a rush of wool and blue grease and flying mud.

Miriam’s grandfather told her to shut the head gate. She pulled the lever, felt the resistance of moving parts in both bruised arms. He and Miriam cut out and cornered another passel of animals from the holding pen and hemmed and goaded them into the chute and Miriam’s grandfather climbed back onto the rails and the process began again. Midway down the line while she filled the syringe he grinned down at her with a gold tooth flashing. “You learn fast, daughter. I can get you a lot of work doing this.”

“I may take you up on it,” Catherine told him.

He took the syringe and tipped it upside down and adjusted the plunger. “Those fellas with you?”

Catherine looked back behind her. The bull and the other man stood near the barn, trying to keep their wingtip shoes and pressed trousers out of the mud. “In a manner of speaking.”

They went back to their work and when Catherine looked around again the bull and the other man were gone. When the last of the sheep ran through the chute Miriam got out of her coveralls and rubber boots in the barn and Catherine walked with her down toward the river, the treeless yellow hills rising off the green lowland and flowing endlessly away. A low line of mountains rose dimly in the ozone, out at the white edge of sky.