Painted Horses (50 page)

He ran the gray hard along the base of a high bluff, skirted wide around a cattail bog and a long seep of willows, and then cut back over and urged the horse up through the limber pine to the high ground at the top. He reined to a stop and tried to glass the floor through the stallion’s jitter and jump. Finally he dismounted and sat and steadied his elbows on his knees and he did not see the horses and he did not see Allen and he did not think he’d overshot either of them. He swung back up and rode along the top of the bluff and stopped again in the trees where the long wall of earth plunged down and away to taper into the sweep of the river. He saw the haze of dust first, hanging in the air like smoke. He saw the horses.

Four of them with their heads up and their ears up, every one quartered away from him and looking back upriver. A young dun mare stamped and angled nervously and looked upriver again. He craned forward in the saddle and tried to spot the rest in the contoured ground below.

He dreaded a rifle shot and wished he could see the herd stallion. The dun mare and the three horses with it began to drift along, not hurrying but not lingering either, and others began to appear out of the broken features of the ground, mares pushing bony foals, last year’s colts nervous with the same premonition. Now and then one or more would stop to look back.

The edge of his eye caught a flash of light in the boulders to the south and he flinched in advance of a report that never came. He looked hard and saw the flash again, bright as a signal mirror. He threw his glasses up and found Jack Allen slithering across the flat top of a boulder on his elbows, trying to get into a position to shoot, rifle balanced crosswise in his hands. The sun winked off the lens of his riflescope.

John H strained to find the stallion below. Horses continued to emerge, appearing from folds and tucks in the land as though spawned fully formed out of the arid earth itself. He looked again at Allen, his rifle sling looped tight around his upper arm now and his head behind the glass, aiming at something John H couldn’t see, something beyond a fin of bare stone breaching the sage along the river like the keel of a capsized boat.

He yanked the Mannlicher out of the scabbard and reined the gray’s head out of the way. He flipped the leaf on the rear sight and threw the buttstock to his shoulder. The short-barreled blast boomed through the trees and receded and the gray jumped and steadied, and he heard the bullet whack the stone fin below and deflect away with a long ringing whine.

Horses milled into the open like hornets out of a nest, the lineback stallion weaving and snapping and goading the others along. With his bare eye John H watched Allen rise to his knees, through his glasses watched him scan down the bluff with the lens of the rifle. John H watched him react to something, watched Allen scramble to his feet and launch off his perch like a man fleeing a fire. He ran gun in hand for the floor of the canyon.

The jacks. John H saw them too, coming fast up the river bottom at the sound of the shot, castaways with no head for freedom. The Barb stallion heard or winded or otherwise sensed them down below and he trotted back in a half circle, tail and head in the air.

John H shoved the Mannlicher in the scabbard and shoved the glasses down his shirt. He’d lost Allen in the breaks, knew he might be trying to head off the mules but more likely was still gunning for the horse. He took the gray up through the pines to the flat ground on top and ran back down the bluff, crossed a game trail and wheeled onto that and had to hold the gray back on the steep drop down.

He felt the saddle ride up the horse’s withers and he knew the cinch had stretched. The horse picked his way down the groove in the face of the bluff, the hillside sheer enough beneath them that John H’s boot and right stirrup hung into space. The groove dipped into another scatter of trees clinging strenuously to the hillside. The gray slid in the loose duff and the saddle hitched a little and the horse caught itself. John H jerked with his weight and righted the saddle again, and when they came off the steep ground he slapped the reins down and let the horse have its head.

They blasted over a berm in the land throwing red earth out behind and came down onto the lowland with the horse’s long neck and forelegs stretching even with the ground, its mane leaping on the air, the fire of the desert leaping in its blood.

The mules heard the irons crack against the cap rock and they veered, and horse and rider drew alongside and gained two lengths in the twitch of a heart. The mules fell into their natural line behind the horse and this formation exactly streaked by Allen in the sage a moment later, wet to his neck from where he’d slipped fording the river and a mask of incredulity on his face, the scoped rifle jinxed and dripping in one hand. John H flashed a painted wave as he passed.

The wild horses had taken full flight now, even the stallion unsure of these odd beings with their warped chromosomal skulls. Chimera of unknown intent, but a devil for certain in the lead. A two-headed devil.

The dust of the herd twisted and seethed like a ghost of the herd, flying not across the ground but up and up, into the thin air of the sky.

John H rode out of the ghost. His shadow crossed the stone.

Power and Light

They kept her a prisoner in the house in Fort Ransom for two days, a man in a car out front at all times. Sometimes she’d look out and the car would be different, the man different, but always there was someone.

Max Caldwell came to the door within an hour after the bull brought her from Miriam’s. The man in the car did not move to stop him because Caldwell carried an enormous double-barreled shotgun. Catherine talked to him on the porch.

“My knight in armor,” she said. “I don’t think they’ll let me go without a fight, though.” The man in the car was speaking into a police radio.

“No, I don’t expect they will,” said Mr. Caldwell. “But I told a guy I’d check on you.”

“Is he here?”

“He’s not.”

“Is he all right?”

“He’s in better shape than you look to be, missy. That the guy done it?”

She shook her head. “They left. I don’t know this one.”

“Guess it’s his lucky day.”

“Is he all right?” she said again.

“Rode hard and put up wet, tell you the truth. Worried over you, too.”

“He killed his horse for me. His good little horse. For nothing.”

“He didn’t say nothing about that. Didn’t seem foremost in his mind.”

“I’m kind of sick about it.”

Caldwell nodded. “What’s going on here, Catherine?”

Another car pulled up and stopped in the street.

She looked at him. “You should go. Don’t get mixed up in this. I’m all right.”

“Your phone’s dead, ain’t it.”

She nodded. “It was out when I got here.”

“Why don’t you come with me right now. We’ll hole up in the gas station. I got a shortwave radio and a gas generator. Even if they cut the phone line I can get fifty guys down here with their squirrel rifles, not to mention bulldozers, backhoes, maybe a crop duster. Enough to put up quite a ruckus.”

“One if by land, two if by sea?” The man in the second car opened the door and swung out. She didn’t recognize him.

“Something like that. We can go national with this thing in a pure D minute.”

She shook her head. “You don’t understand. I know you want to help me but attention is the last thing that’s going to help me. I made a deal with them. I had to.”

Caldwell turned and looked at the men. The driver of the second car had crossed the asphalt and leaned into the passenger window of the first, talking with the other driver. Caldwell stared until they stared back. He launched a stream of Days Work in their direction.

“You ever fired a shotgun?”

“What? Yes, actually. My dad has matched Purdeys. I’ve shot clay pigeons with him.”

Caldwell had a wry look. “This old blunderbuss ain’t all that, but it’ll flatten a skunk like God’s own fist. Or make the skunk think twice before it goes beatin’ on a woman.”

She tried to decline, tried to tell him the worst of it was over.

“You take this gun and I guarantee you the worst is over.” He showed her where the safety was, told her it was loaded. Finally she took it from him. The men at the car stared.

“How long they planning on keeping you like this?”

“A day or two. Not long.”

“They’ll be watching you, but I’ll be watching them. If this is still going on after two days I’ll get some help in here.”

“Make it three,” she said.

He walked down off the porch and she spoke again. “If he comes back, tell him to stay away. Tell him I said so.”

She watched Mr. Caldwell shuffle to the car, heard him light into the two men with all the hellfire and damnation of a blacksnake whip, his crooked finger jabbing like a bayonet. The men just stood there and took it, even when Caldwell loosed another vile brown stream across the windshield, tobacco juice running like diarrhea down the glass. Finally he turned and stomped off toward the service station.

Catherine carried the shotgun inside. She removed the blunt red shells and set them on the counter.

For a while she picked up the handset compulsively every ten or fifteen minutes, hoping against all reason that the line would somehow be alive. After the umpteenth time she felt a surge of rage, could visualize herself stuffing the shells back into the gun and giving the dead phone both barrels, just to teach something a lesson. She got ahold of herself. She didn’t pick up the phone again.

The house became infernally hot in late afternoon, the thin curtains lank and still in the windows and doing nothing to shield the glare. Summer did not seem to ride dreamily into the sunset in these parts. Catherine paced room to room, sweat in her hair and the skin clammy and damp and dirty in the webs of her fingers and toes.

The doors were shut but somehow there were flies in the house anyway, lots of them, zipping around in the heat, batting against the screens, crawling on walls and counters and harrying her head as though they could sense the damaged flesh, perceive something they might exploit.

She went on a killing spree with a rolled newspaper and took an almost narcotic glee in each solid thwack, the mounting body count, until with fifteen or twenty notches tallied she dripped with sweat and had to sit down. The remaining flies let her alone, began to feed on their comrades.

She took a cool shower and wrung her hair and lay on her sheets in the bedroom after the sun went down. The house began to tick and groan around her, siding and framing relaxing in the darkening air. A cross breeze quickened the curtain like a godsend. Once when she got up to pee she peeked through the slats of the jalousie and saw chrome glint at the curb, saw a cigarette burn like a firefly.

In the bed her pillow was still damp from her hair. Finally after hours of craving sleep she did something she’d never done before, licked two fingers and made herself wet, opened her legs and shut her eyes. She writhed against her own pressure and felt a tremor begin to mount, and she tried to locate the epicenter of the tremor and she found it, until a single bang of the headboard made her violently aware of the screeching bedsprings and the horror the guard out front might hear. She slowed herself down.

The finish was not what it could have been and she felt no relief in the aftermath, only the same restless emptiness and now it verged on despair. She got a breath of her own littoral scent on her fingers and she shoved her hand under the pillow. She found herself bargaining with God.

She woke in the gray dawn with the room like an icebox, curled tight as an embryo. She forced herself to shut the window against the draft, pulled the covers onto the bed from the floor and curled up again.

Early in the morning she made a pot of coffee in the kitchen and started writing, for real this time, a longhand account that could not be told except in the reckoning of bits and pieces, small lives and lonely small struggles, random beings colliding in sparks and sintered into other things entirely.

Who would a person love. When would death knock. Mysteries like the wheels of a gear regulated in turn by wars and invasions, earthquakes and famines. In the end the magic of being alive was both created and destroyed by a velocity not perceived but present, each lifetime hurtling toward a light so bright you could but glance before you were forced not only to look away but to forget you ever saw it, for meaning itself was no more than a cipher within that light.

She used to think the cipher owned a great and abiding beauty, and if she tried hard enough, squinted against the light long enough she would glimpse this beauty, and know the secret at the heart of the world. Now she wasn’t sure. When she got up to adjust the blind against the slant of the sun she saw through the window why she’d been cold in the dawn, the world outside white, glittering with the year’s first frost.

In another hour her hand began to cramp around the pencil and she flexed her fingers and wished she had the typewriter, wished she hadn’t sent it through the air to its doom. She tickled the space above the page with the fingers of both hands as though to strike a set of keys, and suddenly she did not want a typewriter at all. For the first time in years, she wished for a piano.

Her arm was still tender the next day when one of the men knocked at the front. The bruising on her throat had faded from ripe purple to a sickly iridescence, uric yellows and greens and a bad shade of blue. She opened the door.