Painted Horses (51 page)

He seemed almost embarrassed to have to look at her, morbidly fascinated as well. He tried to maintain eye contact and couldn’t, his focus darting to her throat. “You’re to have your things together in an hour,” he said. “We’ll put you on the train in Billings.”

“All right.”

“You can call to make arrangements.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The telephone. You can call out east. So they know you’re coming.”

“All right.” He was still standing there holding his hat when she shut the door.

She went to the kitchen and lifted the handset and she realized she was shaking, afraid he’d lied, that the wire would remain a blank line to nothing.

The operator came on and Catherine asked for long distance. She gave the number and heard the switches linking up. One full ring and an answer.

“Mama?” she said, and her voice broke. “Mama it’s me.”

Epilogue

Twilight falls and the man walks into it, into the cold blue wave of it, toward the last bright blush at the edge of the sky. Astral ghosts twist in the north, emerald and red. Colors like creatures, rising with the dark.

The fog off the river has settled into the grass and he feels the kiss of water as he walks, legs drenched to his knees before he’s gone ten paces. Overhead a nighthawk dives, its war whoop close. The man never sees it.

Tonight he fed on deer, a doe felled at a seep as she dipped her head to drink. She jumped at the strike and humped up her spine, tottered two steps with her muzzle dripping and collapsed.

He seared her haunch over coals from the core of the fire, rendered white marbles of kidney fat over the same fire and poured the clear hot tallow into lamps, which he carries now unlit in his hand, moving across the open expanse by memory and by the cool pale gaze of the moon.

The long wall ahead looms like a reverse of what it is. Not an immovable object but an unknowable void, a monument to absolute dark. He scans the black line of ridge for the notch, moves forward and crouches far beneath it.

His kit contains a wad of moss, which he peels like rare fruit to expose the ember inside, its orange energy damped down and dormant though volatile yet. He bunches the moss into a nest and dribbles pine splinters heady with pitch, and working fast lest the ember wink out he cups the nest and holds it to his mouth and he breathes.

The ember pulses, sends hot tracers into the fibers. He breathes again and the tracers find the pitch. The nest flares in his hands. He sets the flaming ball on the ground and raises the light with twigs and from somewhere in the outward dark comes the mutter of an animal, the nervous thump of a hoof. The nighthawk dives again.

He holds a burning twig to each coarse wick and the lamps begin to sputter and glow. He has fuel for an hour, maybe more. He rises with a flame in each hand and moves toward the wall, and though the dark void vanishes at the stab of light the portal in the stone gapes black as ever, a mystery of eternal midnight. The open flames twist and bend. The stone walls close around him. The sounds of night fall away.

The air inside the passage is warmer than the air outside, steadier, though when the man pauses to listen the flames right themselves a moment and bend again, so he knows there is a draft though he cannot feel it. Out of deep silence comes a single drop of water.

He moves again and a few feet along, the walls begin to stir in the glow of the lamps, the contour and bulge of the stone assuming the quiver and flex of muscle and flesh, the red figures of horses galloping as he passes. He wanders through a herd, each animal moving as the corona moves until in a mere second each falls back beyond the reach of the lamps, like horses darting through a dream and then gone.

He passes handprints, pressed onto the stone, passes more horses and comes finally to a blank place on the wall, a ripple of bare rock with a convex bulge that to the right eye possesses exactly the proportions of the shoulder of a running horse.

He sets one lamp on the floor beneath the wall, the other on a ledge. He angles his kit into the light, reaches in and finds lumps of charcoal, clumps of lichen, casings of pigmented paste. He lays the casings on the ground, finds the right one and opens the end. He daubs into soft black ooze.

Somewhere in the dark, water drips again. He presses his thumb to rough brown stone. He starts a line.

She travels home and carries not a thing back with her, not the delicate flint point she found in the creek, not Crane Girl’s smooth stone. But she can’t leave behind the battering she took, the bruises green-black on her throat as though her corpse has somehow returned from a garroting. Her father half turns from her in the train station, the first time she’s seen him actually struck dumb. Catherine holds her own silence, bites her tongue, and buries her secrets. She keeps her word. She gives no one up.

She fully expects to retreat to her room and cry her eyes out for a while, to hide like a spinster until the marks fade. She surprises herself. She doesn’t cry, not much at least, and she can’t bear her own bookshelves with the neat and familiar spines, can’t even look at her bust of Nefertiti and its ageless unblinking stare.

Once upon a time the books were like ships, her passage to the great wide world.
Description de l’Egypte. Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
On her second day home she turns Nefertiti toward the wall. Over her mother’s protest, she drives downtown.

She wanders the sidewalk past the soda shop and the five-and-dime. She can sense people staring. Many of them recognize her, know she’s her father’s daughter, the one who tossed away her own bright future and now look at her. A girl beaten. She meets their eyes just to watch them look away.

She spies a girl she went to school with, emerging from a shop with a child in tow and another on the way, a polite enough girl who will force herself not to stare, force herself to make conversation, and now it is Catherine who hurries off. She crosses the street and finds herself gazing through a display window into a color television set, her first glimpse at this latest example of progress. The Lone Ranger gallops into view, his shirt electric, bluer than life. She turns again for home.

Progress.
She wishes now for the first time in her life to launch ever forward, away from that wild country where scalpings and shootings may as well have happened yesterday, the war chants and bullets slicing yet beneath the rustle of grass.

A few days pass and she agrees to see David. She owes him that at least and anyway, she needs to return his ring. She never comes down from the front step, and he never makes it off the walk. When he sees he’s getting nowhere he suffers the formality and asks if there’s someone else.

She doesn’t answer, can’t force the eyes she knows he loves even to look at him.

He presses into darker territory, averts his own stare from her throat and asks if she’s been, you know, violated, as though his mouth simply won’t form the word he’s actually thinking.

No, she tells him. Not the way you mean.

Time passes and she falls in with other lovers, one a professor of antiquity who’s written an influential book she’s unable to finish, another an ad writer who pursues her at a cocktail party she gets dragged to by a friend. She goes out a few times with a young electrician who answers a service call. Nothing lasts. She avoids cops and engineers, artists as well.

Months then years come and go and she floats along on work and on life. She keeps herself busy, becomes a master of immersion into bits of arcana that hardly matter outside an academic sphere and in this way she makes a barrier against her own first love, because what she loves has become a betrayal. The most vicious way she knows to stifle it is with a fine-tuned boredom.

She hears from Miriam from time to time, a few long letters early on and later mainly holiday cards after Miriam goes off to veterinary school in Idaho. Miriam becomes engaged to a fellow student in her second year, sends Catherine an invitation to a June wedding that Catherine agonizes over for a month before finally responding with regrets and a large wooden packing crate. Wedgwood pottery, out of her parents’ collection.

Sometimes Catherine thinks her mother has never forgiven her for not marrying when she had the chance, knows her father would like grandbabies and knows he would be good at it too. Sometimes when she is on the boat with him off Cape May in the summer with the lighthouse on the point and the whitewashed Coast Guard buildings gleaming she’ll let herself go and imagine she is not herself at all but her own child, spoiled as the princess he always desired, which she always resisted. He deserves it; she knows that. But they never bring it up to her, not anymore.

In 1961 she is offered an advisory role on a minor dig in Israel, a small temple believed to date to the early Roman occupation. She still carries a bit of notoriety in the right circle, people who know she was in London, people who would yank their own eyeteeth with pliers to have been there themselves. A former classmate tracks her down, also a woman and now a PhD, with learning and determination but little practical experience.

Catherine turns her down by rote but this friend who has not seen her in years seems possessed. She tries again with a long letter, says she does not mean to pry.

Something happened, didn’t it? Something that summer. I could see it in your eyes, read it between the lines in your work that last year. The Catherine I knew had so much wonder, like a little girl giddy with life itself.

I guess it’s not my place to cajole you. I’ll be blunt, because I’m selfish and I need your help but hopefully for greater purpose as well: neither is it within my abilities to accept you as a lobotomized shell
. . .

Catherine feels her blood boil and she comes close to tearing the pages to shreds without finishing, but she reads on for no other reason than to fuel her own fury and this turns out to save her. By the coda she weeps because she knows her friend is right. Catherine holds up her hands, squints at her clean little nails.

She finds herself pleasantly shocked by the Israeli government, which goes out of its way not only to accommodate but also to fund and promote the excavation. They have the time to work with care and the manpower to work with efficiency, and over the course of the next two years the site unwinds layer by layer, like the pages of a history read in reverse, index to epigraph.

In the summer of 1962 a feature in
L—
magazine heralds the completion of a major dam project south of Billings, Montana, near the Crow Indian Reservation.

The same magazine runs a long story on archaeology in the Holy Land, with a human-interest sidebar on a dig conducted by “two young relic hunters of the fairer sex, unearthing scrape-by-scrape the mysteries of a Pagan shrine . . .”

A black-and-white photo shows Catherine, herself holding a camera, looking down a series of stone steps that emerge from the earth around it. Her hair is pulled back into a bun with a pencil jabbed through it, one sprig come loose and hanging along her face and though she looks disheveled she can also see why the picture was selected, no doubt by a man.

She studies herself a long time when she is first alone with the magazine. It’s a silly article, true. But in the picture, she does not look out of place.

Months later after she has returned to the States a weatherworn envelope follows by airmail, its surface covered with cancellations and postal forwardings—New York, Damascus, Tel Aviv, back to Damascus, and then back again across the ocean—so much so that it takes a moment to determine the point of origin. Someplace called Elko, NV.

She pays the additional postage to the carrier and laughs with him, saying this better be good, and when she tears the envelope and extracts the contents she catches a flash of color and sits on the parquet tiles in the Tudor’s foyer. She unfolds the page with quivering fingers and looks into her own floating eyes, unmistakable for their color and the kohl like a shadow line of seduction, a vestige of her own ancient past. A splash of light in one pupil, line of hills below. No words but a date. July, 1956.

From the backyard she hears the cough of the mower as the engine turns, the pop of a backfire and a stall and her father’s usual half-comic barrage. The mower fires anew and its noise recedes as she pulls herself up the banister to her room, recedes again when she shuts the door.

She writes him back.

Acknowledgments

A number of people helped to shape and inspire and vet this book.

My parents, Curt and Marie Brooks, and my brothers, Christian Brooks and Aaron Brooks, all watched me scribble and peck away years before anyone else. My sons, Cole and Ethan, now give mightily of their own due time for the same cause.

Anne Brooks, John Bateman, Nick Davis, Ben “Yukon” Kuntz, and Stephen Bodio read the earliest drafts, and each brought a distinct eye and encouragement to the process.

Clay Scott and Dr. Christopher Anderson essentially wrote the French dialogue in “Elixabete.”

Randy Rieman, as elegant a horseman and as superlative a wrangler as ever existed, provided advice and input on all things equine. Any flights of the magical or the fanciful are entirely my own.

Wilfred Husted and Lionel A. Brown shared adventures and stories from the early days of River Basin Surveys and provided invaluable background and color.