The Work of Wolves (12 page)

At the time Earl hadn't understood what Norm meant. Now, though, he wished he'd kept his hand held up until Carson either shook it or clearly refused to. He stared out the side window of the pickup as they rode, unspeaking, tires rumbling on the highway. They pulled into Lostman's Lake and parked near the boat ramp. Carson cut the engine and lights. They got out, the gravel crunching under their feet, the waters of the trapped creek lapping the shore. Carson pushed the pickup seat forward and retrieved a large flashlight.

"They up there?"

He spoke to Willi, but Earl answered. "Yeah. Up there."

Carson turned and set off up the hill. Willi followed him, but Earl held back, watching them disappear into the darkness, blending into the hillside. He thought he'd maybe just stay here. Let the white guys do their thing. He didn't want to be here anyway.

Then he thought of what Norm would say: "That's right. Stand there and pout. I always enjoy a good pout myself."

He pushed away from the pickup. He remembered a TV documentary about pigeons called pouters.
The solitary pouter,
he thought,
decides to join the flock.

AT THE BORDER OF MAGNUS YARBOROUGH'S LAND
, they once again clambered over the fence hung with its painted tires. "Trespassing again," Willi said, swinging his leg up. "When I get back to Germany, I will tell them about this sport." He wobbled on the fence wires, then jumped down.

Earl had caught up to them halfway up the hill. He'd heard them talking quietly ahead of him, but when he joined them the talk ended. Chance, perhaps. Carson's face, when Earl glanced at him, was devoid of emotion. He seemed to emanate silence and distance. But at Willi's comment Carson laughed. Earl had no idea this somber cowboy could have a sense of humor.

"Better 'n soccer, huh?" Carson asked.

"If you mean football, no," Willi replied. "No sport is better than football. Real football. Not your American kind."

Carson laughed again. But as quickly as his laughter came, his face closed down, and he turned from the fence and started uphill. But Earl, watching him, saw a new thing emerge for a moment behind his eyes and mouth, and he realized suddenly that what he had interpreted as aloofness or even prejudice might be something else entirely. For Earl saw a catch, a hitch of pain, some fear or grief, in Carson's face in its transition out of laughter. For just a moment in the starlight, Earl saw Carson bright-eyed, his features distorted, cartoonish in some interior sorrow. It was eerie. Carson glanced at Earl and might have seen that Earl saw, for he turned away like a man angry and found out.

That was not laughter,
Earl thought. He shivered in the warm night. In the daylight he wouldn't have seen that momentary distortion of Carson's features. The darkness and shadows, the diminished light, had exposed it: a possession cracking through the mask that Carson maintained, a being from a different realm.

"
WHERE ARE THEY?
"

"They are over this next hill."

"You mind if I go over alone?"

Earl and Willi looked at each other.

"They'll be less skittish, we don't all three come prancin up on 'em."

Earl listened for a moment to the night. He heard no bats, and no wind blew, and silence seemed a profound and lasting thing, and even the moths of a few days ago had deserted the world or been devoured completely in that storm of dark, invisible wings. What Carson was asking made sense, and he was the horseman, and he should know. But Earl felt something shaping itself on this hillside, far different from anything suggested here, from anything written in the way the three of them stood. He looked at the Great Bear, its legs loping through half the heavens, and he wondered: If he and Willi and Carson were a constellation the Bear looked down upon, what would it form? What was it forming? And the horses, too?

But he didn't know, and it was too late if he did. Stories in points of light. If you looked at the skies in a Lakota way, you saw one set of stories, and if you looked at them in a European way, you saw another. Yet the stars were the same. And if you had no way to look, you saw nothing but stars. Nothing connected. Here they stood, the three of them, in their own constellations, but some new picture was being formed, was somehow already formed—if you had the way to look at it.

Which he didn't. But he did know that stars don't move. Don't wander out of their constellations, don't choose, however random their site in the heavens might be or however ordered, to take another place.

"Go ahead," he said to Carson.

"It is OK with me, too," Willi said.

Carson turned and went over the rise. Earl stood in the dark, with Willi next to him: the silent world, with only each other's breathing in it, and over the hill the sound of large animals moving, and the murmur of a human voice. Earl thought of that sorrowful and haunting look that had flashed in Carson's face. He turned, saw the red blinking lights of Tower Hill away in the high dark. He felt helpless. He knew what he'd tried to deny was beyond denial. There was no randomness in the fact that the small pasture could be seen from nowhere but where he'd seen it from. There was randomness only in the fact that he
had
seen it. Or maybe not: maybe
he
had put the constellation together. Maybe he had ordered it.

So was he star or eye? And of which place, and in which story? He should walk away, he thought—down the hill, across the fence hung with its
NO TRESPASSING
tires, back to nameless and public land. He imagined taking the steps, and the steps themselves were possible. But taking them somehow wasn't. He couldn't bring his feet to move. He stood. And it wouldn't matter anyway. At what point along this chain of circumstance had certain possibilities tipped into impossibility? And others into certainty?

He heard Carson's voice calling, and a sudden surge of panic and dread struck him, and he thought,
Here it is. What I don't want to know.
Then, starlike, he quelled the feeling and walked with Willi up and over the hill. It seemed as if the horses rose out of the earth, their ears like far-off mountains in the night, and then the shapes of them, the heads and dark dragon necks, their rich and earthy smell rising before them. And Carson standing in the pasture among them like the first man who had ever tamed a beast and endeared it to him. The earth trembled under the nervous movement of hooves.

It overwhelmed Earl. He had left his house in the real world, but this seemed now a dream, a strangeness, a reverse wakening. He and Willi walked up to the fence. With Carson standing among them, the horses didn't retreat. Carson held them with his quiet voice. Earl and Willi walked up until they were standing under the horses, and the horses' heads rose above them, replacing whole sections of stars and sky.

"You're right," Carson said, blundy and without prologue. "The son of a bitch is hurting them."

The words were broken and raw and vulnerable, uncontained, without forethought of containment, and Earl knew: It wasn't just the horses being hurt. It was Carson, too. Or maybe all of them. Earl had walked off Tower Hill into someone else's story. He wasn't meant to be here. Or maybe he was. Maybe it was his story, too. He felt he was standing in a time before tools, before races, before languages, and before even that—a time when the genes of horses and men had not yet differentiated, and there was only potential and spirit and fealty, and wind, and a raw, new earth.

C
ARSON HAD GONE OVER THE RISE
, and there on the other side was the new, brief fence and the three horses in the dark, all with their ears forward, waiting for him. As he walked down the hill, they came from where they'd huddled on the far side of the fence. They crossed the small space of pasture that was theirs and reached their necks over the barbs to him. He walked into the pale of those outstretched necks and raised his arms to their bony heads, as if to gather them into himself.

"Jesus, Jesus," he whispered. "They are. They're hers."

R
EBECCA YARBOROUGH HAD APPROACHED SO
quietly on the third day of training that Carson didn't know she'd come until Orlando rolled his eyes back in his head. By then Rebecca was opening the sliding latch on the gate and pushing the gate open and stepping into the corral. Carson stood there with the rope in his hands, feeling Orlando vibrating at the end of it. He almost shouted at her to get out of the corral, but Orlando hadn't heard loud or angry words from him yet, and Carson didn't intend that he should. When the gate banged shut, the horse would have jerked the rope out of Carson's hands if he hadn't prepared for it.

"Mind if I watch?"

She folded her arms and leaned against the gate. Though he'd never seen her in town or anywhere else, Carson had heard that Magnus Yarborough's second wife was young enough to be his daughter. The stories were true. She looked to be in her late twenties, Carson's age or a year or two older. From the way she leaned against the gate, settled in, she was clearly not interested in his answer. Or she assumed she already knew it.

"Don't mind if you watch at all," he said. "Long's you do it on the other side a the fence."

She smiled but didn't move.

"I'm Rebecca Yarborough."

"Even introductions are best done across the fence."

She smiled even more. "If you won't introduce yourself," she said, "I'll just have to make assumptions. You're Carson Fielding, the horse trainer. Quite a guess, huh?"

"Ma'am, you need a open that gate and go stand outside the fence. Once I introduce you to Orlando, you can be in the corral all you want. But right now Orlando don't want you here."

The smile disappeared. She lifted her chin, keeping her arms crossed, and met Carson's eyes with a hard stare. She had a heart-shaped face, cheeks a little full, deep green eyes with the smallest lines at their corners, hair that looked black in the shadow of the post where she stood but that frayed into a deep, burnished red where it edged into the sun.

"I happen to live here," she said. "This is my corral. And Orlando, as you call him, happens to be my horse."

"I expect Orlando's his own horse. And like I already told your husband, you cede me the corral long's I'm here. Odd he didn't mention it."

She held his gaze a moment longer, her lips pursed. Then, with a quick jerk of her neck and shoulders, she pushed herself away from the post, out of the shadow, never uncrossing her arms. Her hair leapt into flame as the sun struck it. Without a word she turned away, opened the gate, walked through it, slammed it with a flick of her left wrist. Carson watched her back, her hair bobbing with the stiffness of her step, the heels of her brand-new riding boots hard on the gravel.

He turned back to Orlando. The horse had moved closer to him. A good sign. He felt the faint warmth of the animal's breath through the weave of his shirt.

"You handled that real good," he said. "Don't worry. She ain't about a ride you till she learns some manners."

MAGNUS CAME TO THE CORRAL THE NEXT DAY
. He Stood OUtSide the fence, watching Carson work. Orlando did well at ignoring him.

"Could I talk to you?"

Magnus's voice was louder than it had to be.

"In a sec." Carson responded to Magnus and Orlando both, sensing the sudden start in the horse, keeping his own voice quiet in response. He passed his hands over the animal's flanks and withers, then wrapped the bridle around a far corral post and walked across the dust to the gate, opened it, stepped out.

"I didn't appreciate you kicking my wife out of the corral yesterday."

Magnus's words had the clipped, careful quality of a man trying to cover belligerence. Carson noted his neck thrust forward, his jutting jaw. He shut the gate quietly and turned to Magnus, who was standing with one hand on the fence, leaning his weight into his shoulder, looking down on Carson.

"Don't know as I kicked her out," Carson said. "She was where she didn't belong."

"You could be polite to her."

"She say I wasn't?"

"She was disturbed."

"No cause to be."

"She thought there was."

"She stepped into the corral. I asked her to stay outside the fence. I had a ask twice."

"And you don't like to ask twice."

"Ain't a matter a me. Orlando didn't want her in the corral."

"Orlando."

"I got to call him somethin. Seemed like an Orlando to me."

"It's a horse."

"That's right."

Magnus shook his head. "The point is you need to get along with my wife."

"I need a get along with the horses."

"You forget you're teaching her to ride?"

"Means she needs a get along with me. She ain't a horse. She'll learn to ride if she listens and does what I tell her. Don't matter if I get along with her or not."

Magnus stared at Orlando standing quietly in the corral. Then he turned stubborn eyes on Carson, his whole body swinging forward slightly off the fulcrum of his arm, intruding. "This isn't some 425-dollar horse you're buying," he said. "If you're looking for a way to leave this job and get paid for it, it's not going to work."

In spite of his tone of voice, the statement was so absurd that Carson looked up, smiling. But he saw no humor in Magnus's face. His eyes had a cold, ball bearing look.

"Is that what you think?" Carson asked. "Because if it is, you can have the last three days' work, an I'll go back to my own place. I won't work with someone thinks I'm try in a rip him off."

Magnus's eyes wavered. He didn't like that wavering, and he tried to prevent it but finally looked away.

"I been clear about this from the start," Carson said. "I never said I wanted a be here. But I agreed, and how I feel about it ain't goin a change the work I do. I don't hafta like bein here to get along with the horses. Your wife don't hafta like me to learn to ride. I'll teach her to ride, but if she needs someone a make her happy, too, you need a be lookin for someone else."

Magnus turned back to him. Bloodless lips, an edge of teeth between them, pale eyes, the suggestion of a smile. He dropped his hand off the post.