The Work of Wolves (29 page)

Earl and Carson and Willi stood rooted, watching the animals materialize from the steam. The horses reached their heads over the barbs. On their breath Earl smelled not the grassy, fermented smell he knew from horses but something sour and corrupt, metallic, and he thought it was the smell of death. Their coats under his fingers were stiff as thorns. Touching Surety, he thought for a moment he'd been cut.

"The bastard," Carson said. But Willi left the fence and ripped out grass until he had an armful. He brought it over, dumped it in front of the horses. They crowded greedily around it, snuffing, devouring it.

"We gotta get 'em outta here," Carson said.

"They are not interested in sometime in the future getting out," Willi said. "They are interested in eating right now."

"You got a point."

The three of them set to work, ripping the dry fall grass out of the ground in a widening circle around the pen and carrying it to the horses, throwing it in heaps at their feet. As fast as they could carry it, the horses devoured it. Finally Carson stopped it. "Feed 'em too much," he said, "we could kill 'em."

Willi threw a last armful of grass into the enclosure, then leaned on a post and watched.

"Keep this up, we'll be pulling grass a quarter mile away," Carson said. "We need a move 'em."

"Move 'em?"

"One word for't. I don't suppose either a you's had a lot've experience stealin horses."

"You're asking for our help?"

"Guess I am."

"That's new."

"Things change."

Earl's dark eyes gazed into Carson's pale ones.

"This will look good on a scholarship application, you know?" Earl said.

"If you can't, you can't."

"I'll help. That sheriff..." Earl shrugged, didn't finish. Then he thought to himself,
You just said you'd help steal horses. You just said you'd become a criminal.

"Willi?"

"I told my sponsors I was coming to South Dakota for the culture. They would be happy, I think, to know I tried everything you do here."

"Guess that settles it, then. We'll all three get 'em out. But like I said before, I need some advice. We need someplace big to take 'em. Where they can get lost. Far from roads. They're branded, and even without that, they're the kind a animals stick out from average horses. So we need a place they're not likely to be seen by someone just drivin around."

"In other words, the rez," Earl said.

"You got it."

"It's not that easy," Earl said. "We can't just let them go in the middle of the rez. A lot've land is family land. If they wandered onto someone's family land, and he didn't know about them, he might be looking for the owner. So we'd need to find someone willing to keep stolen horses on their land, you know?"

The horses stamped the dust, grinding the last of the grass between their molars. The wind freshened, the barbwire hummed.

"I was hopin we could just find a big, empty space on the map."

"That's the rez—just a big empty space."

"Sorry. Didn't mean it that way."

Then Willi, who'd been leaning with his chin on the back of his hands, watching the horses, turned to Earl and Carson.

"I think I know someone on the reservation who might be willing to have on his land stolen horses."

"You know someone?" Earl felt a little defensive. What was Willi doing, making claims to knowing the reservation better than he did? "How would you know someone?"

"Parties."

"Parties?"

"I go to them when I am invited."

"And you met someone at a party who'll take stolen horses?"

"It is the best place to meet someone like that."

"That's a point," Carson said.

"Who?" Earl asked.

"Ted Kills Many. I think you know him, too."

"S
TEAL THEM
?"

Norm had his head under the hood of his Dodge Polaris, bent far over the engine, his right arm submerged to the elbow in iron, tightening a manifold bolt with a socket and ratchet. His voice echoed off the raised hood with a tinny sound. Earl saw his shoulders stop moving, and the clicking of the ratchet ceased along with the heavier thunks of the handle against the manifold and engine block. Norm didn't raise his head, just went still, looking down into the engine like he did when he dropped a nut and couldn't find it.

"We can't see another way, you know?" Earl said.

"Hanh," Norm grunted. He clicked the ratchet a couple of times back and forth, then stopped again. "I suppose you've told your mother about this plan, and she's given it her highest approval?"

When Earl didn't reply, Norm said, "I'll take that for a yes. And if your mother approves, who am I to discourage you?" He clicked and thunked for a while.

"What do you really think?" Earl asked.

"I think if I don't think you have such a hot idea, you wouldn't want to hear me anyway. Especially since your mother's such a fan of it."

He leaned further into the engine and turned his head sideways to get a better angle for his arm. His braid slipped off his back and onto the valve cover. Earl looked up from his uncle's sideways face over the hood of the car. The prairie falcon that seemed a permanent occupant of the space above Norm's place ran down a plane of air in a line so straight it looked like it was running on tightened wire. Then, as Earl watched, it suddenly veered, rose in a looping half-circle, turned into a bundle of feathered chaos as it thrashed its wings, then straightened out to become bird again, the clean rectangle of its tail guiding it in a new direction.

"Hand me another bolt, would you?"

Earl plucked a rusty manifold bolt off the fender and held it out. Norm withdrew from the engine, stood, arched his spine, then took the bolt and went in again. He concentrated on the task, the bolt clinking in the depths of the engine as he sought to fit it. He found the hole, and the sounds changed to the scrape and hush of threads meshing. Then Norm stood and picked up the ratchet again. He looked at it in his hands. "Well," he said. "It's an honorable Lakota tradition."

"What is?"

"Horse stealing."

He bent into the engine again, and the ratchet knocked around until he found the bolt head. His voice came out of the metal, echoed off the hood. "Those old traditions. It's hard to keep them alive in the modern world. I'm happy you're willing to work at it, nephew."

Earl stared at his uncle's bent back. Sometimes he couldn't tell when Norm was joking.

Norm unbent again. "This car," he said. "It's going to put me and my back in the VA hospital. Tighten a few of these bolts for me, nephew."

Earl took the ratchet, exchanged places with his uncle, leaned over the engine, found the bolt Norm had been tightening, fitted the socket over it. He began to work the ratchet, his wrist twisted at an uncomfortable angle. Norm's voice came from behind him: "Just make sure you steal those horses. You don't want to be a robber. You want to be a horse
thief.
"

"A thief?" The socket slipped off the bolt head. Earl fumbled around to find it again.

"Like Iktomi."

"Iktomi?" Earl found the bolt head, slipped the socket over it, ratcheted away.

"Iktomi is a trickster, nephew. And being a thief is the biggest trick there is. Robbing, though—that is serious business. Real grim."

Earl felt the bolt begin to tighten. He strained against the ratchet handle, finished the job, turned around to face his uncle. "I don't see the difference, you know?" he said.

"Let's say you got something I want," Norm said. "Like, for instance, a million acres of land, hanh? So I ask you, 'How about you give me some of that land?' You're not sure that's a wonderful idea, so I get a big gun and point it at your head and say, 'What I said was, how about you give me that land?' So this time you say, 'I've reconsidered. You have yourself a deal.' So we both agree, and there's no secret how the deal was reached. Everything's clear and in the open. Aboveboard, you might say. That's robbing, nephew."

"What's stealing, then?"

"Stealing is an art, hanh? A thief has to carry whatever he takes. He's got to be able to hide it. A thief could never take a whole continent. Robbers go armed. Thieves don't have to. And thieves are always laughing. But you don't want to joke with a robber, hanh? Custer did not have a sense of humor."

Earl laid the ratchet on the air cleaner, leaned against the bumper of the car. Norm was looking at the landscape, collecting thoughts.

"The old-time Lakota horse thieves were magicians," he said. "If you commit a good thievery against someone, they will believe everything except what actually happened. They will believe they misplaced what you took. They will believe their memory is bad. Or that their eyes do not work or that their minds are loco. A good thief creates disbelief, nephew. Makes people believe the world is different than they thought."

Then Norm began to speak of their ancestors thieving horses, how they would sneak into the enemy camp, where everything was ordered, known, secure, and they would take the one thing it would seem impossible to take—the living beasts that might give warning—so that the men of the afflicted tribe went out to the horse herd in the morning and for a while only sensed something wrong without knowing what it was—the borders of their world blurring as they gazed at the remaining horses, an absence there they could not identify.

They blame their slight unease on the light or the weather or their residual dreaming, and they look to the east for clouds and sniff the air and wonder, without speaking of it to each other, about their quiet foreboding. They make small jokes to hold the feeling off, but the sense of something wrong and troubled in the world will not leave them. They look to the morning clouds again, bright white on their eastern edges but gray-blue, darkened by their own shadows, on the west, scudding in the high morning winds like a herd of horses galloping and brindled.

Then one of the men, thinking of how the clouds are like horses far away in the regions of light and thunder, drops his gaze to the real animals before him, and only then does the sense of something wrong find a center. He stares at the horses, saying nothing yet to his companions for fear of being laughed at should his sense prove wrong. The horses mill. They shift positions. Accounting for them all, even to a man who knows them well, is difficult. The other men, alerted by his concentration, turn their eyes to the herd, too, and a moment of complete and utter human silence grows and crescendos, a silence of the kind that can only occur when the world is shifting shape and the shape it is assuming has not yet been identified.

Then the joke descends. The world cracks. Someone manages to count the horses or notices a particular animal missing and states his discovery. But how, how, how? In that moment, when the discovery is made but belief in it has not solidified, anything is possible. In that moment the thievery descends to the foundations of the world and shakes them. The turtle rolls over, the earth slides off its back.

The men cannot believe the horses are gone. Yet the horses are gone. And because they cannot believe what is before their eyes, indisputable, all possibility opens up, the possible and the impossible switch places, and all their sureties fly apart and combine in new, exotic ways. And far away, across the rolling plains, their trail gone cold, the Lakota warriors are leading the missing horses, relaxed and laughing. They tell each other the story of how they did it, and in telling push each other beyond the boundaries of the world: They had, they say, stretched the possibilities of silence, gone beyond the silence of owls or the silence of the grass they crept through, beyond the silence of silent things. It didn't matter whether the sentries were awake or asleep, they tell each other—they had come into the herd of horses like the grass growing among the myriad hooves, so unstartling that the animals bowed their heads to the strange bridles held up to them as if the earth itself upheld them and followed the warriors out of the herd at a pace no faster than the pace of a night-grazing animal, until darkness had swallowed them wholly and the warriors had mounted what was now theirs.

"The point of all this, though, nephew, was not having the horses," Norm said. "The point was the magic. It was the joke. The best horse thieves took horses staked right outside a tipi. It is as if the horses vanish, hanh? A man stakes his finest horse outside his tipi and goes to sleep with his ear a few feet from it. When he wakes and it is gone, he will not believe his eyes. Do you see? He will have to gather other evidence before he is sure that what is before him is before him. He will have to know if other horses are also gone. He will have to find tracks. He will have to talk this over with his family. All to convince himself that his horse, which he can't see, is gone."

Norm laughed. "That's the point of thieving, nephew. To make someone believe nothing and everything. A good thief makes a man believe—for just a moment—that horses can fly."

He picked up another rusty manifold bolt and handed it to Earl. "Suppose we ought to finish this job," he said. "See if that one will go."

Earl took the bolt and leaned into the engine again, feeling with his fingers until he found an empty bolt hole.

"Indians honored stealing and thieves," Norm said. "But white people honor robbing. It is hard for robbers and thieves to understand each other. For one thing, a robber doesn't want to see the world any way but the way he sees it. He has to know the value of what he's robbing. The point of thieving isn't having the thing, but the point of robbing is. So if you're a robber, you're going to rob as much of the world as you can. It is the only way to make sure it stays the way you see it. But a thief"—Norm paused—"he's not trying to control anything."

Earl had been working the ratchet. He felt the bolt tighten, gave the handle two more pushes, withdrew his arm. "That one's good," he said.

"One more to go." Norm handed him the last of the bolts. He seemed to be done talking, and Earl worked in silence, thinking. He wasn't sure how Norm's distinction between thieving and robbing applied to taking the horses. He had more urgent and practical matters to be worried about. He finished with the bolt, pulled the socket and extension off the ratchet, and replaced them in his uncle's toolbox.