The Work of Wolves (39 page)

But by then the horses had jerked their heads up, out of their standing dreams, and before they were even awake were running, heaving themselves about, leaning into the circles their bodies cut, coming fully out of sleep only after they had taken several strides, so that they woke to find the wind they made tangling their manes, the earth coming hard against their hooves, and an old equine terror of canine smell and sound residing in their hearts.

"It could've gone either way," Ted said. "They could've just stood there and kicked the shit out've them dogs. And maybe they would've in the day. But at night—they just took off. Didn't think about it. Just went."

In that race across the prairie, through light and darkness, the horses galloping over the grass, the dogs through it, the horses had all the advantage. Not weak or sick, having regained their strength, with genes of speed both evolved and bred, they widened the gap between themselves and the wall of pursuing sound. Except for the greyhounds. Relentless, poised in their running, their bodies bending and flexing like tireless springs—some of them descendants of racing greyhounds abandoned by the Rapid City greyhound track, that various people had bought and brought to the rez and then abandoned again—they came on. And on. The other dogs dropped out. Collapsed one by one. Stained the grass with their slobber, great puddles of it where they lay down to regain their breath before turning their backs on the chase and slinking home, tails down.

But the greyhounds followed the horses, and the horses, having widened the gap, slowed their pace—then with startle and new panic in their chests realized the dogs, though diminished in number, were narrowing it again. Nothing in the horses' makeup had prepared them for this. The greyhounds, of course, were nonthreat-ening as puppies: mild-mannered, sinewy, nearly weightless, bred for speed and not violence, they would have stopped had the horses stopped. Would have sidled off, confused, looking back over their shoulders, unsure what that frenzied chase had been about, finding only horses, familiar and domestic as themselves, standing in the moonlight.

But chasing and being chased had taken over. The whole thing was a sham. A mockery. A mask and foolishness. But once started, it was beyond the capacity of either species to stop.

"That's all a spirit's got to do sometimes," Ted said. "Just get something started. And let it go."

Willi thought how true that was. And how long something could go.

Ted first heard the yips and howls of the other dogs end, leaving only the greyhounds' weird, thin chorus, and then he heard that chorus fade as the other dogs, shadows still, appeared out of the ravine, and he knew there was nothing he could do to recover hounds or horses. They were far away and getting farther. He feared the horses would come to a barbwire fence and not see it, but barring that, the animals would run until daylight revealed to them their own stupidity, fleeing nothing and chasing nothing. Or they would run until one species or the other wore out. And neither was designed to wear out quickly.

"So they're gone," he concluded. "I don't know where they are."

Willi wanted to be hopeful. "Maybe it is OK," he said. "Maybe the dogs have taken care of our trouble."

"How's that?"

"Maybe the horses will go where no one will find them."

"Only place for that's the Badlands," Ted replied. "And they might not live too long there. They'd need to find water. That ain't a place you'd want to take a horse and drop it off."

"Why did you call me?"

Ted was puzzled. "To tell you they were gone."

"No. I mean not that. I mean, why did you call me and not Carson or Earl? Maybe they would know something to do."

The phone was silent for a while. Finally, in a voice Willi could hardly hear, Ted said, "Walks Alone's gonna blame me for this. I know he is. Fielding, I don't know what he's thinking. I said I'd take these horses. And look what happened. Goddamnit. I'd like to do something right once in my life."

Willi was unprepared for such contrition. Such vulnerability. Ted cared what Earl thought? Was bothered if Earl blamed him? Willi heard his own breathing in the handset. He'd thought Ted agreed to take the horses only because he didn't like Magnus Yarborough or rich white people in general. He'd had no sense that Ted cared what anyone else thought, and surely no sense that Ted had seen this as a right thing he could do to counterbalance the weight of his life.

Willi knew of trying to do right things and the impotence it could bring. He recalled standing outside his grandmother's house in the gathering dark and trying to see the invisible vineyards of the Mosel valley, then turning and looking across the city. One of those lights out there might be his house. Or it might be sunk in darkness. He had felt abandoned. But by whom he did not know. Himself, perhaps. He had thought that his father might be looking out the window, and here he was, looking back—as if he were looking out of a mirror, the patterns of lights reversed, but both of them invisible to each other, and neither knowing the other was looking.

Willi had begun to walk to the bus stop. His grandmother was probably still sitting in her chair, rehearsing her arguments, wishing he would come back—recalling one more thing she might have said, one final statement to convince him. Willi hadn't been convinced, but nevertheless he felt defeated. He'd discovered what he'd come to discover, but nevertheless there was no triumph in it. He'd thought that by a single visit he could crack the shell of his grandmother's dream and reveal his father's error. Had thought time would have worn her dream-made shell down so that he could crack it open and reveal to them all—himself, his father, his grandmother—who she really was: newborn, shining, receptive. He hadn't known the reverse could be true: that a shell could grow inward, could be thickened by years, until it ate into the soul it was protecting, until it devoured and replaced that soul, so that in the end there was nothing to shatter. Nothing to break. His grandmother had become the wall she'd built, the shell she'd grown. Nothing more. A shell that went to the core.

Listening to Ted's defeated voice, Willi remembered how he'd ridden a nearly empty bus back home. He'd thought to know his grandmother but instead had run up against his own history. Maybe it was the same for Ted—taking the horses to change something and finding nothing changed. Even his trusted dogs had betrayed him, succumbing to the spirits and the spooks. Maybe Ted, like Willi, felt caught in his own history.
Cages are everywhere,
Willi thought. But he chased the thought away. Refused to think it again. But for just a moment it seemed to him that history was the biggest cage of all and that it lay all around him, all around Ted, all around them all, in steel and glittering array, and everywhere they turned they bumped against its bars.

AUNT MARTI HAD BROUGHT THE NEWS
of the old woman's death. She didn't weep or cry or protest this time—merely arrived and announced it, dry-eyed and shriveled, breaking no secrets, making no demands, as if one such argument was enough for a lifetime, or as if she couldn't stand to hear her brother once again refuse to attend, to pray, to acknowledge, to mourn. She might have been a piece of newspaper blown through the door. Only a bit of self-pity in her voice, only a carefully restrained look of reproach in her eyes.

When she left, Willi said, "I will go to the funeral."

His father turned from the door through which his sister had gone. Willi expected opposition, but his father said only, "If you wish."

It seemed to Willi that his family had become devoid of emotion. As if they had been fighting a thing, and each other, so long that they no longer knew how to feel. Shocking as it might be, he wished his father would celebrate the old woman's death—dance, drink, toast her absence, ask friends to celebrate with him. Or he wished his father would weep and regret that she was gone and that he had never forgiven her. But his father wouldn't even oppose himself to Willi: "If you wish."

A stubborn anger stirred in Willi. He wanted to probe his father's passivity, force his father into some response. Some reaction. Something other than words like dust.

"Will you go?" he asked.

His father looked out the picture window. It was afternoon, the city gray, only the traffic lights on the streets across the river shaping any possibility of pattern. The Rhine below them was faintly stained downriver by the reflection of the Ehrenbreitstein Fortress on the water. Such massive, built stone—it was a wonder, almost, that its reflection could float.

"No," his father said.

"Did you
ever
love her?"

It was a question. It was an accusation. Willi himself could not imagine the woman he had met being loved. He could never love her himself. Yet he cried the question out and realized that, for some reason he didn't quite comprehend, he wanted his father to have loved her. Sometime.

But he could not make his father budge. "It doesn't matter," his father said, no emotion in his voice.

"It doesn't matter if you loved her?"

"No. It doesn't. Because in my life there are two times. A time before, and a time after. I am living in the time after. And will go on doing so."

The answer made no sense to Willi. He vaguely understood his father meant a time before he knew what he knew and a time after he knew, or perhaps a time before he tried to commit suicide and a time after—but Willi didn't see how he could divide his life that way, insist on its separation, and so deny the meaning of love or hate. He remembered stories his father used to tell of swimming in the Rhine when he was young, of treading water in the powerful current, waiting for a boat to come upstream, and then angling to it, letting the current sweep him into it, and clinging to ropes the laughing deck men threw out. His hands would find a rope in the water, and he would grab it, and the current would wrench him around suddenly, the force astonishing, exhilarating, so strong he almost thought his arms could be pulled from their sockets, and he would sweep into the hull of the boat and cling with all his might, lifting his head from the rush of water to breathe, then diving down into it, pulled through the singing water like a porpoise, and above him the deck hands calling, and below the thrashing of the propeller coming from all around. And when he reached the bridge he had started from, he would let go the rope and be taken by the current again and angle across to shore and step gleaming from the river. Surely, Willi thought, he had loved his mother then. It seemed impossible for a child to walk home from such play and abandon and not love the mother he walked home to. How could he step from the Rhine's rush and not love his mother? Or how could he remember swimming in the river like that and not at the same time remember walking home, entering his house, finding his mother there—and knowing whether he loved her?

"Why don't you go to the funeral and denounce her?" he asked, his face flushing, his voice hot. "Why don't you stand up and tell everyone how terrible she was? Let everyone know. Instead of just standing here?"

Even then his father did not react or rise to the challenge. All he said was, "This is a family matter. And I won't denounce the dead."

Because he said it so calmly and so quickly, Willi realized that he had actually considered it. The idea did not shock him, because he had thought it through already, debated it within himself.

His father turned to him. "Go to her funeral if you wish," he said. "I would not ask you to stay away. She is your grandmother. The harm she did, she did to me. She did not imagine you when she did it. She couldn't have."

Willi had never told his parents that he'd gone to see his grandmother. It seemed taboo. He couldn't bring himself to tell them. But the way his father looked at him, and the words he used, made Willi think he knew. Or suspected, at least. Because Willi had talked with his grandmother, he understood what his father meant—that his grandmother had accepted his father's death as a soldier for the Reich from the moment he'd been conceived and could therefore not have imagined a grandchild. The thought chilled Willi. He'd never considered that. When he'd opened her door, had he been an impossible ghost from the future, as she to him had been one from the past?

"I went to see her," he said suddenly. He'd always wondered if he would say it—and now there it was, already said.

"I thought perhaps you had." His father seemed not surprised at all. "Then you must understand that the time before was false. Before I knew what I know now—it was a false time. An imagined time. If I imagined I loved her then. If I imagined she loved me. It was just imagined, Willi. How can it matter? How can I let it matter?"

It was too much for Willi to take in. Too much to understand. For the first time in his life, he felt his father was actually talking to him. That they'd broken through some barrier. Freed themselves from something. But all he could think was that love had to matter. Somehow, even imagined love had to matter. And wasn't all love imagined? Wasn't that what it was? If his father's mother imagined that she loved him, even after conceiving him for the Reich, then didn't she love him? Truly? And couldn't that be enough?

SO HE LISTENED TO TED'S QUIET VOICE
accept guilt for the horses' leaving, wishing he could do one right thing in his life, and he knew what Ted meant and how he felt. Though he'd never said a word to Ted—or anyone—about his grandmother, he wondered if somehow Ted had sensed a source of sympathy in him, common ground.

"Sometimes you cannot do the right thing," he said. "Sometimes even the spirits are against you."

"Yeah," Ted said. "That's sure the truth, enit?"

Yet, Willi thought, he and his father had talked.

"But not all of them," he said to Ted.

"Not all of what?"

"The spirits. They will not all be against you if you try the right thing to do."

"You think?"

"Yes, I do."

"What do we do now?"

"Maybe if this Magnus Yarborough gets the horses back, he will treat them better."

"Why'd he change?"

"Because he knows that someone knows. He would think, maybe, that someone is watching."