Wild Horses (31 page)

Dwight peered over. “I thought that looked familiar.”

Allison wore the hat with a tarnished radiance, earth angel finding her way again after some terrible fall. He’d not realized that the hat was a gift until he saw her smile, and knew he could never take it back.

Dwight helped her into the saddle, gave her a few pointers on the roan’s habits, watched attentively as horse and rider crossed the corral, trotting at first, picking up into a canter. He called for her to shift more of her weight down to the stirrups, and she did so, leaning closer toward mane and muscular neck as the horse picked up speed, circling the inside of the corral. She shifted the reins to one hand long enough to jam the hat farther down onto her head, then leaned smoothly into the roan again, finding the rhythm and letting her body go with it, with the flex and stride and roll of all that power.

Tom and Dwight leaned against the corral, eyes following the circle; looking for different things, seeing them.

“Told her she had to prove to my satisfaction she wasn’t gonna get her neck broke, I let her take that roan out past my sight,” Dwight said.

“She looks like she’s doing fine.”

Dwight nodded. “Done some riding before, but not a lot, I’d wager. Not as natural to her as walking, but she’s got the hang of it.” He scratched with one boot tip at a cluster of weeds. “Told me she’d grown up around horses, rode all the time when she was a kid, but … that was so, I shouldn’t’ve had to tell her to drop more weight down to them stirrups. I don’t know. I just got the feeling that was mostly wishful thinking.”

“I couldn’t tell you,” Tom said. “The subject never came up.”

“Should’ve seen her asking me, could I saddle her one up and let her take it awhile.” Dwight grinned. “Just like a kid, eyes all wide and lit up. I’d’ve told her no, her face would’ve cracked right in two. Told her okay, and thought she just might piddle her drawers right then.”

“No kidding?” Tom laughed softly. “Then you’ve seen a side of her I haven’t. She keeps that part of herself pretty bottled up.”

“Well, then maybe this is just what the horse doctor ordered. Something about young girls and horses, anyway. You ever notice that? They go through this phase, most of them, where they just love their horses, can’t get enough of them. Draw them, read books about them, watch shows about them. Put up pictures. Even if they never been within fifty miles of one. Funny, way that happens.”

Tom tried to remember if Holly ever mentioned going through such a phase, thought she might have. She would’ve been the type.

Allison brought the roan around again, slowed it, then brought it clopping over to where he and Dwight stood. She looked down at them from beneath the brim of the leather hat, twirling one rein and slapping the end of it against the saddle horn.

“So…?” she said. “Can I leave the kiddie pool now?”

Dwight opened the corral gate to let her loose into acres of tree-studded pasture. When she snapped the reins and kicked the horse into motion, Tom smiled after her, happy to watch and to be alive, and he thought she rode like a dream.

*

She kept the horse out longer than she’d thought she would, losing track of time — morning one minute, the next looking up at the sky and thinking the sun couldn’t possibly have shifted so far to the west. Time passed differently up here. And if, in whatever direction she rode, she eventually reached a fence, it was still good enough, for the sun recognized no fences, shining on both sides, and the wind blew through them as if they weren’t there.

Hector stabled the roan when she brought it back, and the ground felt new and strange beneath her. A pleasing soreness had crept into her bottom and the inside of each thigh.

Dwight was busying himself in the open workspace beneath the porch’s extended roof, hunched over the peculiar coffinlike thing she’d noticed last night. By day, details were more evident, and unmistakably Egyptian in nature. It was rounded, tapering toward squared-off feet, with a headdress that curved broadly around a smooth, staring face. A thin beard jutted down from the chin.

“Thought you’d be halfway to Looziana by now,” said Dwight.

“One horse thief around here, that’s enough,” she said, and his eyes were amused over the top of his bifocals. “I saw this last night. Are you expecting a short mummy?”

Dwight shook his head, sandpapering away at the suggestion of hands fisted against the thing’s side. “It’s not for any mummy, it’s for me.”

“Funny — you look taller than this, close up.”

“Well, it’s not for burying in the first place. At least not with anything in it.” He blew away the sawdust. “This’s what the Egyptians called a ushabti. Only thing dead Egyptians really wanted to do was enjoy the afterworld. But they couldn’t trust the gods. You know how gods are, always something else they need done, never satisfied. So what the Egyptians’d do was, they’d put these inside their tombs, so in case the gods wanted ‘em to work, the ushabtis were there to do the work instead.” Dwight straightened, patted it with affection. “Theirs weren’t nowhere near as big, but I’m making up in size what I lack in numbers. Those gods can kiss my ass if they think I’ll make one for every day of the year.”

Allison looked at him with mild alarm. “Um … you’re not…”

“Dying? Not as anyone’s told me, no.” He grinned, suddenly self-conscious. “It’s just something to do.”

“I saw all those pieces you have inside. Some collection. I wasn’t expecting anything like that, first seeing you last night.”

“Happy to exceed your expectations, then.” He eyeballed the surface of the ushabti, began sandpapering again. “Been meaning for thirty years or more to get over there and see those pyramids, just haven’t gotten around to it yet.” Dwight shrugged. “I don’t guess they’re going anywhere.”

Allison traced her fingers along the two vertical columns of hieroglyphs carved down the front.

“What does this say?”

“It’s a rather impolite boast, and I’d just as soon not get into it, if you don’t mind.” Dwight sanded furiously for a moment, embarrassed. “I’ve never yet made up my mind on what some folks say about us living lifetimes before this one we’re living now. But the way I’ve got it figured is, if that’s so, what I must’ve been in one of those lives was one of Cleopatra’s lovers. So maybe that explains something about me and Egypt.”

Allison drew a cup of water from a five-gallon jug sitting on a table. She asked where Tom was, and Dwight said that the last he knew, Tom had gone off in search of a newspaper. Shortly after, he admitted that it had been Tom who’d given him the impulse to carve the ushabti, upon being told months ago that Tom’s mother was dying and he’d begun to worry about how to mark her grave with something more meaningful than mere name and dates.

“He was right, you know,” said Dwight. “Those stones, they don’t say a whole hell of a lot about who’s down below.”

“What did he decide on?”

Dwight told her how Tom had had the headstone engraved with the masks of comedy and tragedy, for all the dreams that the woman had never gotten to live out. Allison’s heart ached for him, and for her, too, even though she’d not known until now of the woman’s life, death.

“He’s not married, is he?” she asked.

Dwight huffed. “What is it you two do all day in that van? Sit there and each look out your own window?” He let her stew in that a moment. “He was. He’s not anymore.”

“What happened?”

“Shouldn’t you be asking him this instead of me?”

“Probably. But I’m asking you anyway.”

Dwight hadn’t looked at her for a time, absorbed in his work, and would not look at her now, either. “She died too.”

Allison stared at him, stared until he sensed the pressure of her eyes and her silence. In time he crumbled, telling her it had happened five years ago, in a bath, with a blade. Once it was out, Allison realized how aware she was of the birds, the clouds, of everything great and small about this moment. Whatever else was to happen, this would be a moment she’d remember forever, because it explained so much about Tom.

“Holly was three months pregnant at the time,” Dwight added quietly. “If she knew it herself, she’d not told anyone else about it. It was something he found out after.”

Allison felt herself nodding, if only to let Dwight know that she’d heard, while she thought of those sad little books that rode with Tom in his van. All the miles and all the nights.

Why is he telling me this?
she wondered, for it was far more than she’d asked. Now Dwight
was
looking at her, something in his throat keeping him from saying another word. He didn’t need to. It was all there in eyes as strong as the sun, in lines cut by weather and years: a warning, stern as a prophet’s.

You be careful,
she thought she read in it,
because you have touched him whether he admits to it or not, and maybe he’s touched you too, so you decide whatever it is you want, and live with that choice, because I will not see him toyed with.

It would’ve been presumptuous of him, of anyone, to have said it aloud. That he didn’t need to — seemed unable to — gave it more weight than words. She met his gaze until he hunched slowly back over and began his sanding again.

Not knowing what possessed her to do so, she walked over to him and placed her hand upon his until it halted, its wiry hair like bristles against her palm, then she leaned over to kiss him lightly, once, atop his smooth, sun-browned head. Allison was nearly to the porch door before she heard the scratching resume.

She found Tom at the kitchen table, surprised that Dwight hadn’t known he was back. He said nothing even when she took off the hat and scruffed out her sweaty hair. She realized then with a plunge of heart that he looked absolutely crushed.

He heard us out there,
was her first thought.
He heard us and it brought everything back too close again.

She paid no attention to the newspaper until he splayed one hand over the front page and spun it around for her to read.

7 SLAIN IN DINER MASSACRE, read a secondary headline beneath the main banner, while the picture of the building jolted her back a day. Only a shattered plate-glass window changed its face.

“I left those people with a loaded gun,” Tom said, his voice hoarse. “I don’t … understand how they…”

Allison collapsed into a chair to read the article, scarcely understanding any more by the time she was through. A shotgun was the weapon of choice used on six of the seven. They’d been found scattered throughout the building, shot from the front and shot in the back; found by sheriff’s deputies summoned by an anonymous caller. No suspects yet; a number of leads being followed up on.

Where had a shotgun come from, anyway? Madeline and Gunther were plainly unarmed when Tom had turned over the pistol.
Somebody else,
she thought. Someone who’d come along afterward and…

And she knew it couldn’t really have happened that way.

Tom didn’t say it, but she knew he had to be thinking that she was the more culpable of them, because they’d never have left if she hadn’t been so adamant. She wished he’d just say it, get it over with.

Her hand slid across the table, her fingers curling loosely over the back of his forearm. Before long, even thinking about it grew too much to bear, so she watched Dirtball as the dog slept in the center of the floor. His legs and paws twitched in sleep, and she wondered what dogs dreamed about — if they dreamed of rabbits, or of things no one would ever guess. If she could dream of flying, why couldn’t they?

There would be no such dreams for her tonight, though. She knew she would remain rooted stubbornly to the earth, with those already in it, and those who belonged there.

*

Tom passed the darkest hours alone in the bunkhouse, never knowing the time, only that last night’s comfortable mattress felt too hard tonight.

Hours earlier, he and Allison had taken the van back to the nearest crossroads of civilization to contact the Kendall County sheriff’s office. They used a gas station pay phone so the call could not be connected to Dwight, giving as much information as they could on Gunther and Madeline DeCarlo. It wasn’t much, but at least the names — half of one, all of the other, and both from Las Vegas — were more than they’d seen in the paper. Tom hung up as soon as he’d given all he could.

For hours he lay in the dark, mired in one moment’s decision and all the sorrow it caused. Horrifying how it would echo on and on. Today, spouses were devastated, parents heartbroken, children robbed. Next year, someone would wake in the middle of the night, feel the empty spot beside her, and cry. Years later, there would be no father to escort a bride down the aisle of a church. On and on, a hundred people, a thousand, thinking back to yesterday and wondering why it happened.

Why?
Because somebody left her feeling like she had to run. And somebody left me feeling like I couldn’t let her do it alone.

He’d wondered about her last night, up at the house. If her head rested atop a nickel-plated lump beneath her pillow. If, when she stirred in sleep, her hand strayed to touch its cold comfort, just in case. While Dwight inspired trust, Tom was sure she’d trusted her father, too, once upon a time.