Ghost Horses (6 page)

For what seemed ages they stayed there, pressed against the sheer slickrock. Then came the sound of more pounding, only this time it was the pounding of feet as Ethan and Summer ran down the trail toward them. “Are you all right?” Summer cried. Ethan's eyes looked as hard as the rocks that had almost killed them.

He did this, Jack thought suddenly. The thought scoured into him, making his insides raw with fury. It was obvious—Ethan had run ahead, and then there was an avalanche that could have killed them all, and he didn't even care enough to look concerned.
He
rolled those rocks down on us. The spit dried in Jack's mouth as he stared Ethan down.

“Some kids—” Summer panted. “I saw them. Teenagers. They left the trail and tried to climb up the slope. They kicked the rocks loose—I don't think they meant to, they didn't know what they were doing, so crazy—Are you all right?” she asked again.

“Well, we nearly disappeared over the edge,” Jack said, his voice shaking, not at all convinced whether Summer was telling the truth or if she was just covering up for her brother. “Maybe you guys threw them.”

“Jack!” Ashley cried.

“Look at Ethan—he doesn't even care. If those rocks had hit us—”

“Jack, stop!” Steven ordered. “OK, that's it. Everyone back to the lodge. Now! Move!”

S
tanding outside the door to his parents' room, Jack listened to the soft hum of television voices inside and wondered for the hundredth time if what he was about to do was the right thing. Ashley, Summer, and Ethan were all resting for the big night ahead. Jack had waited until he'd heard Ethan's even breathing before slipping out and shutting the door slowly until it locked in place with a quiet click. He needed to talk to his parents. He needed to say out loud what he was thinking, why he was scared that Ethan might have sent the rocks down the mountain, and why he might try something again. But what if Jack was wrong? His dad certainly didn't believe Ethan had caused the rockfall. He'd lectured Jack and Ethan the whole way down the mountain trail.

“Ethan,” his dad had said, “when I tell you that we need to stay together, I mean it. You can't go racing off ahead. Those teenagers could have kicked those rocks on your head too, you know. And Jack,” he'd turned to Jack, his face set in a frown, “I know how scared you were, and when people are frightened they say things they regret. I'm sure you're sorry for accusing Ethan that way.”

Jack had murmured an apology he didn't mean, which Ethan ignored. Now he was standing in front of a door, ready to stir the whole thing up again. Somewhere down the hall a vacuum cleaner whirred. A door slammed with a bang so loud it sounded like a gunshot, and outside a group of kids squealed.

A line from an old movie blinked through his mind like a neon sign:
Speak now, or forever hold your peace.
It was now or never. Taking in a breath, Jack gently tapped the wooden door with his knuckle. A moment later he was sitting on a queen-size bed, looking into the questioning eyes of his mother.

“You look pale, Jack. Are you feeling all right?”

“Yeah. I'm OK,” Jack answered. He began to pull on the cuticle of his finger, unsure how to begin.

“I hear you had a pretty big scare today. When your dad told me you survived a rock slide I about had a heart attack. That's some pretty intense stuff.” Cupping her hand around his neck, she said, “Is that why you're here? Did you want to talk about it?”

“Sort of. I—I want to tell you what I think really happened.”

“You mean about the teenagers kicking the rocks down?”

Shaking his head, Jack tore the piece of skin so that a tiny dot of cherry-red blood began to appear. Looking up, he said, “I mean Ethan.”

Afternoon light poured through the large window, illuminating a halo of curls around his mother's head as she faced him. In the backlight, her expression was hard to read, but Steven's feelings were clear enough; his head slowly shook from side to side, one shake, it seemed, for every word Jack spoke.

“Not this again. Jack, Summer said that it was an accident. Why would you even begin to think Ethan would try to harm us?”

“I don't know—lots of reasons. He doesn't like us. He says that all the time.”

“It's difficult for him,” his mother answered softly. “You know we talked about this already. We need to be patient.”

“More important than that, son, is the fact that you're accusing Ethan on purely circumstantial evidence. Summer said other kids started that slide, and that's good enough for me.” His voice took on a bit of an edge when he added, “And it should be good enough for you, too.”

“Summer does whatever Ethan tells her to do,” Jack protested. “If he told Summer to blame teenagers, then that's what she'd do.”

“Is that all the proof you have? There's nothing else?” his mother asked.

“He kicked rocks at us in the cemetery—that's practically the same as starting a rock slide.”

“I don't think it's anywhere near the same,” his father answered.

“He ran away when you called him, Dad. He just blew you off and vanished up the mountain, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, comes a rock slide. I don't think that's normal, do you? And what about the way he's always whispering to Summer and acting like he wished we'd get out of his life.” The last words came out in a rush, and then there was silence. His mother looked concerned whereas his father seemed almost irritated. Jack's stomach began to slide into his feet when his dad came and stood in front of him. There was no mistaking it now; his father was angry.

“I'm surprised at you, son. The whole idea of bringing other kids into this family—kids who haven't had all the breaks that you've had—was to teach you compassion. I thought you'd be able to walk around in someone else's shoes and see what it's like to be raised in a whole different way. But I guess it didn't work.”

“Steven, he's just trying to tell us what he thinks,” Olivia broke in.

“You're right, you're right.” Taking a deep breath, Steven dropped into an overstuffed chair that had been pushed into a corner. “I'm sorry, Jack, maybe I'm getting a little too hot under the collar here. But if you're going to accuse someone, you've got to have more to go on than a bad feeling. This kind of stuff happened to me all the time when I was in foster care. It's hard to live under a cloud of suspicion just because you're different.”

“Do you really think it was teenagers kicking down those rocks?” Jack asked, getting to his feet.

“Until I have proof otherwise, then I think we need to believe Ethan and Summer. I think we owe them that much.” When his mother nodded in agreement, Jack turned to go. He'd come to his parents with his suspicions, and he'd been shot down. There was nothing more to do but hope they were right.

He used his key to slip back into his darkened room, crawling onto his bed as quietly as a cat. Even though jagged thoughts churned in his brain, when Jack hit the bed he slept like the dead—
dead,
as in what the Landons would have been if the rocks had landed on their heads. Even in the depth of his sleep, he heard the noises those rocks made bouncing off the canyon walls, like the collision of 16-pound balls against tenpins in a bowling alley. In a sweat, he awoke to find Ethan stretched out on his own bed, staring at the ceiling. Jack twisted to see the red digital numbers on the clock between their beds. 4:12. He'd slept for more than an hour.

At 4:16 the door to their room opened slowly. “You guys awake?” Olivia whispered. “We need to start out now if we're going to take part in the mustang capture tonight.”

Jack rolled over and sat up on the bed. “Hey, Mom, I forgot to ask you—how'd it go with your lecture today?”

Olivia gave him a grin and a thumbs-up. “Great! I'll tell you all about it on our drive. Are you up, Ethan?”

“I'm awake.”

“All right then, let's get moving. This mustang trapping is going to be quite an adventure!”

On the long drive toward the Chloride Canyon, Olivia chattered on and on about the seminar: “…so when your dad teased me yesterday about pinkeye in the deer population, he actually picked a good example of the different policies in the Park Service and the BLM. Mostly, though, I spoke about the condition of the deer population here in Zion National Park.”

She turned in her seat to face the kids in the back. “Have you seen any deer since we've been here? They're kind of small and scraggly looking. We think it's because they've stopped migrating out of the park in the fall—they just stay here all year long. That means the herd's isolated, and getting too little fresh genetic material into the mix when they breed.”

“That's cool, Mom,” Jack told her. “So what are they going to do about the deer not getting any new genes?”

“New jeans?” Summer whispered, totally puzzled. “For the deer?”

“Not
those
kind of jeans,” Ashley giggled. “Genes that are inside your cells—you know, that tell your body whether to make brown eyes or blue or white skin or red and all that kind of stuff.”

“And if too many of the bad recessive genes hook together because they didn't get genetic variation, then you get problems,” Jack explained, bewildering Summer even more.

“That's exactly what I was talking about at the seminar,” Olivia said. “I suggested that the park people trap male deer from other areas and bring them in here to revitalize the herd, but it's national park policy to let nature take its course. So they're doing nothing.” She raised her eyebrows in a “that's the way it is” expression.

His parents were being a lot like the Park Service, Jack mused. They were letting
human
nature take its course. The Landons could go on doing nothing and let Ethan keep secretly trying to hurt them—
if
that's what Ethan was doing. His dad's talk had succeeded in making Jack feel guilty about his suspicions, but that didn't make them go away.

Ethan sat slumped in his corner of the tailgate seat in the SUV. His fingers drummed the edges of his knees, where his jeans had worn thin. They looked like they could use a good washing—both the fingers and the jeans; he looked as punky as one of the scruffier deer in Zion. Well, Jack decided, he'd follow park policy and leave Ethan alone.

Acres of dried-up land reached into a horizon of low mountains and cloudless sky. All around him were barren, lifeless stretches of sand with occasional patches of sagebrush and blowing tumbleweed. It was hard to believe that Zion, with its color-drenched stone and brilliant green foliage, was only an hour's drive away. This land was open, flat, and lifeless. How could wild mustangs even survive out in this parched desert? Through the window, Jack watched the miles slip by.

Grinning mischievously, Ashley deliberately began to chant, “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?” since she knew how much it got on Jack's nerves.

“Stop it!” he hissed. “Don't be a dork.”

“I wasn't asking you, I was asking Mom. Hey, Mom, are we there yet?”

Olivia was wrestling with the map. “I'm trying to figure out which road we're supposed to take,” she answered. “I think we ought to be getting there pretty soon. And Ashley, I'll let you know when we get there. In other words, you don't have to ask again.”

Funny, Jack thought—when they traveled, Steven usually did the driving, although Olivia was a perfectly good driver. Without ever talking about it, his parents seemed to divide their lives: His dad did the yard work, kept their car in good shape, and did most of the driving; his mother did the laundry, the food shopping, and packed the kids' lunches every day. Both of them liked to cook, so they took turns with that.

Jack and Ashley didn't have any boy/girl division in their chores; they both had to stack the dirty dishes in the dishwasher and take the clean dishes out, fold their own clothes, keep their personal junk out of the living room, and run the vacuum cleaner. He wondered about Ethan and Summer, whether they had to do chores in their grandmother's house on the reservation—or in what
used
to be their grandmother's house. The social worker said that starting now, their grandmother would spend the rest of her life in a nursing home.

Just to aggravate Jack, Ashley kept whispering, “Are we there yet? Are we there yet?” until he gave her an elbow in the ribs.

“Mo-om, Jack hit me,” she whined, and then she started to laugh and said to Summer, “Just kidding. That's how we used to act when we were little and took long trips in the car.”

Summer blinked uncertainly.

“Didn't you do that?” Ashley asked her. “You must have gone on long trips in a car with your brother, didn't you? Like, when you went to powwows?”

“Grandmother never had a car,” Ethan answered. “So we never went anywhere, 'cause there was no bus, either. Just the school bus to junior high in Lander, outside the reservation. Summer doesn't ride the bus 'cause she's not in junior high yet.”

“You mean your grandmother never left the reservation in her whole life?” Even though Jack hadn't been talking to Ethan, he couldn't help but blurt out the question. It seemed impossible that a person could live in the United States but never leave one tiny corner of it. Maybe it was because Jack and Ashley had been hauled around the country since they were old enough to walk.

“Not when she could decide for herself.”

“What does that mean? Did she leave when she was younger?” Jack pressed.

Again Jack saw the flash of anger in Ethan's eyes as he answered, “When Grandmother was a little girl like Summer, white people came and took her to a boarding school. She was supposed to learn to be like a white person—she didn't want to, but they said she had to. They wouldn't let her talk in Shoshone, only in English. Once she forgot and said something in Shoshone, so they taped her mouth shut and made her scrub the whole big gym floor on her hands and knees to punish her. It took her all night.”

That was the most words they'd ever heard all at once from Ethan, and it left the Landons in stunned silence. Is this what his dad meant when he said Jack should walk around in Ethan's shoes? As bad as all that sounded, Jack told himself, it still didn't give Ethan the right to roll rocks on their heads.

Steven answered, “Different times, different people, Ethan. That would never happen today. Any school official who punished a kid that way would be fired. Or maybe even arrested.”

Olivia added, “Lots of things have changed for the better since your grandmother was a little girl. For just one example, wild mustangs used to be rounded up, jammed into big trucks with horrible conditions, and shipped to slaughterhouses, where they were butchered for dog food. Today we protect the mustangs.”

Ethan just turned his face to the window and peered out.

Dry and dusty, the rangeland that slid past their SUV now showed endless acres of yellowish brown grass, broken here and there by clumps of sagebrush and an occasional small tree. Behind the flat land, the mountains looked more like hills, cone-shaped brown hills dotted with junipers and pinyon pines.