Painted Horses (2 page)

“So where you headed?”

“It’s . . . a long story. A canyon of some sort, south of Billings. Near an Indian reservation.” She’d been schooling herself with a book earlier, looked around now and found where it slipped from her lap while she slept.
The Crow Indians
, by Lowie. Hardly as exciting as the contents of the satchel.

“Your boy in oil?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“That’s what’s in Billings. Oilmen. Like Texas.”

“His name’s David and he’s not a boy. He’s not in Billings, either. He’s in Manhattan. He’s a broker. I’m coming out here for my own job.”

“A modern girl.”

She shrugged. “Women don’t necessarily just keep house anymore. You sound like my mother.”

“You sound like mine.”

“Well you’re lucky, then.”

“Huh. Can I ask a personal question?”

“Would the word
no
stop you?”

“How long you been engaged?”

She was again very aware of the ring. “About a week. Officially.”

He smoked and looked thoughtful. “You get this job; he pops the question.”

Is this anyone’s business
, she thought. “Pretty much,” she answered. What little she’d inhaled of the cigarette had her spinning. She stubbed the remainder.

“How long you know him?”

“Good lord. Long enough.”

“Don’t get testy. I’m just thinking, you might be the modern version of a war bride.”

“The what?”

“You know, like when we were kids. Guy’s shipping out, gets all panicked, pulls the trigger so to speak. This is the same thing, in reverse. Girl’s got a job, heading for parts unknown, guy . . . You know.”

“Pulls the trigger. So to speak.”

He crushed his own cigarette. “So to speak. Look, I’m not saying he ain’t sincere. I’m just saying, we don’t live in the world we used to. You said so yourself.”

“Do you read
Playboy
?”

Now she had him. He looked like a rabbit himself, a cornered one. He said, “I’ve seen it.”

“It’s for the modern man, I take it?”

He shrugged. “Sure, I guess.”

“What’s wrong with me having a fiancé in the east and a job out . . . here?” Another glance through the window and the question seemed ridiculous even to her. She gentled. “Look. What’s conventional anymore anyway?”

He shook out another smoke. “You got me there.”

The train crawled to a stop in Miles City, a metropolis in name only. Catherine was sure the entire downtown could fit well within Kensington Gardens or Regent’s Park. But relative to the country she had just witnessed the place was indeed bustling.

She had two hours to stretch. She followed the boy off the coach and onto the platform. He seemed intent on his own business.

She called to his back. “Have you been here before?”

He turned. “Go out through the front of the station. You’ll see the main drag a few blocks down.”

She turned to go, but now he called after her. “Hey. So where is it?”

“Where’s what?”

“Londinium. You never said where.”

She shook her head. “It’s London. Twenty feet underground.”

He looked stalled in his tracks, lost in the hall the first day at school.

“I’m an archaeologist.”

“Huh.” He shouldered his satchel and walked away.

Catherine herself owned a rucksack, a heavy leather model used in Europe by alpinists and adventurers. She bought it before returning home, bought it because it suggested the sort of life she wanted to lead. She carried it now, its compartment stuffed with hand tools and notebooks and a Leica movie camera, a going-away gift from her father she still hadn’t learned to use.

Springtime in Montana seemed a knot of contradiction. A frigid breeze gusted off the plains like the stab of a knife, but only at intervals. Otherwise the afternoon sunlight touched her skin like the reach of a fire. She walked along in her rucksack and swung her arms and wanted never to sit so still for so long again.

The smell of the cigarette owned her nostrils but once when the wind really blew she picked up something else, the dense odor of some pungent new herb, and whatever it was made her wobble with hunger. She rounded the corner and took in the brick buildings along Main Street. She entered the first café she found.

The glass eyes of three dead deer and a gigantic brindle bull stared down from the wall. She looked at her disheveled reflection in the mirror behind the bar, looked past herself at the eye of another beast hovering in the glass. A framed painting, hanging on the wall behind her.

She turned to face the painting. A river of bison flowed across a landscape identical to what she had traversed in the train. The head of this long herd loomed in the foreground, its lead bull dark and massive, towering above an evil-looking canid and the stripped ribs of some other, less fortunate creature. She could hardly look away.

“It’s called
When the Land Belonged to God
.”

She turned toward the speaker, a wrinkled yet ramrod-straight old gent perched at the far end of the bar with two equally wrinkled cronies. “Charlie Russell,” he added.

“Do you serve food here, Mr. Russell?”

The men laughed. “Not me, miss. The painting. It’s by Charlie Russell. I met him right where you’re standing, fifty year ago by God.” He gestured toward the back bar, its time-tinted mirror. “Checked his teeth in that selfsame glass. I wasn’t any older’n you.”

Catherine felt the blood flow through her legs again. She wanted to stretch so badly. “Can I get a sandwich?”

He brought her a menu. “Like a seat?”

“I’m fine. Just an egg sandwich.”

“Been on the train?”

“Yes. For too long.”

“Been west before? No? Did you see our bullet hole?”

“I don’t believe so.”

He walked down the bar, beckoning Catherine to follow. “Look halfway to the floor.”

She saw a hole the size of a dime, like a dark knot in the red hue of the wood. She couldn’t resist putting her finger there, the grain worn smooth a thousand fingers before.

“Nineteen-aught-three. Fight over a horse. Let me get your sandwich.”

In 1903 her parents were not quite born. New York and Boston and Philadelphia had had incandescent lighting for a decade and the first actual movie was a Western, filmed that year in New Jersey, of all places. Here they shot up saloons over horses. Catherine walked back down the bar.

She was traveling to her first real job, but did not regard this as her first adventure. Two years ago she’d boarded a steamer in New York, bound for England on a Fulbright. The passage, her first, had seemed as interminable then as the crawl of the train did now. But in London the world had opened for her in ways she couldn’t have guessed, and travel-worn or not she couldn’t help but feel a sort of hope.

She ate her sandwich while the wind lifted outside. She could feel her legs again, could feel the boards of the floor through the soles of her sneakers. She gave a last little wave to the men at the bar. She slipped out the door.

The glow of the sun had yielded to the chill of the air. She wished she’d brought more than her sweater from the train, but resisted the idea of returning only to sit for another hour at the station. She looked up the street, saw the quaint old architecture. Down the road beyond the edge of town she spied a bridge, a line of trees along the river. She set off walking.

The trees near the water were a variety that didn’t grow in the east, mammoth and heavy barked like a chestnut only much straighter, with limbs shooting for the sky. The trees wound through a ramshackle city park, here and there a mound of dirty snow rotting from a winter not long past. She smelled the fertile muck of the river.

She followed a muddy path a few feet and stepped onto the wet grass instead. Water pooled on the ground, nubs of spring green poking through. A sagging gazebo peeped through the trees, dark and mysterious as a ruin. Catherine made her way toward it, stepped around a massive trunk and nearly walked into a horse.

The animal flared like a cobra, lips curling from yellow teeth as crooked as the fingers of a witch. She jumped back with her breath in her throat. The horse shook its head and stamped a hoof. This was no regular horse but a demon horse, garish and primeval with symbols in yellow and red, rings around one eye and bands up its legs and the splayed print of a human hand plastered on a flank. She fought to reject the notion she’d come face-to-face with the maniacal ghost of a war pony.

She found the wit to step aside. One eerie blue eyeball strained in its socket to follow. The horse was tethered and saddled.

“Not sure who spooked who, exactly.”

Catherine jumped anew. A man came around the animal’s backside, sliding an open palm along rump and flank. The horse again shook its head. “Are you all right, miss? Miss?”

She felt a spike of fury at her own fear. She knew she was shaking, the embarrassment nothing short of crushing. She stared at a smudge on his washed-out blue shirt. Paint.

“I’m fine. Who’d paint a horse anyway.” Catherine wheeled and made for the street in a rushing walk, chin planted on her chest to avoid an outright run. Her heart banged against her ribs but she willed herself toward something like composure. She did not want to think of herself as fleeing, not when she’d barely arrived.

She calmed by the time she reached the station. The wind blew with a real fury now, bending dead grass to the earth and slapping trash against the buildings. She hadn’t been around horses since the riding lessons her father insisted upon when she was a girl. Those were well-mannered stable horses, no malice whatsoever.

The boy had returned from his private errand when she took her seat on the train. He seemed less inclined now toward either showmanship or conversation. His face had the red flush of a lamp.

She watched the waning sun play with the colors of the rocks and the low broken hills, saw muted, shifting shades of green and gray. The sapphire sky went white, then pink in the west. By the time the train lurched forward, shadows crawled across the ground. Flecks of grit blasted against the glass.

Not far down the line she saw a mounted rider in the open country to the south, loping toward a notch on the skyline. The blue-shirted man from the park. Catherine couldn’t imagine how horse and rider both didn’t cartwheel away in the wind.

She took up her book again and studied the name on the spine. Robert Lowie was an anthropologist who had himself spent time in this country and almost certainly would not have fled from a horse.

She had missed her opportunity. The scientist in her should have taken the cue to investigate. The historian should have unearthed a primitive meaning.

Still, she was very far from home, and just now very aware of it. She had two final hours on the train and knew she should just slide back into sleep, knew as well this wouldn’t happen.

She’d stay awake, and dreams would come anyway. She’d see a million black bison, flowing across the plains. She’d dream of mounted warriors, their painted horses.

2

He found the herd on the flat above the canyon, a stretch of land devoid of farm or fence. He’d come out to match on canvas the angle of the light on a batholith, thrusting through the earth like a breaching red whale. His own mare cropped bunchgrass while he mixed pigments, tested colors with the ball of his thumb. He heard her pause in her steady feeding, from the edge of his eye saw her head rise, her ears turn forward.

A neigh like a plea rippled through the falling light. The mare nickered and neighed back and took two steps and John H came off the seat of his jeans, half stumbled on a sage root and felt lightning flash in his knee. He recovered and caught up the reins. She was a loyal horse but also a captive mustang. Loyalty to her own kind might prove the stronger. He whoaed her and checked the cinch and mounted. He left paint and canvas where they lay.

He rode south across the flat at a lope and steered her into a northeast-running fissure, a wash cut by seasonal water through the time-heaped strata of the plains. He slacked the reins and let her pick her way through stalagmites of crumbling clay, weird impermanent formations jutting like teeth up the walls of the wash. The mare slipped in gumbo above the fissure’s wet floor, lurched in a jerk like the missed stroke of a motor. John H felt the shock of her unbalanced weight throb through his legs. He braced himself to ride out a fall.

It never came. The mare caught herself heavily on her front feet and schussed to the bottom, hooves sinking in the muck from yesterday’s rain. He rode up the center of the wash. She found dry purchase in places but in others the walls of the wash bottlenecked to permit passage through wet mud only and here he felt the pull of her hooves against the suck of the earth.

He reined up after five minutes and listened. A draft pushed down the draw, an omen of dark. Evening wind. He strained his ears and heard nothing though the mare seemed to sense something and she pawed at the muck with the urge to be on. He let her move. The light fell fast in the fissure but he looked up at the rim of the plain to see a lavender band on the lip of the sky. Daylight dying.