The Secrets She Keeps (30 page)

“How can I see anything but all that pain?”

“You will. I promise, you will. There will always be men with guns, Nash. There’ll always be…I don’t know. Ugliness? But one day you’ll see how beautiful those horses are. Jesus, those crazy animals! You’ll see them, and the beauty of ’em will be bigger than anything awful. Beauty trumps the bad every damn time, Nash, I swear.”

His thumb caresses her cheek. She feels the shift in him. And this is the man she wants, the one she saw in the pool in the light of the moon. He is a different Jack because she is a different Nash. She is not the strong, horsey girl, the girl who can flip a saddle onto a mare, the girl who stands with her arms crossed in front of a long, dark car, even though her heart is beating hard in her chest. She is a girl who is crushed, who needs, who is right then leaning and crying, and so much of it, too much of it—love, two people together—seems not about love at all but about weakness and strength, power and powerlessness, the yearning to be small and needy or large and needed, the movement of various pieces by two people, whatever it takes to fill out some idea of yourself, but none of that matters now.

“Those horses…” His voice is husky and low. She doesn’t want to talk about horses anymore. She turns her face and her mouth meets his. There are his lips, and there is the warm taste of alcohol on his breath, and there is his tongue and hers.

“Nash. We can’t…” His body says otherwise. “You know I care about you, but Alice’ll—”

She shuts him up with her mouth. There are tongues and heat and he grips her hair. She is down on the bed, and he is over her, his stubble is against her cheek, and he is heavy and she shifts him ever so, and his hands are fast and rough. She is not afraid, even though she has not known exactly how to imagine what comes next. She does not think about the rightness or wrongness of what he does, either. Who he is, who he really is, the way he’s a contradiction—caring and crass, selfless and selfish, it doesn’t matter yet. Nor does the complicated question of who exactly is using whom. Every mistaken idea—none of them matter. He was over Lilly like this, his hands were fast and rough on her, and this strange thought fuels her own heat and desire.

She lets him unbutton her blouse, and she lets him pull her pants down over her hips. She is someone now who is vulnerable and taken, who has small wrists under large hands, a borrowed someone, a someone who is made to feel the one thing everyone wants to feel: protected in the face of danger. It is a someone who will not be there in the morning or in the days that follow. It’s powerful, that weakness; who knew? There is the subterranean rumble of triumph. Her secret self is both whole and unmoored, but, most of all, that self is maddeningly fleeting, and this knowledge fills her with urgency. She wants more and more of him and her and them, now.

As Jack’s mouth presses on Nash’s, as his hands cup the curve of her breasts, Mrs. Shumley, that ox, settles in for the night at the Riverside Hotel. She unrolls her stockings, unsnaps that huge pink girdle. At least, this is how Nash imagines it later, when she finds out what’s happened: The ox sighs as she eases into bed, just after dining with Raymond and Phyllis Whittaker, old friends visiting from Chicago. How shocked Phyllis was to hear about the goings-on at Tamarosa, particularly about the despicable ruse played on the great Stuart Marcel by his strumpet of a wife. Mrs. Shumley whispered Nash’s own words to Phyllis over oysters Rockefeller, as Raymond chatted with the waiter about the wine. That actress—an
extra,
really—she probably wanted to run off with her cowboy, make a pretty new family without the bother of the baby’s father. As if Stuart would stand for that.

The rest of the story will be pieced together with the help of Lilly’s friend Eve, but it is also easy to envision: Upon arriving home, Phyllis Whittaker rushes to call her sister Wilma, wife of the great Mr. George Greatstone,
Visions of Africa
producer and longtime business partner of Stuart Marcel. Greatstone’s niece, Mary Ann Madrid, even has a small role in the film, thanks to him. In fact, on the other side of the world right then, Mary Ann Madrid is being eaten alive by mosquitos in that costume (a short jungle-print toga, with a palm-frond plume in her hair), as she waits to be taken captive by drum-pounding natives. For two weeks, Harvey Patch, the assistant director, has been promising that Mr. Marcel will be arriving at any moment to finish what’s supposed to be his most important film yet. Truthfully, Harvey Patch has no idea where the hell Stuart Marcel is. In spite of the huge amounts of alcohol he’s been consuming, Patch has lost a good ten pounds from nerves and dysentery, from blood flukes, and from running around with a shovel to protect himself against another wild-boar attack.

In the desert, though, in a creaky bed in a cabin at Tamarosa Ranch just days before Greatstone gets a call from his wife at the bug-infested front desk of Hotel Misery, Jack’s hands are so hot that he is nearly burning Nash’s skin. He is right—there will always be men with guns, and, too, there will always be vicious gossips and bad mistakes.

He parts the cleft between her legs, and he enters her, and small choices become large outcomes as the rain falls on the roof and on the dry desert ground, and as Mrs. Shumley shuts off the light.

Shaye turned off the movie when my phone rang. It was a silly film, an old black-and-white that made you wonder what in the world people were thinking in those days. Right then, a woman in a short jungle-print toga with a palm-frond plume in her hair was being taken captive by drum-pounding natives. We’d been in our pajamas far too long, and it was time to get moving anyway. I went upstairs to talk to Amy, who was phoning from an old, ragged hotel near the bottom of an active volcano. There was a rain forest surrounding it, she told me. She and Hannah saw two capuchin monkeys. They had a view of the volcano from their room. Why had I been gone from home for so long, she wanted to know? Melissa told her I’d been at the ranch. I should go back to Seattle, she said, because Dad needed me. He was the kind of person who’d leave his coffee cup on the top of the car before driving off.

Whether it was distance or Amy’s own ever-laid-back temperament, she was less concerned about my absence than Melissa was. It made me think of the two of them, their small, distinct selves, getting ready for school. While Melissa organized her little blue backpack, Amy shoved everything into her orange one and hoped for the best. Back then, I’d have never thought I’d actually miss the days of buying school supplies, but there you have it.

I hung up from Amy and called Melissa to check in. It seemed she’d decided to ignore her parents’ bad behavior, which is a trick we used to try, too. She asked if we still had that blow-up raft we had when they were kids. She and Thomas had hunted around in the garage and couldn’t find it, but they were sure it was there somewhere. She and Kelly and Jess wanted to float it down the Sammamish River.

This is what we looked like: a trip out in a raft, Thomas making scrambled eggs, dinner with Richard and André or maybe our neighbors Lawrence and his wife, Sienna, at that great Italian place. Amy on the phone with a new love, her voice filling the house; Hugo barking his head off every time he heard the latch of the front gate. Thomas asking if I saw that thing on the news about the art heist; Thomas and me, lying on the couch together and laughing so hard at some comedian on TV. A trip to the Asian market, a meal gone wrong that we all made fun of, filling Easter baskets the kids had since they were babies. A sore throat; an opossum in the yard; the three of us plus Melissa’s new boyfriend sitting in a row at Amy’s violin concert. The poor guy clapped at the wrong place, because who ever knows when to clap at those things, and we kidded him hard about it. We could, because each and every one of us had done it over the years. Our marriage was us, but our marriage was also a family and a life. Lives entwined.

If I went home, and the mood came back and Thomas looked at me and said it was over, I didn’t know what I’d do. If I went home and I looked at Thomas and said it was over, I didn’t know what I’d do, either. I’d be destroyed, flattened. I’d be desolate. I’d be the desert. I’d be what the desert looks like at first glance. When you look further, though, when you look close enough to see it all, it is teeming with life. I’d be that old, desert old, and I’d be young as I once was, too.

—

“Are the horses afraid?” I asked. “Because I think I’d be afraid if a helicopter was chasing me.”

The corrals had grown in numbers and size. There were five large holding pens, and the fencing that created the chute now reached out toward the open land of the desert. Lorraine eyed me from the stables, but then she looked up toward the sky. I saw it, too, a dark cloud moving fast. A fat drop of water fell on my cheek and I wiped it away. The rain began to patter down, pinging against metal and plastic.

“Come on,” Kit Covey said. He grabbed my sleeve and we ran. We took the two wobbly stairs up into the trailer, where Kit exhaled. “Whew! It’s really coming down.”

“I’ve never seen it do this.”

“The desert,” he said, as explanation. “It won’t last long, which is a shame for those horses. They sure as hell need it. You’re soaked.” He handed me a towel from the padded bench, and I patted my hair dry.

“That came fast. Out of nowhere. The cold, too.”

“Sit,” he said. He went to a stove and turned on the burner under a pot of coffee. “Cup?”

“Please.”

The coffee was bitter and thick from sitting too long, but it was warm, at least, as the rain hit the roof. That day, I could tell that the energy was different at the site. The movement was faster, the voices louder. The chute that reached toward the desert had large, wide arms, arms that beckoned to the animals. I had seen new road-closure signs on the drive.

Kit Covey rubbed the side of his face with one hand. “You asked if they’re afraid? I won’t lie to you. Yeah, they are, and in part that’s why it works. The noise of the helicopter sets them running. And the pilot has to get pretty low to drive them toward the trap.”

“How low?”

“Low enough to get them going the right direction. He’ll back off a little after that, depending on the distance, so they don’t get as stressed. Then they’ll usually follow the Judas horse right on in. There may be a few stragglers for the wranglers to deal with, but it’s the helicopter that does most of the work. So, yeah, they’re afraid.”

“The Judas horse.” The name sounded awful. Tricked, trapped.

“The Judas horse, the Prada. The pilot. Called a lot of things.”

“Jasper.”

“Jasper, too.” He smiled. This was the Kit that was familiar to me, the one who drove his truck and danced with me, ever so briefly. The Kit out here, though, he reminded me that there was much I didn’t know about this man. How he felt about his mother, what he was like when he was angry. What his daughter sounded like, laughing.

I tried to imagine it: Something overhead. The frightening
whick-whick-whick
of helicopter blades, a huge object lowering itself above you. Running. Fearing for your life and the lives of your offspring. “This is the way it has to be done?”

“There are other ways. I told you about the water traps, right? Fire crews’ll bring water to an existing spring to lure them. That means three thousand gallons every few days, and I can tell you, that’s a lot of water. Then you wait. You can gather maybe twenty-five, thirty horses at a time that way. But it’d take too long, and it’d be too expensive here. We aim to gather eight hundred.”

“Eight hundred!”

“Well, Nevada’s got maybe twenty thousand wild horses and burros. Half the entire wild-horse population of the West. This land out here can’t sustain them.”

The rain stopped, just like that. One of the men yelled, “Damn sandwich is wet,” and the others laughed.

“Trevor Tompkins,” Kit said. “Our helicopter pilot. And that man’s gotta have his food. You need to come and watch.”

“I can watch?”

“Anyone can. You call the BLM, tell ’em you want to. Meet at the assigned place of the day, and there you go. And you, Miss McBride, can skip the call to the office.”

“P.R.,” I said.

“I want you to see.”

“I want to see.”

“I’ll let you know. The first one will probably be in a few days. We can’t always tell. Conditions change.”

“A few days. So it’s happening.”

“It’s happening.”

“My aunt, she said she saw a gather before. She told me last night. She said…Well, it wasn’t what she said exactly. She just indicated that something bad happened. I think that’s the reason for the boot-throwing.” I shrugged. I didn’t know how I felt about this, or about much else, truthfully.

“Around here? Recently?”

“I think she meant a long time ago.”

“Well, that explains it. It was brutal then. It was. Even the early gathers the BLM did. And before that? Damn mustangers did whatever the hell they wanted. It was a free-for-all. They sold the corpses for cash. Dog-food companies…Jesus.” He shook his head in disgust. “We’ve got the same pieces, sure—horses, land, humans—but we have a different mindset and different problems. Overburdened land, first off. Depleted vegetation. Vanishing species of it, even. We’ve got to think about the health of the wildlife, all of it, and how the horses themselves are doing. It’s not a perfect answer, but it’s the most gentle, humane one we have. Are they afraid? Yeah. Are they sometimes hurt? Yeah. But we give them our care and our respect. We’re as thoughtful as we can reasonably be. Some things don’t change, right? They gathered back then. We still do it today. They used airplanes. We use helicopters. But we understand more as time goes on, and we try to do better. We try to be a damn sight more kind.”