"Holy shit!" Ted whispered. "What the hell was that?"
"Musta been 'n owl."
"Never seen an owl that big."
"Musta been a big owl."
They all felt they had traveled a long way into the darkness before Ted stopped and shut off the engine. For a few moments they sat, listening to the immense, sudden silence, the darkness so complete outside the windows it seemed to be pressing against them. Finally they opened their doors and stepped out, and as their eyes adjusted, they saw the Badlands wall, a blacker blackness than the night itself, looming in the near distance, thrusting out of the plains and going straight up, solid and impenetrable. They angled toward it, feeling their way toward the horses.
"Still think it's half crazy, takin 'em in there," Carson said.
"Maybe," Ted said. "But what else we got to do?"
"Than be crazy?"
"Yeah."
"Not much, I guess, way things're goin."
It had been Ted who'd insisted they take the horses into the Badlands—the concession he'd demanded if they wouldn't go after Magnus. Carson had argued against it. "Ain't no point," he'd said. "The more complicated we make this, the more chances we got a bein caught. We ain't tryin a hide it. Just want a make sure no one knows we're the ones did't. You think the horses's goin a care?"
Ted had surprised him. "Yeah," he'd said.
Then, as the other three looked at him, he'd said more quietly, a little abashed to be speaking of such things, "They're spiritual beings. It makes a difference how we do it."
"That is right," Willi said immediately. "I with Ted agree."
"We ain't takin 'em to church."
"That ain't what I mean."
"Point is, the end result's the same either way."
"There's nothing good in any've this. It's just one, long, ugly road, enit? And we just can't seem to get off it. So the least we oughta do is walk it the right way."
Ted said this with a vehemence that silenced them. They felt beneath his words a grief that would not end, a fog of loss and bereavement so thick he didn't understand it and so wide he couldn't remember if he'd ever been out of it, and what he was speaking now was a single, clear idea that cut through some of it—did not disperse it, but showed a way, for a while, to move within it. All of them suddenly looked up and saw each other and felt inside themselves the same kind of grieving, the same fog of loss, and each knew, without knowing the sources, that the others felt it, too. It almost frightened them—that they were so close, that what they each held secret was so nearly known and yet not known. They all felt that they had plucked the others out of the night, held the others in their eyes, and that each of them was so held, visible and yet transparent, and the feeling hushed them, made them stare at each other with a strange and humble wonder.
"You're right, Ted," Earl said, his voice like a noise carried by the breeze out of his own fog.
"What we are doing," Willi said. "It should be hard, and it should be so that we almost cannot do it. So that whatever might stop us in the world, we have to give it every chance."
Carson, feeling it all, too, yet resisted a while longer, clinging to practicality, which for so long had been his reliable guide. "I just don' know," he said. "You might be makin this more 'n it is. I'm the one trained these animals, but I ain't seein any pilgrimage here. Just a thing's gotta be done."
"Just because you don't see a pilgrimage doesn't mean you're not on one, you know?"
"It is the Red Road. And the Black Road. Both of them. And Ted is saying how we walk is what makes the difference. Is what makes one from the other."
"Yeah. Maybe I'm sayin that."
"There were horses here way back, you know? My uncle says their spirits are still in the Badlands. I think these horses would want to go there. To be with their ancestors."
"
Mitakuye Oyasin.
It's how we gotta treat 'em, enit?"
"Mitak what?"
"All my relations," Willi answered. "It is a Lakota saying meaning we are all related. Everybody, every being, every thing."
"You learn that in Germany?"
"Many people know it there."
Carson shook his head. "I been livin here all my life, an I ain't never heard it. I don't know which one a us is weirder, Willi. But OK. We'll go."
GUIDED BY LANDMARKS
they had memorized the first time they'd come, they found the horses in their lonely draw. The horses came out of the darkness and allowed themselves to be bridled, and Carson took a hatchet from a sheath at his belt and chopped through the ice and managed to find some water underneath. He led the horses to it and let them drink. They slurped noisily while he pulled fence staples and removed clips, and when the horses were satisfied and the wires loose, the seven of them set off, Willi and Earl holding the wires down while Ted and Carson led the horses over them, then replacing the staples at Earl's insistence.
True to the forecast it began snowing, the night so dark they were aware of the snow first by its touch on their faces, and only then did they look and see the flakes appearing briefly in the nearer dark before disappearing again into the white earth. The wind increased, pushing the snow along the ground. All over the land, hori
zon to horizon, they heard snow moving, millions of flakes in a massive hush and shuffle. They walked through it, guiding themselves by the wall of the Badlands looming nearer. They knew each other as presences of darkness moving nearby, at the same pace, in the same silence. They lost track of time, and none of them cared to track it. They walked the abandoned section line road, and when it ended, they went cross-country, taking down fences when they had to and putting them back up. Whenever they stopped, the horses lowered their heads and grazed and then, feeling the tug of reins, lifted their heads again and plodded on.
"Why's he doing it?"
Ted's voice startled them all, coming disembodied and sudden from the darkness. It even startled him, and he lowered it into the register of wind and moving snow. "These animals. What's he got against 'em?"
There were few boundaries on such a night. There was only passage, negotiated together, and Carson replied, "He saw what he wanted a see. That's the nearest I can come to explainin it."
And he told them, briefly, with the snow descending all around and pinging against their jackets, what had happened, knowing they would hold it to themselves alone. He spoke of Rebecca, and of Magnus's presence, and how he didn't know any longer whether Rebecca had been driven toward him, Carson, and he toward her, by that presence, or whether they had been impelled by their own internal gravities. He didn't know, he said, how much two people could be attracted to each other by forces outside themselves, and he said he had to be careful not to blame Magnus for everything, yet he had come to think that if Magnus hadn't insisted on seeing what he wanted to see, Rebecca would not have seen it, though he didn't know about himself. In any case, what Magnus saw happening hadn't, after all, happened, and a man who could see what wasn't there and could refuse to hear what was, or to acknowledge any need for reform in his own behavior or vision, was also a man who could confuse happiness with the exercise of power and the alleviation of anger with revenge, and such a man might have no way to stop himself when circumstances of revenge and the exercise of power formed a vicious circle. For such a man could never see beyond that circle. And these horses had come within that circle and gotten trapped in it. Therefore, Carson repeated, all he could do to explain why the seven of them were walking in the snow and dark this night was that Magnus saw what he wanted to see and had the power to go on doing so, and so he could not see that these horses were merely horses. He had turned them into something else, into symbols that spoke the world as he believed it was. And that, it seemed to Carson, was a dangerous thing—to turn the things of the world and the beings that occupied it into statements to convince yourself and others of your own notions of the world. And Carson said he was not even sure what he meant when he said all this, that he was himself merely trying to grasp it, and he wasn't sure he ever would.
He spoke all this slowly, and all the time they walked, and the wall of the Badlands grew closer so that it now loomed above them, a black background behind the descending snow.
"I can't seem to get away from the sonofabitch," Carson said. "Anymore I don't sometimes know if I'm thinkin somethin because it's me thinkin it, or if it's a thought comes out a him. The last thing he did is he's buyin our ranch."
The storm increased, obscuring even the wall before them, and they walked for a while invisible to each other, in a world of all sound, where only feet and hooves striking the snow and lifting from it again served as evidence for any kind of presence at all.
"He's buying your ranch?" Earl's voice came filtered through the snowfall.
"Offering two and a half times what it's worth. Like somehow the sonofabitch knows that ranch's all that matters to me. Same way he knew these horses mattered to his wife. Hell, I don't know. Ain't no way my parents can resist that kind of money, though."
But suddenly he was seized by a great doubt that coiled in his stomach and uncoiled like a broken spring, and he stumbled under its force and had to fight to regain his stride. What if resistance was the very thing his parents needed—and he'd denied it to them? What if they needed to see what forces were aligned against or with them? What if his silence, which he'd thought protected them and prevented him from using them, merely left them ignorant, without the information they needed to do what they might otherwise do? What if Magnus was making all the rules and setting all the structures precisely because, as Rebecca had said, he was rich enough to hide himself? Because lying was easy for him? What if he, Carson, was merely being a fool, feeding Magnus's power by his silence? Letting him take over more and more land and influence by offering to others what he knew, and perhaps only he knew, were cheap dreams, a cascade of coins cast on the floor, rolling in unsteady circles. Kneel and pick them up. And stand to find your self gone: your land, your family, your past. And think yourself a winner.
For the first time in his life, Carson felt panic rising inside him. His heart wobbled like an unbalanced pulley. He'd let Magnus convince his parents they were winners. He'd forgotten what to keep his eyes on, and he'd fallen. Fallen bad. Maybe let his parents fall, though they would never know it. Let the land fall. His grandfather. All. And maybe he had done it out of love. Maybe out of care. But it didn't matter. Maybe they were short-term things, love and care, and people like Magnus depended on people like Carson and his parents not seeing that, depended on them thinking love and care mattered beyond death and change. But what if they didn't? What if only the land did? And Carson had let Magnus have it.
If it hadn't been for Orlando's reins in his hands, Carson would have fallen when he stumbled, but he clutched at the reins, and Orlando's neck, though weak, held him up. And the horse's warm breath against his neck dampened his panic. In any case, it was too late. His parents, as he'd known they would, had decided, and his father had already signed the first papers. There was nothing to be done. Nothing at the moment but to walk forward through the snow, on this mission that was unchanged and irrevocable. And maybe he was wrong about his fears. There were no clear lines to follow. No boundaries he could be absolutely sure of. He'd done what he'd done. He hadn't spoken of the cow, and if he'd been silent out of weakness or shame as well as out of honor, there was nothing to do but accept it. Go on. But without even knowing he was speaking aloud, without even knowing he was continuing the conversation he'd been having with the others, that it had mingled with the realization inside his mind, he spoke in a voice of wonder and loss.
"Everything I know's on that place. How can it all get turned into money?"
They all sensed what he meant. Not just the survey, the plat, the spaces marked by legal definitions and fences, but the snowy surface of things ironhard right now but moving always toward changes: the prairie flowers that would rise small and shy in the spring, the mallards and canvasbacks that would drop into the stock ponds, the work that defined the way one moved in the world.
"About everything can get turned into money," Earl said. "Maybe all you can do is try not to be miserable, you know?" The snow decreased a little, and a few stars appeared, the high clouds scudding downwind behind them as they marched forward, the wall rising imperceptibly higher. Earl thought of the string of cars going down to the liquor stores in Nebraska across the reservation border—a place of black magic where even misery was turned into money and multiplied and then carried back up across the border stronger than when it went down. Misery was an endless resource, inexhaustible.
"My grandmother lived her whole life miserable, I think," Willi said. "For her, being miserable was maybe the only way she knew how to be happy."
"Sounds pathetic," Carson said.
""It's what happened to us," Ted said. "Losing land like you're saying."
"Us who?"
"Indians."
"Yeah. I guess it did."
"Just goes on. Guns or money. However it works. No one much cares what land means to the people who don't keep it."
"That makes me feel better."
"I'm just saying."
They walked in silence for an indefinite time. Then Earl's voice, lilting, questioning, arose out of the night.
"There wasn't anything you could do, you know?" he said. "It's hard to fight a robber. Our grandfathers tried about everything, you know?"
For a moment Carson was flooded with emotion. What a strange, quiet guy Earl was. In one way his words meant that Carson's own ancestors were robbers of the land. Yet Earl intended comfort. And, oddly, Carson felt better. He wasn't sure Earl was right—that there was nothing he could have done—but the words nonetheless relieved him, in some nameless way forgave him.
THEY STRUGGLED UPWARD
through narrow corridors of clay and sand, the dark escarpments of the Badlands rising above them, finding their way with no idea where they were going, only knowing they had to go and believing they would recognize their arrival. The walk had weakened the horses, and the climb slowed them. They plodded with their heads down, needing constant urging. With the passing of the storm, the stars shed enough light on the whitened ground so they could see obstacles and stones in their way. Ted walked ahead, guiding, and the others followed, each holding reins, leading the horses single file. They went inward and up, through narrow channels that sometimes dead-ended, forcing them to retreat and try another. They felt as if they were walking into the sky and would emerge in some skyland where nothing was familiar. They lost their sense of direction. Though the Great Bear wheeled above them around the pivot of the North Star, they did not bother to read that direction or to be guided by it. The land controlled where they could go, and they moved within its maze.