Painted Horses

Painted

Horses

Painted

Horses

M
ALCOLM
B
ROOKS

Grove Press

New York

Copyright © 2014 by Malcolm Brooks

Jacket design by Royce M. Baker

Jacket photograph © Yva Momatiuk/John Eastcott/Getty Images

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

“John H: I” (which begins on page 42) appeared in different form as

“Rail to the West,” in Big Sky Journal.

Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

FIRST EDITION

ISBN 978-0-8021-2164-6

eISBN 978-0-8021-9260-8

Grove Press

an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

www.groveatlantic.com

14 15 16 17 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Marcia Callenberger, who gave me a book, and started a line . . .

Beyond Arrow Creek, by the Mission house, the war-drum of Bear-below was beating monotonously, and over in the hay field that belonged to Plenty-coups a white man was mowing grass with that clattering modern mower. Yesterday I had seen an airplane flying over the Chief’s house. The past seemed desperately to clash with the present on the Crow reservation.

Frank Bird Linderman,

Plenty-coups: Chief of the Crows

Painted

Horses

Catherine

1

London, even the smell of it. She had a trowel in one hand, the other cold and wet and braced for balance against the emerging stone wall. She blew the same errant sprig of hair from her face as she worked, again and again. The ancient muck at her feet had a grip, a suction, and when she pulled with her foot to shift sideways her rubber boot remained in the mire, her foot popped free. She’d wiggled her toes then. She did again now. If she fell she wanted to sink, wanted some other dreamer to dig
her
out in two thousand years, find the smile still on her face.

She teetered on one foot, weaving to and fro. She heard the lonesome moan of a foghorn, one of the tugs on the Thames sounding through the mist, warning her from what lay ahead. She reached with her empty hand to pull her boot free and the boot somehow pulled back, yanked her fist into the rich black mud and then yanked her off-balance.

When she toppled she fell not into the glorious ooze but merely through the air, falling and falling, the London sludge yawning into a portal and then widening to the gape of a canyon, the great rim of the world receding as she fell, hair wild in her face and air all around and the
THUMP-thump-thump
of her heart gorged in her own aching throat.

She plunged too quickly into her own destiny, with no yielding muck ahead to absorb the fall. She wanted to claw back for the safety of the mud, the safety of what she already knew. That gunflint ground at the floor of the canyon rushed at her—

—
that
THUMP-thump-thump
again, not the thud of her heart now but the bang of a drum, a tom-tom beating, the sound bouncing through the canyon walls. She’d already landed, somehow never did feel the blow. Still in one rubber boot but down on her knees on the stony soil, the hard bare desert rasping her skin through the cloth of her pants, strand of hair again in her face. She had her trowel from London and she scraped right back, or tried to, the point of the blade dancing and skipping against the stubborn ground.

“You don’t have what you need, love. That’s the problem.” An English voice at her back, a Welshwoman in a black hat with a black head of hair and just out of the mud herself, she knew it without looking. “Hasn’t that always been the problem?”

She couldn’t bring herself to look behind, couldn’t stop scraping with the trowel. She’d carved barely a scratch, the point screeching against the ground. She had long romanced the ravages of time but saw in a terror the ravages here were total. No buried temples. No pyramids, rising from the sand.

“You aren’t ready, love. You don’t have what you need, not at all. You should have stayed back . . .”

She raised the trowel like a dagger and started to stab, again and again, thinking if she could just break through, if she could just crack the surface, surely there was
something
down there, surely she could prove
something
. . .

The point of the trowel bent with the blows. The ground surrendered nothing. Sparks flew, the steel tip blunting and blunting as she stabbed and stabbed and she dreamed in a flash her next essay topic—
Failure to Find Nothing in the Archaeological West.
Why on earth did she ever sign on—

She heard the
THUMP-thump-thump
of the wheels on the track, heard again the blast of a horn. Not a tug on the Thames at all but the whistle of the train, climbing to a flat from the breaks of a river.

The sharp hard suck of her own frantic breathing dawned on her and she slapped awake. She felt her heart racing, felt it still in her throat. She took a breath, blinked against the blazing light. Her nails dug at her palms.

The afternoon sun shot along the window. Grainfields had yielded to brown rock and stunted gray shrub. Brilliant white flashes bloomed against muted earth and a band of some utterly alien species raced alongside, then turned to hunch one by one beneath the strands of a wire fence. She blew the hair from her face and watched them shrink with the distance.

“The West,” she said. “So this is it.”

“What did you expect? Monument Valley?”

Catherine rubbed her eyes with the heel of a hand. She had in fact anticipated the general vista of a cowboy movie. Red mesas and towering sandstone spires. Minuscule horsemen galloping.

She squinted toward her critic, a cocksure kid at least three years her junior. He wore a ducktail and all the sideburns he could muster, plus an enormous pompadour like this new singer Elvis Presley, if not quite so gorgeous. But game—he’d tried for her attention for three hundred miles.

“Not exactly,” she said. She wiggled the underside of her engagement ring and wondered if this were too plain a gesture. She hadn’t quite gotten used to the ring herself.

“It’s not like going back in time. It’s still the twentieth century. Even in Montana.”

“You sound like you’re trying to convince yourself.”

“Huh. Not me, sister. I’ve seen it all before.”

Despite sleep-strewn blonde hair and unlaced red sneakers, one of them now fallen to the floor, she evidently had just enough of the older woman about her to tease his imagination. A college girl to his high school senior. She let herself flirt with him, a momentary lapse. “Maybe that’s why you need to convince yourself.”

“Huh. Don’t you know the whole story.”

She dipped her head in a shrug. “I’ve been to older places than this.”

“What, you been to Rome or something? You and Audrey Hepburn?”

Catherine smiled and looked toward the window, not prepared for the delayed shock she felt at the sheer emptiness on the other side of the glass. Just islands of rock and a sea of those shrubs. Stunted trees here and there. Not even a power line. She looked back.

“Sort of. By way of Londinium.”

His eyes flicked across her, chin to waist and back again. He changed the subject. “My grandparents own a ranch out thisaway. I come every summer.”

“Is it anywhere near Londinium?” She tried to keep a straight face and couldn’t.

He let himself deflate a bit. “You’re heartless.” He gestured at her ring. “You must run that boy you got ragged.”

“What were those animals? Running outside, when I woke up?”

“Antelopes. Out here they call ’em goats. Speed goats.”

He dug in his satchel. Hours earlier she’d caught a partial glimpse of a magazine inside, just the top corner with the block letters
PLA
. She furtively tried to glimpse it again now but couldn’t because of the angle.

She knew what it was. Entertainment for men, nothing short of a sensation. For three years she’d had a guilty curiosity to lay her hands on an issue, mostly to understand what this sensation was she wasn’t supposed to see. Common knowledge the actress Marilyn Monroe appeared naked in the first issue. Catherine’s mother refused to see
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
after learning this, even though she was nuts for the original Broadway show.

The boy came up with a cigarette case. He offered her one, told her she’d been jerking around in her sleep like crazy. She’d smoked a little in Europe where nobody thought twice, wickedly strong little numbers that made her head feel like a rocket, never quite getting used to it and hating the way it made her fingers smell. But now she felt grimy with travel anyway. Grimy and nervous and bored.