Painted Horses (29 page)

She reached out with her frail crooked fingers and Catherine uncertainly extended a hand herself. Crane Girl gripped on to her and pulled her nearer, pulled her until Catherine’s face was only inches from her own.

“Blueshirt.”

Catherine increased her grip. Miriam’s grandmother gripped back. “You know.”

Catherine shook her head. She tried to smile. “I don’t. I wish I did.”

She was off balance already and the charged air behind her, the shock waves of the drums maybe, seemed to press against her with a physical force, threatened to topple her onto the old woman.

Crane Girl nodded, folded Catherine’s hand into a fist and gave the fist a pat. She released her. Catherine righted herself again.

She was nearly to the exit before she realized she held something in her hand. A smooth round thing. She knew she’d lose the light in a step or two and she stopped, looked down at her closed fist with something on the order of dread and thought,
If this is a marble ear I’m finished. I swear it
. She opened her hand.

Not an ear but a simple stone, flat and perfectly oval, worn smooth by the millennial action of a creek or the polish of a leather pouch. The caress of a thousand fingers.

She looked again for Miriam but couldn’t recognize her in the hallucinatory smear of stares, the sea of smoke. The drums banged in her head. She clutched the rock in her fist and took one last look at the eagle, its blank empty eye.

3

Catherine stumbled from the orange heat and felt the blue air of the night douse her skin like a wave. Sweat rolled from her temples, dampness like dew at the back of her neck. She walked unsteadily a few steps away from the lodge, through the lighted tepees. Her feet felt like concrete, her brain light as a bubble. She wanted water, her tongue just a clod in her mouth.

At the street an explosion of noise and light. A band played a waltz on the back of a flatbed trailer, men with fiddles and a big bass and some slippery Hawaiian guitar. Hundreds of people congregated in the road and on the rickety wooden walks, dancing couples and men both Indian and white with beer in paper cups, the white men in Stetsons, the Indians in some other oversize cowboy hat.

Catherine pushed through the crowd to the tavern. She jostled someone’s cup and felt cold beer slosh her arm. She put her tongue to it.

At the threshold of the bar she caught another lungful of smoke, tobacco this time, clouds of it roiling within. She turned her head back to the street and looked up, took in one last mighty pull of air. She held her breath and went into the din.

She got through the throng of standing bodies and stopped behind the line of shoulders at the bar top. She looked between a picket of heads and hats and startled herself with her own elongated eyes, staring back from the mirror above the back bar. Then a secondary recognition, filtering like the earliest shade of dawn. She knew the man to her left, his blue eyes and the echoing blue of his shirt. He grinned his half grin in the mirror. She smiled back, felt the hot rock in her hand and it crossed her febrile mind he might be in cahoots with Miriam’s grandmother. She put the rock in her pocket.

John H turned on his barstool. “Howdy-do, Cleo.”

“Thirsty,” she said, half-surprised her tongue functioned at all. “That’s how I do.”

“We can fix that.” He beckoned to a bartender. “I’d like to buy this girl a drink.”

“What’s she drinking?”

John H cast a quizzical eye.

“Oh. Only water.” She felt a little silly.

John H pushed a bill at the bartender. “Make it a tall one.” He rotated again to face her. “You know what we say about water, here in the great American West.”

This last rang like a gong. One of Jack’s expressions. She shook her head. “No idea.”

John H rattled the rocks in his glass. “Whiskey’s for drinking. Water’s for fighting over.”

She wondered if he were being cagey. Then her water arrived, the glass a-glitter with ice. She said, “I don’t want to fight with anyone,” and gulped half the volume in a single indelicate swallow. The water tasted of cold galvanized metal, the ache in her teeth the sweetest thing she knew.

A little later she took the barstool beside him. She began to feel centered again, properly alert to the world around her. She studied the glass in her hand, and looked at him. “So,” she said, “twice my rescuer. And all I ever wanted was to feel suitably able.”

He did seem endlessly amused. Faintly, but endlessly. “I’m sure you’re able to do something. Otherwise you wouldn’t drive a company truck.”

“That doesn’t indicate much at all I’m afraid. Painful, but true.”

“You a Brit?”

This took her by surprise, also for some reason raised her dander. “You mean am I English? Of course not.” She faced herself again in the mirror, saw the catlike mask, the bronze of her skin. “Isn’t it obvious? I’m Nubian.” She turned back to him.

Now he had a real grin. “You’re sunburned, but not that sunburned.”

“I’m not from England, not even New England. I’m from New Jersey. But I did spend a year in London not long ago. I sort of—found God there, you could say.”

“Ah.”

“I guess we should clear up something else since it seems a sticking point. I don’t have anything to do with Mr. Harris’s dam. Don’t know anything about it, don’t care anything about it.”

He lifted his glass. “I’ll drink to that.”

She clinked his glass with her own, empty now save an ice cube or two.

She didn’t feel finished. She wanted him to know everything and evidently he was inside her whirling mind already. “So you do what, exactly?”

“Archaeology. I find things from the past.”

“Things somebody lost?”

“I guess so. Things everybody lost.”

She told him she worked for the Smithsonian, that the ambulance was strictly on loan. “It’s government policy, to go in ahead of water reclamation sites.” She shrugged. “I know Harris Power is a private company but there’s some federal component to these big projects too. I think through the army, the Corps of Engineers. It’s sort of hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. I myself in all honesty am very new to any of this, even the archaeology. I cut my teeth in London and that is a long way from here.”

She saw the bird point again, sitting in the top of the dresser in her little house. Was that only two days ago? She felt the other rock, hot in her pocket. She looked him in the eye. “I will admit it’s getting more interesting all the time.”

John H drained the remainder of his whiskey in one smooth swallow. He said, “I take it that betrothed of yours is nowhere to be found.”

He gazed steadily at her face, same faint smile. She felt the underside of her ring with her thumb. She’d tried to call David before she drove here tonight, the only thing that reminded her to put the ring back on. Jack Allen told her never to wear a ring around a horse, not if you wanted to keep the finger you wore it on, so off it had come. “Oh you could find him, but you’d have to go to New York to do it.”

“Guess I could call and run it by him, then. Or you could just come out to the street and dance a waltz with me.”

Catherine slid down from the barstool. “I tried calling him already. He didn’t pick up.”

She held his hand through the crowd and out to the coolness of the night. The band on the flatbed sawed away at a square dance, the singer barking steps like a drill sergeant. Through the wall of bystanders she could see twenty or thirty couples in front of the stage, stomping and spinning. Catherine had a flicker of panic he’d drag her into that uncharted territory but by the time they reached the edge of the crowd the band had indeed shifted into a simple waltz. She heard the lazy, three-count thump of bass and kick drum. He led her out and squared off to her.

“I haven’t waltzed since I was in junior high, and never to anything this . . . Texas-like.” The singer was in fact crooning about Texas at that very moment.

“I probably haven’t waltzed myself since you were in junior high. Don’t worry, it’s the same step, Texas or Vienna. Nubia, even.”

She heard herself laugh, and his hand was in the small of her back. She touched the junction of his shoulder and neck and he stepped toward her and she naturally stepped away. “
One
twothree,” he said, and she rose up onto her toes and back down again. She recalled learning inside turns and scissors steps, though he led her through none of that now. He merely led her in circles, around and among the other couples and their own small orbits, and then the pattern became automatic and she found she could talk to him.

“Did you see the dancing in the ball field?”

“From a distance. Just the end of it.”

“It was amazing. Hypnotic, nearly. All those drums.”

“And not a one with a three-count beat.”

“No, the opposite of this. Isn’t it funny.”

He said nothing, and somehow this in itself seemed to beg explanation. Or maybe she just wanted to talk.

“Two different dances, and they mean such different things.”

“What is it you think they mean, Catherine.”

There. He’d said it. “The first dance is about an entire people, but this dance is about two people.”

He said, “Now that’s interesting,” and then he did turn her out, so suddenly she had to jump to avoid shuffling completely out of time. She managed to twirl beneath his hand and come back on the proper step. She forgot what she was going to say.

“Beautiful,” he told her. In the last bars of the waltz she realized he carried himself with a stiffness, a rigidity that made her think of the mannered poise of a classicist. How odd. She studied his face with its narrow little smile, prepared herself for another spontaneous step that in the end never came. The band reached the end of the song, and he released her. They were at the outer edge of the makeshift floor, just shy of the general street crowd. Now she did want a drink, a real one.

“You live down in there, don’t you?”

He never had a chance to answer. Someone spoke from the throng at his back, a man’s voice with a familiar edge and though John H barely moved a muscle Catherine watched him go visibly taut.

“Figured you for a goner, H-man. Figured you never made it past the Po River.” Jack Allen, in a hat with a flashy line of conchos at the band. The man beside him stood a full head shorter and probably fifty pounds heavier, which made Allen appear all the more wolflike.

John H turned to face him, at the same time drifting away from Catherine. She felt a knot wallop her stomach like a fist, felt a flash of hyperkinetic nervousness.

Jack Allen was still talking. “You cut a fine little rug with Miss Lemay here. Given that busted knee and all.”

“Anything for a pretty girl.”

“Ho ho. Sense of humor still intact. Tell me H, whatever got into you with that passel of farm nags? Guys like you and me, we wouldn’t figure to be any different than two beans in a stewpot. You sent as many scrubs to the can as I did, back in the old days. Then you get all high-minded and charitable on us.” The man with him wore an almost luminous white Stetson, a hat of plainly better quality than anything else in the vicinity, also a bespoke suit of decidedly nonwestern origin. Savile Row, more likely. What on earth was he doing here?

“You still rousting mustangs, Jack?”

“What passes for ’em. Ain’t a thing like it used to be.”

“Never is, is it.”

Allen shrugged. “All what you make of it, I guess.”

“Why Jack. You sound downright melancholy.” He was moving now, stepping away, not looking at her at all.

“Didn’t figure you for a sentimental streak. That’s for sure.”

“Paint fumes.”

“How’s that?”

John H circled the air around his ear with a finger. “It’s the paint fumes, Jack.”

“Oh yeah. An artist. I forgot.”

John H was walking away now, putting layers of the crowd between them. She noticed the source of his carriage then, his martial rigidity. He moved with the slightest stage of a limp.

Allen raised his voice. “See you soon, H.”

Over his shoulder he said, “Thanks for the warning,” and he was gone.

Catherine wanted to vanish herself. At the very least she now fully regretted the kohl—the man beside Allen seemed unable to stop staring. She took the reins. “What was that about?”

“Ladies and gentlemen, you have witnessed a ghost. Also what you might call a turncoat.”

“His name is John Barb,” Catherine supplied. He’d said so, that day in the canyon.

Jack Allen snickered. “That what he told you?”

She looked at him. She felt a spike of ire that Jack Allen should have some inside knowledge into this particular subject. She felt startlingly, dangerously territorial, as though he were not simply his usual arrogant self but something altogether worse, something more along the lines of, say, another female.

“A Barb is a horse, little darlin. A type of horse. Sort of a Spanish Arabian. Mister H was having some fun with you.”

Catherine realized she was glaring at him. To her surprise Jack Allen turned a little wary. She felt a wicked spasm of delight.