Painted Horses (5 page)

A sliver of gray stone pierced the rubber tread like a spike. She stood there and watched the tire empty and for the first time since the day she watched the English coast recede behind her, felt as though she might break down and cry. She fought the tears until the wave passed.

She’d never changed a tire in her life. She remembered a flat one Sunday when she was a girl, her father swearing by the side of the road, but that was years ago and she’d paid scant attention. She knew she could walk out if she had to but the prospect of this, the sheer humiliation, made her want to cry all over again.

She freed the spare from its recess behind the driver’s door. It wasn’t light but she managed it to the ground, wheeled it to the rear of the truck. She found the jack and lug wrench but no instructions on their use. She fiddled with the jack, made it wind up and back down again and set it in what seemed like a logical place beneath the axle. She thought she had the jack securely placed but apparently not, for when she cranked the crippled tire off the ground the jack tipped and popped loose, and to her horror the Dodge rolled forward.

She leaped out of the way. The ambulance heaved and picked up speed with the grade, the lug wrench whirling crazily with the rotation of the wheel and then sailing loose to bounce and ring along the ground.

The front wheels hit a low wash crosswise to the river and the runaway truck crashed to a stop in a burst of debris. The ambulance rocked.

Now she really did cry, a mixture of shock and self-reproach. She sat and bawled, not caring to quit until she considered she had no choice. She’d have to walk to the highway and she’d better get started. Five or six hours ahead of her at least. She sniffled and tried not to think about the hitchhiking that lay in her future.

She forced herself out of the dirt and went to the ambulance. She wiped her eyes and her cheeks with the thin blue skin of her wrists, her fingers and hands black from the tire and jack.

The ambulance seemed stable enough in its resting place, half in the ditch. She took her jacket and gloves from the front seat and her container of water and the ignition key. She followed the prints of the tires up the side of the canyon.

4

John H wormed to the edge and propped on his elbows in the sage. He raised the binoculars. The horses stepped from a chute in the canyon wall and he heard hooves on stone, heard pebbles shift from a thousand-year sleep. The pebbles bounced and gathered speed, spilled off a stone lip and settled again.

The glasses came from Germany and bore Nazi stampings in the arbor, a swastika in a circle with an eagle up above. John H still had a bit-and-bridle rig he’d used before the war, the silver conchos disfigured with a tricorn file to obliterate other, ornamental swastikas after the Luftwaffe bombed Guernica, Spain, in 1937. Nearly twenty years ago now. He wasn’t twenty himself then, still young enough to think the teeth of a file might actually change something.

The days had lengthened with the spring but the horses wore their winter coats and through the perfect prism of German glass he saw sunlight flash in the fibers along their backs. Twenty-eight horses emerged, seemingly from the cleft in the rock.

Two were foals only, days old and knock-kneed, attached to their mothers by an invisible tether. Other mares heaved about with swollen bellies, ready to drop their own young at any moment, one in particular hanging off by herself with an amniotic wash down the insides of her back legs. The herd stallion stayed to the rear. All had solid coats, bay and blood bay and chestnut and the stud horse himself, a dun the color of alfalfa honey with a black line the length of his spine. Not a piebald or roan among them.

John H was less consumed by color than configuration, what his father and others in the thoroughbred world called conformation. He studied the way their wide skulls narrowed to a delicate muzzle, the way the nose in profile had a slight Roman curve. The shape of the chest had uncommon narrowness as well, forelegs meeting the body nearly at the same point, different from the solid, blunt boxiness of a quarter horse.

He watched the stallion through the glass, watched him turn and test the air and shake his head hard, watched dust explode from his coat. Behind him the shriek of a hawk, somewhere in the wind.

Last night on the flat he had a fair glimpse of the stallion when the horse turned out of his charge, thought he knew what he was looking at then and was sure of it now, studying through glasses in daylight. Those tapering muscles and heads. These may not be thoroughbreds or standardbreds or even predictable quarter horses, but nor were they any motley collection of hammerheaded feral mustangs. These horses had crossed northern Africa with the Berbers, carried warring Moors into Spain. Into the New World with Cortez, to put the fear of pale gods into the Aztec. Eaten by the Apache. Adopted by the Comanche. John H had heard the stories. He had not seen their kind in all his years on the sage.

He watched from the rim for a long time. He wished he had materials along to sketch but he didn’t so he only studied the way they moved one among another, identifying their signs and signals and the language of gestures common to their kind, in Africa or Iberia or in a Kentucky bluegrass pasture. He noted the herd mare, a zebra dun with antique stripes on her legs and the stallion’s same dark dorsal line. She did his bidding while he hung on the edge, cropping spring grama and swatting flies in the sun.

Once the stallion scuffled with and finally mounted another male horse, an unruly two-year colt that twice already had tangled with the herd mare. The stallion took him by the nape and began to use him like a mare and the colt fought it and scrambled away across the rocks. He shook this off but kept his distance and when he began to goad a foal the herd mare pounced, sinking her teeth and driving him away.

Eventually the stallion would run him out for good. That, or be run out himself. The mares would come into season and the males would tangle because the chemistry of their blood demanded they tangle. No way to avoid it. John H burned the red hue of the colt into his brain. This was the horse he would ride.

In the afternoon the herd went to water and he waited for them to vanish into the trees and returned to the mare. She nickered when she sensed him coming, craned her head against the flex of the tree. He checked the cinch, pulled the slipknot from the reins and mounted. She wanted water now herself.

He rode away from the river and off the plateau, turning down through the bowl. The mare pricked her ears to the herd’s lingering sign but he urged her on and rode up the slope on the far side. They passed through a belt of pines and topped the hill into the open again, back to sagebrush and soapweed, back to iron-colored stone.

He loped her a mile and turned her toward the river. The slope to the floor was less severe here and he kept to the saddle, wound down a shallow wash that funneled water in some long-past age but ran now dry as flaking bone.

He heard the cluck and rattle of throats and wings and looked up to see sharp-tailed grouse, a dozen at least, hurtling in formation down the bank of the river. Two or four at a time fixed their wings to glide for some spell, then propelled themselves forward again. They traveled on out of sight. Possibly something had spooked them, coyote or fox or lynx. Equally possible they flew for reasons known only to themselves.

He led the mare down and let her drink, the water roiling and discolored with runoff, too murky for human use outside dire necessity. He’d already drained his canteen and didn’t know of a spring nearby. He was out of food entirely.

With the mare watered he turned for home. He rode upriver toward a formation of flutes in a sheer stone wall, the mare moving at little more than a walk for nearly an hour through loose rock and broken footing. The flutes drew closer, the wide distance a deceit. He looked across the river and a flashpoint in his memory revived the gallows humor of all warfare everywhere.

A meat wagon, as he and his brothers-in-arms had christened the army ambulances. Only this one was painted red, and crippled in a ditch.

5

After an hour on foot she had a clearer sense of the ache in her arms. The track out of the canyon followed the contours of the land in an endless series of switchbacks, lap after lap after lap. On the way in she concentrated only on keeping from the edge and hadn’t metered the number of times she’d cranked the obstinate wheel of the Dodge in a buttonhook turn. At slow speed, no less.

Catherine still couldn’t understand how anything of substance could live out here. She could see an impossible distance yet nothing seemed to move. Even the plant life occurred in patches, clump here and sprig there. The supposition of millions of buffalo seemed the myth of a lost Eden. Every culture had one.

In childhood she’d fallen in love with the vanished past. The earth swallowed stories whole only to disgorge them later, in flakes of stone and shards of clay, sacked ruins and empty temples. But the stories remained, waiting for a voice. She was a girl seduced.

At nine she saw mummies and sarcophagi in the Penn Museum and contracted an instant obsession with Egypt. She struck out on her own long expedition, exhuming dusty old monographs by Flinders Petrie, the first modern Egyptologist. She went to lectures at the university, wrote letters to archaeologists in far-flung places. A few wrote back.

Her parents and her teachers encouraged her while she was still young enough to be precocious—she was certainly more original than the legion of boys who planned to become cowboys or G-men—but by her midteens sanction had waned. The cowboys and detectives realized they would actually become attorneys and businessmen. Catherine alone didn’t seem to quit.

She was pushed toward the piano early and she excelled, out of an eagerness to please as much as anything. At ten the fantasies of mounting an expedition to the Valley of the Kings seemed impish and cute but at seventeen, with college on the horizon, talk of forgoing music to study archaeology made her parents’ lives flash before their eyes. They pleaded and cajoled. They pressured.

And they won. They’d reared a polite, sensible girl. She applied to Juilliard’s conservatory program, and got in. Two years later she won a Fulbright to Cambridge, also her parents’ idea. They had toured Britain on their honeymoon and began in short order to style themselves as Anglophiles, with Wedgwood china and a half-timbered Tudor house in New Jersey full of extravagant furniture. Her father went to great expense to import a Morgan runabout, British racing green with a leather strap around the bonnet.

Given their own mania, England’s influence on their daughter was unfortunate indeed. Her first full day in London, Catherine discovered Rome.

She’d made her way in a misty drizzle to Fleet Street, groggy with travel but restless with excitement. Even the air around her had the tarnish of age. She wanted to see the Thames and the Tower and St. Paul’s and she had no idea where to begin. So she wandered aimlessly, rounded a corner and found the standing dead.

Two long rows of gutted buildings slouched down the street, roofs flayed to the rain. Rubble littered the pavement in mounds. She took a tentative step forward. Empty windows peered like masks and made her feel stared upon. She shrugged this off as exhaustion.

Most of the buildings had been three or four stories tall. Now only the facades and the random suggestion of an interior remained, a crumbling portion of an inside wall, a banister curving to nowhere. Up ahead the damage was heavier yet, entire buildings reduced to debris with here and there a lonely corner of dovetailed brick spiking forty feet in the air.

Nearly a decade after the last German bomb, this was her first real comprehension of the war. Centuries of provenance, undone in an instant.

She heard muffled laughter rebound through the hull of a building, and a happy voice that seemed not a part of its surroundings. A second voice said something in reply. Workmen, she assumed, though it was hard to imagine what could be achieved here without a regular army of bulldozers and trucks. She moved toward the voices.

They were in the basement of a shell, three men with tall rubber boots and rain slickers and shovels. A wooden ladder went down from the doorway to the mud. Precise trenches bisected the basement floor and extended into the adjoining basement, the distinction between the two made pointless by bomb damage. Heavy stone footings stood up from the mud in the shape of a polygon, with connecting footings curving outward in two directions. Catherine recognized what she’d read about for so long. She’d stumbled onto a dig.

“Watch that step, eh miss?”

All three looked up at her, probably as curious as she was. “May I come down?”

“Up to you, but it’s a bit of a wallow.”

She climbed down the ladder wishing she hadn’t worn a skirt and heels. Her fingers slipped in the mud on the rungs. She cat-stepped as best she could around the standing water and stopped short of the polygon and stared.

“Have you some connection to the building then?”

“Gosh no. I’ve only been here a day.”

“An American girl, lads.” He said this as though he’d never been more delighted. “If I might borrow a line, what the devil is a girl like you doing in a place like this?”

They all laughed, and Catherine laughed too. “I didn’t realize there would still be damage from the war. So much of it, at least.”

The youngest of the three was at least ten years her senior, the other two ten years older than that. No doubt they experienced the blackouts and explosions firsthand.