Painted Horses (10 page)

She flashed to a conversation she once had with an eccentric old physicist from Columbia, at a formal dinner in Manhattan. He described a strategy to plant subterranean missiles in the vast open spaces of Montana, seeds of fire that could blossom from the dirt in one hemisphere, level a city in another. At the time this seemed utterly outlandish. Now that she was actually in Montana, the thought did occur—if truly you wanted to hide something, this would be the place.

“Look, kitten. You know I’ve got confidence in you, and I don’t want this to come out wrong. Do you feel like it’s safe to be there alone?”

She saw again the runaway ambulance and the ditch and the carvings in the trees and she almost answered no. She surprised herself with a spasm of laughter, a giddiness against the panic she wanted to contain.

“This isn’t funny, Catherine.” David rarely came off as testy. “It’s all right for someone to worry about you, you know.”

“Oh, David. That’s not what I’m laughing at. You’re right to worry and I don’t take it lightly. But there’s another aspect to this and I’m not quite sure what to think of it. Remember on the map the canyon runs along an Indian reservation? Well apparently, not everyone wants to see it disappear underwater.”

“Why not?”

“According to the developer, the Indians think the canyon’s sacred.”

“And you’re in contact with the developer?”

She had told him this already, had already explained that archaeology no longer happened in a vacuum. Or as a hobby. “He
is
my contact. The field office for the Smithsonian, it’s clear down in Nebraska?”

“Right, I remember. How do the Indians figure, again?”

She hesitated. That snip in the line again, and now David did sound sort of submerged. “They don’t want a dam, evidently. They want the canyon the way it’s always been.”

“But it’s legally not theirs now?”

“Not all of it I don’t think, but part of it. I get the sense it’s got him worried.”

“Your boss?”

“The Smithsonian?”

“No, sorry, the dam guy. Gad, this connection. How’s he tied to the Smithsonian?”

“I don’t know that he is, other than he’s obligated to cooperate with a rescue survey before he can build anything.”

“And he’s trying to get his ducks in a row now, in case these Indians try to hold things up?”

She didn’t immediately have a reply. Her mind had flashed to one of the books she’d brought, one she hadn’t yet cracked although the title as she recalled it jumped at her now.
American: Chief of the Crows.

David went on. “You know what really worries me? Not only are you traipsing around some godforsaken wilderness, but then the obvious thing. It actually works out better for this guy Harris if you don’t come up with anything at all.”

The obvious thing. This struck Catherine hard and for a spaceless, weightless instant, she didn’t fully hear what he said next. Then she felt it more than heard it, like a razor in her heart.

“Has it occurred to you he might have a reason for wanting somebody who’s not even finished with school yet?”

“You mean a girl who’s not finished with school?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You may as well have. For the record he wants me because of what happened in London, somebody who’s already gotten between archaeology and a development project. It does make me sort of uniquely qualified.”

“I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

“I don’t mean it that way and you know it—”

“Did you even read my essay?”

“I guess I should just shut up while I’m ahead—”

“You aren’t ahead.”

“But if I did I don’t think I’d sleep well tonight and can I finish? Please? I don’t like fighting with you. You know archaeology. I don’t argue with that, but what I know is business, and I know guys who do well in business, and this looks a lot like conflict of interest, and that’s a sticky situation for
anyone
to get mixed up in. That’s all.”

Somehow things had gotten flipped around. She would now have to defend Dub Harris to her boyfriend and though she hadn’t actually met the man, she got the feeling she wouldn’t much like him herself.

“Look David. I’m hungry, I need a bath, and for right now I really don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

He tried to gentle his tone. She could hear it even through the static.

“Catherine, I’m not trying to make some larger comment about your work or your ability. I’m in sort of a precarious position because I want to marry you and I want to come home to you, but one of the things I most love about you is you’re driven. I wish I had half the passion for my job that you have for yours. I love it that you’re following your heart. But you can’t let passion override judgment. That’s all I want to say.”

“Point taken,” she answered. It seemed the quickest way out. They talked a little about trivial things, about David’s little sister and Catherine’s mother and her father’s new sailboat, which David planned to go out on over the weekend.

He told her he missed her in his bed.

“That’s good to know,” she said. She was still so shy, still so new to it. She told him she was sorry she wasn’t there for him. He said don’t be silly.

He told her he loved her and she said she knew and that she did too. He told her to get some sleep.

Off the phone she realized she’d never asked how he was doing. She realized she was still angry.

She had a pragmatic streak and wondered if it wasn’t a hindrance in certain ways. True, she had the mettle to learn the practical side of her profession, but the price seemed to deduct from her very soul. She had a passion all right, but worried this was not the same thing as simply having passion.

She bought a Frank Sinatra record called
Songs For Swingin’ Lovers!
before she left for England, thinking she should prime herself for romance before heading across the sea. Even this seemed like a pragmatic move.

She had just started seeing David at the time, had met him at a club in New York with some Juilliard friends who were at first more smitten than Catherine herself. He cut the sort of figure that attracted girls from good families. He was well dressed, with enough natural sarcasm to project a commanding if wry presence. He had just come off the Yale crew team, had big shoulders and a big future. Who wouldn’t look twice?

He walked up to Catherine’s table and asked her to dance. He told her she looked very French, the oddest compliment she’d ever received. But for once her girlfriends seemed sort of awestruck by her, jealous even, and Catherine almost guiltily wanted to feed this. Danger and power, wrapped into one.

She saw David a few times before she left and even introduced him to her parents, a move that backfired. Like them, he loved it that she played piano and this instantly became a base of solidarity. Her mother turned out to be wild for him.

“Oh I hope you don’t meet some English boy over there.”

“Mother, please.”

“It’s just my luck. You find this perfect man a month before you’re set to leave.”

“Mama, you’re the one who wants me to go to England, remember?”

“I do? When did I say that?”

Her mother never had been entirely clear about certain things. She was not, for example, at all forthcoming about sex, except to imply it wasn’t something people of quality engaged in.

Over the years her mother had dragged her to matinee showings of
Gone with the Wind
at least five times. Just before she left for England they saw the film again and after two years at Juilliard, Catherine caught a snippet of dialogue she hadn’t picked up on before. Rhett Butler telling Scarlett O’Hara she was the type of woman who needed to be kissed, and kissed often, by someone who knew how. A euphemism if ever there was one. She laughed aloud and her mother looked at her and laughed a little too, and Catherine wondered if they were laughing at the same thing.

She’d been out with David five times. He talked of resuming once she returned.

“I’ll be gone eight months, you know.”

He shrugged. “So you’ll be gone eight months.”

“What if someone else comes along? For you, I mean.”

He always had the right answer. One of those guys. “Come on now. I could never disappoint your mother like that.”

She got a voice student named Rachel to take a walk with her, the day before her last date with David. She’d half resolved to sleep with him before she sailed off across the ocean. It seemed like the elegant thing to do.

“How do you keep from getting pregnant?”

“Catherine, are you a virgin?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Hmm.”

“I’m sort of tired of it.”

“I don’t blame you. You know what a rubber is, don’t you?”

“Yes. Sort of.”

“You get them at a pharmacy. Or rather, you get your boyfriend to get them at a pharmacy, and you refuse to let him near you unless he’s got one on.”

“How thick is it? The actual, well, rubber.”

“It’s like a balloon. Before you blow it up.”

“What if it doesn’t work?”

“What do you mean?”

“Balloons pop. What if it breaks?”

“Then you cross your fingers and pray to God. But you’re thinking too much. They usually don’t break. Anyway, babies aren’t the only danger. You can sort of get your heart broken, too. You’re about to leave the country, remember.”

“Heartbreak I can handle,” said Catherine. “What I don’t want is to be stuck in one place.”

In the end she didn’t sleep with David. He came down with the flu and had to cancel, and there was no chance to be alone with him after that. In truth she was a little relieved because she’d never quite figured out how to ask if he had a rubber. She went ahead and took the Sinatra record to England.

She stayed not eight months but an entire year. A little longer, even.

She’d given herself three weeks to settle in before her studies began at Cambridge. The original idea consisted mainly of viewing the famous attractions—London Bridge, Big Ben, perhaps the Cliffs of Dover that so impressed her parents. After her first encounter with the bomb rubble, she found herself instead seeking ruins.

Catherine met many people who endured the Blitz. They watched the first waves of Junkers and Messerschmitts drone over the city in daylight raids, schoolkids on their parents’ shoulders to get a better view, the collective cognition disconnected at first from what exactly was taking place.

Later throngs of strangers sheltered in subway tunnels as entire districts collapsed aboveground. Phosphorous flashes of heat and light, miniature earthquakes. Gas mains alight and roaring with flame. People maimed, burned, killed in bursting buildings or in vehicles plunged into sudden craters in the street. Children were shipped off to relatives in the countryside.

Feats of architecture and engineering disintegrated in fractions of seconds while fires raged into days.

Yet the pulse of the city beat on. Catherine heard stories of girls shopping for makeup in half-shattered department stores, dance bands pausing just long enough for the air raid sirens to subside. If panic was the intent, resolve was the response.

By the end of the war more than fifty acres within the old walled city were reduced to heaped rubble and strewn rock, the surface of London smashed like the shell of an egg. For years England had been at the vanguard of archaeology in her ports of empire around the world. The next great dig lay at her feet.

Catherine arrived at exactly the right time. The first siftings following the war had given way to full-scale excavation. Not since the 1666 fire had the city needed to gather its wits for such a mammoth rebuilding, and now its wits were gathered. The developers were coming. A fevered effort to retrieve the clues of the past unfolded a half step ahead of bulldozers and cement mixers. Digging teams cleared debris and cut trenches year-round, in every variety of weather.

Catherine went back to the Cripplegate site again and the men there directed her to other cuttings in the shattered blocks. Two streets over she watched while a laborer in a vest and tie and tall rubber boots cleared debris from a gate socket sunk into the earth. Roman without doubt, he told her. He also told her she might be able to enroll for volunteer work through the London Museum. Catherine walked to the nearest intact street and waved a cab.

She signed on for the weekend to a groundwater-bedeviled site called Walbrook, where an exploratory trench had revealed a radiused fragment of buried stone wall. The trench promptly flooded and work halted until a mechanical pump could be found to get ahead of the seeping water. Even so the place remained a mud pit, hence not a favorite of the general corps of volunteers. Catherine jumped at it.

Saturday she mostly observed while two professional excavators cleared around the lip of what appeared to be a stone-lined well a short way from the emergent wall. They told her the well was probably medieval, the wall certainly earlier. The men themselves were twice her age and more and they kept teasing her about her youth and her nationality, her indubitable preoccupation with movie stars and boys. But they also described what it was like to discern ancient wheel ruts in the packed metalling of lost Roman streets, the flush of wonder to find a coin with an emperor’s bust. On Sunday they let her scrape in the earth along with them.