Painted Horses (21 page)

A bell on the door chimes when he enters, the smell of saddle leather dense and sweet as the meat of a nut. A hammer taps in back. A moment later a man in a leather apron emerges, the hammer still dangling from his hand. It does not seem to dawn on him that here is only a kid. “Help you out with something?”

“I’m hired on with the Meyer outfit.”

“In off the range, are you? Got some new duds?”

He nods.

“Looking to buy a rig?”

John H scans the stock of stiff new display saddles with their tall pommels and almond-colored fenders. Minor variations in cantle design and horn shape and tooling. A single black parade saddle, heavily bedizened with latigo and silver pendants. John H ignores this and walks over to a simple working outfit with a deep seat and a double cinch, a small steel horn perched atop the pommel like the arching neck of a swan. He runs his fingers across a star stamped into the leather of the seat. A circle inside the star bears the Furstnow name, also the number 215. John H looks at the proprietor and says, “Someday.”

Decades earlier with the bones of the great bison herds glinting in the sun the first large droves of beef cows trailed in out of Oregon and Texas. Fortunes were staked on these natives of European bog and fen, loosed on an endless swath of ripe Montana wheatgrass, the same fortunes shortly and summarily gutted by a single, epic winter.

Thirty-nine years after Jean Bakar Arrieta drifted into Montana he still can hear the brogue of the Scot who hired him, the Scot ceaselessly expounding on that season as though the winter of ’86 was a tour of combat seared permanently on his soul.

Whiteouts. Rivers of ice. Snow and stiff cows, piled to the rims of the coulees. “A vast and empty middle continent, ripe with agricultural promise. A stockman’s paradise.”

Well. By the spring of ’87 that notion looked about as fruitful as the staves of a rib cage, juttin’ from a rottin’ bank of snow.
What money remained went into sheep.

By the close of the century cattle reigned once again, if not in actual numbers then certainly in the currency of romance. Cowboys were king, sheepherders roughly equivalent to railroad coolies, practitioners of a low task suited mainly to the brown of skin. Long months living out of a tent wagon, coddling dull-witted sheep and pining for homeland and companionship.

He tells the boy he came to this vastness from his own land-poor nation, to work and to save American money, and then to return. Buy a plot, marry a farm girl or a fisherman’s daughter. Sire a brood. Now he has overstayed by forty years and has little to his name. This does not come across as grumbling.

Jean Bakar teaches the boy to read the country on behalf of sheep, to locate grass and water, when to prod them and when to let them be. He teaches him to set a snare or a deadfall, to tell wild onion from death camas. To brew proper coffee in the enamel pot.

Up in the aspens bordering high summer pasture Jean Bakar takes a blade and scores words and symbols into the skin of silver trees. John H follows him and sees he is not the first. The grove is a gallery, names and dates and renditions. Other carvers have left messages one to another, some in decades long past so the girth of the trunk has stretched or scarred the lines of the original carvings into shapes and texts inscrutable.

Bakar busies himself with his knife while John H wanders. He sees stars everywhere, crosses here and there. Terse messages, none in English. Rudimentary carvings of four legged mammals and what appears to be a woman’s naked torso, with an oversized bosom and no head. Nearby a set of arcing lines cross and curve and cross again to form a narrow slot. He sees this image repeated in other places and has the odd feeling that somewhere within him he knows how to interpret it, has known it deep within the twists of some dream, its meaning clear while he slept and even now only barely beyond the grip of his wakening mind.

Jean Bakar has carved another object, a sort of swastika composed not of hard angles but gentle, looping hooks. “
Lauburu
,” he says. “Basque cross.” Below it he forms the word
Bilbao
.

He waves his hand to take in the glade. “Some of these men I know only through the trees. In this grove, or in many others like this. Across the West, wherever there are aspens. Some of these messages pertain to water, some to grass. Pasturage.”

He grins at the boy, a look of mischief. “Many pertain to women, for it is a lonely life. Some of us left sweethearts behind. Betrothals.” The grin turns to something else. “Some of us never got so far as that.”

He waves again at the tree, its green meat laid bare. A crude tattoo. “Some of us, this is all the mark we are going to make.”

In 1934 another cataclysm, not a force of nature but legislation. The Taylor Grazing Act soughs out of Washington like a breeze, strikes the high plains like a hurricane.

For decades the expanses of Wyoming and Nevada, Oregon and Montana have borne the tracks of free-ranging cattle and sheep, also the bristly contention between husbanders of same. Cattlemen maintain that sheep destroy grass, that their hooves leave a taint offensive to cattle. At times the competition becomes downright lethal, with shootouts at watering holes and beatings in saloons.

With the stroke of a pen the free range ends. Public land may now be fenced and regulated, grazing rights granted to a single leaseholder. For Jean Bakar and John H and ten thousand others like them, the new law spells the end of their peripatetic ramblings.

For Bakar especially this is disaster. Trailing sheep in the solitary wild is the only vocation he has known and he is not a young man. In the final weeks of their time in the mountains John H notices a new stoop to his shoulders, a dullness to his eye.

John H is now legitimately sixteen years old, lean as an ax handle and tall as he will ever be. He finds himself less sad than scared, worried the blow will make his friend crack the way his father cracked, worried that life will change too quickly to keep up.

They drive the last band of sheep to the Miles City feedlots and Jean Bakar and John H and a roiling lot of fellow drovers collect their severance and with Prohibition ended divide themselves between the Range Riders and the Bison Bar and the Montana Bar on Main Street. When Jean Bakar asks John H which establishment strikes his fancy, John H replies, “How about the saddle shop.”

Jean Bakar grins broadly for the first time in a month. He shakes his head and grips John H’s arm and tows him toward the Range Riders. “Later, rubio. Later.”

John H is years from the legal drinking age but nobody seems to notice or care. He’s had bootlegged whiskey a time or two but never a cold beer. Somebody sets a frosted glass before him. He sniffs the amber fluid, can practically smell its chill. He takes a drink, wonders why such an icy marvel was ever against the law in the first place.

Later with more of the stuff solid in his belly and light in his head he perceives he is the object of some discussion. Bakar is across the room leaning against the bar, talking to a handful of other Basques. He gestures toward John H a time or two, and the others laugh and look his way as well. A little later John H catches the eye of Clive, the ranch wrangler. Clive wags a finger as though scolding a puppy and John H mouths,
What?

His glass has remained empty for some time. He stands and steps toward the bar and makes it halfway before Jean Bakar and an entire throng catch him like a tide and pull him toward the door, empty glass still in his hand. “Not too drunk, rubio,” Jean Bakar tells him. “Only enough for courage.”

Despite this John H assumes they will be making the rounds, heading forthwith to another saloon.

Instead the pack steers him toward the river then down off the roadway to the looming forms of three houses in the trees. He sees the wink of a pond in the twilight, a flicker of red on the water from a bulb above a doorway. Through the mist in his head another light goes on. His heart begins to thump.

The pack is ushered into the middle house by a hefty woman in a velvet dress, her tremendous bosom barely contained by the plunging neckline. She wears a pillbox hat with a fishnet veil and her voice booms when she speaks though for the life of him John H can’t retain a thing she’s said once the words are out of her mouth.

They crowd into a parlor, all dim lighting and old-fashioned claw-foot furniture, and a line of girls forms as if by magic at one end of the room.

At first he pays no attention to age or hair color or any other distinguishing feature, because not a one of them is close to properly clothed. Legs in stockings with garters that vanish beneath vague little shifts, bare shoulders crossed by the merest of silken straps. His eye zips from one cream-colored swath to another, lands for a second on the hypnotic shade of a woman’s cleavage and zips awkwardly away again.

Finally he lands on a face and gives a start because he is looking at Cora.

Not Cora herself but a girl who could well be her sister. Same black bob and arched black brows, but a red set to her mouth and a narrowness to her eyes entirely her own. She is certainly skeptical, possibly cruel, and he thinks all of this even as his eyes lock on to hers and she folds one lid closed in a bright blue wink.

Minutes later he opens his pants for the madam in an alcove at the foot of the stairs. His pecker seems practically to have climbed inside his body for warmth. Even the madam seems amused and surely she’s seen it all. She gives it a tug, peels back his foreskin, scrutinizes what little there is to see. “When’s your last bath, cowboy.”

John H finds his voice, which sounds about as tiny as his manhood. “Two hours ago.” Bakar had insisted.

“Good for you. Lily’s got the pick of the litter. This from the whiskey, or are you just shy?”

“Haven’t had any whiskey.”

She presses something into his hand, a small square like an aspirin tin. “Run along. Don’t be too long about it.”

The girl with the bob leads him up the stairs through the dusky light of the sconces. John H watches the sway of her backside, the bones in her shoulders.

She guides him to a room and sits on the edge of the bed. He holds the beer stein in one hand, the tin in the other, both slippery as eels. He looks at the tin. Silhouette of a Roman soldier. “What’s this,” he asks.

She narrows her eyes. “That’s what you call a prerequisite. Don’t even think about coming over here without it.”

He sets the mug on a dresser and pries the lid of the tin. A rolled rubber ring.

“Can I have that?”

He looks at the cup of her hand, and up the sculpted limb to a second cup beneath her arm, smooth and bare as ivory. He feels himself stir.

She sets the tin on the bed and turns to him. She stretches her arms for the ceiling and for some reason it is not the sight of her nipples tight against her shift but merely this view of her underarms that triggers a swell of pure desire. His cock goes from groundhog to battering ram, like it might in the speed of transformation tear right through his pants.

She lowers her arms, studies him with an almost imperious satisfaction. “You’ve never been to bed with a woman, have you.”

“Not exactly.”

“Have you kissed a girl?”

He shakes his head. “Been in love once, though. She was sixteen. I was twelve.”

This seems to startle her, unnerve her even. She thinks a moment, curls her lip in a triumphant smile. “Let me guess. I look just like her. Enough to be her sister.” She has without appearing to move allowed the flimsy black silk of her shift to slouch down the slope of one breast, the slight peak of her nipple rising at the edge of the cloth.

John H concentrates. He shakes his head. “Nope.”

“Liar.” She feigns petulance. “I don’t believe you.” She pulls her garment over her head and lets it trail from her fingers. A mermaid rising from the sea. She sits in her garters with her head high, beckons him with crook of a finger.

She pulls his boots from his feet, pops the snaps on his shirt. Hat tossed to a chair.

“Can I touch you?”

She laughs. “You have to, if you want to get this done.”

He puts a tenuous hand on the curve of her shoulder, the other on the opposite knee. She covers his hands with hers.

He runs his palms across her like a blind man. A moment later she leans and puts her lips against his cheek, then against his chest in two places, finally against his own mouth, which is dry as the floor of a desert. Her tongue like warm summer rain.

She frees herself and lies back against an incline of pillows. She seizes his gaze with her stare, a hypnotist or a siren. Her legs fold apart like the bloom of a flower and he knows the soft curves of her seat, the slim secret groove at her center. He sees the carving in the trees.

The next day he takes his wages to the Furstnow shop. He does not have enough for a brand-new saddle but the proprietor disappears into the back and lugs out a reconditioned mustanger’s saddle, deep-seated and lightweight.

“Probably twenty years old. Built by the man himself. I just took it on trade, replaced the seat and restitched where it needed. Already broke in, should be comfortable as a feather pillow.”

John H hefts the saddle in his hands, glances at the star stamped into the back of the cantle. “Throw in a blanket?”