Painted Horses (25 page)

“And when have I complained? Not at five
A.M.
, ever. Not when you waltzed off with the tire to my car, which you have yet to return by the way. Not even when you’ve spent hours looking for horse tracks instead of helping me to find a single thing of value.”

He held up his hands. “Don’t get your panties in a wad. A week it is.” He turned his horse again and nudged on up the trail. “Just be careful what you wish for, missy. All I’m saying.”

In truth he had a point. Catherine hadn’t camped since she was a kid and the sum total of that experience—four summers at Camp Wicosuta, a well-appointed girls’ sleepaway in New Hampshire—barely counted.

Still, her early riding lessons had indeed not been for naught.
Ambitious, aggressive, and anxious to please
had evidently been about right. She was riding well, and truly hadn’t complained once. Surely she could handle six nights on the ground.

She and Miriam drove to Billings on a Saturday with a checklist of provisions penciled in Jack Allen’s surprisingly tidy hand. Tent stakes, sleeping roll, ground cloth. Coffee, 1 lb. Oatmeal, peanuts, raisins, 5 lb. Bacon, beans. By midafternoon they’d stopped at five different stores and had an unruly mountain of supplies piled in the rear of the Dodge.

On the way out of the city she got going down a one-way avenue and missed the turn toward the highway. Miriam had to lean out the passenger window to see if the lane was clear to merge and when it wasn’t, Catherine made a snap decision to turn left instead. Somebody leaned on a horn she presumed at her, although she couldn’t imagine what she’d done wrong, and impulsively she let off the gas pedal. The Dodge began to lunge like a balking mule and she panicked, stamped the brake and stalled out yet again with a slam.

Miriam roared with laughter beside her. Another horn blared. “Just clutch it when that happens,” she wheezed. “Your gear was too high.”

Catherine gave a stricken glance at a line of onlookers on the sidewalk and her mind saw again the throngs queued and shouting during those last weeks at Walbrook, the flashbulbs popping once the newspapers got hold of things and the pandemonium and the eyes of all Britain cast upon them, frantically digging away, frantic in the dirt. Audrey Williams laughing, she could hear it like she could hear Miriam now, telling Catherine she might be a bit of a Bolshevik. The tidal scent of the Thames on the autumn air—

The horn blasted again. The crowd on the sidewalk was in fact the line at a ticket booth. She had stalled in front of a theater. She glanced at the marquee and gave a second start.
Blackboard Jungle.
She and David never had gotten around to seeing it.

She looked at Miriam. “Is rock and roll here yet?”

Miriam had caught her breath. “Um, maybe? I know I’ve heard of it.”

Catherine shoved in the clutch and pushed the starter.

Fifteen minutes later the lights dimmed in the theater. They sat through a newsreel and a trailer for a Western movie with gaping color vistas not so unlike the terrain of the canyon, but also Indians in headdresses being shot off their horses, which made Catherine cringe. But Miriam seemed unaffected, or at least unsurprised.

The screen went dark and the head of a lion appeared with his grunt-like roar, and as the animal melted away again his voice merged with a rising military drumbeat, which
rat-a-tatted
along before half veering, half morphing into something more along the line of bass-bomb inflected bebop. Then out of nowhere a hard, sharp jolt when the sticks
ka-kack-kacked
against the steel rim of a snare and a voice like a threat went, “
One two three o’clock, Four o’clock Rock,
” and Catherine felt Miriam and somehow half the audience flinch like they’d been electrocuted.

She leaned into Miriam’s ear. “This is it. Rock and roll.”

The song wound on, punctuated by a sort of jabbing saxophone break and then again by a guitar part, which Catherine despite herself could only regard as perfectly delivered, all racing downscale runs and wailing, bending notes.

“Is there more music like this?”

“More and more. This movie sort of started it.”

Somebody threw an ice cube, which bounced off Catherine’s seat. Somebody said, “Shut up over there.” She leaned again toward Miriam and whispered, “It’s known to bring out the worst in people.”

“It’s really what’s called a twelve-bar blues, or built around that, anyway,” Catherine said. They were driving now, the day later along than she would have guessed but somehow still brilliant and ripe with sunlight. “But it blends these other elements, from all around—hillbilly twang and boogie-woogie and swing. The guitarist is obviously a jazz player. So it’s sort of nothing but everything, all at once.”

“Does everyone from the East know this stuff?”

“What, rock and roll? That’s just a fad, for teenagers, because of the movie. The latest thing, you know? It’ll be something else, tomorrow.”

“No. I mean yes. That, but all the
stuff
you know. All the twelve-bar this, and Wedgwood that. I’ve read half the books in the Hardin library and I feel like I don’t know
anything
.”

“Miriam, I recently had it demonstrated to me, rather frighteningly, that I can’t change a tire. You’ve seen me. I can barely drive a clutch.”

“You’re learning, though.”

“So are you.”

They rode along to the grind of the ambulance’s gear, to the noise of the wind around the seals in the doors. Catherine wished they had a radio now, wished she could bring the whole wide world through that whistling air and right into Miriam’s ears. Not only more of this kid’s-stuff rock and roll, or rhythm and blues or whatever it was, for currency, but every worthy string of notes in the galaxy.

Her parents’ elegant Glenn Miller records.

Tchaikovsky’s nocturnes, a few of which she herself could play by rote on the spot should a piano suddenly present itself. A record player—she’d buy Miriam a record player, before the summer was out. And records. And books.

The light came across the plains at a cast that made the spring green shimmer on the hills, made the arcing red stone of an anticline across the valley nearly radiant with color. Black cows, glistening like lacquer. Miriam said, “Is the city really all dirty and dangerous, like in the movie?”

It had been a harrowing tale, with a rape attempt on a teacher by a student, knife fights in class, and threats against an expectant mother. “In places, I’m sure, although probably compressed and sensationalized for the movie. That was supposed to be a vocational school, in a tough part of New York. Poor kids.” She immediately regretted this last. “You know what I mean.”

“You don’t have to explain. Not to me. But remember how I was saying the people in New York, or Chicago, think of us in a certain way? When we were in the movie I realized the opposite is true, too. Out here, we think of everyone back in those places as having, well, your sort of life. And I guess that’s not the whole truth.”

“No, it isn’t. There are all kinds of lives. There always have been. I’m just a product of circumstance, like anyone else. I got plunked in front of a piano when I was four, with a tutor, and I soaked it up like a sponge, without any thought at all. It was expected of me, and I did it. I was expected to practice, and I did. And there was always a certain amount of money around, and a certain consciousness about taste, and I was an only child raised around pretty sophisticated adults. Or educated at least, if not actually sophisticated. So I . . . became what I became. Even when I decided to become something else.”

“But I think you’re more than what you say. You, in particular.”

Catherine gave her a sidelong look.

“A product of circumstance, I don’t think that’s true at all. I think you made yourself more than that.”

“Oh, you know. I got to a really obvious fork in the road and I went down the path that looked more interesting. Even then I had some pretty respectable people giving me permission. It wasn’t all that bold, not really.”

“The other day you said London saved your life.”

“And I’ll go on saying that until I’m dead I’m sure.” She peeled her eyes from the road for just a second now, looked at Miriam face on. “But you know what can truly save your life? Literally, truly save your life?” She looked back to the highway. “Knowing how to change your tire.”

On Sunday, Jack Allen arrived at the house with an assortment of ropes and panniers and canvas sheets and with martial efficiency proceeded to condense both equipment and food into loads of cargo for three packsaddles. He hung a spring scale from the limb of a tree and checked the weights of the packs, shifting contents from one to another. When he was satisfied he marked a code on each with a stub of chalk.

The next morning they bounced in the gray dawn over a rutted road through an empty stretch of country. Catherine towed one stock trailer with the Dodge, following the lights of another trailer pulled by Jack Allen’s battered truck.

When the sun showed above the horizon they parked along the river, the wide mouth of the canyon yawning darkly a mile off. Allen offloaded the pack animals from Catherine’s trailer—three long-legged government-style jack mules, comical looking animals with oversized ears and skulls curved like the blade of a pickax. Catherine and Miriam together carried the loaded panniers from the rear of the ambulance, Catherine at least struggling with the weight and trying not to show it. Allen lashed the cargo to the saddled mules, slinging rope around like a spider, his nimble fingers building hitches as intricate as the structure of a snowflake. He loaded two of the mules with the packs and panniers, the third with a pair of bundled hay bales and a sack of grain.

They were riding upriver in less than an hour, Catherine and Miriam mounted on horses new to both of them and Jack Allen as always astride his magnificent gray. (Miriam: “Doesn’t that horse ever get tired?” Jack Allen: “Nope.”)

The mules trailed behind. When Catherine looked back at the string of them lumbering beneath their loads she remembered again the map in her kitchen, that brown blotch of land. She had a vision of themselves as fortune seekers, delicious as it was forbidden in modern, matured archaeology.

“Have you ever seen
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
?” she said to Miriam.

“It’s another movie?”

“Yes.”

Miriam frowned. “I don’t think so. I really haven’t seen very many. Is it about archaeology?”

“No, it’s about gold. But the mules made me think of it.”

“You like movies, don’t you.”

“She’s a rich white girl. Goes without saying she likes movies.” Jack Allen rode face forward though his voice carried back like a clarion.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Now he did look back. Though he rode into the sun he wasn’t yet wearing his Ray-Ban glasses and his cool, blue eyes had their trademark half-teasing, half-taunting squint. “You’re the student of humanity, darlin’. You tell me.”

Catherine looked back at Miriam. Miriam shrugged.

They pitched camp five miles from the mouth of the canyon in a meadow off the river, another vibrant green gash in the rock-red corpus around them. Jack Allen stretched a canvas between two trees and staked the free corners with guy lines to the ground. He piled tack and provisions at one end, set up a makeshift kitchen near the other. Collapsible table, canvas stools, battered green cookstove with its bright red tank. He looked at Catherine. “Home sweet home.”

He rode off alone in the afternoon. Catherine and Miriam walked out across the meadow and climbed as high as they could on the talus slope at the base of the east rim. “Watch for snakes,” Miriam said, a routine caution by now. In the prior weeks they had encountered and even heard the buzz of a number of the terrifying creatures and Catherine had long before realized she needed to scan always as much for rattlers as remains.

They studied the ground below from the elevation, tried for all its lush grass to spy the telltale rock circles of tepee rings and tried as well to deduce whatever features had drawn Jack Allen to this particular place.

“Water, obviously. And grass for the animals,” Catherine said. “I don’t even see why he bothered to pack hay bales in here, actually.”

“You have to be careful with horses and fresh grass. They can gorge themselves and founder.”

“Founder?”

“It’s like that rich man’s disease? In humans? With the feet?”

“Gout,” said Catherine wryly. Her father had a touch.

“Right. That’s why he brought the hay.” Miriam shielded her eyes against the sun, high up now over this broad point in the canyon and glaring like a heat lamp. They saw the temperature shimmer off the rocks in the distance. “You know what else we need to remember? Not everyone who might have camped here had horses. I mean if people were here four thousand years ago, like Mr. Caldwell said, then horses didn’t factor at all.”

“I know. I was just thinking the same thing.”

Catherine studied the river where its long sweep emerged from the trees, down a bit now from the high runoff a few weeks earlier but still off-color and for the most part difficult to cross, even on horseback. “If people had to wade across on foot they must surely have known where the gravel bars were, the wide shallow crossings. Even then it seems really unlikely entire populations would come here, with women and kids and big camps and all. Look at it. What would be the point? Hunting? There is some game around; we know that.”