Painted Horses (33 page)

He reads the places where medics worked on the wounded, sees discarded morphine vials and cutaway fabric. He finds the bodies of two German soldiers in a low scrape in the ground. He finds the machine gun nest, empty now save a sinister jackpot of shell casings.

The dun calls out to him and he kills the light and as he makes his way back some odd foreign object collapses beneath his foot. His heart freezes, thinking he’s triggered a mine. When no blast follows he switches the light back on.

McKee’s doughboy campaign hat, crushed beneath his boot. He picks it up and pushes the crown out. No bullet holes and no blood. He moves on to the horse.

He passes mule carts along the road, dead servicemen piled like busted furniture. He makes his way to a field hospital and though there is no sign of McKee a nurse asks if John H needs doctoring. John H does not follow and she flashes a mirror, shows him the blood in a new moon on his chin. He thanks her but heads back to the night.

A week later he sees
MCKEE, ENOS LEMUEL, PFC
on a missing-in-combat list and writes a letter addressed to McKee Clan, Ogden, UT.

In the fall the rain starts again. The recon cavalry has been dismantled for months though John H is still with the dun and a handful of other horses, still working with the mule lines.

He finds himself under the scrutiny of an officer fresh to the war, a West Pointer and confirmed tank man, champing to charge across the Po valley with his roaring Shermans and kick Kesselring straight back to Berlin. He is thus nothing less than affronted to spy the horses in his camp, to see John H leading the gray dun.

The officer is a spit-and-polish paragon and he strides straight up and knocks the battered Stetson from John H’s head. The gray dun shies, does a two-step.

John H steadies the horse and picks up the hat.

“This is not 1914, soldier. That is not regulation attire.”

John H replaces the hat on his head. “You new here?”

The officer is momentarily dumbstruck and John H avails himself, clucks at the horse and walks off. Now the officer’s dander really rises but just as he finds his voice he spies something else and goes speechless again. Two yellow handprints, one atop the other on the horse’s rump. What kind of an army have they been running over here.

For months the bivouacs have trailed a dizzying throng of refugees, desperate women with bawling children, the lot of them wholly dependent on Allied food shipments that never stretch quite far enough. The officer grits his teeth even to stomach this disordered rabble, boys who steal anything they get their slippery fingers on and women who whore themselves for crumbs.

Now we’re feeding horses to boot. Well not anymore. The officer sends an order to the field kitchen. The horses are to be separated from the mule line, slaughtered with dispatch and rationed to the refugee camp. Any US soldier not assigned to a pack battalion will report to general infantry.

John H heads to the officer’s compound but is stopped outside by the MPs. Finally an aide emerges.

“Is he out of his mind?”

“Whether or not he’s out of his mind, I can assure you he won’t be changing his mind.” The aide muses a moment. “He’s pretty far from what you might call an agrarian.”

Past midnight John H slips into the holding pen and finds the gray dun. He has the horse saddled in a quick minute, then cuts out a dominant mare and tethers her with a slipknot to the Furstnow. He leads the dun and the mare to the creek at the edge of camp, a dozen loose horses trailing behind, the click of hooves lost in the babble and flow.

By dawn he’s in a forested draw to the north. He stops up at daylight and pickets the horses in a beech stand, carries his rifle to the line of the ridge up above. To the west he sees the blue plain of the Ligurian Sea, melting into mist on the horizon. He is either smack within or perhaps just outside the German line.

He rides by moonlight for the next two nights, holes up during the day beneath the cloak of ragged trees.

By the third morning, he has outridden the war.

The Zeiss glasses tell him this, make a gift of villages that have not been bombed or strafed or otherwise contested. He sees dairy cows in their pastures, views gloriously intact red tile roofs against brilliant sapphire sky. The countryside is not incinerated, at least not yet.

He travels by daylight and makes better time though still he keeps away from the roads. He rides with the odor of the sea always in the air, climbs to a vantage from time to time to be sure it is still within sight. In this way he follows the curve of the continent until the ocean is not to the west but directly south and then gradually south and east. Early one morning he leaves the horses in a hayfield at the edge of the woods and rides out past the rick stacks to a dirt lane, follows the lane to a crossroads, also unpaved. He can see a farm tucked into a dell, perhaps a mile off, smoke trailing from a chimney. He raises his glasses and watches a hunter with two dogs working a hedgerow along a harvested grainfield.

He lopes down the road until a crossroad appears, reins the dun to read the white arrows on the corner post. Most of the names are in French. Toulon he knows. He is in liberated country now, the Allied invasion of southern France months past and the armies long traveled north. He turns the dun back for the hayfield.

For the second time in his life he pushes urgently west, staying in the trees or the hills when he can and otherwise avoiding the roadways. He skirts slumbering stone villages in the dawn, waves to farm folk from a distance.

He happens on the girl in a dense stretch of forest along the Rhone River. He is watering the horses when suddenly she is simply there, appearing for all he knows out of thin winter air. She is nine or ten, no more, dusky as the forest light itself, festooned in colored rags and tinkling copper hoops. She pays him little mind but hops and skips around the horses, greeting each in turn. She studies the paint on their shoulders and flanks, dots and slashes and stripes.

She arrives at the gray dun. She places her own small brown hand atop the larger yellow palm print, splays her fingers and giggles. Now she looks at the man, unfurls her arm in a sort of demand. John H senses it will be useless to speak to her in English but he finds himself holding his own arm out to her, gathers this is what she wants. She seizes his hand and turns it over, traces the lines in his palm with the tip of her finger. She looks up at him, her eyes very grave. She runs her thumb and forefinger like calipers down the length of each of his fingers, base to tip, looking not at his hand but all the while at his face. John H looks back.

She finishes at the end of his pinkie, elevates his palm toward hers and fans her fingers against his. Again she giggles.

She pulls him through the forest. He has the gray dun by the halter and the other horses trailing, this mute slip of a girl in the lead. He smells woodsmoke, sees the leap of a fire. Other children coalesce in the same shadowy way as the girl, a pack of dark wildings whose collective adornment swirls in the atmosphere like miniature chimes. One or the other swoops in to tug at his sleeve or his pocket until he has been sampled by the lot of them. They speak an alien tongue, chattering to themselves and apparently to him, gold glinting in their mouths. The girl alone remains silent.

The wagon camp sprawls through the gully like the effect of a cyclone. Through evening’s frail light he sees the wagons are as chromatic as the girl’s clothing and no less ragged, accented by fading stencils and tattered colored flags. With a pang he thinks they look nearly like a sheep wagon.

Only one of the men knows any English and this is broken at best but John H pieces out a story. They are travelers, coppersmiths and carders, restless by nature and transient by heritage. His band and a thousand like his have been as hounded as the Jews for the past five centuries though all of that pales beside the past five years.

This is the first John H has heard of the death camps and with the language barrier he is not sure he understands the man correctly. Rumors out of the east. Night raids and cattle cars. They have survived in the cover of the forest for months, terrified for their children’s lives. The Nazis patrolled roads and villages, but they did not come here.

“The Kraut army’s gone,” John H tells him. “Retreated north. This country’s been liberated.”

The man nods in the firelight, snaps his fingers and as if by magic a loaf of bread appears. He tears through crust, tosses a chunk to John H. The bread is still warm. “Is good, no?”

John H has not had fresh bread in at least a year. He holds this to his nose and smells salt and yeast and his belly growls as though on signal. The man grins like a thimblerigger, turns to the silent girl and shuffles the hair on top of her head, says, “
Ma petite fille
, she read like a book.” He looks straight on to her and mouths something, his lips moving without sound, and the girl nods and dips and floats like ether. John H loses her in the dark.

The man holds the remainder of the loaf in two hands, cradles it in the air. “She this big, she is a fever. She burn alive. Who know what she hear then. Who know what she know.”

“She knows horses.”

“Aye, she know horses. Birds, dogs, maybe snakes and owls. Know men, too. Know you, before you know her.
Le chevalier, le cavalier pour le soleil dans l’ouest
. She know where to find you,
ami
. She know you bring horses.”

John H still holds the bread, still has not taken it to his mouth. The gray dun shifts behind him, nudges his shoulder with the weight of its skull.

“We need your horses,
ami
.”

John H shakes his head, thinks of the little girl and feels true regret. “I made a deal with these horses.”

“A deal. What is this,
deal
.”

“A safe passage deal. Get them out of the line of fire.” He laughs a little, looks at the bread in his hand. “Not to mention out of the soup pot.”

Behind him the gray dun draws up its croup and raises its tail and shits with a sound to blush the dead. Soft apples splat like batter, the smell rising over and above woodsmoke and baking and lived-in wool. Children laugh out of the darkness.

“Your horse maybe think different, eh? He see this deal for what it is, eh?”

John H shrugs. “Got me.”

“My fren’, we are not so different,
vous et moi
. We are responsible both for the creatures in our care, no? Both we accept this. Also we are cut off both from our place in this world, no?”

John H points at the vardos. “That ain’t your place in the world?”

“Ah, is a point, a fine point. Is incorrect. This wheels have no turn in five years,
ami
. Is a sin,
ami
, to displace a man, displace the creatures in his care.” He steps forward and moves among the horses, moves the way the girl moved along the river.

“In our second winter we are no longer able to feed ourselves, much less feed the horses. So the horses feed us.
Vous comprenez?
Is of little choice. Is ah, is ah—”

“Do or die,” says John H.

“How again?”

“Do or die.”

“
Oui
. As you say. Do or die. I need your horses, my fren’. To take me to my place in the world. You talk about a deal, my fren’.
Venez
, I make you a deal.”

The girl awaits by the fire. She kneels before a trunk case, a narrow leather boot with buckles. She smiles, holds out her hand. She lifts the lid of the case.

Though he’s never seen one before John H knows in his own moment of prescience precisely what this is. Within the case rests a weapon, part rifle and part wand, a Mannlicher with a flat bolt handle and the stock wood down the length of the barrel. His mind flashes to a safari story,
Cosmopolitan
magazine in Bakar’s Miles City kitchen, a blustery day way back when. Ernest Hemingway. The short happy life of Francis Mac-somebody, shot by his wife with just such a gun.

The girl lifts the rifle and holds it up to him and he hesitates because he knows that here is a deal all right, a deal with the devil. There are flames even, firelight lapping the red hue of the stock and the soft blue of the barrel, lapping over the girl, snapping like sparks in the jet of her eyes. He takes it from her, and he is a goner.

He turns the rifle in his hands, works the bolt and marvels at whatever wrought such elegant angles from the raw and Precambrian lodes of the earth. The bolt glides through the action like silk through a ring, with none of the rattle and slop of his battle rifle. The forearm mates to the barrel the way muscle cleaves to bone. Yak would be smitten. John H reads
MADE IN AUSTRIA
and thinks,
I can’t believe we’re beating these guys
.

He looks at the gypsy king. “I want your word.”

“My word?”

“That you don’t eat these horses. Other horses, maybe. Do or die. Not these horses.”

The gypsy bows.