Painted Horses (39 page)

She followed the music through the turns in the walls and the trumpet grew stronger as the light weaker, the horses fading in the dusk. If this did not kill her it would utterly make her. She emerged from the seam into a cirque, wobbled across the grassy bottom toward a slow plaintive tune, mournful and blue as the darkening fathoms of a sea.

Cobalt blue.

Egyptian blue, the color of nightfall.

She saw an orange glow from the rock, went toward light and sound at once and found herself up under a low porch roof and then peering through a doorway, an oil lamp burning on a table.

From the rough wooden doorframe she could take in the whole room at once. A stretched canvas on an easel, a stack of others behind it. Heads and shoulders of horses, daubed on the red stone wall. Against the wall a rifle not much larger than a toy and by the lamp a suitcase Victrola, its black disc whirling, its slow song winding to a close.

He stepped up behind her and she knew who it was but she jumped on impulse anyway, spun around with her heart in her throat. Heard the jump of the needle in its groove.

He had a half-eaten apple in one hand, two paintbrushes in the other. His familiar shirt. “Catherine,” he said. “You’ve seen a ghost.”

“It was a religion for Roman soldiers, mostly. Only men could join, so the women mainly became Christians, which meant the kids did too.”

She spoke around mouthfuls, table manners scrapped in the face of food. She shrugged and she chewed. “Eventually it just faded, became a victim of itself. Its exclusivity. No one really knows much about it.”

He was heating a kettle over a fire and the smell of it rose up like the sensory wallop of a Chinatown, a little Italy. She slavered like a dog.

He handed her a bowl of something halfway between a soup and a stew, cubes of meat and tomato bobbing in a broth with a kind of tiny onion bulb. She tried to slow herself through the first bowl and couldn’t. He ladled her a second without asking, chasing through the kettle after chunks of meat. He didn’t eat himself.

He counted her pulse at her wrist in the dim light of the lamp, turned up the wick and tilted her chin to see her pupils. Examined the egg on her skull. She followed his finger in the air, grinned at his tease when his hand jerked quickly away. Outside she heard the blow of a horse, the question of an owl.

He asked if she’d been ill.

She had not. Then she remembered her epic period, still not fully passed but she couldn’t tell him about that. He told her he’d been hungry before himself, that he didn’t care to be again.

“I guess this reminds me of those days,” she said. “The way the stones fit together. Like you live inside an artifact.”

He wound the Victrola and set the needle against the disc. Not a horn this time but a guitar, flying through a song to urge a caravan along.

“How long did it take to build this?”

He shook his head. “Not me. It’s like you say, an artifact. I fixed it up some, kicked the pack rats out. That’s about it.” He looked around as though seeing the room for the first time himself, seeing the wood-framed window with its hinged wooden shutter and rusty screen, the stone firebox with its iron plate on top.

“Stock thieves used to work out of this canyon. Fifty, sixty years ago. Back in the wild old days.” He closed one eye and looked at her with the other, leveled a finger as though to draw a bead.

“Before the war I worked on a place south of here, had a stove-up old cookie who spent his youth dodging stock detectives. Finally got caught and did a stretch in the pen and when he got out, everything had changed. Automobiles and aeroplanes, neither of which he had a lot of use for.

“He was too crippled up to ride when I met him but he loved horses. Loved to talk, too. Old stories about the outlaw trail, cutting stock by the rustler’s moon, switching brands with a running iron. Moving horses into Canada, moving whiskey back to Butte.

“Stories about this hideout they had. Good grass, good water. A stone house against a cliff.” He pointed with his chin at a masoned wall. “Reckon one of them old outlaws was half Roman himself, the way these stones fit together. When I got back from France I rode up in here and found it.”

Catherine settled back from her empty bowl. An hour ago she’d been out of her head. Now she could think. Exhausted to be sure, nearly crippled with food, but otherwise not stupefied. “You make it sound so easy.”

He trained his eye on her again. Took his aim.

“What,” she drawled, heard the color of her voice and felt the color come again to her face.

“You walked right to it yourself. Must not be much of a hideout, if a girl on her own two feet can waltz right in.”

She remembered the crane. Surely she’d imagined it yet here she was and he would think she was crazy. She half thought it herself. “That’s what I do,” she said. “Find things.”

She thought of the horses in the crevasse, the silhouettes on the wall behind her. She studied him in the light from the globe, even his half smile etching thin lines in the corners of his eyes. He might be older than he looked.

She said, “Maybe tomorrow you can help me find something else.”

He put her in the Furstnow saddle on the grulla mare, told her not to let her guard down, that the horse was accustomed to no one but him. He smoothed a blanket over the red colt and led the nervous colt around with the bit in his mouth, then laddered backward up the corral rails and eased a leg across.

They rode out through the seam past the painted panels, the likenesses vivid and full of flight, appearing to dash even now with her head clear and the light as strong as it could get between the high looming walls.

She remembered thinking she was about to be famous, presenting to the world a displaced gallery of prehistoric horses to rival anything in Spain or France. Nothing like it in the New World at all. The Walbrook temple might not rate a pass but surely this would trump Harris Power and Light. It would have been true, too, she thought, but for the rueful allowance none of it was actually old. She watched his shoulders roll with the gait of the colt, kept expecting him to turn and offer some explanation. Some of the figures approached the size of billboards but he did not so much as acknowledge they were there.

Catherine had unfolded her map for him an hour earlier, the sun up over the rim of the cirque, warm on her neck and shining like water on the horses in the grass. She showed him the places she had camped, the sequence of her summer jotted with arrows.

The draw where she and Miriam had chased the cranes, the spring where they found the point. She retraced her path through the canyon, and the notes made in her own or in Miriam’s hand made her think of specific meals they had eaten, hilarious remarks Miriam had made.

Here they had forgotten the can opener and had to pierce a tin of peaches with a rock to the hilt of a knife. Here they startled a bull elk out of his bed, the thrashing the elk made startling the wits out of the two of them. Here Jack Allen first noticed horse tracks.

She found herself telling him these things, working her way upriver as though the map had become an archive of her own runaway life. She hadn’t thought of it this way before.

John H could see the flaws in the thing, the falsities of proportion and scale. “This place you’re trying to get to? It’s nearly as far from where we are now as what you hiked yesterday, from this road here.”

“So I’m only halfway there.”

“More or less.”

She frowned. “And where are we, exactly? On the map, I mean.”

That little half smile again. “Where we are isn’t on the map.”

Now this half-wild mare he had her on kept crowding the red colt in the crevasse, pushing impatiently forward with her ears flattened back, lunging with her grotesque teeth for the flesh of his rump and nearly tearing the reins from her hand.

“Whoa now,” he said. He trotted the red horse forward a few steps. “Rein her back, just gently. That’s it.”

Her left hand gripped the horn like an amulet. “What if she bucks me?”

“She won’t buck. She just wants up ahead. Once we’re out she can have her way.”

He disappeared through the willows ahead of her. The mare shied at the sway, prancing in place with her head jerking. Catherine screwed up her courage and gouged her heels in, nearly toppled from the saddle in shock when the mare shot forward into the whip and slap of vegetation.

He laughed when she burst into the open, sitting the red horse above her on the edge of the wash. She’d regained her seat now and she steered the mare beside him and told him she was glad he thought it was funny, and he wheeled the colt and both horses galloped across the flat.

They reached the head of the draw in what Catherine guessed at a little more than an hour, though the hands of her watch remained frozen from the day before. No amount of tapping or winding would make them move. She hadn’t imagined that, either.

“Should we leave the horses here? The ride up gets pretty scary.”

“No, keep riding. We’re okay for now.”

“Do you already know what’s up there? Tell me the truth.”

He shook his head. “No idea.”

“You’re not just playing along?”

“Missy, I don’t walk unless I have to. I sure don’t go in for mountain climbing.”

“You’re going to have to. Mountain climb, I mean.”

He shrugged. “I’ll make an exception.”

She smiled. “Lucky me.”

“Let’s just say I can’t ignore your sand.”

If he thought her a fool for traipsing around these raw parts alone, endlessly requiring rescue, he certainly didn’t let on. Maybe he took her seriously, even. She wondered in a sort of idle flash if he would like to sleep with her. He hadn’t let on about that either.

She thought again of the panels in the crevasse, the silhouettes he’d painted in the small stone house. From where they sat on the horses she could look up the funnel of the draw and just see the notch in the top of the cliff. She said, “I think you’re going to be interested in a lot more than sand.”

She went through two of her three film reels out on the cap rock before he beckoned her up under the overhang. He’d found faint carvings there as well, also what looked like the last traces of painted figures, barely distinguishable from the natural striations in the rock. She was not sure she could have noticed them on her own.

“How much more film do you have?” he asked.

“Just a few minutes’ worth. I’m not sure it matters. The light isn’t strong enough in here.”

“Not this time of day, with the sun up past the mouth there. But east is straight on over there. First thing in the morning you’d have direct sunlight on that back wall.”

She looked at the opening, then at the camera in her hand, then at him. He’d taken a seat on a low shelf beneath the band of flint, his left knee stretched straight ahead. He didn’t say whether it troubled him to climb the chute, or to scramble from stone to stone, but even in her giddiness Catherine noticed his limp.

She said, “I take it we’re coming back.”

He led her across the river and up another draw. They traveled a short way through a pine forest along a creek to a place where hot water rushed from a cleft, mineral streaks rusting the slick face of the stone as though the stone were untreated steel. She saw steam rise where the hot pool overflowed to meld with the cool of the stream.

He hoisted his leg over the colt’s back and went to the ground like a child down a slide.

By the time she’d clambered from the mare he was down to his blue jeans, his body ghost white beneath the copper V of his neck. She turned to tie the reins off and when she turned back he was stark naked, stepping gingerly across the rocks. Pale as to be almost luminous and flopping like a fish. She averted her eyes, then glanced back again. He lowered himself into the pool, disappeared completely underwater for a moment and then popped gently through the surface.

Catherine felt a little frozen in place. She knew she shouldn’t be shy about nakedness, and even knew she wouldn’t be under ordinary circumstances. But the narrow belt running around her hips, with its hooks and straps and lump of gauze in the crotch of her panties, may as well have suddenly caught fire beneath her clothes. “How is it?” She had to yell above the noise of the water.

“Restorative,” he shouted. “Limp in. Leap out.”

He went under again and she seized her chance, slipped around the other side of the horses and from there behind the trunk of a tree. She hurried to unlace her boots and peel off her socks, then kicked free of her pants. She undid the little clasp on the belt and checked the gauze. Barely any blood at all, by now practically a formality. She went back to the pool.

“Don’t peek,” she told him. She wore only her shirt and that was half undone.

He grinned right at her, water running from his hair. “Wouldn’t think of it.”

She laughed and let the shirt go to the ground.

She heard the drone of the prop long before she knew what it was, a faint hum in the air she thought might be a dragonfly. She listened and the hum grew steadily louder before John H seemed to perceive it.

He reined the red colt. The sound was mechanical, coming from downriver. They watched an airplane bank into view and level out far down the canyon, saw the glass flash on the cockpit.