Painted Horses (9 page)

In the middle of the night he startles awake to sour breath on his face, a rasp of stubble against his cheek and neck, a foreign hand sliding under his clothing across his boy’s belly and then down to the warmth of his groin.

He panics and tries to calculate at the same time. He’s in a boxcar half filled with hay bales he jumped at dusk. He can look over at the open door of the car and see the curve of the moon now. Another rider hopped in after him, a gaunt man perhaps the age of his father wearing a worn-out suit jacket over a pair of coveralls. The man shared a can of peaches as evening limped toward dark, let John H sample a cigarette that made his head swim.

For a long second he is paralyzed with fear. Then he feels the rough cob of the man’s hand clasp his genitals.

John H flails out with his right arm, his left pinned beneath the weight of this body that is now moving against his own. He hears the same sour voice breathe at him to lie still, that this won’t hurt, and then his fingers close around a solid object, a cold handle, smooth steel.

A bale hook. He saw it earlier on the floor of the car but paid little attention. The man is now propped above him, fumbling with the buttons on his pants, a solid blank spot in the dark. With the weight away from his arm John H lifts himself in one motion and swings for all he’s worth.

The hook’s steel point strikes solid flesh and for all he knows bone as well, strikes with a sickening thud. The man roars in pain and his lust goes to rage. He strikes out at John H with a sort of berserk blizzard of movement. One fist glances off the boy’s cheek and the other lands solidly on the front of his shoulder, which causes the hook to tear through flesh like a dull knife through a roast. He roars again and John H rips the hook free.

Now John H is on his feet, now skipping to his right on the wooden floorboards. His pants are half-undone. The man silhouettes himself in the open door and John H swings again, a real roundhouse. The hook sinks again, this time deeply. He can feel it. The man shrieks, a sound from some reservoir of sounds not ordinarily summoned by grown men. He staggers backward. Something hot and wet slaps John H in the face and he releases his grip. The man spins in the opening against the night sky. John H glimpses the black shadow of the hook, swinging from his neck.

The man collapses on the floor where he gurgles and writhes. John H feels a new surge of panic and without thinking at all he jumps past the body on the floor and through the open door.

He feels a rush of air and the ground swings up beneath him like a giant club. The impact comes quickly and feels as though it will knock him limb from limb. His left leg jams at the knee in a jolt of biting pain and he is flung like a page in the wind, bouncing and rolling crazily down the side of the railbed. He meets a rough stop against the poke and prod of a wire-limbed shrub. He feels like one massive, bleeding scrape, the last breath he took ripped by force from his lungs.

The train clacks in the moonlight. The last car passes, the long wall of noise shrinking in the distance. He realizes the train is by chance chuffing up a long grade, not as a result moving at its usual travel speed. Otherwise he would likely be dead.

When his breath returns he moves his limbs, rotates his feet and hands. Every inch of him hurts, but everything seems to work. He rises slowly and rubs his knee for a minute, fastens his pants and limps up the side of the railbed to the tracks. He feels cool air fan his face and remembers his face is wet. He touches his finger to the stickiness on his cheek. Blood he knows is not his own.

He left his pack on the train and now has nothing but what he wears on his back. He looks out from the elevated railbed. Beneath the white moon the landscape appears itself fully lunar, empty and open and spare. A creature yips in the distance, then howls. Another of its kind howls back.

He walks through the night to keep warm, following the twin gleam of the rails for hours. His jammed knee throbs but he ignores it. At one point far out in the distance he can see a pulsing dot he takes for a campfire. He sticks to the railbed.

By daylight he’s nearly faint with hunger. He crosses a creek on a low trestle and peers into the water. The creek runs clear. He stumbles down and drinks, figuring through the ravenous fatigue that unclouded water can’t be any worse than some of the food he’s recently eaten. The water is shockingly cold and he swallows only two or three mouthfuls. Even this amount sloshes in his belly like a frigid wave. He forgets to wash his face. A blast of pain shoots through his knee when he stands.

An hour later he sweats out the water as he walks, the morning sunshine burning the chill of night fast from this shadeless environment. Though he believes this is still the month of May the sun beats down with the intensity of high summer. He has no hat and he can tell he will need one.

The vegetation is sparse, consisting mainly of a species of spindly shrub with narrow gray-green leaves and scattered clumps of short-stemmed grass. The landscape dips and climbs, low-lying flats abutting chaotic jumbles of stone and long fissures rending the earth in two. He spies a band of horses, a large band, running before a great cloud of dust in the distance. He takes this as a single, favorable sign.

He retreats into the fog of his mind for long stretches of time. His legs follow the tracks but his brain is nowhere around.

He is with Cora. He catches himself mumbling to her.

A chime seems to follow him and he thinks this is not real either. Or perhaps it is the chime of an angel, come to claim him.

At the moment he barely has the ambition to be afraid.

He is starving and his very brain throbs.

The chime continues and he dully understands it rings not behind him but up ahead. He plods on, listening as the chime fades out and then sounds again. He passes through a narrow wedge between two raised tables, walking up through a shallow trough in the land. Midway up the trough a narrow gully cuts through crosswise, dropping downhill to his left through a chute studded with rocks. The sound of the chime carries through the chute like a draft through a flue.

The chute opens to a flat plain and the floor of the plain appears to move. It shifts and writhes and he thinks he must be seeing things but the chime rings again and he figures it out. Sheep. He’s seeing a flock of sheep, milling and moving on the desert. He has been hearing the chime of a bellwether. Perhaps there is a farm. With food.

He picks through the chute and has just reached the flock when a fine-featured dog appears out of nowhere. The dog stands between him and the sheep, pointed ears pricked. It studies him a moment and goes into a berserk barking fit, false-charging and then retreating again, white teeth flashing. John H stands stock-still and tries to cut through the haze in his mind, tries to figure this out.

Fortunately he doesn’t have to. He hears a familiar sound on the hillside and looks up. The shod hooves of a horse, clattering on the rocks. A rider with a broad, battered hat directs the horse toward him. The rider shouts in some foreign tongue at the dog and the dog backs off and quiets but remains alert. The rider reins the horse and studies John H. John H notices a rifle in a scabbard, a shepherd’s crook across the pommel.

The face beneath the hat is not young and while the rider does not strike John H as an Indian, neither is he exactly white. He has skin the color of new saddle leather, eyes like black roasted coffee beans. Both face and hands are gnarled with age but somehow both appear trustworthy. Perhaps it is the fact he is a shepherd.

John H tries to think. The last time he trusted someone. An offering of peaches and now he is here. The sheep behind him number in the hundreds and one of them or another is always bleating and he cannot reason. He smells their collective animal smell.

“I am Jean Bakar Arietta. You are injured.” He pronounces injured as though it begins with a pair of
e
’s.

John H does not recall he is covered in someone else’s blood. He finds it miraculous that Jean Bakar Arietta can perceive his aches and pains. “I fell off the train.”

“Oh my.” He brings his horse down and dismounts. “My camp is a little bit that way. You can ride a horse? You need food?”

John H begins to cry. He doesn’t want to but this means nothing. “I can ride a horse,” he says. “I need food.”

Jean Bakar Arietta lives out of a wagon with a faded green box and a stained and patched canvas top in the shape of a half cylinder. A stovepipe protrudes at one end. He feeds John H powder biscuits left over from his breakfast and a bowl of cold stew that tastes better than anything he’s ever had.

Jean Bakar watches the boy squat in the dirt and eat. He has by now figured out the dried blood belongs to another but any opinion he has he keeps to himself. He begins to talk while John H chews and swallows.

“I come to this land in 1891. I am young then. Not so young as you but pretty young.”

His dog nearby lifts its ears. John H considers that perhaps it has been awhile since this old brown man has spoken to another human.

“I fall off the train myself. So to speak. In my home there is not much land so I come here. Me and many others, mostly without family. I speak none of the English then but I know the sheep. My people always know the sheep, from the time we place the first bell around the neck of a wild lamb. From the time we leave the caves. You know about sheep?”

John H shakes his head as he chews.

“But you know the horses.”

He nods. “Yeah. I know horses.”

Jean Bakar nods back. “This I can tell. You will do well here.”

He finds a hat for John H to wear against the sun and puts him bareback on his second horse and they drive the sheep to water in the afternoon, then to a natural cirque with decent grass near the wagon for the night. He checks his snares and finds a fat cottontail, which he dresses and spits at the wagon. He sends the boy after greasewood and dead sage and starts a fire outside. Tonight they dine well.

He heats water for John H on the stove in the wagon and leaves him alone to bathe. John H sponges weeks of grime and old sweat, the residue of hard travel, the soot and cinder of trains. Blood. His knee is swollen and stiff.

They turn in that night on the twin bunks in the wagon, the dog outside with the sheep. “Whereabouts are we?” asks John H in the dark.

“How do you mean?”

“Last I knew I was in South Dakota. That was yesterday.”

“You are in Montana. Near the Powder River.”

John H chews on this for a spell. “Where are you from? Your people, I mean.”

Jean Bakar’s voice comes back muffled through the first stages of sleep. “I am Naffaroan. Euskaldunak. What you call Basque.”

John H doesn’t follow. He lies awake a long time in the dark, listening to the sounds of sleep from the other bunk. From outside he hears the horses cropping. After a long while he finds Cora’s pillowcase, carried near his body all this time. He presses it to his face in the dark and he breathes.

He hopes against hope. Her scent has long disappeared.

Relics

1

Catherine telephoned her betrothed, her first chance in what—five days? Yesterday she knew she should try but kept expecting Dub Harris’s guide to appear, and by the time evening arrived and he hadn’t, she could barely keep her eyes open. Now she ignored the hollow hunger in her gut and waited for the connection to go through. She studied her dirty hands, considered she might be trying to get her priorities straight.

She’d made it out of the canyon before dark, more relieved by this than she realized she would be. The sun fell rapidly as she drove on the asphalt roadway. She kept trying to imagine herself hitchhiking, running over imaginary things to say to various people as they pulled to the shoulder. She thought of the mustanger, his bound and bloodied horse in the rear of the truck. She thought of him watching her, thought of his one-way glasses.

She tried to tell herself she was being ridiculous, that the world was changing and she could go anywhere a man could. Still, when she passed two teenaged Indian boys with their thumbs out on the side of the road, she kept right on driving.

David answered on the second ring.

“Hi,” she said. Something clicked like the snip of a scissor, clicked again and she realized the lines weren’t fully linked. “Hello? David?”

“Kitten?”

“David? Can you hear me?”

“Now I can. Do I sound like I’m underwater?”

“No. Do I?”

“Yeah, a little. I’ve been wondering when you’d call. Started to think you’d been swept away by some rugged Gary Cooper sort.”

Now this was uncanny. “You
are
the rugged Gary Cooper sort.”

“Yeah, well.
Fountainhead
Coop, maybe. I sure don’t ride around on horses. Got a good view of the city lights, though. How are you doing out there?”

How to answer? Certainly not truthfully. “Just feeling my way along. I’ve barely gotten settled. My clothes are still in bags.”

“When do you start working?”

“Tomorrow. It’s . . . a bigger prospect than I realized.”

“How do you mean?”

“How do I mean. It’s huge out here. And
empty
. You can’t even imagine until you see it. The canyon alone is fifty miles long, and deeper than—” she stopped herself short of Satan’s appetites. “There’s nothing, for miles. It’s like landing on Jupiter.”