Passion Play (21 page)

The onslaught subsided; the ditches began to swell with the seething mass of horses, their neighing a distant tide in the vast-ness of sand and rock. Soon only a few mares were left to roam the corral aimlessly. Now the mounted men abandoned the easy pleasures of the gun for the challenge of lasso and the illusion of the hunt. Mad with terror, the mustangs hurtled through the net of their trappers, yet one by one, the whirling noose of rope brought each mare down, strangling it into submission, to be dragged headlong toward the swollen trenches, the dogs howling, the mounts of the men, inflamed with blood and death, now as terrified as the animals they hauled.

Fabian watched as the riders searched the horizon intently, to ensure that they had felled all the wild horses; then they made a last tour of the heaving trenches, huddled flesh still quivering and steaming in the great open gashes of earch. He noticed how quick, almost furtive, the men were about it, aware that the grassy plain they had cleared of wild mustangs was public land. The prosperous ranchers they worked for would soon bring their private cattle there to graze, the scarcity of grass no longer a threat. With the dogs in yapping pursuit, the men galloped away from the corral, heading toward their bunkhouses, their reward, chili, beans and beer. Slowly, Fabian descended to the plain, Big Lick’s nostrils twitching, quick with apprehension as it picked its way toward the mass graves, Gaited Amble reluctant to follow, sniffing the air, its head tossing.

A curtain of dust hung in the air, drifting lightly over the valley, masking the rocks and flats with a grainy film. At Fabian’s approach, a thin, whistling moan rose from the ditches, a sigh of desolation. Panicked, Big Lick thrust sideways, almost unseating Fabian and jerking Gaited Amble at the end of the lead rope. Fabian calmed the animals with his voice and hand, and the three of them continued to make their way along the ditches.

The tableau of massacre opened before him in all its grotesque composition. Cramped in heaps in the narrow furrows of the mass graves, most of the animals were dead; some twitched, a last flicker of life. Settled at the brink of the spilling trough, Fabian saw the mound of dead and dying mustangs as an infernal creation: meshed and intersecting heads, shoulders, hocks, erupting muzzles, ribs and tails, twisting coils of a monstrous snake
that burrowed greedily through the stony ground of the valley, its scattered eyes blinking, its venomous mouth open, ready to strike, indicting earth and sky.

Suddenly, Big Lick gave out a vast neigh, all its power and strength of life in the cry, sundering the deathly calm of the valley. Before it could rebound in echo, from one of the ditches came an answering shriek, muted yet still firm, the last voice of life calling to life. But before it dissolved into echo, Gaited Amble called out, a third cry shivering the sky, the voice of a temporary victor in the battle of life, rallying the vanquished.

As if at a signal, Fabian tightened his legs and threw Big Lick into a gallop. With Gaited Amble abreast, the curtain of dust veiling them still, he moved past the corral, across the mesa, through the plains and peaks, the valleys of Nevada.

Early in the fall, after he had been idling on the road for about a week, he crossed into Arkansas and reached the Double Bridle Stables in Totemfield. As he drove up, the late afternoon sun was cresting over a string of spindly pine trees, their pointy tips like wooden arrows shafting the air, poised against the sky. Through the tracery of wood, the shell of an old mill hulked like a skull. Tiny cones of hemlock and spruce, a tangle of roots, littered his path. A drowsing melancholy invaded Fabian. Time always altered, rarely improved: the place looked shabby, not as he remembered it. He wondered if, in the intervening years, he had aged as gracelessly. He felt degraded by his poverty, which had brought him here now, for the second time; he wondered at the obsession that had once driven him here for the first. The obsession had been Vanessa.

He remembered her, a student in his riding class, waiting for him at the paddock or riding off with him into the woods. The place had been filled with young riders, parents, instructors—a confusion of horses, cars and bicycles. Because of her, in their midst he had seen himself as a figure of charm, authority and influence. Then he had thought that one day he would return to claim her; now, the more he looked around, the more uncertain he was of himself and of her.

What remained for him was the short walk to the office, where he would confront another woman from his past—but not to claim her.

He parked his VanHome just beyond the main buildings, near the pond, where, sheltered by trees, it would not obstruct a view of the stables. As he swung down from the cab of the VanHome, he caught sight of three Hackney foals gamboling in the paddock, whinnying in the quiet.

Fabian found Stella in the office. She looked well, the dash of her riding breeches a sweep of black, setting off the burnished gilt of her softly coiling hair, her skin even creamier than he had remembered. She had known when to expect him—he had telephoned a few hours earlier—but even so, he could not discern whether her allure was intended for him or for others.

Face to face with her, Fabian felt a rush of withered emotion; he could not plagiarize a past self, was unwilling to pretend that the sight of her touched him.

He took off his jacket and sat across the desk from Stella. A handwritten calendar hung on one dirty wall, a schedule of riding classes scribbled all over it in red pencil, and tacked above it were a row of yellowing photographs: Stella jumping bareback, Stella on the cover of
The Tennessee Walking Horse,
Stella exhibiting a two-year-old stallion, a champion of the Spring Jubilee, Stella with members of the Walking Horse Breeders Association at Shelbyville, Stella accepting an award from the American Legion Saddle Club. In one snapshot, Stella, poised against a graceful black mare, was visibly in her teens. The picture could have served for a poster of a Southern belle posing with her favorite Tennessee Walker. Had the photographer moved his camera one inch to the right, the snapshot would have included Fabian, for the picture had been taken only a few days after Fabian met Stella for the first time, after she had attended his horsemanship classes.

Now, as then, it was common for him to be at a horse show, as a spectator, or judging a competition, and suddenly hear his name called out: he would turn and face a young woman,
vibrant, fresh and lovely, one of his former students. As she threw her arms about his neck, reminded him of who she was, where they had met, what had happened, how well she remembered what he had taught her and the stories he used to tell her, Fabian registered the force of her transformed presence, her command of age and time. Yet he was trapped by uncertainty, what to say or do, conscious of the crossroads before which he stood, his dilemma sometimes observed by the young boyfriend, manly and handsome, whom the woman had discreetly left in the background. In her embrace, the return of her voice, Fabian sought the outline of the young girl he had once known, tempted to know if she might consent to a fresh bond he could devise for the two of them. But he was aware that the same process of time that had carried her to maturity had made of him a man in midlife.

Closing in on youth—a young woman, a girl—Fabian could not resist its spell; he was compelled, his instinct honed by anguish. He would fix with an intensity almost clinical, bordering on obsession, on the sheen of a girl’s eyes, the deep color that washed pupil and iris, each filament of hair that streamed from her head, the taut yet resilient skin that blanketed her bones and veins, the buoyancy of her flesh, its scent and feel not yet probed by another. All these were for him counters to the steady waste of time and age that raced between them. In that relentless flow, his age a constant subtraction, Fabian saw himself as the heir of time, an unransomable hostage to a past that was the only gift at his command. He saw himself appearing in a girl’s life as time’s agent, unbidden, indifferent to the drama of her destiny. He contemplated aligning himself next to her, unyoking their bodies to all that was spontaneous, involuntary—his flesh rising, erect, hers hardening, enfolding him as he sundered it, seed in its flood.

Fabian was convinced that in first love, a young girl gave her love to her lover; in later loves, love merely came to her. But he knew that just as he should not expect a pony to bend to the curb, to the rein and the spur without prior schooling and cultivation, neither should he expect a young woman, healthy and beautiful, to come to him, a man more than twice her age, his home the road, his house a thing on wheels, a man of undistinguished
looks and without obvious charm, with no riches to seduce, no particular skill to enthrall, and no profession that enhanced—above all, a man outside of permanence, able to offer only a few hours, days, weeks of his presence. For this reason, he had to find a girl while she was still susceptible to a man of his experience, a mentor, even if he could offer her no more than adventure in place of advice, weariness instead of wisdom. Usually the girl would still be in high school, still be living with her parents. In singling her out, cultivating her, arranging their first encounter alone, Fabian wished to initiate her, to keep a hold on her will and emotions, to leave his brand.

He could not meet with the girl too many times without attracting unwanted attention, the notice of her fellow students, the teachers and staff of her school, often her parents. To avoid collision with the caprices of local laws, he would arrange no more than four or five meetings with the girl, some at public events, others in his VanHome. He saw to it that each meeting was intense enough to leave its mark for good.

In every town or sprawling suburb, pastoral outpost or even city where he gave lessons in horsemanship, lectured sometimes or took part in various horse shows or polo meets, Fabian kept a watch for two or three girls who would, he hoped, yield to him without mistrust.

Sometimes as he watched a young girl off in the corner of a stable, wholly absorbed in the patient ritual of waxing, flexing, polishing, buffing the riding gear and tack that lay clustered about her, he understood that horses were another embodiment of the dolls the girls had coddled and chided in their childhood, the vulnerable babies they had nurtured in their adolescent fantasies. To horses they brought devotion and a passionate loyalty that did not falter. They cosseted them, were sensitive to their needs, anointed lovingly their lesions and sores. In the routine of grooming—the combing, soaping, brushing—they took a quiet pleasure, almost domestic. He understood, also, that with conventions of family and school weakened or discarded, myths and traditions of physical weakness and submission challenged, a girl riding at hunt or dressage, taking a jump, revealed and claimed her power to master, direct, and bend to her will a horse, a living creature so much larger and more powerful than herself.

Quickening to ripeness more swiftly than boys of the same age, girls revealed a more balanced temperament, coordination whetted to a tauter pitch. They often seemed to Fabian a curious union of ballet dancer and gymnast, and in his classes he found that he could treat them as his equals, independent, responsible, alert, complete. He responded to their persistence, their strong motivation, a certain competitive heat. Many of them had been bred on banal tales of life in the Old West, romantic fictions and fantasies of adventures in the saddle, and they projected themselves into the roles of those pulp heroines or heroes. They were determined to attract notice: fame was the spur, and they rode to win.

Sometimes, after the initiation had been successfully accomplished, the inoculation had taken, the brand burned indelibly, Fabian’s interest in a girl began to wane. He might have considered her a bad prospect for a future relationship, unimaginative, the life of her fantasy already depleted. Rather than waste his time arranging future meetings with the girl, or sustain her belief that he was going to see her again, he would break with her. He was wary, though, never to reject her too abruptly or with too visible finality. This he had learned shortly after the publication of his first book on equitation.

The book, a novelty in its time, had been a considerable success; it won him a small reputation, as well as a steady flow of invitations to lecture or teach at various riding schools and academies. Among the first invitations he accepted was a request to join a house party—at which, of course, Fabian would be expected to show off his polo skill—at the Florida estate of a rich and powerful businessman, who had made his fortune in turnstiles and was celebrated for the horses he bred to race, as well as for the formidable array of breeds he maintained for polo and pleasure riding. Enclosed with the invitation was a gracious note from the millionaire, expressing the hope that Fabian would feel free to remain at the estate for several weeks as his guest.

To adjust to changes in climate, which often affected his health and his riding performance, Fabian was in the habit of arriving for any assignment at least a day or two before he was expected.
On this occasion, still in the grip of a bad cold, he had left the Northeast a week earlier to escape the height of a brutal winter.

In Florida, when he stepped off the plane, released from the pressure of its claustrophobic cabin, soporific with the medicine he had been taking, he felt dazed by the wash of heat, the hypnotic lull of the palms, the distant glare of sand. He knew he should go directly to one of the small motels nearby, but, weak and light-headed, decided to inquire first at a horse and tack supply shop about renting a horse challenging enough for the few days’ workout he felt he would need before showing up—and showing off—at the millionaire’s estate.

The shop was cramped, a bit forlorn, but even in his distracted state, Fabian was pleasantly surprised to find his book displayed on a counter, near a blaring portable radio. He was leafing through the book when a salesgirl came out from a back room. Impulsively, he held up the book, with his photograph on the back jacket next to his face, and asked about local stables. The girl had no visible reaction to his four eyes contemplating her, but simply told him, with routine politeness, that the owner was on vacation, that she herself had only started this job a few weeks before and that she knew nothing about horses or stables or where he might make any arrangements. Swept by a sudden vertigo, Fabian slumped against the counter still clutching his book; the medicine he had been taking, the plane trip, the onslaught of Southern heat had taken their toll. The girl hurried around to him and helped him to a chair.