The Death-Defying Pepper Roux (8 page)

No one paints horses brown for honest reasons. But Pepper had no way of knowing what law was being broken. People trap badgers and rats, slugs and rabbits—why not horses?

Jacques had accumulated seventeen horses.

“Enough,” said Jeanne. “Let’s go.”

“Shift the wire, cockroach,” said Jacques. And Pepper had to drag the big barbed metal coils aside while the horses in each paddock were formed into teams. Four at a time were united by a single slat of wood from a billboard, which ran under their jaws and kept them from going their separate ways (or working up to a gallop, even though their hooves had healed). They put Pepper in mind of the protesters in Marseille, united by their placards. What would horses protest about if they could? he wondered.

“Where are we going? To a horse fair?”

“Right,” said Jacques. “Happy homes all around. Ladies with sidesaddles. Kiddies in jodhpurs. Big houses with stables. Easy street. Sea air and fun.”
Splat, splat
went the words, and lay in the sun gathering flies.

“Thoroughbred bloodstock, that’s what we got here, right?” said Jeanne, menacing Pepper with her rubber biking gloves. “Thoroughbred bloodstock bought at great expense and brought on to perfect condition. Right?”

They roped the horses into a convoy, as if, like
huskies, they might have to drag some sled. But they had only to drag their sorry carcasses over thirty miles of scrub, following behind the smelly motorbikes. Pepper rode the tall dun cob with fluffy feet.
If they tried, they could get away easy,
thought Pepper, but he knew that they would not. Perhaps they had gotten wind of the new life in store, better than the old one.

“Think. One day you might belong to someone like me,” he told his mount.

Do you live on soap?
said the brown horse obscurely.

The seaside town of Saint-Bonnard-de-la-Mer came into sight, first its spires, as if it were proudest of being holy, and then its factories, as if it were proud of being rich. Its curved smile it saved for its seaside visitors; approached from behind, it was a muddle of poor houses crouching down low so as not to embarrass the hilltop hotels and villas. Noon set the
étangs
, the seawater lakes, glinting like great moist eyes keeping watch over mounds of mined sea salt. Saint-Bonnardde-la-Mer had grown rich on salt.

There was a cloud overhead in the shape of an albatross. The tide was turning, and a fine drizzle began
to pepper the dusty horses—to dapple their hides. Jacques’s face settled into a stupid grin, as if he were about to tell a dirty joke. “You’ll want to clear off, lag,” he told Pepper.

Pepper was startled. “Why would I?”

The horse breeder snorted—something he must have picked up from long acquaintance with horses.

Jeanne agreed. “You on the run and all. We know about you, see. Jacques read about you in the paper. ’Scaped off a chain gang, in’t you?”

“Off a—” Pepper laughed so loudly that the horses shied and jostled. He pointed at Jacques. “I thought that was him! I thought he was the escaped prisoner!”

Jeanne laughed too, then…though Jacques simply reached up and pushed Pepper off the horse.

“I’m not a convict! Honest!” Pepper protested, picking himself up.

But the two drove off anyway, the jerk of the ropes almost snapping the head off one mare and making two others stumble. The dust swamped Pepper, then settled on him like sleep, along with silence as the bikes receded into the distance. He set off to walk in their wake—could no more have stopped still than if there had been a rope around his neck too. Because if he
was not responsible for looking after those poor horses, then Jacques and Jeanne were right: He was nothing but a boy on the run. “Honest.”
Honest
, had he said? The very word tasted like soap.

A million years before, as a little boy, he had been taught by Aunty Mireille not to tell lies. Whenever he had said (as five-year-olds do), “Look, I’m a pirate!” or “I hunted a tiger in the bushes this morning,” or “There’s a monster under my bed,” or “I’m going to be a captain one day, like Daddy!” then Aunty had grated carbolic soap into his bedtime milk and made him drink it down, whispering, “Lies! Such a little liar! We’ll have to wash the sin out of that lying mouth of yours!”

Lies (he learned) taste like soap. In the way certain smells bring pictures floating to mind, so Pepper had been left with the taste of soap in his mouth every time he spoke—or heard—a lie.

It was not difficult to follow the trail of seventeen horses, and he did not have far to follow it: Town planners don’t build abattoirs—slaughterhouses—in the middle of towns but on the outskirts, where the stench can be enjoyed by the fewest people. Soon, the smell on the hot wind was so bad that Pepper gagged.

All manner of animals ended their days at the Abattoir St. Adrian: goats, sheep, cattle, and horses, though the locals tended to kill their own pigs and chickens. The law of course forbade the killing of the famous wild white horses, pride of the Camargue…but then the law never understood about business enterprise or canny entrepreneurs like Jeanne and Jacques. The manager of the abattoir had a nice little “backdoor” arrangement with the two of them: Jacques took a low price for the horses he delivered and, in return, the manager asked no awkward questions about where they came from. Meat’s meat, and people who buy and eat it have better things to worry about than whether the meat had a name once or is protected by the law.

In point of fact, wild horses make for tough eating—sinewy in comparison with domestic horses fattened in grassy paddocks. Then again, most nags sold to the abattoir were ancient, sickly specimens that could barely drag their bones over the threshold. And wild meat has a nice dense texture that a good butcher can dress up well on the slab.

Pepper stood outside the bolted gate of the Abattoir St. Adrian and held his nose shut with finger and
thumb, palm covering his mouth to keep his no-breakfast inside him. Aunty Mireille had shown him many pictures of Hell, so he could easily imagine the scene inside the gates: the meat hooks, the cleavers, the saws, the fires…. Just on the other side of the gate he could hear the trampling hooves of his horses—his charges—his friends—as they turned around and around in the confined space of the yard. Their whinnies, snorts, and shrieks all seemed to mention Pepper by name:

The gates were bolted on the inside, and very high. Pepper had been climbing things since he was four, but his hands were in a bad way, and there were no footholds at all. He stopped passersby and told them: “Horses! White horses! They’re selling horses to the meat man! They’re trapping horses for meat!”

No one would listen. Sleeping under a soap billboard for four weeks had done nothing to keep his clothes clean. Barbed wire and hooves had both left their marks on Pepper. The dust of the Camargue had near enough blotted out his respectability. The good people of Saint-Bonnard-de-la-Mer walked past him, through him, around him, and hurried on down the hill.

Think, Pepper. Be clever, Pepper. What do you know about gates, Pepper? How to open a gate?
He thought back to the books in his father’s library—remembered explosive devices lashed to castle gates—battering rams!—catapults lobbing fireballs! All he lacked was explosives or a battle engine.

He remembered how the hatch cover of
L’Ombrage
had been raised with winch and rope. All he lacked was a winch and a rope.

He thought of the power of the press, and how Pepper Papier could have written something to outrage
all France and bring the police running. All he lacked was forty-eight hours and a pencil.

He thought of lobbing prayers at the sky, offering a deal, a bargain, a trade-off:
Take me instead of the horses!
All he lacked was a system of pipes that would carry his words as far as Heaven. Besides, if the angels were in need of new horse souls to draw their fiery chariots, they would ignore him.

He thought of shouting protests through the slats of the gate:
Skeleton men! Skeleton men!
But such things hadn’t persuaded Captain Pepper to open his cabin door; why should they work here? So what
would
induce them to open up?

“Sell me the goat! Sell me the goat!” he shouted at the woman standing in her cottage doorway. She hastily shut the door.

Pepper jumped her gate, ran this way and that, giddy with vexation, the breath barking in his throat. He was turning into an animal, and he knew it. Animals can’t think logically.

“Excuse me, madame,” he said, smiling crookedly at a second woman standing in her cottage garden. “I would really
love
to buy your sheep…. Sorry about
the clothes: I was caught in a landslide.”

“Tea, dear?” said the woman.

“Thank you, but just the sheep would be nice, madame. I’d pay a good price.”

“A
pastis
? You look very hot, dear.”

“You are much too kind. What do sheep cost exactly? It’s a very nice sheep.”

“She’s a good milker. Lovely cheese.”

Pepper took out the contents of one pocket and held them, crumpled and bunched up, on his two hands. “Cheese too!
Mmmm
,” he said appreciatively. The woman picked all the paper money out of his palms and left the prayers written on lilac paper.

Pepper knocked at the side gate of the Abattoir St. Adrian. The sheep at his knee looked up at him with yellow demonic eyes.
“I have a sheep wants killing!”
he called when he heard movement on the other side of the gate. The gate opened, but only a crack.

“Come back tonight. We got a yardful.”

“I just want it jointed. For a party. Tonight.” And the side gate opened a little more.

“Too much work on. Come back tomorrow, I said.”

The sound of Pepper’s voice had stirred the horses, like a spoon in a bowl. Their individual stamping and cribbing gave way to a shared distress. They began to circle the yard now, like water in a drain. The sheep pressed against Pepper’s legs, warm and greasy, and peed on his feet, terrified by the smell of death. The slaughterhouse man scowled and looked over his shoulder at the welter of sweating, agitated horses: He was needed to quell the unrest in the yard. Pepper seized his chance. He kicked the sheep backward into the street, darted inside, and ran straight in the direction of the front gates, though his way was barred by seventeen frightened horses.

In among their legs he went, into a mangrove wilderness of moving hooves and hocks and dung and dust, ducking and threading his way through it, losing direction, jumping up to sight the gates again, barged and buffeted by the sweat-wet, brown-smeared flanks of seventeen unbroken horses. Colliding with the gates, he shot the bolts with the heels of his punctured hands, leaned all his weight against the bowing, scraping, splintery planks, and pushed.

Pepper himself spilled out into the road: A passing
pedestrian had to step over him. A mailman on a bicycle braked to avoid him. But the horses in the yard—still at last—only stared. There they stood, motionless, framed in the rectangle of the gateway.

The slaughterhouse hands, thinking the gates had come open accidentally, froze too, for fear they would spook the horses out of their trance. The situation might yet be saved, if they kept very still.

Pepper picked himself up from the ground. He stretched his arms out to either side. He snapped his fingers twice, three times. The horses swiveled their ears and turned their heads—every one—toward the boy in the roadway.

The mailman, seeing what was coming, put his feet to the pedals and shot away down the hill, narrowly missing a—“What the—?”—loose sheep. The slaughterhouse man who had opened the side gate glimpsed Pepper for the first time and bellowed:

“That b—let them out!”

The shout jolted the horses like a bolt of electricity. Legs deliberately lamed, eyes rheumy from pestering flies, sinews stringy from imprisonment suddenly recalled the wild, glittering glory of the open spaces.
So close to the edge of town, the Camargue was in plain view, beyond a garden or two. The mares from the bottle trap were first to move. They leaped from standing into a full gallop, and behind them the stained and grubby livestock Jacques and Jeanne had trapped for horsemeat turned back into the white ghosts of the Camargue.

Witnesses afterward said that the boy in their path did not move a muscle. But he did.

He tipped his head back and looked up at the sky.

Glimpsing a flicker of orange and pink above him, Pepper watched a skein of birds fly east in a flapping chevron banner of peachy splendor. After weeks working on the Camargue, he knew they were only flamingos and not an angel host. He laid no store by them as birds of omen. He just wanted to enjoy their preposterous beauty. After weeks on the Camargue, Pepper was wiser in all kinds of ways—about flamingos, about thoroughbred horses, about people.

But he still trusted horses one hundred percent.

Quite rightly on this occasion.

Witnesses said afterward that a torrent, a dam burst of horseflesh erupted through the open gates, hooves
sliding on the paved roadway, necks stretched, teeth set, eyes rolling with the exertion of movement from a standing start. The boy in their path was engulfed, slight as a bulrush in a river spate. Then the horses galloped on, their wet manes shedding water drops, as whitely overwhelming as roaring surf.