The Horse Whisperer (35 page)

He could see Grace biting her lip, trying not to tremble as she held her hands out below the horse’s nose. There was fear on both sides and it was surely a greeting of a lesser kind than Grace must remember. But in the sniffing of her hands, then later of her face and hair, Tom thought he saw at least a glimpse of what they once had been together and yet might be again.

   “Annie this is Lucy. Are you there?”

Annie let the question hang for a while. She was composing an important memo to all her key people on how they should handle interference from Crawford Gates. The basic message was tell him to go fuck himself. She’d switched the answering machine on to give herself peace so that she could find an only slightly more veiled way of saying it.

“Shit. You’re probably out chopping off cow’s balls or whatever the hell it is they do out there. Listen, I . . . Oh, just call me will you?”

There was a troubled note in her voice that made Annie pick up.

“Cows don’t have balls.”

“Speak for yourself kiddo. So we were lurking there, were we?”

“Screening, Luce, it’s called screening. What’s up?”

“He fired me.”

“What?”

“The son of a bitch fired me.”

Annie had seen it coming for weeks. Lucy was the first person she’d hired, her closest ally. By firing her, Gates was sending the clearest possible signal. Annie listened with a dull sinking in her chest while Lucy told her how it happened.

The pretext had been a piece on women truck drivers. Annie had seen the copy and though predictably preoccupied with sex, it was a lot of fun. The pictures were terrific too. Lucy had wanted a big headline that said simply
MOTHERTRUCKERS
. Gates had vetoed it, saying Lucy was “obsessed with sleaze.” They’d had a stand-up fight in front of the whole office during the course of which Lucy had told Gates bluntly to do what Annie was trying to find a euphemism for in her memo.

“I’m not going to let him do this,” Annie said.

“Kiddo, it’s done. I’m gone.”

“No you’re not. He can’t do it.”

“He can Annie. You know he can and, shit, I’d had enough anyway. It’s no fun anymore.”

There were a few seconds of silence while they both thought about that. Annie sighed.

“Annie?”

“What?”

“You better get back here, you know? And quick.”

   
Grace came home late, bubbling with all that had happened with Pilgrim. She helped Annie serve supper and told her while they ate how it had felt to touch him again, how he’d trembled. He hadn’t let her stroke him as he’d let Tom and she’d felt a little upset at how briefly he tolerated her near him. But Tom said it would come, you just had to take it a step at a time.

“Pilgrim wouldn’t look at me. It was weird. Like he was ashamed or something.”

“Of what happened?”

“No. I don’t know. Maybe just of the way he is.”

She told Annie how, later, Tom had led him up to the barn and they’d washed him down. He’d allowed Tom to pick up his feet and clean some of the compacted filth out of them and though he wouldn’t let his mane or tail be cleaned, they’d at least managed to get a brush to most of his coat. Grace suddenly stopped and gave Annie a look of concern.

“You okay?”

“I’m fine. Why?”

“I dunno. You looked sort of worried or something.”

“Just tired I guess, that’s all.”

When they were almost through eating, Robert called and Grace went and sat at Annie’s desk and told the same story all over again while Annie cleared the dishes.

She stood at the sink washing pans and listening to the frenzied clatter of a bug trapped among corpses he maybe recognized in one of the fluorescent lights. Lucy’s call had cast a reflective shadow that even Grace’s news had failed fully to dispel.

Her spirits had lifted briefly when she heard the scrunch of the Chevy’s wheels outside bringing Grace back from the corrals. She and Tom hadn’t spoken since the barn dance though he’d scarcely been out of her
thoughts and she’d quickly checked her reflection in the glass door of the oven, thinking, hoping, that he’d come in. But he’d just waved and driven off.

Lucy’s call had hauled her back—as in a different way Robert’s did now—into what she knew with dulling acknowledgment to be her real life. Though what she meant by “real,” Annie no longer knew. Nothing, in a sense, could be more real than the life they’d found here. So what was the difference between these two lives?

One, it seemed to Annie, was comprised of obligations and the other of possibilities. Hence, perhaps, the notion of reality. For obligations were palpable, soundly rooted in reciprocal deeds; possibilities on the other hand were chimeras, flimsy and worthless, dangerous even. And as you grew older and wiser, you realized this and closed them off. It was better that way. Of course it was.

The bug in the light was trying a new tactic, taking long rests then hurling himself at the plastic casing with doubled effort. Grace was telling Robert how, the day after tomorrow, she was going to help drive the cattle up to the summer pastures and how they’d all be sleeping rough. Yes, she said, of course she’d be riding, how else was she supposed to go?

“Dad, you don’t have to worry okay? Gonzo’s fine.”

Annie finished in the kitchen and switched off the lights to give the bug a break. She walked slowly into the living room and stopped to stand behind Grace’s chair, idly arranging the girl’s hair on the back of her shoulders.

“She’s not coming,” Grace said. “She says she’s got too much work to do. She’s right here, do you want to talk to her? Okay. I love you too, Daddy.”

She vacated the chair for Annie and went off upstairs
to run a bath. Robert was still in Geneva. He said he would probably be flying back to New York the following Monday. He’d told Annie two nights ago what Freddie Kane had said and now, wearily, she told him about Gates firing Lucy. Robert listened in silence and then asked her what she was going to do about it. Annie sighed.

“I don’t know. What do you think I should do?”

There was a pause and Annie sensed he was thinking carefully about what he was about to say.

“Well, from out there, I don’t think there’s a whole lot you can do.”

“You’re saying we should come back?”

“No, I’m not saying that.”

“With everything going so well with Grace and Pilgrim?”

“No, Annie. I didn’t say that.”

“That’s what it sounded like.”

She could hear him inhale deeply and suddenly she felt guilty about twisting his words when she wasn’t being honest about her own motives for staying. His voice, when he resumed, was measured.

“I’m sorry if that’s how it sounded. It’s wonderful about Grace and Pilgrim. It’s important you all stay out there as long as you need to.”

“More important than my job you mean?”

“Christ, Annie!”

“I’m sorry.”

They talked about other, less contentious things and by the time they said good-bye they were friends again, though he didn’t tell her he loved her. Annie hung up and sat there. She hadn’t meant to attack him like that. It was more that she was punishing herself for her own inability—or reluctance—to sort out the tangle of halfrealized desires and denials that churned within her.

Grace had the radio on in the bathroom. An oldies station was doing what they kept calling a Major Monkees Retrospective. They’d just played “Daydream Believer” and now it was “Last Train to Clarksville.” Grace must have fallen asleep or have her ears underwater.

Suddenly, and with suicidal clarity, Annie knew what she was going to do. She would tell Gates that if he didn’t reinstate Lucy Friedman she would resign. She would fax him the ultimatum tomorrow. If it was still okay with the Bookers, she would, after all, go on the damned cattle drive. And when she came back, she would either have a job or she wouldn’t.

T
HE HERD CURLED UP TOWARD HIM AROUND THE SHOULDER
of the ridge like a spilling black river in reverse. Here the contours of the land gave all the marshaling required, forcing the cattle upward on a curving trail which, though neither fenced nor marked, was yet their only option. Tom always liked to ride ahead here and stop high on the slope to watch them come.

The other riders were coming now, set strategically above and about the edge of the herd, Joe and Grace to the right, Frank and the twins on the left and appearing now at the rear, Diane and Annie. Beyond them, the plateau they had just crossed was a sea of wildflowers through which their passage had churned a wake of green and at whose distant shore they’d rested under a noon sun and watched the cattle drink.

From where Tom now stood his horse, you could see but the faintest shimmer of the pool and nothing at all of the valley beyond where the land fell away to the meadows and cottonwood creeks of the Double Divide. It was as if the plateau shelved seamless and straight to the vast plains and the eastern rim of the sky.

The calves looked dapper and strong, with a fine luster to their coats. Tom smiled to himself when he thought of the sorry beasts they’d driven that spring some thirty years ago when his father first brought them to live out here. Some had been so scrawny you could almost hear the rattle of their ribs.

Daniel Booker had ranched some serious winters back at Clark’s Fork but nothing as harsh as he found on the Front. In that first winter he lost near as many calves as he saved and the cold and the worry etched marks yet deeper in a face already changed forever by the forced sale of his home. But on the ridge where Tom was now, his father had smiled at what he saw about him and known for the first time that his family could survive in this place and even might prosper.

Tom had told Annie about this while they rode across the plateau. During the morning and even when they stopped to eat, there’d been too much going on for them to speak. But now both cattle and riders had the hang of things and there was time. He’d ridden up alongside her and she’d asked him the names of the flowers. He’d shown her blue flax and cinquefoil and balsamroot and the ones they called rooster heads and Annie had listened in that serious way of hers, storing it all away as if one day she might be tested.

It had been one of the warmest springs Tom could remember. The grass was lush and made a wet slicking sound against the legs of their horses. Tom had pointed out the ridge ahead and told her how he’d ridden with his father to its crest that long ago day to see if they were on the right line for the high pastures.

Today Tom was riding one of his young mares, a pretty strawberry roan. Annie rode Rimrock. All day he’d thought how good she looked on him. She and Grace were wearing the hats and boots he’d helped
them buy yesterday after Annie said she was coming. At the store they’d laughed side by side at the sight of themselves in the glass. Annie had asked did they get to wear guns too and he said that depended on who she was going to shoot. She said the only candidate was her boss back in New York so maybe a Tomahawk missile might be better.

Their crossing of the plateau was leisurely. But as the cattle reached the foot of the ridge they seemed to sense that from here on it was one long climb and they quickened the pace and called to each other as if to summon some collective effort. Tom had asked Annie to ride ahead with him but she’d smiled and said she’d better drop back to see if Diane needed help. So he’d come up here alone.

Now the herd was almost up to him. He turned his horse and rode over the crest of the ridge. A small crowd of mule deer vaulted away in front of him. At a safe distance they stopped to look back. The does were heavy-bellied with their fawns and assessed him with their great tilted ears before the buck moved them off again. Beyond their bobbing heads, Tom could see the first of the narrow pine-fringed passes that led to the high pastures and, leaning massively above them, the snowpatched peaks of the divide.

He’d wanted to be beside Annie and see her face when this view was revealed to her and he’d felt a loss when she declined and went back to Diane. Maybe she sensed in his offer an intimacy he hadn’t meant, or rather one he yearned for but hadn’t meant to convey.

By the time they reached it, the pass was already in the shadow of the mountains. And as they moved slowly up between the darkening banks of trees, they looked back and saw the shadow spread east like a stain behind them until only the distant plains retained
the sun. Above the trees on either side, sheer gray walls of rock encompassed them, making echoes of the children’s calls and the murmur of the cattle.

   Frank threw another bough on the fire and its impact sent a volcano of sparks into the night sky. The wood was from a fallen tree they’d found and so dry it seemed to thirst for the flames that beset it, tonguing high into the windless air.

Through the dodging of the flames, Annie watched the glow on the children’s faces and noticed how their eyes and teeth flashed when they laughed. They were telling riddles and Grace had them all guessing feverishly at one of Robert’s favorites. Grace had her new hat tipped rakishly forward and her hair, cascading from it to her shoulders, trapped the firelight in a spectrum of reds and ambers and golds. Never, Annie thought, had her daughter looked more lovely.