The Work of Wolves (33 page)

Earl was so excited he could hardly talk. "No," he said. "I mean, yes. I mean, we got to make them fly, you know? We got to give them wings."

The other three stared at him. "Jesus," Carson said. "First time I decide to be a crook, I choose a loony for a partner. What the hell are you talkin about?"

But Earl could see it. He could map the trajectory and the angle, and in his mind he saw the horses rising up in curving lines, leaving green, phosphorescent traces in the air, nearing the fence as if it were a y-axis, rising and nearing and rising and nearing. He could almost find the equation. Except that in calculus it was always an infinite nearing. The lines never touched. They just became infinitely closer forever. For a moment Earl was transfixed, thinking about it. They were going to steal these horses. Make them fly away. Break the rules of physics, even the rules of math.

"We'll pull the staples, you know?" he said. "Take the fence apart. Then we'll cover all the tracks and put the fence back together. Just like it was. So no one can even see it was taken down. That's what we gotta do."

"What's the point a that?" Carson asked. "All we want a do is get 'em outta here. We don't care if anyone knows they been taken. Long's they don't know it was us did it."

As Earl talked, a slow smile had started on Ted's face, and he was looking at Earl now with disbelief and admiration.

"Damn, Walks Alone," he said. "That's a damn good idea. That's just what we gotta do."

"How is that a good idea?" Carson asked. "The longer we're up here, the more likely someone's gonna spot us. We do what you're talkin about, we'll have to go back to my pickup and get tools. An a tarp to wipe away tracks. And then take time puttin the fence back together. And for what? It sounds like a pisspoor idea to me."

But Earl imagined Greggy Longwell coming up here and staring at the empty pen, its gateless configuration, its smooth and trackless surface. Earl imagined Greggy's moment of doubt, when in spite of his rank confidence in himself and his view of things, he wouldn't be quite sure the horses had been taken by human hands. That tiny flame of panic, too low to be acknowledged. He would pretend to himself that he just had a crime to solve, and he would pretend that he even had an idea who had committed it. But—he might not even know it—as his eyes darted around this empty place, he would be looking for evidence that might indicate not
who
had taken the horses, but
what.
Evidence of a natural disappearance. And he would find none. Would find nothing at all to fulfill his need that the world be as he believed it to be. That's what Norm had been talking about: that need. Greggy would walk from this pen troubled, unfulfilled, and discontent, with nothing here to suggest that humans rather than aliens took the animals. Nothing to suggest that horses can't grow wings. And his sleep would be disturbed by dreams of an empty pen that cannot by any means be empty. He would wake troubled and insecure and looking to see that the things of the world operated as he thought they did, and even the rising of the sun would become suspect to him.

Ted was grinning at Carson and shaking his head over his objections. "No, man," he said. "It's what we gotta do. It is. We do it, old Magnus Yarborough won't know if his head or his ass is sittin on his shoulders."

"Willi," Carson said, "you got 'n opinion here? You gonna help me out?"

Willi thought of the Karl May books he'd read, how he'd occupied his youth with them—all those scenes where Old Shatterhand and Winnetou had covered their tracks to avoid being followed, and how baffled their enemies had always been. Willi had delighted in those scenes, and though he knew better than to think those books were real, something of their excitement and silliness captivated him now. He had read those books before he had learned of his grandfather and grandmother, when tragedy in his life was so light a thing as death on the autobahn—not serious enough for a child to even think about. Back then, Old Shatterhand's exploits and cunning, and Winnetou's wisdom, had been enough to explain and clarify the world.

For a moment Willi wanted to laugh, delighted at the idea that he'd come to America, as Karl May's fictional Old Shatterhand had, and that he could do in real life what Old Shatterhand had only done on the page. But the moment he thought this, a deep grief filled him, for he remembered his grandmother again. He thought of her white cockatoo. He thought of the bird escaping its cage in the night, some birdish cunning his grandmother had never anticipated working in its brain. He thought of it flying away through the windows she in her confidence had left open, so that she rose in the morning to a house made lonely by the absence of shrieking, the absence of claws scraping metal. A house changed. A radical transformation.

Willi imagined his grandmother standing before that empty cage, and it seemed to him it would be fitting if there she wept. If there, at last, she sorrowed. And he thought she might. The cockatoo was the last thing she had thought to fix to herself. The last thing she had thought to make dream her dream. And if it fled that dream and left her, at last, alone with it?

She was already dead. She had died before Willi came to America. He had attended her funeral. Yet it seemed unreal to him. It seemed that the bird might, in fact, have flown, and that she might yet weep, her heart might yet break if that final cage of her invention stood empty. More than anything, Willi wanted that weeping. Wanted that heart's breaking. Cruelty and retribution and kindness: all of them. He wanted all of them.

Carson was waiting for an answer.

"I think we need our tracks to cover anyway," Willi said. "This Mr. Longwell could match our shoes, I think, with all this dust. So we have to get a cloth from the pickup anyway for that. And then I suppose we could get tools, too. To do what Earl says."

"All three a you want a take this fence apart?" Carson asked.

"Think about it," Earl said. "If we do it and Longwell comes up here, the more he looks, the more it's gonna raise some questions, you know? Like why did Magnus Yarborough build a pen without a gate in the first place? If it's obvious how they got out, Longwell might not even notice that."

"Hadn't thought a that. Hell. Let's climb back over this sonfoabitch and get those tools."

They turned toward the lake and the parked pickup. Over the prairie, in the direction of the Badlands, in a dark draw, leaves stirred in a wind, in a place where no wind should find its way. Stirred and stirred. Whirled. The wind grew stronger, whirled harder. Rose. A shape formed out of the whirl and emerged from the draw and stood on the prairie. Starlight glittered on horn. Or something like it. Goatish nostrils, or something like them, nostrils made of wind and air, sniffed the air and wind.

T
RACKS EVERYWHERE
. A swarm of stories.

A half-dozen people drinking beer around a campfire on a table of land near the Badlands hear a sound of wind approaching. Out of the darkness and into the edge of light comes a rushing thing, tall as a dust devil, darker than night itself, a blackness inside the blackness, with footsteps like thunder and breath like burning grass. The telltale glittering horns. Obsidian eyes. Even the campfire is cowed, bows down its flames, sinks into its coals. Then the thing veers off and is heard whoofing and grunting away. After drinking two more bottles of courage, two men fumble to their feet with a flashlight. They find deep indentations in the hard-baked clay, like cloven hooves the size of hubcaps.

Two men are poaching deer, waiting at the top of a draw for the animals to make their way to a spot where the draw widens and brush thins. One of the men is lifting a beer to his lips when he stops. The other, seeing his widened eyes, looks into the draw and meets the eyes of Goat Man, golden eyes this time, gazing up at him, horns swept back over a woolly head, legs thick and corded as tree trunks, mossy hair tufted around the hooves. The legs bend, the muscles bunch beneath the hair like wet rope twisted tight. Then up the hill Goat Man bounds.
Like he's on the moon, man. Like he don't even know what gravity is.
The man with the rifle raises it and presses the trigger, but forgets to take the safety off. Such silence. And in it, the clicking sound of hard hooves striking rock. And then nothing. A cedar tree. A boulder. An ordinary draw. The men wait a half hour, finishing their beer. They descend the draw, find a tuft of dirty hair, strands as long as a young girl's, caught in the needles of a cedar. And the imprint of a foot depressed into a platform of solid rock.

The stories sweep back and forth across the reservation. They leave the reservation and return. Arling Frederickson, having coffee at the Windmill Truck Stop in Rapid, brings back to Twisted Tree the tale of horses that have disappeared from a pasture where there was no break in the fence, no wires cut, no broken or bent fence posts, no tracks of tire or human or horse.

"Aliens," one man said.

"Some government thing," said another.

"Who knows?" a third concluded.

In Twisted Tree the hearers of Arling's tale say, "Goat Man."

And "Goat Man" say the hearers of all the tales in all the doublewides and single-wides and project houses and stick-builts and traditional tipis and abandoned cars throughout the reservation.

And "Bo
shit,
" says Greggy Longwell. Fingering his coffee cup. Staring at the steam.

T
HROUGH THE DARK GLASS
of the welding helmet, the arc was a far-off, irregular sun sputtering alone in blackness. Carson ran the bead along the Farmhand's cracked brace, pushing the rod into the metal as the arc melted it away, spraying comets of slag. As the rod shortened, the arc rose toward Carson's gloves until there were only a couple of inches remaining. Carson jerked the rod up. The arc gasped hollowly, spreading for a moment like a corona in the gap between metal and rod. Carson flipped up the helmet, gazed at the red heat in the metal slowly turning to orange and then a dull gray, the slag ridged like some ancient shell. Still kneeling on the gravel outside the Quonset, he turned around to snap the welder off and found a pair of black boots behind him, rising into sharply creased tan pants.

Startled, he paused with his hand on the welder's switch.
So,
he thought.
He knows they're gone.

He clunked the switch down and stood, laying the wand on top of the welder. "Howdy, Greggy," he said. He removed the helmet and set it down next to the wand.

Greggy nodded. "Carson."

Carson pulled off the heavy gloves, laid them next to the helmet. "How long you been standin here?"

"Just a minute."

"You been watchin that arc? You tryin a go blind?"

"Yep. Gonna start a new career. Reffing high school basketball games."

"You lose someone?"

A few years back the county commissioners had decided to save money by making Greggy wash his own car. In response to this insult to his professional dignity, Greggy refused to chase suspects onto gravel roads where he would dirty his vehicle, unless the suspect had insulted him more than the commissioners had. Anyone committing a minor traffic violation—speeding, crossing the center line—who saw Greggy's lights in his rearview mirror and who made it to a gravel road before Greggy identified him was probably safe from pursuit, as long as he made it to the gravel politely. He had to pretend not to have noticed the flashing rack in his mirror, keep his speed consistent and use his turn signal, give the impression of actually having a destination somewhere down that gravel. If he betrayed in the least his intention to lose Greggy, he was done for. Greggy would dog to hell anyone who indicated he thought he could drive faster or better, and Greggy, when challenged, was inescapable, a driver, for all his seeming lethargy, of prodigious skill and tenacity, and absolutely fearless. The sight of his flashing lights flying over a hill in the darkness, skewed at some impossible angle to his direction of travel, was something almost everyone who lived in the county had seen.

"Nah," Greggy answered Carson. "Didn't lose nobody."

"Thought maybe someone you was chasin turned inna our place."

It had been a week and a half since they'd taken the horses out of the small pasture behind the lake, repaired the fence, dragged a tarp through the dust to hide all tracks, and then walked the horses down in the moonless dark to the waiting trailer parked across the highway. Ted had gone back to Antelope Park for his car, and then Carson had followed him, taking deserted gravel roads, passing only two vehicles during the trip out to Ted's place. Out of sight of the trailer house, they had unloaded the horses. The animals had immediately begun grazing, their front legs scissored far apart to keep their muzzles low, their heads never rising from the grass.

"Seems too easy, you know?" Earl said.

"Easy so far, maybe."

"Worst of it's over.

"Who knows?"

"Hey, what's likely to happen now?"

"It is what is not likely that always makes the trouble."

Now Carson wondered what Greggy had discovered. If he was here because Magnus had found the horses gone and called him, what had Magnus told him? How had Magnus explained that pen behind the lake?

"I'm lookin for some horses," Greggy said.

"You takin up ridin? Or you mean you're lookin for some particular horses?"

"Stole horses."

"Stole horses. So why're you here?"

"Shit, Carson. It ain't my idea. Magnus Yarborough got some horses stole. He says I need a talk to you about it."

"Talk to me? I'm a horse trainer, not a horse detective."

Greggy took off his hat, brushed back his hair, put the hat back on. "Like I say, it ain't my idea. Just doin my job. Trackin down leads, even if in my opinion they ain't worth shit. Magnus seems to got a bur up his butt about you. I ain't here askin for advice. I'm here seein if them horses are on your ranch."

"Magnus thinks I stole his horses?"

Greggy tipped one shoulder up, spread his hands. "Says there's bad blood between him and you. Says you trained them horses and got to thinkin they was yours an not his. Says you threatened to do somethin about it. Says he thinks what you did was take 'em."