The Horse Whisperer

by Nicholas Evans

  “Heck, well I can do that for you,” Diane said. “I’ve got a bunch of things to do in town. Is she up at the Bellview Medical Center?”

  “Yes, but honestly, you don’t want—”

  “Don’t be silly. It’s crazy you driving all that way.”

  Annie demurred but Diane would have none of it, it was no problem she said, and in the end Annie gave way and thanked her. They chatted for a few more minutes about how things were going up at the creek house and whether Annie and Grace had everything they needed, then Diane said she’d better get going.

  On her way back to the ranch Annie puzzled over the encounter. The substance of Diane’s offer had been friendly enough, but the manner in which it had been made was something less. There had been just the faintest hint of accusation, almost as though she were saying that Annie was much too busy to bother herself with being a mother. Or maybe Annie was just being paranoid.

  She traveled north and looked out over the plains to her right where the black shapes of the cattle stood out against the pale grass like the ghosts of buffalo from another age. Ahead on the blacktop, the sun was already making pools of mirage and she lowered the window and let the wind blow her hair back. It was the second week in May and at last it felt as if spring had really come and wasn’t just kidding. When she swung left off 89, the Rocky Mountain Front loomed before her, topped with cloud that seemed squeezed from some galactic can of chantilly. All that was missing, she thought, was a cherry and one of those little paper umbrellas. Then she remembered all the faxes and phone messages that would be waiting for her when she got back to the ranch and realized a moment or two later that the thought had eased her foot on the gas pedal.

  She’d already used up much of the month’s leave she’d asked Crawford Gates to give her. She would have to ask him for more and she wasn’t looking forward to it. For despite all his talk about how she should feel free to take off as much time as she needed, Annie was under no illusion. In the last few days there had been clear signs that Gates was getting restless. There had been a series of small interferences, not one of them on its own enough for her to make a real fuss about, but which, when viewed collectively, signaled danger.

  He had criticized Lucy Friedman’s lounge lizard piece which Annie considered quite brilliant; he’d queried the design team over two front covers—not in a heavyhanded way but enough to make an impression; and he’d sent Annie a long memo about how he thought their coverage of Wall Street was slipping behind the competition. That would have been okay, except that he’d copied it to four other directors before even speaking to her. But if the old bastard wanted a fight, so be it. She hadn’t phoned him. Instead she wrote an immediate and robust reply, full of facts and figures, and copied it to the same people plus, for good measure, a couple of others she knew to be her allies. Touché. But God, it took such a lot of effort.

  When she drove over the hill and down past the corrals, she saw Tom’s yearlings running in the arena, but there was no sign of Tom and she felt disappointed, then amused that she should feel so. As she came around the back of the creek house she saw there was a phone company truck parked there and as she got out, a man in blue coveralls came out of the house onto the porch. He wished her good-day and said he’d fitted the new lines.

  Inside, she found two new phones beside her computer. The answering machine showed four messages and there were three faxes, one of them from Lucy Friedman. As she began to read it, one of the new phones rang.

  “Hi.” It was a man’s voice and for a moment she didn’t recognize it. “Just wanted to see if it worked.”

  “Who is this?” Annie said.

  “I’m sorry. It’s Tom, Tom Booker. I just saw the phone guy leaving and I wanted to see if the new lines worked.”

  Annie laughed.

  “I can hear they do, one of them anyway. I hope you don’t mind him letting himself in.”

  “Of course not. Thank you. You really needn’t have.”

  “It’s no big deal. Grace said her dad sometimes had trouble getting through.”

  “Well, it’s very kind of you.”

  There was a pause and then, just for something to say, Annie told him how she’d bumped into Diane in Choteau and how she’d kindly offered to bring Grace back.

  “She could have taken her in too if we’d known.”

  Annie thanked him again for the phones and offered to pay for them but he brushed it aside and said he’d leave her to get on with using them and hung up. She started to read Lucy’s fax again but for some reason found it hard to concentrate and went off to the kitchen to make some coffee.

  Twenty minutes later she was back at her table and had one of the new lines rigged up for the modem and the other exclusively for the fax. She was just about to call Lucy who was in a new fury about Gates, when she heard footsteps on the back porch and a light tapping on the screen door.

  Through the haze of the screen she could see Tom Booker standing there and he started to smile as he caught sight of her. He stepped back when, Annie opened the door and she saw he had with him two saddled horses, Rimrock and another of the colts. She folded her arms, leaned against the door frame and gave him a skeptical smile.

  “The answer’s no,” she said.

  “You don’t yet know what the question is.”

  “I think I can guess.”

  “You can?”

  “I think so.”

  “Well, I kind of reckoned seeing as you’ve just saved yourself forty minutes driving down to Choteau and then some forty more driving back and all, you might feel inclined to blow a little of it on taking some air.”

  “On horseback.”

  “Well. Yeah.”

  They looked at each other for a moment, just smiling. He was wearing a faded pink shirt and over his jeans those old patched leather chaps he always rode in. Maybe it was just the light, but his eyes seemed as clear and blue as the sky behind him.

  “Truth is, you’d be doing me a favor. I got all these eager young colts to ride and poor old Rimrock here is feeling kind of left out. He’d be that grateful, he’d take real good care of you.”

  “Is this how I get to pay for the phones?”

  “No ma’am, I’m afraid that’s extra.”

  The physical therapist who looked after Grace was a tiny woman with a shock of streaked curls and gray eyes so large they made her seem permanently surprised. Terri Carlson was fifty-one and a Libra; both her parents were dead and she had three sons which her husband had given her in rapid succession some thirty years ago before running off with a Texan rodeo queen. He’d insisted the boys be called John, Paul and George and Terri thanked the Lord he’d gone before there was a fourth. All this Grace had found out on her very first visit here and on each subsequent visit Terri had taken up where she left off so that now, had Grace been asked, she could have filled several notebooks on the woman’s life. Not that Grace minded in the least. She liked it. It meant she could simply lie on the workout bench, as she was doing now, and surrender herself entirely not just to the woman’s hands but to her words as well.

  Grace had protested when Annie told her she’d arranged for her to come here three mornings a week. She knew that after all these months it was more than she strictly needed. But the therapist in New York had told Annie that the harder you worked at it, the less likely it was you’d end up with a limp.

  “Who cares if I have a limp?” Grace said.

  “I do,” Annie said, so that was it.

  In fact, Grace enjoyed the sessions here more than in New York. First they did the workout. Terri had her doing everything. On top of all the exercises, she strapped Velcro weights on her stump, got her sweating on the arm bicycle, even had her disco dancing in front of the mirrors that lined the walls. That first day she’d seen Grace’s expression when the tape came on.

  “You don’t like Tina Turner?”

  Grace said Tina Turner was fine. Just kind of . . .

  “Old? Get outa here! She’s my
age!”

  Grace blushed and they laughed and from then on things were fine. Terri told her to bring in some of her own tapes and these had now become the source oi much joking between them. Whenever Grace brought in a new one Terri would examine it, shake her head and sigh, “More gloom from the tomb.”

  After the workout, Grace would relax for a while and then get to work on her own in the pool. Then, for the last hour, it was back in front of the mirrors for some walk practice or “gait training” as Terri called it. Grace had never felt fitter in her whole life.

  Today Terri had pressed the pause button on her life story and was telling her about an Indian boy she visited each week up on the Blackfeet Reservation. He was twenty years old and proud and beautiful, she said, like something out of a Charlie Russell picture. That was, until last summer when he’d gone swimming in a pool with some friends and dived headfirst into a concealed shelf of rock. It had clean snapped his neck and now he was paralyzed from there on down.

  “First time I visited with him, boy was he angry,” she said. She was working Grace’s stump like a pump handle. “He told me he didn’t want anything to do with me and if I didn’t go then he’d go, he wasn’t sticking around to be humiliated. He didn’t actually say ‘by a woman,’ but that’s what he meant. I thought, what does he mean ‘go’? He wasn’t going anywhere, all he could do was lie there. But you know what? He did go. I got to work on him and after a while I looked at his face and he was—gone.”

  She saw Grace didn’t understand.

  “His mind, his spirit, whatever you care to call it. Just upped and gone. Like that. And he wasn’t faking it, you could tell. He was away somewhere. And when I was through, he just kind of came back. Now he does it every time I visit him. Over you go now honey, let’s do a few Jane Fondas.”

  Grace turned on her left side and started doing scissor lifts. “Does he say where he goes?” she asked. Terri laughed.

  “You know, I asked him that and he said he wouldn’t tell me ‘cause I’d only come busybodying after him. That’s what he calls me, Ol’ Busybody. Makes out he doesn’t like me, but I know he does. It’s just his way of keeping his pride. I guess we all do that some way or other. That’s good, honey. A little higher now? Good!”

  Terri took her to the pool room and left her there. It was a peaceful place and today Grace had it to herself. The air was laced with the clean smell of chlorine. She changed into her swimsuit and settled herself to rest awhile in the small whirlpool. The sun was angling down from the skylight onto the surface of the swimming pool. Some bounced back to dance in shimmering reflection on the ceiling, while the rest slanted through to the bottom of the pool where it formed undulating patterns, like a colony of pale blue snakes that lived and died and were constantly reborn.

  The swirling water felt good on her stump and she lay back and thought about the Indian boy. How good to be able to do that, to leave your body whenever you wanted and go off somewhere. It made her wonder about when she was in the coma. Perhaps that’s what had happened then. But where had she gone and what had she seen? She couldn’t remember a thing about it, not even a dream, only the coming out of it, swimming through the tunnel of glue toward her mother’s voice.

  She had always been able to remember her dreams. It was easy, all you had to do was tell someone about them the moment you woke, even if it was only yourself. When she was younger, in the mornings, she used to climb into her parents’ bed and snuggle under her father’s arm and tell him. He’d ask her all sorts of detailed questions and sometimes she’d have to invent things to fill in the gaps. It was always only her father because by that hour Annie was already up and out running or in the shower yelling for Grace to get dressed and go do her piano practice. Robert used to tell her she should write all her dreams down because she’d have fun reading about them when she was grown up, but Grace could never be bothered.

  She had expected to have terrible, bloody dreams about the accident. But she hadn’t dreamed about it once. And the only one she’d had about Pilgrim was two nights ago. He was standing on the far side of a great brown river and it was odd because he was younger, little more than a foal, but it was definitely Pilgrim. She’d called him and he’d tested the water with his foot then walked right in and started to swim toward her. But he wasn’t strong enough for the current and it started to sweep him away and she’d watched his head getting smaller and smaller and she felt so powerless and filled with anguish because all she could do was keep on calling his name. Then she was aware that someone was standing beside her and she turned and saw Tom Booker and he said she shouldn’t worry, Pilgrim would be okay, because downstream the river wasn’t so deep and he would be sure to find a place to cross.

  Grace hadn’t told Annie about Tom Booker asking if she’d talk about the accident. She feared Annie might make a fuss or resent it or try and make the decision for her. It was none of Annie’s business. It was something private between her and Tom, about her and her horse and it was for her to decide. And she realized now that she had already decided. Although the prospect daunted her, she would talk to him. Maybe she would tell Annie later.

  The door opened and Terri came back in and asked her how she was doing. She said Grace’s mom had just called. Diane Booker would be there at midday to pick her up.

  They rode up along the creek and crossed at the ford where they’d met the other morning. As they moved up into the lower meadow the cattle stepped lazily aside to let them pass. The cloud had broken away and scattered from the snow-covered tops of the mountains and the air smelled new, of roots uncoiling. There were pink crocus and shooting star already showing in the grass and a first hint of leaf hung like a green haze on the cottonwoods.

  He let her go before him for a while and watched the breeze in her hair. She’d never ridden western before and said the saddle felt like a boat. Back at the house she’d got him to shorten Rimrock’s stirrups so they were now more the length you’d ride a cutting horse or if you were roping, but she said she felt more in control that way. He could see she was a rider from the way she held herself and from the easy way her body moved with the rhythm of the horse.

  When it was clear she had the feel of it, he eased alongside and they rode together, neither one of them speaking except when she asked him the name of some tree or plant or bird. She’d fix him with those green eyes of hers while he told her and then nod, all serious, storing the information away. They rode past stands of aspen which he told her they called quakin’ asp on account of the way the wind fluttered in their leaves and he showed her the black scars in their pale trunks where in the winter foraging elk had stripped away the bark.

  They rode up a long, sloping ridge, strewn with pine and potentilla, and came to the rim of a high bluff from where you could look down the twin valleys that gave the ranch its name and there they stopped and sat the horses awhile.

  “That’s quite a view,” Annie said. He nodded.

  “When my daddy moved us all out here, Frank and I would come up here sometimes and have ourselves a race back down to the corral for a dime or maybe a quarter if we were feeling rich. He’d take one creek and I’d take the other.”

  “Who won?”

  “Well, he was younger and mostly he went so darn fast he fell off and I’d have to hang around in the trees down there and time it just right so we finished neck and neck. It made him real happy to win, so most times that’s what happened.”

  She smiled at him.

  “You ride pretty good,” he said. She made a face.

  “This horse of yours would make anyone look good.”

  She reached down and rubbed Rimrock’s neck and for a moment the only sound was the soft frupping of the horses’ nostrils. She sat back up and looked down the valley again. You could just see the tip of the creek house above the trees.

  “Who’s R.B.?” she said.

  He frowned. “R.B.?”

  “On the well, by the house. There are some initials, T.B.—which I guesse
d was you—and R.B.”

  He laughed. “Rachel. My wife.”

  “You’re married?”

  “My ex-wife. We got divorced. A long time ago.”

  “Do you have children?”

  “Uh-huh, one. He’s twenty years old. Lives with his mother and stepfather in New York City.”

  “What’s his name?”

  She sure asked a whole lot of questions. That was her job, he guessed, and he didn’t mind at all. In fact he liked the way she was so direct, just looked you right in the eye and came out with it. He smiled.

  “Hal.”

  “Hal Booker. That’s nice.”

  “Well, he’s a nice guy. You look kind of surprised.”

  Right away he felt bad for saying it for he could tell from the way she colored up that he’d embarrassed her.

  “No, not at all. I just—”

  “He was born right down there in the creek house.”

  “Is that where you lived?”

  “Yup. Rachel didn’t take to it out here. The winters can get kind of hard if you’re not used to it.”

  A shadow passed over the heads of the horses and he looked up at the sky and so did she. It was a pair of golden eagles and he told her how you could know this from their size and the shape and color of their wings. And together, in silence, they watched them soar slowly up the valley until they were lost beneath the massive gray wall of mountain beyond.

  “Been there yet?” Diane said, as the Albertasaurus watched them go by the museum on their way out of town. Grace said she hadn’t. Diane drove brusquely, handling the car as though it needed to be taught a lesson.

  “Joe loves it. The twins prefer Nintendo.”

  Grace laughed. She liked Diane. She was sort of spiky but she’d been nice to her right from the start. Well, they all had, but there was something special about the way Diane talked with her, something confiding, almost sisterly. It occurred to Grace that it might be to do with her having only had sons.

  “They say dinosaurs used this whole area as a breeding ground,” she went on. “And you know what Grace? They’re still around. You just meet some of the men hereabouts.”