Swimming with Horses

by Oakland Ross

  Hilary dragged on her cigarette. “Where do they go now?”

  I had no idea. I was about to say so when I heard a voice calling up from the west, from the fenceline we had just crossed — a man’s voice.

  “Hey, there!” the man shouted. “Hey, you!”

  A lone figure strode out into the long grass. He was too far away to make out clearly, but something about him caught my notice, something about the way he walked, an awkward limp. I could swear it was Mr. Odegaard, from the general store in Hatton. What was he doing out here? Whoever he was, the man now stopped and called up to us again.

  “This is private property, you!”

  Hilary laughed. She rose on her knees, upright above the saddle. “Bugger off!”

  The man seemed to stumble and then rebalance himself. He was carrying something, and now he held it up. A rifle? He was carrying a rifle? Seconds later, I felt something bite into my left arm.

  “Hey!” I felt it again, another sharp pain in my chest. “Hey!”

  The man was shooting at us with some kind of air rifle. Della feinted and ducked her head. She’d been hit, too. I reined her around to the right and dug my heels into her sides. We scooted down into the shelter of the ridge, out of sight. I drew Della to a halt, then swivelled in the saddle and peered back up. What was Hilary doing? There she was, she and Club Soda, both silhouetted against the blue sky near the peak of the ridge. She was looking back down toward the man with the air rifle, and she wasn’t moving. For a moment, I wondered whether she had a gun herself, that Russian pistol. Had Bruce Gruber given it back? I worried that she might pull it out now and shoot Mr. Odegaard or whoever was down there. Why would I think that? Only a fool would do such a thing, a fool or a murderer.

  “Hilary,” I shouted. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  She didn’t budge. For several seconds at least, she didn’t move at all, except to scrunch out her cigarette on the sole of her shoe.

  “I said, come on!”

  This time, she did. She shifted in the saddle, and Club Soda exploded, darted over the green crest of land and scrambled down into the lee of the ridge. We were both safe now, safe for the moment, but Hilary kept right on going, galloped right past me. She veered across the downward slope, aiming toward a dense barrier of sugar bush that bordered the meadow to the north.

  I dug in my heels again, and Della broke into a gallop, just five or six lengths behind Club Soda. We soon reached a trail that bisected the meadow, the old lovers’ lane, I guessed. It was newly worn. A large number of vehicles — heavy vehicles from the look of it, big trucks — had rumbled through this field during the past few days. That seemed odd. We galloped along the same trail, eventually slowing to a canter and then loping into a gap in the wall of sugar bush as if we were entering a vast natural church.

  Before long, we slowed the horses to a brisk trot. We had put plenty of distance between ourselves and the man with the gun. Surely we were safe now. But we kept moving all the same. The trail through the sugar bush was newly gouged, with deep tire tracks dug into the earth. I didn’t remember seeing any trucks entering or leaving the Quinton Vasco lands these past few days, and both Hilary and I had ridden along the fenceline several times. Probably, they had come and gone by night.

  Before long, Hilary slowed to a walk, and I did the same.

  “That fellow was carrying a bloody gun,” she said. “What was that about?”

  “An air rifle, I think. I think it was Mr. Odegaard — you know, from the store in Hatton.”

  “Air rifle …? Never heard of it.”

  “It’s not a real rifle. It shoots little plastic things. BBs, they’re called. They’re not bullets. They’re just …”

  I must have winced or grimaced or something like that because Hilary reined Club Soda over to my side.

  “Let’s take a look at you,” she said. “Here, take off your shirt.”

  “What …?”

  “Take off your shirt.”

  I eased my polo shirt over my head and slung it across the pommel of the saddle.

  “Let’s see.” She leaned closer, whistled. “You’ve bloody well been shot.”

  At least, I think that was what she said. The truth was, I had stopped paying attention to her voice because, suddenly, I could see her breasts, both of them. As she leaned toward me, the fabric of her bikini top cupped outward, and I could definitely see something, the pale tone of her skin, its soft milkiness, a sudden contrast to the bronze suntanned sheen of her shoulders and arms. I wasn’t sure I could see everything, but I could see a lot. I was pretty sure I could make out her nipples. I couldn’t stop looking.

  “My God,” she said. “You really have been shot. I can’t believe it. That man shot you.”

  “With a BB gun.”

  “All the same. Dear Lord, you’d think we were in South Africa. Are you all right?”

  I wasn’t sure. My chest stung in a couple of places, but it didn’t matter. I was thinking only about Hilary’s breasts. If she would just stay like this, leaning toward me in this way, just like this, I would be happy forever. But the view did not last long.

  “Well, there’s not much we can do now,” she said, shifting away from me. “We should keep going.”

  She gathered her reins, eased Club Soda around, and set off along the trail at a brisk trot. I pulled on my shirt and hurried to catch up. My arm and chest still stung where I’d been hit, but already the pain was easing. I tried to ignore it. After a while, we slowed back down to a walk.

  I brought Della alongside Club Soda. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Ask me what?”

  “Why are we here?”

  “You mean here, on this planet?”

  “No. I mean here, now. You and me. Why do we spend so much time together? I’m only fifteen.”

  “Ag, shame.” She laughed and rooted in the pocket of her jeans for another cigarette. When she’d got it lit, she blew a plume of smoke into the golden light, riddled with dust motes and skittering insects. “The reason we spend so much time together is simple. I like you.”

  My heart lifted at once, as if a balloon were expanding in my chest.

  “And the main reason I like you — not the only reason but the main one — is you’re the only male that I know, and I do mean the only male, who doesn’t want to have sex with me.”

  “Oh.”

  “Cheer up, hey. That’s a good thing.”

  “It is?”

  “I’d say so.”

  I swallowed, then blinked several times, trying to screw up my courage. I wanted to say that she was wrong, and I would have said so, except that I wasn’t quite brain-dead. I knew it would be a mistake. I could see it was better to keep things as they were — aimless and confusing — rather than take a risk and probably ruin everything. We kept riding along the same trail, aiming northwest it seemed, not that I was paying much attention. I was still thinking about Hilary’s breasts, I guess, and so I wasn’t fully attuned to our surroundings. It caught me completely unawares when Hilary abruptly drew back on her reins and swore aloud.

  “Frigging bloody hell,” she said. “What on earth is that …?”

  PART THREE

  TWENTY-NINE

  Sam

  Ontario, Summer 1963

  ALL THESE YEARS LATER, I still vividly remember the weekday afternoon, during that long-ago summer, when Hilary Anson and I ventured onto the Quinton Vasco lands. I clearly recall the images of what we found there. Nowadays, the experience makes me think of a certain philosophy lecturer of mine, a Professor Lisgard, who taught an undergraduate course I would one day take, with a section devoted to the notion of causality. Bear with me. I’ll explain.

  If you were hiking through the wilderness, Professor Lisgard told us, and you stumbled upon a huge geodesic dome shimmering beneath the forest cover, you might well entertain a variety of different thoughts. You might suspect that this was an elaborate trick being played on you by your old pal, Kevin. Or you might
believe that Martians had landed here, leaving behind one of their signature glass-and-steel structures. Or you might interpret the dome as evidence of an ancient, highly developed civilization, previously unknown and now extinct, that had built a temple here.

  What you would not think was that this otherworldly structure had materialized, as Professor Lisgard put it, ex nihilo. Out of nothing. It might well be mysterious, but it would be a mystery with causation. You would not doubt that someone or something must have brought the dome into existence. It had not simply appeared of its own accord. Or, as Professor Lisgard would have put it, an action requires an entity.

  Well, the same principle applies to the two great thumping cannons that we discovered hidden away in the sugar bush on that distant afternoon. Cannons. I swear to God. What possible explanation could there have been? And yet, I understood at once that an explanation must exist, a conclusion based partly on instinct, I suppose, and partly on the principle of causation. I accepted at once that these machines had not assumed physical form on some random whim. An entity of some kind had produced a force that had brought them into being. These two colossal guns were the result of something even if I had no idea what that “something” was. There had to have been a cause in order for there to be a result.

  I wondered: Had Quinton Vasco put these weapons here? And, if so, why?

  Freshly painted in olive green, the two cannons rested side by side, surrounded by sugar bush and sheltered by canvas awnings. Nearby, someone had stacked a dozen or so crates atop wooden skids, all protected by another awning. Each of those crates bore a pair of inscriptions stencilled in black: SRC and GC-45. At the time, I had no idea what either of those abbreviations stood for. Now, for what it’s worth, I do understand what they mean.

  Hilary’s reaction was almost as much of a mystery to me as the guns themselves, if that’s possible. Almost from the moment she first set eyes on those great, gangling machines, she busied herself taking pictures of the damned things, along with the neighbouring crates, which appeared to hold shells for those two massive guns. She used a small Kodak camera that she’d pulled from her backpack, a gadget I had never seen her use before. “Souvenirs,” she said. “Souvenirs of Canada.”

  Souvenirs of Canada …?

  What did she mean? What was she talking about?

  What sort of souvenir fodder were these huge mechanisms, each mounted on three sets of tires, with barrels that must have been thirty feet long? In some strange way, they reminded me of giant praying mantises. Their presence here certainly explained the tire tracks we’d seen along the improvised road, to say nothing of Mr. Odegaard’s appearance that day. His air rifle seemed almost laughable now. It seemed extraordinary that there weren’t more men on the lookout, more men armed with guns. But this was Canada, I suppose, so whoever had placed these cannons here had not envisioned a need for overwhelming security, not in this peaceful land.

  Still, I figured there was a good chance of our being discovered, and God knows what the consequences of that would have been. I told Hilary we should leave, get out of there. But she seemed in no hurry. Despite her initial reaction — her expression of astonishment — I now had the weird sensation that she wasn’t exactly surprised to find these massive guns hidden away in this forest. You might almost have thought she’d expected to find them all along. In any case, she pretty much ignored me until, finally, she stopped taking pictures and put her camera away.

  “Yebo,” she said.

  With Hilary in the lead, we left the clearing and its otherworldly weaponry. We rode off in the same direction as before, aiming to the northwest, toward what I guessed was Hatton. The trail beyond the cannons was old and disused, so badly overgrown as to be almost invisible. We barely spoke to one another, just kept plodding through a thick maze of tree trunks, saplings, and shadows. Eventually, we reached another chain-link fence, or really a distant extension of the same fence we had snuck through before. It blocked the trail at what must have been the western extremity of the Quinton Vasco lands. Without a word, Hilary rode off to the right on a short detour through the bush that took us down a slope of moss-covered rocks and rotting tree trunks to another improvised gap in the fence, large enough for a horse to pass through.

  “Well done, Gruber,” she said. She meant Bruce Gruber, of course.

  Again, we both dismounted and ducked through the opening in single file, leading our horses by the reins. Hilary swung herself up into the saddle again, and I did the same. I felt dazed, as if under the effect of some hallucinatory drug. The fence. Mr. Odegaard. And then those cannons. Who could explain any of it? This was Kelso County, a large tract of meadowland and woodlot in rural Ontario. This was horse country. It was not a war zone; it was the furthest thing imaginable. What in the bloody hell was going on? I kept thinking that Hilary would volunteer some information, explain what we had seen. But she was silent. She seemed distracted, occupied by thoughts of her own. It was dusk by the time we reached Fourth Line, the road that led to Hatton. Here, Hilary pulled Club Soda to a halt.

  “You’re almost home,” she said.

  I had all sorts of questions I wanted to ask. What were those cannons? Why were they hidden amid dense bush on that fenced-off land? Why had Hilary taken pictures of them? What was going on? But I knew she wouldn’t tell me merely because I asked. She’d only tell me because she wanted to, and I could sense that she did not.

  “You’re not coming?” I said. I didn’t really know what I was saying. “You could put Club Soda in our barn for the night. No problem.”

  I had an idiotic image of the two of us — Hilary and me — clomping into the house after the barn chores were done and then both of us spending the night in my room, in my bed, with my parents’ permission, of course. We could read to each other from books of hers, books by Alan Paton or Nadine Gordimer. These were insane ideas, of course. My parents would have had a coronary; both of them would. Never in a thousand years could such a thing happen. Not ever — and not only on account of my parents.

  “No, thanks,” she said. “I’d better get a move on. Martin will be furious.”

  “Martin …?”

  “Colonel Barker. He’s always furious these days. It’s his wife, I think. She drives him mad. Anyway, I’d better go. You’re all right, hey?”

  “Sure,” I said. She called him Martin? “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Because of that gun —”

  “The giant ones?”

  “No. You know, the pellet gun. Mr. Odegaard.”

  I shrugged. “It’s no big deal.”

  “If you say so.” She narrowed her gaze. She told me not to say a word to anyone about what we’d seen back there, those cannons. That was a secret.

  I wasn’t so sure that I agreed. I thought we should report what we had seen. I squinted at her. “Why were you taking pictures?”

  “Ag, who knows? Curiosity, I guess. They were so strange. Cannons, in the middle of the woods — hard to believe, hey.”

  “Yeah, but shouldn’t we tell someone?”

  “Are you serious? We were trespassing. We were in a place weren’t supposed to be.”

  “So …?”

  “So that would be bad for us both.”

  As usual, I gave in. “Okay.”

  Hilary nodded, evidently satisfied. I guess she knew me pretty well by then, knew the authority she had over me. If she told me to keep something quiet, I would. Now she just smiled at me and said goodbye. She reined Club Soda around, set off at a canter, bearing south along the gravel shoulder that traced Fourth Line. She rode the way she usually did when she didn’t care who was watching, weight back in the saddle, feet at home in the stirrups. I watched her go, watched her fade into the dwindling light. Even after she had vanished, I still kept looking — searching, I guess, hoping to catch sight of something that wasn’t there.

  At last, I reined Della around, and I urged her into an extended trot. We kept to the gravel shoulder of the asphalt road, aiming towar
d Hatton. My head still buzzed from all I had seen that day. The cannons, yes — but also, and maybe especially, the contours of Hilary’s breasts. The road to Hatton wound to the west past a ruined barn and an old disused silo. I entered the village itself and slowed Della to a walk. I rode past Weintrub’s Garage, where a few outdoor security lamps shed hazy cones of light onto the dirt parking lot below. I wondered about Bruce Gruber and what was really going on between him and Hilary. I guided Della to the left and rode at a walk by Odegaards’ General Store. I guessed that Mr. Odegaard was probably up there now, in the second-floor apartment where his family lived, all crowded into that little space. I looked up. The second-floor lights were on. I saw shadows ripple and swirl against the blinds and wondered whether Mr. Odegaard even knew who it was he’d been shooting at that afternoon. Probably not. Probably, he didn’t even know why. He probably had orders to shoot at anybody, any trespassers, and that was what Hilary and I had been.

  I was soon clear of the village, and now the roar of crickets surged up from the woodlands on either side of the road, chirping like church organs, chattering like trumpets. It was practically deafening, that sound — eerie and relentless. I pushed Della into a canter, and we headed for home.

  THIRTY

  Hilary

  South Africa, Winter 1962

  DAMNED IF THE FRIGGING idea didn’t make sense. Never mind the way it sounded. It sounded mad at first. Of course it did — because it was mad. But that was the beauty of it, its very madness. It was crazy, and yet it made sense, too. Hilary was sure of it. Or maybe not quite sure. It wasn’t a question of being sure. Who is sure of anything? In this frigging life, you have to take your chances.