Swimming with Horses

by Oakland Ross

  God in heaven. It was as if he’d been riding horses all his life, which she knew for a fact he had not. She inclined her head his way. “Where did you learn to do that?”

  Muletsi smiled again. “That’s easy. I watched you.”

  More fool, thou. This was what she thought, but she decided it would be better not to put the thought into words. Instead, she touched her heels to South Wind’s flanks, coaxing him into an easy trot. Muletsi would do fine, it seemed — not that she had ever believed otherwise. You could call this the good news. She already knew the bad. The radio weatherman that morning was calling for a damp storm front to move in off the Indian Ocean and to continue bearing west. When it met the Drakensberg, the humid air would rise, cool, and likely turn to snow, at least on the mountain heights. Meanwhile, she and Muletsi would have to cope with rain, great dollops of the stuff, damnably wet and pissing cold. Goddamn the gods of weather. Still, there was no use complaining. The elements would attend to themselves. Besides, it was past time for them to get this journey started, and now at last they were off, aiming south toward Nottingham Road. They’d have to ride through developed areas for a time. As soon as possible, they’d bear west and enter the Lotheni reserve. There they’d go undetected; she was pretty sure. For a time, several days, they would travel in the shadow of the Drakensberg through what was mostly wilderness. Eventually, though, they would have to scale the Great Escarpment’s southern face. Pray to God there wasn’t snow. Still, either way, snow or not, the border would be unmarked and unmonitored. She had verified everything, first on a map and later at the little lending library in Mooi River. When they got to Basutoland, they’d be safe.

  “Hilary,” he said. “Tell me again. Why are we doing this?”

  “So you can have choices. So you can be free.”

  He smiled, in that way of his, the way that suggested that maybe, just maybe, somebody was missing something here.

  “Choices, is it? Freedom, hey? Is that it?”

  She realized at once that she was talking rot. He had no choices. He wasn’t free. She was about to reply, but he broke in.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re right about one thing. I can’t stay here.”

  That much was surely true, and they let the conversation lapse, at least for the time being. Off they went into the cold greyness of morning, the trek finally begun. She didn’t worry that Muletsi might not be able to keep up. He would. She knew he would. He was a genius that way. On the other hand, she had a nagging sense that something wasn’t right. It did not take long for her to work out what that something was. His glasses. He was still missing his glasses. They should not be heading off without his glasses. But they were.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Sam

  Ontario, Summer 1963

  MRS. BARKER PHONED THAT week with the news. I had made the Kelso team — both of us had, meaning Della and me. She said Edwin and Janet would also ride on the preliminary-level squad. Those two had been shoo-ins all along.

  “After what happened on the weekend in Letham,” she said, “we could hardly leave you off.”

  It was a short conversation, and once it was over, I marched straight out to the barn to let Della know. She didn’t seem too surprised, but I hadn’t expected she would be. I climbed up onto the grain bins and turned on the radio, tuned to CKEY. The Drifters were singing “Up on the Roof.” I leaned back against the steel bars that marked the perimeter of Della’s stall. In my tuneless voice, I sang along.

  Hilary had easily qualified in the advanced division as an individual competitor representing the Mooi River Equestrian Club from South Africa. Many people in Kelso believed this idea to have been a reckless and ill-considered proposition from the start, especially considering the stain of scandal that clung to Hilary, but now they were stuck with it.

  To celebrate our victories, Hilary and I met that Friday afternoon. We rode together down to the quarry ponds. There, as usual, we untacked our horses, replacing bridles with halters. I waited, holding Della and Club Soda by a pair of shanks, while Hilary slipped behind a grove of cedars to change. All the while, we talked about Quinton Vasco.

  “When did you meet him?” I said. “In South Africa, I mean. Last year, was it? The year before?”

  “He came out to my daddy’s farm,” she said from beyond the cedars. “Twice, actually. They were business gatherings. My father has plenty of meetings like that. At least, he used to. Probably still does.”

  “Is your father someone important?”

  She laughed. “God, no. Just a farmer. A gentleman farmer, that’s all.” She was still beyond the cedars, changing.

  Something about her answer struck me as strange, contradictory even. Was her father a businessman or a gentleman farmer? Or both? Then I remembered something else. That day in Letham, at Quinton Vasco’s house, Hilary had referred to her dad as “the minister.” I remembered it clearly. “The minister Daniel Anson.” What kind of minister did she mean? The pastor of a church? And now she was saying her father was a farmer?

  I noticed she had left her backpack on the broad ledge of rock. I thought at once of her gun, the Makarov. Supposedly, Bruce Gruber had the weapon now, but I wasn’t so sure. He’d returned everything else.

  “Say,” I said, “did you get it back yet?”

  “Get what back?”

  “You know, the gun.”

  She was silent for a time. Then she said, “No. Not yet.”

  I kept looking at Hilary’s bag. Its leather straps were loose, unbuckled, and it took me only a moment to reach down and peel back the canvas flap, to peer inside at a bunch of stuff, a small leather purse, a pack of Rothmans cigarettes, her copy of Too Late the Phalarope, a plastic tub containing some kind of ointment, sundry other items of a personal nature — and the Makarov pistol. Plain as day. There it was. She did get it back. Why would she lie?

  “Hey …” Hilary emerged from the grove of cedars, barefoot, wearing her blue two-piece swimsuit.

  I swatted at the flap on her pack and straightened up. Had she seen? “But you remember him?” I said. “Quinton Vasco. You remember meeting him?”

  “Yes. Who wouldn’t?” She wrinkled her brow. “He’s odd, don’t you think? Those black duds. Says unexpected things. I’d be sure to remember him if only because of that.”

  It seemed she hadn’t noticed me checking her backpack. “What business did he have with your father?”

  “Oh, very hush-hush. Always is.” She wrinkled her brow. “Why so many questions, hey?”

  “I don’t know. Just curious, I guess.”

  She nodded, apparently satisfied. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get these beasts into the water.”

  I handed Hilary the shank that was clipped to Club Soda’s halter, and she vaulted onto his back. At once, she urged him ahead, and they both sailed from the limestone ledge, seeming to hang in the still air for a moment before careening downward, colliding with the dark-green surface below, where they were swallowed at once. Soon a pair of horse’s ears reappeared, followed by Club Soda’s head. An instant later, Hilary surged into view. The water sluiced from her shoulders and down her back.

  “Whoa!” she shouted. “That was a corker!”

  I’d seen her perform this same manoeuvre countless times this summer, but still I was impressed — impressed and relieved. “Good one!”

  “Come on,” she said. “Come on in.”

  I swung myself up onto Della’s back and started to rein her around, to head over to the far side of the quarry pond.

  “No,” Hilary shouted. “Not that way. Jump in. From the ledge. Just don’t drop her. Stay with her.”

  I rolled my eyes. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t tried this before. Still, something had changed. If there was one thing I knew by now, it was how to fall off a horse. Besides, this was only water, not solid ground — and, anyway, we had won first prize at Letham. What was I afraid of ? I swung Della around and rode back toward the tall ledge overlooking the pond. T
his time I didn’t hesitate. I pressed my heels into her flanks, urged her forward. By now she had seen Club Soda perform this same feat numberless times, and that must have had an effect. I guess it did. One way or another, she now took two strides, and I’ll be damned if she didn’t launch herself into the air with me aboard, clinging to her mane. For a moment, I felt as if we were both in flight.

  “Wait …!” I shouted, but the water exploded in a hail of crystalline splinters. Suddenly, I was underwater. It was as though we were being sucked toward the bottom, but the feeling lasted only an instant or two, and then we shot back to the surface. “Woo!” I shouted. “Woo!”

  I held tight to Della’s mane with one hand as she swam aimlessly about, first one way, then another, but never turning anywhere near the shore. She seemed almost as excited by what she’d just done as I was. Besides, the water was glorious. It was a sweltering day, after all — part of a late-summer heat wave — and the horses seemed content to swim all afternoon. After a while, I felt something soft and wet nudging against my left shoulder — a pale-blue twist of fabric. I realized it was the top of Hilary’s two-piece swimsuit. Almost right away another piece of blue material floated past — the bottoms.

  “Um, Hilary …?” I said. “Your bathing suit?”

  “I know. It just feels nice like this. Try it.”

  We were almost at opposite ends of the pond, separated by sixty feet or so. I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. But, after a time, I did as she’d suggested, clutched Della’s mane with one hand and reached down with the other to peel off my trunks. I let them float away, just as she had done with her own bathing suit. My head buzzed.

  “Watch me,” she said.

  “What …?”

  I shifted around, still grasping Della’s mane, and I looked on as Hilary urged Club Soda up the grassy ramp at the far end of the quarry pond, saw her ebony hair knotted behind her neck, saw her breasts, long legs, taut belly, slender arms, saw everything. Hilary guided Club Soda around the edge of the quarry pond and up onto the shelf of limestone. She halted just a few yards short of the edge and then dug her calves into her horse’s flanks.

  Club Soda tautened his legs, lowered his hindquarters, took two strides forward, and seemed to burst into empty space. Hilary’s hair pulled loose and flared behind her as bolts of shattered water exploded all around. They vanished at once, she and Club Soda, the cool shadows of the pond devouring them whole. An instant later, they burst back into view, with Hilary laughing and waving at the trees with her free arm, like royalty on parade. Club Soda snorted and tossed his head, his ears twitching back and forth. I swore to myself that I would remember this moment, these images, for as long as I lived.

  Later that afternoon Hilary and I huddled on a large slab of rock, our legs dangling over the edge. We had put our bathing suits back on, and she was reading aloud from her dog-eared paperback copy of Too Late the Phalarope. I listened to her plummy, singsong voice, so different from my own flat, utilitarian accent. The horses nibbled on green leaves and stubble in a thicket behind us, their shanks looped around a tree trunk and secured with safety knots.

  I gazed at the soft down on Hilary’s lower arms, so fine you wouldn’t know it was there unless the sun’s rays caught it just so. I still had an image of her in my mind, naked, as she and Club Soda plunged into the green water. The memory was utterly vivid, yet already I caught myself wondering whether it was really true. In a way, it seemed impossible to think that it had actually happened. It was the sort of vision I might make up. Maybe that was exactly what I’d done. Sometimes you want so badly for a thing to be true that you imagine it into existence. You can do that without even being aware. You can do the opposite, too. You can recoil from an experience so sharply that you wipe it out of your memory; you forget it completely. Or not quite completely. I suppose that a shadow always remains, a kind of pentimento. Pentimento. That was a new word I had learned. It refers to the traces of an older work just visible beneath a fresh layer of paint that has been applied to a canvas.

  Pretty soon I started thinking about my own leap into the pond that afternoon. There was more than just pentimento there. I was sure it had really happened. I wasn’t imagining things. Finally, I had done it, and that made me happy. At first, it did. Then I began to wonder why it had taken me so long to work up the courage to do something I should have been able to do all along.

  “Hilary,” I said. “Why am I such a coward?”

  “Qu’est-ce que tu as dit ?” She set down her book.

  “Me. I’m a coward.”

  “You’re nothing of the kind.”

  “I’m afraid to jump into a stupid pond.”

  “But you just did that very thing. I was watching.” She frowned. “You’re talking ball dust.”

  “It took me months to work up the guts to do it. Weeks, anyway.”

  “And now you’ve done it. Case closed.”

  We were both silent for a time, and then Hilary spoke.

  “I’m serious,” she said. “You’re not a coward. You’re just careful. That’s a good thing — up to a point, anyway. You’re a careful person. That’s who you are. Unlike me.”

  “What kind of person are you?”

  “Bold, hey. You hadn’t noticed?”

  “I want to be bold.”

  “And so you can — within limits.” She sat up straight and looked at me. “We have to make do with what we are.”

  “We can’t change?”

  “We can, a bit. Look at what you did in Letham. You were careful, but you also took some chances, no? And so you won. And today you and Della leapt into the water. I’d call that a good week’s work.” She shrugged. “But you’re still bound to be careful. That’s you.”

  “I can’t be different?”

  She tilted her head, pondering. Then she shrugged. “Oh, who knows? Maybe.”

  “And you?”

  She laughed. “Lost cause. Lost bloody cause.”

  “You couldn’t be a bit less bold?”

  “Could, I suppose. I could also be the next pope. But I don’t think I will. I’ve come too far.”

  She reached for the book, and she opened it again. She took a deep breath. I thought she was going to say something else, but she didn’t. Instead, she resumed reading aloud.

  I listened to the rise and fall of her voice, but at the same time I thought of that gun, now mysteriously restored to Hilary’s backpack. Why did she carry a gun? Why hadn’t she told me it had been returned to her? Why had she taken so long to say that she had already crossed paths with Quinton Vasco even before she came to Canada? “I’ve come too far”: I wondered what she meant by that. Back then, I had no idea. Now, all these years later, I wonder if it wasn’t preordained that Quinton Vasco would die.

  Just then, from somewhere along the wall of the escarpment, I heard the whine of the cicada, buzzing high and fading low, a warning that the fine weather was nearing its end, that autumn loomed — because it did. I knew it did. Already, I could sense the wraith of autumn in the dry rustle of the desiccated leaves overhead. I shut my ears to the sound, for it was summer still, and summer could lead to anything. Or at least I pretended it could, even as the doors of my world were edging shut. The cicada yowled again, but I ignored the sound. Instead, I clung to the rise and fall of Hilary’s voice, as if her voice mattered more than anything — her voice and the nickering of horses nearby.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Jack

  South Africa, Winter 1962

  JACK SHIFTED HIS WEIGHT to the left and pressed his shoulder against Tempest’s rear haunch. “Up. Come on, you. Up.” Dutifully, the horse raised his near hind leg so Jack could pry away with the hoof pick. There. He set the hoof down. “There you go …”

  He sensed some disruption behind him, a shuffle of footsteps, a cough. He straightened up and turned around right quick, a boxer’s instinct, ready for bear. “Eh, who’s that?”

  But it was only his old friend and secret acc
omplice, Everest Ndlovu. “Elephant,” the name meant. Jack feigned surprise, but the truth was he knew full well why Mr. Elephant had come to call. The man had something to report, some information to impart. Right now Ndlovu stood at the entrance to the barn, framed in the dull light. He removed his trilby as if he had just entered a church, and now he clutched it at his chest with both hands. He was wearing a sloppy brown suit with a frayed white shirt and a smudged necktie. Food stains, it looked like.

  “Mr. Jack,” he said. He cleared his throat. “Fine horse there.” As if he knew the first thing about it.

  “The finest.” Jack flipped the hoof pick into the equipment box and slapped his hands together. Time for business. In fact, it was well past time. He knew two horses were missing — South Wind and Welshman. Gone since Sunday. It was Tuesday now. He knew Hilly was gone. He knew they were upside down with worry up at the big house, or Mrs. Anson was, anyway. The boss man wasn’t back yet from another of his business trips. Probably, he was on an airplane even now.

  The police had been by already, the ones from Mooi River. But not much would come of that, not yet, not till Jack gave the word. He was that close to the chief, Walt van Niekerk. They kept each other informed, so to speak, an arrangement that suited them both. In this instance, Jack had decided to deal with matters on his own, and old Walt had said, “Good show, deal away. As you wish, you sneaky bugger.” His very words. And Jack was grateful for that.

  Still, it wouldn’t do to behave in a reckless fashion. It would be best to take things slow, step by step. This was the approach he planned to adopt as regarded his old friend, Everest Ndlovu. One false move and the old coot might bolt. He might go back on the terms of their private agreement, their understanding. It was that delicate.

  Jack nodded toward Ndlovu. “My compliments to your girl.”

  He liked to get that reference in at the start. Blessing was her name. Blessing Ndlovu. All of twelve years old. Be thirteen soon. He had her age committed to memory. He knew Everest Ndlovu understood that. He had been made to understand. The man also understood that it wouldn’t take much to cause that girl trouble. Young people these days — they were forever getting mixed up in matters beyond their years. Politics, to put it plain. Subversion. It wasn’t beyond the ingenuity of the police to find certain incriminating documents in a girl’s bedroom. African National Congress — that sort of thing. Probably the documents were already there. All the young ones these days had them, the Xhosa at least. Granted, the girl was a minor. But that needn’t make a difference. Subversion is subversion, and it is too serious a crime for any high-minded distinctions as to age. Everest Ndlovu understood this very well. Walt van Niekerk had explained it to him, and Jack had been on hand at the time. So it only made sense that Mr. Elephant himself now stood in the grooming bay at the Ansons’ stable, with his trilby pressed to his chest. It was the most natural thing in the world.