Painted Horses

by Malcolm Brooks

  He skewered the breast over a fire, dense purple meat that dripped and sizzled and that he devoured barely seared on the outside. Stabbing flavors of spring hormones and sage. He’d sleep like a tuckered child. The mare cropped forage nearby.

  In the morning he rode upriver and made the ranch kitchen before the noon bell. He grained the mare and turned her into an empty pasture north of the barn and then shaved with water his friend’s wife heated on the stove. He sat and coaxed her to talk while she fixed the meal and waited for her husband and his hirelings to come in from the sheds. Her children shouted in the yard. She missed shellfish, and hake. She missed cod.

  When the men arrived she lay spring lamb and pickled beets and potato laced with garlic and oozing butter on a checked cloth on the outdoor table. The men had names like Marco and Justo and Marie-Pierre. None of them were young. They had followed the shearing circuit from Nevada. In a day or two they would sharpen clippers, get to work here.

  In the evening John H sat on the porch with his friend in the lamplight and drank Canadian whiskey over shards of ice. His friend brought out boxes of bullets shipped from Abercrombie & Fitch in Manhattan, a roll of raw canvases and tubes of oil paste from New York Central. Several new vinyl phonographs as well. John H could hear the mare huffing and snorting, alone in a pen near the house.

  “She misses you. Truer than a wife.”

  John H laughed. “I wish I knew.”

  “Ha. It might happen yet. My wife has designs for you, rubio. She has friends. Beautiful Basque girls.”

  John H nearly let this pass but the whiskey seemed to ignite in his brain. “Already had one. Once upon a time.”

  Now his friend let something pass.

  In the morning they looked over the green horses, eleven of them, Morgans with dainty skulls, the marks of the branding iron scabrous on their gaskins. He watched them awhile and the horses looked back with the inquisitiveness common to their breed. They seemed to sense what was coming.

  He worked the horses for four days. He moved the body of them from the pasture into the corral by the barn, took each singly into the arena and introduced bridle, saddle, and rider. These horses were not skittish like wildings but merely fiery the way unschooled two-year-olds should be. The horses in the corral watched the proceedings in the arena like actors at a stage call and as the number of untested horses dwindled the process became easier.

  By the end of the second day all eleven had been ridden in the arena once. Only one, a young bay stallion, made any show of bucking. John H grabbed the bridle along the horse’s cheek and wrenched its head back and around. The bay turned twice like a corkscrew and quit.

  He saddled and rode each horse in the pasture on the third day and on the fourth he took six of them one by one out into the low hills east of the ranch, to the landscape where they would spend their working lives. He rode around boulders and across ditches, through thickets where rabbits and deer might flush.

  He finished on the bay stallion. When he came in for the evening he pulled the saddle in the corral and worked a curry comb while the horse chewed down molasses and oats. He absently listened to his own mare nicker and snort from a stall in the barn.

  He’d just worked the comb down the stallion’s left flank when the horse’s head jerked out of the grain like a bass exploding from a pond. The stallion neighed once, loudly and inquisitively, and the mare answered back. The stallion strained against halter and rope and John H saw the corral post flex with the animal’s weight. The horse stamped around and neighed again, a sound like the blare of a trumpet but with the unmistakable primal treble of frustration and possession and lust.

  John H pulled the slipknot and led the horse on a short lead out through the corral and around to the open door of the barn. The mare sensed his presence without seeing him. She put up a clatter in the darkened stall, a muscular shuffle and bump against floorboards and walls, the sound of a hoof thumping. She blew through her lips.

  John H gripped the halter beneath the bay’s head in his fist and used his own weight to manage the horse. He brought him forward to the half door of the stall and let him see the mare. She turned a gush of urine loose on the floor. The bay pushed forward mightily and John H had to pull like a horse himself to get the stallion turned and steered outside again. He heard the generator kick on, the dirty bulb lights surging in the barn.

  The mare neighed out one last time and the stallion tried to wheel back to her. John H spoke sharply and plodded forward. He got the horse to the pasture and turned him loose. The horse ran down the fence line, head up and mane and tail flying. His eyes never left the barn.

  John H returned to the stall and saddled the mare. He rode to the house and his friend came out from the dinner table to stand on the porch.

  “I need you to get my rifle and my saddlebags and a plate of food. Also need to settle. Your Morgans are what you might consider green broke.”

  “You’re leaving? At night? You’ve been horseback the last three days.”

  “Mare just came into cycle.”

  “You aim to breed her?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “I give up trying to understand you, rubio.”

  He could hear the hum of the generator, see the glow of light through the kitchen window. He said, “You wouldn’t be the first.”

  3

  As a girl right into her teens Catherine was forbidden to say the word pregnant. She wasn’t the only one. Her last year of summer camp following the eighth grade she and two other well-bred young ladies began to pepper their private conversation with a torrent of swear words. Up-and-coming sophisticates with their own secret ceremony, hell and damn and bitch, but every one of them agreed—pregnant was the mother of them all, a word to invite dish soap and beatings.

  Catherine looked back on those daring weeks and thought how plain it all seemed now, how she’d entered a rite of passage and never even knew it. Not trying to be bad so much as trying to be bigger.

  But pregnant. She flinched even now to say it in front of her mother.

  Miriam on the other hand had an iconoclastic streak. She seemed to take a majestic delight in impolite language. She rambled on about bodily function and gruesome or indecorous animal behavior, a predilection not minimized by her mare’s relentless flatulence their first day out.

  “This nag you’ve got me on has the green farts,” she announced. “I swear. What is she, pregnant or something?”

  Allen was ahead of her, riding a leggy and undeniably magnificent dappled gray. He looked back over his shoulder. “The hell you talking about?”

  “It happens, you know. It’s a pregnancy symptom? Excessive farting?”

  “Sounds like you know a good bit about it. Been pregnant yourself?”

  “Not that I know of. Have you?”

  “Keep it up, missy.”

  “You keep it up. If you can.”

  He shook his head. “Quite a little lady. Wouldn’t you say so, Miss Lemay?”

  At the moment Catherine found herself in small position to say much of anything. After two hours downhill riding the fingers of both hands felt permanently frozen to the saddle horn. The meat of her bottom ached from the slippery angle of the seat. To make things worse her horse wanted constantly to crowd the tail of Miriam’s horse, a horse she could attest indeed to have a boisterous fundament.

  “For what it’s worth, no, she ain’t pregnant,” said Allen. “But she is what you get on five minutes’ notice.”

  Miriam looked around at Catherine and grinned triumphantly. Catherine tried to smile back. She managed a wince. Ten years ago her riding instructor had described her in a written evaluation to her parents as “ambitious, aggressive, and anxious to please.” What a difference a decade made.

  They leveled out when the trail dipped into a wash. Catherine found her voice. “Could we stop? Please?”

  Jack Allen spoke sideways over his shoulder. “We’ll be to the bottom in half an hour.”

  “She h
as to pee but she’s too polite to say so,” said Miriam. “Get with the program, chief.”

  Jack Allen wheeled his horse and reined to a halt. Miriam stopped abreast of him. He looked out over the landscape. “You’ll wind up yet with a sock in that mouth of yours.”

  Miriam had already dismounted. She stuck her tongue out at him, then handed him her reins. She took Catherine’s horse by the bridle. Catherine half pried, half wrenched her fingers loose from the horn. She climbed stiffly down and looked around.

  The wash bisected an open expanse of raw stone and empty slanted earth, the granulated soil layered in folds like the overbaked and crumbling crust of a pie. Here and there a green shock of bunchgrass pushed through the stony soil. She wished for real vegetation, even a screen of saplings or a bush to hide behind, but nothing sprouted. Miles across the canyon she could see the shapes of trees, evergreens, splashed like cuneiform across the face of a rising cliff, no more useful to her now than a code she couldn’t decipher.

  She looked up the wash. A tumble of boulders jutted, some precariously balanced. She couldn’t see any another choice. She fished a wad of tissue from her bag and began to climb.

  “Don’t get snakebit,” said Allen.

  Catherine paused. Everything out of his mouth seemed on some level a veiled threat, so she had no idea what the actual threat might be. Perhaps he was toying with her. Perhaps he was so annoyed at her weak little bladder he wanted her to squat and wet the earth right in the open. She had half a mind to drop her pants where she stood just to prove she wasn’t some shrinking little violet, but then perhaps he already knew her greatest fear was simply the fear of looking stupid. He didn’t strike her as particularly smart. Neither did he seem at all the fool. More a creature of unerring instinct.

  Unreconstructed, Mr. Caldwell had called him. She looked at Jack Allen and thought of something else—the stupidest thing might be to ignore him. “What if I see one?”

  “That ain’t the issue.” Allen was rolling a cigarette, rolling it with one dexterous hand while he loafed in the saddle. “What you need to worry about is the ones you don’t see.”

  “I’ll come with you,” said Miriam. “I know all about snakes.”

  Jack Allen lit his cigarette with a Zippo lighter, the flame dancing in the mirrors across his eyes. “Even the big ones?” He snapped the Zippo closed, blew smoke in a burst at their backs.

  Catherine saw a slight smile tug at Miriam’s mouth. To her credit she didn’t turn around. “There aren’t any big ones around here. You ought to know.”

  They climbed through rounded and weather-scoured rocks to a sheltered depression with a layer of sand.

  “This will do,” said Catherine. She undid her blue dungarees, the buttons stiff and tight with newness. Miriam climbed a little farther into the rocks and pretended to study the random geometry around them.

  “So what is it we’re looking for exactly?”

  Catherine felt ridiculous trying to answer with her pants around her ankles and the hiss of her own water in her ears. She finished and buttoned up, kicked loose dirt over the spot she’d made. “That’s what you’re supposed to tell me.”

  Miriam looked down at her. “Do you know anything at all about Indians?”

  Catherine shook her head. “Honestly? Nowhere near enough to be qualified for what I’m doing, not in a reasonable universe anyway. I’ve been reading as fast as I can to fix that, but before a few months ago? I’d barely given a thought to Indians, at least not beyond what you see in a cowboy movie.”

  Miriam snorted. “Those aren’t Indians. They’re Italians. With war paint.”

  Catherine scrambled up beside her. From Miriam’s vantage in the rocks they could look out and see the canyon both rising and plunging all around them, see the river like a strand of mercury far below. Sheer walls of pink corrugated rock across the chasm and downriver, beyond that an ominous black shadow where the river turned and cut the earth against the angle of the sun. “I look out at that and I think it’s spectacular, maybe even terrifying. But sacred—that’s the way this has been described to me, and that is something quite beyond my grasp.”

  “Isn’t that the whole point?”

  “Of course. But I don’t come from a background where people use that word anymore. Not in a real way. I mean, my parents have a notion that Englishness is somehow sacred. What they really mean is they love big manor houses and buy a lot of grotesque furniture and Wedgwood pottery. They’re Episcopalians, by default. It’s the closest thing to the English church in America.”

  Miriam shook her head. “Catherine, you’re going to have to get something straight. I never lived in a tepee. I can barely stand to eat venison. I like Peggy Lee. I like Perry Como. I worry that boys won’t like me because of my glasses. I don’t know what Wedgwood pottery is, but I’m sure I’d love to own some. I’m, you know. Modern.”

  Catherine took a deep breath. “I know that. I do. But someone who lives where you do, maybe right down the road from you, maybe in the same house as you, still thinks this place is worth keeping the way it is, for some reason that’s older and larger and maybe more enduring than cars or boats. Or Wedgwood.”

  Miriam narrowed her eyes behind her glasses.

  “What I need is a place to start. That’s why I found you. Tell me some stories. Give me something to work with.”

  Miriam lowered her voice and gestured with her chin down the wash. “What about him?”

  Catherine shrugged. “He thinks I’m a nuisance, and that’s okay.” She thought again of her mishap with the Dodge. “For the time being I need him along more than I can afford to do without him.”

  “He is sort of awful, though.” This with a sort of forced earnestness.

  Catherine didn’t fall for it. “Miriam. You’ve been flirting with him since we left the house this morning.”

  Miriam wrinkled her nose like a pixie. “I can stop.”

  “That’s not what I’m saying, necessarily. Just . . . consider the subject.”

  They picked their way through the boulders, this time with Catherine out in front. Midway along something else occurred to her and she looked back. “Miriam? Don’t worry about your glasses. You’re pretty.”

  This froze Miriam cold, her quick tongue flummoxed for the first time since Catherine had known her. Her eyes darted like panicked creatures, searching for a way to escape a trap. When none appeared they stopped on the blue window above. “Well. It’s nice of you to say so.”

  “I’m not just saying so. I think it’s true.”

  Miriam let out a humorless little laugh. “But you aren’t a boy.”

  “Let’s go,” Allen bellowed. Catherine turned to look at him, dismounted now and glaring up from the trail. He was still beyond speaking distance.

  She looked back at Miriam. “Neither is he.”

  They reached the river before noon, the sun high over the canyon and downright hot for the first time since she’d arrived in Montana. The river had risen since she last saw it, racing in a brown roar that rose inside the canyon walls like the pitch in a crowded arena.

  Jack Allen swung down from his horse and stretched. “Well, artifact girl,” he said. “Start looking.”

  Catherine climbed down herself. She wobbled when she took a step but felt less crippled than she had earlier. “I intend to. Any suggestions?”

  He shrugged. “How about the other side of the river.”

  Catherine looked at him. “That’s not helpful.”

  Miriam climbed down as well. She loosed the cinch on her saddle and moved forward to loosen Catherine’s. Both horses blew out with a rubbery snort, shaking their heads against the reins. “Ever spot any arrow points down here, chief?”

  “Arrow points. Let’s see. Can’t say I have.”

  “And wouldn’t tell me if you did. Well. We’re all going to look for some. On this side of the river. I have a good feeling about that little draw up there.” Miriam pointed upstream to the mouth of a ravine, pine
trees climbing through the rocks and above those a narrow stand of pale-barked aspens. All one tree. Catherine watched insects drift in the sunlight, unmoored and random as motes.

  “Knock yourself out. I’ll be up later.”

  Miriam fished lunch out of a saddlebag. Catherine shouldered her pack. The two walked into the draw, perhaps three hundred yards wide where its mouth met the larger gape of the canyon. A narrow creek, swift and off-color with runoff, wound out of the floor of the draw and met the river, made her think of two tongues entwined. “Do you really think we’ll find arrow points?”

  Miriam shook her head. “No idea. But it’s the one thing everybody recognizes.”

  “What about less obvious things? Could you tell if something seemed, you know, not natural?”

  Miriam pursed her lips. “I might,” she said slowly.

  “Tepee rings, for example?”

  Miriam looked at her. “You mean the rock rings, from the old camps?”

  “I tried to school myself as best I could on what to look for out here. That jumped out at me.”

  “I’m sure they must be everywhere, now that you bring it up. The ones I actually know about are right down above the river behind the barn. They’re sort of what you’d imagine—just some rocks in a circle, where they held the edge of a tepee. But there’s a bunch, once you start looking. Gosh, I could’ve showed them to you yesterday.”

  “It’s OK. But you see what I’m driving at?”

  “If we can find an old campground, we have a place to start.”

  “Tepee rings, any sort of cave or overhang in a ledge . . . Who knows. But I don’t trust my own eye out here, at least not yet. It all just looks huge. And indistinguishable.”

  Miriam’s lips remained pursed. She nodded. “You know what’s going to be tough about this?”

  “Is it a trick question?”

  “Right, it’s all tough, but one thing especially. The time it takes to get in and out of here on horseback every day. Doesn’t leave us much time to find anything.”