Painted Horses

by Malcolm Brooks

  “Can’t you tune in something local?”

  Bakar gives him a frozen look. “The Nacionales have destroyed Guernica.”

  John H does not know what this means but can tell it isn’t good. “How bad is it?”

  Jean Bakar shakes his head. “This is Monday? Monday is market day.” He looks away from John H, looks outside at the sunlight. “Guernica is a market town.”

  In the coming days they and the rest of the world learn the full horror. Modern warfare has been uncaged on an undefended town. A thousand or more have been slaughtered from the air, women and children not excepted.

  An English journalist reports that in the smoke and pandemonium following the bombs, fighter planes strafed the panicked crowds with machine gun fire. He utters the name of the German air unit, words that whisper in John H’s head for hours. Condor Legion.

  One ocean and half a continent away, shrapnel and concussion strike the heart of another. Jean Bakar, never fully recovered from his wreck the previous autumn, still hobbles like a prisoner in shackles. John H knows Bakar doesn’t sleep much, has taken to eating even less. But Guernica is a whole other blow.

  Sometimes he spends an entire day muttering in Basque. Sometimes he makes no sense even to himself. He washes into a slipstream of conversations and events that happened fifty years ago, asking John H the same cryptic question a dozen times, rambling about a cod boat he once hoped to buy. “Just gotta find the money,” he says. “Go to America, find the money.”

  Sometimes he addresses John H as Francisco. John H knows this was the name of Bakar’s younger brother, whom he has not seen since his youth. Bakar never notices.

  The cannery finally sends for him and John H quits on the spot. The paymaster offers a raise, tells him the wagon boss regards him as some kind of genius. John H says, “No, you don’t understand. It ain’t the money.”

  By the turn of summer Bakar’s temper has become downright volatile, his moods plunging to silent depths, raging to something like frenzy at the smallest provocation.

  Cooking is the last task to buy him peace. He could always cook well and always this was his pride. But his hands have become unsteady and one day when he tries to slice an onion he can’t get his fingers to work, the onion squirming away like a fish in a live well, and with the veins popping on his temples he begins to hack at the rolling onion, splits it like a melon and something splits inside his head and he goes utterly berserk.

  John H hears the racket from the side yard, the breaking glass and nerve-chilling roar. He bursts through the back door and catches a flung bottle above his right eyebrow, like a collision with a blackjack. He sees a starburst, sees Bakar go down as though clubbed himself, the back of his skull cracking against the counter when he falls. He jerks and writhes on the floor like a revivalist and when John H jumps to his side he sees his eyes have rolled into his head, his tongue twisted in his mouth.

  John H flies back out the door and onto the neighbor’s porch. He wrenches the door nearly off its hinges and the lady of the house throws a hand to her parted lips, in mere surprise he assumes for he has no awareness of the blood above his eye. He says, “Call a doctor fast,” and he’s gone again. By the time he gets back, Bakar is gone as well.

  The coroner leaves the body thinking John H intends to bury it at the Meyer ranch. John H has his wound stitched and walks in a hollow daze to the stockyard and makes arrangement for the loan of two horses and a Decker saddle. When the cool air of evening climbs off the river he goes to hoist his friend up off the floor and realizes Bakar’s right hand still clutches the kitchen knife.

  He tries to pry the fingers open, like prying the blades out of a rusty penknife. He gets the pinkie partially unlocked before it strikes him that it doesn’t really matter. He leaves the knife in place and carries Bakar from the house.

  He rides south with Jean Bakar Arrieta lashed to the other horse. By dawn he’s at an abandoned homestead along Pumpkin Creek, a gaunt frame shack with the tarpaper flapping and the front door groaning in the breeze. And off to one side the deserted hulk of a sheep wagon, sun bleached and weathered, weeds laced through the wheels.

  John H settles Bakar as well as he can on the bunk. He smooths the iron hair from his brow, wishes he could do something about his grimace, his mouth locked open, lips still taut. He wishes he knew some words.

  During these years in town Bakar went often to Mass in the church on Montana Avenue. John H went with him and though he has only a meager knowledge of the Catholic faith he gathers what he’s about to do would be firmly condemned, which is why he avoided calling for the priest. He exits the wagon and looks up at the sky. In the absence of any other means of intercession he says, “Not a bit of this is his doing. Not a bit.”

  The wagon box catches flame and the canvas whirls in fiery tatters. John H goes through the house and carts out mementos of the former residents. Mismatched kitchen chairs with missing spindles, homegrown shelving cobbled together from milk crates. The kitchen door, wrenched from its hinges. All go to the blaze.

  Before long the flames lick twenty feet in the air, the rectangle of the wagon box and its spindled wheels like the negative of a photograph in the fire’s orange core. The box and the wheels collapse in sparks.

  The wall of heat drives him back. He feels the fire in the wound above his eye, feels it throb and burn around the stitching. He keeps the fire roaring for hours, long past the point where any trace of the wagon might be seen.

  He finds the lower half of a broken tricorn file in the general scatter of rusting trash and peels the headstall from his horse and proceeds to deface the swastikas smithed into the conchos on each cheekpiece. The bridle is older than he is and he has no idea where the symbol originated, when or in which culture. But he knows what it’s come to mean now.

  By late afternoon his stomach writhes and he remembers the rabbits he saw darting behind the house. He fetches Bakar’s little .25-20 Winchester from his saddle and pops the first cottontail he sees. He dresses it like the old man taught him, threads it on a peeled willow branch and holds it over a mound of embers.

  A day later he combs the ashes to the still-hot coals underneath, finds the iron hoops of the wheels and knows he’s close. He uses a rake with a broken handle from the barn, layer by layer like a prospector. Finally a fragment of bone surfaces, the ball end of a socket joint. He drops it into a can and rakes again.

  Rites

  1

  John H dozed in the saddle to the sway of the mare and the mare felt the reins go slack against her neck and she plodded on in the moon’s silver light, back toward the canyon, back toward home. Once when she followed the angle of the earth downward the weight of the rider on her back shifted and she felt him lurch awake and catch himself with a hand on the horn of the saddle. They reached level ground and he slept again.

  He found the Spanish horses the following evening. He crossed their trail near the cleft in the wall and tethered the mare and moved along the trees with the German glasses, moving and pausing and moving again until he spied a curl of dust and a moment later the horses themselves, a mile off in a bowl set back from the river. He saw the source of the dust and knew he’d gotten lucky. The big dun stallion had his blood boiling, his nostrils flaring with the scent of his unbred mares.

  He boiled as well at the upstart red colt. The two eyed one another, milling through the web of the herd and lashing and striking when they crossed paths. The colt would back off each time and weave away. The stallion would snap at his mares to harry them from the colt while the colt started in on other mares elsewhere and the same cycle began again.

  Darkness fell and he went back and led his own mare to water. He heard the whisper of sage leaves, the far-off yip of coyotes above the murmur of the river. Then something else—the eerie vibrato of a nighthawk, its wide wings whooping through the air. Six months since he’d last heard the sound.

  The mare drank only a little and he tightened the cinch and rode her by the quarter
moon upstream until the funnel of the canyon carried the smell of the Spanish horses downwind. He felt her senses quicken. He whoaed her and sat in the saddle and let her find them again on the breeze. She stamped and snorted and pealed out with a neigh from deep within her throat. John H patted her sleek neck and soothed her with his voice. He turned her onto the ridge again.

  The tilt of the planet had outrun the legs of winter and dawn climbed early now over the wide lip of the world. He blew a fire to life in the uncertain light and when the twigs and dead limbs blazed he stripped an armful of green sage limbs and let the flames curl and consume the leaves. The fire belched like a thurible. John H positioned himself in the billows. He lifted his arms like a bird, let the smoke swirl. He stood that way until the flames rose up hot and clear and the smoke died down.

  He moved out amid the racket and stir of early risers, the northbound birds and the badgers and voles come up from underground, and he found the horses again and watched through the glasses while the stallion took the nape of a bay mare in his teeth and stood on his haunches and bred her in deep wells of sound and dust devils dancing in the low morning light. The big horse finished in a matter of seconds, stood down with his blood still surging and flattened his ears and ran down the colt.

  The younger horse had a mare backed around and with his attention diverted he stood no chance when the stallion walloped him broadside and knocked him off his feet. The colt flopped to his back, legs scrambling like a bug. The stallion rose up on his haunches and made to drive both front hooves down on the younger horse’s head.

  The colt had already twisted out of the way. He took one hoof on the side of the neck, a scraping, glancing blow. The other hoof missed altogether. The colt rolled to get his legs back under him and the stallion struck again with a lightning front foot, a blow that if anything served to propel the younger horse all the more quickly upright. He tried to stand his ground and rose up with his teeth bared and his forehooves flashing, and the stallion met him with the righteous fury of Zeus with Olympus encroached, lashing with his own iron feet, screaming with a sound to freeze blood.

  The mares milled and collided in their own smaller frenzy. The just-bred bay pranced with her tail up in the manner of a stallion herself, circling the throng like an initiate only newly conscious of the power she held. A noise like lake ice splitting through the middle cracked in the canyon and her head jerked sharply around. The hooves of the fighting males had collided in midair, each with enough force to stave a wall.

  John H lay two hundred yards away and above, watching through the glasses when the colt finally began to capitulate. The dun stallion had bitten a gouge out of his neck, stripping a quirt length of skin and hair along with it, and he’d forced the colt back from the cluster of mares. He rammed the colt with the battering breadth of his chest, bit and kicked him again.

  Finally the red colt fled. The stallion tore after him for a dozen pounding strides, teeth embedded in the flesh of his rump. A final slap. The stallion ripped free and wheeled back to his harem and the red colt kept running, blindly and in an agony not limited to his physical wounds. He had no knowledge of where he might go, no knowledge also of the man in the blue shirt, running as well on the spine of the ridge.

  John H slowed to a trot when he felt the stab in his knee, then to a fast walk to slow his own rising sweat. He reached the mare in the juniper and jerked the hobbles. He fixed the cinch and mounted.

  He turned her out of the trees parallel to the plunge of the canyon and ran her at full gallop until the bench tapered down and vanished in a plunge of its own. He reined her at the edge and she stood there impatiently, dancing and nervous to be on. He stood in the stirrups and scanned the broken bottom country with the Zeiss glasses, studying as best he could amid the jostle and jump of the horse.

  He glimpsed first the dust and then the red flash of the colt. A glimpse and nothing more. The horse was in the boulders and breaks, still racing like a charger with his mount lanced from his back and the roar of a fusillade spurring him on.

  John H turned the mare and rode into the blackened sticks of an old burn. The grass reached her knees and sparkled with dew and in ten steps he could smell the water on her. She had her head and she pushed forward at a punctuated breakneck pace, at times verging on a run but mostly traveling in a frustrated trot, winding through charred trunks like a thread on a bobbin bent awry. The red colt in the canyon had doubtless traveled far upriver by now, the odds of catching him slimmer by the second.

  The mare broke from the burn onto the bald face of a knob and leaped forward at the open expanse but he reined her back and stood again, looked again for the red horse below. Not a sign. The mare snorted and stamped, yanked hard with her head against the tightened reins.

  A mile ahead the leafy crown of an aspen grove rose beyond the curve of the knob. A rock shelf jutted from the sidehill above like the remains of a battlement, corrugated with age and impassable yet. John H kicked loose of the stirrups and left the saddle in a launch.

  He led the mare downhill at an angle. Meadowlarks jumped from the grass, yellow bellies flashing. He moved as quickly as he could and he stumbled once from the incline but caught himself and kept on.

  They reached a game path and he hoisted back to the saddle and the mare flew like a coursing bunny down through the contours and then up again and they burst over the hump of the mountain into an elk herd, the animals starting in alarm and lifting their ears and some rising up out of the grass, but the horse and the man sailed past in a blur, into the aspens and gone. Dust lazy in the air. The elk looked around.

  John H let the mare fathom the trees as quickly as she could, leaned low across her mane and felt the skim and slap of branches. He saw the glare of sunlight at the edge of the grove and the trail climbed and they were free, out of the green shade at the edge of a table. Ahead of him the canyon doubled back around a broad bend of the river, a mile-long oxbow, and with the trees at her back the mare stretched out her neck and galloped. He reined her at the terminus of the flat and fished the glasses out of his shirt.

  The colt finished his pell-mell flight and only plodded now, blood slick on his neck and flanks lathered with sweat. John H watched him work through a maze of slab rock along the river, saw him rouse a coyote, which skirted warily away.

  He turned the mare and rode her down the grade in a halting pigeon step through patches of dry crumbling clay and clumps of bitterbrush, down through a narrow drainage to the river bottom. He found a crossing and brought the mare up dripping on the opposite bank. He felt the breeze wander the canyon like a wraith, no more than a zephyr but enough.

  He tethered the mare to a dead limb and climbed onto a long spit of land, some ancient bluff of the river or remnant of glacial moraine on its own long melt, and he bellied over the top and spied the colt a hundred yards down, looking back in the direction he’d come. John H knew he’d try to return to his kind, knew as well the stallion would either run him out again or kill him.

  The colt lowered his head to water. John H scrambled back and loosed the mare and led her onto the narrow bluff. She saw the colt.

  She blared like a trumpet. John H held to the ground in a crouch and at the sound of her call he watched the head of the colt rise, saw his ears point to the sky. The mare neighed again and the colt took a step forward. John H ducked down the incline, pulling the reluctant mare around. The colt answered from below.

  He scrambled down the slope as quickly as he could, the horse pulling back at first and then heaving alongside in a fan of skittering dry clay and then striding past him altogether near the bottom, and when he planted his heels into the shifting powder to stop himself the mare’s rump swung wide in a circle as though he were a spar and the horse and reins the long accelerating swing of a boom. He’d forgotten his knee altogether now and he tossed the reins over her head and seized the horn and swung with one motion to her back.

  He dug his heels and she thundered upriver, gravel flying from her hoo
ves and then the hooves knocking like knuckles across hardpan. He wheeled her in a burst of dust and held her with the reins and waited.

  The red colt appeared above the crown of land. He stopped with his head up and he spied the dust and he stamped. His whinny spiraled in the air like the whistle of a rocket, piercing and shrill. The mare neighed back and the colt came on, a blur of red motion.

  John H turned the mare into the breeze and held himself across her back and ran her upriver another stretch and stopped again. To the west a black smudge of cloud. Spring storm a-coming. He steered the mare in a buttonhook turn and crouched along her neck and watched the colt run. The wind rustled a screen of willows, tickled the creaking dead limbs of an alder. The colt stopped, tested the same wind with his dilating nose. He brayed with a different sort of voice now, tail aloft like a setter’s and John H knew the colt had scented the mare and scented as well the peak of her cycle, and he had the red horse dead to rights.

  He let the mare warble back once through the bottled air of the canyon and though she wanted to step out toward the colt John H forced her to turn and run upriver again. The wind had risen now and he squinted his eyes against the whip of the air and pulled the brim of the doughboy lower across his brow, saw ripples ridge the surface of the river like the scales of a carp. He knew the mare’s scent worked like a drug on the other horse’s brain, his own predator’s smell crouched behind nothing more than a floating curl of smoke.

  The first drops fell. He looked across the river and found the thin bands of two-track, winding off the side of the mountain. His eye jumped to the wash, the unnatural gouges still present from the crush and crash of the heavy Dodge ambulance.