“Later. I’ve got someplace I need to be for awhile.”
“Can I come with you?” Catherine asked, and she saw Miriam hesitate. “I mean it’s okay if I can’t. I’ll just wait for you at the dance.”
“No,” said Miriam. “I think you should come. I think it might be all right.”
They went back to the darkness outside the churchyard. The moon seemed utterly absent, the church standing pale and weird behind them, its steeple a blank mass pointed against the stars.
They went through the grass toward the river. Catherine heard its sibilant swirl, heard a faint strain of wind in the line of trees. They went over a hump in the land and when they dropped down again the town of Agency may as well have been miles in the past. Miriam had yet to speak. Catherine followed along and kept silent herself.
They went down a shallow wash and followed the curve of a hill and around the base of the grade a haze of light came into view, a golden nimbus in the dark. Tepees, lit from the inside, radiating like giant lamps. Catherine saw figures move like shadows in one of them, felt the sudden burn of smoke in her nose. She heard a wail go up, half cry and half song, in that tribal tongue with its jolting strangeness. Miriam led her through the shelters toward the voice and they stopped outside a much larger structure, twice the size of the others and oddly shaped and emitting no light at all although when Miriam peeled back the flap that served as a door Catherine glimpsed the interior, fairly ablaze and packed with bodies.
Miriam told her to wait and disappeared within. The singing had stopped, replaced with a soliloquy in the same language, spoken softly by a man. Miriam stuck her head out.
“Are you on your period?”
“What? No. I’m not.”
Miriam beckoned, and Catherine ducked through the entry. The flap fell behind her.
A fire burned in the center of the lodge and in the throw of flames she saw people seated three or four deep in a ring around the perimeter, and at first felt relieved she was not the only spectator. But she was wrong, knew it a moment later when her eyes focused in the light. She scanned a line of copper skin and braids, narrow eyes peering back. She was the only white person. The youngest as well, except for Miriam.
The others stared toward the ceiling and she looked up too and with a start took in the shadow of a great bird, wings in a spread across the skin of the lodge. A female voice chanted. She wondered if the shadow were in fact a painting, then started again when she spied the bird itself. An eagle, frozen in motion atop a pole with wings six feet across, the beak fierce but the cup of its eye eerily empty. Somebody beat on a drum.
A figure approached and she tore her gaze from the bird, looked at the cupped hands coming toward her, the face obscured by shadow. The hands unfolded to release a burst of smoke, blown slap in her face as if by a wind. Her eyes smarted and she screwed them shut, her nostrils too, and she twisted her head and fanned to clear the fog. She choked a little but still the smoke bore her back, not toward the doorway but into her own sensory past, her brain impulsively racing to the cedar closet in her parents’ Tudor, its pungent red-streaked wood.
The smoke thinned. She forced her eyes open. The figure had moved on, let go another cloud farther along. A woman in tribal clothing, with locks from the mane of a horse fixed down the sleeves of her dress. When the woman turned toward the light Catherine could see one half of her face painted green, the other half red. Catherine turned to exchange a glance with Miriam, but Miriam was gone.
Other drums began to thump with the first. A second figure in like paint danced out to the center and fed fresh sage to the fire. The flames rushed up and devoured the leaves in a mad spew of smoke, dense gray-green billows that rolled through the lodge and made her wince yet again, the air heavy with the stuff, her lungs blazing.
A song started and a woman began to dance near the fire with her eyes fixed on the eagle, which appeared to float through the smoke. She wailed out from time to time but never stopped moving, never seemed to close her eyes against the sting of the air. Voices in the circle joined the song. Catherine alone seemed to fight the urge to cough.
Two men brought an irregular box and set it near the dancer, a battered-looking container that Catherine at first mistook for simple cardboard, with the sticklike figure of a horse drawn in red on the front. They lifted the lid and she looked closer and saw the box was actually made of rawhide, its corners laced with thongs. The men reached in and withdrew rattles, which they shook in the interstices of the drums, one on each side of the dancer.
Catherine felt herself swoon and realized with a sort of distant recognition how hot she was, her neck and her face burning from the inside out. She shook her head with the vague notion none of this could possibly be real. She looked at the eagle. Still there, its shadow also. She looked back at the dancer. Still dancing.
She brought her wrist into the light and squinted at her watch. Surprisingly not much time had passed since she’d last checked it. She didn’t know how much longer she could stand the hot thick air. She again looked for Miriam and still couldn’t find her.
She verged on fleeing when another player came into the circle, a woman with a flowing head of iron-gray hair and a robe over her shoulders, the robe bearing a circular pattern across the back, hung with feathers and black bolts of horsehair. She approached the dancing woman and held out her cupped hands, appearing to offer something though Catherine couldn’t see what it might be.
The dancer had taken her eyes from the eagle and though her feet continued to step in place she stared now into the woman’s outstretched hands, seemed to search for something contained there, and a moment later broke her step and lunged to make a swipe and a murmur rippled through the ring. The robed woman withdrew her hands and retreated. The dancer looked at her own empty palms and let out a crushing wail, began to step in place again.
The man rattling to her right went to the box with the horse and reached inside. He brought out what Catherine dimly took to be a quirt, and when he handed the quirt to the dancer the woman did indeed commence to flagellate her own shoulders. Catherine shook her head against the fog.
Twice again the robed woman moved in with cupped hands, and twice the dancer tried and failed to receive something. Finally as the dancer appeared close to collapse, wringing with sweat and panting with exhaustion or lack of oxygen or both, the singing and the drumming hit a frenetic pitch and the robed woman stepped up and proffered not her hands but the gape of her mouth, and the dancer feebly reached out and made to pluck something from her tongue.
Apparently she succeeded because she let out a warble that occurred even to Catherine as a mix of jubilation and relief. A general cry rose from the ring and the gray-haired woman sunk into the floor, robe folding like a tent with the poles kicked loose. The dancer halted now and held something up in her hands, extended it toward the eagle overhead. Whatever it was, Catherine couldn’t see.
Other dancers surrounded the woman, some blowing whistles, some with red-and-green faces. Another sage bundle roared up on the fire. Catherine felt a tug on her wrist.
Miriam, minus her glasses and squinting again. She led Catherine out of the circle to the far end of the lodge and the people seated there slid away to let them pass. Miriam’s grandmother waited in the dim light, swaddled despite the heat in her mountain of blankets. Crane Girl.
She reached out with her frail crooked fingers and Catherine uncertainly extended a hand herself. Crane Girl gripped on to her and pulled her nearer, pulled her until Catherine’s face was only inches from her own.
“Blueshirt.”
Catherine increased her grip. Miriam’s grandmother gripped back. “You know.”
Catherine shook her head. She tried to smile. “I don’t. I wish I did.”
She was off balance already and the charged air behind her, the shock waves of the drums maybe, seemed to press against her with a physical force, threatened to topple her onto the old woman.
Crane Girl nodded, folded Catherine’s hand in
to a fist and gave the fist a pat. She released her. Catherine righted herself again.
She was nearly to the exit before she realized she held something in her hand. A smooth round thing. She knew she’d lose the light in a step or two and she stopped, looked down at her closed fist with something on the order of dread and thought, If this is a marble ear I’m finished. I swear it. She opened her hand.
Not an ear but a simple stone, flat and perfectly oval, worn smooth by the millennial action of a creek or the polish of a leather pouch. The caress of a thousand fingers.
She looked again for Miriam but couldn’t recognize her in the hallucinatory smear of stares, the sea of smoke. The drums banged in her head. She clutched the rock in her fist and took one last look at the eagle, its blank empty eye.
3
Catherine stumbled from the orange heat and felt the blue air of the night douse her skin like a wave. Sweat rolled from her temples, dampness like dew at the back of her neck. She walked unsteadily a few steps away from the lodge, through the lighted tepees. Her feet felt like concrete, her brain light as a bubble. She wanted water, her tongue just a clod in her mouth.
At the street an explosion of noise and light. A band played a waltz on the back of a flatbed trailer, men with fiddles and a big bass and some slippery Hawaiian guitar. Hundreds of people congregated in the road and on the rickety wooden walks, dancing couples and men both Indian and white with beer in paper cups, the white men in Stetsons, the Indians in some other oversize cowboy hat.
Catherine pushed through the crowd to the tavern. She jostled someone’s cup and felt cold beer slosh her arm. She put her tongue to it.
At the threshold of the bar she caught another lungful of smoke, tobacco this time, clouds of it roiling within. She turned her head back to the street and looked up, took in one last mighty pull of air. She held her breath and went into the din.
She got through the throng of standing bodies and stopped behind the line of shoulders at the bar top. She looked between a picket of heads and hats and startled herself with her own elongated eyes, staring back from the mirror above the back bar. Then a secondary recognition, filtering like the earliest shade of dawn. She knew the man to her left, his blue eyes and the echoing blue of his shirt. He grinned his half grin in the mirror. She smiled back, felt the hot rock in her hand and it crossed her febrile mind he might be in cahoots with Miriam’s grandmother. She put the rock in her pocket.
John H turned on his barstool. “Howdy-do, Cleo.”
“Thirsty,” she said, half-surprised her tongue functioned at all. “That’s how I do.”
“We can fix that.” He beckoned to a bartender. “I’d like to buy this girl a drink.”
“What’s she drinking?”
John H cast a quizzical eye.
“Oh. Only water.” She felt a little silly.
John H pushed a bill at the bartender. “Make it a tall one.” He rotated again to face her. “You know what we say about water, here in the great American West.”
This last rang like a gong. One of Jack’s expressions. She shook her head. “No idea.”
John H rattled the rocks in his glass. “Whiskey’s for drinking. Water’s for fighting over.”
She wondered if he were being cagey. Then her water arrived, the glass a-glitter with ice. She said, “I don’t want to fight with anyone,” and gulped half the volume in a single indelicate swallow. The water tasted of cold galvanized metal, the ache in her teeth the sweetest thing she knew.
A little later she took the barstool beside him. She began to feel centered again, properly alert to the world around her. She studied the glass in her hand, and looked at him. “So,” she said, “twice my rescuer. And all I ever wanted was to feel suitably able.”
He did seem endlessly amused. Faintly, but endlessly. “I’m sure you’re able to do something. Otherwise you wouldn’t drive a company truck.”
“That doesn’t indicate much at all I’m afraid. Painful, but true.”
“You a Brit?”
This took her by surprise, also for some reason raised her dander. “You mean am I English? Of course not.” She faced herself again in the mirror, saw the catlike mask, the bronze of her skin. “Isn’t it obvious? I’m Nubian.” She turned back to him.
Now he had a real grin. “You’re sunburned, but not that sunburned.”
“I’m not from England, not even New England. I’m from New Jersey. But I did spend a year in London not long ago. I sort of—found God there, you could say.”
“Ah.”
“I guess we should clear up something else since it seems a sticking point. I don’t have anything to do with Mr. Harris’s dam. Don’t know anything about it, don’t care anything about it.”
He lifted his glass. “I’ll drink to that.”
She clinked his glass with her own, empty now save an ice cube or two.
She didn’t feel finished. She wanted him to know everything and evidently he was inside her whirling mind already. “So you do what, exactly?”
“Archaeology. I find things from the past.”
“Things somebody lost?”
“I guess so. Things everybody lost.”
She told him she worked for the Smithsonian, that the ambulance was strictly on loan. “It’s government policy, to go in ahead of water reclamation sites.” She shrugged. “I know Harris Power is a private company but there’s some federal component to these big projects too. I think through the army, the Corps of Engineers. It’s sort of hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. I myself in all honesty am very new to any of this, even the archaeology. I cut my teeth in London and that is a long way from here.”
She saw the bird point again, sitting in the top of the dresser in her little house. Was that only two days ago? She felt the other rock, hot in her pocket. She looked him in the eye. “I will admit it’s getting more interesting all the time.”
John H drained the remainder of his whiskey in one smooth swallow. He said, “I take it that betrothed of yours is nowhere to be found.”
He gazed steadily at her face, same faint smile. She felt the underside of her ring with her thumb. She’d tried to call David before she drove here tonight, the only thing that reminded her to put the ring back on. Jack Allen told her never to wear a ring around a horse, not if you wanted to keep the finger you wore it on, so off it had come. “Oh you could find him, but you’d have to go to New York to do it.”
“Guess I could call and run it by him, then. Or you could just come out to the street and dance a waltz with me.”
Catherine slid down from the barstool. “I tried calling him already. He didn’t pick up.”
She held his hand through the crowd and out to the coolness of the night. The band on the flatbed sawed away at a square dance, the singer barking steps like a drill sergeant. Through the wall of bystanders she could see twenty or thirty couples in front of the stage, stomping and spinning. Catherine had a flicker of panic he’d drag her into that uncharted territory but by the time they reached the edge of the crowd the band had indeed shifted into a simple waltz. She heard the lazy, three-count thump of bass and kick drum. He led her out and squared off to her.
“I haven’t waltzed since I was in junior high, and never to anything this . . . Texas-like.” The singer was in fact crooning about Texas at that very moment.
“I probably haven’t waltzed myself since you were in junior high. Don’t worry, it’s the same step, Texas or Vienna. Nubia, even.”
She heard herself laugh, and his hand was in the small of her back. She touched the junction of his shoulder and neck and he stepped toward her and she naturally stepped away. “Onetwothree,” he said, and she rose up onto her toes and back down again. She recalled learning inside turns and scissors steps, though he led her through none of that now. He merely led her in circles, around and among the other couples and their own small orbits, and then the pattern became automatic and she found she could talk to him.
“Did you
see the dancing in the ball field?”
“From a distance. Just the end of it.”
“It was amazing. Hypnotic, nearly. All those drums.”
“And not a one with a three-count beat.”
“No, the opposite of this. Isn’t it funny.”
He said nothing, and somehow this in itself seemed to beg explanation. Or maybe she just wanted to talk.
“Two different dances, and they mean such different things.”
“What is it you think they mean, Catherine.”
There. He’d said it. “The first dance is about an entire people, but this dance is about two people.”
He said, “Now that’s interesting,” and then he did turn her out, so suddenly she had to jump to avoid shuffling completely out of time. She managed to twirl beneath his hand and come back on the proper step. She forgot what she was going to say.
“Beautiful,” he told her. In the last bars of the waltz she realized he carried himself with a stiffness, a rigidity that made her think of the mannered poise of a classicist. How odd. She studied his face with its narrow little smile, prepared herself for another spontaneous step that in the end never came. The band reached the end of the song, and he released her. They were at the outer edge of the makeshift floor, just shy of the general street crowd. Now she did want a drink, a real one.
“You live down in there, don’t you?”
He never had a chance to answer. Someone spoke from the throng at his back, a man’s voice with a familiar edge and though John H barely moved a muscle Catherine watched him go visibly taut.
“Figured you for a goner, H-man. Figured you never made it past the Po River.” Jack Allen, in a hat with a flashy line of conchos at the band. The man beside him stood a full head shorter and probably fifty pounds heavier, which made Allen appear all the more wolflike.
John H turned to face him, at the same time drifting away from Catherine. She felt a knot wallop her stomach like a fist, felt a flash of hyperkinetic nervousness.
Jack Allen was still talking. “You cut a fine little rug with Miss Lemay here. Given that busted knee and all.”
Painted Horses Page 21
