Painted Horses

by Malcolm Brooks

  “Ain’t a thing gotten into you. Makes more sense than anything else I’ve heard lately.”

  “That damn Allen. You reckon he was jockeying for your saddle?”

  “It occurred to me.”

  “How’s your knee?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  They split a chocolate bar and a tin of Spam, the only food they have. Outside the shelter the snow sails again. They doze until the wood burns up and the cold seeps from the stone and they press ahead. John H again totes his saddle, McKee the rifles.

  The snowstorm has obliterated the mule trail. After an hour’s slog in the dark they come down off the defile and enter an expanse of forest. John H trudges along behind McKee. Outside his week in basic training he has not traveled this far on foot in years and he concentrates on the flex of his knee at every step.

  They pass below the snow line and McKee strikes his Zippo. The mule prints are gone.

  “Reckon the rain washed ’em clean?”

  “No. No way.”

  “Think we’re on the wrong trail?”

  “Yup.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We can go back. Wait for light, see if we can get on the right track.”

  “I don’t see how we’re going pick up that trail again. We rode up in the dark and now it’s buried in snow. For all we know it could be snowing up there right now. Let’s just keep moving west. We’ll get somewhere.”

  “Want me to spell you on the kack awhile?”

  John H shakes his head, shifts the saddle on his shoulder. “I’m OK for now.”

  They drink at a stream in the dim light of morning. When John H rises McKee has finally taken the Furstnow. “Heavier’n it looks,” he says.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “You’re limping like a three-legged dog. I’ll let you know when I’ve had enough.”

  An hour later the path crosses an open expanse of meadow, its boundary described by the staves and slats of a wooden fence. A roofline rises above the hillcrest.

  McKee drops the saddle and takes his rifle back. They skulk down, pause, and crane their necks down the slope.

  Not a quiet farmstead but an entire village, the nearest house emblematic of the rest with half its roof shot away. Broken furniture strews the mud, the stamp of tank treads like the bite of mighty teeth.

  “I hope they left some grub,” McKee whispers. “I’m starving like I got ten tapeworms.”

  They watch the narrow street.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think this whole place is about as empty as your noggin.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I think. Let’s find some food.”

  John H limps back for the meadow. He finds his saddle in the dead grass and bends to lift it and the mutter of a horse stops him short.

  A gray dun peers from the tree line thirty yards off, mutters again and turns half-away. John H clucks at the horse. The dun takes a step forward, then turns away again. John H sees the solid architecture of its shoulders beneath a frost of winter pelage. He clucks again, pulls a fistful of grass. The horse takes another step.

  McKee has found a great round block of cheese and he sits with his back against the wall of the cottage. John H walks up leading the horse. McKee swallows his mouthful of cheese.

  “Aitch,” he says. “Where’d you get the Barb?” He carves off another slab with his knife, squints against the angle of the sun. “You got your paint tin? Ought to deck that pony out.”

  “How’s that?” The horse already has its head over John H’s shoulder, already tries to nibble his clothes.

  “You know, like the red devils done. Out on the plains, when the shaggies was thick. Rings around the eyes for magic vision, and all. Couple of palm prints here and there. Rattle ol’ Adolf’s cage. Put the fear of the US Cavalry into his sorry ass.”

  Seven months later John H watches through the German glasses from the back of the same animal, as McKee and a few others charge a retreating rifle squad in the Arno valley. They race through an orchard, peach trees radiant with fruit.

  All summer McKee has worn a battered Stetson doughboy in place of his helmet, a relic of the last war liberated from a junk shop in Rome. John H sees the flash of the pistol in his hand though with the fighting in all directions he is not able to distinguish the sound.

  A phosphorous shell detonates in the orchard, green limbs and leaves and rank chemical fog. He hears the reaper-like whir of an MG42, sees its lightning tongue lap the smoke. Then the scream of the horses.

  Somebody trips a mine and a fragment clips a notch in the gray dun’s ear and puts him into a bucking fit. John H takes his binoculars hard in the chin. He turns the dun’s head and rides the horse down the crumbling terraces to the road. A column of Shermans crawls through the smoke.

  He spends most of the day riding point for a line of Algerian mule skinners, packing mortars and bullets and bags of transfusion blood into the catacomb rubble of a shattered village. Twice they are strafed from the air, not Hans at all but trigger-happy Yanks in Mustangs who don’t recognize the colonial uniform. Voices shriek for medics out of every rathole and cranny, a bouillabaisse of tongues with the same wailing edge.

  He makes it back to the orchard at nightfall. The routing has moved north, faded with the day into the next line of hills. The horse shies within the trees. John H smells the meat of trampled fruit, but the horse senses blood.

  John H dismounts and moves through the orchard with a flashlight. He finds a red smear in the grass, a little farther the mound of a dead horse with more blood in a fan around its head. Not McKee’s horse.

  He reads the places where medics worked on the wounded, sees discarded morphine vials and cutaway fabric. He finds the bodies of two German soldiers in a low scrape in the ground. He finds the machine gun nest, empty now save a sinister jackpot of shell casings.

  The dun calls out to him and he kills the light and as he makes his way back some odd foreign object collapses beneath his foot. His heart freezes, thinking he’s triggered a mine. When no blast follows he switches the light back on.

  McKee’s doughboy campaign hat, crushed beneath his boot. He picks it up and pushes the crown out. No bullet holes and no blood. He moves on to the horse.

  He passes mule carts along the road, dead servicemen piled like busted furniture. He makes his way to a field hospital and though there is no sign of McKee a nurse asks if John H needs doctoring. John H does not follow and she flashes a mirror, shows him the blood in a new moon on his chin. He thanks her but heads back to the night.

  A week later he sees MCKEE, ENOS LEMUEL, PFC on a missing-in-combat list and writes a letter addressed to McKee Clan, Ogden, UT.

  In the fall the rain starts again. The recon cavalry has been dismantled for months though John H is still with the dun and a handful of other horses, still working with the mule lines.

  He finds himself under the scrutiny of an officer fresh to the war, a West Pointer and confirmed tank man, champing to charge across the Po valley with his roaring Shermans and kick Kesselring straight back to Berlin. He is thus nothing less than affronted to spy the horses in his camp, to see John H leading the gray dun.

  The officer is a spit-and-polish paragon and he strides straight up and knocks the battered Stetson from John H’s head. The gray dun shies, does a two-step.

  John H steadies the horse and picks up the hat.

  “This is not 1914, soldier. That is not regulation attire.”

  John H replaces the hat on his head. “You new here?”

  The officer is momentarily dumbstruck and John H avails himself, clucks at the horse and walks off. Now the officer’s dander really rises but just as he finds his voice he spies something else and goes speechless again. Two yellow handprints, one atop the other on the horse’s rump. What kind of an army have they been running over here.

  For months the bivouacs have trailed a dizzying throng of
refugees, desperate women with bawling children, the lot of them wholly dependent on Allied food shipments that never stretch quite far enough. The officer grits his teeth even to stomach this disordered rabble, boys who steal anything they get their slippery fingers on and women who whore themselves for crumbs.

  Now we’re feeding horses to boot. Well not anymore. The officer sends an order to the field kitchen. The horses are to be separated from the mule line, slaughtered with dispatch and rationed to the refugee camp. Any US soldier not assigned to a pack battalion will report to general infantry.

  John H heads to the officer’s compound but is stopped outside by the MPs. Finally an aide emerges.

  “Is he out of his mind?”

  “Whether or not he’s out of his mind, I can assure you he won’t be changing his mind.” The aide muses a moment. “He’s pretty far from what you might call an agrarian.”

  Past midnight John H slips into the holding pen and finds the gray dun. He has the horse saddled in a quick minute, then cuts out a dominant mare and tethers her with a slipknot to the Furstnow. He leads the dun and the mare to the creek at the edge of camp, a dozen loose horses trailing behind, the click of hooves lost in the babble and flow.

  By dawn he’s in a forested draw to the north. He stops up at daylight and pickets the horses in a beech stand, carries his rifle to the line of the ridge up above. To the west he sees the blue plain of the Ligurian Sea, melting into mist on the horizon. He is either smack within or perhaps just outside the German line.

  He rides by moonlight for the next two nights, holes up during the day beneath the cloak of ragged trees.

  By the third morning, he has outridden the war.

  The Zeiss glasses tell him this, make a gift of villages that have not been bombed or strafed or otherwise contested. He sees dairy cows in their pastures, views gloriously intact red tile roofs against brilliant sapphire sky. The countryside is not incinerated, at least not yet.

  He travels by daylight and makes better time though still he keeps away from the roads. He rides with the odor of the sea always in the air, climbs to a vantage from time to time to be sure it is still within sight. In this way he follows the curve of the continent until the ocean is not to the west but directly south and then gradually south and east. Early one morning he leaves the horses in a hayfield at the edge of the woods and rides out past the rick stacks to a dirt lane, follows the lane to a crossroads, also unpaved. He can see a farm tucked into a dell, perhaps a mile off, smoke trailing from a chimney. He raises his glasses and watches a hunter with two dogs working a hedgerow along a harvested grainfield.

  He lopes down the road until a crossroad appears, reins the dun to read the white arrows on the corner post. Most of the names are in French. Toulon he knows. He is in liberated country now, the Allied invasion of southern France months past and the armies long traveled north. He turns the dun back for the hayfield.

  For the second time in his life he pushes urgently west, staying in the trees or the hills when he can and otherwise avoiding the roadways. He skirts slumbering stone villages in the dawn, waves to farm folk from a distance.

  He happens on the girl in a dense stretch of forest along the Rhone River. He is watering the horses when suddenly she is simply there, appearing for all he knows out of thin winter air. She is nine or ten, no more, dusky as the forest light itself, festooned in colored rags and tinkling copper hoops. She pays him little mind but hops and skips around the horses, greeting each in turn. She studies the paint on their shoulders and flanks, dots and slashes and stripes.

  She arrives at the gray dun. She places her own small brown hand atop the larger yellow palm print, splays her fingers and giggles. Now she looks at the man, unfurls her arm in a sort of demand. John H senses it will be useless to speak to her in English but he finds himself holding his own arm out to her, gathers this is what she wants. She seizes his hand and turns it over, traces the lines in his palm with the tip of her finger. She looks up at him, her eyes very grave. She runs her thumb and forefinger like calipers down the length of each of his fingers, base to tip, looking not at his hand but all the while at his face. John H looks back.

  She finishes at the end of his pinkie, elevates his palm toward hers and fans her fingers against his. Again she giggles.

  She pulls him through the forest. He has the gray dun by the halter and the other horses trailing, this mute slip of a girl in the lead. He smells woodsmoke, sees the leap of a fire. Other children coalesce in the same shadowy way as the girl, a pack of dark wildings whose collective adornment swirls in the atmosphere like miniature chimes. One or the other swoops in to tug at his sleeve or his pocket until he has been sampled by the lot of them. They speak an alien tongue, chattering to themselves and apparently to him, gold glinting in their mouths. The girl alone remains silent.

  The wagon camp sprawls through the gully like the effect of a cyclone. Through evening’s frail light he sees the wagons are as chromatic as the girl’s clothing and no less ragged, accented by fading stencils and tattered colored flags. With a pang he thinks they look nearly like a sheep wagon.

  Only one of the men knows any English and this is broken at best but John H pieces out a story. They are travelers, coppersmiths and carders, restless by nature and transient by heritage. His band and a thousand like his have been as hounded as the Jews for the past five centuries though all of that pales beside the past five years.

  This is the first John H has heard of the death camps and with the language barrier he is not sure he understands the man correctly. Rumors out of the east. Night raids and cattle cars. They have survived in the cover of the forest for months, terrified for their children’s lives. The Nazis patrolled roads and villages, but they did not come here.

  “The Kraut army’s gone,” John H tells him. “Retreated north. This country’s been liberated.”

  The man nods in the firelight, snaps his fingers and as if by magic a loaf of bread appears. He tears through crust, tosses a chunk to John H. The bread is still warm. “Is good, no?”

  John H has not had fresh bread in at least a year. He holds this to his nose and smells salt and yeast and his belly growls as though on signal. The man grins like a thimblerigger, turns to the silent girl and shuffles the hair on top of her head, says, “Ma petite fille, she read like a book.” He looks straight on to her and mouths something, his lips moving without sound, and the girl nods and dips and floats like ether. John H loses her in the dark.

  The man holds the remainder of the loaf in two hands, cradles it in the air. “She this big, she is a fever. She burn alive. Who know what she hear then. Who know what she know.”

  “She knows horses.”

  “Aye, she know horses. Birds, dogs, maybe snakes and owls. Know men, too. Know you, before you know her. Le chevalier, le cavalier pour le soleil dans l’ouest. She know where to find you, ami. She know you bring horses.”

  John H still holds the bread, still has not taken it to his mouth. The gray dun shifts behind him, nudges his shoulder with the weight of its skull.

  “We need your horses, ami.”

  John H shakes his head, thinks of the little girl and feels true regret. “I made a deal with these horses.”

  “A deal. What is this, deal.”

  “A safe passage deal. Get them out of the line of fire.” He laughs a little, looks at the bread in his hand. “Not to mention out of the soup pot.”

  Behind him the gray dun draws up its croup and raises its tail and shits with a sound to blush the dead. Soft apples splat like batter, the smell rising over and above woodsmoke and baking and lived-in wool. Children laugh out of the darkness.

  “Your horse maybe think different, eh? He see this deal for what it is, eh?”

  John H shrugs. “Got me.”

  “My fren’, we are not so different, vous et moi. We are responsible both for the creatures in our care, no? Both we accept this. Also we are cut off both from our place in this world, no?”

  J
ohn H points at the vardos. “That ain’t your place in the world?”

  “Ah, is a point, a fine point. Is incorrect. This wheels have no turn in five years, ami. Is a sin, ami, to displace a man, displace the creatures in his care.” He steps forward and moves among the horses, moves the way the girl moved along the river.

  “In our second winter we are no longer able to feed ourselves, much less feed the horses. So the horses feed us. Vous comprenez? Is of little choice. Is ah, is ah—”

  “Do or die,” says John H.

  “How again?”

  “Do or die.”

  “Oui. As you say. Do or die. I need your horses, my fren’. To take me to my place in the world. You talk about a deal, my fren’. Venez, I make you a deal.”

  The girl awaits by the fire. She kneels before a trunk case, a narrow leather boot with buckles. She smiles, holds out her hand. She lifts the lid of the case.

  Though he’s never seen one before John H knows in his own moment of prescience precisely what this is. Within the case rests a weapon, part rifle and part wand, a Mannlicher with a flat bolt handle and the stock wood down the length of the barrel. His mind flashes to a safari story, Cosmopolitan magazine in Bakar’s Miles City kitchen, a blustery day way back when. Ernest Hemingway. The short happy life of Francis Mac-somebody, shot by his wife with just such a gun.

  The girl lifts the rifle and holds it up to him and he hesitates because he knows that here is a deal all right, a deal with the devil. There are flames even, firelight lapping the red hue of the stock and the soft blue of the barrel, lapping over the girl, snapping like sparks in the jet of her eyes. He takes it from her, and he is a goner.

  He turns the rifle in his hands, works the bolt and marvels at whatever wrought such elegant angles from the raw and Precambrian lodes of the earth. The bolt glides through the action like silk through a ring, with none of the rattle and slop of his battle rifle. The forearm mates to the barrel the way muscle cleaves to bone. Yak would be smitten. John H reads MADE IN AUSTRIA and thinks, I can’t believe we’re beating these guys.