Painted Horses

by Malcolm Brooks

  “There you are. I fear I’ve turned your landlady quite against me but it couldn’t be helped. I’ve been trying to get you for hours.”

  Catherine cuts her off. “Have you seen the paper?”

  “Oh that’s the least of it. Any chance you can get down here first thing?”

  Catherine barely hears her. “All those ridiculous gawkers, like tourists in their own bloody country . . .”

  She prattles on a bit, and intuits a distance at the other end. “Hello? Are you there?”

  “I am. You’re right; it is their own bloody country. And the gawkers just won us two weeks to keep digging. Can you be here on the first morning train?”

  Catherine feels herself squirm. “Of course.”

  “You need to simmer down, love. Who do you think it is we’re doing this for?”

  She disembarks at Cannon Street station before eight the next morning, pads down the cobbles with the workmen and bankers. The only girl in pants. She can smell the river a block away, its odor as familiar as her father’s Indian summer clambake, the fire pit dug in the Tudor’s garden and the seaweed driven from the coast. The tide must be in. She crosses the street and rounds the corner onto Walbrook.

  She remembers the pandemonium around Frank Sinatra a decade ago. Swooning if not hysterical bobby-soxers, absurd scenes outside the Paramount Theatre. This is the first thing that springs to mind. Midway down the street a police line holds back a crowd of onlookers, people hell-bent on a glimpse of the temple.

  Not long ago she would have been the only one, lurking at the edge of a dig like a trout along a current. Now it takes an escort of two bobbies to get her through.

  In the afternoon they find the neck of the god, deeper down in the same small pit, bearing scars of the same severing stroke. Grimes remains on site though he is now almost totally at the beck and call of journalists and officials and Catherine can sense his mounting frustration, knows this is not his purpose or desire. At the dinner break he presses his camera upon her and explains its focus and flash, the urgent angles of sunlight and shadow.

  She knows he’s stepping on a limb. Audrey Williams has taken over his sketching and his notations but she is as able as Grimes himself and who would think otherwise. But this? Catherine holds the camera, feels her knees about to knock.

  “Sir, are you sure?”

  He is already shuffling to his duties, his suit and his tie unsmudged. “We learn as we go, miss. Stop calling me sir.”

  The crowd continues to mass when the workday closes, hundreds of office workers and executives queued by the police down the street clear past St. Stephen’s and on around the corner to the Bank of England. By dusk only a fraction has shuffled past and part of the line has tried and failed to storm the police barricade. With the temple and the dangerous wet trenches descending into darkness the diggers walk off for the day, through a gauntlet of catcalls out of a frustrated, jilted mob.

  To Catherine’s shock Grimes throws his own barbs back. “Egyptian thieves, are we?” he barks. “Watch yourselves, now. Watch you don’t kill what you love.”

  So it proceeds for the better part of a week. Catherine remains in London, overnighting at Audrey Williams’s flat. Other statuary emerges—Mithras’s forearm and hand, his taut knuckles wrapped around the hilt of a knife whose iron blade has long disintegrated.

  Finally another head. Not Mithras but Minerva, her neck wrenched from her torso, which is never recovered, her blank eyes like eggs in her skull.

  Goddess of art and war, the ultimate deity. Audrey Williams holds her up to the onlookers in the dusk and in the long hush that falls Catherine senses some luminous refraction angle off the stilled mass of them, and she gets it. She sees the throng, and she sees herself.

  She’s remained for the most part unaware of the politics. To her this has all been digging and discovery, the wonder of the ages wrapped in a good day’s work. Now with the entire nation on board the demand to preserve the temple becomes unavoidable and the developers, compliant thus far, finally dig in.

  The engineering of the modern office block can in no way accommodate an intact ruin. A fortune has been spent already in permitting fees with the Corporation of London. Work has been voluntarily delayed, then delayed again in the academic interest and now the project is at least a month behind schedule. The list goes on but boils down to one thing. Money being lost.

  Grimes for his part doesn’t seem to blame them, seems to sympathize even. Perhaps this is why he is the right man for the job.

  Once while she works she hears herself make a strange comment to Audrey Williams. “I never really thought of myself as an absolutist,” she says, the words popping out with no thought ahead of them.

  Audrey Williams is writing in a notebook and she does not stop the motion of the pen and does not at first reply, and Catherine begins to hope she only thought the words, that they will require explanation only to herself.

  Not so. Audrey Williams instructs her to scrape a little over here, work the point of the trowel around the edge there. She says, “Most of the absolutists I’ve known have been rich Oxbridge boys with a dreadful resentment of their mothers. Then it’s all Bolshevism, Trotskyism, or some other ism. So no, I wouldn’t think of you as an absolutist either.”

  “That’s not what I mean. All those people over there? They don’t want an office building. They want this, as it is, left in place. And so do I.” She lowers her voice, because nowadays the construction people are forever about, surveying or chalking or generally just observing. “If it ruins some tycoon’s big important venture, so sorry.”

  Audrey Williams laughs, tells her she may be a bit of a Bolshevik after all.

  “What’s that line they keep on with in the papers? ‘Preservation by record’?”

  “I believe so, yes.”

  Catherine tilts back on her haunches, trowel abruptly on the ground. “Maybe I’m too new to have any perspective, but is that honestly all we’re going to get? Preservation by record? What is that? What if we applied such a line to the pyramids, or the Roman Coliseum? People would think we were mad.”

  “It’s not the same city it used to be, love. Not the same world. These are modern times, with modern requirements. Also modern benefits. No, it’s true. Tell me you’d trade what you’re doing this very instant for anything else. You wouldn’t; neither would I. But a trade is exactly what we’ve got. A compromise. Preservation? In situ? Not to be, not this time. But we do have an opportunity, which believe me could be far, far diminished.

  “That public over there. They bought us two whole weeks with little more than a photograph in a newspaper. Such is our fast new world. But listen to me. That same public is a double-sided sword. You mark my words. I’ve thought of it, and Mr. Grimes is obsessed with it. Worried sick I’d say.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Not yet you don’t. Eventually you will. Preservation by record. Not the worst of all possible worlds, not at all. Now carry on while you’ve still got time.”

  Audrey Williams moves away. Catherine takes up her trowel and goes back to work, willing her eyes and her hands through the paces of her task while her mind roves like an animal around a cage, paces and flinches like a wild thing goaded by jabs from a stick.

  She figures it out a week later. The machines have moved in, pried the stones of the temple out of the earth with a force commensurate to a fast rubber stamp. The crowds have wandered back to their regular lives, and Catherine back to Cambridge.

  In her borrowed bed she flips with little interest through a newsstand satire, mud caught yet beneath her nails, waiting for restlessness to yield to the dull throb in her limbs. She thinks she might be catching cold.

  In a single-panel cartoon workmen and cranes poise to break earth on a construction project, a new office block according to the billboard behind them. “Start about here,” points the foreman, “and the first man to find a Roman temple gets docked a quid . . .”

  Stone House
>
  She brooded for a day after Miriam rushed home, half-annoyed at her hamstrung plan, half-contrite for feeling so at all. The gallery in the stone had waited an eon, would no doubt wait another week.

  But Jack Allen, on the other hand. Dub Harris. Who did they wait for. Allen had already mentioned hiring an airplane to scout his mystery horses. The more she pictured in her mind the drone of a prop in the walls of the canyon, the more she stared at the white walls around her, the more rash she allowed herself to become.

  She spread the map on the table and located the circle around the approximate site of the gallery. Miriam’s loopy hand. She studied the other notations the two of them had made over the past months, on the camp table in the evenings or on a flat hot rock up some arroyo, scribbles and palimpsests forming another map entirely over the whorls and elevations of topography.

  The first time she’d ventured out in the Dodge, the day of the punctured tire, she drove in on this road here. She spun the map, folded the legend and distance scale from the underside. Now that she studied it, the road terminated just a few miles from the gallery, certainly less than ten as the crow flew. Across the river, but the river nowadays was no swollen spring roil but a docile summer drift even a child could wade. Maybe she didn’t need a horse.

  She drove out with the town still quiet, the sun yawning awake at her back, the shadows on the plains animating like a vast and teeming menagerie.

  In the spring when she arrived she couldn’t understand this country, couldn’t will herself even to see it. Some localized myopia maybe, her eye conditioned to church steeples and hardwoods, old ordered streets and brick buildings. In the East of her childhood, the ocean alone stretched forever.

  Now she is a hunter in a bygone age. She follows other hide-clad hunters across a land alive with lumbering beasts, cold fires strewn behind, magic in the sky above. She looked out from behind the wheel and she thought, Take away the road, that barbed wire, that railroad track. A mammoth might rise.

  A band of pronghorn ran out of a coulee, darted in a line across the sage. Catherine watched their white rumps as they shrank, does with tiny fleet-footed young and juvenile bucks, finally a barrel-chested male with severe black hooks on his head. The last of the Stone Age critters, Mr. Caldwell had told her, nearly extinct themselves when he first came to this country. Now they were back. She watched with one eye while she drove, watched until they were bobbing specks a mile, two miles across the sage.

  Critters. Coulee and canyon and reckon-I-could. Fair-to-middlin’ and fit-to-be-tied. Rig for truck. The polar opposite of gloaming and cataract, lorry and livery and bloody-well-right.

  The truncated pronouncing of coyote, which even Catherine had caught herself using. Two syllables, not three. KI-yote. To rhyme with zygote.

  The last rain had been weeks ago and by the time she turned off the pavement the sun had burned the dew from the ground, the grasshoppers jumping like popcorn. She wrestled the gearbox into low and wound down the switchbacks to the canyon floor.

  She parked by the scars of her first visit, the gouges plain as though time scarcely crawled here at all. Catherine set her wide hat on her head. She lugged her pack to the river.

  The fang of rock that once split the river like a cleaver now jutted serenely. Fish darted at the base, shadows racing along the gravel. Catherine dropped her pack and kicked off her boots, looked around ridiculously before peeling out of her pants and socks.

  She winced as the cool of the river climbed to her thighs, winced again at the prod of gravel. She toddled for the smooth sand opposite, hit the deepest channel of water and went up onto her tiptoes to keep her underpants out of the drink. She splashed onto the sand, felt the heat of the sun on the flats of her feet.

  She dressed herself again and took a last look at the Dodge in the sage across the river. Red as a buzzard’s pate, slumped into plumage. She began to walk.

  Later she would wish for a horse. She kept the river close and put herself at the mercy of terrain. She battled a willow brake until the whiplike stalks became a virtual wall, smashing mosquitoes the whole way and finally clawing through the green weave to the river’s edge. She ripped the fronds apart and saw open rolling sage across forty feet of water.

  Mosquitoes swarmed and she launched into an Eddie Cantor number, slapping and hopping and tearing at her bootlaces.

  She burst from the willows like a jungle maniac, still in her pants and not caring a whit when she hit water above her knees. She plunged ahead with her boots in one hand and her pack in the other, hit a slick rock and pitched forward, thrusting the pack toward the sky and her shoes straight to the bottom. She caught herself and regained her balance, soaked past her waist now though the pack with its cargo remained dry. She splashed onto dry stones, spilled water from each shoe. She changed the saturated pad between her legs.

  An hour later her clothing had mostly dried in the furnace-like heat though her boots seeped at every step, water welling and subsiding through her socks. She followed the river into the afternoon, went wide around another thick screen of willows. She dropped into washes and breaks and then climbed out again.

  She passed clumps of tiny white flowers, bees humming like voltage in the hot still air, desert honey somewhere in the rocks. Honey as well in the sealed tombs of Egypt, stored beside canopic jars and mummified cats and still pure after three thousand years. John the Baptist, eking by on pilfered honeycomb and grasshoppers.

  Catherine had no such resourcefulness, a fact increasingly troubling by way of her stomach. She’d resolved not to eat until she couldn’t stand it and that juncture seemed nearer than she’d hoped. She had a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter, and a hard square block of cheese. Two apples. She’d contemplated chocolate bars but feared they’d melt in the heat.

  She hoped to make the base of the draw by day’s end, to climb to the glyphs in the morning. A cursory survey, some documenting footage, then back before the grub ran out. Here was the limiting factor. She could summon the energy for the task at hand, certainly the optimism. She couldn’t will more food to appear. She badly wished for Miriam.

  To the tribes of the Plains a handprint meant an enemy killed hand to hand. Miriam told her this the week after the powwow, had remembered Catherine’s curiosity and made a point to ask her grandfather. A handprint wasn’t the only symbol—arrows were painted on the legs of a horse for speed, rings around its eyes for vision. Still others differed tribe to tribe, but the handprint meant one thing. Triumph over another.

  Catherine spent a week hoping Miriam would also say something about the ritual in the lodge. She never did and Catherine finally gathered the courage to ask. Was it some initiation, some rite of passage for the dancing woman? To her surprise Miriam did not have an answer except to say it was an old ceremony, as out of time and perplexing to her as to anyone. She said she’d almost become convinced she dreamt the whole thing. Catherine believed her.

  For her part she had never told Miriam about John H and so had not been entirely truthful about the handprint on the ambulance. Her one peccadillo, her sin of omission. Miriam asked about it, of course. Catherine merely said she didn’t know what it meant, any more than she knew the man who made it. She left it at that.

  She caught a whiff of death in the bake of the sun, a sweet-putrid musk that made her stomach convulse. She held her breath against the clutch of the scent, hotfooted to get beyond this pollution she couldn’t see yet could practically feel, wrapping her skin like gauze. Overhead the soar of carrion eaters. God her stomach.

  Miriam had seen death a hundred times, with her parents long gone and endless stories about threshing machine catastrophes and alcohol poisonings and horse wrecks. She seemed almost insouciant about the whole business, inured through repetition.

  But her mouth had a taut set the other night as she gathered her things, her eyes blinking to keep from crying, a sight so stunning Catherine left the room. She wished now she’d put her arms around Miriam, because even Mi
riam’s hard shell had a crack. But she didn’t, for selfish reasons that haunted her now.

  For the first time in her life she was aware she’d never grieved, regarded grief itself as little more than a curiosity. She knew only what she could see and what she could see was the tip of the ice, even with Miriam whose presence and support and even mocked-up attitude she’d unwittingly taken for granted.

  She trudged along and considered this. She knew all this stuff, as Miriam often pointed out, a regular walking encyclopedia, but practically nothing about life, sheltered as she was from so many things.

  A baby, sucking on a nipple. Simple loss. The nagging she felt now was the closest she’d come to something as elemental as sorrow. The dismantling of the Walbrook temple, maybe. Otherwise she could barely relate. It didn’t seem right.

  Somehow she’d crossed the river again though she didn’t remember doing it. Her feet inside her boots still sloshed. Her pants were perfectly dry.

  The wall to the east stretched away in a series of palisades, sheer flutes towering hundreds of feet in the air. It seemed vaguely familiar, as though she’d passed here before. She wondered if she should look at the map but knew she’d encounter the food in her pack and knew as well she’d lose all strength of will. She checked her watch and kept walking.

  She walked a long time, the palisades above her yet behind her now as well. Her brain swirled away on its own, gone for a spell and then back again. She checked her watch a second time and the hands hadn’t moved.

  She felt a flare of rage, wanted to smash the lying watch with a rock. She forced herself to breathe, to ignore the watch. To march ahead.

  Eventually the edge of the sun slipped below the canyon’s rim and she knew she would not make the draw before nightfall. This she hadn’t reckoned on. She needed to fort up for the night, needed food and a fire. She needed to change the dressing between her legs before the light ran out.

  She allowed herself two quick swallows of peanut butter, enough to cut the fuzz in her head.