Painted Horses

by Malcolm Brooks

  Catherine had unfolded her map for him an hour earlier, the sun up over the rim of the cirque, warm on her neck and shining like water on the horses in the grass. She showed him the places she had camped, the sequence of her summer jotted with arrows.

  The draw where she and Miriam had chased the cranes, the spring where they found the point. She retraced her path through the canyon, and the notes made in her own or in Miriam’s hand made her think of specific meals they had eaten, hilarious remarks Miriam had made.

  Here they had forgotten the can opener and had to pierce a tin of peaches with a rock to the hilt of a knife. Here they startled a bull elk out of his bed, the thrashing the elk made startling the wits out of the two of them. Here Jack Allen first noticed horse tracks.

  She found herself telling him these things, working her way upriver as though the map had become an archive of her own runaway life. She hadn’t thought of it this way before.

  John H could see the flaws in the thing, the falsities of proportion and scale. “This place you’re trying to get to? It’s nearly as far from where we are now as what you hiked yesterday, from this road here.”

  “So I’m only halfway there.”

  “More or less.”

  She frowned. “And where are we, exactly? On the map, I mean.”

  That little half smile again. “Where we are isn’t on the map.”

  Now this half-wild mare he had her on kept crowding the red colt in the crevasse, pushing impatiently forward with her ears flattened back, lunging with her grotesque teeth for the flesh of his rump and nearly tearing the reins from her hand.

  “Whoa now,” he said. He trotted the red horse forward a few steps. “Rein her back, just gently. That’s it.”

  Her left hand gripped the horn like an amulet. “What if she bucks me?”

  “She won’t buck. She just wants up ahead. Once we’re out she can have her way.”

  He disappeared through the willows ahead of her. The mare shied at the sway, prancing in place with her head jerking. Catherine screwed up her courage and gouged her heels in, nearly toppled from the saddle in shock when the mare shot forward into the whip and slap of vegetation.

  He laughed when she burst into the open, sitting the red horse above her on the edge of the wash. She’d regained her seat now and she steered the mare beside him and told him she was glad he thought it was funny, and he wheeled the colt and both horses galloped across the flat.

  They reached the head of the draw in what Catherine guessed at a little more than an hour, though the hands of her watch remained frozen from the day before. No amount of tapping or winding would make them move. She hadn’t imagined that, either.

  “Should we leave the horses here? The ride up gets pretty scary.”

  “No, keep riding. We’re okay for now.”

  “Do you already know what’s up there? Tell me the truth.”

  He shook his head. “No idea.”

  “You’re not just playing along?”

  “Missy, I don’t walk unless I have to. I sure don’t go in for mountain climbing.”

  “You’re going to have to. Mountain climb, I mean.”

  He shrugged. “I’ll make an exception.”

  She smiled. “Lucky me.”

  “Let’s just say I can’t ignore your sand.”

  If he thought her a fool for traipsing around these raw parts alone, endlessly requiring rescue, he certainly didn’t let on. Maybe he took her seriously, even. She wondered in a sort of idle flash if he would like to sleep with her. He hadn’t let on about that either.

  She thought again of the panels in the crevasse, the silhouettes he’d painted in the small stone house. From where they sat on the horses she could look up the funnel of the draw and just see the notch in the top of the cliff. She said, “I think you’re going to be interested in a lot more than sand.”

  She went through two of her three film reels out on the cap rock before he beckoned her up under the overhang. He’d found faint carvings there as well, also what looked like the last traces of painted figures, barely distinguishable from the natural striations in the rock. She was not sure she could have noticed them on her own.

  “How much more film do you have?” he asked.

  “Just a few minutes’ worth. I’m not sure it matters. The light isn’t strong enough in here.”

  “Not this time of day, with the sun up past the mouth there. But east is straight on over there. First thing in the morning you’d have direct sunlight on that back wall.”

  She looked at the opening, then at the camera in her hand, then at him. He’d taken a seat on a low shelf beneath the band of flint, his left knee stretched straight ahead. He didn’t say whether it troubled him to climb the chute, or to scramble from stone to stone, but even in her giddiness Catherine noticed his limp.

  She said, “I take it we’re coming back.”

  He led her across the river and up another draw. They traveled a short way through a pine forest along a creek to a place where hot water rushed from a cleft, mineral streaks rusting the slick face of the stone as though the stone were untreated steel. She saw steam rise where the hot pool overflowed to meld with the cool of the stream.

  He hoisted his leg over the colt’s back and went to the ground like a child down a slide.

  By the time she’d clambered from the mare he was down to his blue jeans, his body ghost white beneath the copper V of his neck. She turned to tie the reins off and when she turned back he was stark naked, stepping gingerly across the rocks. Pale as to be almost luminous and flopping like a fish. She averted her eyes, then glanced back again. He lowered himself into the pool, disappeared completely underwater for a moment and then popped gently through the surface.

  Catherine felt a little frozen in place. She knew she shouldn’t be shy about nakedness, and even knew she wouldn’t be under ordinary circumstances. But the narrow belt running around her hips, with its hooks and straps and lump of gauze in the crotch of her panties, may as well have suddenly caught fire beneath her clothes. “How is it?” She had to yell above the noise of the water.

  “Restorative,” he shouted. “Limp in. Leap out.”

  He went under again and she seized her chance, slipped around the other side of the horses and from there behind the trunk of a tree. She hurried to unlace her boots and peel off her socks, then kicked free of her pants. She undid the little clasp on the belt and checked the gauze. Barely any blood at all, by now practically a formality. She went back to the pool.

  “Don’t peek,” she told him. She wore only her shirt and that was half undone.

  He grinned right at her, water running from his hair. “Wouldn’t think of it.”

  She laughed and let the shirt go to the ground.

  She heard the drone of the prop long before she knew what it was, a faint hum in the air she thought might be a dragonfly. She listened and the hum grew steadily louder before John H seemed to perceive it.

  He reined the red colt. The sound was mechanical, coming from downriver. They watched an airplane bank into view and level out far down the canyon, saw the glass flash on the cockpit.

  “Woops,” he said, and put his heels to the colt.

  They ran the base of a long spit of ground toward the sheer canyon wall, then made the shadow and traveled up and over the spit and down again into an unruly draw of hawthorns and wild roses. He stopped in the brush and Catherine tugged the mare to a stop too, and when she did three sharp-tailed grouse exploded out of the roses, kak-kak-kakking off toward the river. The red colt crow-hopped at the commotion, jumped again when a straggler got up late behind the others.

  “Whoa now,” John H said, and pulled the horse’s head around.

  The engine noise came on louder and the plane floated back into view across the canyon, flying well below the rim of the wall like a carefree white bird. It came abreast of them and passed, its shadow passing on the ground like a silhouette crossing a shade.

  John H patted the colt’
s neck. “Somebody’s looking for you,” he said.

  “Nobody knows I’m here.”

  They sat their horses until the noise of the engine receded upriver, then seemed to change in pitch as the pilot climbed above the canyon’s rim.

  “Well,” he said. “Don’t see that every day.”

  “It could be Jack,” she said. “I hate to say. He’s spent most of his time looking for horses down here and he said something about hiring a plane. But he’s certainly not looking for me.”

  In the stone house he had a shard of mirror and she studied her face, her unadorned eyes and their sun-bleached lashes, her hair dried with a lank softness from the minerals in the pool. She wondered how she had looked to him out there, naked in the light of day. She could hear his voice from outside, low and distant as he curried the horses.

  She undid her dungarees and then her shirt, stepped free again of her underpants and unclasped her bra. She tilted the mirror a bit and stepped back. She looked at herself from the front, held out her arms like wings. She turned and looked over her shoulder at her back, gathered up her hair in two hands in a heap atop her head. She was brown as a penny at her neck and on her face and down the length of both arms, also in a prominent stripe at the small of her back and on her belly where she’d knotted the tails of her shirt against the heat. Otherwise her bare skin glared like polished marble, pale as the day she was born.

  She looked like a marsupial. No wonder he hadn’t tried anything.

  He had a safety razor and a scuttle by the mirror. Catherine glanced again outside and saw him down by his little garden, twisting tomatoes from a bush. She looked at the stubble under her arm and reached for his shave brush.

  Much later she would think of it as an extension of the quarry, the magic of discovery. The heady rush.

  Pictures in stone. Animals that did not exist. Her wrist caught in his grip and his tongue like silk in the pit of her arm, the stone hut dark while a thousand lights burst in her eyes. Inevitable in any case, the last long wash of a wave she already rode. Who wouldn’t want it to linger.

  When he came in she had her shirt back on, nothing more. He dropped the tomatoes on the table and crossed the room in two strides. Later she would bite her lip in a smile, remember thinking his leg worked fine.

  She swam to the surface from a dream, out of mind and out of time for God knew how long, a kiss like a maze she could not recall entering. She was on her back, dizzy on his tongue. Her hand was on his back, under his shirt, grasping the contour of his shoulder, the lovely knobs of his spine.

  The tips of his fingers moved on her thigh and the swell of an ocean rose between her legs. She heard herself murmur, a feral thing fleeing, escaping of its own free will.

  Her shirt had come open, her nipple a pebble electric in his mouth. She tore at buttons, wanted to release him purely to capture him with her own mouth, curl his toes like a lightning strike, render him unable to resist the crook of her finger or her purr in his ear except as soon as she had him free and in her grasp he raised up her legs with his hands in the backs of her knees and he put himself inside her.

  She yelped at the intrusion, shock and thrill at once, and she arched onto her shoulders with her spine in an impossible curve because she wanted him to split her like an atom, wanted a chain reaction that would blast the walls of the canyon and beyond, rattle the boundaries of the universe.

  He hit some deep spot she didn’t know existed and she did in fact seem to detonate from the inside out, contractions in radiant waves, the worst words in the world ricocheting in her brain like astral particles, fuck and prick and cunt, words with a hard Saxon edge maybe he said them to her now she didn’t know her own mouth blabbing away in some involuntary hysteria.

  Her head twisted on her neck and her eyes opened to the wall behind her and she saw the colored horses, stamping and milling, swore she saw them move. She felt another spasm from her center spin in tropical spirals to fingers and toes, saw a flash in her eyes like ocher in the air, his hand and the image of his hand where he pulled away.

  She dug what nails she had into the meat of his ass and wished in a blur she had her old ones back with their wicked little points, the better to keep him where he was, to feel him expend himself into her very tissue but he bucked back against her grip and then pressed himself down along the length of her. His sweet sweet writhe. Her sharp shins crossed. A hot wet burst.

  “I didn’t know my ears still rang until I got back out here.” The light fell in the window, a single cricket chirping and a moth against the screen. Night music.

  He cranked his Victrola and played that also, the baffle damped, a slow, solitary horn against a man’s droll voice. Let’s get lost.

  “That was five, nearly six years after. Hard to fathom.”

  She didn’t know if he referred to the quickness of time or the slowness of recovery. They ate tomato quarters out of a bowl, pieces of the cheese she’d carried in her pack. She thought back to the hours she had lain awake on clear still nights, unable to sleep because her stubborn mind refused to let go the day. She watched constellations make their trackless journey, watched them wander across infinity.

  There were night sounds. The horses stamping or snorting, Miriam’s breath catching as she slept. Coyotes calling. There were also moments, long moments, of utterly bottomless quiet, lunar stillness, as though the canyon were a bottle sealed against existence itself. She said, “I guess one thing you’ve got plenty of down here is silence.”

  She wanted to know everything. She wanted to hear his voice, to keep him talking. In the glow of the lamp she could just see the stack of canvases against the wall, and she saw more than horses. She saw a blur of poppies on a damp green field, a city at night, a horizon of lights that reminded her of The Great Gatsby. She had a greedy urge to rifle the entire stack, imagined herself alone with his things, a thief of secrets. She wanted to piece him together like a puzzle. She was torn between two ends of a mystery, wanting to solve it on one hand, seduced on the other by things she didn’t know.

  She was an archaeologist. Who was he?

  She told him she had to pee and when he let her up he saw streaks of red in the semen he’d shot across her belly. He looked down at himself and saw blood there too.

  “Uh-oh.” He put his hand on her knee. “Tell me you weren’t a virgin.”

  Catherine had a moment of panic. A sudden fear he would think her a slut.

  It passed. “No, it’s the end of my period.” Something else made her cringe. David. She hadn’t talked to him in weeks, had barely thought of him. She still wasn’t wearing her ring.

  She grabbed a corner of the blanket and wiped her stomach, the scratch of the wool raising a blotch to match the flush on her chest. “I’ve been with my fiancé,” she said. She gave him a rueful smile, looked down at the V between her woozy legs. “Technically, anyway. To tell you the truth, it never quite worked before.”

  His grip tightened. “Glad we got that figured out.”

  She looked at the scar on his chin, the scar at his eyebrow. She wanted to know everything. She looked again at the horses, painted on the wall. Most of all, she wanted to know one thing.

  She took his hand and placed it on the last damp traces, streaking her skin like butter. She said, “I’m glad one of us kept his head.”

  Elixabete

  He sees Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli in an ancient stone cellar in Montmartre, the ceiling coved up from the walls to form an unbroken half cylinder overhead, the war rationing blessedly relaxed and the diners devouring trenchers of chicken roasted over a fire while the musicians occupy a buttressed corner and devour not a meal but the entire vaulted space and everything in it. John H has never heard anything like it.

  He finds work as a stable hand, first at Saint-Cloud and then at the steeplechase course at Auteuil. One day in the spring with parts of the course wet from rain a three-year-old black filly on a training lap loses her feet landing a jump, snaps off a fence
post and gores herself on the broken stave, her jockey pitched headlong. The jock collects his wits, lumbers stiffly from the mud and goes ash white at the horse’s breast muscle, torn like a divot and dangling, blood dripping. He hobbles back to the paddock leading the filly like a lost dog.

  The stable rings for a surgeon but after an hour none has materialized. John H goes into the stall with a bottle of iodine and a glover’s needle. The horse flinches and jumps at the iodine but he calms her and swabs again. This time she does nothing.

  He sews the flap with sutures made from strands of the horse’s own tail. When he’s nearly finished the animal surgeon finally arrives, takes a look and lifts his hat and leaves again.

  He takes a painting class at L’Académie de la Grande Chaumière, paying out of pocket even though at least one other American studies there on the GI Bill. John H avoids him.

  One evening for an assignment he totes easel and paints across town to a footbridge to render the precise moment when the natural light wanes and the city illuminates. A tricky proposal made more difficult by the subject’s fleeting time frame, which he supposes is entirely the point. He makes a vague rendition of the skyline during sunset, and slings paint as quickly as he can when the first lights pierce the dusk.

  He is just considering pitching this effort off the bridge and into the water below when he glances up and catches a gold wink from the neck of a pedestrian, a raven-haired woman with raptor-like eyes and a grimness to her mouth. Her pendant is a Basque cross. She passes and he says, “Gora Euzkadi.”

  Her eyes flicker and seize him in their glare. She turns things over in her mind and she guesses correctly, says to him in heavily accented English, “Where did a blond boy like you learn to say that?”

  Her name is Elixabete Borel. She is a communist, a feminist, above all a separatist. John H learns this in short order, other things as well. She comes from Bayonne, on the Spanish border, was studying in Paris when the Nazis invaded. He walks along with her in the yellow glow, his canvas discarded, the easel across his shoulder.