Painted Horses

by Malcolm Brooks

  “I’ve got a friend has one. He made it all the way through Germany into Holland. Liberated that fancy little gun and then had to cut the forestock off to fit the thing into his duffel. Otherwise they wouldn’t let him bring it on the ship. You in Germany too?”

  “Italy. Then France.” He set the bills on the counter beside the camera, and lay the Mannlicher down as well. “You can have the rifle. Just get the camera on the train.”

  “Well looky there. They didn’t saw yours off. Guess you took a different boat.” The postman guffawed again. “Lucky guy. I was in France myself. Far as Omaha Beach, anyway.”

  John H heard the throb of the train in the back and through the windows in the front saw a woman dragging a boy by the arm, the boy craning his neck to look behind.

  The postman pushed the bills back with his hook. “Ain’t nothing but a thing, cousin. I don’t want your money, and your rifle ain’t gonna help me much either. Tell you the honest truth, I’m a natural southpaw.” He paused to let this register. “Just funnin’, pard. You wore the uniform and that’s enough for me. Come on into the back, you can box that fancy Kodak a lot faster than I can.”

  When he returned to the veranda the mare lay motionless on the ground, her head contorted oddly on her neck and her neck odd to her body. A round wet stain the size of a manhole cover spread on the cement from her muzzle. Ten or a dozen people stood around uncertainly. John H walked down to her.

  “Careful mister, she was thrashing like a stuck sow a while ago. Went downright berserk. I’ve seen headshot deer do it but never a horse. Damnedest thing, I tell you what.”

  He waved his hand over her frozen eye and her eye never moved. He unbuckled the bridle and pulled her ear loose and tugged the bit from her mouth. He went over and hoisted his saddle and started walking.

  “That your horse mister?”

  John H kept walking. He heard the upward chug of an engine in the switchyard.

  “Mister, are you daft? You can’t leave a dead horse on the sidewalk.”

  He crossed the street and headed for an alley.

  “Mister I am talking to you. Who in the hell’d paint a horse anyway?”

  3

  They flew her in the helicopter to Billings and landed on top of a six-story downtown hotel and kept her there in a top-floor suite for two days, a posh set of rooms with a view of the city and the ring of cliffs beyond. She determined quickly that she was locked inside the suite and picked up the telephone and told the operator she was being held against her will.

  The operator said it probably appeared so but this was only temporary. Catherine demanded to be turned loose and the operator said eventually she would be. Eventually when. The operator didn’t know, said it was out of her hands. Catherine began to screech at her and went on for a full minute before realizing she was screeching to a dead connection.

  A woman in maid’s attire brought her meals, which she barely touched, also an array of fresh clothing. Catherine refused to bathe or change the entire first day, but as the sun descended fully and darkness came on she realized she’d better plan on spending the night. Her nerves felt like a shoelace that wouldn’t stay tied.

  Finally as the city began to perk up with delivery trucks and electric lights in the predawn she went ahead and soaked in a hot bath, even dozed there very briefly after an otherwise sleepless night.

  Jack Allen had two others with him in the quarry, one the helicopter pilot and the other a compact but powerfully built man with a silver hardhat and rolled shirtsleeves. He was wrestling some contraption off the skid of the helicopter when she climbed through the notch. Jack Allen was shifted sideways talking to the pilot, who gestured at her the second she emerged.

  She strode across the cap rock. “Fancy meeting you here.”

  “Well look who’s all recovered from her monthly. That was a slick bit of playactin’ missy but I’m afraid it’s come back to bite you in the ass. Sorry to disappoint. Your work here is done.”

  “Not as far as I’m concerned.”

  Quick as a whip his hand shot out and seized her by the arm, a grip like a vise. She pulled back against him and he yanked her toward the helicopter and she let her feet go out from under her so he had to contend with her weight, and when he failed so much as to pause but merely dragged her along the rock like a burlap sack she began to kick and flail, connected hard with his ankle with the sole of her boot and made him hop though he didn’t loosen his grip.

  The pilot came up and grabbed her other arm and she twisted and writhed and it flashed in her mind they could rape her and kill her out on this empty waste and no one would ever know a thing, and then Jack Allen grabbed a fistful of her hair and torqued her head back and she froze in pain and terror both.

  “Now that is enough,” he spat. “Nobody wants to hurt you you stupid little fool but you kick me again I will break your jaw. I will pull every hair out of your head if that’s what it takes.”

  The man with the hardhat stood away from the helicopter, had released his contraption from the skid and balanced it upright to look on with interest. Catherine looked at him with her head forced back, caught his amused eye with her bulging own. He balanced a jackhammer.

  “That’s better. There’s an appointment in Billings has your name on it.” Jack Allen let up on her head a little, marched her forward toward the helicopter on her toes. “Ever been in one of these before?”

  “What’s he going to do with that?”

  “Drill holes in rocks.”

  “Jack I don’t think you understand what’s going on here.”

  “I understand plenty. You’re the one has some learning to do.”

  “This needs to be studied, Jack. It’s really old. You don’t understand. All I’m asking is that you leave it alone for now.”

  They bound her hands behind her and stuffed her in the glass bubble of the helicopter and as they were strapping her in she said, “Did you get to Miriam somehow? Is that what happened?”

  Jack leaned across her, fished for the harness. “Never turn your back to a native, missy. That was your first mistake.” He buckled the harness and slammed the door and turned his own back. The pilot climbed in as well and fired the engine, the cockpit vibrating as the blades warped to a blur overhead. As they lifted into the air she watched the man with the hardhat jerk the jackhammer to life, saw blue exhaust cough out of the motor.

  Now she passed into a dream about flying, she and Miriam both, the ground speeding along the way it had beneath the clear bubble of the helicopter, the two of them soaring over a savannah teeming with game, millions of animals feeding and grazing, bison and elk and antelope, and then antelope and mammoths and giant lumbering sloths, the shadow of their flight passing not merely across the skin of the earth but over the surface of time itself, she in her headdress like Isis and Miriam dressed like Pocahontas until suddenly her arms were no longer outstretched like wings but bound painfully behind her back, and she hurtled toward the ground while Miriam sailed on ahead and the hard earth zoomed up fast. Catherine jerked awake in the bathtub with a splash. Her heart thumped so hard her chest hurt.

  She studied her bluish arms, ugly discolored marks where their fingers had been. In yesterday’s excitement she had again forgotten all about Miriam. She couldn’t forget about Miriam.

  Later in the morning the phone on the wall rang and she ignored it, had already prepped herself for this during her sleepless night. The windows in the suite were screwed shut so she couldn’t open them and scream her head off, and the rooms had been cleared of anything that could break glass. She might be a prisoner but this did not mean she had to answer the phone.

  It rang for twenty minutes. Two could play at this game. She willed herself to sit tight and a few times she almost caved but finally the ringing stopped. An hour later it started again, rang for five minutes and quit. Five minutes after that a knock sounded.

  Catherine said nothing. A minute passed and a key slid into the lock. The door swung to rev
eal what struck her as a classic example of a corrupt big-city cop, in his fifties and wearing a suit but exuding a real taste for force. The maid stood behind him.

  “Are you what they call the hotel detective? I’ve got a crime to report.”

  “You need to mind your manners and answer the phone.”

  “Where’s Miriam?”

  “I don’t know, but keep up the crap and I’m sure I can find her.”

  The maid had a room service cart with a breakfast tray. “You need to answer the phone,” she said gently. “We’re trying not to make this any less pleasant.”

  “The board of directors wants a report,” the man said. “In writing, by the end of the day. ‘How I Spent My Summer,’ that sort of thing.”

  “I’d like to talk to my actual employer first. The Smithsonian?”

  “Like I said. Keep up your crap. I’ll be happy to find your little friend.”

  “Fine,” she said. “Bring me a typewriter.”

  “Eat your breakfast first. People are going to a lot of aggravation over you.”

  They left and Catherine began to pick at her meal, what turned out to be poached eggs with hollandaise and a beautiful ruby-red grapefruit, plus a very fresh scone with a side of peach compote. Once she started eating she couldn’t stop, washing it down with amazing hot coffee out of a carafe. She cleaned most of the tray, then sat back in her chair and merely breathed. Her stomach had been in knots since yesterday and now the knots had unraveled, and she could think.

  After ten minutes she phoned the switchboard. “I’m ready to write my report.”

  The maid arrived shortly with a portable Olivetti and a sheaf of paper. She cleared the breakfast tray. Catherine looked at the door, which was only slightly ajar. She said, “Can you help me?”

  The maid had a look of hardship that made her sort of ageless. She may have been five years Catherine’s senior, may have been twenty. But she did not seem unkind, or even particularly complicit with the situation such as it was. “I’m sorry, honey. You’re going to have to help yourself.” She looked toward the door, then back at Catherine. She tapped her ear and mouthed, They can hear you.

  Catherine nodded. “Can I have more coffee?”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  With the maid gone and the bolt turned she opened the latches on the typewriter. She spooled in a piece of paper and began to write, just a free flow of meaningless letters punctuated by the ding of the carriage return. She got through half a page and went into the bathroom.

  She shoved a towel down into the toilet, gritted her teeth, and put her hand in after and screwed the towel as far into the plumbing as she could. She dried off with another towel and turned to the bathtub.

  She stuffed the overflow port with a washcloth and stoppered the drain. She opened the cold-water valve halfway and let the tub begin to fill, went back out and shut the door behind her.

  She typed actual sentences now. MY NAME IS CATHERINE LEMAY, I AM A GRADUATE CANDIDATE IN CLASSICAL HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, IN MARCH, 1956, I WAS OFFERED A FELLOWSHIP THROUGH THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION TO CONDUCT AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL SURVEY IN MONTANA PRIOR TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF A DAM, I WAS LED TO BELIEVE I HAD BEEN SELECTED FOR THIS ASSIGNMENT DESPITE MY SEX BECAUSE OF PRIOR EXPERIENCE IN LONDON.

  I WAS WRONG.

  She went back to the bathroom and peeked through the crack in the door. The tub was close to spilling. She stepped quickly into the bathroom and flushed the toilet, cranked both valves open on the tub and went back to the typewriter.

  She ripped the page free and inserted a new one, scrolled to the middle and typed HELP MY NAME IS CATHERINE LEMAY I AM BEING HELD AGAINST MY WILL BY HARRIS POWER AND LIGHT CALL POLICE. She carried the typewriter to the window and looked down. She waited until a woman walking a dog had passed, then stepped back and hurled the device at the glass.

  The typewriter bounced off the pane and back into the room but nevertheless cracked the glass with a pop like ice coming apart. She picked it up and threw it again and this time the glass blew from the frame with the force of a shotgun blast, the typewriter gone in a crash of splinters and shards.

  She jumped to the sill and stuck her head out and watched mesmerized as it tumbled silently through the air, watched it roll and fall in a rain of sparkling glass and then explode in black fragments on the sidewalk and the urgent, uniquely modern noise of this destruction seemed to launch her own voice to a previously unknown pitch.

  Later she could not recall precisely what she said except the word fuck was in there prominently alongside help and kidnapped. A panel truck braked to a halt in the street and the driver got out and looked up at her and she screamed for him to get the police. Two other cars screeched to a stop as well. People stepped out of doorways.

  She heard a scramble behind her and she grabbed the radiator beneath the window and kept right on howling when she was seized and pulled back into the room. Somebody clapped a sweaty hand over her mouth and she bit down and held on and that person took to howling in her stead. Something hit her in the back of the head and sparks collided with her eyes. She lost her bite on the hand but kept her grip on the radiator, her feet lifted off the floor and thrashing while somebody peeled her fingers from the cold cast iron.

  She slammed facedown and rolled onto her back and felt a grip like a steel collar clench around her throat, and though her eyeballs seemed to shade now beneath a kind of lunar eclipse she knew exactly who this was. She felt like she was floating in warm water, a flavor like metal rusting in her mouth. He said, “Goddammit you are a pissy little bitch,” and time seemed to lag.

  She was in the hall outside the suite when her vision cleared. The hotel bull had her in a grip, her bruised arm bent behind her back. Her clothes were soaked, and the flood in the room had traveled to the hall in a dark sopping stain. The bull marched her to the elevator with two other men. One had his bloody hand wrapped in a wet towel from the bathroom.

  “The human mouth is the filthiest thing in the world,” Catherine told him. “Hopefully, you’ll get gangrene.”

  The bull kept her arm locked, but he laughed.

  “I hope there’s shit on that towel from the toilet.”

  “Shut up,” said the guy with the hand.

  They exited the elevator in the basement and walked through a utility corridor past steam pipes and ducting. A bare bulb dangled from the ceiling every twenty steps, each throwing a grimy wash of yellow light. Catherine was certain they had left the hotel entirely, traveling now beneath other buildings, perhaps even under the street.

  They turned at an intersecting passage and emerged into another basement. The bull and the man she’d bitten squeezed into a service elevator with Catherine between them. The third man stayed behind.

  The elevator carried them up four flights and opened into a hallway. The green carpeting looked familiar. So did the wainscoting. They went around a corner and into the reception area of Harris Power and Light.

  “They’re waiting,” said the secretary.

  The hotel detective ushered her through a set of doors into a boardroom. She made eye contact with Dub Harris, sitting at the head of a massive oak table, flanked on each side by a pair of men. Everyone wore a suit.

  “I’m gonna turn you loose,” the bull told her. “Behave yourself.”

  In truth her arm had gone blue with numbness long before. She could barely move it from behind her back and she winced when she tried.

  “Miss Le Mat. You have blood on your teeth.”

  “She bit the shit out of Lewis.”

  “So I heard.” He leaned back in his chair, crossed his hands behind his head. He looked both younger and bulkier than she remembered from the Crow street fair. Nascent double chin. Despite this he retained a sort of leonine athletic grace; she could tell that even now. “Jack Allen said you could be a real spitfire.”

  “I would like to talk to Miriam.”

  “Ah. Miriam. Your Indian friend.�
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  “You know her.”

  “Of course. She’s the one who gave you up, Miss Le Mat.”

  “That ain’t all she gave up,” said one of the others. This got a snicker all around.

  “For practical purposes you may regard yourself as a subordinate of this company. Your work, your ideas, your conclusions. That will end very soon, for the benefit of everyone I’m sure. In the meantime, what you would like is of very little consideration.”

  “Except I am not subordinate to you or your company. Ask the Smithsonian.”

  He laughed, flicked the air with a hand. “Maybe you should ask the Smithsonian for a list of major donors.”

  “I would love to. We can explain together what’s going on here. In the meantime the police are on their way.”

  “Oh?”

  “Underground tunnel or not, the typewriter had a message in it. I used your name.”

  “Thought of everything, did you. All right.” He buzzed an intercom and said, “Phone city hall for me. Chief of police.” His eyes never wavered.

  “Don’t bother,” said Catherine. “I get it.” She tried to return his stare and found she couldn’t, her eyes fleeing the way the rest of her wanted to flee. His eye was like the eye of a tornado, a calm at the center of carnage. She latched on to the painting on the wall behind him, tried to escape into it. Palm trees and Tahitian nudes.

  “I guess you’re not as stupid as you’ve been acting,” he said. “Welcome to the future, Miss Le Mat. What do you know about power?”

  She kept looking at the painting, its dreamlike world of purples and greens. Bright bursts of red. She could see the marks of the brush.

  He didn’t wait for her to answer. “I’ve made a business of power. Power and light. Fifty years ago we stuck a knife in the greatest enemy mankind has ever known: the dark. We came out of the cave. We mastered the night.”

  Lemay, she thought.

  “We live in a fantastic time, an amazing Technicolor age. What we presume now was unimaginable half a century ago, the same way your generation has no grasp of a world without the flip of a switch or the spin of a dial.