“Come on, Cassie, give me a ride. It’s a long way out there. You’ll get a two-way fare. All I ask is that you take me off the meter while we’re there. You can have some lunch while I take care of my business.”
She looked doubtful. “Are you going to see my uncle?”
“Maybe,” he said, trying to sound as casual as possible. “If he’s there. But he’s not the reason I’m going. You know Two-Step, his mare? She’s for sale, and a friend of mine who’s looking for a horse for his wife asked me to check her out. I’m going to throw a saddle on her and take her for a ride.” He indicated the change of clothes he carried in a large paper bag. “Then I’m going to see if Nee Nee will make me a sandwich, and then I’ll come back.” He paused. “It’s good money.”
“All right,” she said, still sounding dubious. “Get in.”
The drive over the Santa Monica Mountains and across the San Fernando Valley took almost an hour, even with Cassie’s aggressive driving. Horn tried to talk to her, but several abrupt lane changes and hair’s-breadth escapes at intersections made it hard for him to concentrate on conversation.
When she pulled into the drive of Mad Crow’s place, she stopped short of the house. “I’ll wait here,” she said.
“Hey,” he said. “Didn’t you leave some riding stuff in the stable? Pants and boots and that kind of thing?”
“I suppose.”
“Well, come on. Ride with me.”
“I’m working.”
“Who cares? Let’s saddle up and go for a ride up into the foothills. We’ll be back in less than an hour, get some lunch, and you can take me back.”
When she hesitated, he said, “One of the hands told me you get along well with Doodle Bug. I bet she’d enjoy getting out.”
Fifteen minutes later, they led their freshly saddled horses out of the stable, mounted up, and guided them out to the road that led behind Mad Crow’s place and northward up into the foothills. They proceeded until the road gave out, then began climbing steadily up a dirt path, rutted by recent rains and dotted with occasional piles of horse dung. When they reached a kind of plateau, they stopped to rest their horses, turned and looked back.
The light breeze was warmed by a bright midday sun that burned down through a high scattering of streaked clouds. Below them and off into the distance sprawled the ranches, farms, and orchards that for recent generations had defined the San Fernando Valley. Farther off was the newer face of the Valley, the denser collections of houses and businesses butting up against the Santa Monica range. Beyond that line of mountains lay the great, raw, sprawling city itself.
Horn had lived and worked and ridden all over this end of the Valley. Ten years ago, it had seemed almost like wilderness to him, well hidden from the distant noise of Los Angeles. But not anymore. Looking south, he could see that L.A. had spilled over those hills and was fast coming this way.
Horn’s mount shifted its weight restlessly and swatted at something with its tail. “How’s she doing?” Cassie asked. She wore dungarees, boots, and a plaid shirt. Her hair was in a loose ponytail under a wide-brimmed straw hat.
“Little Two-Step? Just fine,” Horn said. “Nice and gentle. Good saddle horse.”
“I think Doodle Bug missed me,” Cassie said, leaning forward to tousle the mare’s forelock and rub the spot between her huge eyes.
“Bet she did. You should come out and ride her more often.”
“Sure,” she said sarcastically. “Me and my uncle, we could go riding together.”
“You used to love horses. Remember the filly back home? The one you introduced me to?”
“One of her owners spooked her, and she ran off and got tangled in some barbed wire,” Cassie said evenly. “By the time they found her, she’d lost so much blood they had to put her down.”
“I’m sorry.”
“People don’t treat horses like they should.”
“And I suppose that includes your uncle.”
Cassie began to answer, but a loud splashing announced that her horse was taking a leak. During the long time it lasted, she stood up in the stirrups to relieve the pressure on the mare’s kidneys.
Horn began rolling a smoke, but Cassie offered him one of her Old Golds. They shared a light.
“What happened to your face?” she asked.
“Just an accident. Have you learned anything about Rose?”
“A few things,” she said. Seeing the look on his face, she added: “I know you think I’m sneaking around the place like some kind of cab-driving Nancy Drew. I’m not, really. I’m getting to know some of the people, asking a few questions about Rose, that’s all. Maybe I’ll learn something important, maybe not. But the place is affordable, and I like living in her room.”
“In a room where somebody died?”
She shrugged. “That doesn’t bother me. I remember her alive, not dead.”
He thought about that. “Well, I guess she’d probably like having you there too.”
“There’s a woman who lives in the building named Madge—”
“I know her,” Horn said. “She was a good friend of Rose. Did you tell her you know me?”
“No reason to. She’s a strange old gal, gabs a lot. I like her, though. She mentioned some odd character who used to hang around the rooming house, who never talked to anybody except Rose.”
“The gray man?”
“That’s right. Funny name. Anyway, I think I may have seen him the other night. He was standing on the sidewalk across the street, just looking up at my window. When I went outside, he was gone.”
Horn had a quick, troubling image of Willie Apples. “Was he big? I mean really big?”
“No. I don’t think so. Tall, but thin.”
“If you see him, call me,” Horn said. “That’s what I told Madge. You don’t know what he’s up to, and there’s no need for you to approach him by yourself.”
“You keep thinking I’m helpless,” Cassie laughed. “And if this person killed Rose, why would he keep coming back to her building?”
“I just want you to let me know,” he said, trying to sound stern but knowing that sternness was largely wasted on Cassie.
“Well, if it’s that important to you, maybe I will.” He could hear the joshing in her voice. But then she turned serious.
“The people who live there are already forgetting about it, even the ones who liked her,” she said. “I don’t think anybody really cares who killed Rose.”
“We do.” They sat in silence for a while, horses and riders relaxed. “So…when you were little, did you want to be Nancy Drew?”
She laughed, so suddenly that Doodle Bug’s ears pricked up lightly at the sound. “Sure I did. Every red-blooded American girl did, even the ones who grew up around the reservation. Who did you want to be?”
“William S. Hart.”
“Who’s that?”
“Cowboy actor, back in the silent days. He had traveled the West as a boy and actually knew real cowboys and Indians. I was seven or eight first time I saw one of his movies, and I remember how solid and serious he seemed, how believable, even to a little kid like me. I also think he reminded me of my father—very stern, very sure of the difference between right and wrong. That was back when I worshiped my father—”
“Before you learned to hate him?”
“That’s right.” He was growing uncomfortable with the subject. “We better start back,” he said. “Hungry?”
Mad Crow, they learned, had lunched and was busy in the stable. His aunt, happy to see Cassie, sat them down in the kitchen and built them fat sandwiches of sliced beef with tomatoes, onions and mayonnaise. She puts mayonnaise oneverything, Mad Crow told him once. Even for breakfast.
The old woman spoke little English, and Mad Crow’s Lakota vocabulary had shrunk over the years, but she seemed to fit comfortably in this world far from the reservation where she had spent most of her life. She claimed to have been born the year of the battle that was fought by the Little Bigho
rn, the river known to her people as the Greasy Grass. As a girl, she said, she had heard the great Sitting Bull himself tell of how he had dreamed of a great victory against the Bluecoats and how the Sioux and Cheyenne, swarming like bees from a hive, had descended on the white soldiers and fulfilled his vision.
“I don’t know,” Mad Crow once said to Horn. “Sitting Bull was killed about four years after the battle, so I’m not sure she would remember him. But if you think I’m going to contradict her on that, you’re crazy.”
Besides being fiercely devoted to her nephew, Nee Nee liked to listen to dance bands on the radio, especially broadcasts from the Avalon Ballroom on Santa Catalina Island. She apparently had developed a crush on Jay Silverheels, the Mohawk actor who hailed from Canada, and she forced Mad Crow to take her to see Key Largo three times because Silverheels had a small part in that movie as a Seminole Indian.
When they had finished eating, Nee Nee hugged Cassie and solemnly shook Horn’s hand. Outside, he spotted Mad Crow and a couple of his ranch hands with a horse in the corral abutting the stable. “I do believe he’s going to work on the mustang,” he said to Cassie. “I think I’ll watch this for a few minutes. Then we can leave.”
“I don’t want to see it,” she responded. “I’ll wait over there.” She indicated one of the lawn chairs nearby, under a sprawling oak.
Horn leaned against the top rail of the corral fence. The other hands had closed the gate and stood outside the corral, leaving Mad Crow alone with the mustang. Mad Crow noticed Horn and nodded silently, then returned his attention to the job at hand.
The stallion was a brown two-year-old with black mane and tail and a silver dollar-sized star between the eyes. Its coat was matted with straw and dirt. It paced nervously at the far end of the corral, always aware of Mad Crow, who stood relaxed in the center with the coils of a lariat looped in his left hand. Slowly he began stalking the horse, and the stud responded by running in quick bursts until stopped by the fence, then wheeling around and starting off in another direction. But the corral was too small to afford it much freedom, and Mad Crow remained in motion, adjusting his angles so as to head off the stallion whenever it decided to go right or left. After ten minutes of this, the horse stood still, breathing heavily, eyes on Mad Crow.
Horn felt pressure on the top rail and turned to find Cassie standing beside him, her face grim. “Watch this,” he said to her in a low voice. “It might surprise you. But don’t talk loud.”
“I’m watching,” she said, sounding bored.
“He’s quarter horse stock, bred on the open range, never handled by anybody,” Horn said.
“He looks afraid,” she said, almost in a whisper.
“He is, because horses have it in them to be afraid. Out there, especially when they’re young, they’re chased by cougars and wolves. They don’t prey on anything; other animals prey on them. This guy’s instinct is to turn away and run from the man with the lariat. But Joseph needs to get him to the point where he’s tired of turning away, where he’ll face the man and concentrate on him. That’s where he is now.”
As they watched, Mad Crow stood about fifteen feet from the stallion. The horse, which had been shifting its hind quarters right or left, now stood squarely facing its adversary, head bobbing nervously. Mad Crow took a step forward, then waited. The head bobbed again. Each time the horse’s attention seemed to stray, Mad Crow took another step. The horse snorted, bobbed its head again, then eyeballed the man.
“He’s puzzled,” Horn said quietly. “But he’s curious too.”
Easing the loop free of the lariat’s coils, Mad Crow made a few easy moves with it, to no response. Then, from a distance of about ten feet and with an almost delicate motion, he flicked the loop over the stallion’s head. The horse took off, running and bucking around the corral. Mad Crow kept a strain on the lariat. Each time the horse tried to head away, Mad Crow tightened his grip. The stallion, clearly troubled by the feel of the loop on its neck, shook its head as it ran. Little by little, the radius between man and horse tightened. Finally, winded, the horse stood as before, facing the man, breathing heavily.
“Horse just learned something,” Horn said. “It’s more comfortable to stand close to the guy with the rope.”
Mad Crow gathered in a big length of lariat, shortening the distance to about five feet, then slowly extended his hand. The stallion bobbed its head one more time, testing the air. Mad Crow took a half-step closer, hand still extended. Then, as Cassie audibly drew in her breath, the horse leaned out and sniffed the hand.
“First time he’s been touched by a human,” Horn said.
The wrinkled muzzle lingered over Mad Crow’s hand. “Watch the ears,” Horn said to her. “This is the dangerous part. If the ears flatten, he’s going for Joseph, and he could hurt him. If not….”
But the ears stayed erect, and the horse delicately lifted its lip as it sniffed.
“Joseph talks about this,” Horn said. “He says there’s a place where the horse just…lets go.Where he decides to trust you. His head drops, and you can see things in the eyes and the face. The horse has just learned that it can trust a human and not get hurt. You know your uncle’s not a particularly emotional man, but when he talks about this…. Well, you should hear him.”
“He never told me about that,” Cassie said.
“Maybe you never gave him a chance.”
Moving slowly, Mad Crow knelt, gently lifted the horse’s left foreleg, and began to stroke it. He repeated the gesture with the right leg. The horse continued to bob its head, wondering about all this strange behavior, but accepted it.
For a long time, Mad Crow remained on the ground, stroking the leg. Then he slowly straightened, shrugged his left shoulder, and caught a bridle as it slid down his arm. With no sudden motions, he slid the bridle up over the long, bony head and secured it.
“Bitless bridle,” Horn said. “It won’t bother him much.”
Leaving the stallion for a moment to get used to the feel of the bridle, Mad Crow fetched a blanket and saddle from the top rail of the fence. Returning, he laid the blanket over the horse’s back, then stood for a moment, waiting. Nothing happened. Stooping, he picked up the saddle and effortlessly swung it up and onto the blanket, keeping a grip on the saddle horn and cantle. The horse made a nervous whuffling sound and stepped away, and Mad Crow let it go. After a few seconds, he followed, raising the saddle into place again. Once again, the stud moved away.
A third time, Mad Crow followed with the saddle, laying it onto the horse’s back with what looked like a feather touch. This time, the mustang stood still, head bobbing slightly, body shuddering with the new sensation.
Horn had witnessed this several times but never failed to appreciate what it meant. “This is an animal who’s afraid of predators,” he said almost wonderingly, “and he’s just agreed to take a strange weight on his back. It’s really something, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is.”
As gently as possible, Mad Crow went through the motions of securing the saddle in place and stepped back. Then, as if to prove Horn wrong, the stud bucked a couple of times, turned to look at the saddle, then bucked some more. But after pacing a little, the horse finally stood still.
Taking a last look over his shoulder at the stallion, Mad Crow came to join them. “Hi, Cassie,” he said casually. Then, to both of them: “I’ll leave the saddle on him a while, let him get used to it. Tomorrow, I’ll bring in some other horses for company, put the saddle on him, and see if he’ll let me ride.”
“I got a nickel says he throws you,” Horn said.
“Wouldn’t be the first time in my illustrious career. If so, I’ll keep trying until he lets me. It’ll take a while, but he’s going to be one great horse. I can tell.”
He noticed the expression on Cassie’s face. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Horn said with a grin. “Just that she thought she knew all about breaking wild horses. She thought it always left them
bloody and sweaty and…well, broken.”
“We’ve all known some idiots who work that way,” Mad Crow said, then turned to her. “I never used a whip or a spur on any animal,” he said quietly.
“I’m glad to hear that.”
“Something else,” Mad Crow said, looking ill at ease. “I don’t know if there’s any good time or good way to say this, but…I’m sorry I hit you.”
Cassie nodded, swallowing hard. “Sorry for the things I said.”
On the way back, Cassie invited Horn to sit up front. Half-turning to him as she changed lanes suddenly, almost dusting the fender of the Buick Roadmaster behind them, she said, “There’s nothing wrong with your car.”
“You’re pretty smart,” he said. “For a cabby.”
“It’s my Indian half.”
* * *
Horn got home in mid-afternoon. While he was debating tackling one of several chores around the place, the phone rang. It was Luther Coby, the police detective. “How are you doing, Mr. Horn?” There was a slight wheeze in his voice, the sound of an overweight man who smoked too much.
“I’m just fine.”
“I mentioned we’d be talking again. You mind if we get together for a little while tomorrow?”
“I suppose not. You have some more questions for me?” Horn was on his guard. He felt he had told Coby enough already.
“A few, I guess, and I may even have some news for you. I don’t particularly relish the idea of driving out to the sticks where you live. You plan on being downtown any time tomorrow?” The suggestion was plain.
“Well…I plan on being halfway there around midday, and I guess I could come the rest of the way in the afternoon.”
“That’s obliging of you. You know the Hall of Justice? I’ll meet you out front on the sidewalk. How’s three o’clock?”
Horn hung up. Even though he knew he was innocent of Rose’s murder, he felt the ex-convict’s sense of shame whenever confronted by a badge. The police had the power to keep their own secrets while uncovering those of others. And who does not have secrets?
Realizing it was getting late in Oklahoma City, he went to the telephone and asked the long-distance operator to place the call. Before long, he heard Ernest’s familiar twang.
While I Disappear Page 17
