Twenty-seven minutes passed in the universe known as the Thomas family kitchen, and then there it was once again, as amazing as last time. Maybe more. The Horse on the Everything Wall looked remarkably similar to what they had seen only a few days ago, except it wasn’t a carbon copy. There were subtle differences that marked it as changed. None of the three who’d been watching Danielle surreptitiously could say what exactly the differences were, but they all were certain that the Horse was different, somehow changed; had it grown or metamorphosed in some manner? Were its ears keen to hear an imagined sound? Were its eyes communicating something the previous drawing hadn’t been aware of? Had Danielle imbued it with a consciousness that wasn’t present before? Had Danielle’s talent evolved? Had the Horse?
Danielle made one last adjustment to the tail, roughing in some yellow with two fingers, making it appear to be moving along the wall towards the doorway. Satisfied, she stood up, let out a deep breath, backed away from the wall, looked at her work, and was finished. The Horse was there, and her job was done. Danielle leaned back, assessing what she had created. All was good. He was here. Concluding that she had done everything she had come to do, she replaced the chalk pieces neatly back in the plastic container and put it on the shelf.
Nobody in the kitchen moved as she did this. As she put on her jacket, she said a pleasant yet perfunctory thank-you that concluded the tiny girl’s third visit to the Thomas house. “And I liked the book very much. Very pretty.” Then Danielle walked through the kitchen to the door, an actual skip in her step, stopping briefly to slip her boots on.
All was silent as the two doors closed behind her. The three usually rowdy and rambunctious children were not so rowdy and rambunctious. In fact, only the hum of the refrigerator and distant growl of the furnace below them could be heard. A few seconds later, Liz entered the room, the only sound and movement.
“Did I hear the door close? Why is everybody so quiet? Something wrong?” Turning around, she saw that the Horse had returned to the Everything Wall. Then it was Liz Thomas’s turn to be quiet. Only for a moment. “Wow,” was all she could utter.
“Yeah,” added William. Shelley and Ralph didn’t speak.
ON HER WAY home, Danielle hummed to herself, not feeling the cold winter wind. This had been a good day for her. A very good day. Though she was tired — she hadn’t slept well because her mother and her mother’s boyfriend had been fighting all night — the only word to describe how she felt was “positive.” Very positive. That was a phrase one of her teachers frequently used, telling students that they should always try to make each and every day positive in some manner. For the first time in a long while, Danielle felt she had managed to do just that. She had friends now, not just the Horse. Going home didn’t seem to matter so much today. Having someplace to look forward to was better than having nothing to look forward to.
She could see her house down at the end of the street. Her mood darkened as she approached the rundown mobile home that seemed it had only ever been at the end of this lane. There had been far worse days, her ten-year-old mind reasoned, so she struggled to keep the smile on her face. For the rest of that day and night, until she left for school in the morning, she would think of her Horse.
The Horse was a lot more than many kids had, she told herself.
WHEN TYE GOT home from the game that night, the house was as dark and silent as the woods around it. It had been a fun night. His team, peopled with half a dozen cousins, had won. A good time had been had by all. Though far past his prime as an athlete, he still frequently got requests to join this and other teams. He was in good enough shape, and most of the other players were of the same age and definitely of a heavier calibre. But his erratic schedule on the road made commitments like that difficult. As a result, he would go out and support the team when he could, always making his apologies when he couldn’t put on the necessary skates and gear.
Someday, when his trucking days were over, he’d have to figure out how to slip back into being a permanent resident of Otter Lake, provided his body would allow him to. But for now he was going for quality, not quantity of representation. Tye had told his wife he would be home a good hour earlier, but the international laws of male companionship dictated two more beers and other stories that absolutely needed to be told that night, or they would not be responsible for what happened to the world. Tye returned to his dark home feeling a little guilty at having robbed his family of an hour of quality time, but he would make it up to them — the battle cry of all late-arriving or absent parents.
Turning the lights and the engine off, Tye coasted into the driveway. No need to wake any of his family. If he was lucky, and that Williams kid hadn’t eaten up all the dinner, there might be something in the fridge for him to gobble on, courtesy of his loving wife. Sometime down the road, he was going to have to do something about William. Not that there was anything wrong with the boy, but he spent so much damn time at their house. Tye knew the Williams house was a loud, raucous place, and his son’s best friend was just one log in a boom of other Williamses, but he was at the Thomases’ house so much that one of the guys at the game had asked if Tye was going to build on an extra bedroom for the boy.
Entering his home was like being enveloped by a warm and comforting blanket. The night and the pickup’s temperamental heater had been cold, so for a few brief seconds Tye stood just inside the doorway, enjoying the warmth of his home, in several different meanings of the word. It was a good home, and he and Liz had worked hard to provide for everybody. He knew the time he spent away was difficult, but work that paid really well was rare on the reserve, and he was glad to have something like this to provide for everybody.
Bonus! There, covered in plastic wrap, was a sizable plate of spaghetti. A traveller of the world, or at least Canada, Tye knew spaghetti seldom tasted better than at midnight in an empty kitchen. Everybody knew that. Seasoning it with salt — Liz was awfully stingy with the salt — and pepper and some extra parmesan cheese, Tye sat down front and centre at the kitchen able to enjoy his wife’s culinary creation. Tomorrow would be his turn in the kitchen, and he had to think of something chicken-related to make. Maybe in the slow cooker.
The first forkful of pasta, however, never quite made it to his mouth. Still sitting in the dark for the most part, the kitchen lit primarily by a street lamp some twenty metres away, Tye saw the Horse. It was back where it had been only a few days before. It was staring at him. The creation on the Wall unnerved the man. There was no reason it should. Tye was a seasoned horror movie fan. He had seen all the Alfred Hitchcock classics and he’d read all of Stephen King. He had survived the horrific experience of being with his wife during the birth of their two kids, though his eyes had been closed most of the time. There was nothing left to scare him. But this image was doing a good approximation of causing him to experience a queasy kind of fear.
It looked at him.
The Horse, as everybody called it, had been drawn by a ten-year-old girl who weighed barely more than his boots. It was made of chalk. There was absolutely no reason why that creation should give Tye the willies. Refusing to back down in front of something only a few grains of chalk in depth, Tye put his plate down and leaned forward in his chair to examine it. The way the light from the streetlamp cascaded through the window and onto the Everything Wall gave the Horse a unique glow.
The girl had talent for sure. There was no denying that. Tye tried to remember the last time he’d seen little Danielle. Must have been sometime just before her father had died. Or maybe at the funeral. Stupid tragedy … but then, most tragedies are. Tye had been on the road as usual but had heard about it from his cousin who worked with Albert at the construction site. A water filtration system was being installed. Albert, with two other men, had been pouring cement into what would be the foundation. The ground on which Albert stood suddenly gave way. Danielle’s father was instantly covered by both earth and cement. His
coworkers were there in an instant, digging at the wet cement and dirt, calling his name. But the man had hit his head in the fall. The dual weight of soil and cement suffocated him before he could be pulled from the hole.
As Tye remembered, Danielle had to be looked after by a distant cousin because Hazel was too grief-stricken to be of any use to her daughter. Many would argue little had changed in that department. Hazel still grieved, albeit in a harsher fashion.
It was the eyes, Tye thought. That’s what it was. He’d seen eyes like this on a documentary he’d come across in some forgotten hotel room in a forgotten truck stop, about that painting, the Mona Lisa. Supposedly, that Italian artist had done such a good job painting that woman’s portrait that if you walked across the room, her eyes would follow you. Just like in some photographs.
Whatever the answer was, Tye didn’t care. His appetite lost, he haphazardly tossed the plastic wrap over the spaghetti and placed it into the fridge. William can eat it tomorrow, he thought. He left the kitchen, relieved at leaving the room now dominated by the Horse and its eyes, eager to find solace anywhere else in his home. Horses hadn’t much interested Tye in the past, and what curiosity he might have had in them was rapidly evaporating in his house’s current environment.
The man shuddered at the thought of that thing becoming a permanent resident of his home. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the Horse; it was just that it unnerved him. Little girls shouldn’t be able to draw things like that. And the things that little girls drew shouldn’t unsettle him, which of course, because it did, unsettled him more. It was a vicious circle.
The other thing that was so puzzling was the blind sense of amazement the rest of the family and, he might as well admit, a good measure of Otter Lake’s junior population held for the thing. A handful of adults had been through the house in the past week, and they had had much the same reaction. It wasn’t just the children. Tye was very aware that when it came to things like art and non-sports pastimes, he walked a different path than his wife.
William was right. Simply put, it was weird. Everybody seemed to see the beauty, the majesty, but for Tye, something more was struggling to come out of the Wall through the Horse. He didn’t know what, but it was there. And possibly, if logic followed a predictable path, it would seem it was somewhere in Danielle. But this was all silly. He was imagining things. That little girl … it was just a drawing. That’s all it was. Tye climbed the stairs to bed.
IN THE KITCHEN, all was quiet. Twenty-one minutes later, Ralph entered. He had heard his father climb the stairs and, after a brief visit to the bathroom, crawl into bed. Though there was a good second level of a house between him and the Horse, he could feel it through the floor panels. Creeping as delicately as the forty-year-old house would let him, Ralph had no idea why he was returning to the kitchen. He wasn’t hungry. With the heat turned down for the night, his feet were rapidly becoming cold on the unheated floor. Not wanting to wake anybody, Ralph resisted the impulse to turn the overhead lights on. Instead, he flicked on the light above the kitchen stove, hoping that would provide enough illumination for him to see the Horse.
Sitting on a kitchen chair, his feet tucked up underneath him, Ralph stared at the Horse. And it stared back. Upstairs, the remaining members of the Thomas family tossed and turned while Ralph remained silent and still. As did the Horse. The boy didn’t understand why he was here. Both Shelley and William were amazed by the Horse, as was he, but that’s where it stopped for them. For Ralph, the relationship continued. It was something deeper. Instinctively, he knew Danielle saw things he couldn’t, that it was more than a series of chalk lines on a kitchen wall. It was alive for her. It was alive for Ralph, too, though not as strongly as for Danielle. He, in some way, knew there was more to this than what everybody else saw. And he wanted more.
Was it possible to draw something into existence? Sure, he’d learned in school that big-time designers and architects drew pictures of cars and planes and buildings that eventually came into creation. Was that the same? Ralph didn’t think so. He wasn’t sure what he was thinking.
Ralph sat alone in the family kitchen for another twenty-two minutes, wondering if he could somehow see what exactly it was Danielle saw. Every once in a while, for a second, he thought he saw something fleeting in the Horse, but just as quickly it flickered and was no longer there, leaving him unsure if the flash he was sure he’d perceived had just been his imagination. But wasn’t that what all this was about — imagination?
The more Ralph thought about it, the more confusing it got. Eventually, he returned to bed, leaving the Horse and all its secrets still, biding its time on the kitchen wall.
ACROSS THE VILLAGE, William lay asleep in a fetal position on his bed. On the other side of the room, his brother Jimmy slept, still in his track pants, mouth wide open, appearing to be in the middle of a silent scream. Underneath William’s bed, buried deep in a notebook beneath a week’s worth of dirty laundry, were sheets of paper testifying to a dozen different attempts at drawing a horse. All were half finished, most with an angry line or two through them.
CHAPTER EIGHT
IT HAD BEEN a long time since Harry had had such a long, detailed conversation with anybody. Normally he could get by in the day using just four, maybe five pistons in the aged engine that was his mind. Today he had had to use seven, with the possibility of eight creeping up on him. This would have required the grease-soaked dust of several years to be cleaned off as he ushered the long-unused pistons into unexpected use. No amount of sugar or caffeine could sustain such effort for long. The first signs of a headache were beginning to knock on the old man’s forehead. For the moment, he chose to ignore them.
To Harry, Ralph’s discomfort with this simple question manifested itself visually with little explosions from the pustules protruding out of his skin. That was one thing Harry had noticed about people: when he asked them direct questions about themselves or their motivations, they tended to get very uncomfortable. Exploding pustules were not a good thing. Even if very small and even if on a man such as the one sitting across the table from him. Harry knew they weren’t really there — at least, that’s what other people seemed to believe. Who was he to contradict them? Those manifestations of spirit were indeed there, and it wasn’t his fault if other people who had bank cards and subway passes couldn’t see them.
“Well?”
Ralph was beginning to feel hot. The Tim Hortons seemed stifling. In his time with Harry he had neglected to take off his coat, thinking theirs would be a short conversation. As a result, there was sweat in all the usual places on his body, and he felt clammy and damp inside his clothes, an unusual sensation for this time of year. The cause wasn’t only his standard-issue police jacket; some was from the overheated interior of the franchise, as its furnace fought to find a balance with the creeping coldness that snuck its way through the constantly moving doors and the large plate glass windows. The heating system was overcompensating to keep the winter at bay. Admittedly, a good portion of the sweat was the result of the grilling this weird old man was giving him. Why had he become a cop? It had been a long time since he’d been asked such an obvious question.
“Why does anybody become a cop?”
Harry shook his head, particles of donut falling from his beard. “Not an answer.”
“Why is this so important to you?”
“Again, not an answer.” Harry blinked his eyes repeatedly. The pain in his head was growing worse. He needed to stop thinking soon. If he were to look in a mirror right now, he was sure he’d see holes peeking through the very essence of who he was. That happened a lot when he overtaxed his mind. There was only so much of him to share on any given day, and he was rapidly tapping himself out. “You want to know about the Horse and the person who drew it? It’s just not that simple. The Horse is complicated. It’s not just a Horse. You may be you, and I may be me, but that Horse is not just a horse. Understand?�
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Ralph did not. This guy was making things far more complicated than they needed to be. He still had not heard from Shelley or William, and his time before work was running out. He needed this discussion to progress at a more efficient pace, and he needed to get some real answers. He’d been trained for situations like this. “I became a cop because my father had been a cop, and my grandfather …”
“You’re lying.” Harry saw the police boy’s pustules start to pulsate. Usually a good indicator of lying. Why was this guy lying to him? Most people lied for three reasons, Harry had learned over the years. One was because they were trying to get something they couldn’t get any other way. Two, because they were afraid of something and lying was the best way for them to protect themselves. And third, lying was in their nature. While Harry could read Ralph in his own way, he wasn’t psychic, meaning all three of these possibilities remained a factor until one of them was proved.
Ralph was lying. The truth was, he wasn’t sure. It had been a spur-of-the-moment decision years ago, and he’d lost the purpose in that time. Less than a decade ago he’d graduated and been posted to the Dead Rat River First Nation in northern Ontario; there, he’d thought he’d bring peace and order to a rather rowdy community, famous for its beaded moccasins and baseball team. His idea of peace and order proved a rather difficult state to achieve. Being single, good-looking, and holder of a regular income, a fair number of local women found him of interest. As a result, a fair number of local men found him problematic. Many difficulties above and beyond his position as a peace officer surfaced as a result of those two strongly held opinions, making his three years in Dead Rat River less than the envious position his fellow graduates believed him to have received.
Knowing the same might happen in any other Indigenous community, Ralph had thought it better to sidestep the noble idea of serving his people specifically and decided to serve them in a larger context. Less Native content and more people of a mixed and varied population. The law, is after all, supposed to be colour-blind. That was how he’d found himself in Toronto, originally with its Aboriginal Peacekeeping Unit; however, finding the unit again too incestuous, Ralph embarked on his career as an ordinary Toronto Police Service officer. In all that time, post–police college, he’d never been asked why he had become a cop.
Chasing Painted Horses Page 12
