Chasing Painted Horses

by Drew Hayden Taylor

  Danielle’s mother was younger than they had expected, but she definitely lacked any youthful vigour that a woman of her age might normally have. She looked tired and worn, as if she had long ago passed her personal best-before date. Hazel smelled of beer, both from her breath and what had evidently spilled on her sweatpants and T-shirt over a longer period of time than the afternoon. The substantial smell of stale cigarette smoke wafted past her and out the door. Her head, for some unknown reason, was cocked to the side as she looked down at the two kids through bloodshot eyes. To top things off, she wore a look of puzzlement and annoyance, filtered through an unknown but visible haze. Both Thomas children took an instinctive step back on the small porch.

  “Who are you?” Behind her, Shelley could see a portion of the trailer’s interior: a couch propped up on two phone books, beer bottles that seemed to be half-filled with cigarette butts on shabby end tables, a stained and worn carpet, and a broken window covered with a black plastic garbage bag and duct tape to stop any drafts. Shelley immediately wondered if looking for Danielle had been such a good idea. She grabbed her brother’s hand, pulling him close.

  It wasn’t the poverty of the place that scared her — she had plenty of relatives who barely got by financially. But this place in particular, the atmosphere, the sense it gave off, and the woman standing in front of them, seemed to lack everything that made a place a home. She couldn’t imagine Danielle living here. Or the Horse coming from such an environment.

  “Um …” Shelley was taken by surprise and didn’t quite know how to respond. She looked to Ralph, who seemed to be debating the possibility of running away as fast as he could. “I … um … my brother …”

  “What?!” Hazel barked.

  “Danielle!” Shelley suddenly yelled out the little girl’s name, trying desperately to let this woman know why they were there as quickly as possible. Collecting herself, she tried a second time, this time a little less loudly. “Danielle. We’ve come to see her. Is she here?” She managed a weak smile.

  For a moment, Hazel Gaadaw looked confused, like she was trying to place the name. “Danielle? Why do you want to talk to Danielle?” She had a peculiar way of talking, sort of like after every third or fourth word she had to reboot her memory or her vocal cords to finish the sentence. The cold wind whistled past Shelley and Ralph into the house, but Hazel seemed entirely oblivious. Ralph blushed when he realized he could see her nipples hardening in the cold under her thin shirt. Evidently this woman wasn’t wearing a bra.

  Shelley tried again. “Danielle wasn’t at school today. Or yesterday or the day before, either. We were kind of worried.”

  Seeing his sister in distress, Ralph tried to help. “We brought her homework.” This was a lie, but a kind one. It was in the lie category their mother would normally forgive after proper explanation. More importantly, it gave them a legitimate reason to be there. Having a reason to be anywhere was always a good idea, but never more so than at this very moment. Seizing on the purpose of the lie, Shelley nodded enthusiastically, mentally crossing her fingers behind her back.

  Hazel didn’t respond at first. She continued to stand in the doorway, swaying slightly. Little wisps of her hair bobbed in the winter wind. Finally, she reacted. “No. Danielle isn’t here.” Her voice was flat.

  “Um, may I ask where she is?”

  Once more there was a pause as the older woman seemed to be formulating a response. “I don’t know where she is. Haven’t seen her in a while.” Hazel then looked over her shoulder to make sure her daughter wasn’t mysteriously standing behind her. “She’ll come home when she’s hungry. She usually does.” Somewhere in the deep interior of the trailer, another voice, angry and loud, bellowed out. Definitely masculine. Definitely angry.

  “Damn it, Hazel! Who the fuck is it?!”

  Both kids flinched at the tone and volume, moving closer together. Hazel turned, looking over her shoulder as she leaned against the doorway. “Nobody. Just some kids looking for Danielle.”

  “Tell them to go away and close the fucking door. I’m fucking freezing! For Christ’s sake, woman!”

  Smiling sleepily to herself, Hazel turned around. “You heard the man. Gotta go. I’ll tell the kid you were here.”

  Shelley only managed to get out, “Okay, our names are —” before Hazel Gaadaw abruptly closed the door. From the other side, she heard the latch go on.

  “— Shelley and Ralph.”

  Immediately, Ralph grabbed Shelley’s arm, pulling her down the steps, almost falling in the process. “Come on. Let’s get out of here. Hurry.”

  Shelley needed little invitation, and soon both kids were walking briskly up the laneway, past where the two famed pines had once stood. “They were drinking! Could you tell?”

  “Oh my god! I can’t believe she lives there. That place is so horrible.”

  A thousand thoughts were going through Shelley’s head, all about poor Danielle. Though she was perhaps too young for this kind of knowledge, Shelley now understood why Danielle had gravitated so quickly towards the Thomas household. The little bit of kindness they’d shown her at their home had been like a crust of bread to a starving little girl. It was so obvious. Even though Shelley had been very kind to the little girl, she now wished she’d been even nicer.

  Ralph’s thoughts were considerably more pragmatic. First and foremost, they involved getting away from the trailer at the end of the lane as quickly as possible. Though he, too, was appalled by the desperate situation of Danielle’s home life, his personal safety and security and that of his sister were of a more immediate concern. There was also innate chivalry involved, a seldom-used sense of protecting his older sister.

  All the way home, wrapped up in thoughts of their own, they said little. Their mission to find Danielle and talk to her had failed, and the young girl was still MIA, as William would have said. On their way home, they walked by his house. In a small community like Otter Lake, there were only so many streets, and they were mostly interconnected. Practically every house along their way was peopled by family or friends. Neither of the two acknowledged the Williams house as they passed or looked towards the large window that was still decorated with Christmas lights. They walked on in the growing cold and dark.

  William, on the other side of the picture window facing the street, saw them approach out the corner of his eye as he sat in his living room watching television. He hoped that Ralph especially was coming to see him and all would be forgiven. He missed Ralph and, oddly enough, his friend’s sister, though in a different way he couldn’t explain. Unfortunately, the Thomas duo walked past his house and continued down the street. Putting two and two together (though math was not his best subject) William calculated where they were coming from. There were only two things further down that street: the trailer park and the hockey arena. Seeing that it was a lazy Wednesday afternoon, bingo wouldn’t be starting at the arena for at least another two hours. And neither Ralph nor Shelley played bingo. That left Twin Pine Lane, and Danielle.

  He too had noticed the little girl had not been around school. It made him feel vaguely uncomfortable, though again he didn’t know why. Conscience was a new, odd, and unpredictable friend. Had he run into the little girl, William had no idea what he would have said to her. So far it hadn’t been an issue.

  William watched Shelley and Ralph disappear around the corner. He went back to half-watching television. One of his brothers kept changing the channel every two seconds, trying to annoy him. William barely noticed. In his own little world, the boy was mad at Danielle for being such a good artist and making him pick on her because of it. He was mad at Ralph for being mad at him. He was mad at Shelley for being Ralph’s sister and for being her annoying self. Most of all, though, he was mad at himself.

  AS FOR THE Everything Wall, it had largely been ignored. A few kids had come over during the week, intent on participating in the recently ent
renched activity; however, while the door was open and the chalk sitting there waiting to be used, there was clearly a different atmosphere in the Thomas house. Everything was the same, yet it wasn’t. The furniture was all in the same place. The same people lived in the house. But Liz seemed less enthusiastic about encouraging kids, thinking more about who wasn’t there than who was. Ralph hadn’t drawn on the Everything Wall at all, and neither had Shelley. The same went for William, for obvious reasons.

  Though most of the other kids had come to find out about Danielle and her unique talent, they had not had any real stake in her involvement in the overall Thomas family affair. The shift in what was normal — no thoughts of Danielle and her Horse and lots of William’s near-constant physical presence in the house, versus the current reality of the opposite — was confusing. Over the days that followed the third week in the life of the Everything Wall, fewer kids came to visit, which was just as well. The Thomas family focus was elsewhere.

  Shelley, Ralph, and William each separately noticed that Danielle still wasn’t to be found. But what could a couple of kids living on an obscure reserve do about that?

  As it turned out, not a hell of a lot.

  FOUR DAYS HAD passed without anybody seeing Danielle Gaadaw. Four days were not enough for the school to get overly worried. She could just have an illness of sorts, a cold or the flu. Nothing, they felt, to wake up the system and start the never-ending task of paperwork. This would require at least another two or three days of absence.

  Shelley and Ralph felt differently. Every day they looked for the little figure of Danielle as soon as they entered the school. In every classroom. Through every recess. They had even, a few times, cautiously walked by Twin Pine Lane, not knowing exactly what they might see or what they would do if they saw something. They wanted to find the little girl, and achieving this goal had somehow become a part of their lives.

  At the end of each school day, Liz Thomas had taken to asking her children about her favourite little artist, and she was rapidly getting concerned herself. She knew of Hazel Gaadaw, having gone to school with her long before children were a fact to either of them, before the death of Hazel’s husband, and before her descent into what she was now. That made her even more worried.

  By Saturday morning, the disappearance of Danielle became too much to bear.

  “Please, Mom.”

  Two sets of eyes pleaded with Liz, and Liz, being who she was, couldn’t say no.

  “Very well.” Though she protested, Liz too was curious as to where Danielle was and the story behind her so-called disappearance. So being forced to call the Gaadaw house by her children was merely accelerating what she would have done eventually. It was seldom both son and daughter agreed on anything. Perhaps she should have made the call before now.

  And she, too, was feeling the absence of William in her house.

  These were indeed odd times.

  The Gaadaw phone number came from somebody at the band office. It rang three times before a male voice answered, taking Liz by surprise. “What?” Loud and gruff, it made Liz momentarily forget who she was calling.

  “Uh … uh … is Hazel there?”

  In the background she could hear the man coughing, loud and unpleasant. “Of course she’s here.” Silence.

  “May I speak to her?”

  Liz heard the man clear his throat one more time before yelling, “Hazel! Some woman wants to talk to you.” A second passed before the man’s voice returned. “Who is this?”

  “It’s Liz Thomas. I’m a very old …”

  “Somebody named Liz Thomas.”

  Through the crackle of the line, Liz could hear the hints of a conversation stuttering. Ralph and Shelley watched their mother expectantly. What was difficult for them to achieve, their mother frequently could. Suddenly the voice was back. “What do ya want?”

  This was not the conversation the woman had expected. “Uh … I just wanted to ask about Danielle. Maybe she could come over and have lunch with my kids. I understand she …” Once again, the voice was gone and there were more indecipherable mutterings.

  “Hazel’s busy.” The line went dead.

  Liz looked at her phone, puzzled and concerned about the context of the conversation. “Well, what did she say?” asked Shelley.

  “Nothing. Didn’t speak to her. Some guy answered. Said Hazel didn’t want to come to the phone. And hung up when I asked about Danielle.”

  “Mom,” Ralph spoke. “You look worried.”

  Putting on her best smile, Liz hugged her two children briefly. No need to share her concerns with her kids. She considered them too young to warn about the evils of the world, or even just Otter Lake. They would learn those truths eventually. Today, she decided to let them think the world was still a fairly nice place, though cracks were already beginning to form in that philosophy. But deep in her mind, it bothered the woman. The rumours about Hazel and her friends. The missing Danielle. The undercurrents of the voice of the man on the phone. Her kids had opened the door to this problem, but it looked like they were all about to walk through it together.

  THAT AFTERNOON, A spike in the Danielle mystery graph appeared; it came from an unexpected source.

  Splayed out on an overstuffed armchair, Ralph was leafing listlessly through one of the books that he and his sister had forgotten to return to the library. The book explored cave paintings in Lascaux, France. Because the paintings were supposedly twenty thousand years old, the author marvelled at the technique, the imagination, and the artistry that were abundantly evident — and all from what were once called “primitive cavemen.”

  Page after page showed large animals of many varieties; some Ralph recognized, many he didn’t. When he glanced up from the book to where the Horse on the Everything Wall still guarded the kitchen and beyond, the boy was surprised at the number of similarities between the horses in Lascaux and Danielle’s Horse in Otter Lake, particularly the shading used by the artists to create texture. Danielle’s innate ability to master such a complex practice continued to astound him. Instinctively, Ralph understood there was more than just talent involved in Danielle’s creation. There was something deeper. But, like everybody else, he had no idea exactly what that extra something was. It was difficult to believe that the thin young girl with pretty much nothing to say other than her polite thank-you had such depths to her.

  Shelley, meanwhile, was making a feeble attempt at some homework. She had planned to go over to Vanessa’s in the afternoon, but she’d lost the impulse around the time her mother left. Instead, she turned her attention to the annoying social studies project she’d been putting off. It was due on Thursday, so she set her mind to the task and sank her teeth into it. She could think of a hundred things right off the top of her head that said “Saturday afternoon” way more than studying the migratory patterns of the Amish.

  Piled-up books and a couple of maps spread out on the coffee table before her, Shelley was sitting near the front window of their house. Trying to put her mind in the heads of a contemporary Amish family, she had idly glanced out their living room window at the world she was increasingly having difficulty understanding or appreciating. Why would somebody voluntarily want to use outhouses instead of bathrooms in the house and horses for transportation instead of cars and truck? She had no appreciation of the outhouses, but did have some for the animal that appeared to be running free in the Thomas family kitchen.

  While she was thinking about the Amish horse and buggy and the Horse in the kitchen, wondering if there was anything more than an ephemeral connection, she was almost positive that she spotted a familiar figure in a familiar parka.

  “Ralph, is that William … I mean It … out there?”

  “What? Where?” Ralph jumped up off the chair and hustled over to the window near his sister.

  “Over there. Across the road, near the big pine tree. I think I saw him.
” Both siblings looked hard out the window, squinting against the bright white expanse between the house and where the forest began. They saw a small flock of chickadees looking for food and a woodpecker making its way up the pine tree. But that was all.

  “I don’t …” Ralph didn’t have a chance to finish his sentence. He saw the distinctive brush cut sticking out from behind the big pine tree, looking at their house. It hovered there for a second, then disappeared out of sight. Perhaps he saw the brother and sister staring back at him.

  “That was It, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but why is he hiding?

  “I don’t know. He’s your friend.”

  “That doesn’t mean I know how he thinks.”

  They watched the pine tree for a few seconds longer, and then William’s head darted out again, this time on the other side of the tree. Because of the angle of their window and the storm windows attached on the outside, the glare off the multiple panes of glass made it impossible for William to know he had been spotted. Still, two seconds later, he pulled his head back to safety behind the big tree. Brother and sister looked at each other and shrugged. Then they nodded.

  A few moments later they had put on their winter boots and jackets and were out the door, walking down their driveway in the direction of the big tree just ahead. Ralph was in the lead. “Hey, William! Might as well come out. We saw you!”