Chapter Twenty-three 6 page

'Yes, I can see.' Mrs Dyer smiled, briefly.

'Why isn't he in the barn?' Grace asked. Mrs Dyer didn't answer. They were at the stalls now and she stopped by the only door that was closed and turned to face them. She swallowed hard and looked at Annie.

'I don't know how much Harry and Liz have told you.' Annie shrugged.

'Well, we know he's lucky to be alive,' Robert said. There was a pause. They were all waiting for Mrs Dyer to go on. She seemed to be searching for the right words.

'Grace,' she said. 'Pilgrim isn't how he used to be. He's been very disturbed by what happened.' Grace looked very worried suddenly and Mrs Dyer looked at Annie and Robert for help. 'To be honest, I'm not sure it's a good idea for her to see him.'

'Why? What—?' Robert started to say, but Grace cut him off.

'I want to see him. Open the door.'

Mrs Dyer looked at Annie for a decision. It seemed to Annie that they had already gone too far to turn back. She nodded. Reluctantly Mrs Dyer drew back the bolt on the top half of the door. There was an immediate explosion of sound inside the stall which startled them all. Then there was silence. Mrs Dyer slowly opened the top door and Grace peered in with Annie and Robert standing behind her.

It took a while for the girl's eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness. Then she saw him. Her voice when she spoke was so small and frail that the others could barely hear it.

'Pilgrim? Pilgrim?'

Then she gave a cry and turned away and Robert had to reach out quickly to stop her from falling.

'No! Daddy, no!'

He put his arms around her and led her back to the yard. The sound of her sobbing faded and was lost on the wind.

'Annie,' Mrs Dyer said. 'I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have let her.'

Annie looked at her blankly then stepped closer to the door of the stall. The smell of urine hit her in a sudden, pungent wave and she could see the floor was filthy with dung. Pilgrim was backed into the shadow of the far corner, watching her. His feet were splayed and his neck stretched so low that his head was little more than a foot above the ground.

His grotesquely scarred muzzle was tilted up at her, as if daring her to move and he was panting in short, nervy snorts. Annie felt a shiver at the nape of her neck and the horse seemed to sense it too for now he pinned back his ears and leered at her in a toothy, gothic parody of threat.

Annie looked into his eyes with their blood-crazed whites and for the first time in her life knew how one might come to believe in the devil.

Chapter Five

The meeting had been dragging on for almost an hour and Annie was bored. There were people perched all around her office, locked in a fierce and esoteric debate about which particular shade of pink would look best on an upcoming cover. The competing mock-ups were laid out before them. Annie thought they all looked vile.

'I just don't think our readers are Day-Glo kind of people,' somebody was saying. The art director, who clearly did think so, was getting more and more defensive.

'It isn't Day-Glo,' he said. 'It's electric candy.'

'Well I don't think they're electric candy people either. It's too eighties.'

'Eighties? That's absurd!'

Annie would normally have cut it short long before it got to this. She would simply have told them what she thought and that would have been that. The problem was, she was finding it almost impossible to concentrate and, more worryingly, to care.

It had been the same all morning. First there had been a breakfast meeting to make peace with the Hollywood agent whose 'black hole' client had gone berserk at having his profile canceled. Then she'd had the production people in her office for two hours spreading doom about the soaring cost of paper. One of them had been wearing a cologne of such dizzying awfulness that Annie had needed to open all the windows afterward. She could still smell it now.

In recent weeks she had come to rely more than ever on her friend and deputy, Lucy Friedman, the magazine's resident style guru. The cover they were now discussing was tied to a piece Lucy had commissioned on lounge lizards and featured a grinning photograph of a perennial rock star whose wrinkles had already been contractually removed by computer.

Sensing, no doubt, that Annie's mind was elsewhere, Lucy was effectively chairing the meeting. She was a big, pugnacious woman with a wicked sense of humor and a voice like a rusty car muffler. She enjoyed turning things upside down and did it now by changing her mind and saying the background shouldn't be pink at all but fluorescent lime-green.

As the argument raged, Annie drifted off again. In an office across the street, a man wearing spectacles and a business suit was standing by the window, doing some kind of t'ai chi routine. Annie watched the precise, dramatic swooping of his arms and how still he kept his head and she wondered what it did for him.

Something caught her eye and she saw through the glass panel by the door that Anthony, her assistant, was mouthing and pointing at his watch. It was nearly noon and she was supposed to be meeting Robert and Grace at the orthopedic clinic.

'What do you think Annie?' Lucy said.

'Sorry Luce, what was that?'

'Lime-green. With pink cover lines.'

'Sounds great.' The art director muttered something that Annie chose to ignore. She sat forward and laid her hands flat on the desk. 'Listen, can we wind this up now? I have to be somewhere.'

There was a car waiting for her and she gave the driver the address and sat in the back, hunched inside her coat, as they wove across to the East Side and headed uptown. The streets and those who walked them looked gray and dreary. It was that season of gloom, when the new year had been in long enough for all to see it was just as bad as the old one. Waiting at some lights, Annie watched two derelicts huddled in a doorway, one sleeping while the other declaimed grandly to the sky. Her hands felt cold and she shoved them deeper into her coat pockets.

They passed Lester's, the coffee shop on Eighty-fourth where Robert used to take Grace for breakfast sometimes before school. They hadn't talked about school yet but soon she would have to go back and face the stares of the other girls. It wasn't going to be easy but the longer they left it, the tougher it would be. If the new leg fit alright, the one they were going to try today at the clinic, Grace would soon be walking. When she'd got the hang of it, she should go back to school.

Annie got there twenty minutes late and Robert and Grace were already in with Wendy Auerbach, the prosthetist. Annie declined the receptionist's offer to take her coat and was led down a narrow white corridor to the fitting room. She could hear their voices.

The door was open and none of them saw her come in. Grace was sitting in her panties on a bed. She was looking down at her legs but Annie couldn't see them because the prosthetist was kneeling there, adjusting something. Robert stood to one side, watching.

'How's that?' said the prosthetist. 'Is that better?' Grace nodded. 'Alrighty. Now see how it feels standing.'

She stood clear and Annie watched Grace frown in concentration and ease herself slowly off the bed, wincing as the false leg took her weight. Then she looked up and saw Annie.

'Hi,' she said and did her best to smile. Robert and the prosthetist turned.

'Hi,' Annie said. 'How's it going?' Grace shrugged. How pale she looked, thought Annie. How frail.

'The kid's a natural,' said Wendy Auerbach. 'Sorry, we had to start without you, Mom.'

Annie put up a hand to show she didn't mind. The woman's relentless jollity irritated her. 'Alrighty' was bad enough. Calling her 'Mom' was dicing with death. She was finding it difficult to take her eyes off the leg and was aware that Grace was studying her reaction. The leg was flesh-colored and, apart from the hinge and valve hole at the knee, a reasonable match for her left leg. Annie thought it looked hideous, outrageous. She didn't know what to say. Robert came to the rescue. 'The new socket fits a treat.' After the first fitting, they had taken another plaster mold of Grace's stump and fashioned this new and better socket. Robert's fascination with the technology had made the whole process easier. He had taken Grace into the workshop and asked so many questions he probably now knew enough to be a prosthetist himself. Annie knew the purpose was to distract not just Grace but also himself from the horror of it all. But it worked and Annie was grateful.

Someone brought in a walking-frame and Robert and Annie watched Wendy Auerbach show Grace how to use it. This would only be needed for a day or two, she said, until Grace got the feel of the leg. Then she could just use a cane and pretty soon she'd find she didn't even need that. Grace sat down again and the prosthetist bounced through a list of maintenance and hygiene tips. She talked mainly to Grace, but tried to involve the parents too. Soon, this narrowed down to Robert for it was he who asked the questions and anyway she seemed to sense Annie's dislike.

'Alrighty,' she said eventually, clapping her hands. 'I think we're done.'

She escorted them to the door. Grace kept the leg on but walked with crutches. Robert carried the walking-frame and a bag of things Wendy Auerbach had given them to look after the leg. He thanked her and they all waited as she opened the door and offered Grace one last piece of advice.

'Remember. There's hardly a thing you did before that you can't do now. So, young lady, you just get up on that darn horse of yours as soon as you can.'

Grace lowered her eyes. Robert put his hand on her shoulder. Annie shepherded them before her out of the door.

'She doesn't want to,' she said through her teeth as she went past. 'And neither does the darn horse. Alrighty?'

Pilgrim was wasting away. The broken bones and the scars on his body and legs had healed, but the damage done to the nerves in his shoulder had rendered him lame. Only a combination of confinement and physical therapy could help him. But such was the violence with which he exploded at anyone's approach that the latter was impossible without risk of serious injury. Confinement alone was thus his lot. In the dark stench of his stall, behind the barn where he had known days far happier, Pilgrim grew thin.

Harry Logan had neither the courage nor the skill of Dorothy Chen in administering shots. And so Mrs Dyer's boys devised a sly technique to help him. They cut a small, sliding hatch in the bottom section of the door through which they pushed in Pilgrim's food and water. When a shot was due they would starve him. With Logan standing ready with his syringe, they would put down pails of feed and water outside then open the hatch. The boys would often get a fit of giggles as they hid to one side and waited for Pilgrim's hunger and thirst to get the better of his fear. When he reached tentatively out to sniff the pails, the boys would ram down the hatch and trap his head long enough for Logan to get the shot into his neck. Logan hated it. He especially hated the way the boys laughed.

In early February he called Liz Hammond and they arranged to meet at the stables. They took a look at Pilgrim through the stall door and then went to sit in Liz's car. They sat in silence for a while watching Tim and Eric hosing down the yard, fooling around.

'I've had enough Liz,' Logan said. 'It's all yours now.'

'Have you spoken with Annie?'

'I called her ten times. I told her a month ago the horse ought to be put down. She won't listen. But I tell you, I can't handle this anymore. Those two fucking kids drive me nuts. I'm a vet, Lizzie. I'm supposed to stop animals suffering, not make them suffer. I've had it.'

Neither of them spoke for a moment, just sat there, gravely assessing the boys. Eric was trying to light a cigarette but Tim kept aiming the hose at him.

'She was asking me if there were horse psychiatrists,' said Liz. Logan laughed.

'That horse doesn't need a shrink, he needs a lobotomy.' He thought for a while. 'There's this horse chiropractor guy over in Pittsfield but he doesn't do cases like this. Can't think of anybody who does. Can you?'

Liz shook her head.

There was no one. Logan sighed. The whole thing, he concluded, had been one goddamn miserable fuckup from the start. And there was no sign he could see of it getting any better.

Part Two

Chapter Six

It was in America that horses first roamed. A million years before the birth of man, they grazed the vast plains of wiry grass and crossed to other continents over bridges of rock soon severed by retreating ice. They first knew man as the hunted knows the hunter, for long before he saw them as a means to killing other beasts, man killed them for their meat.

Paintings on the walls of caves showed how. Lions and bears would turn and fight and that was the moment men speared them. But the horse was a creature of flight not fight and, with a simple deadly logic, the hunter used flight to destroy it. Whole herds were driven hurtling headlong to their deaths from the tops of cliffs. Deposits of their broken bones bore testimony. And though later he came pretending friendship, the alliance with man would ever be but fragile, for the fear he'd struck into their hearts was too deep to be dislodged.

Since that neolithic moment when first a horse was haltered, there were those among men who understood this.

They could see into the creature's soul and soothe the wounds they found there. Often they were seen as witches and perhaps they were. Some wrought their magic with the bleached bones of toads, plucked from moonlit streams. Others, it was said, could with but a glance root the hooves of a working team to the earth they plowed. There were gypsies and showmen, shamans and charlatans. And those who truly had the gift were wont to guard it wisely, for it was said that he who drove the devil out, might also drive him in. The owner of a horse you calmed might shake your hand then dance around the flames while they burned you in the village square.

For secrets uttered softly into pricked and troubled ears, these men were known as Whisperers.

They were mainly men it seemed and this puzzled Annie as she read by hooded lamplight in the cavernous reading room of the public library. She had assumed that women would know more about such things than men. She sat for many hours at one of the long, gleaming mahogany tables, privately corralled by the books she had found, and she stayed until the place closed.

She read about an Irishman called Sullivan who lived two hundred years ago and whose taming of furious horses had been witnessed by many. He would lead the animals away into a darkened barn and no one knew for sure what happened when he closed the door. He claimed that all he used were the words of an Indian charm, bought for the price of a meal from a hungry traveler. No one ever knew if this was true, for his secret died with him. All the witnesses knew was that when Sullivan lead the horses out again, all fury had vanished. Some said they looked hypnotized by fear.

There was a man from Groveport, Ohio, called John Solomon Rarey who tamed his first horse at the age of twelve. Word of his gift spread and in 1858 he was summoned to Windsor Castle in England to calm a horse of Queen Victoria. The queen and her entourage watched astonished as Rarey put his hands on the animal and laid it down on the ground before them. Then he lay down beside it and rested his head on its hooves. The queen chuckled with delight and gave Rarey a hundred dollars. He was a modest, quiet man, but now he was famous and the press wanted more. The call went out to find the most ferocious horse in all England.

It was duly found.

He was a stallion by the name of Cruiser, once the fastest racehorse in the land. Now though, according to the account Annie read, he was a 'fiend incarnate' and wore an eight-pound iron muzzle to stop him killing too many stableboys. His owners only kept him alive because they wanted to breed from him and to make him safe enough to do this, they planned to blind him. Against all advice, Rarey let himself into the stable where no one else dared venture and shut the door. He emerged three hours later leading Crusier, without his muzzle and gentle as a lamb. The owners were so impressed they gave him the horse. Rarey brought him back to Ohio where Crusier died on 6 July 1875, outliving his new master by a full nine years.

Annie came out of the library and down between the massive lions that guarded the steps to the street. Traffic blared by and the wind funneled icily up the canyon of buildings. She still had three or four hours of work to do back at the office, but she didn't take a cab. She wanted to walk. The cold air might make sense of the stories swirling in her head. Whatever their names, no matter where or when they lived, the horses she had read about all had but one face. Pilgrim's. It was into Pilgrim's ears that the Irishman intoned and they were Pilgrim's eyes behind the iron muzzle.

Something was happening to Annie which she couldn't yet define. Something visceral. Over the past month she had watched her daughter walking the floors of the apartment, first with the frame, then with the cane. She had helped Grace, they all had, with the brutal, boring, daily slog of physical therapy, hour upon hour of it, till their limbs ached as much as hers. Physically, there was a steady accumulation of tiny triumphs. But Annie could see that, in almost equal measure, something inside the girl was dying.

Grace tried to mask it from them - her parents, Elsa, her friends, even the army of counselors and therapists who were paid well to see such things -with a kind of dogged cheerfulness. But Annie saw through it, saw the way Grace's face went when she thought no one was looking and saw silence, like a patient monster, enfold her daughter in its arms.

Quite why the life of a savage horse slammed up in a squalid, country stall should seem now so crucially linked with her daughter's decline, Annie had no idea. There was no logic to it. She respected Grace's decision not to ride again, indeed Annie didn't like the idea of her even trying. And when Harry Logan and Liz told her again and again that it would be kinder to destroy Pilgrim and that his prolonged existence was a misery to all concerned, she knew they were talking sense. Why then did she keep saying no? Why, when the magazine's circulation figures had started to level out, had she just taken two whole afternoons off to read about weirdos who whispered into animals' ears? Because she was a fool, she told herself.

Everyone was going home when she got back to the office. She settled at her desk and Anthony gave her a list of messages and reminded her about a breakfast meeting she had been trying to avoid. Then he said good-night and left her on her own. Annie made a couple of calls that he'd said couldn't wait, then called home.

Robert told her that Grace was doing her exercises. She was fine, he said. It was what he always said. Annie told him she would be late and to go ahead and eat without her.

'You sound tired,' he said. 'Heavy day?'

'No. I spent it reading about whisperers.'

'About what?'

'I'll tell you later.'

She started to go through the stack of papers Anthony had left for her but her thoughts kept sliding away into farfetched fantasies about what she'd read in the library. Maybe John Rarey had a great-great-grandson somewhere who'd inherited the gift and could use it on Pilgrim? Maybe she could place an ad in the Times to trace him? Whisperer wanted .

How long it was before she fell asleep she had no idea, but she woke with a start to see a security man standing at the door. He was doing a routine check of the offices and apologized for disturbing her. Annie asked him what time it was and was shocked to hear it was past eleven.

She called for a car and slouched dismally in the back as it took her all the way up Central Park West. The apartment building's green door-canopy looked colorless in the sodium glow of the streetlamps.

Robert and Grace had both gone to bed. Annie stood in the doorway of Grace's room and let her eyes get used to the dark. The false leg stood in the corner like a toy sentry. Grace shifted in her sleep and murmured something. And the thought suddenly occurred to Annie that perhaps this need she felt to keep Pilgrim alive, to find someone who could calm his troubled heart, wasn't about Grace at all. Perhaps it was about herself.

Annie softly pulled the covers up over Grace's shoulder and walked back along the corridor to the kitchen. Robert had left a note on the yellow pad on the table. Liz Hammond had called, it said. She had the name of someone who might be able to help.

Chapter Seven

Tom Booker woke at six and listened to the local news on the TV while he shaved. A guy from Oakland had parked in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge, shot his wife and two kids and then jumped off. Traffic both ways was at a standstill. In the eastern suburbs a woman out jogging in the hills behind her home had been killed by a mountain lion.

The light above the mirror made his sunburnt face look green against the shaving foam. The bathroom was dingy and cramped and Tom had to stoop to stand under the shower rigged in the bathtub. It always seemed motels like this were built for some miniature race you never came across, people with tiny, nimble fingers who actually preferred soap the size of credit cards and wrapped for their convenience.

He dressed and sat on the bed to pull his boots on, looking out over the little parking lot that was crammed with the pickups and four-wheeler trucks of those coming to the clinic. As of last night there were going to be twenty in the colt class and about the same in the horsemanship class. It was too many but he never liked turning folk away. For their horses' sake more than theirs. He put on his green wool jacket, picked up his hat and let himself out into the narrow concrete corridor that led to reception.

The young Chinese manager was putting out a tray of evil-looking doughnuts by the coffee machine. He beamed at Tom.

'Morning Mr Booker! How you doing?'

'Good thanks,' Tom said. He put his key down on the desk. 'How are you?'

Fine. Complimentary doughnut?'

'No thanks.'

'All set for the clinic?'

'Oh, reckon we'll muddle through. See you later.'

'Bye Mr Booker.'

The dawn air felt damp and chilly as he walked toward his pickup, but the cloud was high and Tom knew it would burn off by midmorning. Back home in Montana the ranch was still under two foot of snow, but when they drove into Marin County here last night it felt like spring. California, he thought. They sure had it all worked out down here, even the weather. He couldn't wait to get home.

He pointed the red Chevy out onto the highway and looped back over 101. The riding center nestled in a gently sloping wooded valley a couple of miles out of town. He had brought the trailer up here last night before checking into the motel and turned Rimrock out into the meadow. Tom saw someone had already been out putting arrow signs up along the route saying BOOKER HORSE CLINIC and wished whoever it was hadn't. If the place was harder to find maybe some of the dumber ones wouldn't show up.

He drove through the gate and parked on the grass near the big arena where the sand had been watered and neatly combed. There was no one about. Rimrock saw him from the far side of the meadow and by the time Tom got over to the fence he was there waiting. He was an eight-year-old brown quarter horse with a white blaze on his face and four neat white socks that gave him the dapper look of someone dressed up for a tennis party. Tom had bred and reared him himself. He rubbed the horse's neck and let him nuzzle the side of his face.

'You got your work cut out today, old son,' Tom said. Normally he liked to have two horses at a clinic so they could share the load. But his mare, Bronty, was about to foal and he'd had to leave her back in Montana. That was another reason he wanted to get home.

Tom turned and leaned against the fence and the two of them silently surveyed the empty space that for the next five days would be buzzing with nervous horses and their more nervous owners. After he and Rimrock had worked with them, most would go home a little less nervous and that made it worth doing. But this was the fourth clinic in about as many weeks and seeing the same damn fool problems cropping up time and time again got kind of wearing.

For the first time in twenty years he was going to take the spring and summer off. No clinics, no traveling. Just stay put on the ranch, get some of his own colts going, help his brother some. That was it. Maybe he was getting too old. He was forty-five, hell, nearly forty-six. When he'd started out doing clinics he could do one a week all year round and love every minute. If only the people could be as smart as the horses.

Rona Williams, the woman who owned the center and hosted this clinic every year, had seen him and was coming down from the stables. She was a small, wiry woman with the eyes of a zealot and though pushing forty, wore her hair in two long plaits. The girlishness of this was contradicted by the manly way she walked. It was the walk of someone used to being obeyed. Tom liked her. She worked hard to make a success of the clinic. He touched his hat to her and she smiled then looked up at the sky.

'Gonna be a good one,' she said.

'I reckon.' Tom nodded toward the road. 'I see you got yourself some nice new signs out there. In case any of these forty crazy horses get themselves lost.'

'Thirty-nine.'

'Oh? Someone drop out?'

'Nope. Thirty-nine horses, one donkey.' She grinned. 'Guy who owns it's an actor or something. Coming up from L.A.'

He sighed and gave her a look.

'You're a ruthless woman, Rona. You'll have me wrestling grizzly bears before you're through.'

'It's an idea.'

They walked down to the arena together and talked the schedule through. He would kick off this morning with the colts, working with them one by one. With twenty of them, that was going to take pretty much the whole day. Tomorrow would be the horsemanship class, with some cattle work later, if there was time, for those who wanted it.

Tom had bought some new speakers and wanted to do a sound test, so Rona helped him get them out of the Chevy and they set them up near the bleachers where the spectators would sit. The speakers squealed with feedback when they were switched on, then settled into a menacing, anticipatory hum as Tom walked out across the virgin sand of the arena and spoke into the radio mike of his headset.

'Hi folks.' His voice boomed among the trees that stood unstirring in the still air of the valley. 'This is the Rona Williams show and I'm Tom Booker, donkey tamer to the stars.'

When they'd checked everything through, they drove down into town to the place they always had breakfast. Smoky and T.J., the two young guys Tom had brought from Montana to help with this run of four clinics, were already eating. Rona ordered granola and Tom some scrambled eggs, wheat toast and a large orange juice.

'You hear about that woman killed by a mountain lion out jogging?' said Smoky.

'The lion was jogging too?' Tom asked, all big blue-eyed innocence. Everyone laughed.

'Why not?' said Rona. 'Hey fellas, it's California.'

'That's right,' said T.J. 'They say he was all in Lycra and wearing these little earphones.'

'You mean one of them Sony Prowlmen?' said Tom. Smoky waited for them to finish, taking it well. Teasing him had become the morning game. Tom was fond of him. He wasn't a Nobel prizewinner, but when it came to horses he had something going for him. One day, if he worked at it, he'd be good. Tom reached out and ruffled his hair.

'You're okay Smoke,' he said.

A pair of buzzards circled lazily against the liquid blue of the afternoon sky. They floated ever upward on the thermals that rose from the valley, filling that middle space between tree and hilltop with an eerie, intermittent mewing. Five hundred feet below, in a cloud of dust, the latest of the day's twenty dramas was unfolding. The sun and maybe the signs along the road had lured as big a crowd as Tom had ever seen here. The bleachers were packed and people were still coming in, paying their ten bucks a head to one of Rona's helpers at the gate. The women running the refreshment stall were doing brisk business and the air was laced with the smell of barbecue.

In the middle of the arena stood a small corral some thirty feet across and it was here that Tom and Rimrock were working. The sweat was starting to streak the dust on Tom's face and he wiped it on the sleeve of his faded blue snap-button shirt. His legs felt hot under the old leather chaps he wore over his jeans. He'd done eleven colts already and this now was the twelfth, a beautiful black thoroughbred.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 618