He raised his face, and he continued to smile. “I had a vision.”
“Just now?” He shook his head, but the smile remained. He was making me nervous.
“Earlier.”
I watched him. “Why are you smiling?”
He laughed. “The vision, you are not going to like it.”
I quickly convinced myself that if it were really bad, he wouldn’t be smiling. “What?”
“Horses, you will be assisted by horses; powerful horses, paints.”
I laughed with him. “I’ll take any help I can get.”
His face grew serious. “You know the power of this medicine.” He stretched his back muscles and looked at me again. “You will be assisted by horses; powerful horses, paints.”
“Okay.” He seemed satisfied, so I pulled the note from my breast pocket.
He took it and studied it without opening the envelope. “Again?”
I nodded. “At the crime scene on the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, taped to the railing.”
He opened the envelope and read the note. “Do you know any other Indians in Philadelphia?”
“No.”
He looked at the card again. “Then I do not know…Perhaps something to do with the reception?”
“Possibly.”
Henry placed the card back and handed it to me. “It will be revealed to you.”
I stuffed the tiny envelope in my breast pocket. “Let me guess, by horses.”
He shrugged. “That, or by another note.”
I decided to sleep in the chair for the rest of the night, sending the Cheyenne Nation to his guest-artist bed. I wished I had my cowboy hat to pull over my eyes, but it was at Cady’s. I thought about using the football helmet, but I didn’t want to upset the mojo. I borrowed a towel from the night nurse and folded it. I remained like that for a while, staring at the underside of the towel and thinking: GO BACK TO THE INDIAN. Who was involved with all of this who would be sympathetic toward us? Who did we know here? GO BACK TO THE INDIAN; I had, and I didn’t know anything more than I had before. Some detective.
I took the towel off and rubbed my eyes. Henry had left a partial bottle of water on the other chair, so I picked it up, screwed off the top, and chugged what was left. There was a slick portfolio underneath it with a water ring on the cover where the bottle had been. I picked it up and studied the beautifully lit main hall gallery of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. It was the brochure for the Mennonite photo exhibit.
The photograph on the inside cover was of a horse haltered to a broken-down Studebaker pickup. The paint was looking at the camera, and the water bottle that Henry had left on the brochure had wept a perfect circle around its eye. I laughed, remembering Henry’s vision, and looked at the text. It was one of the poems that Dena Many Camps had been gracious enough to bestow on the project, and it was elegant and powerful.
…Walks the quiet rushes of the Mni Shoshe, then moves north, to higher ground. He motions toward the ponies as they rise up and release their tears, large drops the size of ripe apples. They dance then, as my mother and father shift in sleep, dreaming to the rhythm of horses’ hooves.
The horse that had been dead for seventy years looked at me, and I wondered if Dena would be at the reception; probably not, as Henry hadn’t mentioned that she would be. I could be wrong, but he seemed to talk of her less. I had asked him about the pool tournament in Las Vegas, which she had won, but Henry said she had been seen in the company of a tall, handsome Assiniboine about half his age. The conversation had dwindled from there.
I set the brochure back on the seat, refolded the towel, and replaced it over my eyes, staring at the five words in my head, the warning, the clue, the note passed between the aisles.
I guess I was getting used to the sounds and rhythms of the ICU. I struggled for a while but then tossed myself into a fidgety, ungrateful sleep.
I was still looking at my boots, which floated above the buffalo grass and sage of northern Wyoming. I kicked my feet back and forth and could feel the looseness of my boots on my feet, the air between my socks and the innersoles. I snuck a glance to my right; the same medicine man was there, and the wind still suspended us above the bluffs at Cat Creek.
We weren’t moving but were being held aloft by the current, with our arms outstretched toward the Bighorn Mountains. I could feel the gusts whip my hat away, and I laughed. The medicine man laughed along with me, and I turned my head with the tears streaming from my face, lids clenched with a flattened image of the elderly man who floated beside me. I had to yell over the howling of the wind, but you grow used to such things on the high plains. His head turned toward mine, and I watched as the fringe of his leggings swirled behind him like trailing eddies in the air stream.
He nodded at my one-word question and pointed with his nearest hand, the leathery finger aimed at the canyon below, and they were there: an entire remuda of wild ones, the wind buffeting their manes and tails as they threw the gusts against their broad withers, using the coming storm to their own advantage. The sound of clattering hooves overtook the aching cry of the wind and joined it with a resonance that rose from the stone walls of the canyon. The orange and white pattern of their bodies was like the pattern of the thunderheads that ascended as if they were time-lapse photography, cumulus explosions stronger than technology.
The horses were large and potent, the muscles of their limbs reaching out like the flexing of fingers, gobbling up the distance and reaching out for more. The aged Indian beside me laughed when I glanced back at him, chuckling at their approach.
As they reached the end of the canyon, they climbed the walls with powerful, striking hooves that drove into the rock with sparks of electricity that arched upward, shooting past us and into the clouds. The air was cool with the promise of water, and I could feel my hair standing on end.
They thundered their way up at the same speed that they had entered the canyon, seemingly on a crash course with us. I veered from them and threw myself off balance. I closed one eye like a kid at a Saturday matinee and waited for the impact. The lead mare kicked as though she was ridding herself of an unwanted rider, and the cloud-pattern body twisted. The earth fell away like a flanking strap, and the impact of our collision threw my shoulder down and against her neck as her head stretched upward and the long mane covered my face.
I scrambled to get my fingers into her hair, wrapped an arm around her neck, and dug my legs against her sides. The pressure of her rising body forced the air from my lungs, and it was all I could do to hold on as the backing of the metal star pinned to my jacket drove itself into my chest.
Her hair still covered my face but parted at the rim of the canyon, just enough for me to see that the old man was now astride the broad back of his own cloud pony, his one hand wrapped in the mane of his horse, the other reaching into the billowing expansion above us.
I looked up at the detonation of clouds that seemed like a saturated watercolor. Compacted flares fired deep in the towers of umber, white, and disappearing blue and reflected in the flanks of my paint. Her rhythm was steady and sure and her eyes watched carefully, as if a misplaced hoof would send us plummeting into the distant earth below.
The medicine man’s lips moved, and even though his voice was barely a whisper, the sound of his words echoed within the clouds like drums. “This is better, yes?” I stared at him, and it was clear to me he was insane. He laughed. “How can you know the earth if you never see it?”
I looked past his outstretched arm at the glow of the clouds and at one that looked like an eye with a circle around it.