The Horse Whisperer Read online

  Gulliver and Judith were past her now and she watched her friend being flung like a discarded doll across the horse’s rear, then jerk and twist viciously back as her foot snagged in the stirrup. Judith’s body bounced and swung sideways and as she hit the ice hard with the back of her head, her foot took another twist in the stirrup, locking itself there so that now she was being dragged. In one seething, frenzied tangle, the two horses and their riders careered down toward the road.

  Wayne Tanner saw them as soon as he came out of the bend. Assuming he would be approaching from the south, the mill people hadn’t thought to mention the old access road farther north. So Wayne had seen the turn and taken it and was relieved to find the Kenworth’s wheels seemed to hold the untracked snow as well as they had back on the highway. When he came around the bend he saw, maybe a hundred yards ahead, the concrete walls of the bridge and beyond it, framed by it, some animal, a horse, trailing something. Wayne’s stomach turned over.

  “What the hell?”

  He hit the brakes, but not too hard, for he knew that if he made things too sudden the wheels would lock, so he worked the trolley valve on the steering wheel, trying to get drag from the brakes at the back of the trailer. He couldn’t even feel it. The gears would have to bring him down and he smacked the heel of his hand into the shift and double-declutched, making the six cylinders of the Cummins roar. Shit, he’d been going too fast. There were two horses there now, one with a rider on it. What the hell were they doing? Why didn’t they get off the goddamn road? His heart was pounding and he could feel a sweat breaking out as he worked the trailer brakes and the shift, finding a rhythm in the mantra going through his head: Hit the binders, grab a gear, hit the binders, grab a gear. But the bridge was looming up too fast. For Christsake, couldn’t they hear him coming? Couldn’t they see him?

  They could. Even Judith, in her agony on the ground, could see him, fleetingly, as she was thrashed around screaming through the snow. Her thighbone had snapped when she fell and in the slide to the road both horses had stepped on her, crushing ribs and splintering a forearm. In that first stumble Gulliver had cracked a knee and torn tendons and the pain and fear that filled his head showed in the whites of his eyes as he reeled and pranced and tried to free himself of this thing that hung hooked to his side.

  Grace saw the truck as soon as they reached the road. One look was enough. Somehow she had managed not to fall and now she had to get them all off the road. If she could get hold of Gulliver’s reins, she could lead him off to safety, dragging Judith behind. But Pilgrim was as freaked as the older horse and the two of them circled frantically, feeding each other’s fear.

  With all her strength, Grace tugged on Pilgrim’s mouth and for a moment had his attention. She backed him toward the other horse, leaning precariously from her saddle, and reached out for Gulliver’s bridle. He moved off, but she shadowed him, stretching out her arm till she thought it would pop from its socket. Her fingers were nearly on it when the truck blasted its horn.

  Wayne saw both horses leap at the sound and for the first time realized what it was that hung from the side of the one that had no rider.

  “Holy shit.”

  He said it out loud and at the same time found he had run out of gears. He was in first and the bridge and the horses were coming up so fast he knew all he could do now was go for the tractor brakes. He murmured a little prayer and stepped harder than he knew he should on the foot valve. For a second it seemed to work. He could feel the wheels at the back of the cab bite home.

  “Yeah! That’s my girl.”

  Then the wheels locked and Wayne felt forty tons of steel take charge of their own destiny.

  In a stately, accelerating slither, the Kenworth snaked into the mouth of the bridge, entirely ignoring his efforts at the wheel. Now Wayne was just a spectator and he watched the cab’s offside wing below him make contact with the concrete wall in what at first was but a glancing kiss of sparks. Then, as the deadweight of the trailer shouldered in behind, there was a gouging, ripping mayhem of noise that made the very air vibrate,

  In front of him now he could see the black horse turn to face him and he saw that its rider was just a young girl and that her eyes were wide with fear beneath the dark peak of her hat.

  “No, no, no,” he said.

  But the horse reared up defiantly before him and the girl was jerked back and fell to the road. Only briefly did the horse’s front feet come down, for in the moment before the truck was upon it, Wayne saw it lift its head and rear again. Only this time it leapt right at him. With all the power of its hind legs, it launched itself over the front of the cab, clearing the sheer face of the radiator grille as if it were a jump. The metal shoes on its front feet came down on the hood, skidding up it in a frenzy of sparks and as a hoof hit the windshield there was a loud crack and Wayne lost all sight in a craze of glass. Where was the girl? God, she must be down there on the road in front of him.

  Wayne smashed his fist and forearm against the windshield and when it shattered he saw the horse was still there on the hood. Its right foreleg was stuck in the V-shaped struts of the wing mirror and the animal was screaming at him, covered in fragments of glass, its mouth foaming and bloody. Beyond it, Wayne could see the other horse at the side of the road, trying to limp away, its rider still hanging by her leg from the stirrup.

  And still the truck kept going. The trailer was coming clear of the bridge wall and with nothing now to restrain its sideways drift, it began a slow, relentless jack knife, effortlessly scything down the fence and sending up a cresting bow-wave of snow like an ocean liner.

  As the trailer’s momentum overtook that of the cab and slowed it, the horse on the hood made one last great effort. The struts of the wing mirror broke and the animal rolled free and disappeared from Wayne’s view. There was a moment of brooding calm, as in the eye of a hurricane, in which Wayne watched the trailer finish its sweep of the fence and the edge of the field beyond and start slowly arcing back toward him. Corralled in the quietly closing angle of the jackknife stood the other horse, uncertain now where escape might lie. Wayne thought he saw its dangling rider lift her head from the ground to look at him, unaware of the wave that was breaking behind her. Then she was lost. For the trailer surged over her, scooping the horse toward the cab like a butterfly in a book and crushing it there in a final thunderous slam of metal.

  “Hello? Gracie?”

  Robert Maclean paused in the passageway by the back door, holding two large bags of groceries. There was no reply and he went through into the kitchen and dumped the bags on the table.

  He always liked to get the weekend food in before Annie arrived. If he didn’t, they would have to go to the supermarket together and would end up spending an hour there while Annie pondered the fine distinctions between various brands. It never failed to astound him how someone who every moment of her working life made snap decisions, Committing thousands, even millions of dollars, could at weekends spend ten minutes wondering which kind of pesto sauce to buy. It also cost a lot more than if he shopped alone, because Annie usually failed to reach any final decision over which brand was best and they’d end up buying all three.

  The downside of doing it alone was of course the inevitable criticism he would face for buying the wrong things. But in the lawyerly manner which he applied to all areas of his life, Robert had weighed both sides of this issue and shopping without his wife emerged the clear winner.

  Grace’s note lay by the phone, where she had left it. Robert looked at his watch. It was only a little after ten and he could understand the two girls wanting to spend longer out on a morning like this. He pushed the playback button on the answering machine, took off his parka and started to put away the groceries. There were two messages. The first, from Annie, made him smile. She must have called right after he’d left for the supermarket. Time he was up, indeed. The second was from Mrs. Dyer up at the stables. All she said was would they please call her. But something in her voice made
Robert go cold.

  The helicopter hung there for a while above the river, taking in the scene, then dipped its nose and lifted up over the woods, filling the valley with the deep, reverberating thud of its blades. The pilot looked down to one side as he circled again. There were ambulances, police cars and rescue squad vehicles down there, red lights flashing, all parked in fan formation in the field beside the massive jackknifed truck. They had marked out where they wanted the helicopter to land and a cop was making big, unnecessary arm signals.

  It had taken just ten minutes for them to fly down from Albany and the paramedics had worked all the way, going through routine checks of the equipment. Now they were ready and watched silently over the pilot’s shoulder as he circled and made his approach. The sun flashed briefly on the river as the helicopter followed its own shadow in over the police roadblock and over a red four-wheel-drive car also making its way toward the scene of the wreck.

  Through the window of the police car, Wayne Tanner watched the helicopter hover above the landing spot and gently lower itself, whipping up a blizzard around the head of the cop who was directing it in.

  Wayne was in the front passenger seat with a blanket over his shoulders, holding a cup of something hot he hadn’t yet tasted. He could make no more sense of all the activity going on outside than he could of the harsh, intermittent babble of the police radio beside him. His shoulder ached and there was a small cut on his hand that the ambulance woman had insisted on bandaging extravagantly. It hadn’t needed it. It was as if she didn’t want him, surrounded by such carnage, to feel left out.

  Wayne could see Koopman, the young deputy sheriff whose car he was sitting in, over by the truck talking to the rescue squad people. Nearby, leaning on the hood of a rusted pale blue pickup and listening in, was the little hunter guy in the fur hat who had raised the alarm. He’d been up in the woods, heard the crash and gone straight down to the mill where they called the sheriff’s office. When Koopman arrived, Wayne was sitting in the snow out in the field. The deputy was just a kid and had clearly never seen a wreck this bad before, but he’d handled things well and even looked disappointed when Wayne told him he’d already put out a call on channel nine of his CB. That was the channel monitored by the state police and minutes later they started to arrive. Now the place was swarming with them and Koopman looked a little put out that it wasn’t his show anymore.

  On the snow beneath the truck, Wayne could see the reflected glare of the oxyacetylene blowtorches that the rescue squad guys were using to cut through the tangled wreck of the trailer and the turbines. He looked away, fighting the memory of those long minutes after the jackknife finished.

  He hadn’t heard it right away. Garth Brooks was singing on regardless on the tape machine and Wayne had been so stunned at his own survival that he was unsure if it was he or his ghost climbing down from the cab. There were blue jays squawking in the trees and at first he thought this other noise came from them too. But it was too desperate, too insistent, a kind of sustained, tortured shrieking and Wayne realized it was the horse dying in the closed jackknife and he’d clamped his hands to his ears and run away into the field.

  They’d already told him one of the girls was still alive and he could see the paramedics at work around her stretcher, getting her ready for the helicopter. One of them was pressing a mask over her face and another had his arms up high, holding two plastic bags of fluid that were connected by tubes to her arms. The body of the other girl had already been flown out.

  A red four-wheeler had just pulled up and Wayne watched a big bearded man get out and take a black bag out of the back. He slung it over a shoulder and made his way toward Koopman who turned to greet him. They talked for a few minutes then Koopman led him out of sight behind the truck, where the blowtorchers were at work. When they reappeared, the bearded guy looked grim. They went over to talk to the little hunter guy who listened, nodded and got what looked like a rifle bag out of the cab of his pickup. Now all three of them were heading over toward Wayne. Koopman opened the car door.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay.”

  Koopman nodded toward the bearded guy.

  “Mr. Logan here is a veterinarian. We need to find that other horse.”

  Now that the door was open Wayne could hear the roar of the blowtorches. It made him feel sick.

  “Any idea which way it went?”

  “No sir. Sure don’t think he could’ve gotten far.”

  “Okay.” Koopman put a hand on Wayne’s shoulder. “We’ll be getting you out of here soon, okay?”

  Wayne nodded. Koopman shut the door. They stood there talking outside the car but Wayne couldn’t hear what they said. Beyond them, the helicopter was lifting off, taking the girl away. Someone’s hat blew off in the blizzard. But Wayne saw none of this. All he saw was the bloodfoam mouth of the horse and its eyes staring at him over a jagged edge of windshield as they would stare at him in his dreams for a long time to come.

  “We’ve got him, haven’t we?”

  Annie was standing by her desk, looking over Don Farlow’s shoulder as he sat reading the contract. He didn’t answer, just lifted a sandy eyebrow, finishing the page.

  “We have,” Annie said. “I know we have.”

  Farlow put the contract down on his lap.

  “Yes, I think we have.”

  “Ha!” Annie raised a fist and walked across the office to pour herself another cup of coffee.

  They had been there half an hour. She’d caught a cab down to Forty-third and Seventh, got stuck in the traffic and walked the last two blocks. New York drivers were coping with the snow in the way they knew best, blaring their horns and yelling at each other. Farlow was already there in her office and had the coffee on. She liked the way he made himself at home.

  “Of course, he’ll deny he ever spoke to them,” he said.

  “It’s a direct quote, Don. And look how much detail there is. He can’t deny he said it.”

  Annie brought her coffee back and sat down at her desk, a vast asymmetrical affair in elm and walnut that a friend in England had made for her four years ago when, to everyone’s surprise, she had given up writing to become an executive. It had followed her from that magazine to this much grander one, where it had won the instant loathing of the interior designer hired at great expense to restyle the deposed editor’s office to Annie’s taste. He had taken clever revenge by insisting that, as the desk clashed so badly, everything else should clash too. The result was a cacophony of shape and color that the designer, with no detectable sign of irony, called Eclectic Deconstructionism.

  All that really worked were some abstract splatter paintings done by Grace at the age of three that Annie (to her daughter’s initial pride and subsequent embarrassment) had proudly framed. They hung on the walls among all the awards and photographs of Annie smiling cheek by jowl with assorted glitterati. More discreetly positioned, on the desk where only she could see them, were the photographs of those she cared about: Grace, Robert and her father.

  Over the tops of these Annie now surveyed Don Farlow. It was funny to see him not wearing a suit. The old denim jacket and hiking boots had surprised her. She’d had him down as a Brooks Brothers type—slacks, loafers and yellow cashmere. He smiled.

  “So. You want to sue him?”

  Annie laughed. “Of course I want to sue him. He signed an agreement saying he wouldn’t talk to the press and he’s libeled me by saying I’ve faked the figures.”

  “A libel that’ll be repeated a hundred times over if we sue. And blown up into a much bigger story.”

  Annie frowned.

  “Don, you’re not going soft on me are you? Fenimore Fiske is a bitter, twisted, talentless, spiteful old toad.”

  Farlow put up his hands, grinning.

  “Don’t hold back Annie, tell me what you really think.”

  “While he was here he did all he could to stir up trouble and now he’s gone he’s trying to do the same. I want to bu
rn his wrinkled ass.”

  “Is that an English expression?”

  “No, we’d say apply heat to his aging fundament.”

  “Well, you’re the boss. Fundamentally.”

  “You better believe it.”

  One of the phones on Annie’s desk clicked and she picked it up. It was Robert. He told her in a level voice that Grace had been in an accident. She’d been flown up to a hospital in Albany where she was in intensive care, still unconscious. Annie should stay on the train all the way to Albany. He would meet her there.

  TWO

  AND ROBERT HAD MET WHEN SHE WAS ONLY eighteen. It was the summer of 1968 and rather than go straight from school to Oxford University where she had been offered a place, Annie decided to take a year off. She signed up with an organization called Voluntary Service Overseas and was given a two-week crash course on how to teach English, avoid malaria and repel the advances of amorous locals (say no, loudly, and mean it).

  Thus prepared, she flew to Senegal in West Africa and after a brief stay in the capital, Dakar, set off on the dusty five-hundred-mile ride south in an open-sided bus crammed with people, chickens and goats, to the small town that was to be her home for the next twelve months. On the second day, as night fell, they arrived at the banks of a great river.

  The night air was hot and damp and clamorous with insects and Annie could see the lights of the town twinkling far across the water. But the ferry had shut down till morning and the driver and other passengers, now her friends, were concerned about where she would spend the night. There was no hotel and though they themselves would have no trouble finding a place to lay their heads, they clearly felt the young Englishwoman needed somewhere more salubrious.

  They told her there was a tubab living nearby who would surely put her up. Without the faintest idea of what a tubab might be, Annie found herself being led in a large posse bearing her bags along winding jungle tracks to a small mud house set among baobab and papaya trees. The tubab who answered the door—she later found out it meant white man—was Robert.