Thorn, Fred Saberhagen [bearly read books .txt] 📗

      Pat not-answered, as he often did. Looking out the window, he pretended that he hadn’t heard. The man cleared his throat but did not repeat the question. Later on he would. A small roadside sign announced that they were entering an Indian reservation. God, what could even Indians do on land as barren as this? Raise sheep? But there were none in sight.

      You could make movies, of course, you could do that just about anywhere. Pat visualized a line of Indian dancers a thousand strong, their line stretching away over the yellow-brown plain. Make it ten thousand, the line would still look small. A camera in a low-flying aircraft, skimming just above their heads … tell them to show no expression on their faces…

      The Pinto sped in scanty traffic. They kept topping long brown hills, one after another. Annie was getting close. In the distance, on every side now, more mountains reared. Somehow the highway had shrunk, it seemed too narrow here to be called an Interstate. Pat hadn’t been watching the signs. The man, after his first attempt to talk, was unexpectedly going to be silent. Who knew what went on inside people’s heads? No one did. No one. It was all right, silence was okay with Pat.

      After they had driven for the better part of an hour through virtual nothingness they topped a final long hill. Now, miles ahead, some kind of a town or city came into view, looking as if it had been dropped at the foot of the tallest-looking mountains around. Their peaks still showed white that Pat supposed was snow.

      The man cleared his throat again. “Where-abouts can I let you off?”

      Pat brought his gaze back into the car, shifted his position in the seat. Annie was near. “Somewhere around the center of town is fine. If you’re going that way.”

      “The Plaza?”

      Pat didn’t know what The Plaza meant. “That’s fine. Anywhere around there is fine.”

      The man stopped the Pinto twenty minutes later to let Pat out in the midst of a minor traffic jam in narrow streets. Slanting afternoon sunlight warmed low buildings covered with what Pat would have called beige stucco; they put him vaguely in mind of pictures that he had seen of Indian cliff dwellings. And here were some Indians, real-by-God Indians, with their blankets spread on a roofed sidewalk to display pots and jewelry for sale. Above their heads the rough ends of unfinished logs stuck out of the edge of the building’s roof.

      “Thanks for the ride.” Pat flashed a merry smile as he got out. He always liked to do that, no matter what. Maybe he hoped that the people would remember him.

      The man huffily not-answered as he drove away.

      Annie was somewhere around here. That way. Within walking distance now, or almost. Pat started walking.

* * *

      On the rear patio of his huge house near the northern edge of Santa Fe, Ellison Seabright was trying to get his wife posed properly to paint before the light changed any more. They were out on the rear patio, overlooking a spectacular scene of what was almost wilderness. Only a few other houses were visible, around the edges. Ellison had given Stephanie a supposedly genuine seventeenth-century Spanish shawl to put around her while she perched on the low stone balustrade that rimmed the patio. Just behind his subject, a slope of sandy earth and sparse wild grass, punctuated with dwarfish juniper, fell unfenced and almost untrodden for a hundred yards to end in the bottom of a sinuous ravine. Somewhere down there was an unmarked line where Sea-bright land ended and national forest land began.

      Beginning right with the steep opposing slope of the wild ravine, the Sangre de Cristos mounted to the north and east, claiming the sky in one great rounded step above another. The highest and most distant shoulder of the mountain, blue-clad in distant fir and pine, hid behind it the bald snowcapped peaks projecting upward beyond timberline. Almost all the land in view was government land, unsettled and unpeopled. The mountains went up a mile or more in altitude above the seven thousand feet or so of the patio; a thousand years, Ellison thought, or maybe more than a thousand, back in time.

      Ellison vaguely enjoyed thinking about the mountains, and liked knowing that they were there as a subject for his own painting, whenever he got around to it. He seemed to be chronically pressed for time, and rarely felt he could take time out from business to pick up a brush himself. But today, at last, he had Stephanie at home with him. And a few hours without people or business to interfere.

      Stephanie, sitting on the balustrade, had at last got the shawl arranged to Ellison’s satisfaction. She smiled into the lowering sun, as if she enjoyed its warmth.

      “You’re in a cheerful mood today,” Ellison commented, getting some paints out of the box.

      “Why shouldn’t I be?” Her voice was lighter and easier than he had heard it in some time.

      “No reason. You’re basically a lucky lady.” Except for Helen, of course, a few months back—but if Stephanie could start to forget that now, Ellison wasn’t going to remind her. “But last week in Phoenix you were worried about the sun, how it aged the skin and brought on wrinkles. You said you weren’t going to pose for me any more, out in the sun.”

      “The sun here isn’t as hot.”

      “And you’ve stopped imagining you have wrinkles, I hope.”

      “I don’t intend to get them. I know you divorce your wives when that happens, and look for someone younger. You’ve done it twice before.”

      Ellison looked at her. She gave him back a smile, enigmatic, Mona Lisa. “Shall I cross my legs?”

      “No,” he said, pretending patience, wondering what was going on. “We have the pose all settled. Let’s just concentrate on keeping it.” A change in his wife lately, sure enough; he had thought it was only Helen’s death, but it was more.