Ghost Horses Read online

  Jack had murmured an apology he didn’t mean, which Ethan ignored. Now he was standing in front of a door, ready to stir the whole thing up again. Somewhere down the hall a vacuum cleaner whirred. A door slammed with a bang so loud it sounded like a gunshot, and outside a group of kids squealed.

  A line from an old movie blinked through his mind like a neon sign: Speak now, or forever hold your peace. It was now or never. Taking in a breath, Jack gently tapped the wooden door with his knuckle. A moment later he was sitting on a queen-size bed, looking into the questioning eyes of his mother.

  “You look pale, Jack. Are you feeling all right?”

  “Yeah. I’m OK,” Jack answered. He began to pull on the cuticle of his finger, unsure how to begin.

  “I hear you had a pretty big scare today. When your dad told me you survived a rock slide I about had a heart attack. That’s some pretty intense stuff.” Cupping her hand around his neck, she said, “Is that why you’re here? Did you want to talk about it?”

  “Sort of. I—I want to tell you what I think really happened.”

  “You mean about the teenagers kicking the rocks down?”

  Shaking his head, Jack tore the piece of skin so that a tiny dot of cherry-red blood began to appear. Looking up, he said, “I mean Ethan.”

  Afternoon light poured through the large window, illuminating a halo of curls around his mother’s head as she faced him. In the backlight, her expression was hard to read, but Steven’s feelings were clear enough; his head slowly shook from side to side, one shake, it seemed, for every word Jack spoke.

  “Not this again. Jack, Summer said that it was an accident. Why would you even begin to think Ethan would try to harm us?”

  “I don’t know—lots of reasons. He doesn’t like us. He says that all the time.”

  “It’s difficult for him,” his mother answered softly. “You know we talked about this already. We need to be patient.”

  “More important than that, son, is the fact that you’re accusing Ethan on purely circumstantial evidence. Summer said other kids started that slide, and that’s good enough for me.” His voice took on a bit of an edge when he added, “And it should be good enough for you, too.”

  “Summer does whatever Ethan tells her to do,” Jack protested. “If he told Summer to blame teenagers, then that’s what she’d do.”

  “Is that all the proof you have? There’s nothing else?” his mother asked.

  “He kicked rocks at us in the cemetery—that’s practically the same as starting a rock slide.”

  “I don’t think it’s anywhere near the same,” his father answered.

  “He ran away when you called him, Dad. He just blew you off and vanished up the mountain, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, comes a rock slide. I don’t think that’s normal, do you? And what about the way he’s always whispering to Summer and acting like he wished we’d get out of his life.” The last words came out in a rush, and then there was silence. His mother looked concerned whereas his father seemed almost irritated. Jack’s stomach began to slide into his feet when his dad came and stood in front of him. There was no mistaking it now; his father was angry.

  “I’m surprised at you, son. The whole idea of bringing other kids into this family—kids who haven’t had all the breaks that you’ve had—was to teach you compassion. I thought you’d be able to walk around in someone else’s shoes and see what it’s like to be raised in a whole different way. But I guess it didn’t work.”

  “Steven, he’s just trying to tell us what he thinks,” Olivia broke in.

  “You’re right, you’re right.” Taking a deep breath, Steven dropped into an overstuffed chair that had been pushed into a corner. “I’m sorry, Jack, maybe I’m getting a little too hot under the collar here. But if you’re going to accuse someone, you’ve got to have more to go on than a bad feeling. This kind of stuff happened to me all the time when I was in foster care. It’s hard to live under a cloud of suspicion just because you’re different.”

  “Do you really think it was teenagers kicking down those rocks?” Jack asked, getting to his feet.

  “Until I have proof otherwise, then I think we need to believe Ethan and Summer. I think we owe them that much.” When his mother nodded in agreement, Jack turned to go. He’d come to his parents with his suspicions, and he’d been shot down. There was nothing more to do but hope they were right.

  He used his key to slip back into his darkened room, crawling onto his bed as quietly as a cat. Even though jagged thoughts churned in his brain, when Jack hit the bed he slept like the dead—dead, as in what the Landons would have been if the rocks had landed on their heads. Even in the depth of his sleep, he heard the noises those rocks made bouncing off the canyon walls, like the collision of 16-pound balls against tenpins in a bowling alley. In a sweat, he awoke to find Ethan stretched out on his own bed, staring at the ceiling. Jack twisted to see the red digital numbers on the clock between their beds. 4:12. He’d slept for more than an hour.

  At 4:16 the door to their room opened slowly. “You guys awake?” Olivia whispered. “We need to start out now if we’re going to take part in the mustang capture tonight.”

  Jack rolled over and sat up on the bed. “Hey, Mom, I forgot to ask you—how’d it go with your lecture today?”

  Olivia gave him a grin and a thumbs-up. “Great! I’ll tell you all about it on our drive. Are you up, Ethan?”

  “I’m awake.”

  “All right then, let’s get moving. This mustang trapping is going to be quite an adventure!”

  On the long drive toward the Chloride Canyon, Olivia chattered on and on about the seminar: “…so when your dad teased me yesterday about pinkeye in the deer population, he actually picked a good example of the different policies in the Park Service and the BLM. Mostly, though, I spoke about the condition of the deer population here in Zion National Park.”

  She turned in her seat to face the kids in the back. “Have you seen any deer since we’ve been here? They’re kind of small and scraggly looking. We think it’s because they’ve stopped migrating out of the park in the fall—they just stay here all year long. That means the herd’s isolated, and getting too little fresh genetic material into the mix when they breed.”

  “That’s cool, Mom,” Jack told her. “So what are they going to do about the deer not getting any new genes?”

  “New jeans?” Summer whispered, totally puzzled. “For the deer?”

  “Not those kind of jeans,” Ashley giggled. “Genes that are inside your cells—you know, that tell your body whether to make brown eyes or blue or white skin or red and all that kind of stuff.”

  “And if too many of the bad recessive genes hook together because they didn’t get genetic variation, then you get problems,” Jack explained, bewildering Summer even more.

  “That’s exactly what I was talking about at the seminar,” Olivia said. “I suggested that the park people trap male deer from other areas and bring them in here to revitalize the herd, but it’s national park policy to let nature take its course. So they’re doing nothing.” She raised her eyebrows in a “that’s the way it is” expression.

  His parents were being a lot like the Park Service, Jack mused. They were letting human nature take its course. The Landons could go on doing nothing and let Ethan keep secretly trying to hurt them—if that’s what Ethan was doing. His dad’s talk had succeeded in making Jack feel guilty about his suspicions, but that didn’t make them go away.

  Ethan sat slumped in his corner of the tailgate seat in the SUV. His fingers drummed the edges of his knees, where his jeans had worn thin. They looked like they could use a good washing—both the fingers and the jeans; he looked as punky as one of the scruffier deer in Zion. Well, Jack decided, he’d follow park policy and leave Ethan alone.

  Acres of dried-up land reached into a horizon of low mountains and cloudless sky. All around him were barren, lifeless stretches of sand with occasional patches of sagebrush and blowing tumbleweed
. It was hard to believe that Zion, with its color-drenched stone and brilliant green foliage, was only an hour’s drive away. This land was open, flat, and lifeless. How could wild mustangs even survive out in this parched desert? Through the window, Jack watched the miles slip by.

  Grinning mischievously, Ashley deliberately began to chant, “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?” since she knew how much it got on Jack’s nerves.

  “Stop it!” he hissed. “Don’t be a dork.”

  “I wasn’t asking you, I was asking Mom. Hey, Mom, are we there yet?”

  Olivia was wrestling with the map. “I’m trying to figure out which road we’re supposed to take,” she answered. “I think we ought to be getting there pretty soon. And Ashley, I’ll let you know when we get there. In other words, you don’t have to ask again.”

  Funny, Jack thought—when they traveled, Steven usually did the driving, although Olivia was a perfectly good driver. Without ever talking about it, his parents seemed to divide their lives: His dad did the yard work, kept their car in good shape, and did most of the driving; his mother did the laundry, the food shopping, and packed the kids’ lunches every day. Both of them liked to cook, so they took turns with that.

  Jack and Ashley didn’t have any boy/girl division in their chores; they both had to stack the dirty dishes in the dishwasher and take the clean dishes out, fold their own clothes, keep their personal junk out of the living room, and run the vacuum cleaner. He wondered about Ethan and Summer, whether they had to do chores in their grandmother’s house on the reservation—or in what used to be their grandmother’s house. The social worker said that starting now, their grandmother would spend the rest of her life in a nursing home.

  Just to aggravate Jack, Ashley kept whispering, “Are we there yet? Are we there yet?” until he gave her an elbow in the ribs.

  “Mo-om, Jack hit me,” she whined, and then she started to laugh and said to Summer, “Just kidding. That’s how we used to act when we were little and took long trips in the car.”

  Summer blinked uncertainly.

  “Didn’t you do that?” Ashley asked her. “You must have gone on long trips in a car with your brother, didn’t you? Like, when you went to powwows?”

  “Grandmother never had a car,” Ethan answered. “So we never went anywhere, ’cause there was no bus, either. Just the school bus to junior high in Lander, outside the reservation. Summer doesn’t ride the bus ’cause she’s not in junior high yet.”

  “You mean your grandmother never left the reservation in her whole life?” Even though Jack hadn’t been talking to Ethan, he couldn’t help but blurt out the question. It seemed impossible that a person could live in the United States but never leave one tiny corner of it. Maybe it was because Jack and Ashley had been hauled around the country since they were old enough to walk.

  “Not when she could decide for herself.”

  “What does that mean? Did she leave when she was younger?” Jack pressed.

  Again Jack saw the flash of anger in Ethan’s eyes as he answered, “When Grandmother was a little girl like Summer, white people came and took her to a boarding school. She was supposed to learn to be like a white person—she didn’t want to, but they said she had to. They wouldn’t let her talk in Shoshone, only in English. Once she forgot and said something in Shoshone, so they taped her mouth shut and made her scrub the whole big gym floor on her hands and knees to punish her. It took her all night.”

  That was the most words they’d ever heard all at once from Ethan, and it left the Landons in stunned silence. Is this what his dad meant when he said Jack should walk around in Ethan’s shoes? As bad as all that sounded, Jack told himself, it still didn’t give Ethan the right to roll rocks on their heads.

  Steven answered, “Different times, different people, Ethan. That would never happen today. Any school official who punished a kid that way would be fired. Or maybe even arrested.”

  Olivia added, “Lots of things have changed for the better since your grandmother was a little girl. For just one example, wild mustangs used to be rounded up, jammed into big trucks with horrible conditions, and shipped to slaughterhouses, where they were butchered for dog food. Today we protect the mustangs.”

  Ethan just turned his face to the window and peered out.

  Dry and dusty, the rangeland that slid past their SUV now showed endless acres of yellowish brown grass, broken here and there by clumps of sagebrush and an occasional small tree. Behind the flat land, the mountains looked more like hills, cone-shaped brown hills dotted with junipers and pinyon pines.

  So this was the range that the Bureau of Land Management was sworn to protect. Fence posts made from stripped, narrow tree trunks held miles of barbed wire strung across the tops of the posts, and rows of telephone poles carried their own miles of electrical wires. To where? Jack couldn’t see any houses. Not a single “home, home on the range.” So who needed all that electricity?

  Olivia rattled the map and said, “I think this is it. We’re supposed to meet Art at this crossroad. Looks like we’re right on time.”

  It was close to sundown—around seven in the evening. Orange and rose-colored clouds streaked the horizon.

  “There he is,” Steven said, “in that flatbed truck parked on the side of the road ahead of us.” When they got closer, Art waved an arm out the window of the truck cab.

  “Gus is with him, too,” Ashley said. “But what’s all that stuff in the back of the truck?”

  “That’s the corral they’re going to set up at the water trap,” Steven answered. He waved back at Art, who started his vehicle and motioned for Steven to follow him.

  After a mile of dusty, unpaved road, Art stopped and Gus got out to open a gate. Once both vehicles had driven through, Gus closed the gate and got back in the truck.

  “Worst thing you can do,” Steven said, “is leave a gate open on rangeland. Sure as shootin’, the cattle will find it, and they’ll all get out and take a stroll along the highway.”

  “I haven’t seen any cattle,” Ashley said.

  “They’re around. They move a lot. It takes plenty of acreage to feed a cow.”

  They were no longer on any kind of road, but bumped along over the dirt and low brush, jarring the kids in the tailgate of the SUV. The sun was nearly gone, leaving only a faint smear of color along the horizon. Finally Art came to a halt, and Steven stopped right behind him.

  “Hi, Olivia, hi Steven, hi kids,” Art said all in one breath. “Gotta hurry. Gotta set up these panels before it’s too dark. Good thing there’s so much manpower here—me and Gus, Steven and the two boys.”

  “Me too,” Olivia said. “I may be short, but I’m pretty strong.”

  “And us too,” Ashley said. “Me and Summer can help.”

  “Tell you what,” Gus answered. “You girls see that stand of junipers over there?” He gestured to a clump of trees whose foliage looked almost black in the waning light. “That’s where we’re going to hide while we wait for the mustangs to come to the watering hole. Why don’t you two go and clear the ground inside the trees so we can set there. We brought a couple little camp stools and some tarps.”

  “You want me to make a blind?” Summer asked.

  “You really know how to make a blind?” Gus seemed surprised.

  “Sure. I’m an Indian, you know.”

  “Then go right to it, honey,” he told her. “There’s a lot of us here, and we need plenty of cover to stay hid from those mustangs.”

  The men had begun to unload railed panels from the back of the truck, setting them upright around the small enclosed spring where the horses would come to drink. Each panel stood higher, even, than Steven’s head, which was pretty high. The half dozen metal rails that made up the panels were unpainted to keep them from reflecting moonlight or even light from the stars, which would shine thick and bright overhead in that dark, isolated desert. Where one panel joined the next, the men slid bolt-like fasteners to hook them together.


  Jack tried to help, but mostly he seemed to be in the way until Art told him, “See this here rope? One end’ll be tied to the gate, but the gate’s gotta stay open till the horses come inside—if we’re lucky and they do come in. The rope’s gonna stretch over to that bunch of junipers where we’ll be hiding. When the horses get into the trap, we’ll pull the rope and shut the gate on ’em.”

  “I get it,” Jack said.

  “So I’m gonna lay this rope down across the ground now, and you boys cover her up with dirt.”

  That didn’t sound like a very exciting job, considering that the men got to set up panels around the spring. And since the trees stood about a hundred feet distant from the water trap, Jack and Ethan would have to do a lot of digging and covering up. As they got close to the blind, the last of the light faded, but not before Jack had noticed how skillfully Summer was weaving broken branches through the spaces between the trees. All of them would be well hidden.

  By the time the full moon rose over Chloride Canyon, everything was in place.

  “Now,” Art said, “we wait. And we must stay ab-so-lute-ly quiet while we wait.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Jack had never before been in a situation like this. Eight people sat waiting in that blind made from juniper trees and broken branches, all of them in touching distance of one another, but no one spoke a single word. Not even a whisper. It had to be hard on Ashley, who was a nonstop talker, but she seemed content to lie on her back and watch the stars weave themselves into the bright, shining carpet of the Milky Way.

  All through the first hour, Jack strained his ears to listen for whinnies in the distance, but he heard nothing except the rustling of the grass as the breeze played with it. Halfway into the second hour, he stopped looking at his watch, and his thoughts drifted. Drifted…. Maybe he was falling asleep. In his half-awake state he heard it—the same whinny he’d heard echoing off the cliffs the night before.