The Shuswap most days in August is as smooth as a millpond, a
glittering expanse of sunlit glass. Nonetheless, it's a treacherous
lake, full of unsuspected hazards. Snags and deadheads lurk along the
wooded shoreline, and with no warning at all a storm can sweep down
from the hills with hurricane force.
Those are the days when houseboats break loose from
their moorings, sailboats capsize and fir trees topple across
campgrounds, crushing vacationers in their tents.
But on this particular August evening, as the Watley
man half-dozed in the front seat of his Plymouth with a warm beer in
his hand, such dangers seemed remote.
The Watley man was not short of things to worry about.
The farmwives in this end of the valley, while generous enough with
their cups of tea and their raisin scones, were begrudging with their
cash. They'd buy a bottle of liniment or two, a tin of salve for the
baby's bottom, but when it came to fancy soaps and hand-lotions, their
egg-money stayed in the kitchen cupboard.
Which might explain why this route had changed hands
half a dozen times in the past three years. Some of his predecessors
had found salaried jobs. Others had dropped out of sight. One Watley
man, according to local rumour, had simply abandoned his car by the
side of the road and disappeared in mid-route. Maybe that's what
happened to all old salesmen, the Watley man thought ruefully. They
faded away like old soldiers, vanishing with their shabby sample cases
into the green Okanagan landscape. But more likely they just moved to
Kamloops or Vancouver.
Meanwhile his wife back in Penticton was dropping
hints about a new living room suite; his house taxes were overdue; and
after a year of back-country roads the springs on the Plymouth were
shot. The Watley man belched discreetly, pulled down the sun-visor and
opened another beer.
The girl on the white horse, ambling quielty around
the curve of the bay, caught him unawares. One minute he was alone,
and the next minute she was there at the water's edge, silhouetted
against the low sun. She was riding a big sleek-coated white stallion
with a nervous look in its eye that suggested the Watley man would do
well to stay out of hoof-range.
It was far too much horse for a slip of a girl, and
yet as she gathered up the reins and nudged the animal forward, she
seemed effortlessly in control.
She was a tall girl, in faded blue jeans and a man's
denim shirt several sizes too large. A little too thin for her height,
thought the Watley man, assessing her with an expert eye, but what
there was of her was nicely assembled. And no more than sixteen, with
that irresistible bloom that fades by twenty. She had a small, pale,
pointed face, and hair so blonde it was almost silver. Her eyes were
green, green as new leaves, green as meadow-grass, thought the Watley
man who, like every good salesman, was half-way to being a poet.
As they approached the Plymouth the big horse bridled,
curling back his lips to show huge, foam-flecked teeth. The slanting
light through the alders gave his smooth flanks a greenish cast. He
fixed the Watley man with a baleful eye.
"Gently, Bainseach," said the girl, leaning
forward to stroke the animal's neck.
"That's a damned funny name for a horse,"
said the Watley man through the open window. "What kind of name
is that?"
The girl glanced down at him. Her expression was
solemn, almost schoolmarmish, he thought. "It's Irish," she
said. "He's an Irish horse."
She nodded. He liked her gravity, the directness of
her gaze, the cool aplomb with which she sat her horse.
"And what's your name, then?"
"Siobhan." She gave the name a Gaelic lilt,
like a phrase of music.
"Can't say I've ever run into a Siobhan before.
Plenty of Kathleens, and a Colleen or two. And it seems to me I recall
a Bridget. None of them as good-looking as you." Most girls her
age would have giggled, maybe blushed a little, wondered which way to
look. This one narrowed her grass-green eyes and stared him straight
in the eye.
Watley man felt an all-too-familiar yearning. This
won't do, he reminded himself. This won't do at all. He'd sworn, after
the last time, that he'd never be led astray again. He'd had a city
job back then, steady salaried work in a lady's shoe store.
And he'd lost it when he'd let his eyes and his hands
wander.
But oh, the sweetness, the slimness, the terrible
dangerous innocence of young girls. The tender curves of their thighs
in skimpy shorts, the slenderness of their cinched waists in summer
dirndles, all thrown away, thought the Watley man, on fumble-fingered
youths in the back seats of Chevies.
"Goodbye," said the girl, and gently kneed
her mount. Her mouth was grave as a saint's, but her eyes were full of
a wild green light. With his heart in his throat the Watley man
watcher her ride off, plaits bouncing like braided moonlight against
her retreating back.
The next afternoon he happened to find himself parked
by that same grassy stretch of lakeshore. And purely by chance, just
as the sun slipped into the lake in a dazzle of rose and gold, the
green-eyed girl rode out of the larch trees.
She slid from the saddle and wrapped the reins around
an alder branch. She was wearing a white halter that left her midriff
bare, and tight-legged jeans. The Watley man realized, with a shock,
how very thin she was, how unnaturally pale. Her skin, which should
have been brown from the August sun, had an almost nacreous glow. He
wondered if she had been ill. There was infantile paralysis all up and
down the valley that summer. It could explain her precocious air of
gravity, of self-containment.
"I've brought you something," the Watley man
said.
The girl raised her brows. Her solemnity at once
disturbed and profoundly excited him. He reached into the back seat of
the Plymouth and pulled out his sample case. Rummaging among the tins
of zinc ointment and cinnamon sticks, he found the box of Watley's
Rose-Scented Soap he had packed that morning. The girl examined it
curiously, and dropped it into a leather bag on her saddlehorn. She
did not thank him, and he could not tell whether she was pleased with
it or not.
Uncertainty made him rash. "Do I get a kiss for
that?"
She shrugged and stepped closer, standing pliant and
unprotesting in his embrace. Her lips were glassy cool, her tongue
meeting his like a small darting fish. The bones of her back and
shoulders felt as porous and delicate as a bird's.
"You're a witch," he told her. "A
beautiful little green-eyed witch."
She stepped out of his arms as coolly as she had
entered them. "I have to go now," she said.
"Yes," said the Watley man, torn between
common sense and the dreadful urgency of his desire.
Behind her the white horse whickered softly. The girl
turned, unfastened the reins, swung lithely into the saddle. She
looked down at the Watley man. "I ride here every day," she
said.
On the third day she came to him again, as willingly
as a bride. The Watley man's hands worked deftly, intently, undoing
the buttons on her denim shirt. Her small, high breasts were white as
skim milk, faintly veined with blue. She stood quietly, her face
somber and self-absorbed, as he unbuckled her belt.
Naked, she was narrow and supple as an otter. Her
compliance astonished and aroused him. She seemed curiously childlike,
sexless, almost, in her unquestioning obedience. There was nothing he
could not do with her, to her. Her small pale hands grasped him,
stroked him, as artlessly as she had caressed the white stallion's
neck. He cupped her face in his two hands, as gently as he might have
held a piece of egg-shell china.
"Do you want to please me, little girl?" he
whispered with his lips against her white-gold hair.
Almost imperceptibly she nodded. And gently, gently,
with his blood singing in his ears, he drew down her silken head. At
the last moment, realizing what was expected of her, she tried to pull
away. He held her firmly as she wriggled in his grasp. Then, with a
small sigh of assent, or acquiescence, she did as he wished.
In the midst of it all he heard the white horse
whinny, heard the angry, impatient scraping of hooves on the sandy
ground.
Afterwards her cheeks were flushed, and she refused to
meet his eyes. As soon as she was dressed she rode off without a word
or a backward glance.
That's the last I'll see of her, he thought, with
guilt, and sadness, and under it all an immense relief. But, the next
evening he heard a whisper of leaves, a faint clicking of hooves, and
when he looked up she was there. She was smiling shyly, hesitantly, as
though they were meeting for the first time.
"I'm riding that way," she said, pointing
round the curve of the bay. "Come with me."
He shook his head. "I'm a city boy," he
said. "Never been on a horse in my life."
"It doesn't matter. Put your foot in the stirrup,
that's right, and pull yourself up behind me."
He wrapped his arms around her, nuzzled her downy
nape. She looked over her shoulder, laughed; then they were cantering
briskly along the shore.
|
"Hang on tight," said the green-eyed girl, and she
kneed the white horse to a gallop.
His hat blew off. The wind tore at his shirt and
stung his cheeks. He could feel the stallion's great smooth
muscles moving |
by B. Huffman
Dragon
Works Graphics |
under him. They raced through a cow-pasture, leaped a
fence. Then they were on an abandoned logging road, dust billowing up
under the horse's hooves, the lake a steel blue glitter glimpsed
through fir and hemlock boughs.
"Where in God's name are we going?" asked
the Watley man once or twice. But if she knew, she chose not to
answer.
Their pace slowed as the gravel road dwindled away
into a narrow, rutted track through old-growth forest. They had left
the campgrounds and the last of the summer cabins miles behind them;
they were moving ever deeper into unknown country, into the gathering
dusk.
When they came down to the lake again it had turned to
slate gray and silver. A thin mist was rising. The air smelled of
pine-resin, and water-weeds, and darkness. Here there was no beach,
only a strip of rank grass sloping steeply down to a granite ledge. As
they rode out of the trees the Watley man could hear the slap and suck
of the dark water washing over the rocks.
Without warning the girl drove her knee sharply into
the stallion's side. The animal snorted and at once broke into a hard
gallop, pounding headlong towards the lake. Realizing too late what
was happening, the Watley man, who could no more swim than he could
ride, snatched uselessly at the reins. Just before they plunged over
the edge, the girl, who had been crouched over the horse's neck,
straightened and leaned back against the Watley man. Desperately he
clutched at her. Beneath his hands, where there should have been
yielding flesh, he felt ridges and knobs and the hollow of naked bone.
She turned, and when he saw her face a great shriek
rose in his throat. The sound he made was like the noise of a bandsaw
striking metal.
And then he was falling and falling helplessly through
bottomless depths of water, and the stallion swam with him, as fierce
and as ravenous as a great white shark.
The lips curled back from the huge square teeth, the
mane floated out like a tangled hank of weed. Hooves flailed, and the
deadly jaws of the water-horse, the Each-Uisge, opened. As his
lungs filled the Watley man felt skin, flesh, muscles tear and shred
like rotten fabric. Blood gushed, coiling and flowering around him.
In a bright cascade of bubbles the water-horse dragged
its prey to the bottom. The last thing the Watley man saw was a dark
gleam of cobalt glass. Half-buried in sand and the wreckage of a
salesman's sample case was a Watley's liniment bottle.
