In reality, this was because Salto, driven to madness by the lack of radio in the stable, had broken through the walls of his stall and had just rioted the previously sleeping cattle gathered near the barn. They now stampeded directly toward Pete and Beatriz, the stallion at their head. He was an enormous horse, nearly eighteen hands tall, and as chestnut as a violin. The cows were red as dirt with white faces and had horns for hanging men on. There were many of them.
Beatriz did not wait for Pete to move; she simply grabbed his leg and dragged him out of the animals’ path just in time. The wire she’d gathered for her antenna scattered across the ground as she fell on her backside. Dust churned over them both, but all of their insides remained where they belonged. Pete sat up just in time to see the cattle slowly wind to a halt as they reached a fence line. Salto, on the other hand, sailed right over it.
Beatriz had no feelings for Salto either way, but she knew as well as any other Soria that his rare and pricey seed put food on their table.
She pushed up from the ground and ran.
“What are you doing?” Pete shouted.
“Getting that horse back!”
Pete leaped to his feet, stepping hard into his boot to put it back on, as Beatriz had nearly pulled it off in her hurry to drag him free of the stampede’s path. Then he, too, broke into a run—only he ran for the Mercury.
This was the moment their love story began.
It may seem like madness for a young woman to chase a runaway horse, as a galloping horse travels at twenty-five miles an hour and a galloping woman travels at only fifteen. But runaway horses rarely have a purpose, and young women chasing them often do. When combined with the asset of a young man in a station wagon, the question of catching the horse becomes a matter of when, not if.
But when was still a long distance off.
The Mercury did not start straightaway—it turns out that it is not good for cars to be jostled by giants—and by the time Pete got the engine running and the headlights on, both Beatriz and Salto were out of sight.
“Sorry, Tony,” he said, although Tony was still quite a distance away, having given them space as Beatriz had requested. Pete headed off in the direction the horse and the young woman had gone.
Several hundred yards away, Salto was pelting across the scrub with the enthusiasm of a horse that had been kept in a stall for too many years. Beatriz was not keeping up, but she still had him in her sights by the time Pete drove up alongside her. The station wagon scuffed to a halt and without pause Beatriz climbed into the passenger seat.
“We should try to cut him off,” she said quite calmly, although she was out of breath. “Is there anything like a rope in here?”
“I don’t know,” Pete replied. “This isn’t my car.”
Beatriz squeezed between the seats to look in the back, striking her head on the roof as the Mercury experimented with gravity. Tony did not have a rope in the backseat of his car, nor in the cargo area, where Pete had spent a night. As she rummaged, Pete overtook Salto and skidded to a halt before him. The stallion, however, merely leaped over the station wagon like the cow over the moon.
“Gee,” Pete said.
As he hit the gas again, Beatriz climbed back into the front seat. She was holding a revolver—an enormous Ruger Single-Six with a dark wood grip and a long, long barrel. It would have appeared at home in a very good Western movie and was large enough to have been purchased by a man who judged cars with a tape measure.
Pete was scandalized. “You’re not going to shoot him?”
“This was in the back,” Beatriz said. “It was cocked. That’s very dangerous.”
“It’s not my gun!”
Beatriz closed it away in the glove box as Pete tried once more to block Salto with the station wagon. Again the horse sailed over them.
“Just follow him,” Beatriz said. “He’ll tire eventually.”
“What will you lead him back with?”
Beatriz held up a silk tie that she had found under the passenger seat along with a large quantity of marijuana, a fifth of whiskey, and a small stack of cash. So Pete and Beatriz and Salto traipsed over the county as the stars moved slowly overhead and the mountains told stories to themselves. An hour into the night, Salto caught the scent of mares, and his journey took on a renewed focus. The stallion led the Mercury through the maze of abandoned stick buildings that used to be a mining camp, and the force of his passion caused already weak porches to collapse upon themselves. Then he careened through a muddy creek bed that sighed as it was galloped through and then driven through. Then past an abandoned general store and an empty house with a leaning, ghost-toothed picket fence out front. Then back into the desert hills.
Antelope joined them briefly, surrounding the car with hooved animals before they remembered their wildness and disappeared into the night. Far overhead, an upwardly mobile owl that had chased the whisper of a miracle far up into the atmosphere spotted the Mercury down below and dove after it. The owl was so far above the Earth that it had thought the station wagon was small enough to be prey; once it discovered its mistake, it peeled off just before hitting the windshield.
Beatriz watched it fly away. “You don’t have darkness in you, do you?” she asked.
“Just the hole in my heart,” Pete replied.
As the night cantered on, the stallion covered hundreds of acres to a ranch many miles away, only vaguely known by the occupants of Bicho Raro. The sign over the gate read double d ranch, and the gate was closed. Salto leaped it with aplomb and disappeared between the barns as mares sang winsomely from inside one of them.
Beatriz and Pete exchanged a glance. Pete knew nothing about this ranch, because he was from Oklahoma. Beatriz knew nothing about this ranch, because she did not own any roosters. In 1962, appearing at a ranch at night without warning was a good way to get shot. But in 1962, allowing a stallion to pillage another person’s barn was also a good way to get shot. Pete and Beatriz weighed these options.
Pete stopped the vehicle.
“Lotta cars,” he said. Because there were indeed a healthy number of vehicles parked in the drive on the other side of the gate.
“A lot of lights,” Beatriz added, because each barn had a glowing orange light on it.
“Well, that’s okay,” Pete said, but doubtfully. “Because we’re not doing anything criminal.”
They clambered over the gate.