Echo Burning

They make sure I know it.”
    “You should get out. You’ve got forty-eight hours.”
    She nodded. “Forty-eight hours exactly, I think. They’ll let him out at seven in the morning. They’ll drive all night to be there for him. It’s about seven hours. So he’ll be back home this time on Monday. Just after lunch.”
    “So get out, right now.”
    “I can’t.”
    “You should,” he said. “This place is impossible. It’s like the outside world doesn’t exist.”
    She smiled, bitterly. “Tell me about it. I’ve lived here nearly seven years. My whole adult life, give or take.”
    She hung her hat and her pocketbook on a nail in the wall. Did all the saddling work herself, quickly and efficiently. She was lithe and deft. The slim muscles in her arms bunched and relaxed as she lifted the saddles. Her fingers were precise with the buckles. She readied two horses in a quarter of the time he had taken to do one.
    “You’re pretty good at this,” he said.
    “Gracias, señor,” she said. “I get a lot of practice.”
    “So how can they believe you keep falling off, regular as clockwork?”
    “They think I’m clumsy.”
    He watched her lead his horse out of its stall. It was one of the geldings. She was tiny beside it. In the jeans, he could have spanned her waist with his hand.
    “You sure don’t look clumsy,” he said.
    She shrugged. “People believe what they need to.”
    He took the reins from her. The horse huffed through its nose and shifted its feet. Moved its head up and down, up and down. His hand went with it.
    “Walk him out,” she said.
    “Shouldn’t we have leather pants? And riding gloves?”
    “Are you kidding? We never wear that stuff here. It’s way too hot.”
    He waited for her. Her horse was the smaller mare. She wedged her hat on her head and took her pocketbook off the nail and put it in a saddlebag. Then she followed him, leading her mare confidently out into the yard, into the heat and the sun.
    “O.K., like this,” she said. She stood on the mare’s left and put her left foot in the stirrup. Gripped the horn with her left hand and bounced twice on her right leg and jacked herself smoothly into the saddle. He tried it the same way. Put his left foot in the stirrup, grasped the horn, put all his weight on the stirrup foot and straightened his leg and pulled with hishand. Leaned his weight forward and right and suddenly he was up there in the seat. The horse felt very wide, and he was very high in the air. About the same as riding on an armored personnel carrier.
    “Put your right foot in,” she said.
    He jammed his foot into the other stirrup and squirmed around until he was as comfortable as he was ever going to get. The horse waited patiently.
    “Now bunch the reins on the horn, in your left hand.”
    That part was easy. It was just a question of imitating the movies. He let his right hand swing free, like he was carrying a Winchester repeater or a coil of rope.
    “O.K., now just relax. And kick gently with your heels.”
    He kicked once and the horse lurched into a walk. He used his left hand on the horn to keep himself steady. After a couple of paces he began to understand the rhythm. The horse was moving him left and right and forward and back with every alternate step. He held tight to the horn and used pressure from his feet to keep his body still.
    “Good,” she said. “Now I’ll go in front and he’ll follow. He’s pretty docile.”
    I would be, too, he thought, a hundred ten degrees and two hundred fifty pounds on my back . Carmen clicked her tongue and kicked her heels and her horse moved smoothly around his and led the way through the yard and past the house. She swayed easily in the saddle, the muscles in her thighs bunching and flexing as she kept her balance. Her hat was down over her eyes. Her left hand held the reins and her right was hanging loose at her side. He caught the blue flash of the fake diamond in the sun.
    She led him out under the gate to the road and straight across without looking or stopping. He glanced left and right, south and north, and saw nothing at all except heat shimmer and distant silver mirages. On the far side of the road was a step about a foot high onto the limestone ledge. He leaned forward and let the horse climb it underneath him. Then the rock rose gently into the middle distance, reaching maybe fifty feet of elevation in the best part of a mile. There were deep fissures running east-west and washed-out