Johnny Calico first saw Graylady on a mild spring morning, one so full of the damp scent of
life that he could almost believe its promise of new beginnings.  Spires of smoke rising from south
of Provo and northwest of Orem told the truth, however.  The fires still burned, a neighborhood here,
a city block there, and would continue to do so as long as there were houses to feed the flames.

Johnny crinkled his nose against the trace of smoke and ash in the air. Before he'd left the reservation, he used to love the smell of smoke, pungent with memories of fry bread and mutton
stew and shelter from bitter winter winds.  Now, it always smelled of death, even smoke from the
clean fires that burned in the woods far from the homes.

Still, he preferred the outside air and was glad that it would soon be mild enough to sleep outside. 
He hated sleeping in the houses, with the stink of blood soaked into the walls, and probably a ghost
or two just looking for a ten-year-old Navajo boy to torment.  Once, Mom Tyler had told him that Anglo houses didn't have ghosts.  She had said it flatly as if she couldn't possibly be wrong, but Johnny wasn't sure--his grandfather believed in ghosts.  He wondered if the Tyler home had ghosts or if by now it had burned to the ground, but he didn't know.  Since the Death, he had lived in twenty or thirty houses, and had wandered all over Utah Valley, moving every week or so, but he'd never gone near the Tyler's neighborhood again.  If the men from the Church were still looking for him, that would be the first place they'd check.

This time, he'd picked north Orem, and, in the dark of the night, had ridden his bike with one
of his packs hooked over the handlebars and the other on his back.  He'd worn the precious rifle, found just two weeks before, slung over his shoulder. 

He hated riding in the dark.  One big piece of glass and he'd have a flat tire, which would mean endless searching to replace it and might delay his trip just when it was critical to get started.  But daylight was too dangerous, so it had been in the dark that he'd traveled north, picking a house at random when he felt he'd gone far enough.  It hadn't been hard to get in--it never was; people had been too busy dying to worry about locking doors--and Johnny had spent the night on the couch.

In the morning he'd gone into the backyard to breathe the spring air, and to check out the neighborhood from the protection of the backyard fence.  Peeking through the old redwood slats,
he saw her.  She sat among the weeds in the yard of the house across from him, staring at something behind and above him. Mount Timpanogas, perhaps.  She was about thirty-five or forty, and, despite her baggy sweater, Johnny could see that she was thin.

Suddenly her shoulders began shaking and she raised a sleeve to wipe her eyes.  He named her then.  Graylady.  Not because of her fair skin, paler even than Mom Tyler's, or because of her dark hair that fell raggedly around her shoulders, but because, as he watched her alone in the weeds, it seemed that her heart was as gray as the ash from the ever-present fires, her soul as burned and fragile.  

**

The horse came almost a week later.  Normally, Johnny would have moved on by then, but he'd been agonizing whether it was late enough in the spring to begin the trip.  If he waited too long, the desert would be impossible.  A two-day rainstorm decided the issue.  Rain in the valleys meant snow on Soldier Summit, which was the only way he could get across the mountains.  So he waited out the rain, opening the side and back windows at night to let in the cool, wet air.

The morning after the rain, the sound of hooves on pavement jolted him awake.  He leapt out
of bed and ran to the window, heart pounding, worried that one of the bishop's riders had finally caught up with him.

A horse, with no trace of saddle, bridle, or rider, trotted down the road, veered into Graylady's yard and then abruptly stopped, as if it had come home.  After a few furtive looks in different directions, it began grabbing mouthfuls of grass. The horse was a bay, a dark red with a black
mane and tail. Well-bred, Arabian or Thoroughbred maybe.

Johnny couldn't believe his eyes. It was the first riderless horse that he'd seen in the seven months since the Death, and he wondered if it had run wild all this time or, if not, who could have
been careless enough to let it out.

 He wondered, too, why it had stopped so suddenly in Graylady's yard.  Only a few nights before, on a cold, starry night, he'd prayed with all heart to whatever ancestors might be listening
that he'd find his way back to his grandfather.

And now a horse was practically given to him.  A horse would be much better than the bike.  With a pair of wire cutters, he could ride cross-country and not have to worry about being seen on
the roads.  He was sure he could find some wire-cutters, and he remembered a house in Provo that had several saddles and bridles in the garage.  He watched the horse, barely able to contain his excitement.  This was what he needed, what he'd been searching for, the miracle that would see him back to the reservation and his grandfather.

**  

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