In the Moon of Red Ponies

by James Lee Burke

  Down the road someone was having a fight. He heard a woman shout, then a car or truck door slam, followed by more shouting. Enough was enough. He opened the kitchen window and stuck his head out. “Shut up that goddamn racket!” he yelled.

  It was warm and snug in the kitchen, the iron lids on his stove etched with light from the firebox. The rest of the lower floor had been destroyed by river ice, but the kitchen had been built on higher ground and the glass was still in the windows, the shelves, icebox, and chimney intact. He heated a skillet, then poured flapjack batter into it and broke eggs on the side. He removed a jar of jam and a stick of butter and a loaf of bread from the icebox, toasted the bread in a separate skillet, and sat down to eat.

  He looked up and saw a fat Indian woman with braids staring at him through the window. Before he could get up from the chair, she had gone around to the front of the house. A moment later, she was pounding on the door with her fist.

  “Nobody home! Get out of here!” he yelled.

  “Help me!” she cried.

  He walked through the clutter in the front of the house and jerked open the door. “Was you the woman yelling her head off down the road?” he said.

  She smelled of sweat, talcum powder, river damp, and alcohol, and her dress looked like a burlap tent fitted over a haystack. Her left eye was swollen and watery, as though it had been stung by a bee. “My husband says he’s gonna kill me and my baby. Call the police,” she said.

  “See any phone wires going to this house?” Wyatt said.

  “He’s got a knife. He took the car keys and run up the hill,” she said.

  Wyatt walked out onto the grass. He gazed up the hill and at the trees and at the birds singing in them and at the steam rising off the river. Dry thunder rippled across the sky. He watched his Appaloosa in the railed lot in back of the house. The Appaloosa was eating grass through the fence, tearing it out in divots. “Where’s the baby at?” Wyatt said.

  “In my car. I ran away. I was scared,” she said.

  “Your baby is in the car and your old man is up on that hill and you’re here?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I ain’t no ‘sir.’ I tell you what. I got to take a shower. Bring your baby to the house and I’ll drive y’all into Missoula. I’ll leave the door unlocked. In the meantime, I don’t want to hear no more yelling or carrying on out here.”

  He closed the door in her face.

  The woman walked back down the road and around the bend the road made between two wooded hills. Wyatt stood among the water-damaged furniture in his living room, tossing a cell phone and catching it in his palm. She was a half-breed, he thought, one he had seen somewhere before. A truck stop outside Billings or Bozeman? He wasn’t sure. Truckers called them pavement princesses. This one looked more like Native America’s answer to the Bride of Frankenstein, he thought.

  But the important fact was that she hadn’t asked him if he had a cell phone, even though it had been sticking out of his jeans pocket in full view. He flipped open his cell and brought up the numbers he kept in the memory bank. He looked at my number, pushed the dial button, then thought about it a moment and killed the call. He slipped the cell back in his pocket and went upstairs to the shower.

  He turned on the water and put his hand inside the spray until steam began to drift out the open window. He pulled off his T-shirt and hung it on the outside doorknob, brushed his teeth in the basin, and spit. When he looked into the mirror, his own face reminded him of the edge of a hatchet. Through the window he heard his Appaloosa nicker in the lot.

  THE TWO KILLERS, whose names were Tex Barker and Lynwood Peeples, worked their way down the slope through fir trees until they hit the dirt road. They moved quickly through the blueness of the dawn, into the lee of the house, flattening themselves against the side wall so they would not be seen from a window. They could hear the shower running upstairs and see steam floating through a screened window into the wind. They began working their way toward the back door while Wyatt Dixon’s Appaloosa spooked in circles.

  When they entered the kitchen, the firebox in the stove was glowing, the circular iron lids immaculately clean with heat. A plate of flapjacks, eggs, and toast and a full pot of coffee sat on the table. The shorter man, Tex Barker, whose gnarled brow was too long for the rest of his face, snapped on a stun gun, and an electric thread danced between the two prongs on the end. His partner, Lynwood, carried a .22 Ruger semiautomatic in one hand and in the other a cloth bag framed with wood hasps and a wood handle, one similar in design to a nineteenth-century carpetbag. The two men began walking up the stairs toward the sounds of water drumming on the sides of a tin shower stall.

  At the top of the stairs they could see a T-shirt hanging on the outside knob of a door that was half opened on the bathroom. Tex Barker was in the lead, the stun gun tingling with power in his palm. Then Barker felt his partner grab him by the back of his belt. He turned and stared at him.

  “His food’s getting cold on the table. Something’s wrong,” Lynwood whispered.

  “What did you say?” Tex asked.

  Lynwood was starting to back down the stairs, his cloth bag rubbing heavily against the wall.

  “No. We take him,” Tex said hoarsely.

  But Lynwood wasn’t listening. Force the play, just do it, Barker thought, and charged ahead to the top of the stairs, his stubby thighs knotting like a dwarf’s.

  “Howdy doodie, boys?” Wyatt Dixon said, stepping out from a bedroom doorway and swinging a cast-iron skillet squarely into the center of Tex Barker’s face.

  Barker crashed backwards into his partner, his nose broken and streaming blood. Lynwood Peeples tried to raise the Ruger and fire, but the iron skillet came down on his forearm, snapping something inside, and he felt his fingers straighten like useless sticks and heard the gun clatter to the foot of the stairs. Wyatt swung the skillet into Peeples’s mouth, splitting his lip, then down on the crown of his skull and the back of his neck. Peeples and Barker both rolled to the bottom of the stairwell, but Wyatt followed them down and swung again, this time catching Peeples on the elbow when he tried to protect his face with his arm.

  Each blow snapped off teeth at the gumline, sent bruises all the way into the bone, slung blood on the walls. With one hand Wyatt picked up Peeples by his collar and shoved his face down on a stove lid and held it there. Barker was rolled up into a ball, but while Peeples screamed and fought to get loose from Wyatt’s grasp, Barker managed to pull a stiletto from his jeans and flick it open. He stabbed the blade deep into Wyatt’s thigh, just before the skillet came down again and almost ripped Barker’s ear from his head.

  Barker fell out the door into the backyard, with Peeples tumbling right on top of him, the side of his face blistered and puckered from his chin to his hairline. Wyatt pushed open the screen and stepped down hard onto the grass, the stiletto embedded almost to the handle in his thigh, his pants leg painted with blood all the way to the heel of his boot. But Wyatt no longer had the skillet in his hand. Instead, he held what looked like an antique rifle, one with a big hammer on it and long-distance, elevated sights. When Peeples tried to get to his feet, Wyatt butt-stroked him alongside the head, then drove the butt of the rifle into his kidney.

  And all the while Wyatt’s eyes showed neither pain nor anger, like two pieces of glass with a black insect trapped inside each one. At that moment Barker was sure he was about to die. Then he saw Wyatt waver and lose balance temporarily, his eyes close and his mouth form a cone, as though a wave of nausea had suddenly washed through his vitals.

  Barker rose to his feet, then pulled Peeples up from the grass by one arm. The two of them hobbled down the road like men who had been broken on the wheel, holding each other erect, streaked with blood, looking behind them, their faces twitching with shock and fear. Wyatt fell against the fence railing of his horse lot and pulled back the hammer on the working replica of his Sharps buffalo rifle. But the mountain crests and the fir trees on the slopes and th
e cottonwoods along the river tilted sideways, and he fell backward on the ground as though someone had severed all the motors that went to his legs.

  He pulled the cell phone from his blue jeans pocket and pushed the redial button, then lay back in the coolness of the grass, the cell phone against his ear, the sky and the clouds whirling above him.

  “Howdy doodie, Brother Holland?” he said after he got me on the line.

  “What is it this time, Wyatt?” I said.

  “I’m up here on the Blackfoot. Beautiful morning, counselor. But I think I might be bleeding to death,” he said, and passed out.

  Chapter 12

  THAT EVENING I SAT by Wyatt Dixon’s bed at St. Pat’s Hospital and tried to figure out the strange processes that must have governed his thinking. Had he called me rather than 911 only because my number was automatically activated by the redial button? Or had he factored me into his life as some kind of symbiotic brother-in-arms? And, more essentially, how could a man who was so brave be capable of so much evil? He had perhaps come within fifteen minutes of dying, had been in surgery four hours, and now lay in traction, his thigh encased in plaster, refusing painkillers, because, he explained, “Dope puts un-Christian-like thoughts in my brain cells.”

  He stonewalled the cops, stating he had no idea who had attacked him or where the attackers had gone. “What I have told you officers is just a picture from the other side of life in this land of the free and home of the brave,” he said. “It is like many a sad situation in the world of dim lights, thick smoke, and loud, loud music, where honky-tonk angels and men with broken hearts play. Sirs, I have came often upon these scenes of destruction, and I heard the groans of the dying but I didn’t hear nobody pray.”

  The cops put away their notebooks in disgust and left the room.

  Except for Darrel McComb, who stood at the foot of the bed, snapping a piece of gum between his molars. “You a fan of Vern Gosdin and Hank Williams? Don’t bother answering that. I just wanted you to be aware I know where all that cornpone crap comes from,” Darrel said.

  “In my correspondence with President Bush, I have asked him to put aside extra money for lawmen such as yourself. While the rest of us is sleeping safe in our beds, you are out there fighting the criminals that is turning our great country into a dungheap. Even when I was standing dirty and hungry on the punishment barrel in Huntsville Pen, I knowed it was men like you that was protecting the nation from the likes of me. You have kept the Stars and Stripes popping smartly atop every institution in our fine nation, including the jails where this lonely cowboy slept in shackles and chains. I say God bless you, noble sir.”

  “You listen, you hillbilly moron,” Darrel said. “I know you broke into Greta Lundstrum’s house. You think you’re some kind of one-man intelligence operation? Here’s a big flash for you. Meltdowns and ignorant peckerwoods don’t get to be intelligence operatives. You got the names of Tex Barker and Lynwood Peeples out of her house. Those are the guys who buried that shank in your thigh. They were carrying a bagful of tools to torture you with. Is it starting to add up for you now? You’ve stuck your dork in the wall socket, Gomer. That means you start cooperating with us or we’re going to let them recycle you into fish chum.”

  Wyatt stared at Darrel McComb, his mouth twisting with each word Darrel spoke, his eyes blinking with feigned awe. “You have done convinced me of the fact you are not an ordinary policeman. I am contacting President Bush immediately to see if he can find federal employment for you. I have never seen such a shameful waste of mental talents.”

  “Who’s Mabus?” Darrel asked.

  Wyatt started to speak, then was silent. A strange transformation seemed to take place in his face. He looked straight ahead, his eyes thoughtful, his mouth compressed. He raised his right hand off the sheet and ticked a callus with his thumbnail, his eyes uplifted at Darrel now. “I ain’t sure who he is. But I got a notion he’s a whole lot bigger than any little shithouse operation you got around here. I seen that name wrote inside a—”

  “Inside what?” Darrel said.

  “I need my chemical cocktail. I’m done talking with you,” Wyatt said, his sardonic attitude gone now, his expression sullen.

  After Darrel McComb left the room, a nurse brought in a glass containing the orange medicine that smelled as if it had been dipped out of a settling pond at a sewage works. Wyatt drank the glass empty and continued to stare into space.

  “You saw the name ‘Mabus’ written inside what, Wyatt?” I said.

  “A pentagram. The woman who wrote it there knows what a pentagram means, too. Her daddy was a preacher.”

  “The sign of the devil?”

  “I ain’t got no more to say on it. God, my leg hurts. Them boys who visited me was a pair of mean motor scooters, wasn’t they?”

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON, Saturday, I was Johnny American Horse’s best man at his and Amber Finley’s wedding on the lawn of a small white woodframe church with a tiny belfry, set against the backdrop of the Mission Mountains, rising like ancient glaciers straight out of the green earth into the clouds. The ceremony was conducted by both a Methodist minister and an Indian shaman who was the great-grandson of the Lakota mystic Black Elk. Amber wore a white dress with frills on it and purple suede cowboy boots, and looked radiant and happy and beautiful in the sunshine. Johnny, conservative as always, wore what was evidently his only suit, one that brought back memories I did not want to entertain on such a fine afternoon. The suit and vest were narrow-cut, dark pinstripe, just like the suit worn by L. Q. Navarro on the night he died.

  Johnny and Amber had sent out no formal invitations, but the churchyard was crowded with their friends—wranglers, feed growers from the Jocko Valley, musicians, log haulers, university professors, hard-core drunks, organic farmers, writers and artists, Indians from the Salish, Northern Cheyenne, Crow, and Blackfeet reservations, and weirded-out, mind-altered people who still believed the year was 1968.

  The reception was in a saloon, the dinner a pig and half of a buffalo barbecued over a pit of flaming wood dug in a grove of cottonwoods. The orchestra was a western string band put together by my son, Lucas, and the dance was held on a cement pad under a lilac sky, the snow on the Missions red in the sunset, the music of Bob Wills and Rose Maddox floating out over a countryside knee-deep in alfalfa and pooled with duck ponds.

  Everyone important in Amber’s life was there. Except for her father, United States Senator Romulus Finley.

  SENATOR FINLEY was at my office by 8 A.M. Monday. When he didn’t find me there, he went to the courthouse, where I was involved in a trial, and caught me in the corridor outside the courtroom. “What in the goddamn hell do you think you’re doing, son?” he said, his grip biting into my arm.

  “I’d appreciate your taking your hand off my person,” I said.

  “A murderer just married my daughter, and you helped him do it.”

  “I’m not going to ask you again,” I said.

  He released me and took a step back. “I won’t put up with this bullshit, Mr. Holland.”

  “I think you embarrass yourself, sir,” I said.

  “Say that again?”

  “Your daughter is a good person. Why don’t you show her a little respect?”

  “Son, I’m just about a half inch from busting you between the lights.”

  “My father was a stringer-bead welder on gaslines all over the Southwest. He was a fine man and called me ‘son.’ Other men don’t.”

  “Have it your way. As far as I’m concerned, Johnny American Horse is a subversive and a traitor. He’s taken advantage of my daughter’s naïveté and you, an educated man and officer of the court, have helped him do it. I won’t put up with it.”

  He walked back down the corridor toward the courthouse entrance, his leather soles loud, his meaty shoulders and neck framed against the light outside.

  I should have dismissed the insult, even the implied threat, as the expression of wounded pride in a childish man. But there wa
s something about Finley that was hard to abide, a prototypical personality any southerner recognizes—one characterized by a combination of self-satisfaction, stupidity, and a suggestion of imminent violence, all of it glossed over with a veneer of moral and patriotic respectability.

  I followed him down the sidewalk through the maples on the courthouse lawn to a steel-gray limousine with charcoal-tinted windows that was parked by the curb. He opened the back door to get in, and on the far side of the leather seat I saw a man in his fifties who had a good-natured face, blond hair that was white on the tips, a smile that was both familiar and likable. His eyes were friendly and warm, his teeth almost perfect. There were gin roses in his face, but they gave his countenance a vulnerability and consequently a greater humanity. I was sure I knew him and at the same time equally sure we had never met.

  Romulus Finley started to raise a remonstrative finger at me, but his companion leaned over so he could look at both of us and said, “Now, now, let’s don’t have this. Mr. Holland, take a ride with us. We’ll have coffee at a dandy place on the river.”

  “Thank you just the same, but I have an issue here with Senator Finley,” I replied.

  “Whatever it is, we can work it out,” Finley’s companion replied. He stretched out his arm and handed me a business card that was inserted between two of his fingers. “My home phone is on the back. I’m impressed with your legal reputation. Your father died in a natural gas blowout down in Texas, didn’t he? I bet he’d be mighty proud of you today.”

  “What did you say about my father?”

  “Call me,” he said. “I’d like to help you cut through some of the problems you’re encountering.”

  He was still smiling at me when Finley got in the limo and closed the door. I stared dumbly at the tinted back window of the limo as it drove away, then looked at the business card in my hand. The name on it was KARSTEN MABUS.

  THAT EVENING, Temple and I fixed sliced chicken and mayonnaise sandwiches and iced tea and fruit salad for dinner and took it out on the side gallery to eat. The sky was blue above the valley, the sunlight a pale yellow on the hillsides, and hawks floated above the trees up in the saddles. But I couldn’t concentrate on either our conversation or the loveliness of the evening. I wiped my mouth with a napkin and pushed away my plate.