In the Moon of Red Ponies

by James Lee Burke

  “No,” I replied.

  “The third biggest independent arms dealer in the world. He provided over two million Chinese-manufactured AK-47 rifles to rival factions all over the Mideast. On one occasion, when he thought a particular regional war wasn’t being prosecuted vigorously enough, he paid a bounty for human ears. His business boomed. Sixty Minutes did a special on him.”

  “Not interested.”

  “You should be. Emile gets along very well with a lot of people in our government.”

  “I had my say, Mr. Mabus.”

  “You went in the little bedroom off the library, didn’t you? Don’t bother explaining. You went in there to use the bathroom. Your hands are still a little wet.” He jabbed his finger at me, his face breaking into a grin. “Got you again, didn’t I?”

  “You sure did.”

  He got up from the couch. “That bedroom looks like it was transported from a Marseilles whorehouse.” He started laughing. “But the house came like that. It was built for a notorious Hollywood sex freak who blew out his doors with speed he cooked down from diet pills. Come on, lighten up. The guy screwed every starlet in the business, then canceled his own ticket because his stomach was so big he couldn’t see his schlong.” He laughed until he had to wipe his eyes. “Anyway, that bedroom is scheduled to be remodeled next week. In the meantime, don’t leave here thinking you’ve just visited a theme park for sex addicts. I’m a decent guy. In fact, you may be looking at the next governor of Montana.”

  When I left, he was laughing so hard he could barely catch his breath. As I drove back toward the highway in the fading light, the wheel lines blowing haloes of water spray above Karsten Mabus’s pastures, I had to conclude that he was perhaps the most engaging man I had ever met. I also believed absolutely nothing he had told me.

  THAT NIGHT, while we slept, someone cinched a vinyl garbage bag over the head of my buckskin gelding and let him run himself to death in the darkness.

  Chapter 17

  I REPORTED THE GELDING’S DEATH to Darrel McComb in the morning. He looked wired, distracted, his hands too busy on top of his desk. “You don’t have any idea who did it? An angry client, maybe some guy you defended on a traffic ticket who ended up in Deer Lodge?” he said.

  “You think this is funny?”

  “I’m on the desk, if you haven’t noticed. I can’t do anything for you.”

  “You’re a good cop, Darrel. You’re the one guy in here who can help me.”

  He twisted a pencil between his fingers. Two wire baskets filled with traffic reports and time sheets rested on his desk. He wore a starched white collar that was biting into his neck. He pulled at his collar and glanced through the opening in his cubicle. “Romulus Finley wanted me to get rid of Johnny American Horse for him. I thought it was because he wanted Johnny out of Amber’s life. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “Get rid of him?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Go back over that. You’re not sure about what?”

  “I thought Finley was bent out of joint because his daughter was the regular hump for an Indian. But I think the real deal is the break-in at Global Research. I got played on that, too.”

  “By whom?”

  “My own Johnson. I’m going to lock it in a vault.”

  “Greta Lundstrum played you?”

  “No, guys like me get to sleep with Sharon Stone. You really blow my head, Holland.”

  I WENT DOWN to the Federal Building on East Broadway and tried to talk to either an FBI or an ATF agent and got nowhere. But I wasn’t surprised. All the personnel there knew I had been Johnny American Horse’s attorney, and right now, in their mind, he was not only the man who had killed Seth Masterson, he was taking on the supernatural properties of a mythological hero at their expense.

  There were many stories about Johnny’s elusiveness. He was seen everywhere and nowhere. Some speculated he had died from a fall or hypothermia high up in the Missions or from drowning in the Tongue River Reservoir. A trucker said an Indian fitting Johnny’s description had hitched a ride with him over Lookout Pass into the old mining-and-brothel town of Wallace, Idaho, then hooked up with a gang of bikers on their way to Sturgis, South Dakota—in the opposite direction. A rancher who raised buffalo as commercial beef by West Yellowstone, hundreds of miles away, claimed he’d seen wolves tearing apart a cow in his pasture. When he drove his truck at them in the darkness, blowing his horn, a man in a loincloth, his body streaked with blood, had separated himself from the wolf pack and raced into the woods, a torn haunch over his shoulder.

  That same night a bartender in Missoula swore Johnny came into his saloon, drank for an hour, settled his tab, and left in a taxicab.

  It was obvious the Feds were tracking Amber’s movements in order to find her husband. She showed up in Lame Deer, on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, buying canned goods, dried beef, cases of diet soda, a secondhand saddle, coils of rope, rifle ammunition, and a set of animal traps. She drove her Dakota all over the Custer National Forest, pulling perhaps a dozen agents out of the Billings area with her. Meanwhile, one hundred miles away, Johnny walked out of the bulrushes on the Little Big Horn River, ate lunch with an Indian farm family in Garryowen, then swung up on a freight train headed back west over the Grand Divide.

  My favorite story about Johnny and the authorities’ pursuit of him involves a Crow Indian named Half Yellow Face, who was a descendant of one of Custer’s scouts at the Little Big Horn. Half Yellow Face was a seasonal firefighter and packer for the U.S. Forest Service who could look at a hoof scratch on a dry rock and tell you the size and weight of the animal that had put it there and exactly where it had gone. Johnny had been spotted at the head of a canyon in the Bob Marshall Wilderness, then bottled up and sealed off by federal agents and Flathead County sheriff’s deputies. Half Yellow Face was helicoptered in by the FBI to ferret out Johnny’s hiding place, although he was not told the name of the man he was supposed to find. The road leading into the canyon was lined with government vehicles, the blades of helicopters thropping overhead, agents with scoped rifles and caps inverted on their heads resting by the roadside.

  Half Yellow Face was six foot seven inches tall, had haunted, recessed eyes, had done time in both Vietnam and Deer Lodge Pen, and towered over the government men around him. “This guy got loose from a federal pen?” he said.

  “His name is Johnny American Horse. He’s wanted on a murder warrant. You don’t watch the news?” an FBI agent said.

  Half Yellow Face stared at his feet, cleared his mouth, and spat, grinding the saliva into the dust with his boot. He stared up at the gray cliffs that rose straight into a sky sealed with smoke and rain clouds. The only access to the head of the canyon was a dry streambed cluttered with slag. On one bank, among cottonwoods, were the remains of a deer that had been killed by either a cougar or a grizzly, the desiccated hide as taut as a lampshade on its ribs.

  “You ain’t gonna catch him,” Half Yellow Face said.

  “He’s got no back door up there. If he comes out from under the canopy, our choppers are going to grease him all over the rocks,” the agent said.

  “American Horse has medicine. He don’t need doors. I’m going back home.”

  “Sounds like you guys are old buddies at the bar. I thought the Crows didn’t have much use for the Sioux,” the agent said.

  “ ‘Crow’ is the white man’s word for us. I’m a member of the Absarokee. That means ‘Children of the Large Beaked Bird.’ The Absarokee lived in the sky until the white man penned them up. American Horse can turn himself into a hoofed or winged creature. You ain’t gonna see him.”

  “I’ll make a note of that and fax Washington right away,” the agent said.

  Ten minutes later, as the sun disappeared beyond the mountains and the temperature dropped precipitously, the sheriff’s deputies and government agents along the road heard the popping sounds of large-caliber ammunition up on the cliffs. They took cover in the trees while a helico
pter roared over the canyon, searchlights on, sharpshooters positioned in the doors.

  The sound of firing went on intermittently for five minutes. The helicopter reported campfire smoke in the trees at the top of the canyon, and federal agents and county lawmen worked their way up the streambed, clattering over the slag, crouching each time a round popped on top of the cliff. Finally they lifted one another nine feet up a sheer stone wall onto the pine needle floor of the forest and crawled through timber shaggy with moss to Johnny’s campsite.

  Inside a clearing, a big steel skillet sat in a campfire that had crumpled into ash. Empty .308 casings that had been dumped into the skillet and left to explode as the skillet heated stuck out of the ash like brass teeth. The wind blew through the clearing and feathered the smoke in the trees. From the cliff the agents could see their vehicles parked on the canyon road, their tires flat, the valve stems slashed off with a trade ax.

  The farthest vehicle from the cliff, a U.S. Forest Service crew bus, had been moved and parked at an angle across the road and was now burning brightly in the dusk. Johnny was nowhere in sight. No one could explain how he had descended from the mountain and circled behind his pursuers. He had not stolen a vehicle, nor did he leave any scent for bloodhounds on the vehicles he had vandalized.

  The agents and country deputies watched a solitary blue heron fly the length of the road, then lift on extended wings in the sunset and soar toward the wetlands in the Swan River drainage. The country deputies, most of whom had lived all their lives in that area, said herons did not fly into the high country and could offer no explanation for the blue heron’s presence in the canyon.

  That night Half Yellow Face burned wet sage on a rock behind a bar in Seeley Lake and sang the loon’s song to the wind, sure in his heart that Johnny American Horse, wherever he was, could hear the Children of the Large Beaked Bird talking to him.

  THE FBI MEN were not interested in the attempt on my wife’s life or the cruel death imposed on my buckskin gelding, but I didn’t fault them for it. They had their own problems, and I was not reporting the commission of a federal crime. But I did resent their bureaucratic single-mindedness, which in this instance I believed masked political convenience. They did not want to consider the possibility that a large conspiracy was at work to hide the history of Global Research, Inc.

  When I left the Federal Building I felt like a man who had just filed a report on an alien abduction. Back home, I sat by myself a long time in the backyard, then went inside and returned with L.Q.’s revolver, a box of shells, a pair of ear guards, and two empty peach cans. At twenty-five yards I blew the cans skittering across the arroyo, banging them off rocks, knocking them in the air, twice hitting them on the fly. I loaded and reloaded and continued firing until my palm tingled and the grass was littered with shell casings.

  I did not allow my thoughts to dwell on either my actions or the strange sense of serenity I experienced when I felt the heavy weight of L.Q.’s revolver in my hand. I cleaned the revolver with a bore brush and an oil rag, reloaded the chambers, and put it back in my desk drawer. Through the window I watched the light die in the valley and the flames on Black Mountain, just north of us, gusting three hundred feet into the sky.

  SATURDAY MORNING, Darrel McComb made several entries in his home computer, all of them indicating his inability to deal with Greta Lundstrum’s treachery. Over and over he relived his birthday celebration at her house, the dessert she had prepared especially for him, the fine watch she had given him, the way she had made love to him and then talked secretly on the phone about him with a dirt bag after she thought he was asleep.

  How bad could one guy get taken?

  But he didn’t know what to do about it. She had used him for a dildo, pumped him for information, and helped him paint himself into a corner so he couldn’t explain the nature of his problem to either the D.A. or the sheriff without admitting he was a professional idiot.

  It was a collection of pocket gophers that gave Darrel a plan. Darrel had bought a five-acre lot up on the Swan River years before hoping eventually to build a cabin there. The grass was tall and emerald-green in the spring, interspersed with Indian paintbrush, lupine, and harebells, shaded by cottonwoods and birch trees, a virtual fairyland. Then a family of pocket gophers moved in, burrowing under the sod, eating the root systems, covering the terrain with barren, serpentine mounds that looked like calcified scar tissue.

  Darrel had thought the problem could be easily handled. A rodent was a rodent, food for owls and coyotes, hardly worth the price of a .22 round. He sprayed pesticides and dropped strychnine down their holes and saw no effect. So he called the county agent and was told to cover all the holes around the burrow except one, then flood the burrow with a garden hose. Darrel pumped enough water into the ground to float Noah’s Ark and managed to push one gopher to the surface. He flattened it with a shovel. In the morning, fresh dirt piles exploded all over the lot.

  He moved on with exhaust fumes that he piped from his car into the ground. He could smell the carbon monoxide rising from the dirt mounds, even hear tiny feet running under the sod. But at sunrise the next day fresh piles stood at the entrance of every burrow and not one dead gopher lay in sight.

  Darrel drove to a fireworks stand in Seeley Lake and loaded up with M-80s, cherry bombs, Roman candles, and devil-chasers, which fired like rockets down the passageways and exploded deep inside the burrows. The upshot was that he set his own field on fire.

  Darrel upped the stakes with gopher bombs that looked like half-sized sticks of dynamite, a combination of sulfur and sodium nitrate that created curds of thick yellow smoke and an unbearable stench. He spaded open the burrows, lit the fuses, then packed the dirt tightly on top of the openings and stood back to watch his handiwork. He could hear the bombs burning underground and the roots of the grass and wildflowers frying in the heat, and see tongues of sulfurous smoke rising out of the sod all over the field.

  The next day, he saw no sign of gopher activity. With a happy heart he strung water hoses and sprinklers over his property, raked grass seed into the serpentine lines of sterile dirt and rock that now networked his entire lot, and drove home whistling a song.

  When he returned the following week, he couldn’t believe his eyes. The combination of chemical, igneous, and rodent damage was incredible. Grass that had not been eaten at the roots had been cooked by the rockets, firecrackers, and sulfur bombs. The grass was yellow or dying, the field pocked with collapsed areas larger than his car, his well water contaminated. He saw a solitary gopher sitting on the edge of its hole and emptied the magazine of his nine millimeter at it. Some of the bullets ricocheted off a rock and hit a neighbor’s truck across the river.

  The following week, Darrel determined the flaw in his strategy. He had waged a war of aggression and superior force against a wily creature that had survived millions of years by using its wits to outsmart both primitive and modern man. Power and success had their origins in guile and deception, not in force and weaponry. How had the famous North Vietnamese general Giap once put it? He had defeated the French not with the gun but with the shovel. Darrel had tried to defeat the gopher with the gun.

  What was the answer?

  Give the gopher what it wanted.

  Darrel fixed a huge salad of scallions and the tender root systems of alfalfa and Canadian bluegrass. He wore rubber gloves so as not to get his scent on the salad, then soaked it overnight in poison. The next morning he packed the salad down the burrows of every pocket gopher on the property. His gopher problem disappeared.

  Give your enemies what they want, he told himself. With Greta and her friends, that was easy.

  Greta wanted Wyatt Dixon dead and the goods from the Global Research robbery back in the company’s possession.

  Before he went to her house that afternoon, he gargled with whiskey, swallowing none of it, and dabbed some on his cheeks and shirt. When she opened the door, she caught a load of his breath and said, “I thought you’d
given up getting hammered for a while.”

  “What’s a guy going to do on a Saturday afternoon?”

  “Come in and I’ll show you,” she said, pulling him by the arm.

  He feigned a smile and sat down heavily in a chair. “Got a cold beer? I smell like a smoked ham. The fire on Black Mountain blew out last night,” he said.

  She unscrewed the cap on a long-necked bottle and handed it to him. “Want to take a shower?” she said.

  “Got to work tonight. I think I’ll be scrubbing a couple of your problems off the blackboard.”

  “Like what?”

  “Know why the Feds haven’t found the goods from the Global Research break-in?”

  “The Feds are bozos?”

  “No, they’re smart guys. At least most of the time. They just didn’t figure Wyatt Dixon as a serious player. They marked him off as a psycho because he writes letters to the President.” He upended his beer and smiled at her over the top of the bottle.

  She sat down in a chair across from him. She wore a white dress with purple and green flowers printed on it, a silver chain around her neck. Her hair was brushed in thick swirls, her cheeks ruddy. Once again she made him think of a country woman, someone who could knead bread dough, grind up hamburger, and handle a windstorm blowing her wash all over the lawn.

  “Darrel, I’ve got a lot at stake in this. Don’t be clever or tease me,” she said. Her eyes were green and sincere, and they never blinked when she spoke.

  “The Indians had the stuff from Global Research stashed in a barn up by Johnny American Horse’s spread,” he said. “Wyatt Dixon is con-wise and was onto these guys from the jump. That’s why he was following Amber Finley around. He found their stash and moved it to an old potato cellar behind his house on the Blackfoot. I’m going to take him down tonight. Dixon’s going to do the big exit on this one.”

  “Say that last part again.”

  “Tonight he gets his ticket punched. No transfers. Next stop, a long cylinder where he gets turned into a shoe box full of ashes.” Darrel laughed, watching her.