In the Moon of Red Ponies bbh-4

by James Lee Burke

Wyatt Dixon and his friends sat down at a table by the door. Outside, a trailer loaded with horses was parked in a yellow zone. It didn’t take long for Wyatt’s vacuous gaze to sweep the restaurant, then settle on us.

  The cast or composition of his eyes was unlike any I had ever seen in a human being. They had almost no color and showed no emotion; the pupils were black pinpoints, even in bright light. They studied both people and animals with an invasiveness that was like peeling living tissue off bone.

  He sat with one booted foot extended into the aisle, causing the waitresses to step around it, his eyes focused curiously on Temple’s face.

  The waitress brought a chicken basket for Temple, fried pork chops and mashed potatoes and string beans for me. I looked back once more at Wyatt, then picked up a steak knife and started to cut my food. Temple scraped back her chair and walked to the pay phone by the front door, no more than five feet from Wyatt Dixon’s table. She punched in three numbers on the key pad.

  “This is Temple Carrol Holland, down by the depot on North Higgins,” she said into the receiver. “A psychopathic bucket of shit by the name of Wyatt Dixon and some of his friends have illegally parked a horse trailer by the restaurant. Please send a cruiser down here so we don’t have to breathe horse sweat while we eat. Thank you.”

  The level of sound in the restaurant dropped precipitously as she hung up the phone and walked back to our table. Wyatt’s jaw was hooked forward, exposing his teeth, a smile denting the corner of his mouth, like a thumbnail’s incision in tan clay. He told one of the wranglers to go outside and move the truck, then came to our table.

  “Howdy doodie, Miss Temple?” he said, standing above us. “ ’Member me? Bet you still think I was one of them men dug a hole and stuck you in it.”

  “Go back to your table, Wyatt,” I said.

  “Let him talk,” Temple said.

  “Truth is, I don’t know what I done before I got filled up on chemical cocktails and had my brains electrified at Warm Springs. But in this time of national trial, there is no excuse for one American doing mean things to another. Here’s two tickets to an ass-buster down in Stevensville. There you will find this humble rodeo clown entertaining the throngs of people that follows our greatest national sport.”

  I brushed the tickets off the tablecloth onto the floor. “You’re about to have the worst day in your life,” I said.

  He looked down at the tickets, then back at me in mock disbelief. A waitress stepped around him, a loaded tray balanced on her shoulder. He admired her rump a moment, then squatted down, eye-level with me. He was clean-shaved, his skin without tattoos or scars. I could smell horses and an odor like hay and buttermilk in his clothes. He looked at the steak knife that rested in my right hand. “I had a lot of bad nights up at the Zoo. A lot of time to study on things, Brother Holland. Glad I found Jesus. ’Cause I wouldn’t want to act on the kind of thoughts that was tangled up in my head,” he said.

  Through the window I saw a city police cruiser pull to the curb.

  “Your cab is here,” Temple said.

  Wyatt glanced over his shoulder, then scratched his cheek. “I will not pretend I can contend with the smarts and humor of Miss Temple. Instead, I salute both y’all as fellow Texans and patriots defending the U.S. of A. against the ragheads that is attacking our great country,” he said. “I’ll be out to your ranch directly with a haunch of sirloin to slap on the barbecue. Y’all live up that gulch right outside Lolo?”

  He grinned idiotically, his teeth shiny with his saliva.

  Later, after he and his friends had eaten and gone, Temple and I sat in the quietness of the now almost deserted restaurant, the glass in the window vibrating with wind. I felt both inept and angry at myself for reasons I couldn’t define. I kept reviewing in my mind what I should have done to Wyatt Dixon, like a schoolboy who has been shoved down in the playground and done nothing about it.

  “Forget it,” Temple said.

  “He spit on us.”

  “Don’t get the ego mixed up in this, Billy Bob.”

  “I’ll see you at home,” I said.

  “Where are you going?”

  I paid the check and went out the door without answering.

  The District Attorney was a Northern California transplant by the name of Fay Harback. She was a petite woman with a small, attractive face and white skin, and hair that was mahogany-colored and thick on the back of her neck. She’d graduated at the top of Stanford Law and, like many of her fellow Californians in the aftermath of the Rodney King riots, had moved into the northern Rockies.

  But her husband, an organic truck farmer, had bad luck in lots of ways. His ideals drove him and his wife into bankruptcy, and after he died in a hunting accident, she became an assistant district attorney, then ran for the D.A.’s job and won, largely because she had helped shut down an industrial waste disposal group that had tried to construct a PCB incinerator on the river, one that would have probably poisoned the entire valley.

  I liked Fay and I liked her toughness in particular, even though she was sometimes ambitious, but I could never guess which way her wind vane was about to blow.

  “Let’s see if I understand. I sent Wyatt Dixon up the road, but I’m responsible for the fact he’s on the street?” she said.

  “I didn’t say that,” I replied.

  “Look-” she began. She pinched her temples and got up from her chair and stood at the window. I heard her take a breath. “I screwed it up.”

  “How?”

  “Failure to disclose exculpatory evidence. A jailhouse gum ball claimed Dixon was shooting pool with him when the biker was killed. His only problem was he drooled when he was off his medication.”

  “Why didn’t you give his statement to the defense?”

  “An A.D.A. we later fired said he’d taken care of it. I forgot all about it. It was worthless information, anyway. But I got sandbagged on appeal,” she said.

  “Get Dixon for the burial of my wife.”

  “We can’t prove he did it.”

  “You’ve got his fall partner’s testimony.”

  “Terry Witherspoon’s? He died from AIDS in the prison infirmary last week.” She looked at the frustration in my face. Her expression softened. “You were a Texas Ranger?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have days you miss it?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Montana isn’t the O.K. Corral anymore. If I were you, I wouldn’t listen to the wrong voices inside my head.”

  “Box up the psychobabble and ship it back to Marin County, Fay,” I said.

  “I grew up in Weed. So run your redneck shuck on somebody else, Billy Bob.”

  Lesson? Don’t mess with short women who have law degrees from Stanford.

  That night the sky was black and bursting with stars above the valley where we lived, then clouds quaking with thunder moved across the moon and snow began to fall on the mountaintops, sticking on the ponderosa and fir trees that grew high up on the slopes. In my sleep I dreamed of small-arms fire in the dark, the running of booted feet, the smell of wet mesquite, scrub oak, burned gunpowder, and ponded water that had gone stagnant. In the dream I raised my revolver and fired at a man silhouetted against the sky, saw his arms reach out horizontally, then clutch the wound that burst like a rose from the top buttonhole on his shirt.

  Fay Harback had asked if I missed my career as a Texas Ranger. The truth was I had never left it. It returned to me at least every third night, in the form of my best friend’s accidental death down in Old Mexico.

  L. Q. Navarro had long ago forgiven me, as the priests at my church had. But absolution by both the living and the dead did not reach into my nocturnal hours. I woke at 3 A.M. and sat alone in the coldness of the living room, looking out at the moonlight that had broken through the clouds and at the caked snow steaming on the backs of my horses in the pasture.

  Just before dawn I fell asleep in the chair and did not wake until I heard Temple making breakfast in the kitc
hen.

  Chapter 2

  Johnny American Horse’s dreams did not involve past events from his own life, guilt, erotic need, or even people or places he knew. His dreams were filled with birds and wild animals on alluvial moonscape, rivers and pink mesas he had never seen, herds of mustangs racing across a darkening plain forked by lightning. Sometimes the people in his dreams carried obsolete flintlocks, drove bison over cliffs, and sat by meat fires among cottonwoods whose leaves flickered like thousands of green butterflies.

  He told a bartender in Lonepine and one in Big Arm he’d dreamed where the grave of Crazy Horse was located, although no historian had ever been able to find it. He built a sweat lodge in the Swan Mountains and fasted and prayed on the banks of a creek that had been melted snow only the day before, and inserted himself at dawn, hot and naked, between boulders that roared with white water out of fir and spruce trees.

  When he performed the Sun Dance ceremony over at the Northern Cheyenne Reservation and tore the hooked pieces of antler loose from his pectoral muscles, he saw a burning white globe spin out of the sky and burst inside his head, blinding him to all images of the earth except those given to him by an ancient deity who had no English name.

  But none of these things brought Johnny American Horse peace of mind. Instead, he joined radical Native American groups and fought with oil, pipeline, and timber companies, and sometimes became a shrill and obsessive voice to which no one listened. Some nights he slept in the woods or the reservation jail. Some nights he wasn’t sure where he slept.

  But one week ago the content of his dreams had changed. He had fallen asleep in a chair on his front porch overlooking the Jocko River. The wind was cool blowing up the valley, smelling of pines and woodsmoke, and Johnny slept with his hat pulled down on his eyes and a sheep-lined coat spread across his chest. In his dream he heard a car engine roar to life, then saw a Firebird speeding at dawn out of an industrial city on the shore of a great lake, two men seated in the front, the exhaust thundering on the asphalt.

  The man in the passenger seat had gold, peroxided hair, cut military-style, his arms tattooed with roses and green parrots that had yellow beaks. His chest was flat-plated, his face like tallow that had been warmed next to a flame and wiped clean of either joy or remorse, then allowed to cool, retaining no trace of any humanity it might have possessed.

  The driver was middle-aged and wore horn-rimmed, thick glasses and had tiny red and blue veins in his jowls. He was dressed in a tweed coat, brown pants, a tie and white shirt, and shined shoes. Except for the intensity and concentration with which he drove the Firebird, he could have been a department store floorwalker or an accountant.

  For three nights Johnny saw the two men on their journey westward, their vehicle low-slung, hammering hard across the Great Plains, through mesa country and badlands that were the color of chalk. They ate in truck stops, with neither pleasure nor distaste, ordering whatever was the special for the day, usually snuffing out their cigarettes in their unfinished food. At the Super 8 and the Econo Lodge they slept in beds that crackled with static electricity and smelled of other people’s copulation.

  They drank brandy and soda in roadside bars, staring without interest at sports television, picked up two whores in Belfield, North Dakota, blew out a tire in Billings, hit an icy stretch on the Grand Divide, and whacked a swatch out of the guardrail west of Butte. To the men in the dream, one activity was no different in meaning or significance from another.

  Then one morning Johnny American Horse woke in the coldness of the sunrise, his mind empty of images, the fir trees and ponderosa on the hillside above the Jocko wet and shining, the whole world as bright and clear as a spoon ringing against the rim of a crystal glass, and he knew he would not dream of the two men again. There was no need to. The horn-rimmed man and the man whose face had melted next to a flame were here, someplace around Missoula, waiting, but he did not know where.

  The day after Johnny was released from jail on the weapons charge, he was turning over the thatch in his vegetable garden, the sun warm on his shoulders, when the scene around him seemed to dissolve and break apart, replaced by a collage of neon-lit smoke, green felt, a brass rail, and a man in a tweed jacket hunched over a bowl of chili by a window lighted from the outside. He heard pool balls clattering inside a triangular plastic rack and saw a man with roses and green parrots tattooed on his arms sight along a pool cue and smack an eight ball into a side pocket.

  Johnny got into his pickup truck and drove into Missoula and on down West Broadway toward the business district. In the distance he could see the huge brown slopes of the mountains that enclosed the eastern end of the city, the trees a deep green in the saddles. On his right the Clark Fork of the Columbia River paralleled the street he drove on, its banks fringed with willow trees. The current was a greenish-coppery color from the first snowmelt, the water braiding between the chains of rocks that protruded from the surface. To the south were the beginnings of the Sapphire Mountains and the Bitterroot Valley, the fresh snow on the peaks a blinding white in the sunlight.

  But here, on each side of the street, was a different world, one of $19.95 motels, a self-service filling station that advertised itself as AMERICAN OWNED, and bars where women fought with knives and the clientele came to the door at 7 A.M.

  He parked down by the river and entered the back of a bar that smelled of coffee, flat beer, and cigarette smoke that had soaked into the walls and vinyl booths. A swamper was swinging a wet mop on the floor, the bartender loading a cooler with long-necked bottles of beer. A man with peroxided hair, wearing a yellow muscle shirt and stonewashed jeans and polished military boots, split a nine-ball rack with such force the cue ball jumped the rail and rolled across the floor.

  Johnny picked up the ball and set it back on the felt.

  “Thanks,” the pool shooter said, his eyes flat.

  “No problem,” Johnny said.

  He sat at the bar, ordered a soft drink, and peeled a hard-boiled egg. The pool shooter ran the balls in a string down to the nine ball, chalking his cue before each shot, his eyes never leaving his game. Then he replaced his cue in the wall rack and started to leave the bar.

  “Where’s your friend?” Johnny asked.

  “Which friend?” the man asked.

  “The guy you drove out with.”

  “You lost me.”

  “No matter what you guys are getting paid, if I was you, I’d give the money back.”

  “Yeah, I guess that’s good to know. But I got no idea what you’re talking about,” the man said.

  “Maybe I got you confused with somebody else.”

  “Yeah, maybe you do,” the man said.

  Johnny watched the man with roses and parrots tattooed on his arms go out the door and cross the street, then walk down an alley, where a car was parked. The man walked gracefully, light-footed, like a prizefighter, his back a triangle of sinew and muscle. Just before he reached the car, a Firebird, he turned and looked back at the bar.

  When Johnny got back home, he strung tin cans on wires around his house and removed a box from under his bed containing a bowie knife that had been forged from a car spring, and a trade hatchet, with an oak handle and a half-moon hook on the head, given to him by his grandfather. He went into his toolshed and ground the hatchet on an emery wheel, then sharpened both it and the bowie knife on a whetstone and returned to the house.

  The day was growing warmer, and through the window he could see flies hatching out of the reeds on the riverbanks, drifting onto the riffle, where rainbow trout popped them as soon as they touched the surface. He fell asleep in a chair on the porch and thought he heard dry thunder on the far side of the mountains that ringed his land.

  Every Defense Attorney has clients who enter his life on a seemingly temporary basis, then become the human equivalent of chewing gum on the bottom of a shoe. Celebrity defense attorneys who appear regularly on CNN talk shows may lead glamorous lives, but the average practitioner of crimi
nal law has a clientele with whom he does not want to be seen in public. These include grifters of every stripe, jackrollers, pimps, paperhangers, drug dealers, Murphy artists, cross-dressing prostitutes, court-assigned women who kill their children, and lifetime recidivists who are convinced they are criminal geniuses and try to outwit the system by lying to their attorneys.

  Private investigators deal daily with the same bunch, although occasionally there’s one who doesn’t fit into the box. Temple called me that afternoon. “It’s Amber Finley again,” she said. “She’s in on a drunk and disorderly. She also hit a cop. Actually, she threw her underwear in his face.”

  “Why is she calling you?”

  “She’s burned herself with every attorney in town. At least with the good ones,” she replied.

  “She wants me to represent her?”

  “She’s not a bad gal, Billy Bob.”

  “Answer is no.”

  “You pretty busy now?”

  “She can call her father. I don’t want to get involved.”

  “She says she knows why Johnny American Horse was carrying a pistol.”

  “How does she know anything about Johnny?”

  “They’ve been seeing each other. At least that’s what she says.”

  “Her old man must love that.”

  “You want me to tell her to get lost?”

  A few minutes later I walked over to the sheriff’s department and a deputy escorted me to a holding cell, where Amber Finley sat on a metal bench, her legs crossed, looking at the wall. She was around twenty-five and wore beat-up cowboy boots, jeans hitched tightly around her hips, a Harley T-shirt, and long earrings with blue stones in them. Her hair was blond and cut short, her eyes an intense blue. Even though she was hung over, her face still possessed the lovely features and complexion that Hollywood had idealized and turned into a national icon in the Technicolor films of the forties and fifties. But Amber Finley’s mind-set was far removed from that earlier, more innocent time.

  She was a biker girl one night, a cowgirl the next. She drank in busthead bars and was probably the wet dream of the men and college boys who hung in them. But the clothes she wore and the life she led were a self-abasing deception. She spoke French and German, had an IQ of 160, a degree in English literature from the University of Virginia, and was the daughter of United States Senator Romulus Finley.