In the Moon of Red Ponies bbh-4

by James Lee Burke

  He let his hands hang between his thighs and stared at the sidewalk. Then he gathered up his crutches and got to his feet. “Tell Miss Temple I’m sorry. And you go to hell, counselor,” he said.

  With that, he stepped off the curb into the traffic, jaywalking across the street to a cafe, jabbing a crutch into the door of a taxi that had blown its horn at him.

  I could afford to pay Lucas’s board and tuition at the university, where he had the improbable double major of music and dairy husbandry, but he would not allow it. Instead, he played several gigs a week at nightclubs and sometimes waited tables while carrying eighteen academic hours. His schedule took its toll, and often he was tired and barely able to stay awake when he came to dinner at our house.

  But on Friday afternoon he was beaming as he came into my office.

  “Win the lottery?” I asked.

  “Pert’ near,” he replied, taking a torn envelope from his back pocket. “I got a full scholarship, all tuition and out-of-state fees paid, plus five hundred dollars a month living expenses.”

  “How you’d pull that off?”

  “Applied for every kind of financial assistance they got. This one just happened to come through.”

  He handed me the awards letter. It was written on gold-and-silver-embossed stationery and was from a group called the Rocky Mountain Educational Foundation in Denver. “That’s great, Lucas,” I said.

  “I’m taking y’all to dinner. The Golden Corral has got all-you-can-eat fish tonight,” he said.

  “Sounds swell,” I said.

  “Want to ask Johnny and Amber? I reckon they’re feeling pretty low these days.”

  “I’m not Johnny’s attorney anymore.”

  “Y’all have a blowup or something?”

  “Johnny has his own time zone. I need to stay out of it.”

  “You used to tell me a guy can have all the friends he wants when he’s in tall cotton. You always said your real friends are the ones who stick with you in hard times. When did you change your mind?”

  A week passed and still Johnny had not been charged in the death of Seth Masterson. I busied myself with other cases, fished in the evenings, and thinned out the trees and undergrowth around our house as we entered the fire season.

  At sunset the heat rose from the ground and broke up in the wind, but even though the nights were clear and the stars bright, we could smell smoke lingering on the hillsides and see the glow of forest fires burning out of control in Idaho.

  On the Fourth of July, Temple and I attended the Indian rodeo and powwow up on the res, ate buffalo burgers, fried bread, and snow cones, and watched hundreds of ceremonial dancers in heavy, feathered regalia perform in ninety-five-degree shade. I was sure I saw Johnny and Amber in the crowd, but when I waved they showed no sign of recognition.

  Perhaps it was the heat and dust and the constant pounding by the elders on a giant rawhide drum, but I felt like a interloper at the ceremony, an effete sojourner little different from the tourists whose chief interest was buying Indian jewelry as cheaply as possible. After the dance ended, I tried to catch sight of Johnny and Amber amid the concession stands or by the rough stock pens adjacent to the bucking chutes.

  Instead, I saw Wyatt Dixon perched atop a slat fence, his bad leg supported precariously, a solitary crutch balanced on his loins. His bare arms were red with sunburn, his face shaded by a white, lacquered, high-crown hat he wore low on his ears. He looked at me momentarily, then made a snuffing sound in his nose and turned his attention back to a couple of wranglers trying to load a bull onto a cattle truck.

  I didn’t think Temple had seen him and I made no mention of his presence. But very little escaped her eye. “What’s with Dixon?” she said later.

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t lie.”

  “He came to see me a week ago. He’s got some notion I’m a river-baptized crusader or something. He said to tell you he was sorry for what he did.”

  “You believe this guy’s horseshit?”

  “No.”

  “Then don’t tell me about it.”

  We were in the parking area now. The air smelled of livestock and heat and dry manure, and the sun was red and veiled with dust over the western hills. “I can’t keep him from coming around,” I said.

  “I can,” she said. “He’ll be the deadest ex-convict in the state of Montana.”

  “Why are you so angry?”

  “Because Dixon can read you like a map. Your causes come before your family. Sometimes you break my heart.”

  We drove home in silence. I believe it was the worst Fourth of July in my life.

  The next morning was Saturday and I got up before Temple did, packed a lunch, and drove up Rock Creek, which is rated by outdoor magazines as one of the ten top trout streams in the United States. But I didn’t fish. In fact, I was not even sure why I was there, except for the fact the morning was cool, the woods deep in shadow, the riffle flowing over a smooth, pebbled creekbed streaked with green moss.

  Soon I was back into my old, futile habit of trying to think my way out of conflict or worry. There was no doubt that Dixon had set the hook, either consciously or by accident. I was baptized at age nine under a canopy of hardwood trees that were turning to flame against the blue outline of the Ozark Mountains. The preacher who leaned me back under the water had a face like a horse and teeth like barrel slats. The water was spring-fed and cold, and my skin burned as though it had been held over a cool fire. I broke the surface gasping for air and my father wrapped me in his World War II Army shirt, one with an Indian-head Second Division patch on the sleeve, while the preacher clog-danced on a wood platform, Bible in hand, and the congregation thundered out “I Saw the Light.”

  But perhaps the ritual was less important than what the preacher told me afterwards, or at least as I recall his words: “You done been joined in spirit to God, to earth, to sky, to water and trees. Jesus is your light, your sword and shield. There ain’t no place in his kingdom you don’t belong. You ain’t never got to be afraid again.”

  But I cannot say my baptism made me a good Christian. I know for certain L. Q. Navarro and I killed at least seven men. I believe they deserved what they got and the world is a better place without them. But my latent desire for violent recourse did not die with them. The Hollands were violent people, going all the way back to our patriarch, Son Holland, who fought against Santa Anna at the Battle of San Jac-into. The penchant in our family for red-black rage and the shedding of blood lay as strong a claim on our souls as a genetic desire for alcohol. Except that drunkards are consumed by their own energies. The Hollands were not.

  A helicopter flew by overhead, low over the canopy, filling the canyon with the roar of its blades. I watched it tip upward into the sunlight, climbing abruptly over a wooded hill, then circle back toward me, the pilot as tiny as a bug inside the Plexiglas. Deer and a moose spooked out of the trees, clattering over stone, then the helicopter lifted once again over a hill and was gone.

  It was after 8 A.M. I called home on my cell phone, but Temple didn’t pick up. A family in a campground was cooking breakfast, and an old man and a young boy who was probably his grandson were fishing in a pool behind a beaver dam, the current cutting around the tops of their waders. The old man helped the boy unhook a rainbow and put it in his creel, then the two of them walked up on the bank and joined their relatives in the campground.

  I thought of my own father and mother, both gone now, and the town in the Texas hill country where I had grown up, a place of green rivers, fried-chicken picnics, and downtown streets that still had elevated sidewalks with tethering rings set in them. I fed my packed lunch to a family of red squirrels and walked back toward my truck. The mystics may have found solace in the meditative life, but I think there are days when memory and solitude are not one’s friend.

  I was only a short distance down the road when a black car with tinted windows cut me off and a second one pulled in behind me. Two men in suits and shad
es stepped out of the first car and approached both sides of my truck. The one closest to me opened his identification. “Mr. Mabus would like to invite you for coffee or a brunch,” he said.

  Farther up the road a steel-gray limo was parked in the dappled shade of cottonwood trees. Beyond the trees, I saw the helicopter that had buzzed the creek sitting idly in an open field where the grass was turning yellow, the pilot smoking a cigarette.

  “That’s a P.I. badge, partner. It doesn’t carry a lot of weight on a rural road in western Montana,” I said to the man at my window.

  “Whatever you say, sir. But Mr. Mabus would like the pleasure of your company,” he replied. He was thick-necked, his blond hair neatly combed, his gaze focused down the road so as not to give the impression his eyes were being invasive behind his shades.

  “Need you to move your vehicle,” I said.

  “Yes, sir, we’ll gladly do that. Will you first walk over and speak to Mr. Mabus?” He removed his shades and tried to smile. His facial skin was like pig hide, his eyes dead-looking in the same way a barroom bouncer’s are.

  “All right, brother,” I said.

  He opened the door for me and continued to hold it while I got out on the road. “You want to take your hat, sir?” he asked.

  “No, because I’ll be coming right back. Then we’ll have this bullshit behind us,” I replied.

  He smiled again, his eyes unfocused.

  But I was making a point to the hired help, a man for whom restraint was built into his paycheck. The very fact that I was approaching Karsten Mabus’s limo indicated I was accepting his imperious behavior. He pushed open the back door and waited for me to get in. He was dressed in the soft, earth-tone fabrics of a gentleman rancher or horse breeder, one arm propped across the top of the creamy, rolled leather seat. Two young women in pin-striped suits and white hose sat across from him, their knees close together, their hands folded in their laps. “Please join us for a late breakfast or an early lunch,” he said.

  “Where do you get off bracing me on the road, Mr. Mabus?” I said.

  “I don’t believe they did that, did they? It was meant to be an invitation. Congratulations on your son’s scholarship,” he said.

  “How do you know about my boy’s scholarship?”

  “I contribute to a few educational endowments. The paperwork floats across my desk sometimes.”

  “You mentioned my father’s accidental death on a previous occasion. Frankly, I resent the hell out of your intrusiveness into my family’s history.”

  “Let’s clear this up, Mr. Holland. I own several ranch properties in western Montana. Their worth is somewhere around one hundred million dollars. I plan to subdivide and put the property up for sale over a five-year period. I need a good local attorney to oversee those sales, not someone from New York or Los Angeles-someone like you, a fellow who knows cattle, horses, indigenous grasses, irrigation methods, and land values. These two ladies here looked into your background. That’s how I knew about the circumstances of your father’s death. My purposes were purely business-oriented and professional. I apologize if I gave you any other impression.”

  His speech was husky, as though in spite of his wealth he was perhaps a shy man, a bit diffident, but sincere and forthright. “Get in. Please,” he said, opening his hand to me.

  It was warm inside the cottonwoods, and insects were worrying my neck and eyes, a shaft of sunlight shining into my eyes. I sat down on the leather seat, inside the coolness and leather comfort of the limo. The perfume of the two young women smelled like flowers in a garden. “Can you handle another client?” he said.

  “I’m a one-loop operation. You need a firm,” I replied.

  He laughed. “I like the way you talk, Mr. Holland. I’d rather pay you six percent on those ranch sales than a bunch of fraternity fellows in Denver.”

  I realized he was offering me a situation worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not eventually millions. I started to speak, but he cut me off. “I’ll tell you a fairly well known secret. Terrorists will attack us again. Every government official and everyone in federal law enforcement knows it. It will be large scale and aimed at another American city, perhaps several of them. When that happens, half of the West Coast will want to migrate to small towns in Montana, Idaho, and Utah. What do you think the value of this property will be then?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t care. I’m not a speculator, Mr. Mabus. On that note I’m going to thank you for your offer and say good-bye.”

  “What can I say?” he said, lifting his hands in good-natured surrender. “Have a fine day. I admire your principles. My guess is you’re a hell of a guy.”

  He shut the car door behind me, then rolled down the window on its electric motor and snapped his fingers several times at the men who had stopped my truck. They climbed wordlessly into their vehicles and drove away, the dust from their wheels floating back into my face.

  Chapter 15

  I should have seen it coming, or at least given more consideration to Darrel McComb’s prediction about Johnny American Horse’s legal fate; but like most people who believe that humankind is basically good and capable of conducting its affairs in a reasonable way, I daily avoided the inescapable conclusion that collective stupidity has often been the norm in the long and sorry history of human progress, and that perhaps the soundest argument for the existence of God is the fact that the human race has survived in spite of itself.

  One week after the Fourth of July, charges were filed on Johnny for the shooting death of a federal agent. But when two dozen government lawmen and sharpshooters in bulletproof vests descended on his house, Johnny was gone, literally out the back door, up the hill and into the Mission Mountains, running with a survival knife, a new trade ax he had bought at the powwow, and one arm looped through a backpack.

  Government helicopters buzzed the treetops in the high country for four days and agents on horseback threaded their way up rock-strewn ravines, only to find dead campfires, a hand line and fishing hook by a frozen lake, the cleated tracks of alpine shoes through a griz feeding area, a sweat lodge knocked together from fir boughs and blackened stones.

  But it was not a safe bet Johnny was in the Missions. There were sightings of him up in the Swans, in the Bitterroots and the Cabinets, even over the Divide in the Bridgers and the Bear Paws.

  Amber denied any knowledge of where he might be. She was held forty-eight hours in an isolation cell as a possible accomplice and questioned repeatedly by both FBI and ATF agents while her and Johnny’s house was torn apart. While she was being questioned and her home destroyed, her father remained in Washington and made no attempt to contact her or me, even though he knew I still represented her.

  Six days after Johnny had hauled freight into the high country, I saw his new counsel, Brendan Merwood, at the cafe across the street from the courthouse. Brendan was eating steak and eggs at a table by himself, cutting his food neatly, spearing small bites into his mouth with the tines of his fork held upside down. He wore a long-sleeved pale blue shirt, with white cuffs and a rolled white collar. His posture was simian, his big head almost bald, except for the close-cropped hair around his ears and the back of his neck. The tan he’d worked on dutifully in Hawaii gleamed under the indirect lighting.

  “Join me?” he said.

  “Thanks, I’m meeting someone,” I lied, and sat down at the counter. I picked up a menu and began to read it.

  “Too bad you got screwed on that bail deal,” he said.

  I set the menu down and looked at him in the mirror. He had gone back to eating his food. I turned around on the stool. “Which bail deal?” I said.

  “You didn’t know? Those Indian bondsmen Johnny hired didn’t process their paperwork. If you ask me, they chickened out. His bond is still on you. That must be the shits.”

  When I got home that afternoon, I could hardly face Temple.

  “We’ll owe two hundred thousand dollars?” she said.

  “If J
ohnny doesn’t appear for trial in the murder of Charlie Ruggles.”

  “This can’t be happening to us.”

  “I checked with the court. The bond was never transferred. I called these Indian bondsmen five times. Their secretary kept telling me she had given them my messages but they’d been chasing down a bail skip in Butte. I drove up to the res and found one of them in a bar. He denies knowing anything about Johnny’s bond or transferring it from us to him.”

  “Why did Johnny tell you we were off the hook?”

  “He thought we were. That bondsman was lying. Somebody got to him.”

  “I think Johnny fed us to the wolves.”

  “I doubt if he knows this has happened, Temple.”

  “How could he? He’s camping in the mountains while we’re about to lose our home.”

  She went into the kitchen and started preparing supper. It was 7 P.M. Thursday, the one evening of the week during summer we always saved to attend the open-air dance in the park by the river. This particular evening a bluegrass group was playing, and a late afternoon shower had dropped the temperature ten degrees and filled the air with the smell of flowers and lawn sprinklers striking warm cement. But in the kitchen I heard Temple slam a cabinet door and clang a skillet on the stove, then make a grunting sound as she struggled with a can opener, just before slicing her hand.

  I turned off the stove and ran tap water over her hand. In her anger she tried to resist my help, but I held on to her, gathering her against me, pressing my face in her hair, holding her tight, even when she hit me in the back and sides with her fists, the cut on her thumb streaking my shirt with blood.

  On Saturday, Lucas came to the house, a torn envelope and a sheet of gold-and-silver-embossed stationery in his hand. “I cain’t figure this. Don’t them people know how to run their own business?” he said.

  I took the letter from his hand and read it, then put it in my back pocket. I tried to keep my face empty. “I’ll give them a call Monday,” I said.