In the Moon of Red Ponies bbh-4

by James Lee Burke

  He blackened his face and hands with dirt, then reached inside his tote sack for a weapon. But his hand found only canned goods and broken glass. He dumped the sack’s contents on the ground. His knife and trade ax were gone.

  A circle of flashlights shone in his face, then someone racked a shell into the chamber of a cut-down ten gauge. Johnny sat back against a tree, his bad arm in his lap. Red circles of light burned into his eyes and receded into his brain.

  “Squeeze it off and be done with it,” he said.

  “Are you kidding? Those shells are expensive. Hold up your wrist, Running Man Who Thinks with Forked Brain,” an FBI agent said.

  The other agents laughed and lit cigarettes and talked about the National League pennant race. How about those Atlanta Braves?

  In the predawn darkness, Amber thought she was having a dream about a violent wind, then she realized the sounds surrounding her were real. The house shook, the doors rattled against the locks, and a glass pitcher on a kitchen windowsill shattered in the sink. She looked out her bedroom window and saw lightning in the clouds, like streaks of gold inside pewter. The air was filled with pine needles blowing from the trees on the hillsides, then the front screen door sprung back on its hinges and snapped back into place as loudly as a pistol report.

  She got up from her bed and began closing windows, sure that the rain everyone had prayed for was about to drench the countryside. When she entered the living room she saw a yellow glow flickering on the porch, like the flame given off by a guttering candle. Then the entire yard filled with a warm yellow radiance, burning away the shadows, reaching all the way back to the barn, carving the horses out of the darkness.

  Amber pulled opened the door, thinking she was about to see her first instance of ball lightning. Instead, the yellow light constricted upon itself, forming an envelope around an Indian woman wearing a white buckskin dress fringed with purple glass beads that were shaped like teardrops. The wind ripped through the house, blowing pictures off the walls, spinning the Rolodex on the telephone stand.

  “Who are you?” Amber asked.

  The Indian woman didn’t answer. She pointed toward the south, in the direction of the Bitterroot Mountains.

  “Please tell me who you are,” Amber repeated, stepping out on the porch. Her bare foot came down on a cold, sharp-edged object. She stepped backwards and looked down at Johnny’s trade ax and, next to it, his survival knife.

  “Where did you get these? Why did you bring them here?” Amber asked.

  The Indian woman’s shape broke into hundreds of fireflies and disappeared. When Amber went back in the house, one of the Rolodex cards had been torn from the spindle and lay on the floor. The names on it were those of William Robert and Temple Holland.

  Chapter 19

  The next day was Saturday. Johnny was in St. Pat’s Hospital, under arrest, his arm pumped full of antibiotics, but I was not allowed to see him, since I was no longer his attorney. Amber came out to the house that afternoon and told me of the Indian woman who supposedly had left Johnny’s survival knife and trade ax at her door. I tried to listen without letting my feelings show, but I could not help but believe her bizarre account hid an element in Johnny’s story she didn’t want to share.

  “The Indian woman saved Johnny’s life. If he’d attacked the agents, they would have killed him,” she said. “Johnny thought she’d deserted him, that he’d lost his power.”

  “I think somebody found Johnny’s weapons along his route, recognized them as his, and returned them to your house. I also think there’s something you’re not telling me.”

  We were in the living room and through the front window I could see ash drifting in the sunlight. Amber walked in a circle, tapped her knuckles on the stonework in the fireplace, and stared at the hillside and the wind ruffling the trees. “I think Johnny might have thrown the Global Research stuff up there on the ridgeline someplace,” she said.

  “Pardon?”

  “He’s not sure where he threw it. He was almost delirious. It could be anywhere. What was he supposed to do, let the Feds nail him with it?”

  “He hid materials from a burglary on our property?”

  “He didn’t hide it, he just got rid of it. In the dark. He didn’t know where he was. Maybe it’s not on your property. Why don’t you worry about someone except yourself for a change?”

  “I hate to say this, but I don’t think anyone, and I mean anyone, can afford knowing you and Johnny. I’d probably tell other people about this, but I think they’d recommend I have a lobotomy.”

  “He tried to protect you. That’s why he fired you and hired that piece of shit Brendan Merwood. That’s why he tried to get his bail transferred to those worthless tribal bondsmen.”

  “I don’t care how you do it, but you get that stuff off our land.”

  “I don’t know where it is or I would. So stick your self-righteous attitude up your ass, Billy Bob.”

  She slammed out of the house. For the first time in my relationship with Amber, I felt a degree of sympathy for her father.

  An hour later Wyatt drove his skinned-up, slat-sided truck across the cattle guard and parked in front of the house, his arm cocked on the driver’s window, an empty horse trailer bouncing behind him. “Just dropped my Appaloosa off to get his teeth floated and thought I’d see what you was up to,” he said. “You seen all them FBI and ATF agents up on your ridge?”

  “No,” I said, glancing involuntarily up the hill behind our house.

  “They must have strung a half mile of crime scene tape through them woods. Ain’t that where American Horse got busted last night?”

  “What do you want, Wyatt?”

  He got out of his truck on his crutches and propped his butt against one fender, then began paring his fingernails with a toothpick. “Them boys that shanked me in the leg? A buddy of mine seen them in Hamilton yesterday. That means they still aim to take me out, or else they’d be to hell and gone down the road by now, know what I mean?”

  “What do you want me to do about it?”

  “Ain’t many I can talk to. Ain’t many gonna understand. But you and me share the same kind of upbringing. You growed up in a church where the preacher preached hell so hot you could feel the fire climbing up through the floor. It was a three-ring circus, with folks talking in tongues, drinking poisons, sticking their hands in a boxful of snakes. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  “You’re wrong,” I lied.

  He kept his eyes on his nails. “The man I killed behind my house with my Sharps had the mark of the devil on his arm.”

  “I don’t want to hear this.”

  “I seen it. I touched his skin. I ain’t a drunk or an addict, counselor. I ain’t crazy, either, at least not no more. Them people is acolytes of Satan himself.”

  How do you talk to a man for whom the devil is more real than God? But I tried. “Isn’t there enough evil in human beings without looking for the devil as the cause of our problems? You’re a smart man, Wyatt. Why not deal with the world as it is and not get lost in the next one?”

  “You’re a naive fellow, Brother Holland.”

  “Oh?”

  “One child gets the daylights slapped out of him for messing his diapers and grows up picking cotton from cain’t-see to cain’t-see in a hunnerd-degree heat, but he don’t turn out much worse on a personal basis than a rich kid whose daddy give him everything he wanted.

  “But maybe right down the road there’s another kid, with ordinary folks, maybe a little shiftless but ordinary just the same-”

  “Wyatt-” I said, holding my hand up for him to discontinue.

  “No, you hear me out. That same kid grows up cruel to the bone. He don’t enjoy sex unless he’s hurting someone while he’s doing it, and when he finally gets to the joint, he lets everybody know he’s the huckleberry who’ll bust a shank off in your back for a deck of smokes. Worse, he ain’t got no fear of God ’cause he murdered all the light in his soul. That’s the ones got the mar
k of the beast on them, counselor. I been jailing with them since I was fifteen years old.”

  His description of a sociopath was possibly the most credible I had ever heard, and I wondered if it came from self-knowledge rather than his experience. Then I realized he had read the question in my eyes.

  “I ain’t one of them kind. Least I don’t think I am. But you never know, do you?” he said.

  He opened the driver’s door to his truck and threw his crutches inside.

  “What’s your purpose here, Wyatt? Do you just want to be a source of worry and irritation and grief? Is that why you come here?”

  “Maybe you and American Horse both owe me. I got confidence in you. You’ll figure it out directly. Lordy, you got a nice place here,” he said, surveying the house and the deep green of our pasture under the pall of yellow smoke that hung over it.

  Just before the sun slipped in a red orb behind the ridgeline, an FBI agent named Francis Broussard served a search warrant on our property. He was a trim, rosy-cheeked, olive-skinned man, with a fresh haircut, a dimple in his chin, and a Cajun accent. “We’ll be working our way over the top of the mountain and into your backyard. We’ll try to get out of your way as soon as we can,” he said.

  “Mind telling me what you’re looking for?” I asked.

  “I think you know. Yes indeedy, I surely do,” he said.

  “ Yes indeedy? ”

  “Come on up the hill and help us out. I’ll make note of your cooperation in my report. That might give you greater credibility later.”

  “I’m glad to know y’all are in a lighthearted mood.”

  He held a clipboard in one hand and wore a blue windbreaker with the abbreviation for his agency in bright gold letters on the back. He gazed abstractly at the haze on our pasture and the purple shadows spreading across the valley floor.

  “Is there something else you need?” I said.

  “Yeah, I hate to ask you this. But could I use your bathroom?” he replied.

  For the next hour, Broussard and the agents under his supervision fanned across the hillside and worked their way down through the timber toward the house and the barn. The wind began to blow out of the east, clearing the ash from the sky but feeding the fires that were raging on the Idaho line. When I stood in our front yard, I could see streamers of sparks rising in the west and twisting columns of smoke that were filled with light, almost like water-spouts on the ocean. Then I heard an agent shout to his colleagues up on the hillside.

  I saddled my Morgan, whose name was Beau, and rode him onto one of the switchback deer trails that zigzagged up to the ridgeline behind the house. The fir and larch trees looked mossy and shapeless in the evening shade. Up ahead I could see a dozen FBI and ATF agents shining their flashlights across rocks and deadfalls and arroyos that were littered with leaves and pine needles and the detritus from years of snowmelt. Even though the tips of the trees were bending in the wind, smoke was trapped under the canopy, the air was dense and acidic, and I was starting to sweat inside my clothes.

  With the exception of the agent in charge, Francis Broussard, none of the agents even bothered to look at me, which told me they had already found what they were searching for and hence my presence was of no interest to them.

  “Glad you dropped up to see us, Mr. Holland,” Broussard said. “See that broken place in the deadfall? Something heavy, with hard edges, probably metal ones, bounced down the hill and crashed right through a bear’s lair. Pretty interesting, huh?”

  “You bet,” I said.

  “Except whatever came crashing down the hill is no longer here. Know why not?” he said.

  “You got me.”

  “Somebody hauled it out, probably with a rope and a horse. Step down here, if you don’t mind.”

  I swung down from the saddle and looked at a torn area of broken leaves and dirt on the edge of the deadfall, where he was now shining his flashlight.

  “See the hoofprints and the drag marks going back up toward the log road? I bet somebody had a rope looped around a big, heavy metal box and towed it up the hill there. What do you think, Mr. Holland?” he said.

  “I’m probably not qualified to make an observation, Mr. Broussard.”

  “Notice anything unusual about those hoofprints?”

  “Was never much of a tracker.”

  “The horse wasn’t wearing shoes. What’s that tell you, Mr. Holland?”

  “Nothing.”

  “The horse we’re talking about has hard feet. Like an Appaloosa might have. You own an Appaloosa, Mr. Holland?”

  “Two of them. But the last time I looked, they were both shoed.”

  “I’ll take your word for it. Know why anybody might want to drag a heavy metal box up the hillside?”

  “When you find out, let me know.”

  “You don’t like us much, do you?”

  “I like you fine. I just don’t like some of the causes you serve.”

  “You were a Texas Ranger and an assistant U.S. attorney?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Ever listen to that shock jock on the radio, guy was a disgraced FBI agent, did a federal bit for a B and E, always putting down the government?”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard him,” I replied.

  Broussard’s eyes looked straight into mine for a beat. “He’s an interesting study,” he said. He clicked off his flashlight and walked up the hill, his back to me.

  A gust of wind blew through the tree trunks. The sweat on my face felt as cold as ice water.

  But I didn’t have time to worry about Francis Broussard’s condemnation. Somebody riding an unshod horse had rope-dragged the goods from the Global Research burglary off our property. It had to be someone who had access to the ridgeline, someone perhaps riding an Appaloosa, a breed known for its hard feet. The only candidate that came to mind was Wyatt Dixon. He used a farrier and veterinary service in the drainage just over the hill from us, and he had a way of finding excuses to wander onto our property. Could he have seen Johnny’s flight up the mountain and followed him?

  I went back into the house and told Temple of my conversation up the hillside with Francis Broussard and the removal of the metal box.

  “Well, maybe it’s over, then,” she said.

  “I think Dixon took it.”

  “Who cares?”

  “You’ve got a point,” I said.

  I began fixing a cold supper for both of us. I opened a bottle of wine and poured Temple a glass and one for myself.

  “I think I’ll just have some Talking Rain to drink,” she said.

  “You feel all right?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “On Saturday night you always have a glass of wine.”

  “I’m just not in the mood. Want to take a walk? We can eat when we come back.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  I put the food back in the refrigerator and followed her outside. The valley was dark now, the sky still blue, the evening star twinkling in the smoke to the west. I heard the phone ring inside. “I’ll be right back,” I said.

  I picked up the phone receiver in the hallway. Through the front window I could see Temple waiting for me in the yard, the gallery light shining on her hair, one knuckle pressed against her chin, her face lost in thought.

  “Hello?” I said into the receiver.

  “Hey, glad we caught you at home, dickwad,” a voice said.

  I checked my caller ID. The call number was blocked. “Say it,” I said.

  “You got other people’s property. That’s not nice.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “The Indian dumped a lockbox on your property. It’s not there now. Where do you think it went? It grew wings and flew up in a fucking tree?”

  The accent was eastern seaboard, maybe Jersey or Rhode Island, the question mark at the end of a sentence as barbed as a fishhook.

  “You got a line into the Feds?” I asked.

  “What we got a line into is your old lady�
��s womb. Want your baby to get born? If not, we got a guy does beautiful work with a coat hanger.”

  “What?”

  “There’s nothing about your life we don’t got. That includes your old lady’s medical records. Deliver our goods and you don’t got a problem. Think I’m blowing gas? When you get off the phone, ask your son what kind of day he’s had.”

  “You listen, you motherfucker-”

  “We’ll be in touch. Buy better rubbers or stay out of other people’s business,” he said.

  The line went dead.

  I went outside, my hands shaking so badly I had to put them in my pockets.

  “What happened?” Temple said.

  “A guy just threatened you. He said you’re going to have a baby. What’s he talking about?”

  I saw the blood drain in her face. “I just found out yesterday. I’m pregnant. I was going to tell you tonight. I didn’t know how you were going to take it.”

  “How I was going to take it? You thought I didn’t want a child of our own?”

  “How am I supposed to know? Half the time, we’re worrying about every person on the planet except ourselves.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Yes, it is. And it’s because of your goddamn guilt over shooting L.Q. Navarro. It’s always your goddamn guilt and the obsessions you drag like a junkyard with you from one day to the next.”

  I couldn’t speak. My words were like fish bone in my throat. I felt my heart twist as though someone had inserted a cold hand into my chest. I went back into the house, my ears ringing. I could hear her feet coming hard behind me.

  “Who was it that called?”

  “A piece of human garbage who said he was going to use a coat hanger on you. A man who’s done something to Lucas.”

  “Lucas?”

  “Yeah, one of the people I evidently don’t have time to care about,” I said, hardly able to punch his number into the telephone.

  She sat down in the living room, her hands clasped together, pushed down between her thighs. “Don’t let them do this to us, Billy Bob,” she said.

  But they already had.

  On Saturdays, Lucas sometimes swam or shot hoops at the university gym. That afternoon he had changed into his workout clothes, stuffed his gym bag in a locker, snapped his combination lock on it, and joined a basketball game on the court. Sunlight flooded through the high windows, and the slap and squeak of basketballs and the slam dunks through the steel hoops echoed in the cavernous building like a testimonial to all that is good and wholesome in traditional America.