In the Moon of Red Ponies bbh-4

by James Lee Burke

  Then the ear-splitting cacophony of the fire alarm rose into the rafters. The building was evacuated in minutes. Lucas stood among a crowd of students in gym clothes and wet swimsuits and watched firemen, campus and city cops, and a bomb-squad unit with leashed dogs stream inside, some of them carrying fire protection shields on their forearms.

  A half hour passed and the emergency personnel began exiting the building. A false alarm, everyone said. Wow, what a drag. What some guys will do for a few kicks. How about that for sick?

  But something wasn’t right. City cops and campus cops had crossed the street onto the shady lawn where the students were standing. The cops circled behind the crowd, forming a gray-and-blue cordon through which no one could leave.

  “Women students can go, everybody else back inside! Women students can go, everybody else back inside!” a cop wearing a cap and bars on his collar was saying.

  “I’m bisexual. How about me?” a kid next to Lucas shouted.

  The crowd laughed; the cops didn’t.

  The male students filed back into the gym and stood listlessly on the polished floor, one or two of them picking up basketballs, arching them through the air, twanging them off steel hoops. Ten minutes later two older men in suits and ties, university administrators of some kind, joined the cops, then cops, students, and administrators went into the men’s dressing room. Someone clanged shut and locked a metal door behind them.

  As Lucas looked into the rectangular depth of the room, the rigidity of the lines, the tea-colored light, he felt as though he were staring into the interior of a coffin. It was the same strange emotion that had invaded his system and poisoned his blood as a child after his mother had died and he had been left in the care of a harsh, inept stepfather who believed joy was an illusion and brotherhood a sucker’s game.

  At the far end of the room a cop had pulled up a choke chain on a bomb-sniffing German shepherd. Every locker on either side of the dressing benches was closed, except one. The shaft on the combination lock had been snapped in half by bolt cutters and all the locker’s contents raked out on the floor. Lucas swallowed as he recognized his Wrangler jeans with the wide belt and Indian-head buckle threaded through the loops, his beat-up Acme cowboy boots, his snap-button checkered shirt, his gym bag that he had packed with a towel, soap, fresh underwear, and socks.

  But items that didn’t belong to him were there, too: a string of Chinese firecrackers, an open manila envelope with a sheaf of papers protruding from it, and a Ziploc bag fat as a softball from its shredded green contents.

  One of the administrators, a man with meringue hair and tiny veins in his soft cheeks, was holding a hand-tooled wallet in his palm. He opened it and studied a celluloid window inside. “Which of you is Lucas Smothers?” he asked.

  “I am,” Lucas said.

  “You want to explain this?” the administrator with meringue hair said, nodding at the piled items on the floor.

  “That wallet and those clothes and that gym bag are my stuff. I don’t know where them other things come from, if that’s what you’re asking me,” Lucas said.

  “Son, how can part of these things be yours and part not be yours, when all of them were in the same locker?” the administrator said.

  Unconsciously, Lucas shifted his weight from one foot to the other, the same way he had done when his stepfather hurled accusations at him, totally irrational ones, that he couldn’t answer. “Why would I have firecrackers in my locker?” Lucas said. Then he realized he had stepped into the old trap of defending himself, legitimizing his accuser.

  “How about the baggie here? You wouldn’t be a user or purveyor of marijuana, would you, Mr. Smothers?”

  “A pur-” he began, unable to process the word.

  Everyone was looking at him now. His skin felt tight against his face, his body shrunken inside his sweat-stained clothes. Don’t lose your temper, don’t smart off, just don’t say anything, he told himself.

  “I ain’t never used dope. The person who says I have is a dad-burned liar,” he said.

  “Frankly, I don’t care if you use dope or not, Mr. Smothers, because you’re not going to be around here very long. Know what’s in that envelope?”

  “No, ’cause I ain’t ever seen it before.”

  “They’re stolen LSATs and the answer sheets that go with them. How much you get for these, son?”

  Lucas could feel his eyes watering, the room morphing, the faces around him distorting, going out of shape. “I didn’t steal no LSATs or whatever they are. I didn’t carry no reefer in here, either. I work two or three jobs-”

  He couldn’t finish his statement. All the correct grammar he had learned in composition courses had disappeared and he was once again the kid in strap overalls standing in the principal’s office of a rural junior high school, in trouble, tongue-tied, his cheeks pooled with color, the years of his stepfather’s belittling remarks thundering in his head.

  “Go wash your face, then accompany these officers. There’s a price to pay when you break the law. My advice is you own up to your problems here and get them behind you,” the administrator with meringue hair said.

  Lucas stared at nothing. The room was silent, the faces of everyone around him now indistinct, somehow separate and no longer a part of his life. Outside, he could hear people whocking the ball back and forth on a tennis court.

  “What are you doing?” the administrator said.

  Lucas stepped out of his tennis shoes and peeled off his T-shirt, gym shorts, and jockstrap, then stood naked and raw with stink in the middle of the room, taller than anyone around him, his gaze now turned inward. “Gonna take a shower and put on fresh clothes,” he said. “Then when I get to the jailhouse I’m gonna call Billy Bob Holland and tell him to sue y’all. How you like them apples, sports fans?”

  He smiled at his own question, his head tilted quizzically, his eyes squeezed shut.

  Lucas’s heart was always bigger than the adversity the world handed him, but as I sat with him in his jail cell that night I had a hard time participating in the optimism and indifference Lucas always used as a shield when he was badly hurt. In all probability he would be charged with possession of stolen property and narcotics. If he was really unlucky, the latter charge would include intent to distribute. Bail would not be set until Monday morning, which meant he would have to stay in jail through the weekend. Suspension from the university was a foregone conclusion.

  “So what? My summer courses are over. We’ll get all this straightened out by fall. This don’t bother me,” he said.

  The stainless-steel toilet attached to the wall gurgled when somebody in another cell flushed his. I was sitting on the edge of Lucas’s bunk, looking at the tips of my boots, unsure of what to say, reluctant to rob him of his courage. He got up and walked to the bars, shirtless, his back like an inverted triangle, his shoulders wide and knobby.

  “I still cain’t quite put it all together, though. Can you figure it out?” he said, smiling halfheartedly, trying not to give recognition to the cunning of the people who had undone him.

  “Some pretty slick guys opened your locker, planted the dope and stolen exams and firecrackers inside, then called in a bomb threat. They knew the cops would search the gym with explosive-sniffing dogs. The gunpowder in the firecrackers brought the dogs straight to your locker.”

  “These are the same guys who jerked me around on the scholarship?”

  “The same guys,” I replied.

  “What do they want?”

  “They think I have some records that were stolen from a biotech research lab. A guy called me this evening and told me he knew Temple was pregnant. He said a friend of his might abort the baby with a coat hanger.”

  “Y’all gonna have a baby?” he said, the evil represented by the phone caller not even registering on his consciousness.

  “Yeah, she was going to tell me tonight.”

  “Man, that’s great. Wow, I cain’t believe it. I’m gonna have me a little b
aby brother or baby sister. Way to go, Billy Bob, you son of a gun,” he said, his whole face lit by his grin.

  Chapter 20

  I slept little either that night or the next. Early Monday morning, I tracked down Special Agent Francis Broussard at the Federal Building on East Broadway. He was standing over a desk in a small office, sorting papers in piles from a manila folder, his back to me, when I tapped on the jamb of the doorway. He looked at me peculiarly. “You all right there?” he said.

  “No, my son’s in the can on bogus charges and an anonymous caller threatened to mutilate my wife and unborn child with a coat hanger,” I said.

  “Is this connected with American Horse?”

  “What do you think?”

  “How about changing your tone of voice?”

  “Know a guy name of Karsten Mabus?”

  “Do I know who he is? Yeah, who doesn’t?”

  “You damn well better do something about him.”

  “Why don’t you go get a cup of coffee and a couple of aspirin and come back when you’re feeling better, Mr. Holland?”

  “Ever been a victim of a violent crime, Mr. Broussard?”

  “That’s the last personal statement you’re going to make to me this morning.”

  “I think Wyatt Dixon has the goods stolen from Global Research. He rides an Appaloosa. He has strange biblical convictions about our man Karsten Mabus.”

  “The cowboy clown with horse pucky between his ears who writes letters to the President? He’s the source of all our trouble?”

  “Excuse me for saying this, but you’re starting to piss me off.”

  “Which means, if you don’t get what you want here today, you’re going to kick some ass on your own? My advice, Mr. Holland, is you clean those thoughts out of your head, take care of your son, and stay out of federal business.”

  “What bothers me, Mr. Broussard, is I think you bastards have probably used the Patriot Act to tap my phones. That means you already know about the threat to my wife and our unborn child but you’re pretending otherwise. If I had the goods from Global Research, I’d turn them over to y’all or return them to the owner. But I can’t do that, so I’m stuck. What would you do if you were in my shoes?”

  “Start my life over, to be honest.”

  “Care to walk outside and talk about this more specifically? I’ll try not to make it too personal.”

  “Stay out of the line of fire, Mr. Holland. And take your histrionics out of my office,” he said.

  At 11 A.M. I got Lucas out of jail on a five-thousand-dollar bond, then drove up to Wyatt’s place on the Blackfoot River. His truck was gone, but his Appaloosa was in the lot behind the house, nosing through a curlicue of fresh hay Wyatt had dumped on the ground. I climbed through the fence and lifted one of the Appaloosa’s hooves. There were small nailholes where the hoof had probably once held a composite shoe, but there were no shoes on the animal now. I had no doubt it was Wyatt who had found and rope-dragged Johnny American Horse’s lockbox off the hillside behind our house.

  I heard a junker car misfiring up the dirt road, dust and oil smoke spiraling back from the frame. The driver, a tattooed man wearing a strap undershirt, with body hair as thick as monkey fur, braked to a stop in the yard. “What are you doing with Wyatt’s horse?” he said.

  “Looking at his feet. Who are you?” I said.

  “The neighbor. You another one of them federal men?”

  “I’m Wyatt’s lawyer. Which federal men?”

  “They was here yesterday, looking at that animal’s feet, just like you. What’s this with the feet?”

  “There’s a lot of fetishism going around.”

  “What?”

  “Where’s Wyatt?”

  “He left here with the pastor from his church. I think they was going up to the res. What’s your name?”

  “If Wyatt’s got any complaint about people trespassing on his land, tell him to call Francis Broussard at the Federal Building. Got that? Francis Broussard is the man to talk to. Francis Broussard would love to hear from Wyatt.”

  It was midafternoon when I got up to the res. The sky was yellow with smoke, and I could see Forest Service slurry bombers coming in low on a hillside, laying fire retardant in a frozen pink spray across the canopy. Wyatt’s church building was an ancient brick-and-wood schoolhouse, one with dark-stained gables, not far from the Jocko River. Someone had run a dozer into the yard and pushed the rusted wrecks of cars that had sat there for years into a huge metallic junkpile, leaving behind road-size scars in the soft green sod.

  The church was empty, but down by the riverside a rock sweathouse was leaking with both steam and chants in a consonant-heavy language I had heard only two or three times in my life. I wanted to be kind in my attitude toward the members of Wyatt Dixon’s church, but as a person raised in the rural South I’d known many like them, and as a child they had filled me with fear. The severity of their views, the ferocity of their passion, the absolutism that characterized their thinking were such that I always felt they had one foot in the next world and were heedless of this one. I also believed that, given the opportunity, they would destroy the earth rather than let it be governed by a creed other than their own.

  Moreover, Wyatt’s church had a singular reputation for inclusion of brain-singed mercenaries and war veterans who stayed off the computer and moved about like gypsy moths through the mountains and rain forests of the Pacific Northwest. Some of them were harmless Libertarians or survivalists trying to re-create a nineteenth-century frontier ethos; but others were tormented men who could not purge their dreams of memories that no human being should have to carry.

  I pulled aside the tarp that hung over the truncated door in the rock house, squatted down, and stepped inside. The heat and steam and astringent odor of male sweat covered my face like a wet cloth. In one corner the pastor sat on a stool in an oversized pair of black swim trunks, his skin as pink as a baby pig’s, his face smiling, a jolly, innocent man among men whose backgrounds had nothing in common with his own. Wyatt sat across from him on an old rug, wearing only a jockstrap, his knees pulled up in front of him, drops of sweat as big as dimes sliding down his face. But it was the three other men in the rock house who bothered me.

  Perhaps I had been away too long from hands-on involvement with law enforcement and the realities of the criminal world. Perhaps I had become too much like the ordinary citizen who sees criminals only when they are in custody-free of drugs and booze, showered, clean-shaven, their hair freshly barbered, their tattoos hidden by buttoned collars and conservative neckties and long-sleeve shirts. It had been a temptation to think of Wyatt as a slightly fried, engaging, hillbilly eccentric; but one look at his sweathouse friends was a quick reminder that his jailhouse past and criminal frame of reference were not abstractions.

  One man was totally naked, head shaved, perhaps six and a half feet tall, snake-belly white, the edges of his eyes tattooed with blue teardrops. An Indian sat next to him, his braids, sopping with moisture, tied on top of his scalp, his chest pocked with two lead-gray circular scars that looked like bullet wounds, his arms scrolled from wrist to armpit with jailhouse art that convicts call “sleeves.”

  The third man had the flawless gray proportions of a granite sculpture, his abs recessed, elongated like strips of stone below the curvature of his chest, his phallus huge, his eyes dancing with an inquisitional light as though my casual glance at him were a personal challenge to his manhood.

  “See you outside, Wyatt?” I said.

  “This is a prayer meeting. Can it wait?” he replied.

  “No,” I said, and stepped back outside, my shirt peppered with moisture.

  He followed me, standing up on a pair of walking canes, but before I could speak he lumbered into the Jocko and sat down chest-deep in the current, holding on to a boulder with each arm while the ice-cold water boiled over his skin. Then he hobbled back up on the bank and began pulling on his clothes, one eye squinting at me. “You got a b
eef about something?” he asked.

  “I’m taking your weight,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “You found the goods from the Global Research robbery. But some guys think I’ve got them and they’re coming down on my family to get them back.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “I’m in a bad mood, Wyatt. I don’t have a lot to lose at this point, get my meaning? You think you’re about to make the big score with the Global goods? Is that why you’re hanging with the Deer Lodge alumni in there?”

  “I wouldn’t say that too loud if I was you.”

  “You turn the goods over to the Feds or Karsten Mabus’s people, I don’t care which.”

  “I thought you was a smart man, but I’m revising my opinion downward. I got a buddy to bust into them files. The day that Mabus fellow gets them files back, I’m a dead man and so are you.”

  “Call The Washington Post or The New York Times. I’ll help you.”

  “Yeah, they’ll run with that one-stolen goods turned over to them by an ex-con with a homicide in his jacket and a lawman who killed his best friend.”

  “Nobody can accuse you of an excess of sentiment,” I said.

  He tucked his shirt into his jeans, his mouth twisted into a button. “I’m always on the receiving end of your insults, counselor. It gets to be a drag.”

  “What’s in those files?” I said.

  “Stuff about anthrax, Ebola virus, mustard gas, the Black Death. I done told you before, I ain’t got the education or the experience to deal with a man like Mabus. But the two of us can come up with a plan. It takes smarts to whip the devil.”

  “Let’s keep it simple and save the Bible lessons for your study group in there. You dump the goods. End of story.”