In the Moon of Red Ponies bbh-4

by James Lee Burke

  Temple lifted the glass to his mouth and held it there while he drew through the straw. She could feel his breath on the back of her wrist, his eyes examining her face.

  “Thanks,” he said. “You got nice tits. Are they implants or the real thing?”

  That night the moon was full above the valley and there were deep shadows inside the fir trees on the hill behind our house. Temple had been quiet all evening, and as we prepared to go to bed she put on her nightgown with her back to me.

  “You still thinking about Ruggles?” I said.

  “No, not Ruggles.”

  She sat on the side of the bed, looking out the window. I placed my hand between her shoulder blades. I could feel her heart beating. “What’s the trouble?” I asked.

  “Johnny American Horse is a professional martyr. He’s going to hurt us,” she said.

  “I don’t read him that way.”

  “That’s why he comes to you and not somebody else.”

  “He’s our friend,” I replied.

  She peeled back the covers and lay down, the curvature of her spine imprinted against her nightgown.

  “Temple?” I said.

  “Ruggles is a Detroit button man. So was the other guy. Johnny has to know who sent them.”

  I couldn’t argue with her. Maybe in some ways Johnny was enigmatic by choice. People who claim mystical powers don’t spend a lot of time feigning normalcy at Kiwanis meetings. But I still believed Johnny was basically honest about who he was.

  “I’ll talk to him tomorrow,” I said.

  “It won’t do any good,” she replied.

  Moments later she was asleep. I lay in the darkness with my eyes open a long time. We had a wonderful home in Montana, one hundred and twenty acres spread up both sides of a dirt road that traversed timber, meadowland, and knobbed hills. It was an enclave where distant wars and images of oil smoke on desert horizons seemed to have no application.

  Why put it at risk for Johnny American Horse?

  I heard a vehicle on the road, I supposed one of the few neighbors living up the valley from us. But a moment later I heard the same vehicle again, then a third time, as though the driver were lost.

  I put on my slippers and went into the living room. Through the window I could see a paint-skinned pickup truck with slat sides stopped on the road and a man in a snow-white Stetson, a long-sleeved canary-yellow shirt, and tight jeans leaning on our railed fence, studying the front of our house.

  I went back into the bedroom, slipped on my khakis and boots, then stopped in the hallway to put on my hat and leather jacket. In the living room I removed a. 30-30 Winchester from the gun rack. Every firearm in our house was kept loaded, although no round was ever in the chamber. I heard Temple behind me. “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “It’s Wyatt Dixon,” I replied.

  I stepped out on the gallery and levered a round into the Winchester’s chamber. Wyatt positioned his hat on the back of his head, the way Will Rogers often did, so that his face was bathed in moonlight. I steadied the rifle against a post and aimed just to the left of his shoulder and pulled the trigger.

  The bullet struck rock on the opposite hillside and whined away in the shadows with a sound like a tightly wrapped guitar string snapping free from the tuning peg.

  Wyatt looked behind him curiously, then scratched a match on a fencepost and cupped the flame to a cigar stub clenched between his teeth. He flicked the dead match into our yard.

  I ejected the spent casing and sighted again. This time I blew a spray of wood splinters out of the fence rail. I saw Wyatt touch his cheek, then look at his hand and wipe it on his jeans.

  My third shot blew dirt out of the road six inches from his foot. I started to eject the spent casing, but Temple grabbed the barrel and pushed it down toward the gallery railing.

  “Either put the gun away or give it to me,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “He knows you won’t kill him. He knows I will,” she replied.

  I put my arm around her shoulder. She was wearing only her nightgown and her back was shaking with cold. “To hell with Wyatt Dixon,” I said.

  We went back inside and closed the door. Through the window I saw him get inside his truck and puff his cigar alight. Then he started the engine and drove away.

  “Billy Bob?” Temple said.

  “What?”

  “You’re unbelievable. You shoot at somebody, then say to hell with him,” she said.

  “What’s unusual about that?”

  She laughed. “Come back to bed. You know any cures for insomnia?” she said.

  The next morning was Friday. Fay Harback was in my office just after 8 A.M. “Where do you get off sending your wife into a suspect’s hospital room?” she said.

  “It’s a free country,” I replied.

  “This isn’t rural Bumfuck. You don’t get to make up your own rules.”

  “Have you charged Ruggles yet?” I said.

  “None of your business.”

  “I’m getting a bad feeling on this one.”

  “About what?” she said.

  “The other half of the assassination team, what’s his name, Bumper, had no record at all. Ruggles has at least a half-dozen arrests, including passing counterfeit, but the charges were always dismissed.”

  Her eyes shifted off mine, an unformed thought buried inside them.

  “Any Feds been to see you?” I asked.

  “Feds? No. You’re too imaginative.”

  “My client isn’t going to get set up.”

  I saw the color rise in her throat. “That takes real nerve,” she said.

  “File charges against Ruggles and we won’t be having this kind of conversation,” I said.

  “The investigation is still in progress.”

  “Seems open and shut to me. Who’s running it?”

  “Darrel McComb.”

  “You’re not serious?”

  “If you have a problem with that, talk to the sheriff.”

  “No, we’ll just give your general attitude a ‘D’ for ‘disingenuous.’ Shame on you, Fay.”

  She slammed the door on the way out.

  I headed up to the Jocko Valley. Western Montana is terraced country, each mountain plateau and valley stacked a little higher than the ones below it. To get to the Flathead Reservation, you climb a long grade outside Missoula, between steep-sloped, thickly wooded mountains, then enter the wide green sweep of the Jocko Valley. To the left are a string of bars and an open-air arena with a cement dance floor where Merle Haggard sometimes performs. Across the breadth of the valley are the homes of fairly prosperous feed growers as well as the prefabricated tract houses built for Flathead Indians by the government. The tract houses look like a sad imitation of a middle-income suburb. Some of the yards are dotted with log outbuildings, rusted car bodies, parts of washing machines, and old refrigerators. Often a police car is parked in one of them.

  But through it all winds the Jocko River-tea-colored in the early spring, later boiling with snowmelt, in the summer undulating like satin over beaver-cut cottonwoods and heavy pink and gray boulders. Johnny American Horse wanted to save it, along with the wooded hills and the grasslands that had never been kicked over with a plow. He also argued for the reintroduction of bison on the plains, allowing them to crash through fences and trample two centuries of agrarian economics into finely ground cereal. Some people on the res listened to him. Most did not.

  I parked in his yard and sat down on the front steps with him. A sealed gallon jar of sun tea rested by his foot. A calico cat rolled in the new clover. Part of the mountains behind his house was still in shadow, and when the wind blew down the slope I could smell the odor of pine needles and damp humus and lichen and stone back in the trees.

  “A couple of things are bothering me, Johnny,” I said.

  “Like what?” he said, watching the cat trap a grasshopper with its paws.

  “Why’d you have to use a knife and hatchet on th
ose guys?”

  “The only gun I own is the one the cops took away from me.”

  “Why’d you lay in wait for them? Why didn’t you get some help?”

  “This is the res. People take care of themselves here. Ask any federal agent what he thinks about Indians. An Indian homicide is just another dead Indian.”

  “I think maybe you know who sent Bumper and Ruggles after you.”

  He seemed to study a thought that was hidden behind his eyes. “Ever hear of wet work?” he asked.

  “Maybe,” I replied.

  “You were a Texas Ranger and an assistant U.S. attorney, Billy Bob.”

  “You’re saying the G sicced these guys on you?”

  “What’s the G? It’s just the guys who are currently running things. I trained with people just like Bumper and Ruggles. Some of the old-timers had been in the Phoenix Program.”

  The screen door opened behind us. “You telling Billy Bob about your dream?” Amber Finley asked. Her eyes were the bluest, most radiant I’d ever seen, her complexion glowing.

  “What dream?” I said.

  Johnny got up from the steps and walked across the yard toward the barn, his face averted. Amber watched him, a hand perched on one hip. “Isn’t he something else?” she said.

  “What dream?” I said.

  “He just told me, ‘All those dudes are going down. There’s nothing to worry about.’ I wish I could have dreams like that. Mine suck,” she said.

  Chapter 4

  My son was Lucas Smothers. Illegitimate, raised by a tormented, uneducated foster father, Lucas was living testimony to the fact that goodness, love, decency, and musical talent could survive in an individual who had every reason to hate the world. He had my eyes and reddish-blond hair and six-foot height, but oddly I thought of him as my son rather than of myself as his father. When I had a moral question to resolve, I asked myself what Lucas would do in the same situation.

  He was in his second year at the University of Montana and lived in an old, maple-lined neighborhood west of the campus. His small apartment looked like a recording studio more than the residence of a college student. Microphones, stereo systems, amplifiers for his electric guitars, stacks of CDs and old vinyl records, as well as his instruments-a banjo, mandolin, fiddle, stand-up bass, twelve-string mariachi guitar, and his acoustical HD-28 Martin-covered every available piece of space in the living room.

  He answered the door barefoot, wearing no shirt, his stomach flat inside his Wranglers. Over his shoulder I saw a young woman go out the back door and clang loudly down the fire escape. “Who was that?” I asked.

  “A friend who stayed over. She’s late for class,” he said.

  “It’s two o’clock in the afternoon.”

  “That’s what I said. She’s late,” he replied.

  I nodded, as though his response made perfect sense. “Wyatt Dixon is out of prison,” I said.

  “I read about it in the newspaper,” he said. He started picking up clothes from the floor, some of which included a woman’s undergarments.

  “I ran him off our place last night. But he’ll be back. Watch yourself,” I said.

  “He’s not interested in me.”

  “People like Dixon hate goodness. They try to injure it whenever they can, Lucas.”

  “I ain’t afraid. I know you sure as hell ain’t. So what’s the big deal?” He pressed a button on his stereo and the amplified voices of Bonnie Raitt and John Lee Hooker almost blew me out of the room.

  But I couldn’t get Wyatt Dixon off my mind that afternoon, or Johnny American Horse’s cavalier attitude about sharing information with me. I worked until late, my resentment growing. At 5:30 P.M. the courthouse square was purple with shadow, the trees pulsing with birds. I called Johnny at his house.

  “You told Amber, ‘All those dudes are going down.’ How about some clarification on that?” I said.

  “All power lies in the world of dreams. I have a dream about red ponies. It means I don’t have to worry about these guys who are after me,” he said.

  “Then why were you carrying a gun?”

  “Don’t represent me.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  I felt my old nemesis, anger, flare inside me like a lighted match. Don’t say anything, I heard a voice say.

  “You got it, bud,” I said, and hung up the phone.

  I wish it had all ended right there. But it didn’t.

  That evening, Temple and I had supper at a Mexican restaurant in town. The streets were full of college kids, people riding bikes over the long bridge that spanned the Clark Fork, tourists visiting the art galleries that had replaced the bars and workingmen’s cafes on Front Street. A tall man in a hat and a western-cut suit walked past the restaurant window. His face was lean, his skin brown, his lavender shirt stitched with flowers. He could have been a cattleman out of the 1940s. But Seth Masterson was no cattleman.

  “What are you staring at?” Temple said.

  “That guy at the corner. He was a special agent in Phoenix.”

  “You sure? He seemed to look right through you.”

  “I’ll be right back,” I said.

  I caught up with Masterson before he could cross the intersection. “Why, hey there, Billy Bob,” he said, as though my face had been hard to recognize in the failing light. “What are you doing in Missoula?”

  “Chasing ambulances. You know how it is,” I replied. “How about you?”

  “A little vacation,” he replied, his eyes twinkling.

  “Right,” I said.

  “You ought to come back and work for the G.”

  “Got any openings?” I said.

  “You know me. I stay out of administration. Hey, I don’t want to keep you. Call me if you’re in Arizona.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  He crossed the intersection, then went into the Fact and Fiction bookstore. My food was cold when I got back to the table.

  “What’s the deal on your friend?” Temple said.

  “Remember the story about the FBI agent who wrote a memo warning the head office terrorists were taking flight instruction in Phoenix? The memo that got ignored?”

  “That’s the guy?”

  “He was at Ruby Ridge and Waco, too. Seth gets around.”

  “You want your food reheated?”

  “Why not?” I said. But even after the waitress warmed up my plate, I couldn’t eat. I wasn’t sure why Seth was in Missoula, but there were two things I was certain of: Seth Masterson didn’t take prisoners and I didn’t want him as an adversary.

  Saturday morning I received a call at home from a man who was probably the most effective but lowest-rent attorney in Missoula. If a human being could exude oil through his pores, it was Brendan Merwood. His politics were for sale, his advocacy almost always on the side of power and greed. What he was now telling me seemed to offend reason.

  “You represent Michael Charles Ruggles and he wants to see me?” I said.

  “He likes to be called Charlie.”

  “Why would ‘Charlie’ have any interest in me?”

  “Put it this way-he’s not your ordinary guy.”

  “My wife got that impression when he called her a bitch and expressed his thoughts about her anatomy.”

  “I’m just passing on the message. Do with it as you wish, my friend,” he said, and hung up.

  I drove to St. Patrick’s Hospital in Missoula and rode the elevator up to Charlie Ruggles’s floor. A sheriff’s deputy stopped me at his door. “You’re supposed to be on an approved visitors list, Billy Bob,” he said.

  “Better check with the man inside,” I said, and grinned.

  The deputy went into the room and came back out. “Go on in,” he said.

  Instead, I stayed outside momentarily and pulled the door closed so Charlie Ruggles could not hear our conversation. “Was Seth by here?” I asked.

  “Who?” the deputy said.

  “Seth Masterson. Tall guy
, western clothes, nice-looking?”

  “Oh yeah, you mean that Fed. He was here yesterday afternoon. What about him?”

  “Nothing. We used to work together.”

  I went inside the room and shut the door behind me. Charlie Ruggles watched me out of a face that seemed as dead and empty of emotion as pink rubber.

  “You made remarks about my wife’s breasts and called her a bitch. But since you’re in an impaired condition, I’m not going to wrap that bedpan around your head. That said, would you like to tell me something?”

  “I want one hundred grand. You’ll get everything your client needs. Tell the Indian what I said.”

  I stood at the window and looked out at the treetops and the old brick apartment houses along the streets. “Why would anyone want to pay you a hundred grand?” I said, my back turned to Charlie Ruggles.

  “Considering what’s on the table, that ain’t much to ask,” he replied.

  The personality and mind-set of men and women like Charlie Ruggles never changed, I thought. They believe their own experience and knowledge of events are of indispensable value and importance to others. The fact that their own lives are marked by failure of every kind, that their rodent’s-eye view of the world is repellent to any normal person, is totally lost upon them. “Hey, did you hear me?” he asked.

  “I don’t have one hundred grand. Neither does my client. If we did, we wouldn’t give it to you,” I replied.

  “Your client knows the people he can get it from. They’ll pay him just to go away.”

  “I don’t want to offend you, Ruggles, but are you retarded?”

  His facial expression remained dead, but his eyes were imbued with a mindless, liquid malevolence that I had seen only in condemned sociopaths who no longer had anything to lose. “Step over here and I’ll whisper a secret in your ear. Come on, don’t be afraid. You’re safe with me. I just want to tell you about a couple of liberal lawyers who got in my face.”

  He rubbed his tattoos with the balls of his fingers and waited for me to speak. I walked close to his bed.

  “What do you think hell’s going to be like?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”