I unlocked the shell on the bed of my Tacoma and put my fly rod, vest, and waders inside. Seth was quiet for a long time, his eyes obviously troubled by an unresolved conflict inside himself. “I’ve been thinking about taking early retirement,” he said.
“Doesn’t sound like you,” I said.
“I don’t always like the cases I catch anymore. Get my drift?”
“I’m kind of slow sometimes,” I said.
“You’ve stepped into a pile of pig flop, Billy Bob. I’d get a lot of gone between me and Johnny American Horse.”
“Hate to hear you talk like that.”
“Not half as bad as I do,” he replied.
In the cab he pulled his hat down and pretended to sleep the rest of the way back to town.
That night I visited Johnny at St. Pat’s Hospital. He had taken stitches in one eyebrow, behind his ear, and on the jawbone. “Quit looking at me like that. I get out in the morning,” he said.
“You’re being charged with attempted assault on a law officer. Why’d you have to get in McComb’s face?” I said.
“Dude leaves a big footprint. This is still the United States. I fought for this damn country,” he said.
“When wars are over, nobody cares about the people who actually fought them.”
“Doesn’t matter. McComb tore up my home. He tried to hit on Amber. He didn’t do it because he’s a cop, either. He did it because he’s a white redneck and he knew he could get away with it,” he said.
“I’ve got to know why Ruggles and Eddy Bumper came after you, Johnny.”
He raised his hands and dropped them on the sheet. “My coalition has sued a couple of oil companies to stop them from drilling test wells on the east slope of the Divide. In the meantime we’re trying to kick a pipeline off the res. I kind of went out on my own on this anthrax stuff, too.”
“Say that last part again?”
“A private grudge I brought back from the first Gulf war, I guess. Sometimes I see things in my head, in broad daylight, that make me wish I wasn’t on the planet,” he said.
I didn’t want to hear it.
It was late and I was tired when I got back home. Temple had already gone to bed. I fixed a ham-and-egg sandwich and poured a glass of buttermilk and ate at the kitchen table. The moon was up and through the side window I could see elk and deer in the pasture and hear our horses nickering in the darkness on the far side of the barn.
I grew up on a small ranch in the hill country of south-central Texas. My mother was a librarian by profession and my father a tack and hot-pass welder on pipelines all over Texas and Oklahoma. Both of them dearly loved our ranch, in spite of the meager income it provided them. They also loved the Victorian purple brick home in which I grew up. They loved the horses, dogs, goats, cats, sheep, beehives, fish in the ponds (called tanks in Texas), and even poultry in the chicken run on our land. My father named our ranch “Heartwood,” and he burned the name into a thick red-oak plank with the intention of hanging it from the front gate.
But the man who had landed at Normandy, and who had walked all the way across Europe to the Elbe River, was killed in a natural gas blowout at Matagorda Bay and never got to hang his sign. So I hung it for him down in Texas, and now I had hung it above our gate in Montana, up a valley that was the most beautiful stretch of land I had ever seen.
I brushed my teeth and lay down next to Temple. I felt her weight turn on the mattress and her hand touch my back. “Your muscles are stiff as iron. What’s wrong?” she said.
“Heartwood is the best place I’ve ever been. It’s not one spread, either. It’s the place where I grew up and it’s the place we’ve built together, here, in Montana,” I said.
She raised herself on her elbow so she could look into my face. “What happened tonight?” she said.
“Seth Masterson tried to warn me off Johnny’s case.”
“Who the hell does he think he is?”
“You don’t know Seth. He broke all his own rules. Johnny American Horse is in the meat grinder. You were right. Johnny might pull us down with him.”
She pressed her face next to mine. “Listen to me, Billy Bob. You tell the FBI to screw themselves. Nobody threatens us,” she said.
I turned and looked into her eyes. They were milky green, the color of the Guadalupe River in summer, sometimes with shadows in them, the way the river was when it flowed under a tree. “You’re special,” I said.
She pulled her nightgown over her knees and sat on top of me, then leaned down and kissed me on the mouth. I cupped her breasts, then heard her say “Wait.” She worked her gown over her head and I put her nipples in my mouth and ran my hands over her baby fat and felt my own hardness touch her stomach.
I rolled on top of her, then she reached down and held me with her hand and placed me inside her, her knees widening, her face turned to one side, her eyes closing, then, slowly, her mouth puckering as though she were warming the air before she breathed it. Her skin was moist and pink in the glow of the moon through the window, then she began to come and I felt as though the two of us were dropping down inside a well that swirled with starlight at the bottom.
She held me tighter, then even tighter than that, and made a sound in my ear that was like the cry of the loon, and I was sure in that moment no evil would ever touch our lives.
Chapter 6
On Tuesday morning, when Johnny was about to be transported from the hospital to face the trumped-up attempted assault charges filed against him by Darrel McComb, he was formally placed under arrest for the murder of Charlie Ruggles and taken in handcuffs to a cell at the county jail. I caught Fay Harback at the coffee stand by the back entrance of the courthouse. “No,” she said, raising her hand prohibitively. “I don’t want to see you.”
“This is bogus, Fay. You’re being a dupe,” I said.
“How would you like to have this coffee thrown in your face?”
“My client is the victim, not the perpetrator. You’re helping a collection of assholes gang up on an innocent man.”
“Did I ever tell you, you make my blood boil? I want to hit you with a large, hard object,” she said. People were starting to stare now. “Come outside.”
We went through the big glass doors onto the lawn. It was cold in the shade of the building and the grass was stiff with frost. “Which collection of assholes are you talking about?” she asked.
“I’m not sure.”
“That’s beautiful. You just slander people in public without knowing why?”
“The Feds are involved in this stuff. An agent tried to warn me off last night.”
“Let me make it simple for you. American Horse’s tennis shoes matched a perfectly stenciled impression on the floor right next to Charlie Ruggles’s bed.” She raised a finger when I started to speak.
“Hear me out. Your client not only left behind a signature with his foot, he dropped a Jiffy Lube receipt on the floor. It has his name on it and his fingerprints. We found a pair of greens in a service elevator. They smelled of booze.”
“How could Johnny have gotten past the guard at the door? All the deputies know him,” I said
For just a second, no more than a blink, I saw the confidence weaken in her eyes. “The deputy went to help an elderly man use the bathroom. It’s not his fault,” she replied.
“Who said it was?”
“Johnny was in a bar down the street from the hospital. He’s a mercurial, unpredictable man. He killed Ruggles. There’s no conspiracy here,” she said.
“Hell there’s not.”
She looked into space, as though my words contained a degree of credibility which, for reasons of her own, she would not acknowledge. “I do my job. I don’t always like it. Don’t ever try to embarrass me in front of people like that again,” she said.
That afternoon, I visited Johnny at the lockup. We sat at a wood table in a small room that contained a narrow, vertical slit for a window, through which I could see the old buildings and brick s
treets down by the train yards. Johnny wore a bright orange jumpsuit with the word JAIL lettered in black across the back.
“How do you explain the Jiffy Lube receipt and the prints of your tennis shoes in Ruggles’s room?” I said.
“Somebody must have taken the shoes out of the house and put them back later. The receipt for the oil change was in my pickup.”
His eyes wandered around the room. I touched him on the wrist to make him look at me. “You get pretty swacked Saturday night?” I said.
“No.”
“No blackouts?”
“Amber was with me all night. We were at the Ox, Charley B’s, and Stockman’s. I went down to Red’s for a few minutes to meet a guy who wants to buy my truck. But he wasn’t there.”
“You went to Red’s by yourself?”
“Like I said.”
“Has a Fed named Masterson been in here?”
“No. Who is he?”
“Johnny, nobody wants to believe in conspiracies anymore. People want to trust the government. They don’t want to believe that corporations run their lives, either. But everything you do and say sends them another message. You hearing me on this?”
“Not really,” he said.
They’re going to burn you at the stake, I thought. I banged on the door for the turnkey to let me out.
“You still my attorney?” Johnny said.
“Nobody else will hire me,” I replied, and winked at him.
Darrel McComb belonged to an athletic club downtown, one frequented primarily by middle-class businesspeople during their lunch hour or just before they drove home from work. But Darrel did not go to the club for the tanning services it offered or for the state-of-the-art exercise machines most members used while they read magazines or watched a television program of their selection, the audio filtering through the foam-rubber headsets clamped on their ears. Darrel was there to clank serious iron, benching three hundred pounds, curling forty-pound dumbbells in each hand, the veins in his muscles rippling like nests of purple string.
He also liked to smack the heavy bag, getting high on his own heated smell, diverting an imaginary opponent with a left jab, then ripping a vicious right hook into the place where his opponent’s rib cage would be, under the heart, driving his fist so deep into the leather the bag rattled on its chain.
But on that particular Tuesday evening Darrel was disturbed for reasons he couldn’t adequately explain. As he sat in the steam room by himself, he experienced a sense of depression about his life and about who he was that few people would understand.
Not unless they had grown up abandoned by their parents in a town that was hardly more than a dusty crossroads inside several million acres of Nebraska wheat. Not unless at age fifteen they had blown an orphanage where the kids scrubbed floors with rags tied on their knees. Not unless they had piloted Flying Boxcars through AK-47 ground fire with a guy named Rocky Harrigan.
Rocky was a legend. He had dog-fought the Japanese in the skies over the Pacific, made airdrops to the Tibetan Resistance, and lit up the Pathet Lao with fifty-gallon drums of gasoline mixed with Tide laundry detergent. Then, in the mid-eighties, Rocky had hooked up with a CIA front in Fort Lauderdale, telephoned his young friend Darrel McComb, who was spraying crops and dodging power lines in Kansas, and invited him to join the fun down in Central America.
But planes crashed, names spilled into headlines, and the era of Ronald Reagan came to an end. Darrel McComb always believed he had shared a special moment in history, one whose complexities and dangers few people were aware of. The Iron Curtain had collapsed, hadn’t it? American companies were opening textile mills and creating jobs in Stone Age villages where Indians still lived in grass huts, weren’t they? None of that would have happened if it hadn’t been for men like Rocky and himself, would it?
Let the peace marchers and the bunny huggers light candles and sing their hymns, he thought. They would never be players. This was a great country. Guys like Rocky gave up their lives so the jackoff crowd could revel in their own ignorance. In Cuba they’d be diced pork inside somebody’s taco.
But the splenetic nature of his thoughts brought him little peace. What was really on his mind? he asked himself, sitting on the tile stoop in the steam room, his skin threaded with sweat. For an answer he only had to glance down at the erection under his towel.
Amber Finley.
He thought about her all the time, in ways he had never thought about a woman. In fact, women had never been an issue in his life. He went to bed with them occasionally and had even been married for a few months. An Army psychiatrist had once told him he was probably homoerotic, a categorization that oddly enough didn’t offend him. But the sight of Amber Finley filled his head with images and sounds that beset him like a crown of thorns, leaving him sleepless at night and throbbing in the morning.
What was it that attracted or bothered him most about her? The blueness and luminosity of her eyes? Her heart-shaped face? Or the throaty quality of her laugh and the irreverence in her speech? Perhaps the perfect quality of her skin, her education and intelligence and the fact she spent it like coin in lowlife bars with people like Johnny American Horse?
No, it was all of it. Amber Finley could walk down a street and make his innards drain like water.
He shouldn’t have lost it with that Indian kid. American Horse was going down anyway; he might even ride the needle for the gig on Ruggles. Why did Darrel have to make a martyr of him and probably earn himself a civil rights beef in the bargain? He’d flushed himself good with Amber, and acquired a dirty jacket on top of it.
He showered, dressed, and ate supper by himself in a workingmen’s cafe on Front Street. The evening was warm, the color of the sky as soft as lilacs, the flooded willows on the riverbanks clattering with birds. There were many places he could go-a movie, a concert in the park, a minor league baseball game, a bar where cops drank and he sometimes joined them with a soda and sliced lime. But Darrel had no doubt where he would end up as soon as the sun began to sink, and that thought more than any other filled him with an abiding shame.
Amber lived with her widower father, the senator, up Rattlesnake Creek, in a two-story home built on a slope above a sepia-tinted stream. Darrel parked his car and walked through a woods that looked down on the back of the house, the hot tub on the deck, and the lawn where Amber’s yoga class met on Tuesday evenings. His binoculars were Russian Army issue, the magnification amazing. He could see the down on her cheeks, the shine on the tops of her breasts, the way she breathed through her mouth, as though the air were cold and she were warming it before it entered her lungs. No woman had the right to be that desirable.
Was this what people called midlife crisis?
A black Mercury pulled to the front of the house, and two men and a woman got out and were greeted at the door by the senator. The woman looked familiar, but Darrel could not be sure where he had seen her. Then he heard a noise behind him.
A man in a cowboy hat and jeans was sitting on a big, flat, lichen-stained rock, shaving a stick with the six-inch blade of an opened bone-handled knife. Even though there was a chill in the air, the man’s corduroy shirtsleeves were rolled, exposing biceps that were as big as grapefruit.
“Late for bird-watching, ain’t it?” the man said, without looking up.
Think, Darrel told himself. He opened his badge holder. “I don’t know who the hell you are, but you’re interfering in a police surveillance. That means haul your ass out of here, pal,” he said.
The man closed the knife in his palm and stuck it in his back pocket. He picked a piece of wet matter off his lip and looked at it. “You don’t ’member me?” he asked.
“No.”
The man removed his hat and the afterglow of the sun fell through the trees on the paleness of his brow and the moral vacuity in his eyes, the chiseled, lifeless features of his face. “ ’Member me now?” he asked.
“Maybe,” Darrel said.
“I want in on it,” the
man said.
“On what?”
“Chance to serve the red, white, and blue, sir. You want serious work done, I’m your huckleberry.”
“Is that right? Well, I think you’re crazy. I think your name is Wyatt Dixon and you’re about to get yourself put back in a cage.”
Wyatt fitted his hat back on and pushed himself up from the rock, advancing toward Darrel so quickly Darrel’s hand went inside his coat. Then he realized Wyatt Dixon was not even looking at him but instead was unzipping his jeans.
“Drunk a horse tank of lemonade this afternoon. Ah, that’s better,” he said, urinating in a bright arc down the side of the hill.
Wyatt’s voice was loud and had obviously carried down into the Finleys’ yard. Amber went into the house and came back out the sliding glass door with her father, both of them now staring up the hill. Don’t lose control. Handle this right, Darrel told himself. Never surrender the situation to perps.
He turned on Wyatt Dixon. “You’re in a shitload of trouble, boy. Wait right here till I get back,” he said.
Darrel went hurriedly down the incline, stepped across a series of rocks that spanned the stream at the bottom, and entered Amber Finley’s backyard, while she and her father and their guests stared at him in dismay. His shield was open in his hand.
“I’m Detective Darrel McComb, Senator. I was following an ex-convict by the name of Wyatt Dixon. He seems to have taken an interest in your house,” he said.
“Why would he be interested in us?” Romulus Finley asked.
“He was in Deer Lodge for a homicide. But unfortunately he’s out,” Darrel said.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“This man beat Johnny American Horse with a blackjack,” Amber said.
“I see,” Romulus said.
“I’ve intruded on you, but I thought you should know, I mean about this fellow up in the trees,” Darrel said. He folded his badge holder and put it away, glad to have something to occupy his hands.
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