In the Moon of Red Ponies bbh-4

by James Lee Burke

  The cabin was snug and watertight, stocked with canned beef and vegetables a cousin of Lester Antelope’s had backpacked over the crest of the mountain. In wistful, self-deceptive moments Johnny and Amber almost believed their geographical removal from the outside world had somehow changed the legal machinery that was waiting to grind them up.

  But if Johnny and Amber had forgotten the relentless nature of their enemies, Lester Antelope’s cousin had not. He had left Johnny a Lee-Enfield carbine, a British officer’s model with peep sights, a lightweight stock, and a bolt action that worked as smoothly as a Mauser’s.

  Then one night they heard sounds whose source they couldn’t identify-a footfall in the woods, a tree branch snapping, shale sliding over rock surfaces on the hillside. Johnny walked out in the trees and listened, the moonlight as bright as a flame on the pool where they drew their water. He came back to the cabin, poured a cup of cold coffee, and told Amber he had seen the freshly churned tracks of elk in the pine needles.

  The next morning Amber saw Johnny oiling the carbine on the back step, pressing cartridges with his thumb down into the magazine, his skin netted with the sunlight that broke through the canopy overhead.

  “We have plenty of meat. I wouldn’t squeeze that off up here,” she said, stepping into the doorway.

  “A griz might try to get in at night. They can smell food a long way,” he said.

  “I’m not afraid of jail,” she said. “Don’t do what you’re doing, Johnny.”

  His face was bladed, his cheeks slightly sunken. “You’re not afraid of anything,” he said.

  “Losing you.”

  “If they nail us, it’ll be for good. No second chances this time,” he said.

  “Don’t say that. They don’t have that kind of power.”

  “I let them take me without a fight. They asked me what I thought of the Atlanta Braves,” he replied. He lowered his head and rubbed the oil rag along the carbine’s barrel, his thoughts hidden.

  She remained standing above him in the doorway, the wind blowing down from the crest of the mountain, through larch trees whose needles had turned yellow and were starting to fall. He locked down the bolt of the Lee-Enfield, a piece of cartilage pulsing on his jawbone.

  “If they come for us, we go together,” she said.

  “That’s no good. No good at all,” he said.

  She placed one hand on his shoulder for balance and sat down beside him. She picked his hand off the carbine and held it between hers. “If they come for us, we’ll run. There’re places in British Columbia they’d never find us,” she said.

  “That’s right,” he said, taking his hand from hers. “We don’t have to worry about the griz, either. They’re looking for food down low. They won’t bother us.”

  He worked the bolt on the Lee-Enfield and jacked the cartridges from the magazine onto the ground. “See? All this was about nothing,” he said.

  But five minutes later, when she looked out the kitchen window, she saw him picking the cartridges for the Lee-Enfield out of the dirt and wiping them clean on his shirt before he stuck them in his pocket. That night, after she and Johnny went to bed, she thought she heard the engines of helicopters high above the trees.

  She woke at false dawn. The cabin was cold, the woodstove unlit, and Johnny’s side of the bed empty. She put on her jeans and Johnny’s Army jacket and went out into the backyard. The privy door hung open, squeaking on its hinges. Her vehicle was still under its tarp and cover of pine boughs, the canvas stiff with frost. In the grayness of the woods she couldn’t see the movement of a single warm-blooded creature-not an owl, a rabbit, a deer mouse, a hooded jay, or even robins, which only yesterday had filled the trees in flocks on their way south.

  She went back inside the cabin and absently let the door slam behind her. The sound was like a rifle shot in her ears, and out in the woods she heard a large bird, perhaps an eagle, take flight, its wings flapping as loudly as leather in the dead air.

  The carbine, she thought.

  She went into the bedroom and pulled open the closet door, where Johnny had put the Lee-Enfield before he went to bed last night. But it was gone.

  She dug her cell phone out of a drawer, then hesitated before clicking it on, trying to remember what she had heard once about law enforcement agencies tracking cell phones by satellite. Billy Bob had told her to get off the phone, that his own line was tapped. He had also told her to use a land line, she thought. She had done what he’d said, pulling the tarp and pine boughs off her vehicle and driving to a truck stop, taking a risk she didn’t want to take again. No, satellite track or not, she would not leave the cabin again.

  She activated the phone. As soon as she did, its message chime went off. She hit the retrieve button.

  “It’s Billy Bob. Call me at the office or home. Everything is okay,” the recorded voice said. Then the transmission broke up.

  There were three other messages with the same callback number on them, each of them impossible to understand. She rushed out the back of the cabin and climbed up the gulch until she was out of the timber, standing on a crag that overlooked a long, sloping mountainside covered with Douglas fir. She hit the dialback key on the cell and waited, her heart beating, her breath fogging in the cold.

  The phone rang in my kitchen while Temple and I were eating breakfast.

  “Amber?” I said.

  “Tell it to me fast. My batteries are almost dead,” she said.

  “Where are you?”

  “Tell it to me, Billy Bob. Hurry!”

  “You and Johnny are free.”

  “Free?”

  “Darrel McComb caught some of Karsten Mabus’s thugs on tape. Johnny’s clear on the homicides.”

  “Why didn’t Darrel tell us?”

  “Darrel is dead.”

  “Dead?”

  “One thing at a time. How could Darrel know where you are?” I said.

  “He brought antibiotics to Johnny’s cabin. He’d followed me there once during his”-she hesitated-“during his voyeur stage. He figured that’s where we were hiding. I can’t think through this. How did Darrel die?”

  “Mabus’s men tortured him to death. Darrel had taped a recorder to his leg. He wouldn’t give Johnny up.”

  “Oh, Billy Bob,” she said.

  “What?” I couldn’t tell if she was expressing grief over Darrel McComb’s death or at something she hadn’t told me about yet.

  “Johnny left before dawn with a gun. He believes the Feds have found us.”

  The cell phone made a crackling sound, then went dead.

  In the predawn darkness Johnny had heard the thropping sounds of a helicopter and for a moment he did not know if they came from his dreams or somewhere above the gulch. He lay awake as the grayness of the dawn grew inside the trees, then sat straight up in bed when he heard, this time for sure, a motorized vehicle working its way up the log road.

  He dressed and slipped the sling of the Lee-Enfield over his shoulder, put on a slouch hat, and without a coat walked out into the cold, up the hill into woods that were speckled with frost. He followed a deer trail to the top of the gulch, then entered a long, flat area where the trees were widely spaced and he could make out the log road that accessed his cabin.

  He heard the helicopter again, but the wind was behind him and he couldn’t be sure of the helicopter’s location. Then he saw electric lights flashing below the rim of a mountain across the valley.

  Could a logging crew be working there? The big companies were logging old-growth timber now, lifting out three-hundred-year-old trees by helicopter in the early morning and late evening hours so the companies’ handiwork would not be seen in broad daylight.

  But would they be logging when there was still fire danger in the woods, when a spark from an engine exhaust or even a chain-saw blade could set the undergrowth ablaze?

  He dismissed the possibility of a logging crew. Someone else was out there. But so what? Hokay hey, he thought. They were deali
ng the play. Maybe they’d get a surprise about the hand they’d just dealt themselves.

  The Everywhere Spirit and the grandfathers who lived with the four points of the wind would not fail him, he told himself. And with a renewed confidence in his vision of this world and the next, he rested behind a tree and watched the broken contours of the log road turn buff-colored and purple under the paling of the sky.

  It did not take long for his worst fears to be confirmed. In the distance he saw government vehicles park on the log road and men file into the shadows of the trees, working their way up the slope in what would be a wide semicircle, sealing off any escape from his cabin.

  Darrel McComb had turned out to be a rat after all, he thought.

  He waited in the coolness of the trees, the Lee-Enfield’s leather sling wrapped loosely around his left forearm, his left knee resting comfortably on a bed of pine needles. He watched the wind puff the mist out of the trees on the valley floor, then the sky became as light-colored and textured as weathered bone, stained at the bottom by the radiance of a red sun.

  The men from the government vehicles were almost through the timber and about to enter an old clear-cut where they would be completely exposed. What fools, Johnny thought. He got to his feet and tightened the sling of his left arm, steadying the carbine against a pine trunk. He was breathing hard now, his heart tripping, a stench like soiled cat litter rising from his armpits. For just a moment he thought he heard the clatter of armored personnel carriers and tanks lurching over sand dunes, then he heard nothing at all, only wind and pinecones bouncing down the hillside

  He wiped his eyes on his sleeve and opened his mouth to clear a popping sound in his ears. Up on the hill behind him he heard feet running and twigs breaking. When he turned, he saw a flash of clothing, like an olive field jacket, moving fast through the trees. Somehow they had flanked him and gotten around behind him.

  But who cared? He’d waste them front and rear, blow brains and feathers all over the brush, and let the devil sort them out.

  On the far side of the clear-cut he saw sunlight glint on brass, on a helmet, on steel, then the government men began to emerge out of the shadows. Johnny aimed through the peep sight on the point man’s breast and felt his finger tighten inside the Lee-Enfield’s trigger guard. In less than a second, a. 303 round would be on its way down-range, perhaps starting to topple before it cored through its target.

  Then he saw the green workclothes of the man he was about to kill and the red, white, and blue patch sewn above his shirt pocket. The man came on into the clear-cut, oblivious to the threat up on the hillside, a string of black and Indian Job Corps kids behind him, all of them carrying tools and surveyors’ equipment.

  “Johnny!” he heard Amber call behind him.

  He stepped back from the tree and lowered the carbine, just as a helicopter lifted out of the next valley, its engine roaring, a huge log suspended by a cable from the airframe.

  “Johnny, we’re free! I talked to Billy Bob! We can go back!” Amber shouted, waving her arms.

  The world seemed to tilt against the horizon. Johnny dropped the Lee-Enfield from his hands, the sling sliding off his bad arm, his eyes swimming. Then he picked the carbine up again, pulled the bolt free, and threw it down the hillside. He smashed the stock across the pine trunk again and again, the wood flying from the metal parts, as though he were vainly attempting to hew down an intransigent monument to his own rage.

  “Did you hear me?” she said, skidding down the side of the hill, fighting to keep her balance, the Army field jacket she wore streaked with dew from the trees.

  But he sat down on a rock, his head in his hands, and could not answer.

  Epilogue

  We had Indian summer that year. The nights were crisp, the days warm, the maples heavy with gold and red leaves all over Missoula. College kids climbed every day to the big white cement “M” overlooking the university, and hang gliders turned in lazy circles on the warm updrafts rising from Hellgate Canyon. The evening news at our health club showed brief clips of burned-out American Humvees in the streets of Baghdad but never images of the wounded or the dead. Nor did the camera visit civilian hospitals. The war was there, not here, and Indian summer came to us every morning like a balmy wind laced with the smell of distant rain.

  I wished for a dramatic denouement to the events of the last few months, a clap of divine hands that would reassure us of an ontological order wherein evil is punished and good rewarded, not unlike the playwright’s pen at work in the fifth act of an Elizabethan tragedy. But neither the death of Darrel McComb nor the revelations of the recorder he had hidden on his person could usurp the tranquillity of the system or dampen our desire to extend the beautiful days of fall into the coming of winter.

  But Darrel’s worst detractors had to take their hats off to him. He had created a preface on the tape, explaining how he had anonymously called in a fire alarm on Brendan Merwood’s office, then had planted the recorder in the restroom when he entered the building with the firemen. The material on the tape caused the resignation of Fay Harback, who was discovered to have accepted large unsecured loans from a Mabus lending institution, and it brought about the arrest of Greta Lundstrum for the murder of Charles Ruggles. But Greta died in custody of coronary failure. And the security men who had tortured Darrel McComb to death and who had probably murdered Seth Masterson fled the area and to this date have not been found.

  Romulus Finley and Brendan Merwood denied any knowledge of wrongdoing of any kind and were widely believed. If their careers were impaired in any fashion, I saw no sign of it. They played golf together on the links by old Fort Missoula, lifting the ball high above the fairways, their faces glowing with health and good fortune and the respect of their peers. Mortality and the judgment of the world seemed to hold no sway in their lives, but I sometimes wondered if Romulus Finley did not find his own room in hell when he had to look into his daughter’s eyes.

  If there was a dramatic turn in the story, it was one that few people will ever know about. After the federal and state charges against Johnny American Horse fell apart, I saw Amber and Johnny coming out of the old city cemetery on the north end of town. The sky was an immaculate blue, the saddles in the mountains veined with snow, the maple leaves cascading like dry paper across the tombstones. I stopped my truck by the entrance and waved at Amber, who seemed lost in thought, a scarf tied tightly under her chin, a clutch of chrysanthemums in her hand.

  “Oh, hi, Billy Bob,” she said, as though awakening from sleep. “We couldn’t find Darrel’s grave.”

  “It’s in back. I’ll show y’all,” I said.

  We walked up a knoll, though trees, into shade that was cold and smelled of damp pine needles and fresh piled dirt. I could see rain falling on a green hill by the river, and the sun was shining inside the rain.

  “You think the dead can hear our voices?” she asked.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “The sheriff told us Darrel was probably tortured for hours. At any point he could have given up our whereabouts,” she said.

  “They would have killed him anyway, Amber,” I said.

  Johnny took the flowers from Amber’s hand and spread them on Darrel’s grave. Then he drew himself to attention and saluted.

  “I think he’d appreciate that,” I said.

  When we came out of the cemetery, the sunshower on the hill by the river had turned itself into a rainbow. I saw Johnny’s eyes crinkle at the corners, and I wondered if, in his mind, the Everywhere Spirit had just hung the archer’s bow in the sky.

  So maybe this story is actually about the presence of courage, self-sacrifice, and humility in people from whom we don’t expect those qualities. Not a great deal was changed externally by the events I’ve described here. Wyatt Dixon’s newspaper friends in Dallas published the story of Karsten Mabus’s connections to the sale of chemical and biological agents to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, but no one seemed to care. In fact, Karsten Mabus is curr
ently underwriting legislation in the U.S. Congress that will open up wilderness areas in this country for oil and gas exploration while, at the same time, his companies are receiving contracts for the rebuilding of Iraq’s infrastructure.

  But as the old-time African-American hymn admonishes, I don’t study war anymore. I made my separate peace regarding my own excursion into violence at Mabus’s ranch, an event that left two men seriously wounded, consoling myself with the biblical account of Peter, who, after drawing blood with his sword in the Garden of Gethsemane, received only a mild rebuke from the Lord.

  In fact, perhaps my greater sin was my presumption that violence, in this case the attempted assassination of Karsten Mabus, can change history for the better. As Wyatt Dixon suggested, Mabus cannot be gotten rid of by a bullet. Mabus is of our own manufacture, an extension of ourselves and the futile belief that the successful pursuit of wealth and power can transform avarice into virtue. His successors are legion and timeless. They need only to wait in the wings for their moment, then walk onstage to thunderous applause, their faces touched with an ethereal light.

  I also knew that Mabus had a long memory and my story with him was probably not over.

  But I refused to borrow tomorrow’s trouble and make it today’s concern. Our child would be born in spring, and each day Temple seemed happier and more lovely than the day before. During the fall she, Lucas, and I packed a straw hamper with supper and made a point of spending at least two afternoons a week fishing for German browns on the Blackfoot River, not far from the steel suspension bridge that led to Wyatt Dixon’s house.