In the Moon of Red Ponies Read online

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  SIMON & SCHUSTER

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2004 by James Lee Burke

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Designed by Paul Dippolito

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Burke, James Lee, date.

  In the moon of red ponies / James Lee Burke.

  p. cm.

  1. Holland, Billy Bob (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Vietnamese Conflict, 1961–1975—Veterans—Fiction. 3. Private investigators—Montana—Fiction. 4. Montana—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3552.U723153 2004

  813’.54—dc22 2004045430

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-7017-5

  ISBN-10: 0-7432-7017-7

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  In memory of Thomas Edmund Kroutter, Jr.

  Acknowledgments

  Once again I would like to thank my wife, Pearl, and our children, Jim, Jr., Andree, Pamala, and Alafair, for all the help and support they have given me over the years. I would also like to thank Father Jim Hogan and Father Ed Monroe for their friendship along the way, and I’d like to mention my ongoing debt of gratitude to all the librarians and booksellers who have promoted my work without ever asking for any type of thanks.

  Lastly, I owe a tip of a battered hat to my old Montana compadre Paul Zarzyski for the Larry Mahan quote.

  God be blessed for all dappled things.

  Chapter 1

  MY LAW OFFICE was located on the old courthouse square of Missoula, Montana, not far from the two or three blocks of low-end bars and hotels that front the railyards, where occasionally Johnny American Horse ended up on a Sunday morning, sleeping in a doorway, shivering in the cold.

  The city police liked Johnny and always treated him with a gentleness and sense of fraternity that is not easily earned from cops. He had been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for bravery in Operation Desert Storm, and some cops said Johnny’s claims that he suffered Gulf War syndrome were probably true and that he was less drunk than sick from a wartime chemical inhalation.

  More accurately, Johnny was a strange man who didn’t fit easily into categories. He lived on the Flathead Reservation in the Jocko Valley, although his name came from the Lakota Sioux, and his relatives told me he was a descendant of Crazy Horse, the shaman and chief strategist for Red Cloud, who actually defeated the United States Army and shut down the Bozeman Trail in Red Cloud’s War of 1868. I don’t know whether or not Johnny experienced mystical visions as his ancestor supposedly did, but I had no doubt he heard voices, since he often smiled during the middle of a conversation and asked people to repeat themselves, explaining nonchalantly that other people were talking too loudly, although no one else was in the room.

  But on balance he was a decent and honorable man and a hard worker, who took pride in tree-planting the side of a bare hill or digging postholes from sunrise to dark, in the way ranch hands did years ago, when love of the work itself was sometimes more important than the money it paid. He was handsome, full of fun, his hands shiny with callus, his face usually cut with a grin, his coned-up straw hat slanted on his brow. His higher ambitions were quixotic and of a kind that are doomed to destruction, but he was never dissuaded by the world’s rejection or the fate it would eventually impose on him.

  I just wished Johnny hadn’t been so brave or so trusting in the rest of us.

  MONTANA’S HISTORY of rough justice is legendary. During the 1860s the Montana Vigilantes lynched twenty-two members of Henry Plummer’s gang, riding through ten-foot snowdrifts to bounce them off cottonwood trees and barn ladders all over the state. Plummer’s men died game, often toasting the mob with freshly popped bottles of champagne and shouting out salutes to Jefferson Davis before cashing in. Plummer, a county sheriff, was the only exception. He begged his executioners to saw off his arms and legs and cut out his tongue rather than take his life. The vigilantes listened quietly to his appeal, then hanged him from the crossbeam at the entrance to his ranch, the soles of his boots swinging back and forth three inches from the ground.

  But that was then. Today the Montana legal system is little different from any other state’s, and the appeals apparatus in criminal convictions sometimes produces situations with which no one can adequately deal.

  The most dangerous, depraved, twisted, and unpredictable human being I ever knew was a rodeo clown by the name of Wyatt Dixon. With my help, he had been sentenced to sixty years in Deer Lodge Pen for murdering a biker in the Aryan Brotherhood. On an early spring morning, one year after Wyatt had begun his sentence in Deer Lodge Pen, I walked from the house down to the road and removed the daily newspaper from the tin cylinder in which it was rolled. I flipped the paper open and began to read the headlines as I walked back up the incline to the house, distracted momentarily by a black bear running out of the sunshine into the spruce trees that grew on the hill immediately behind the house.

  When I glanced back at the paper, I saw Wyatt’s name and a wire service story that made me swallow.

  I sat down at the breakfast table in our kitchen and kept the newspaper folded back upon itself so the story dealing with Wyatt was not visible. Through the side window I could see steam rising from the metal roof on our barn and, farther on, a small herd of elk coming down an arroyo, their hooves pocking the snow that had frozen on the grass during the night.

  “Why the face?” Temple, my wife, asked.

  “For spring it’s still pretty cold out,” I replied.

  She straightened the tulips in a glass vase on the windowsill and lifted a strand of hair off the glasses she had started wearing. She had thick chestnut hair and the light was shining on it through the window. “Did you say something about Johnny American Horse earlier?” she asked.

  “He got himself stuck in the can again. I thought I’d go down to morning court,” I replied.

  “He needs a lawyer to get out of the drunk tank?”

  “This time he had a revolver on him. It was under his coat, so he got booked for carrying a concealed weapon.”

  “Johnny?” she said.

  I folded the newspaper and stuck it in my coat pocket. “Meet me for lunch?” I said from the doorway.

  “Can you tell me why you’re acting so weird? Why are you taking the newspaper with you?”

  “No reason.”

  “Right.”

  The phone rang on the coun
ter. I got to it before she did. “Hello?” I said, my mouth dry.

  “Well, God bless your little heart, I’d recognize that voice anywhere. Howdy doodie, Mr. Holland? I wasn’t sure you was still around, but soon as I come into town, I looked in the phone directory and there was your name in the middle of the page, big as a horse turd floating in a milk shake. Bet you don’t know who this is?”

  “You’re making a mistake, partner.”

  “Sir, that injures my feelings. I have called you in good faith and as a fellow American, ’cause this is the land of the free and the home of the brave. I don’t hold no grudges. I have even used your name as a reference in the many letters I have wrote to our country’s leaders. In fact, I have wrote President Bush himself to offer my services. Has he contacted you yet?”

  “I’m going to hang up now. Don’t call here again,” I said, trying to avoid Temple’s stare.

  “Now listen here, sir, I’m inviting you and your wife to a blowout, all-you-can-eat buffet dinner at the Golden Corral Restaurant. Do not hang up that phone, no-siree-bobtail—”

  I returned the receiver to the cradle. Temple’s eyes were riveted on mine.

  “Who was that?” she said.

  “Wyatt Dixon. He’s out,” I replied.

  She began to straighten the tulips in the window again but instead knocked over the vase, shattering it in the sink, the tulip petals red as blood among the shards of glass.

  AS I LEFT the house for work the sun was bright on the hillsides of the valley in which we lived, and to the south I could see the timber climbing up into the snowpack on the crests of the Bitterroots. I turned onto the two-lane into the little town of Lolo, then headed up the road to my office in Missoula. My reluctance to tell Temple that Wyatt Dixon was out of prison had nothing to do with the reasons people normally conceal bad news from their loved ones. Rather, it had everything to do with Temple’s own propensity for immediate and violent retaliation against anyone who threatened her person or that of her friends or family.

  Back in Texas, before she became a private investigator for small-town lawyers such as myself, she had been a patrolwoman in Dallas, a deputy sheriff in Fort Bend County near Houston, and a corrections officer in Louisiana. She had also been buried alive by Wyatt Dixon.

  I parked in my rental space not far from the Oxford Bar, whose doors have stayed open since 1891, and walked down the street toward my office close by the courthouse. The maple trees on the courthouse lawn were in new leaf now, riffling in the breeze, the shadows shifting like lacework on the grass. At the corner, across from a pawnshop and bar, I saw a man watching me, his arm hooked on top of a parking meter.

  He was lantern-jawed, his red hair like cornsilk, his eyes as pale and empty as a desert sky, his teeth big and square, his hard buttocks no wider than the palms of a woman’s hands. He wore skintight Wrangler jeans, boots that were cracked from age, a beautiful Stetson with an eagle feather in the band, and a heavy, long-sleeved cotton shirt printed from collar to shirttail with a collage from the American flag. When he grinned, his skin stretched back from his teeth, his lips a strange, purplish color in the shade.

  “How ’bout I take you down to the Oxford and buy you a breakfast of eggs and corned beef? Guaranteed to put a chunk of drill pipe in your britches,” he said.

  “You get the hell away from me,” I said.

  He twisted a finger in his ear and looked down the street at two college-age kids, a girl and boy, jogging through the intersection, both of them sweaty and hot, their faces bright. His eyes came back on mine. “I ain’t got no grief with you, counselor. Left that back at the joint. Know why?” he said, his eyes widening.

  “Not interested,” I said.

  “They dusted off the electroshock machine, wired me up, and made blue sparks jump off my Johnson. I was definitely in the spirit when they pulled them electrodes off my head, yes sir.”

  “Electroshock isn’t used anymore.”

  “They said in my case they was making an exception, although they didn’t give me no explanation on that. Put me naked in an isolation cell and hosed me down with ice-cold water, too,” he said, fitting his hand on his scrotum, watching the college girl jog by a few feet away. “I’m putting together a company to provide the best rough stock on the Northwestern circuit. Horses you couldn’t hold in with a barbed wire hackamore. Need you as my legal point man.”

  “Are you out of your mind?”

  He seemed genuinely puzzled, his jaw hooked forward like a camel’s. “I’ll pay you top dollar, cash money, Brother Holland,” he said.

  “Brother?”

  “I joined a church when I was inside. You are not looking at the same Wyatt Dixon who traveled the Lost Highway and went to the Wild Side of Life where the scarlet waters flow. You have probably noticed them are lyrics written by the greatest songwriters of our time. I hope you can feel the depth of sincerity in each of them poetic words.”

  “I want you to work real hard on this concept, Wyatt. You come anywhere around me or my wife or son, if you send any of your neo-Nazi friends after us, if I see that barnyard, white-trash face anywhere near—”

  I stopped. Each of my statements seemed to connect with and energize a neuron inside his head, causing his face to jerk, his mouth to flex, his legs to cave, his feet to splay, as though he were being struck with invisible blasts of air. He stared at me, his eyes dilated with awe.

  “I did not believe it possible, but once again your word skills has done blowed away this simple rodeo cowboy,” he said. “I know now I have chose the right man to recommend me to President Bush. God bless you, sir.”

  I went inside the office. Through the window I could see him stretched out under a tree on the courthouse lawn, the side of his face propped on his hand, watching the passersby, none of whom had any idea that a man wearing a shirt stamped with the colors and design of the Stars and Stripes was thinking thoughts about them that would cause the weak of spirit to weep.

  I called Temple at home, but no one answered. I called the agency where she worked as a private investigator with a man and another woman. “He was waiting for me outside the office,” I said.

  “He’s going to reoffend. Just wait him out,” she said.

  “Temple?”

  “Yes?” she said.

  “If he comes around the house and I’m not there, shoot him,” I said.

  “I’ll shoot him whether you’re there or not,” she replied.

  THE MORNING COURT judge was Clark Lebeau, known for his egalitarian attitudes, short tolerance for stupidity, and unusual sentences for people who thought they would simply pay a fine and be on their way. Businessmen found themselves working on the sanitation truck; animal abusers cleaned the litter boxes at the shelter; and drunk drivers mowed grass and weeded graves at the cemetery. Rumor had it he kept both a gun and a bottle of gin under the bench.

  “What the hell were you doing with a pistol?” he asked from the bench.

  “I guess I was gonna pawn it,” Johnny American Horse replied.

  “You guess?” the judge said.

  “I was pretty drunk, your honor.”

  “The officers said it was under your coat. That means while you were passed out you managed to commit a felony. Where’s your goddamn brains, son?”

  “Left them in the Oxford, your honor,” Johnny said.

  I winced inside.

  “You took a gun to a saloon?” the judge said.

  “Your honor,” I began.

  “Shut up, Mr. Holland,” the judge said. “You carried a gun into the Oxford?”

  “I don’t remember,” Johnny said.

  The judge rubbed his mouth. He was old and sometimes irritable but not an unfair man. “I’m letting you go on your own recognizance. Come back in here on a firearms charge, I’m going dig up the jail and drop it on your head. Am I making myself clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” Johnny said.

  We walked outside into the brilliance of the morning, sunshine on the
hills above the town, birds flying through trees on the courthouse lawn, the noise of traffic, a world of normalcy as dissimilar from life inside a jail as the quick are from the dead.

  That is, except for the presence of Wyatt Dixon, who was now sitting up in the shade, sailing playing cards into his inverted hat. His pale eyes looked up at us, a matchstick rolling in his teeth.

  “Know that dude?” I asked Johnny.

  “You betcha I do,” Johnny said. “He was shacked up with a girl on the res. Her ex and a couple of his Deer Lodge buds decided to remodel Wyatt’s cranial structure. One of them walks with a permanent limp now. The other two decided to start new careers in Idaho.”

  Johnny reached down, picked up a small pinecone, and threw it at Wyatt’s head. “Hey, boy, I thought you were in the pen,” he said.

  “Hell, no,” Wyatt said, his eyes looking at nothing, his matchstick flexing at an upward angle.

  We walked to the corner, then crossed the street to my office. I didn’t speak until we were a long way from Wyatt Dixon.

  “Why not just put your necktie in the garbage grinder?” I said.

  “Telling a man you’re afraid of him is the same as telling him he’s not as good as you. That’s when you have trouble. Fellow as smart as you ought to know that, Billy Bob,” Johnny said. He hit me on the shoulder.

  “Why were you carrying a gun?” I said.

  He didn’t answer. Inside the office, I asked him again.

  “A couple of guys are here to fry my Spam,” he said.

  “Which guys?” I asked.

  “Don’t know. Saw them in a dream. But they’re here,” he said.

  “That’ll make a fine defense. Maybe we can get a couple of counselors from detox to testify for us.”

  He told me he’d work off my fees at my small spread outside Lolo, then went to search for his pickup truck so he could drive back to his house on the reservation in the Jocko Valley.

  IT’S PROBABLY FAIR to say that welfare dependency, alcoholism, glue sniffing, infant mortality, the highest suicide rate among any of our ethnic groups, recidivism, xenophobia, and a general aversion to capitalistic monetary concepts are but a few of the problems American Indians have. The list goes on. Unfortunately, their troubles are of a kind most white people don’t want to dwell on, primarily, I suspect, because Indians were a happy people before their encounter with the white race.