In the Moon of Red Ponies bbh-4 Page 20

  “How can they give me a scholarship, then take it back because I’m an out-of-state student? My application already said I was from out of state. It’s like they’re calling me a liar.”

  “There’s a guy around here by the name of Karsten Mabus. He’s a donor to this educational foundation. I think he’s trying to squeeze me by going through you,” I said.

  “What’s he want from you?”

  “It has to do with Johnny American Horse.”

  “Well, throw that damn letter away. I wouldn’t use the sonofabitch’s money to wipe my-”

  “I’ll call Monday.”

  He studied a distant place on the hill across the road, his thumbs hitched in his pockets, his brow furrowed under the brim of his hat. His cheeks were flushed, his eyes vexed, but I knew his disappointment would not last. Lucas was endowed with both a childlike innocence and a love of his art, and he didn’t care two cents for the world’s opinion or the material rewards it might offer or deny him.

  His face seemed to reach a conclusion in his thought process. “Y’all eat breakfast?” he asked.

  “Not yet. How about tanking down some pork chops and buttermilk biscuits with us?”

  “Sure I’m not barging in?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Want to wet a line later on?” he said.

  “You got it.”

  I could have learned a lot from Lucas.

  Monday morning I called the educational foundation in Denver and tried to extract an explanation from the personnel there for the retraction of Lucas’s scholarship. I was put on hold twice, cut off once, and finally told by a man with a sonorous voice that a clerical error had been made, that Lucas was ineligible for the particular award that had been given him, and that he could apply in another category. “We’re sorry for the inconvenience,” he said.

  “That’s my son you’re jerking around,” I said.

  “Thank you for your inquiry,” he replied, and quietly hung up.

  An hour later, I received an office visit from Brendan Merwood. He was a strange man, one I had never understood. His skill as a trial lawyer was well known throughout the Northwest, but he seemed to have no principles whatsoever. He was a glad-hander, a sycophant, and a toady for every meretricious enterprise in the state, as though his own merits and well-earned success as an attorney brought him no sense of validation. Even his pro bono work seemed to be a public exercise in self-flattery. Now, he sat in my office like a battle-scarred feral hog, reeking of aftershave lotion, effusive with so much goodwill that I believed Brendan Merwood was a genuinely frightened man.

  “I think you got a bum deal on this bail bond business,” he said. “You tried to help Johnny in good faith, and look what happened. Both of you thought he’d be there for trial and never saw this tragedy with the federal agent in the making.” He shook his head to show his sense of mystification at the unfairness of the universe. “I just don’t think innocent folks should get hurt like this. That’s why I want to help.”

  “What are you trying to tell me, sir?”

  “You and I both know this is all connected in some way with ecoterrorism. Somebody is sitting on those materials that were stolen from Global Research. Those materials have got to get back into the right hands-either the government’s or the owner’s. Are my words getting through here, Billy Bob? Talk to Johnny’s wife. She’ll listen to you.”

  “No, she won’t.”

  He crossed his legs and pulled at one knee, as though it were injured, his eyes lifting toward the ceiling. “Once in a while you have to make a concession. You make the concession and you move on. That’s how the world works. This is a good community. We don’t need all this trouble,” he said.

  “My wife and I didn’t cause it. But somebody is doing his best to destroy us.”

  “I wouldn’t know anything about that. I guess people fight with the weapons that are available to them.”

  “So do I.”

  “I’ve heard about your history in Texas. I don’t think that’s going to work here, my friend. Believe it or not, I’m on your side,” he said.

  “I think in your way you probably are. So thank you for coming in, Brendan. Tell the man you work for I’ll kill him if he tries to hurt my family.”

  He shook his finger back and forth. “This conversation is one in which we didn’t communicate very well. That’s the only memory I’ll have of it. If Johnny gets in touch with you, tell him to surrender himself or to call me. I don’t want that boy hurt. God’s truth on that,” he said.

  He left my office, shaking his head profoundly.

  THAT AFTERNOON, as I pulled into the dirt drive at Johnny’s house, I saw Amber unloading boxes of groceries from her Dakota. I followed her into the back of the house without being invited. She had swept the floors clean of splintered wood and broken glass and had placed a throw rug over the stain where Seth Masterson had died.

  “That’s a lot of food,” I said.

  “Not in the mood for it, Billy Bob,” she replied.

  “Brendan Merwood was in my office this morning. He knows you have the records that were stolen out of Global Research. He wants you to give them up.”

  “The day Global gets its goods back is the day Johnny gets his death warrant signed. What a life, huh, boss?”

  One sack on the table was filled with first-aid supplies.

  “You don’t think you’re being watched or followed?” I said.

  “They try. I don’t think they do a very good job of it. Did you see those telephone workers by the crossroads? I wonder why they all have the same haircut.”

  “I wouldn’t underestimate them,” I said.

  But my words were useless. I leaned against the doorjamb and watched her sort out the canned and dried food and medical purchases that she was obviously taking to Johnny. I wondered how long it would be before she was in the crosshairs of a telescopic lens.

  “How badly is he hurt?” I asked.

  “Bad enough.”

  “Amber, you need to be aware Temple and I are about to lose our home. Johnny’s tribal bondsmen double-crossed him and us.”

  Her back was turned to me. She paused in her work a moment, as though she were about to speak. Then she wrapped a bottle of hydrogen peroxide in a towel and placed it deep in a cardboard box.

  “Did you hear me? Others are being hurt as well as you and Johnny. Seth Masterson got set up and blown into a pile of bloody rags because he tried to save Johnny and you from yourselves.”

  This time she turned on me. “How serious do you think anthrax is? Or bubonic plague or the Ebola virus? Forget about the fact it’s down in the Bitterroot Valley. How do you feel about this stuff being used on human beings?” she said.

  “That’s what they’re messing with at Global?”

  “They’re the bastards who gave Saddam Hussein part of his biological warfare program.”

  “Turn over your material to the media. You can do it anonymously.”

  “It would never see the light of day.”

  “I tried,” I said.

  “Yeah, you did. Go burn a candle to yourself. I wish the tribal bondsmen hadn’t shafted you. One of them just made a down payment on a new house. Not on the res, either, since he’s obviously moving up in life. You got screwed and so did we and so did your friend the FBI agent. I don’t have anything else to say, except ta-ta. That’s the way it shakes out sometimes.”

  I went back outside, got in my Avalon, and turned around on the edge of the yard. The air was dry and I could see a smoky sheen rising into the sky from fires that were burning close to Glacier National Park. Amber came out on the porch and waved for me to stop. The anger and self-manufactured cynicism had gone out of her face, replaced by a vulnerability I didn’t normally associate with her.

  “Do you ever hear from my father?” she said.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “He was in town. I thought he might have called.”

  “Sometimes my answering machine
is off when the office is closed.”

  “He’s mad about my marrying Johnny, but he always checks on me through third parties. That’s why I was asking,” she said.

  I wanted to tell her to be careful, to wrap herself in whatever spiritual shield ancient deities could provide her. But how do you caution a fawn about a cigarette a motorist has just flipped from his car window into a patch of yellow grass, or tell a sparrow that winged creatures eventually plummet to earth?

  That evening Temple and I moved about the house in silence, clicking on the cable news, clicking it off again when the other entered the room, busying ourselves in our self-imposed solitude with inconsequential chores, as though our feigned solemnity were a successful disguise for our depression and mutual resentment.

  It was dusk, the valley purple with shadow, when she finally spoke out of more than necessity. “Wyatt Dixon called the house today. He wanted to talk to you.”

  “About what?”

  “I didn’t give him a chance to say. I told him I’d report him to the sheriff’s office if he called again.”

  “I’ll have a talk with him.”

  “He’s worthless. Let him alone.”

  She walked down to the barn and turned on the valve that fed the irrigation line to the pasture. In the distance I saw the water burst from the pipe and spray in the wind. Then she came back in the house, showered, and went to bed. I went into the den I used as a home office and sat in the dark with L. Q. Navarro’s holstered. 45 revolver in my lap. It was a beautiful firearm, blue-black, perfectly balanced, with yellowed ivory grips and a gold-plated trigger guard and hammer. I sometimes wondered if my fondness for holding L.Q.’s revolver wasn’t a form of fetish, but actually I didn’t care whether it was or not. I loved guns then and I love them now, just as I loved L.Q. and his courage and his manly smell and his confidence that regardless of what we did, we were always on the side of justice.

  The moon above the hills was the same pale yellow as the ivory on L.Q.’s revolver. I could hear heavy animals cracking through the underbrush on the slope behind the house and pinecones pinging off the metal roof when the wind gusted hard out of the trees. For a moment I thought I saw L.Q. moving about in the shadows, his jaws slack, his white shirt water-stained from the grave, death’s hold on him not up for debate.

  In my mind’s eye I saw the beer garden strung with paper lanterns where we attended dances in Monterrey; the times he and Temple and I ate Mexican dinners in a sidewalk cafe by the San Antonio River, only two blocks from the Alamo; the ancient Spanish mission where he was married and I stood as his best man, the same mission where his wife’s funeral Mass would be celebrated six months later.

  L.Q. and I had lived a violent life, marked by death and memories of nocturnal events that made me doubt our humanity, but it had its moments. I just wished I could reclaim them.

  I felt Temple’s hand on my shoulder. “I’ve acted badly,” she said.

  Her nightgown was backlit by the moon, and I could see the outline of her body inside it.

  “No, you haven’t. You warned me about Johnny, but I walked into a buzz saw,” I said.

  “Your goodness is your weakness. People use it against you. That’s why I get mad.”

  “I don’t believe Johnny and Amber meant to hurt us.”

  “We’re not going to lose our home, Billy Bob. We’re going to find out who’s behind all this and make their lives miserable.”

  “L.Q. couldn’t have said it better.”

  “What are you doing with his gun?”

  “I hear sounds out in the woods. Sometimes I think it’s L.Q.”

  She looked at me strangely. I learned forward in the leather chair in which I was sitting and dropped L.Q.’s revolver in my desk drawer. “Sometimes I still want the old ways back. I want to round up every greedy shit hog who’s feeding off this country and blow them apart,” I said.

  She sat down on the arm of my chair and pulled my head against her breast and pressed her cheek down on my hair. I could feel her heart beating against my ear.

  I didn’t know Wyatt Dixon’s cell phone number and the next morning I had to drive out to his house in order to talk to him. He was sitting on a rock patterned with the scales of dead hellgrammites, wearing neither shirt nor shoes, flipping a wet fly into the current, watching it float downstream.

  “Doin’ any good?” I said.

  “It’s too hot. They’re holed up in them pools.”

  “Why’d you call my wife yesterday?”

  “Your office was closed. So I rung you at home. I wasn’t trying to bother your wife, if that’s why your nose is bent out of joint.”

  “She doesn’t want to hear from you. What does it take to get that across?”

  His mouth was hooked down at the corners, his face as absent of emotion as clay. “There’s a yard bitch by the name of Wilbur Pickett, lives up at Ronan. I knowed him from some of my past activities before the Man on High got my attention. He says them boys who put that frog-sticker in me told him there’s an ex-Texas Ranger herebouts gonna get himself boxed up and shipped to the boneyard. The ex-Ranger and maybe his old woman, too.”

  “How about giving me Mr. Pickett’s address?”

  “Mr. Pickett has done caught air for other parts. Primarily ’cause he dimed them two boys with Darrel McComb and they found out about it.”

  “My wife was mentioned in this threat?”

  He retrieved the wet fly out of the riffle and flicked it out again.

  “Asked you a question, partner,” I said.

  “When you tell a man to repeat himself, you’re accusing him of lying. I don’t care for it, counselor.”

  “Who’s paying these two guys?”

  “I think you know.” He set his fly rod down on the rock. Perhaps because of the shade his eyes had taken on the pale blue cast of the sky, but nonetheless they looked like marbles placed inside a death mask. “That name ‘Mabus’ wrote down inside a pentacle won’t go out of my head. I ain’t got the education or experience to deal with them kinds of things by myself. The preacher at our congregation ain’t an educated man, either. But you and me? That’s another matter. Brother Holland, we could crank up the band.”

  “Deal with what things?”

  “Read the Book of John. I made a study of it in Deer Lodge.” His eyes clicked sideways and looked into mine.

  “Don’t call my wife again,” I said.

  Darrel McComb was in trouble with Fay Harback, but this time he was beginning to enjoy it. In some ways it felt good to be excoriated, to be the one wheel in the machine that didn’t automatically lock into gear when a lever was pulled. In fact, for the first time in his life he felt genuinely free.

  Fay Harback removed her glasses and looked up at him after reading the document on her desk, a Xerox of a letter Darrel had written and mailed four days earlier. “Darrel, you cannot write to the United States attorney and say the kind of things you say in this letter,” she said.

  Her tone was not unsympathetic. Actually, Darrel had just realized he liked Fay; he also liked her petite features and small face and the way her mahogany-colored hair lay thickly on the back of her neck. He couldn’t remember when he had felt so protective toward her.

  “Darrel?” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “Are you listening?”

  “You said I shouldn’t take it on myself to write the United States attorney. But why shouldn’t I? The First Amendment gives me that right.”

  “You accused him of misusing his office.”

  “Not exactly.”

  She slipped her glasses back on and looked back down at the photocopy. “ ‘If you’d take the time to examine American Horse’s service record, you’d discover he was an expert marksman. The shooter on the hill behind American Horse’s house couldn’t hit a blimp with a guided missile. Maybe you guys used up the remnants of your brainpower while persecuting Richard Jewell, but this time out I suggest you give up the role of court jesters and no
t try to railroad another innocent man.’ ”

  “Sounds pretty accurate to me,” Darrel said.

  “I worry about you.”

  “Why?”

  “I think you’re having a nervous breakdown.”

  “Maybe I was. But not now. Life is great.”

  “I.A. still has you on the desk?”

  “Some guys are cops twenty-four hours a day. What’s eight hours?”

  “Not a good statement to make to the district attorney.”

  But he wasn’t listening now. Through the window he saw Wyatt Dixon parking himself and his crutches on a bench under the maples, a group of bums and jailhouse riffraff greeting him, shaking his hand, as though he were a celebrity. “Before this is over, I’m going to cool that son of a buck out,” Darrel said.

  Fay followed Darrel’s line of vision to Wyatt sitting on the bench, a silvery shirt stitched with purple roses stretched tightly across his back, a black hat with a red feather in the band perched high on his head. “What I see is a man enjoying the morning and not bothering anyone. And I didn’t hear that last remark,” she said. “God, you’re a fruitcake.”

  But Fay’s political correctness and personal denigration of him did not diminish Darrel’s mood or the new sense of freedom that had somehow rooted itself in his life.

  It took Greta Lundstrum to do that. He had begun the affair believing he was in charge, that he was using her as a means to solve a case no one else wanted to touch. But as time progressed, he wondered more and more about his own sexual dependency and if, in fact, he hadn’t developed a genuine affection for Greta. She was an Amazon-in bed, in her business dealings, with men who got in her face. He even wondered if there was not a perverse element in his erotic attachment to her, namely, her masculine qualities, the heated, muscular way in which she made love, the orgasms he could equate only with a volcanic upheaval.

  That evening she greeted him at the door in straw sandals, white shorts high up on her thighs, and a nylon shirt whose color changed from copper to magenta.

  “You’re early. I haven’t had time to dress,” she said.