In the Moon of Red Ponies bbh-4 Page 29

“If the guy had been stand-up and told the truth, if maybe he’d given up the name of his contact, chances are the others would have let him go back to his family. You hearing me on this? Don’t lie. Don’t degrade yourself. I’m the only person who can save your ass. No, don’t look away, don’t start crying, either. That stuff belongs on soap operas, not in big-people land, Greta. Why’d you kill Charlie Ruggles? Poor ole Charlie, sawed-off little jarhead gets snuffed by a broad, probably humiliating as hell for him.”

  He thought she was going to faint. She sank heavily into a chair, her face splotched with color, her green eyes as round as Life Savers. “I had to. I lost control of my life years ago. My second husband was a martial arts instructor who did security work for Karsten Mabus. I went to work for him, too.”

  “That means you had to smother a guy in a hospital bed?”

  Her hands were fists, her arms folded across her breasts, her throat as taut as a chunk of sewer pipe. Then the fingers of her left hand seemed to spread protectively over the lump on her side. “Mabus owns people. You can’t guess at what it’s like,” she said.

  Her face was uplifted, her eyes fixed on his now. The direction of the conversation was not one Darrel liked. The motivation in most crimes was money. Not sex, not power. It was money. Money could buy you all the sex and power you wanted. A premeditated homicide, in this case holding a pillow down on the face of a potential government witness, was done for money. But Darrel’s own questions about the mark or lump or whatever it was on Greta’s side would not let go of him.

  “Dixon says the crew working for Mabus have the mark of the beast on them. I don’t like to even repeat bullshit like that, but what the fuck is he talking about?” he said.

  She bent over in the chair, her hands pressed on the sides of her head. “I’m going to be sick,” she said.

  “Are you in a cult?”

  “Cult? You idiot! Cult? No one can be that stupid.”

  Her skin had turned as gray as a cadaver’s, her upper lip beaded with moisture. Then she sniffed at the air again, remembering the food on the stove. She ran into the kitchen and shut off the flame under a pan filled with blackened onions and scorched hamburger patties.

  “Turn around and look at me,” Darrel said.

  Instead, she swung the pan at his head. He blocked her arm and food that smelled like it had been dug out of an incinerator splattered all over the walls. But she wasn’t finished. She struck at his face and tried to claw his eyes, and he had to pin her arms against her sides and squeeze them against her torso in a bear hug until the tension made her breath seize in her chest and her spine pop.

  He saw her mouth open, and he knew what was coming next. He released her, and she ran to the toilet and threw up, then went into the dry heaves on her knees, clenching the edge of the bowl, her back shaking, her skin the color of cardboard.

  Darrel sat on the rim of the tub and flushed the toilet for her, then wet a towel and put it in her hand. “Why’d you rat-fuck me, Greta?” he said.

  “Because I hate you,” she replied.

  “For once you’re probably telling the truth,” he said, his eyes flat, concealing the recognition that her words could still wound him.

  He leaned over and raised her shirt, exposing a dry, star-shaped swelling under her arm.

  “That looks like a jungle ulcer. We used to get them in Nicaragua,” he said.

  “Rah-rah for you,” she said.

  “It’s just a skin problem, so now we got that out of the way. You’re going to wear a recorder into Karsten Mabus’s house, Greta.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “I still don’t think you understand my status. I’m effectively canned, in large part because of you. That means we’re not using rule books here. You wear a recorder, or I put out the word you’re a federal informant. I also stoke up Wyatt Dixon and let him know who sent that collection of killers to his house. Want Wyatt coming around to see you again, Greta?”

  “I have melanoma. It’s already gone into my organs. You can’t hurt me,” she said. She tried to hold her eyes on his, but they watered around the edges and she blinked and looked away.

  “Good try,” he said.

  Johnny American Horse’s window at St. Pat’s looked out upon a neighborhood of early-twentieth-century buildings and sidewalks shaded by dense rows of maple trees. The buildings were brick, solidly constructed, undiminished by time, but the porches were made of wood and the cracked paint on them gave the dwellings a look of weathered gentility. Blue-collar people and college students lived in the buildings, and on Thursday evenings during the summer many of them walked together down to the free concert and dance in the park by the river. The yards were green and cool, sometimes bordered by tulip beds, and the people who lived in the apartments planted vegetable gardens between the alleyways and the back porches, which were usually enclosed with latticework. If a man chose to live in town, this was a fine neighborhood to raise a family in, Johnny thought.

  When he woke Tuesday morning he was handcuffed to the railing of the bed and could not see out the window into the street, but even before the soft edges of his sleep had disappeared from his mind, he knew there was something different about this day. He could hear the sweep of rain on the window glass-not a shower, either, but a hard, driving rain that ran off the eaves and through the guttering and over the hospital lawn into storm drains. Johnny could hear the wet sound of automobile tires on the slickness of the streets, a deep roll of thunder resonating in the hills, the thick flapping of an American flag someone had forgotten to take down from the hospital pole, and he knew the summer drought was broken, that the fires that threatened his ranch up on the Jocko were turning into steam.

  He pushed the button for the nurse who would come to the room and then tell the U.S. marshal on the door that Johnny needed to be unhooked so he could use the bathroom. The rain clicked on the glass, and he could hear a freight train blowing somewhere west of town, perhaps heading into Alberton Gorge. After the marshal unsnapped the cuff on his wrist, Johnny stood by his bed and gazed out the window at the dark green sogginess of the maples on the street, the cars driving with their lights on in the middle of the day, and the columns of smoke rising from extinguished fires on the mountainsides. All that separated him from the outside world was a pane of glass and a thirty-foot drop onto a spongy square of flooded lawn.

  He used the toilet, then waited for the marshal to hook him up again.

  “It looks like you’re going to Fort Lewis tomorrow. Sorry to lose you, Johnny. You play a mean game of checkers,” the marshal said.

  He was a heavyset, prematurely balding man named Tim, who had a small Irish mouth and big hands, and was evidently addicted to the candy bars he carried in his pockets as a surrogate for the booze he was trying to get rid of at Twelve-Step meetings.

  “Who told you that about Fort Lewis?” Johnny asked, lying back on the bed, the handcuff chain pulling tight on his wrist.

  “Forget I mentioned it. That’s true, you have the DSC from Operation Desert Storm?”

  “Yeah, you want it?”

  “Shouldn’t kid like that,” Tim said.

  A floral delivery man tapped on the door and Tim let him in. The delivery man started to set a vase of cut flowers on the table by Johnny’s bed. “Let me see that first,” Tim said.

  Tim peeled back the decorative foil wrapped around the vase, shifted the flower stems around in the water, and examined the greeting card inside the small envelope attached with a paper clip to the foil. Then he set the vase down on the table. “Looks like somebody sent you a nice bouquet. Can I ask you something?” he said.

  “Sure,” Johnny said.

  “How’d you get messed up like this?”

  “It was easy. I was me,” Johnny said.

  “You sound like you might be a Twelve-Step guy yourself.”

  “I’m not,” Johnny replied.

  As the marshal and the nurse left the room, Johnny glanced through the opened door an
d saw a group of painters pass by, carrying buckets, tarps, ladders, and brushes, all of them dressed in paint-flecked caps and coveralls. The last man in the group was an Indian from the res. His eyes, as unreadable as obsidian, swept across Johnny, then the door closed.

  Johnny removed the card from the envelope on the flower vase and opened it. It read:

  They still won’t let me visit you, but look across the street at noon and you’ll see your gal with the 8:30 blues. We’re going to beat this, baby.

  Love, A.

  Johnny stared at the paper clip on the envelope, then looked at the glass in the window that separated him from the outside world. He looked at the glass a long time, then gave up whatever thoughts were on his mind and ate the breakfast an orderly brought in on a tray. At eleven-thirty, just before he was scheduled to be cuffed to a wheelchair and rolled down the corridor for X-rays, Johnny slipped the paper clip into his mouth between his gum and cheek.

  The rain had turned to hail, and it bounced on the windowsill as brightly as mothballs against the grayness of the day. When Johnny closed his eyes and listened to the hail and the roll of thunder in the hills, he imagined a vast landscape where the mesas rose into steel-colored stormheads forked with lightning while down below the hooves of red ponies shook the earth. At this moment, for no reason that made logical sense, he knew his dreams were real and not fantasies and that all the gifts of creation still awaited him, were still his, as tangible as a woman’s smile on the far side of a street on a rainy day.

  That morning I left the office and went home, unable to work, concentrate, or think on any subject except the telephone threat that had been made against Temple and the child she was carrying. I had now talked to the sheriff’s office, Fay Harback, and the FBI agent Francis Broussard and had gotten nowhere. Lucas had been set up on a bogus marijuana bust and suspended from the university, and Temple had almost drowned in the Blackfoot River after the brake-fluid line on our truck had been cut. No one was in custody for any of the damage done to my family, nor had anyone even been questioned. My own relationship with every law agency in the area had become that of gadfly and public nuisance.

  Most television cop dramas make use of the following storyline: A likable individual is raped or assaulted, or a hardworking family loses one of its members to a serial killer, or a blue-collar stiff with a juvenile felony on his record gets jammed on a bad beef and is about to be sent to the pen. What happens? A half-dozen uniforms and five detectives with shields hanging from their necks show up at the crime scene and invest the entirety of their lives in seeing justice done. Every law officer in the script, male and female, seems to have an IQ of 180 and the altruism of St. Francis of Assisi. They verbally joust with the rich and powerful, walk into corporate board meetings where they hook up CEOs, and are immune to the invective flung at them by an unappreciative citizenry.

  The federal agents who wander into the script are even more impressive. They have tanned skin, little-boy haircuts, and the anatomies of California surfers. Their psychoanalytical knowledge of the criminal mind is stunning. Without hesitation, they conclude for the viewer that serial rapists possess violent tendencies toward women and people who plant bombs on airplanes are antisocial.

  But my thoughts on the subject are cheap in design and substance. It’s easy to be facile about law enforcement. The truth is the good guys are understaffed, overworked, underfunded, and out-gunned. Most of the time the bad guys win, or if they do take a fall, it’s because a wrecking ball swings into their lives for reasons that have nothing to do with jurisprudence. If you have ever been a victim of violent crime, or if you have been threatened by deviates or sadists-and by the latter I mean wakened by anonymous phone calls in the middle of the night, surveilled by people you’ve never seen before, forced to take public transportation because you’re afraid to start your car in the morning-then you know that what I’m about to say is an absolute fact: You’re on your own.

  Law enforcement agencies don’t prevent crimes. With good luck, they solve a few of them. In the meantime, if violent and dangerous people intend to do you injury, your own thoughts become your worst enemies. The morning might start with sunshine and birdsong, but by noon it’s usually filled with gargoyles.

  I walked around the house aimlessly, trying to chase down each of my thoughts and hold it in a bright place in the center of my mind, face it down fair and square. But it was to no avail. Thunder ripped across the sky and rain pounded on the roof and swept in sheets across the hillside. Through the kitchen window I thought I saw L. Q. Navarro standing among the fir trees, wearing his pin-striped suit and ash-colored Stetson, his face lit briefly by a flicker of lightning.

  Take this guy Mabus off at the neck. Smoke him and put a throw-down on the body and buy your wife a trip to Hawaii, he said.

  I wish I could, L.Q.

  Don’t think about it, just do it. Everybody dies. You want this guy to kill your wife or unborn child or Lucas? Take care of your own and screw the rest of it.

  That easy, huh?

  There’s nothing wrong with this guy Mabus a two-hundred-and-thirty-grain brass-jacketed hollow-point wouldn’t cure.

  But I did not listen to L.Q.’s words. Instead, I found Karsten Mabus’s business card, the one he had given me with his home telephone number written on the back. I hesitated only a moment, then punched the number into the phone, thereby beginning the commission of the most cowardly act of my life.

  “Hello?” he said.

  “It’s Billy Bob Holland, Mr. Mabus.”

  “How you doin’?”

  “I don’t want my wife or boy or unborn child hurt.”

  “I don’t, either. But why are you telling me this?”

  “Call your guys off. I don’t have the goods from the Global Research boost.”

  “Mr. Holland, I couldn’t care less about that stuff. Look, can you and your wife come out to dinner this evening? I realize it’s late notice, but-”

  “Johnny American Horse dumped a metal box of some kind on my property. But I don’t have it and neither does Johnny or his wife, Amber. Wyatt Dixon found it and has it in his possession.”

  My own words sounded strange and apart from me, separate from my life and the person I thought I was.

  “Can you please tell me who in the Sam Hill Wyatt Dixon is?” Mabus asked.

  “Leave Wyatt alone and he’ll probably blow out his own doors. But whatever you do, just stay away from us,” I said.

  “At this point, gladly, sir. I guess I have a great personal flaw, Mr. Holland. I’m obviously a terrible judge of character,” he said, and hung up.

  Chapter 22

  It was still raining when Johnny was wheeled in a chair down a corridor to the X-ray room by a nurse and the U.S. marshal, who ate a candy bar while he talked. Before leaving the room, Tim cuffed Johnny’s right wrist to the arm of the wheelchair.

  “You’ll be back in your room before lunchtime. If you want, I can get you an extra dessert from the cafeteria,” Tim said.

  Johnny didn’t answer. Out in the hallway the painters were erecting a scaffolding against the wall.

  “Did you hear me?” Tim said.

  “Sorry, I got a toothache,” Johnny said, touching his jaw.

  “If I don’t cut down on my sugar, that’s what I’m gonna have,” Tim said.

  “We need to take some pictures now. There’s a waiting room to your left, just past the double doors,” the X-ray technician said.

  “Take good care of my man here,” Tim said. He walked down the corridor and through the double doors, nodding to the painters as he passed.

  “You have any pain in your left arm?” the technician said.

  “None,” Johnny replied.

  “Did you feel a break in it?”

  “No.”

  “I guess the government just likes to be careful. How’s the wound progressing?” the technician said.

  “Fine. You guys did a good job.” Johnny pressed his fingers against his j
aw and cleared his throat.

  “Well, let’s get you done here,” the technician said.

  “I hate to tell you this, but I got to use the toilet real bad,” Johnny said.

  “I wish you’d told the marshal that.”

  “Just wheel me over to the restroom. I’m not going anywhere,” Johnny said, clinking the handcuff chain tight on the arm of the chair.

  The technician took Johnny across the corridor and watched him fold up the wheelchair, work his way awkwardly into a stall, his right wrist still cuffed to the chair arm, then ease down on the toilet seat. “I’ll come back in a few minutes,” the technician said.

  When Johnny heard the door click shut, he removed the paper clip from his mouth, straightened it, and inserted it into the lock on his handcuffs. It took him less than thirty seconds to spring the curved steel tongue that Tim had crimped into his wrist. Behind the door of the next stall he found a painter’s cap and pair of coveralls hanging on a hook. He ripped off his hospital gown, pulled on the coveralls, and fitted the cap down on his head. He stepped out into the corridor just as the painters were passing by.

  The last man in line was an Indian who was struggling with a rolled tarp that sagged heavily across his shoulder. Johnny picked up the end of the roll, dropped it on his shoulder, snugging the side of his face against the canvas, and walked out the front door of the hospital into the rain-swept breadth of the outside world.

  But what Johnny saw was more than simply the outside world. The building and sidewalks and cars and telephone wires were gone. Under an ink-wash sky he saw hills that had turned the bright gold of haystacks in late summer, the fir trees and ponderosa pine like miniature forests in the saddles. He could see black-horn buffalo grazing in the grass along the river, and he could see lightning in the clouds beyond the hills where the four points of the wind and the Everywhere Spirit made their home. He saw muscular fish that were the dull tint of dried blood working their way up a stream, beating themselves to death on the rocks in order to lay their roe and hold their claim on the earth. He saw bears, mustangs, deer, elk, and winged creatures that lived under the great bowl of heaven the Everywhere Spirit had made with His hands and filled with both sun and rain in order to bring life to the corn and the grass, and in the midst of all this he saw thousands of wickiups whose lodge skins were painted with the signs of the moon and the passing of the seasons, and he knew these presences had long ago been ingested by the great vastness of the Everywhere Spirit and they now lived inside Him, as they lived inside Johnny’s sleep, and hence they could not die.