In The Moon Of Red Ponies

Chapter 8

I WANTED TO BELIEVE Johnny American Horse had nothing to do with the break-in at the research lab. I had put up the equity in our home and one hundred twenty acres of land for his bond so he could be released from jail, and I expected thereafter he would have only one goal in mind-to be found not guilty of Charlie Ruggles’s murder. Johnny was an honorable man and would not hang a friend out to dry, I told myself.

But Johnny was also an idealist, and it’s the idealists who, given the chance, will incinerate half the earth to save the other half. Tuesday morning I found him at work, cleaning and burning brush under an abandoned railroad trestle that spanned a gorge on Evaro Hill, ten miles outside Missoula.

It was shady and cool inside the gorge, but Johnny was sweating in the heat of the fire, his forearms and yellow gloves smeared with soot.

“Say all that again,” he said.

“It’s a simple question. Did you bust into that research lab or not?” I said.

“No, I did not.”

“You know who did?”

“I’ll tell people anything they want to know about me. But that’s as far as it goes.” He piled a rotted ponderosa on the flames and stepped back when it burst alight. Down below were the home and a warehouse owned by a famous antique and vintage arms dealer. A Gatling gun stood in the front yard and a World War II tank and armored personnel carrier in a side lot. The wind shifted and Johnny walked out of the smoke and sat on a rock. “I had a bad dream about a fire last night.”

I really didn’t want to hear more about Johnny’s dreams or visions or whatever they were. But I suspect, as the Bible says, that Johnny was one of those who was made different in the womb and he saw no fence between this world and the one that lay behind it. “I saw an animal running in a woods. The woods were burning. The trunks of the trees were like a big cage and the animal couldn’t get out,” he said.

I sat down next to him and placed my hand on his shoulder. His muscles were as hard as rocks under his shirt. “Listen to me, bud. There’s enough misery in this world without a guy using his dreams to create more of it,” I said.

“You don’t get it. Somehow I’m responsible for the fate of that animal.”

“I think you ought to contact the V.A. and talk to someone,” I said.

He looked into my face and I saw the injury in his eyes. “I better get back to work. See you around,” he said, turning his back to me.

I walked back down the slope, past the armored vehicles on the property of the dealer in vintage and antique arms. Their steel tracks were spiked with weeds, their turrets and machine-gun slits a haven for birds and deer mice. But rusted and ugly as they were, their true history unknown, these relics would remain objects of fascination for all those who would never be required to journey into foreign deserts or live inside the nocturnal experiences of a man like Johnny American Horse.

LESTER ANTELOPE GRADUATED from high school on the res, tried the Army, and even worked a short time for a security service before he decided he didn’t like uniforms or being bossed around by other people. In fact, Lester took pride in doing grunt work that required nothing of him except his labor and physical presence. He carried hod, stacked sacks of cement as though they were filled with mulch, gathered fieldstones by hand and turned them into rock fences that were artworks.

He wore braids, a traditional Indian flat-brimmed, high-domed hat, and had a face like a dented pie plate. One night he took on four millworkers outside the Oxford Bar and, with his back against the building so they couldn’t get behind him, put them away one by one as though he were swatting baseballs inside a batting cage.

Lester Antelope worked hard, spoke seldom, ate his meals in workingmen’s cafés, and kept few close friends. Until he met Johnny American Horse in the drunk tank of the county jail. Lester listened to Johnny talk of a range dotted from horizon to horizon with bison and red ponies, and for the first time in his life felt he was part of a world much larger than himself, one that was not only attainable but perhaps worth dying for.

Lester knew instinctively that Johnny’s courage was unlike other men’s. Johnny was brave in the way an animal is brave when it fights for its life or protection of its young-without problems of pride or self-pity or desire to vindicate or avenge oneself. Johnny’s soul had the iridescence of the archer’s bow the Everywhere Spirit hung in the sky after a thunderstorm. Johnny’s indomitable courage and resilience gave not only voice but hope to those who had none.

Lester Antelope lived downtown by the tracks in a rooming house with a bath at the end of the hall. Tuesday evening, after work, he found the business card of a detective named Darrel McComb stuck in his doorjamb. He threw the card in the trash sack under his kitchen sink, bathed and changed into fresh clothes, then strolled down to Stockman’s Bar to eat supper and shoot pool.

It was early and except for the bartender the pool table area was deserted. Lester was shooting a solitary game of rotation when a man entered the back door, silhouetted against the soft evening light and the river down below. The man was thin and dark-haired, and wore a cheap suit and a white shirt that had gone gray with washing and was frayed on the collar and cuffs. Lester could hear the man dropping a series of coins into the pay phone, then speaking with his back to Lester, as though he wanted to conceal the urgent nature of his conversation.

“Can you wire a money order? The car battery is dead. Even if I get a jump start I hate to take Ellie and the baby over the pass like that,” the man said.

There was silence while the man listened, his free hand clenching and unclenching at his side.

“We just need to get to Spokane. I’ll get paid in two weeks and everything will be fine,” the man said. “I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t a dire situation…No, operator, I don’t have more change. Did you hear me? No, please don’t cut me off.”

Then the man was staring wanly at the receiver, which had gone dead in his hand. He replaced it in the cradle and pinched his temples between his thumb and forefinger. Lester glanced out the back door of the saloon. A battered car with a Washington State plate was parked down by the river, a blond woman in the passenger seat, an infant wrapped in a blanket on her shoulder. “You want to borrow a buck or two?” Lester said.

“Oh, no, thanks. But I could sure use a battery jump. I got cables in my trunk,” the dark-haired man said.

Ten minutes later the battered car with the Washington tag was seen roaring up the entrance ramp to the interstate highway. A tramp living in a hobo jungle on the mountainside close by the ramp walked hurriedly to a filling station and made a 911 call. He swore he had seen a baby thrown from the car’s passenger window.

The bartender at Stockman’s brought a fried pork chop sandwich, a plate of hash browns, and a cup of coffee to the table where Lester ate his meals. But Lester never returned from the parking lot, and the food grew cold and finally the bartender took it away and tipped it into the garbage can.

AT 8:14 A.M. WEDNESDAY, Darrel McComb called my office from a cell phone. “Ever know an Indian named Lester Antelope?” he said.

“Yeah, he does fence work for Johnny American Horse sometimes,” I replied.

“Describe him.”

“What for?”

“I need somebody to do an ID. I’m looking at a guy I think is Antelope but I can’t be sure.”

“I’m not understanding you.”

“He’s dead. You know Sleeman Creek Road?”

“Lester’s dead? Up Sleeman Creek? That’s close to my house.”

“Good. You know the way,” he said.

I drove ten miles south of Missoula through Lolo, then west on Highway 12 toward Idaho. I turned up the dirt road that led past my home, then entered a long, deserted valley where the hills were round on the tops and steep-sided, with ponderosa growing hard by the rock outcroppings. A collection of police cruisers and emergency vehicles were parked on a slope at the bottom of an arroyo. The coroner had just arrived.

Midway up the arroyo, in deep shadow, was a tin shed built on a cement pad, the door hanging half open. Darrel McComb walked down to meet me. He wore a rumpled suit with a blue shirt and dark tie. His face had no expression.

“Last night a bum called in a 911 on an infant thrown from an automobile. The ‘infant’ turned out to be a plastic doll,” he said. “We have a feeling Antelope got lured out of Stockman’s Bar by some people posing as a hard-up family trying to get to Spokane.”

“Why would anyone want to kidnap Lester?”

“He used to work for Blue Mountain Security. I have a feeling he was one of the Indians who broke into the Global Research lab. This morning a hiker got caught in a shower and took shelter in the shed. Take a look inside, then talk to me.”

“Why me?” I said.

He wrote in a small spiral notebook and didn’t answer.

“I asked you a question,” I said.

“You got a vested interest in this case, Holland. Maybe we’re on the same side,” he replied.

I walked up the slope and looked inside the shed, which was bolted down on a concrete pad and had probably once been a storage place for logging equipment. The coroner was squatted down by the body of a large Indian man who lay on his side, his face pointed toward me. A uniformed deputy had placed a lit flashlight on the floor. One of the Indian’s pigtails had been cut from his head. I looked at the walls, floor, and ceiling, then backed out of the shed and blew out my breath.

“Is it Lester Antelope?” Darrel said.

Before I could speak I had to clear my mouth and spit. “Yeah, it’s Lester Antelope. He didn’t have any identification on him?” I said.

“Picked clean. Ever see anybody take a beating that bad when you were a cop?”

“No.”

He looked back over his shoulder, as though he did not want anyone else to hear our conversation. “How do you read it?” he asked.

“Someone cuffed him to a U-bolt and used the two-by-four that’s on the floor. Then Lester broke the chain on the cuffs and went after them. That’s when he got shot in the forehead. I think some of the blood on the walls might belong to his kidnappers.”

“Think Antelope creeped the research lab down in the Bitterroots?”

“How would I know?”

“He’s buds with your client, Johnny American Horse, Native America’s answer to Jesus Christ.”

“I knew Lester. He was a good man. This happened right up the road from my house. I’m not in a light mood about it,” I said.

“Maybe these guys are sending you a message. You think of that?”

“Be more specific,” I said.

“You and I both worked for the G. All this Indian stuff is cosmetic. There’s a much bigger issue at work here. I just don’t know what it is. You still pissed because I got rough with American Horse?”

“I don’t like cops who blackjack unarmed people.”

“Maybe I don’t, either,” he said.

Darrel stuck his notebook in his shirt pocket, the wind flapping his coat, his revolver and holster exposed. Then he scratched his cheek and seemed puzzled. For a moment I thought he could actually be a likable man, except for his abiding insecurity and desire to control others. He was standing slightly higher on the slope than I was, I suspect not by accident. “They didn’t get what they wanted, did they?” he said.

“I think Lester spit in their faces, then signed off with his hands on their throats. You want anything else, Darrel?” I said.

“Nope,” he said.

I turned to go. The valley down below was green and blanketed with sunlight now, and just around the bend in the road was my house, where Temple and I would have supper together that night, safe from all the intrusions of the world.

“Antelope had information these guys wanted real bad. That means they’re going to have another run at it. You think about that,” Darrel said.

I walked back up the slope until I was a few inches from him. “Run that by me again?”

“I was being straight up with you, Holland. No second meaning intended. I don’t want any beef with you,” he said.

LATE THAT AFTERNOON it turned cold and snowed unexpectedly. Through the back window I could see the ravine and trees behind the house turning gray, the white-tailed deer heading through the undergrowth for cover. Temple had spent the day in Red Lodge, deposing witnesses in a civil suit, and had heard nothing of Lester Antelope’s death. I fixed her a cup of tea, then told her of the events that had occurred that morning. She stared out the window at the snow drifting in the trees.

“They drove him up our road to do it?” she said.

I nodded.

“Coincidence?”

“Maybe. Except the doll was thrown from the car up on I-Ninety. The abductors were headed in the opposite direction from us.”

“Maybe Lester was put in another vehicle.”

“Maybe. Johnny American Horse told me he’d had a dream about an animal trapped in a burning woods. He said he felt responsible for the animal’s fate.”

“I don’t care about Johnny anymore. I care about what he’s doing to us.”

“Guys like him and Lester are on their own. They don’t have many friends, Temple.”

“Forgive me. I guess I shouldn’t worry about the prospect of losing our home,” she said.

“It’s not that bad,” I said.

She walked to the sink and stood with her back to me, looking up the ravine at the trees misting over and disappearing inside the weather. I went to the pantry to get some food for supper, and I heard her use the name of God bitterly under her breath.

In the morning the sky was bright and clear, and the snow that had fallen during the night was melting in the trees on the hillsides. I walked down to the front gate to retrieve the newspaper from the metal cylinder next to the mailbox. As an afterthought I flipped open the mailbox in case I had forgotten to pick up the mail the previous day. Inside was a blood-spotted black pigtail braided from human hair.

LATER THAT DAY I got hold of Seth Masterson. “I need some help,” I said.

“Sure, what is it?” he said.

I told him about Lester Antelope’s death up the valley from me and my discovery of his severed pigtail in my mailbox. “Yeah, I already got the paperwork on it,” he said.

“So?”

“There’s no federal jurisdiction here,” he replied.

“It’s a kidnapping.”

“Not per se.”

“We don’t have local resources to deal with what’s going on here, Seth.”

“You want my advice? Disengage from Johnny American Horse. Or buy yourself a high-end security system or a lot more guns.”

“How about losing the Okie-from-Muskogee routine?”

“We’re living in a different era, partner. Before it’s over, the body count will be higher than anyone could have ever imagined. I’m talking about right here at home. None of us will be unaffected. That’s just one guy’s opinion.”

In the silence that followed I could hear the receiver humming in my ear like wind in a cave.

THAT EVENING the sunset was orange on the hills and trees above our house, and before dusk I began opening the irrigation trenches that ran from the hillsides down through our pasture. We had no twelve-month creeks on our land, but the snowmelt and runoff in the spring gave us good grass, and during the end of summer we got by with temporary irrigation from a three-hundred-foot well. We kept six horses-a sorrel, a buckskin, two Appaloosas, a Morgan, and an Arabian I bought from a circus. From the far end of the pasture, as shadows grew across the valley, I could see the red metal roof of our barn and the one-and-a-half-story house we had built, with a wraparound veranda and cupolated corners that gave a wide-angle view of the valley and the snow-covered peaks of the Bitterroots in the south.

The air smelled cold and heavy as the water coursed through the irrigation trenches in the shade. Then the wind shifted and blew from the opposite hills, out of the sunlight, and I heard our horses nicker behind me and the sorrel, for no apparent reason, begin galloping through a stand of aspens toward the barn.

I stared up at the lighted hillside in the east and saw a flash on metal or glass among the trees. Then I saw it again. I went to my truck and got my binoculars from the glove box and swept the lenses across the hillcrest. A man in a sportsman’s cap and down vest was crouched next to a ponderosa trunk, looking straight at me. Two other men, both dressed in jeans and caps, stood behind him. All three men turned their faces in the opposite direction, then worked their way up the slope through the Douglas fir and disappeared on the other side.

I could feel my heart beating when I lowered the binoculars from my face.

I SAID NOTHING about the men on the hill to Temple. That night she fell asleep with her back turned toward me, her hip molded under the thin blanket. The darkness was alive with sound-deer or elk thumping down the trails on the hillside, an owl screeching, a bear knocking over the garbage can in the barn, a hoof clacking like a punctuation mark on the top rail of the fence as an animal vaulted over it. I placed my hand lightly on Temple’s back and could feel the swelling of her lungs through my palm. A moment later she got up and walked to the bathroom, then returned to bed, covered her head with a pillow, and went back to sleep.

I woke before first light and drank coffee by myself in the coldness of the kitchen. As the stars began to fade in the sky, I saw a skinned-up truck with slat sides parked on the road and a hatted man in a thick canvas coat leading our buckskin gelding back through a break in the fence. I put on a coat and walked down to the road.

“Why are you here, Wyatt?” I said.

He slipped the lariat off the buckskin’s neck and popped him on the rump to encourage him though the collapsed fence rails. He hoisted the top rail into place and began hammering the torn nails into the post with a rock. “You got a mixture of crested wheatgrass and alfalfa in that pasture. Good dryland combo, but when elk come off a winter range a fence like this don’t even slow them down,” he said.

“Let that be. Tell me what you want and leave,” I said.

He tapped the nails snug and removed a thermos from inside the truck. He unscrewed the top with his thumb while he stared at me with a crazy light in his face. “Got me a Sharps buffalo rifle with a fifty-caliber barrel. At three hundred yards I can core a hole big as a tangerine through a cottonwood tree. I know all about the Indian got killed up the road yonder. Know about the pigtail they left in your postbox, too. You need backup, Brother Holland. I’m the huckleberry can do it, too. You know I am.”

He lifted his thermos to his mouth and drank.

“My God, what is that? It smells like a septic tank,” I said.

“More like lemon-flavored paint thinner. It’s my chemical cocktail. Medicaid will pay for it, but so far I ain’t had to take no money from the government. There was men watching you from up on that ridge last night.”

“How’d you know that?”

“I got connections.”

“I don’t think you do. I think you were probably spying on us, and just like me you spotted those guys up on the hill.”

“Suit yourself. That Indian went out full throttle and fuck-it, didn’t he? Know why? Indians ain’t afraid of dying. That’s ’cause they think this world is already part of the next. But white people ain’t got that kind of comfort. How’d you like them motherfuckers who did Lester Antelope to go to work on Miss Temple or that boy of yours?”

He upended his thermos and drank it empty, his Adam’s apple working smoothly, an orange rivulet running from his mouth, his lidless eyes waiting for my response.

LATER, I CALLED our new sheriff, a stolid and unimaginative man who was more bureaucrat than law officer. I asked him what he had on the murder of Lester Antelope.

“It’s under investigation,” he said.

“I know that. I was at the crime scene. One of his pigtails was in my mailbox,” I said.

“I’m aware of all those details, Mr. Holland. You don’t need to raise your voice,” he said.

“Look, some men were watching me through binoculars yesterday. I think these guys are sending me and my wife a message.”

“I’m not quite sure what you’re talking about. If you want, you can come in and make a report. We’ll look into it. Sending you a message? About what?”

I walked across the street to Fay Harback’s office. I told her of my conversation with the sheriff. I also told her of Wyatt Dixon’s early morning visit to my house.

“What’s Dixon up to?” she said.

“I don’t have any idea.”

“We think we may have found the car that was used to abduct Lester Antelope. Or at least it fits the description given by the homeless man who saw the doll thrown from the window. It was burned in a canyon up Fish Creek. The tags were gone, but the vehicle ID matches up with a car that was stolen in Superior a couple of weeks ago. The sheriff didn’t tell you any of this?”

“He didn’t get around to it.”

“So you think the guys who murdered Antelope might come after you or Johnny American Horse now? Because you or Johnny might have access to the material that was stolen out of the Global Research lab?”

“They think I may have access.”

“No truth to that?”

“No.”

“Johnny doesn’t know anything about it, either?”

“He wasn’t involved.” I tried to hold my eyes on hers.

“I feel sorry for you,” she said.

“Why?” My face started to tingle, as though someone had popped me contemptuously on the cheek.

“You’re going to take his bounce,” she replied.

AT LUNCHTIME Lucas came into the office, his jeans hitched up above his hips, the legs tucked into his boots. “You eat yet?” he said.

“Can’t do it. Got to work.”

He looked disappointed for a moment, then he smiled. “I got invited to play at the bluegrass festival in Hamilton,” he said.

“That’s good, bud.”

“Y’all coming?”

“Couldn’t run us off with a shotgun.”

He stared idly out the window at the trees on the courthouse lawn. “Weird thing happened this morning. Somebody stuck a crunched-up license plate in my mail slot,” he said.

“What kind of plate?” I said.

“Washington State. It was twisted into a cone and jammed into the slot. Why would somebody do that?”

“Where is it?”

“In my trash can. What’s going on?”

“Let’s go,” I said.

We drove over to his apartment and I removed the tag from his garbage can with a pencil and dropped it in a plastic shopping bag. I called Fay Harback on my cell phone and read the tag numbers to her. I heard her shuffling papers around on her desk.

“Bring it in. We’ll see if there’re any latents on it. It came off the burned vehicle we found up Fish Creek…Hello?” she said.

“Where’s Wyatt Dixon live?” I said.