In The Moon Of Red Ponies

Chapter 9

WYATT LIVED UP on the Blackfoot River, on a grassy bench north of a sawmill and an unused railroad trestle. Several years back an ice jam had crashed through the cottonwoods, sweeping away the owner’s truck, automobile, and machine shop, depositing great chunks of frozen flotsam inside the downstairs area of the main house. Wyatt rented the house for a song. He strung canvas over the holes in the first story and moved into an upstairs bedroom that allowed him a view of the only two ways the property could be accessed-either by a steel swing bridge suspended over the river or by a single-track log road that wound over the hill behind the house.

The sky was still filled with light when I parked on the riverbank and headed toward the swing bridge. The wind blowing down the canyon smelled of damp stone, pine needles, and wood smoke, and a fisherman was down below in the current, flipping a dry fly out on the riffle, taking up the slack in his line with his left hand. The swing bridge pinged and bounced with my weight as I crossed it, then the sun dropped behind the mountain, filling the gorge with shadow, and I swore I saw a figure in the willows at the far end of the bridge.

Ain’t nobody home, Billy Bob. Better be glad, too, L. Q. Navarro said.

Mind your own business, I replied.

You’re trying to use Dixon as a cure for your problem. That’s like shopping in hell for an air-conditioning unit.

What do you suggest?

Inside his black coat he wore a white shirt with pale gray stripes in it. A red ribbon folded in the shape of a shepherd’s hook was pinned to the place where I had shot and killed him. The problem is you haven’t figured out what he’s really up to. This boy ain’t your reg’lar psychopath, he said.

I sure could use you now, L.Q. I hate myself for what I did down there on the border.

But he was gone. I turned around and walked back across the bridge, my boots clanking on the steel grid. The fisherman down below, who had witnessed my conversation with someone no one else saw, was looking at me strangely. I waved at him, but he didn’t respond.

I sat in my truck, trying to think. As L.Q. had indicated, I had never figured out Dixon. He was born twenty miles from the birthplace of Audie Murphy, on a dust-blown, locust-infested farm where his parents apparently raised children as they would livestock. Then the family moved to another rental farm, in an even more godforsaken place, not far from the birthplace of Clyde Barrow. Somehow it seemed more than coincidence that Wyatt’s early life was geographically linked to names that were so antithetically juxtaposed in connotation.

At age fifteen, Wyatt ran away from home and enlisted in the United States Army. At bayonet practice a drill instructor who had a particular dislike for Wyatt made the mistake of choosing him for a demonstration with a pugil stick. Wyatt broke the drill instructor’s jaw with the pugil stick. The Army found the drill instructor at fault but later realized it had underestimated Wyatt’s potential when he waylaid a black mess sergeant in a San Antonio alley, cut off his stripes, and stuffed them down his throat.

He picked chickens in a Texas slaughterhouse, hauled illegal Mexican beef, and did time in a Coahuila prison, where the guards made him kneel on stones with his wrists chained to a log stretched across his shoulders. He wandered the American West in stolen cars and pickups, sleeping under the stars, working cockfight pits, breaking mustangs in Nevada, gypo logging in the Cascades, running a bale or two of weed up from Baja when he ran short of cash. His body looked as though it were made from whipcord. The muscles in his forearms swelled into balloons; his grip was like steel cable. Then at age nineteen Wyatt discovered the world of a full-time, honest-to-God rodeo man.

As a bull rider, he would tie himself down with a suicide wrap and either ride to the buzzer or take his chances on being dragged, stomped, hooked, or flung into the boards. As a steer wrestler, he would fly from the saddle, grab the steer’s horns, and slam it to the ground with such force he and the steer would seem to disappear inside a brown aura of dust and desiccated manure. From Big D to Calgary, the crowds loved Wyatt Dixon.

Barroom women sucked his fingers, and mainline ex-cons, neo-Nazis, and outlaw bikers walked around him. His skin was stitched with scar tissue but clean of tattoos, the skeletal structure of his face like a Roman soldier’s. He spent large sums on fine boots and embroidered western shirts, drank tequila with a beer back, and belonged to Aryan supremacist groups out of convenience rather than need. He ate his pain, let his enemies break their fists on his face, and grinned like a jack-o’-lantern at the condemnation of the world.

It was Dixon’s courage that made no sense. Sociopaths are invariably cowards, and their cruelty exists in direct proportion to their own fear and self-pity. If they show any calm when they’re executed by the state, it’s because they’ve forced their executioner to do what they could not do themselves.

Wyatt Dixon didn’t fit the category.

As I started the truck, I remembered the two rodeo passes he had tried to give me and Temple at the café in Missoula, tickets I had brushed off the table onto the floor. Then I remembered seeing an ad in the morning paper. The rodeo, in Stevensville, began that weekend.

When I arrived the fairgrounds were teeming with people, neon-scrolled carnival rides revolved against a turquoise light in the sky, and crowds of rodeo fans were packing into the grandstands while Bob Wills’s original version of “San Antonio Rose” blared from loudspeakers. I bought a candied apple and sat up high in the stands, where I had a wonderful view of the bucking chutes and the arena. But I saw no sign of Wyatt. He usually worked as a clown, dressed in a cherry-red, bulbous nose, face paint, baggy pants, firehouse suspenders, and fright wig, staring the bull down, pawing the ground with his cleats, arching his back away from the horned charge with only an inch or two to spare, sometimes mooning the bull as it turned for another pass.

I watched the bulldogging and calf-roping competition, the ladies’ barrel race, and a comedy routine involving a monkey named Whiplash who, dressed in cowboy garb, charged about the arena strapped to a dog sprinting after sheep.

Then it was time for the bareback riders.

Almost all the riders came from Montana and Wyoming. Most were young and wore red or purple or green chaps, outrageous shirts, and hats with huge crowns and sloping brims; none of them had a teaspoon of fat on his body, and all of them seemed to glide across the ground rather than walk. When they came out of the chute, the only thing between them and a ride into the sky was a suitcase handle stitched to the slender piece of leather rigging on the horse’s withers. Larry Mahan once said bareback riding was easy, that it was just like loading a suitcase with bricks, hefting it up by the handle, then stepping out of a ten-story window.

Then I saw Wyatt Dixon mount the side of a bucking chute, rosin the palms of his gloves, and slide down inside the boards onto the rigging of a horse named Drunkard’s Dream. At first it seemed Wyatt was having trouble getting set, dipping his hand repeatedly into the rigging and tugging back on the suitcase handle. The horse began rearing its head, banging Wyatt’s legs into the boards, trying to clear space to get off a solid kick.

For no reason that made any sense a rough stock handler poked a battery-powered hotshot through the boards and jolted the horse’s forequarters with it. The horse went berserk. But Wyatt hollered, “Outside!” anyway, and he and Drunkard’s Dream exploded into the arena.

First bounce out of the chute, he roweled the horse’s neck, his legs extended in front of him, his back almost touching the horse’s rump. Drunkard’s Dream corkscrewed, sunfished, and came totally off the ground, but Wyatt’s lock on the suitcase handle was so tight his small, muscular buttocks seemed stitched to the animal’s hide.

“Wyatt Dixon, thirty-nine years young! Look at that cowboy ride, ladies and gentlemen!” the announcer yelled with genuine excitement and admiration.

But in a blink it went south. Wyatt seemed to slip and lose balance on the horse’s back, as though the arena were tilting. Drunkard’s Dream raked him against the boards, and Wyatt and his rigging went over the side, under the horse’s hooves.

The crowd was on its feet, horrified. They could see Wyatt through the horse’s legs, curled in a ball, his forearms raised defensively. They could even hear the uneven sound the horse’s hooves made as they trod over both the sod and Wyatt’s body.

The clowns and a pickup rider were the first people to get to Wyatt. When they tried to lift him onto a stretcher, he pushed them away and rose to his feet, falling back against the boards for support. His face was dazed, filmed with dust, blood leaking from a cut in his scalp. He reached over, almost falling down again, picked up his hat, and slapped it clean against his leg.

Regardless of his injury, Wyatt had ridden to the buzzer, and the judges gave him the highest score so far in the bareback competition. But Wyatt seemed to be completely indifferent to either the crowd’s applause or the points just given to him for his ride. He left the arena at the far end, where the rough stock were kept, then circled back under the stands.

I walked to the concourse, where I could see the unlighted area behind the concession stands and under the seats. The man who had used the hotshot on Wyatt’s horse was eating a chili dog out of a paper plate, his face bent close to his food. He was a tall man with a pot stomach, narrow shoulders, and flaccid arms. He was a rough stock handler, not a rider, a man who would always be a candle moth and never a player. When he looked up from his food, his face turned gray.

“The cinch busted. It didn’t have nothing to do with the hotshot, Wyatt,” I heard him say.

Wyatt’s back was turned to me, so I could not see his face or hear his words. But when he spoke, the handler nodded his head up and down, then shook it from side to side. His chili dog slid off his plate onto the ground. People were starting to gather now. An older man stepped forward and patted Wyatt on the shoulder, then I saw Wyatt look away at the people passing by the concession stands, as though he were leaving one reality and entering another. In profile his face and exposed eye possessed the same flat, bloodless and brutal luminosity as a passing shark’s.

Then he simply walked away, his mouth down-hooked, his shoulders sloped forward, a rivulet of blood glued to the side of his eye and down his cheek, like paint on an Indian warrior.

I was sure he had not seen me. I drove back to his house by the Blackfoot River and left the following note in his mailbox:

You think a jailhouse jerk-off like you is going to sell information about us to a defense attorney? That cut cinch was just a warning. Take it to heart, sperm breath.

HE CALLED the house Saturday morning. “I just received a communication that’s a test for my thinking powers, Brother Holland,” he said.

“You need to take my number out of your Rolodex,” I said.

“Got the shit kicked out of me under a horse last night. This morning I find this note in my mailbox, accusing me of trying to sell information about certain parties to a defense lawyer. You been telling people I done that?”

“I sure did. To anybody who’d listen.”

“I am very disappointed to learn that. I thought we was operating on a basis of lawyer-client confidentiality.”

“I want you to hear this, Dixon-”

“Brother Holland, I know you wasn’t raised up on a pig farm. It’s impolite to call folks by their last names. You done sicced some bad people on me, sir. That means you owe me.”

I hung up, but I knew he’d taken the hook. He called back fifteen seconds later. “I think somebody put acid on my cinch so it looked like it busted from dry rot. Last night I was fixing to rip the arms off the wrong man. Glad I have calmed down and got my Christian attitudes back on the front burner,” he said.

“Leave me out of your life.”

“No-siree-bobtail, we’re in this together. Remember, I have already given your name as my reference with President Bush. That means both you and me are in the service of the red, white, and blue. I ’spect I’m gonna be making some home calls on a few folks. But whatever I do, I’ll keep you updated as my counselor. Have you been to Brother Sneed’s church up at Arlee? I think you would find it an uplifting experience.”

“Have a great weekend, Wyatt,” I said, and eased the receiver into the phone cradle.

The kitchen was full of sunlight, the hills a soft green from the spring melt. Temple stood in the doorway, staring at me in disbelief.

“You’re trying to manipulate a lunatic like Wyatt Dixon?” she said.

“Got any other solutions?” I replied.

She started to speak, to fling a rejoinder at me. Then she gave it up and shook her head. I put my arms around her and pulled her close against me, my face buried in her hair, and could take no pleasure in either her verbal defeat or my having just stepped into the moral basement that constituted the world of Wyatt Dixon.

IT WAS THE WEEKEND and Darrel McComb was off the clock, but he could not get Amber Finley off his mind, nor the whole business involving the Indians and what he had come to believe was some form of intelligence operation. What had Rocky Harrigan always told him about being a player? Kick ass, take names, and don’t look back. But kick ass.

Saturday afternoon he showered, shined his shoes, put on a Hawaiian shirt, what Rocky used to call a “goon” shirt, and knocked on the Finleys’ door. When she opened it she looked absolutely stunning, in a purple dress printed with green flowers, with big red beads around her throat and straw sandals on her feet. In the rush of cool air out into the sunlight he could smell her perfume and the odor of her shampoo. It was obvious she had been on her way out. “This is an official visit,” he said.

“Then I’d be more comfortable if somebody was accompanying you,” she replied.

“We don’t have a lot of budget for weekend overtime,” he said, half smiling.

She stepped aside to let him in. “Get it over with, whatever it is,” she said.

The living room was furnished with green velvet drapes and massive, dark furniture, but the morose effect was attenuated by the flow of light through the French doors that opened onto the backyard and creek. As his eyes adjusted, he realized the glass tabletops, the pale marble in the mantelpiece, and the big mirror above it gave contrasts to the room that were a mark of taste and planning inconceivable in the homes of most people he knew. He waited for her to ask him to sit down. But she didn’t. He removed a notebook from his shirt pocket and sat on the couch, anyway, folding back pages and clicking his ballpoint to give the impression he was all business and at the same time controlling the situation, not letting her use social protocol to achieve the upper hand.

“You knew Lester Antelope?” he said.

“He worked for Johnny sometimes. I knew him around. Why?”

“He was murdered.”

“I know that. Why don’t you find the people who did it?”

She was standing by the mantel, one forearm propped on the corner. Darrel smiled at her. “Believe it or not, that’s the purpose of my visit. I think Antelope was mixed up with the burglary of that research lab down in Stevensville. I suspect it had something to do with ecoterrorism. But we’re pretty sure four Indians did the job.” He paused a moment to give emphasis to the rest of his statement. “A white woman was with them. Maybe somebody who just got caught up in things.”

She didn’t blink. Her eyes stayed riveted on his, the most radiant blue eyes he had ever seen. “You said, ‘We’re pretty sure.’ The Missoula Sheriff’s Department is investigating crimes in Ravalli County?”

He’d slipped and she’d caught it. “I’m getting a crick in my neck looking up at you. Could you sit down?” he said.

“There’s no ‘we,’ is there?” she said.

He tried to look bored. “It’s a cooperative effort. In this instance, a burglary and a homicide are linked together in two jurisdictions. Who do you think that woman was?”

“Snow White, with four of the dwarfs. Get a life, Darrel.”

He grinned at her humor and wrote in his notebook. He was on top of it now-generous, confident enough to be indulgent. When they cracked wise, they had unknowingly admitted they were amateurs and probably guilty as well. In the old days, mainline hard cases took the beating. Today, the pros asked for an attorney and became deaf-mutes.

“About five years ago, I knew a gal from your background who went inside. Educated, smart, nice-looking, used to ski in Aspen and hang out in Malibu. Her daddy was a state senator, a big rancher, a wheeler and a dealer, with juice all the way to D.C. But the girl fell in love with a junkie who maxed out all her credit cards and made her drive the car whenever he turned over a liquor or convenience store.

“One night the junkie had a fierce jones going and decided to hold up a store in a strip mall. He killed three people, including a twelve-year-old kid. Our girlfriend got raped by a male guard her first week inside and the next week by a couple of dykes. She never came out. She hung herself. Think I’m kidding? I’ll give you her name. You can check it out.”

He had driven the barb in deep. Amber’s eyes were shimmering, her throat spotted with color. He felt paternal and wanted to stand up and touch her cheek and hair, to reassure her things were not out of control yet, that he would be there as her friend. His thoughts, although not deliberately erotic, caused a thickening in his throat.

But he saw the flicker of weakness and humiliation leave her eyes and her jawbone flex, her posture straighten as she removed her hand from the mantelpiece.

“Do anything you goddamn feel like, but in the meantime take yourself, your horny attitudes, and your hair tonic or cologne or whatever that stink is out of my house. If you come back again without a warrant, my attorney will pull the nails out of your shoes.”

He rose from the couch, clicked his ballpoint pen, and stuck it in his pocket. His face burned, then his embarrassment turned to anger and he had to bite down on his lip so he would not say the words he was thinking. He walked to the door and opened it, the sunlight blinding his eyes. When he looked back at her, her arms were folded on her breasts, one knuckle poised on her lips while she watched him. She had not only bested him again but insulted him physically. A bilious fluid rose in his throat.

His desire for vindication, even revenge, should have made him willing to pull out all the stops. But as he looked at the composure in her face, the paleness on the tops of her breasts, her cocked hip, her refusal to be bested by him, only one thought coursed through his mind: What an incredible woman.

Why couldn’t she accept his feelings for what they were?

DARREL AND GRETA Lundstrum had made a date that evening. Before he left his apartment on the river, he made an entry in the computer file he was now keeping on the case of Johnny American Horse and the individuals who threaded their way in and out of it. The entry read:

Greta Lundstrum-smart, confrontational, I suspect territorial as hell, maybe a sexual adventurer. Would she get in the sack with a guy like Wyatt Dixon just for fun? Or is she a player? Why was she at the house of a U.S. senator? An easterner out here among the cowboys just for kicks? No way.

As he drove down to Stevensville to pick her up, he tried to convince himself that his motivations were professional in nature. But his unrequited obsession over Amber Finley was taking its toll. Night and day he felt a vague sense of sexual need that left him not only uncomfortable but irritable and discontent, almost hostile, as though he were less in the eyes of others, an inept, clumsy man who smelled of locker rooms and had to wear his military history like an invisible uniform to know who he was.

Greta Lundstrum lived in a white bungalow with blue shutters, a solitary spruce tree planted on each side of the small porch. In the late afternoon light the yard, the spruce trees, and the house looked like a demonstration home removed from a 1940s subdivision development. She opened the door and came outside without inviting him in, dressed in a black skirt and a white blouse, a gold chain around her throat. A shiny black purse hung on her arm.

“Am I late?” he asked, looking at his watch.

“I made reservations at the Depot for six-thirty,” she replied, walking ahead of him.

“I didn’t know we were going to the Depot,” he said.

“You don’t like eating there?”

“No, it’s fine,” he said.

“Good. That’s where I usually eat when I’m in Missoula,” she said. She opened the car door for herself and got inside, her purse on her lap, waiting for him to start the engine.

The restaurant’s main dining area and the bar across the foyer were crowded. Outside, on the terrace, a jazz combo played under a striped canopy, the sun a soft orange ball above the hills behind the railroad tracks.

“I’m glad you got reservations,” Darrel said.

“You have to. On Saturday night university types take over everything,” she said.

“It’s that kind of town, all right,” he said.

She ordered wine and he a glass of seltzer with a slice of lime.

“You don’t drink?” she said.

“Not too often. But I can if I want to,” he replied.

“When do you want to?” she said, and smiled when she said it.

“When I feel like it. I just never had the taste for it.”

“Give me the sirloin, well done, sour cream and chives on the baked potato. No butter,” she told the waiter.

“Yeah, same for me,” Darrel said.

During dinner he realized she spoke to no one at the other tables, although her eyes seemed to take note, without personal interest, of everyone in the room. She had firm arms, square shoulders, a small cleft in her chin, and medium-size hands with clipped, pink nails. She ate with a good appetite and midway through the meal ordered another glass of wine. “Sure you won’t join me?” she said.

“Why not?” he said, nodding to the waiter.

Later, she had Bavarian cake for dessert, and when the waiter brought coffee, she looked sated, happy, her face a bit flushed. She didn’t order anything else to drink and he knew she wasn’t a real boozer. “I always like the food here,” she said.

“I’ve been looking into that guy Dixon’s background. You know, the rodeo guy?” he said casually.

She picked up her spoon from her coffee saucer and looked at it and put it back down. “I think I already told you I strayed into a dalliance with Wyatt. It was my fault, not his. But I’m not really interested in hearing any more about him,” she said.

“The Feds say he writes letters to the President. He’s a definite head case.”

He looked out the window, waiting for her reaction. “Is this why you asked me out?” she said.

“I shouldn’t have brought this guy up. Cops have a hard time getting off the clock. That’s why they hang out together. Lot of times in late night bars. I’m glad you wanted to go to dinner tonight.”

She let her eyes rove around the dining room, her thoughts veiled. “Ever been married?” she asked.

“For a little while. I was in the Army, moving around from place to place.”

“You seem like a frank man. What do you think of me?”

“You’re a classy lady. I got a feeling we’re a lot alike,” Darrel said.

“Who knows?” she said.

“Want to take a walk down by the river? There’s a concert in the park tonight. Actually, my apartment is across the river from the park. Sometimes I listen to the music on my balcony,” he said.

“You saying you want to go to the concert or to your apartment?”

“Whatever,” he replied.

She rested her chin on her fist and looked directly into his face again. “You go to Vegas or Reno very much?” she said.

“Yeah, how’d you know?”

“Because I go there, too. Know why?” she said.

“ ’Cause you never know what’s going to happen next. Twenty-four hours a day, you can have any kind of adventure you want,” he replied.

She kept her eyes on his and kissed the air with her lips.

A FEW MINUTES later, he and Greta were sitting on a grass embankment by the river and listening to a band pound out “The Eight-Thirty Blues.” The park was crowded with college kids, young couples with children, Frisbee throwers, skateboarders, hobos who slept in the willows along the riverbank, and punked-out street people who dealt drugs in the shadows by the public restrooms and looked as if they had been shot out of a cannon.

But Darrel had little interest in street dealers or the strips of maroon cloud on the mountains in the west or the yellow light that filled the sky or the breeze that blew off the water and smelled of fern and wet stone. Instead, his entire attentions were now focused on two people dancing on the clipped lawn in front of the bandstand-Amber Finley and Johnny American Horse.

Amber wore a knee-length black spaghetti-strap dress and Mexican cowboy boots, and danced with her fists held in the air, swinging her hips from side to side, kicking one booted foot when she made a turn, totally indifferent to the impression she made on anyone else. By contrast, Johnny American Horse looked like a post, his face shaded by a light-colored Stetson, his skin dark, his black jeans and tight-fitting silver shirt stretched to splitting on the leanness of his body.

Greta’s eyes followed Darrel’s line of vision.

“A penny for your thoughts,” she said.

“The country’s turning into a toilet,” he replied.

“It’s not that bad, is it?”

He picked a blade of glass off his shoe and flicked it into the breeze. “I guess not,” he said.

“You want to go?” she asked.

“I’ll go get us a couple of snow cones, then we’ll see,” he said.

He worked his way through the crowd to the concession stands that had been set up under a huge canvas awning. The band had stopped playing and he could see Amber and Johnny by the bandstand, talking to the musicians, Johnny’s arm draped across her shoulder. Darrel felt his jaw tighten, the fingernails of his right hand rake across the heel of his palm.

Then Amber left the lawn area and walked directly toward him, the black fringe on her dress swishing on her knees, the yellow light in the sky reflecting on her shoulders.

“Your snow cones, sir,” the kid at the concession stand said.

“What?” Darrel replied.

“Your snow cones? You want them?”

Darrel took one in each hand and found himself standing in Amber’s path, awkward, stupid-looking, like a giant clod just arrived from Nebraska, grains of colored ice sliding down his hands and wrists. Why was she bearing down on him? What had he done wrong this time? “Hi, Amber,” he said.

She turned, her blue eyes searching for the voice that had called her name. Then he realized she had been completely unaware of his presence in the crowd.

“What are you doing here?” she said.

“Checking out the music,” he said, trying to smile.

“What is your problem? Are you following me again?”

“No.”

“You peek through my windows, you come to my house uninvited, you beat up my boyfriend with a blackjack, and now you trail your BO into the concert I’m attending. Do you see a pattern here?”

People were turning to stare now. His face was burning, his armpits sweating inside his coat. He tried to find words to speak but couldn’t. He shoved his way through the crowd back toward the grass embankment where Greta waited for him. Behind him he thought he heard people laughing.

Greta pulled the snow cones out of his hands. “You look terrible. Sit down. What happened over there?” she said.

“Senator Finley’s daughter holds a grudge. It’s no big deal,” he said.

“Who cares? She’s a brat who should have had her butt pounded a long time ago,” Greta said. She got up from the grass and threw the snow cones in a trash barrel. “Come on, big fellow. Show me where you live.”

She walked a few steps toward the parking lot, then turned and waited for him to follow.

THEY DROVE ACROSS the bridge and turned into a shady side street that bordered the river. But he couldn’t concentrate. He had started out the evening convinced he was investigating both ecoterrorists and a rogue intelligence operation. Now he’d been made a public fool and he was in the company of a woman whose complexities and motivations he couldn’t begin to guess at. He felt like a man being pushed into a fistfight after his arms had been torn off.

His apartment was located in a century-old refurbished brick building with a grand view of the river and the city. He walked out on the balcony and looked back toward the bridge and the park on the opposite side of the river where the dance was still in progress. Why care what those people thought? he asked himself. The civilian world was a joke, a giant self-delusion that had little connection to the realities of nations in conflict.

He remembered a moment of revelation in El Salvador back in the 1980s. A photographer had taken pictures of U.S. advisers carrying weapons in the field and several congressmen had threatened an investigation. The irony was that the El Salvadoran helicopters raking leftist villages with Gatling guns were receiving their coordinates from U.S. AWACS planes high overhead and no media knew anything about it.

Darrel wondered if Amber and her liberal friends at the dance had any idea what was done for them and in their name on the ragged green edges of the American Empire.

But moments of reverie like these were not entirely comforting to Darrel. He also remembered seeing a helicopter gunship coming in low over a rain forest, a molten sun behind it, the downdraft whipping the canopy into a frenzy, then the Gatling guns blowing a series of huts into a pinkish-brown cloud laced with dried thatch. There had been children as well as adult civilians in those huts, and sometimes in the middle of the night he heard the sounds they made before they died.

Greta was making a pitcher of sangria at his bar, although he had not asked her to.

“Still thinking about that spoiled twat?” she said.

“You never told me what you were doing over at Senator Finley’s place.”

“Mine to know,” she said, stirring the ice and red wine with a celery stalk. “But if you insist, I have friends who contribute to his campaign. I suspect you voted for Finley, didn’t you?”

“I don’t vote. I think politics is a sideshow.”

She filled two goblets with sangria, fitted orange slices on the rims, and handed him one. “Here’s to all the jerks who take sideshows seriously,” she said, and clinked his goblet.

“I don’t figure you.”

“What’s to figure?” she said. She drank from her goblet, then set it down and slipped her arms around his waist. He felt her stomach touch his loins like an electric current.

Later, after they had made love in his roll-away bed, she put on her panties and walked without her top to the bar and came back to the bed with their drinks. She had few wrinkles in her skin, no stretch marks, and her muscle tone was extraordinary for her age. She drank from her glass, then leaned over him and kissed him wetly on the mouth. “You didn’t say anything,” she said.

“About what?”

“How you liked it.”

“Good. I liked it real good. You’re quite a woman.”

She tapped him on the lips with a finger and winked. “You’re not bad yourself. Next time, though, give a girl a little compliment. Mind if I use your bathroom?” she said.

A moment later he heard the toilet flush and the faucet running. The band was still playing across the river, the sound of the music floating thinly above the roar of the current. He put on his boxer shorts and walked to the balcony. Somewhere in the crowd on the clipped lawn Amber Finley was still dancing with Johnny American Horse, the moon rising above the mountains into a turquoise sky, the two of them blessed with youth, the admiration of their peers, the knowledge that the earth and all its gifts had been created especially for them.

He had never felt so miserable in his life.

AFTER SUNSET and another pitcher of sangria, Darrel drove Greta back to her bungalow in the Bitterroot Valley. When she unlocked the front door, neither of them could believe what they saw. Every room was a shambles. The furniture was turned upside down, mattresses and upholstery slashed and gutted, drywall torn off the joists, desk and dresser drawers dumped, even all the canned goods in the pantry and frozen food in the icebox raked on the floor.

The alarm had never sounded because the home invader or invaders had come through the roof, first chopping a hole in it, then smashing a dead-bolted attic door into kindling. The level of violence done to the bungalow created in Darrel’s mind a perpetrator of immense strength and destructive energies, someone with tendons in his arms and hands like steel cable and with absolutely no sense of mercy or restraint at all.

Greta Lundstrum sat down in a deep chair and wept.

“When was the last time you saw Wyatt Dixon?” Darrel asked.