In The Moon Of Red Ponies

Chapter 19

THE NEXT DAY was Saturday. Johnny was in St. Pat’s Hospital, under arrest, his arm pumped full of antibiotics, but I was not allowed to see him, since I was no longer his attorney. Amber came out to the house that afternoon and told me of the Indian woman who supposedly had left Johnny’s survival knife and trade ax at her door. I tried to listen without letting my feelings show, but I could not help but believe her bizarre account hid an element in Johnny’s story she didn’t want to share.

“The Indian woman saved Johnny’s life. If he’d attacked the agents, they would have killed him,” she said. “Johnny thought she’d deserted him, that he’d lost his power.”

“I think somebody found Johnny’s weapons along his route, recognized them as his, and returned them to your house. I also think there’s something you’re not telling me.”

We were in the living room and through the front window I could see ash drifting in the sunlight. Amber walked in a circle, tapped her knuckles on the stonework in the fireplace, and stared at the hillside and the wind ruffling the trees. “I think Johnny might have thrown the Global Research stuff up there on the ridgeline someplace,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“He’s not sure where he threw it. He was almost delirious. It could be anywhere. What was he supposed to do, let the Feds nail him with it?”

“He hid materials from a burglary on our property?”

“He didn’t hide it, he just got rid of it. In the dark. He didn’t know where he was. Maybe it’s not on your property. Why don’t you worry about someone except yourself for a change?”

“I hate to say this, but I don’t think anyone, and I mean anyone, can afford knowing you and Johnny. I’d probably tell other people about this, but I think they’d recommend I have a lobotomy.”

“He tried to protect you. That’s why he fired you and hired that piece of shit Brendan Merwood. That’s why he tried to get his bail transferred to those worthless tribal bondsmen.”

“I don’t care how you do it, but you get that stuff off our land.”

“I don’t know where it is or I would. So stick your self-righteous attitude up your ass, Billy Bob.”

She slammed out of the house. For the first time in my relationship with Amber, I felt a degree of sympathy for her father.

AN HOUR LATER Wyatt drove his skinned-up, slat-sided truck across the cattle guard and parked in front of the house, his arm cocked on the driver’s window, an empty horse trailer bouncing behind him. “Just dropped my Appaloosa off to get his teeth floated and thought I’d see what you was up to,” he said. “You seen all them FBI and ATF agents up on your ridge?”

“No,” I said, glancing involuntarily up the hill behind our house.

“They must have strung a half mile of crime scene tape through them woods. Ain’t that where American Horse got busted last night?”

“What do you want, Wyatt?”

He got out of his truck on his crutches and propped his butt against one fender, then began paring his fingernails with a toothpick. “Them boys that shanked me in the leg? A buddy of mine seen them in Hamilton yesterday. That means they still aim to take me out, or else they’d be to hell and gone down the road by now, know what I mean?”

“What do you want me to do about it?”

“Ain’t many I can talk to. Ain’t many gonna understand. But you and me share the same kind of upbringing. You growed up in a church where the preacher preached hell so hot you could feel the fire climbing up through the floor. It was a three-ring circus, with folks talking in tongues, drinking poisons, sticking their hands in a boxful of snakes. Tell me I’m wrong.”

“You’re wrong,” I lied.

He kept his eyes on his nails. “The man I killed behind my house with my Sharps had the mark of the devil on his arm.”

“I don’t want to hear this.”

“I seen it. I touched his skin. I ain’t a drunk or an addict, counselor. I ain’t crazy, either, at least not no more. Them people is acolytes of Satan himself.”

How do you talk to a man for whom the devil is more real than God? But I tried. “Isn’t there enough evil in human beings without looking for the devil as the cause of our problems? You’re a smart man, Wyatt. Why not deal with the world as it is and not get lost in the next one?”

“You’re a naive fellow, Brother Holland.”

“Oh?”

“One child gets the daylights slapped out of him for messing his diapers and grows up picking cotton from cain’t-see to cain’t-see in a hunnerd-degree heat, but he don’t turn out much worse on a personal basis than a rich kid whose daddy give him everything he wanted.

“But maybe right down the road there’s another kid, with ordinary folks, maybe a little shiftless but ordinary just the same-”

“Wyatt-” I said, holding my hand up for him to discontinue.

“No, you hear me out. That same kid grows up cruel to the bone. He don’t enjoy sex unless he’s hurting someone while he’s doing it, and when he finally gets to the joint, he lets everybody know he’s the huckleberry who’ll bust a shank off in your back for a deck of smokes. Worse, he ain’t got no fear of God ’cause he murdered all the light in his soul. That’s the ones got the mark of the beast on them, counselor. I been jailing with them since I was fifteen years old.”

His description of a sociopath was possibly the most credible I had ever heard, and I wondered if it came from self-knowledge rather than his experience. Then I realized he had read the question in my eyes.

“I ain’t one of them kind. Least I don’t think I am. But you never know, do you?” he said.

He opened the driver’s door to his truck and threw his crutches inside.

“What’s your purpose here, Wyatt? Do you just want to be a source of worry and irritation and grief? Is that why you come here?”

“Maybe you and American Horse both owe me. I got confidence in you. You’ll figure it out directly. Lordy, you got a nice place here,” he said, surveying the house and the deep green of our pasture under the pall of yellow smoke that hung over it.

JUST BEFORE THE SUN slipped in a red orb behind the ridgeline, an FBI agent named Francis Broussard served a search warrant on our property. He was a trim, rosy-cheeked, olive-skinned man, with a fresh haircut, a dimple in his chin, and a Cajun accent. “We’ll be working our way over the top of the mountain and into your backyard. We’ll try to get out of your way as soon as we can,” he said.

“Mind telling me what you’re looking for?” I asked.

“I think you know. Yes indeedy, I surely do,” he said.

“Yes indeedy?”

“Come on up the hill and help us out. I’ll make note of your cooperation in my report. That might give you greater credibility later.”

“I’m glad to know y’all are in a lighthearted mood.”

He held a clipboard in one hand and wore a blue windbreaker with the abbreviation for his agency in bright gold letters on the back. He gazed abstractly at the haze on our pasture and the purple shadows spreading across the valley floor.

“Is there something else you need?” I said.

“Yeah, I hate to ask you this. But could I use your bathroom?” he replied.

For the next hour, Broussard and the agents under his supervision fanned across the hillside and worked their way down through the timber toward the house and the barn. The wind began to blow out of the east, clearing the ash from the sky but feeding the fires that were raging on the Idaho line. When I stood in our front yard, I could see streamers of sparks rising in the west and twisting columns of smoke that were filled with light, almost like water-spouts on the ocean. Then I heard an agent shout to his colleagues up on the hillside.

I saddled my Morgan, whose name was Beau, and rode him onto one of the switchback deer trails that zigzagged up to the ridgeline behind the house. The fir and larch trees looked mossy and shapeless in the evening shade. Up ahead I could see a dozen FBI and ATF agents shining their flashlights across rocks and deadfalls and arroyos that were littered with leaves and pine needles and the detritus from years of snowmelt. Even though the tips of the trees were bending in the wind, smoke was trapped under the canopy, the air was dense and acidic, and I was starting to sweat inside my clothes.

With the exception of the agent in charge, Francis Broussard, none of the agents even bothered to look at me, which told me they had already found what they were searching for and hence my presence was of no interest to them.

“Glad you dropped up to see us, Mr. Holland,” Broussard said. “See that broken place in the deadfall? Something heavy, with hard edges, probably metal ones, bounced down the hill and crashed right through a bear’s lair. Pretty interesting, huh?”

“You bet,” I said.

“Except whatever came crashing down the hill is no longer here. Know why not?” he said.

“You got me.”

“Somebody hauled it out, probably with a rope and a horse. Step down here, if you don’t mind.”

I swung down from the saddle and looked at a torn area of broken leaves and dirt on the edge of the deadfall, where he was now shining his flashlight.

“See the hoofprints and the drag marks going back up toward the log road? I bet somebody had a rope looped around a big, heavy metal box and towed it up the hill there. What do you think, Mr. Holland?” he said.

“I’m probably not qualified to make an observation, Mr. Broussard.”

“Notice anything unusual about those hoofprints?”

“Was never much of a tracker.”

“The horse wasn’t wearing shoes. What’s that tell you, Mr. Holland?”

“Nothing.”

“The horse we’re talking about has hard feet. Like an Appaloosa might have. You own an Appaloosa, Mr. Holland?”

“Two of them. But the last time I looked, they were both shoed.”

“I’ll take your word for it. Know why anybody might want to drag a heavy metal box up the hillside?”

“When you find out, let me know.”

“You don’t like us much, do you?”

“I like you fine. I just don’t like some of the causes you serve.”

“You were a Texas Ranger and an assistant U.S. attorney?”

“That’s right.”

“Ever listen to that shock jock on the radio, guy was a disgraced FBI agent, did a federal bit for a B and E, always putting down the government?”

“Yeah, I’ve heard him,” I replied.

Broussard’s eyes looked straight into mine for a beat. “He’s an interesting study,” he said. He clicked off his flashlight and walked up the hill, his back to me.

A gust of wind blew through the tree trunks. The sweat on my face felt as cold as ice water.

BUT I DIDN’T have time to worry about Francis Broussard’s condemnation. Somebody riding an unshod horse had rope-dragged the goods from the Global Research burglary off our property. It had to be someone who had access to the ridgeline, someone perhaps riding an Appaloosa, a breed known for its hard feet. The only candidate that came to mind was Wyatt Dixon. He used a farrier and veterinary service in the drainage just over the hill from us, and he had a way of finding excuses to wander onto our property. Could he have seen Johnny’s flight up the mountain and followed him?

I went back into the house and told Temple of my conversation up the hillside with Francis Broussard and the removal of the metal box.

“Well, maybe it’s over, then,” she said.

“I think Dixon took it.”

“Who cares?”

“You’ve got a point,” I said.

I began fixing a cold supper for both of us. I opened a bottle of wine and poured Temple a glass and one for myself.

“I think I’ll just have some Talking Rain to drink,” she said.

“You feel all right?” I asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“On Saturday night you always have a glass of wine.”

“I’m just not in the mood. Want to take a walk? We can eat when we come back.”

“Sure,” I said.

I put the food back in the refrigerator and followed her outside. The valley was dark now, the sky still blue, the evening star twinkling in the smoke to the west. I heard the phone ring inside. “I’ll be right back,” I said.

I picked up the phone receiver in the hallway. Through the front window I could see Temple waiting for me in the yard, the gallery light shining on her hair, one knuckle pressed against her chin, her face lost in thought.

“Hello?” I said into the receiver.

“Hey, glad we caught you at home, dickwad,” a voice said.

I checked my caller ID. The call number was blocked. “Say it,” I said.

“You got other people’s property. That’s not nice.”

“You’re wrong.”

“The Indian dumped a lockbox on your property. It’s not there now. Where do you think it went? It grew wings and flew up in a fucking tree?”

The accent was eastern seaboard, maybe Jersey or Rhode Island, the question mark at the end of a sentence as barbed as a fishhook.

“You got a line into the Feds?” I asked.

“What we got a line into is your old lady’s womb. Want your baby to get born? If not, we got a guy does beautiful work with a coat hanger.”

“What?”

“There’s nothing about your life we don’t got. That includes your old lady’s medical records. Deliver our goods and you don’t got a problem. Think I’m blowing gas? When you get off the phone, ask your son what kind of day he’s had.”

“You listen, you motherfucker-”

“We’ll be in touch. Buy better rubbers or stay out of other people’s business,” he said.

The line went dead.

I went outside, my hands shaking so badly I had to put them in my pockets.

“What happened?” Temple said.

“A guy just threatened you. He said you’re going to have a baby. What’s he talking about?”

I saw the blood drain in her face. “I just found out yesterday. I’m pregnant. I was going to tell you tonight. I didn’t know how you were going to take it.”

“How I was going to take it? You thought I didn’t want a child of our own?”

“How am I supposed to know? Half the time, we’re worrying about every person on the planet except ourselves.”

“That’s not true.”

“Yes, it is. And it’s because of your goddamn guilt over shooting L.Q. Navarro. It’s always your goddamn guilt and the obsessions you drag like a junkyard with you from one day to the next.”

I couldn’t speak. My words were like fish bone in my throat. I felt my heart twist as though someone had inserted a cold hand into my chest. I went back into the house, my ears ringing. I could hear her feet coming hard behind me.

“Who was it that called?”

“A piece of human garbage who said he was going to use a coat hanger on you. A man who’s done something to Lucas.”

“Lucas?”

“Yeah, one of the people I evidently don’t have time to care about,” I said, hardly able to punch his number into the telephone.

She sat down in the living room, her hands clasped together, pushed down between her thighs. “Don’t let them do this to us, Billy Bob,” she said.

But they already had.

ON SATURDAYS, Lucas sometimes swam or shot hoops at the university gym. That afternoon he had changed into his workout clothes, stuffed his gym bag in a locker, snapped his combination lock on it, and joined a basketball game on the court. Sunlight flooded through the high windows, and the slap and squeak of basketballs and the slam dunks through the steel hoops echoed in the cavernous building like a testimonial to all that is good and wholesome in traditional America.

Then the ear-splitting cacophony of the fire alarm rose into the rafters. The building was evacuated in minutes. Lucas stood among a crowd of students in gym clothes and wet swimsuits and watched firemen, campus and city cops, and a bomb-squad unit with leashed dogs stream inside, some of them carrying fire protection shields on their forearms.

A half hour passed and the emergency personnel began exiting the building. A false alarm, everyone said. Wow, what a drag. What some guys will do for a few kicks. How about that for sick?

But something wasn’t right. City cops and campus cops had crossed the street onto the shady lawn where the students were standing. The cops circled behind the crowd, forming a gray-and-blue cordon through which no one could leave.

“Women students can go, everybody else back inside! Women students can go, everybody else back inside!” a cop wearing a cap and bars on his collar was saying.

“I’m bisexual. How about me?” a kid next to Lucas shouted.

The crowd laughed; the cops didn’t.

The male students filed back into the gym and stood listlessly on the polished floor, one or two of them picking up basketballs, arching them through the air, twanging them off steel hoops. Ten minutes later two older men in suits and ties, university administrators of some kind, joined the cops, then cops, students, and administrators went into the men’s dressing room. Someone clanged shut and locked a metal door behind them.

As Lucas looked into the rectangular depth of the room, the rigidity of the lines, the tea-colored light, he felt as though he were staring into the interior of a coffin. It was the same strange emotion that had invaded his system and poisoned his blood as a child after his mother had died and he had been left in the care of a harsh, inept stepfather who believed joy was an illusion and brotherhood a sucker’s game.

At the far end of the room a cop had pulled up a choke chain on a bomb-sniffing German shepherd. Every locker on either side of the dressing benches was closed, except one. The shaft on the combination lock had been snapped in half by bolt cutters and all the locker’s contents raked out on the floor. Lucas swallowed as he recognized his Wrangler jeans with the wide belt and Indian-head buckle threaded through the loops, his beat-up Acme cowboy boots, his snap-button checkered shirt, his gym bag that he had packed with a towel, soap, fresh underwear, and socks.

But items that didn’t belong to him were there, too: a string of Chinese firecrackers, an open manila envelope with a sheaf of papers protruding from it, and a Ziploc bag fat as a softball from its shredded green contents.

One of the administrators, a man with meringue hair and tiny veins in his soft cheeks, was holding a hand-tooled wallet in his palm. He opened it and studied a celluloid window inside. “Which of you is Lucas Smothers?” he asked.

“I am,” Lucas said.

“You want to explain this?” the administrator with meringue hair said, nodding at the piled items on the floor.

“That wallet and those clothes and that gym bag are my stuff. I don’t know where them other things come from, if that’s what you’re asking me,” Lucas said.

“Son, how can part of these things be yours and part not be yours, when all of them were in the same locker?” the administrator said.

Unconsciously, Lucas shifted his weight from one foot to the other, the same way he had done when his stepfather hurled accusations at him, totally irrational ones, that he couldn’t answer. “Why would I have firecrackers in my locker?” Lucas said. Then he realized he had stepped into the old trap of defending himself, legitimizing his accuser.

“How about the baggie here? You wouldn’t be a user or purveyor of marijuana, would you, Mr. Smothers?”

“A pur-” he began, unable to process the word.

Everyone was looking at him now. His skin felt tight against his face, his body shrunken inside his sweat-stained clothes. Don’t lose your temper, don’t smart off, just don’t say anything, he told himself.

“I ain’t never used dope. The person who says I have is a dad-burned liar,” he said.

“Frankly, I don’t care if you use dope or not, Mr. Smothers, because you’re not going to be around here very long. Know what’s in that envelope?”

“No, ’cause I ain’t ever seen it before.”

“They’re stolen LSATs and the answer sheets that go with them. How much you get for these, son?”

Lucas could feel his eyes watering, the room morphing, the faces around him distorting, going out of shape. “I didn’t steal no LSATs or whatever they are. I didn’t carry no reefer in here, either. I work two or three jobs-”

He couldn’t finish his statement. All the correct grammar he had learned in composition courses had disappeared and he was once again the kid in strap overalls standing in the principal’s office of a rural junior high school, in trouble, tongue-tied, his cheeks pooled with color, the years of his stepfather’s belittling remarks thundering in his head.

“Go wash your face, then accompany these officers. There’s a price to pay when you break the law. My advice is you own up to your problems here and get them behind you,” the administrator with meringue hair said.

Lucas stared at nothing. The room was silent, the faces of everyone around him now indistinct, somehow separate and no longer a part of his life. Outside, he could hear people whocking the ball back and forth on a tennis court.

“What are you doing?” the administrator said.

Lucas stepped out of his tennis shoes and peeled off his T-shirt, gym shorts, and jockstrap, then stood naked and raw with stink in the middle of the room, taller than anyone around him, his gaze now turned inward. “Gonna take a shower and put on fresh clothes,” he said. “Then when I get to the jailhouse I’m gonna call Billy Bob Holland and tell him to sue y’all. How you like them apples, sports fans?”

He smiled at his own question, his head tilted quizzically, his eyes squeezed shut.

LUCAS’S HEART was always bigger than the adversity the world handed him, but as I sat with him in his jail cell that night I had a hard time participating in the optimism and indifference Lucas always used as a shield when he was badly hurt. In all probability he would be charged with possession of stolen property and narcotics. If he was really unlucky, the latter charge would include intent to distribute. Bail would not be set until Monday morning, which meant he would have to stay in jail through the weekend. Suspension from the university was a foregone conclusion.

“So what? My summer courses are over. We’ll get all this straightened out by fall. This don’t bother me,” he said.

The stainless-steel toilet attached to the wall gurgled when somebody in another cell flushed his. I was sitting on the edge of Lucas’s bunk, looking at the tips of my boots, unsure of what to say, reluctant to rob him of his courage. He got up and walked to the bars, shirtless, his back like an inverted triangle, his shoulders wide and knobby.

“I still cain’t quite put it all together, though. Can you figure it out?” he said, smiling halfheartedly, trying not to give recognition to the cunning of the people who had undone him.

“Some pretty slick guys opened your locker, planted the dope and stolen exams and firecrackers inside, then called in a bomb threat. They knew the cops would search the gym with explosive-sniffing dogs. The gunpowder in the firecrackers brought the dogs straight to your locker.”

“These are the same guys who jerked me around on the scholarship?”

“The same guys,” I replied.

“What do they want?”

“They think I have some records that were stolen from a biotech research lab. A guy called me this evening and told me he knew Temple was pregnant. He said a friend of his might abort the baby with a coat hanger.”

“Y’all gonna have a baby?” he said, the evil represented by the phone caller not even registering on his consciousness.

“Yeah, she was going to tell me tonight.”

“Man, that’s great. Wow, I cain’t believe it. I’m gonna have me a little baby brother or baby sister. Way to go, Billy Bob, you son of a gun,” he said, his whole face lit by his grin.