In The Moon Of Red Ponies

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 jaw 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.

And more important than all these things, he saw his wife, Amber American Horse, wearing the white buckskin dress of the Indian woman who had guided him through the Bob Marshall Wilderness, the purple glass beads that were shaped like teardrops on the fringe of her dress tinkling in the wind, her hand beckoning, as though both she and Johnny were about to embark on a journey from which neither of them would return.

TEMPLE CAME HOME early that afternoon, unsure of where I had been all day. “Why didn’t you answer the phone?” she said from the mud room, where she was hanging up her raincoat.

“I was in the barn,” I replied, although I wasn’t sure where I had been.

She walked into the kitchen. “Are you sick?”

“No, but I did something that I have a hard time squaring with-”

“With what?”

“Honorable behavior is the term I’m probably looking for.”

She waited for me to go on, her face sharpening.

“I called up Karsten Mabus and told him Wyatt had the goods from the Global Research break-in. It’s between Mabus and Dixon now,” I said. I felt my eyes shift off her face.

She was quiet a long time. Then she took a quart of milk out of the icebox and poured it into a glass, slowly, as though she couldn’t concentrate on what she was doing. “Do you want something to eat?” she said.

“No.”

“I didn’t stop at the grocery because I thought we might go out.”

“I’m not very hungry right now. We can go out, though, if you want.”

“It’s not important,” she said, looking out the window now at the wetness of the trees and the mist floating on the hillside. She picked up her glass of milk and drank from it. “So Dixon has become shark meat?”

“He can take care of himself,” I said.

“Right,” she said. She poured her milk down the drain.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

“Not much. It’s our one-year anniversary. I have your present in the car. I’ll go get it,” she said.

A HALF HOUR LATER, I got a call from Francis Broussard at the FBI office. “Johnny American Horse walked out of St. Pat’s Hospital today. You happen to know anything about it?” he said.

I couldn’t assimilate his words. “He walked-”

“He used a paper clip to pick his handcuffs and went out the front door with some painters. We think one of his buddies from the res planted some workclothes in the restroom for him to change into. His wife was waiting for him across the street. The question is, how did he and his wife set it up and where did they go?”

“You think I had something to do with it?”

There was a pause. “No, but you’re a personal friend and you know things about American Horse other people don’t,” he replied.

“Was Amber allowed to visit him?”

“No.”

“How about his lawyer, Brendan Merwood?” I said.

“He was there twice.”

“Anyone else?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?” I said.

Again the phone went silent, and I knew Broussard had already drawn conclusions that he didn’t want to admit, at least to me.

“The escape couldn’t have been set up without Merwood’s participation,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s a possibility, isn’t it? But why would an oilcan like Merwood risk his career, plus serious prison time, on a pro bono case?”

“How about he’s scared shitless?”

“I did some background on Mr. Merwood. He’s represented a couple of Karsten Mabus’s enterprises. Do you know where American Horse and his wife are hiding?”

“No, I don’t,” I said impatiently. “You’re telling me Merwood is setting them up to get whacked?”

“You said it, I didn’t.”

“What about the painters?”

“We have an Indian from the res in custody. But he’s D, D, and D, and I don’t think that’s going to change.”

“He’s what?” I said.

“It’s the Indian concept of a dialogue with federal agents. ‘Deaf, dumb, and don’t know.’ ”

“Pick up Merwood and lose the paperwork. Move him to a federal facility and let him spend a couple of days in the bridal suite with a few swinging dicks who dig rap music.”

“I can’t imagine why the A.G.’s office was happy to see you make a career change. Call me if you hear from American Horse,” he replied.

THE REVEREND ELTON T. SNEED was not a man for whom the world was a complex place. He believed in Jesus, the flag, the devil, sin, camp meetings, Wednesday night services, helping his neighbor, tithing, jailhouse ministries, the restorative power of baptism, the gift of tongues, and the exorcism of demonic spirits, some of whom he called by name. The heroes and villains of the Old Testament moved in and out of his rhetoric as though they were contemporary figures who lived in the community. Unlike many of his peers’, his sermons seldom touched on the subjects of sex or politics, primarily because he had no interest in them. For Elton T. Sneed, the critical issue for a preacher was the wrestling contest between Yahweh and Satan.

For Elton, a ministry meant the acquisition of power-the power to heal, to cast out unclean spirits, and to wash away original sin. Salvation didn’t come with catechism lessons, attendance at church, or even the daily practice of good deeds. It came like the sun crashing out of the sky, crushing a person to the earth. “If you don’t believe me, ask St. Paul what happened on the road to Damascus,” Elton was fond of saying.

When Elton brought salvation to the willing, it was in the form of an exorcism that left them dripping with sweat and fear, or, if he baptized them, he pushed them under so many times they thought they were about to drown or had been mistaken for dirty laundry.

The problem for Elton was not his belief system but the consequences of it. If redemption and forgiveness of sin came with baptism, or if indeed the Holy Spirit descended through the top of the tent and entered the human breast, how could a Christian shun or turn away from a brother or sister whom Jesus had chosen to save?

Sometimes Elton’s jailhouse converts seemed to be a bit shaky in their beliefs after they made parole. They showed up at the parsonage door, asking for money, perhaps smelling of marijuana, a couple of women in the car, their faces averted. In these instances Elton usually gave them money, provided he had any, then would be filled with depression, a sense of personal failure, and a question mark about the worth of his ministry.

But he consoled himself with the changes he had witnessed in Wyatt Dixon, even though some of Wyatt’s friends were a challenge to Elton’s attempts at unconditional charity. His church and his larder remained opened to the worst of the worst. Who was he to judge? If he’d been dealt the lot of these poor souls, he would have probably turned out as corrupt and profligate as they, he told himself.

Look at the two men who had just pulled their pickup truck into his yard. The evening light was weak, the western sun veiled by smoke from dead fires, but Elton could see the faces of the two men getting out of the truck, and he wondered if both of them had been in a terrible accident or malformed in the womb.

The shorter man had a gnarled forehead, like the corrugation in a washboard, a squashed nose, and missing teeth. His eyes were set too low in his face and his upper torso was too long for his short legs, so that he gave the impression of a walking tree stump.

His friend was tall, with the flaccid muscle tone of a gorged serpent, a disfigured mouth that looked as if it had been broken with a hard instrument, and a hairline-to-cheek burn scar that had tightened the skin on one eye into a tiny aperture, as though he were permanently squinting.

Elton stepped outside the door of the parsonage, which was actually a house trailer enclosed in a wood shell, and nodded at the two visitors walking up the incline toward him. The air was damp from the rain and smelled of smoke and river stone and wet trees, and he thought he heard geese honking high overhead.

“Hep you boys?” he said. There was grease on his hands from his dinner, and he wiped his hands on a paper towel.

“Looking for work. Man at the State Employment said you might get us on bucking bales here’bouts,” the tall man said, his eyes going past Elton into the backyard.

“Haying is all done by machine today. Don’t many buck bales no more,” Elton said.

“We’re not choicy,” the tall man said. “Haven’t ate for a day or so.”

The two visitors stared at Elton, as though their problems had not only become his but somehow had originated with him. Elton put the paper towel in his pocket self-consciously. “I expect I could fix you something,” he said. “But it looks like y’all need a job more than anything else.” He tried to grin, and his face felt stiff and self-mocking.

“Nice of you to invite us in,” the shorter man said, walking past Elton into his home. His friend followed him, passing inches from Elton’s chest, the burned area on his face puckered like dried-out putty.

Elton stepped inside but did not close the door behind him. “I got peanut butter and jelly, if y’all don’t mind something simple,” he said.

But they seemed not to hear him. They looked at the meagerness of his possessions-the footworn carpet, the secondhand furniture, the imitation wood paneling on the walls-with the curiosity of people who might be visiting a zoo.

“Your wife here?” the truncated man asked.

“She died. Eight years back. In Arkansas. Say-”

“It’s true y’all talk in tongues?” the tall man said.

This time Elton did not try to answer their questions because he knew they did not care about the answers he would give them. The truncated man sat down in a soft chair and clicked on the television, flipped the channels, his eyes like angry chunks of lead as he stared at several blurred images. He clicked the set off. “It’s this Mideastern crap. That’s all that’s on there. Guys who wipe their ass with their hands shaking their fists at the camera,” he said.

Elton remained silent, knowing in his heart of hearts that everything that was about to happen was part of a higher plan. Just don’t be afraid, he told himself. Think of the children of Israel in the fiery furnace. Think of Dan’el in the lion’s den. Think of Paul and Silas locked in jail, the angel of the Lord flinging back their door in a burst of light.

But he could not suppress the fear that was invading his body, stealing his courage and his faith, causing his face to twitch, his brow to break into a sweat, his buttocks to tremble. “It’s Wyatt you’re after, but he ain’t here. He’s trading some horses up at Flathead,” he said.

“You’ll do just fine, Preacher,” the tall man said.

“Wyatt’s friends are here. Three fellows y’all don’t want to meet. They went up to the grocery for me,” Elton said.

“They were here,” the short man said. He was still seated in the soft chair. His elongated forehead was tilted forward. He raised his eyebrows at Elton, as an ape in a cage might. “But they’re not here now. That’s because they’re locked in the back of a van.”

The room was silent again, so quiet Elton could hear his own breathing, an imperceptible creak under his foot when he shifted his weight. A drop of sweat ran into his eye, and he wiped it out of his eye socket with the heel of his hand.

The tall man took a carton of orange juice out of Elton’s icebox, shook it, and drank directly from the carton. Then he glanced at his watch and exhaled his breath wearily. He wore a dark green shirt that was tucked into his khakis and dusty alpine boots, and his clothes gave off an odor like detergent that had been ironed into the fabric. He set the orange juice carton on the counter and looked at Elton evenly, his half-destroyed face seeming to study the forms of redress the world owed him.

“Wyatt took a lockbox that’s not his and hid it someplace. We think it’s on your property,” he said. “My buddy here is gonna fill up the bathtub now and then the three of us is gonna clear up this whole problem about where that lockbox is located. You’ll be doing a good deed. I’m here to give witness to that.”

The eye that had been shrunken to the size of a dime by the scar tissue on his face glistened brightly.

“You was raised in the church, I can tell. Why do you want to do this, boy?” Elton said.

“ ’Cause it makes me feel good,” the tall man replied.

Outside, the evening light had gone from the sky, and through the open window Elton thought he could hear the dull clatter of stones under the river’s surface and the sound of geese flying north, perhaps to a warm-water refuge that they would never have to leave.

I HAD NOT FORGOTTEN our anniversary, at least not entirely. I had bought Temple an Indian concho belt and a new western saddle, one made by a famous craftsman in Yoakum, Texas. I had iced down a bottle of non-alcoholic champagne and arranged for flowers to be delivered to the house. But after the telephone threat on her life, I had lost all consciousness of the date.

Then, rather than act on my anger and take it to Mabus with hot tongs, I had made a sacrificial offering in the form of Wyatt Dixon, and I knew in all probability I would never feel the same about myself again. I told Temple all these things, brought the saddle from the barn and splayed it across the gallery railing, popped the cork on the champagne, flopped two heavy trout wrapped in perforated tinfoil on the grill, and slipped the concho belt around Temple’s waist. She stared at me, bemused, perhaps concluding, as she often did, that the man she lived with had long ago severed his ties with the rational world.

Temple went into the bedroom and put on a white lace dress and I put on a suit, then we both put on heavy coats and ate dinner on the side gallery. The rain had stopped, and for the first time in six weeks the moon rose into a clear black sky chained with stars. The meadow was pooled with water, and elk were drinking from the pools, their tails flicking, their racks as hard-looking as sculpted bone in the moonlight. Temple lifted her wineglass to her mouth and drank, her eyes on mine. I had never known a woman who had shadows inside her eyes, but Temple did.

“What’s on your mind?” I said.

“It took courage for you to call Karsten Mabus. Back in the old days you and L.Q. would have done things differently. It’s important for you to remember that, Billy Bob. Don’t look back on what you did. You’re a brave man.”

“No, I’m not.”

“I know you better than you know yourself. I always did. You fault yourself for your violence. But when you and L.Q. did those things down on the border, you did them to protect other people.”

“L.Q. paid the price for it, Temple.”

“He knew the risks going in. He was a brave man, just like you are. Don’t treat him like a victim. Don’t do that kind of disservice to either him or yourself.”

The wind came up and made a rushing sound in the trees on the hillside, and a shower of wet pine needles sifted down the slopes of the roof. I got up from my chair and went around behind Temple and bit her softly on the neck. She reached behind her and clasped the back of my neck, pushing her fingers into my hair, tilting up her chin, her eyes closed.

We left the rest of our food uneaten and went into the bedroom. I slipped her dress over her head and lay her back on the bed, then lifted a strand of hair off her eye and kissed her mouth and the tops of her breasts and stroked her thighs. Then I undressed and lay down close against her, my body against hers, our feet, thighs, and stomachs touching, my face buried in her hair, my fingers tracing the stiffened points of her breasts.

When I was inside Temple Carrol, I could never understand how any moment of anger, fear, resentment, or suspicion could have come between us. Temple’s skin glowed with love for the man she was with. Her arms, thighs, calves, mouth, her womb, the warmth of her breathing against my cheek, were the most encompassing, unrelenting expression of loyalty and affirmation I had ever experienced. She went about making love with a selfless abandon that was both humbling and beyond what any man expects. She was never stintful, never sought her own satisfaction, and was never dependent, self-conscious, or embarrassed. In fact, she radiated a kind of visceral purity, even in the way she perspired, that made me think of flowers opening, sunshowers, a salty wave full of kelp cresting inside a groundswell.

Later I placed my ear against her stomach and listened. Her skin was moist against the side of my face, and I could hear the whirrings of the life inside her. Then I kissed her stomach and her mouth and pulled the sheet over her breasts. “Don’t catch cold. We’ve got the best baby in the history of babydom in there,” I said.

She touched my cheek with her hand.

That’s when the phone rang.