In The Moon Of Red Ponies

Chapter 25

DARREL SAT in the backseat of the Chrysler and gazed through the tinted windows as the city of Missoula slipped behind him. The man with silver hair sat on one side of him, a second security man on the other side, Greta up front in the passenger seat. The man with silver hair was named Sidney. He had taken off his coat and folded it neatly across his legs. There were bright stripes in his dress shirt, like thin bands of smoothed tinfoil, and a silver pin in his lavender tie.

“I know you from somewhere,” Darrel said.

“The health club,” Sidney said.

“No, before that. Maybe from Nicaragua or El Sal.”

“Could be. Lot of guys were looking for a job back then. You?”

“A little bit. Nothing to write home about.”

“Three hots and a cot, right?” Sidney said.

They went through Lolo and turned west on Highway 12, heading toward the Idaho line. Darrel was amazed at how green the hills had become after only one day’s rain. Lolo Creek was boiling, the current filled with driftwood from the banks. Up ahead Darrel could see the blueness of the sky above Lolo Pass and snow on the tip of St. Mary’s Peak.

Then he looked through the back window for his Honda. It was gone.

“They stopped for something to eat. They’re gonna join us. Don’t worry about it,” Sidney said.

“Yeah? That’s my car. I want it back,” Darrel said.

Sidney didn’t answer. But Greta turned around in the front seat. “You’re in good hands,” she said.

When Darrel didn’t reply, she said it again. But Darrel was now staring at the side of Sidney’s face. “It was at El Mozote,” he said. “On the Honduran border. December 1981. You were standing by the trench where all those peasants were buried.”

“You got the wrong dude, Mac,” Sidney said, staring indifferently out the side window.

The Chrysler’s tires hummed around a slight bend in the road and Darrel saw the entrance to Karsten Mabus’s ranch, the white-railed fences and breeding barns shining in the sun. But the Chrysler kept going, climbing a hill, rounding another curve that was layered with outcroppings of gray and yellow rock.

“Mabus is the guy I need to talk to,” Darrel said.

“Sure,” said the man on the other side of Darrel, and plunged a hypodermic needle into his neck.

FOR THE NEXT three hours Darrel McComb drifted in and out of a red haze that was like the sunrise down on the equator-hot, pervasive, blinding when you looked straight into it. Pain had become geographic, a conduit into past places and events, a tropical garden spiked with bougainvillea, lime trees, crowns of thorns, and rosebushes that bloomed in December. He saw the waxy faces of the dead, the firing-squad victims with their thumbs wired behind them, the sawed-off soldiers in salt-crusted uniforms and oversized steel pots, their M-16s leaking white smoke. And for the first time in more than twenty years he felt these images leaving him forever.

The pain his tormentors had inflicted upon him hadn’t worked, and neither had the chemicals they had injected into his veins. At some point a cloth bag coated with insecticide had been fitted over his head, but that had not worked, either. In fact, it had even obstructed his interrogators’ agenda.

“You think people are coming to help you?” Sidney said, bare-chested, squatting down eye-level with Darrel. “Take a look at who’s having drinks by Mabus’s pool.”

Two of Darrel’s tormentors lifted up the chair he was strapped in and set it by a window in the log house high up on a mountain overlooking the back of Mabus’s ranch. Sidney fitted a pair of binoculars on Darrel’s eyes. “That’s United States Senator Romulus Finley down there, pal. That’s also your friend the district attorney, Fay Harback. They’re on the pad, my man,” he said.

But Darrel’s eyes were too swollen to see.

“Light him up again,” Sidney said.

Someone behind Darrel poured a bucket of water over his head, then an electrical surge struck his genitals and his nipples like a blow from a jackhammer. They hit him again. And again. And again. When he awoke, he was bleeding from the mouth.

Sidney had pulled up a straight-backed chair in front of him. He leaned forward, his lean stomach ridged, his chest patinaed with gray monkey fur. “Don’t be a hardhead. I don’t want to keep doing this to you,” he said. “Just tell us where American Horse is. You’ll get to live and make yourself a few spendolies at the same time.”

The sun had gone behind the mountain, and in the shade the trees on the hillside looked cold and dark. But on a flat outcropping that jutted out over the canyon, Darrel thought he saw Rocky Harrigan gazing at the countryside, his heavy physique and the ledge he stood on bathed in sunlight. Rocky was wearing slacks, penny loafers, his aviator glasses, and his favorite goon shirt, a Hawaiian job printed with bluebirds and palm trees, the way he always dressed for an evening out. Been waiting on you, old partner. Come on, we’re going to have a fine time, Rocky said.

Darrel saw him remove his shades and give the thumbs-up sign, then beckon Darrel to walk across the air and join him on the lip of a canyon that opened onto green valleys Darrel had never seen before.

Darrel’s eyes closed, then opened briefly. “Got to tell you something, Sidney,” he whispered hoarsely.

Sidney leaned down, his eyes close to Darrel’s. “Go ahead, pal. You got the right attitude. Let’s get this behind us,” he said.

Darrel tried to muster the words but could not get them out. His teeth were red with his blood, his breath fetid, his eyes like slits in tea-colored eggs.

“Take your time. You can do it. You’re almost home free,” Sidney said.

Darrel lifted his lips an inch from Sidney’s ear. “I was a good cop,” he whispered, grinning self-effacingly at the effort it took him to speak.

ONE WEEK LATER, a rock climber found Darrel’s Honda and his body inside it at the bottom of a canyon just west of the Idaho line. The car’s roof was crushed from the three-hundred-foot fall it had taken down the mountainside, and Darrel’s body had been degraded by magpies and putrefaction, relegating the particular cause of Darrel’s death to guesswork. But when the paramedics lifted the body into a vinyl bag, one of them felt a hard object behind Darrel’s left calf muscle. The coroner scissored away the fabric, exposing a miniaturized recorder and microphone taped behind Darrel’s knee.

THE NEXT THREE WEEKS passed for Johnny and Amber American Horse with little or no contact from the outside world. They stayed holed up in a cabin on the edge of the Bob Marshall Wilderness, a woodstove for heat, their water drawn by hand from a rock-dammed creek at the base of a canyon wall that stayed in shadow until late afternoon. The water from the pool was always cold and tasted like stone and fern and snowmelt, and at the bottom of the pool were schools of cutthroat trout pointed into the current, their bodies as sleek as silver and red ribbons. When Amber threw the canvas bucket heavily into the water, both her reflection and the schooled-up trout splintered into the rocks.

Years before, Johnny had built the cabin in a thickly timbered gulch that gave shade in the summer and protection from cold winds in winter and was hard to see from either the lowlands or the sky. The abandoned log road that led to the cabin had caved along the edges and was considered treacherous and unusable by both hunters and U.S. Forest Service personnel. On the first day of Johnny’s escape from federal custody, he and Amber had parked Amber’s vehicle behind the cabin, pulled a tarp over it, and covered the tarp with pine boughs. They used the woodstove only in the daylight hours and gathered only fuel that was dry and worm-eaten and would burn with maximum heat and little smoke.

The cabin was snug and watertight, stocked with canned beef and vegetables a cousin of Lester Antelope’s had backpacked over the crest of the mountain. In wistful, self-deceptive moments Johnny and Amber almost believed their geographical removal from the outside world had somehow changed the legal machinery that was waiting to grind them up.

But if Johnny and Amber had forgotten the relentless nature of their enemies, Lester Antelope’s cousin had not. He had left Johnny a Lee-Enfield carbine, a British officer’s model with peep sights, a lightweight stock, and a bolt action that worked as smoothly as a Mauser’s.

Then one night they heard sounds whose source they couldn’t identify-a footfall in the woods, a tree branch snapping, shale sliding over rock surfaces on the hillside. Johnny walked out in the trees and listened, the moonlight as bright as a flame on the pool where they drew their water. He came back to the cabin, poured a cup of cold coffee, and told Amber he had seen the freshly churned tracks of elk in the pine needles.

The next morning Amber saw Johnny oiling the carbine on the back step, pressing cartridges with his thumb down into the magazine, his skin netted with the sunlight that broke through the canopy overhead.

“We have plenty of meat. I wouldn’t squeeze that off up here,” she said, stepping into the doorway.

“A griz might try to get in at night. They can smell food a long way,” he said.

“I’m not afraid of jail,” she said. “Don’t do what you’re doing, Johnny.”

His face was bladed, his cheeks slightly sunken. “You’re not afraid of anything,” he said.

“Losing you.”

“If they nail us, it’ll be for good. No second chances this time,” he said.

“Don’t say that. They don’t have that kind of power.”

“I let them take me without a fight. They asked me what I thought of the Atlanta Braves,” he replied. He lowered his head and rubbed the oil rag along the carbine’s barrel, his thoughts hidden.

She remained standing above him in the doorway, the wind blowing down from the crest of the mountain, through larch trees whose needles had turned yellow and were starting to fall. He locked down the bolt of the Lee-Enfield, a piece of cartilage pulsing on his jawbone.

“If they come for us, we go together,” she said.

“That’s no good. No good at all,” he said.

She placed one hand on his shoulder for balance and sat down beside him. She picked his hand off the carbine and held it between hers. “If they come for us, we’ll run. There’re places in British Columbia they’d never find us,” she said.

“That’s right,” he said, taking his hand from hers. “We don’t have to worry about the griz, either. They’re looking for food down low. They won’t bother us.”

He worked the bolt on the Lee-Enfield and jacked the cartridges from the magazine onto the ground. “See? All this was about nothing,” he said.

But five minutes later, when she looked out the kitchen window, she saw him picking the cartridges for the Lee-Enfield out of the dirt and wiping them clean on his shirt before he stuck them in his pocket. That night, after she and Johnny went to bed, she thought she heard the engines of helicopters high above the trees.

She woke at false dawn. The cabin was cold, the woodstove unlit, and Johnny’s side of the bed empty. She put on her jeans and Johnny’s Army jacket and went out into the backyard. The privy door hung open, squeaking on its hinges. Her vehicle was still under its tarp and cover of pine boughs, the canvas stiff with frost. In the grayness of the woods she couldn’t see the movement of a single warm-blooded creature-not an owl, a rabbit, a deer mouse, a hooded jay, or even robins, which only yesterday had filled the trees in flocks on their way south.

She went back inside the cabin and absently let the door slam behind her. The sound was like a rifle shot in her ears, and out in the woods she heard a large bird, perhaps an eagle, take flight, its wings flapping as loudly as leather in the dead air.

The carbine, she thought.

She went into the bedroom and pulled open the closet door, where Johnny had put the Lee-Enfield before he went to bed last night. But it was gone.

She dug her cell phone out of a drawer, then hesitated before clicking it on, trying to remember what she had heard once about law enforcement agencies tracking cell phones by satellite. Billy Bob had told her to get off the phone, that his own line was tapped. He had also told her to use a land line, she thought. She had done what he’d said, pulling the tarp and pine boughs off her vehicle and driving to a truck stop, taking a risk she didn’t want to take again. No, satellite track or not, she would not leave the cabin again.

She activated the phone. As soon as she did, its message chime went off. She hit the retrieve button.

“It’s Billy Bob. Call me at the office or home. Everything is okay,” the recorded voice said. Then the transmission broke up.

There were three other messages with the same callback number on them, each of them impossible to understand. She rushed out the back of the cabin and climbed up the gulch until she was out of the timber, standing on a crag that overlooked a long, sloping mountainside covered with Douglas fir. She hit the dialback key on the cell and waited, her heart beating, her breath fogging in the cold.

THE PHONE RANG in my kitchen while Temple and I were eating breakfast.

“Amber?” I said.

“Tell it to me fast. My batteries are almost dead,” she said.

“Where are you?”

“Tell it to me, Billy Bob. Hurry!”

“You and Johnny are free.”

“Free?”

“Darrel McComb caught some of Karsten Mabus’s thugs on tape. Johnny’s clear on the homicides.”

“Why didn’t Darrel tell us?”

“Darrel is dead.”

“Dead?”

“One thing at a time. How could Darrel know where you are?” I said.

“He brought antibiotics to Johnny’s cabin. He’d followed me there once during his”-she hesitated-“during his voyeur stage. He figured that’s where we were hiding. I can’t think through this. How did Darrel die?”

“Mabus’s men tortured him to death. Darrel had taped a recorder to his leg. He wouldn’t give Johnny up.”

“Oh, Billy Bob,” she said.

“What?” I couldn’t tell if she was expressing grief over Darrel McComb’s death or at something she hadn’t told me about yet.

“Johnny left before dawn with a gun. He believes the Feds have found us.”

The cell phone made a crackling sound, then went dead.

IN THE PREDAWN darkness Johnny had heard the thropping sounds of a helicopter and for a moment he did not know if they came from his dreams or somewhere above the gulch. He lay awake as the grayness of the dawn grew inside the trees, then sat straight up in bed when he heard, this time for sure, a motorized vehicle working its way up the log road.

He dressed and slipped the sling of the Lee-Enfield over his shoulder, put on a slouch hat, and without a coat walked out into the cold, up the hill into woods that were speckled with frost. He followed a deer trail to the top of the gulch, then entered a long, flat area where the trees were widely spaced and he could make out the log road that accessed his cabin.

He heard the helicopter again, but the wind was behind him and he couldn’t be sure of the helicopter’s location. Then he saw electric lights flashing below the rim of a mountain across the valley.

Could a logging crew be working there? The big companies were logging old-growth timber now, lifting out three-hundred-year-old trees by helicopter in the early morning and late evening hours so the companies’ handiwork would not be seen in broad daylight.

But would they be logging when there was still fire danger in the woods, when a spark from an engine exhaust or even a chain-saw blade could set the undergrowth ablaze?

He dismissed the possibility of a logging crew. Someone else was out there. But so what? Hokay hey, he thought. They were dealing the play. Maybe they’d get a surprise about the hand they’d just dealt themselves.

The Everywhere Spirit and the grandfathers who lived with the four points of the wind would not fail him, he told himself. And with a renewed confidence in his vision of this world and the next, he rested behind a tree and watched the broken contours of the log road turn buff-colored and purple under the paling of the sky.

It did not take long for his worst fears to be confirmed. In the distance he saw government vehicles park on the log road and men file into the shadows of the trees, working their way up the slope in what would be a wide semicircle, sealing off any escape from his cabin.

Darrel McComb had turned out to be a rat after all, he thought.

He waited in the coolness of the trees, the Lee-Enfield’s leather sling wrapped loosely around his left forearm, his left knee resting comfortably on a bed of pine needles. He watched the wind puff the mist out of the trees on the valley floor, then the sky became as light-colored and textured as weathered bone, stained at the bottom by the radiance of a red sun.

The men from the government vehicles were almost through the timber and about to enter an old clear-cut where they would be completely exposed. What fools, Johnny thought. He got to his feet and tightened the sling of his left arm, steadying the carbine against a pine trunk. He was breathing hard now, his heart tripping, a stench like soiled cat litter rising from his armpits. For just a moment he thought he heard the clatter of armored personnel carriers and tanks lurching over sand dunes, then he heard nothing at all, only wind and pinecones bouncing down the hillside

He wiped his eyes on his sleeve and opened his mouth to clear a popping sound in his ears. Up on the hill behind him he heard feet running and twigs breaking. When he turned, he saw a flash of clothing, like an olive field jacket, moving fast through the trees. Somehow they had flanked him and gotten around behind him.

But who cared? He’d waste them front and rear, blow brains and feathers all over the brush, and let the devil sort them out.

On the far side of the clear-cut he saw sunlight glint on brass, on a helmet, on steel, then the government men began to emerge out of the shadows. Johnny aimed through the peep sight on the point man’s breast and felt his finger tighten inside the Lee-Enfield’s trigger guard. In less than a second, a.303 round would be on its way down-range, perhaps starting to topple before it cored through its target.

Then he saw the green workclothes of the man he was about to kill and the red, white, and blue patch sewn above his shirt pocket. The man came on into the clear-cut, oblivious to the threat up on the hillside, a string of black and Indian Job Corps kids behind him, all of them carrying tools and surveyors’ equipment.

“Johnny!” he heard Amber call behind him.

He stepped back from the tree and lowered the carbine, just as a helicopter lifted out of the next valley, its engine roaring, a huge log suspended by a cable from the airframe.

“Johnny, we’re free! I talked to Billy Bob! We can go back!” Amber shouted, waving her arms.

The world seemed to tilt against the horizon. Johnny dropped the Lee-Enfield from his hands, the sling sliding off his bad arm, his eyes swimming. Then he picked the carbine up again, pulled the bolt free, and threw it down the hillside. He smashed the stock across the pine trunk again and again, the wood flying from the metal parts, as though he were vainly attempting to hew down an intransigent monument to his own rage.

“Did you hear me?” she said, skidding down the side of the hill, fighting to keep her balance, the Army field jacket she wore streaked with dew from the trees.

But he sat down on a rock, his head in his hands, and could not answer.