In The Moon Of Red Ponies

Chapter 3

THE MAN NAMED EDDY was on the surgeon’s table four hours. His full name, according to his driver’s license and a GI dog tag tucked down in his wallet, was Edward T. Bumper of New Baltimore, Michigan, a lakeside community on the shores of Lake Erie. The next day an information check through the National Crime Information Center would indicate that Eddy Bumper had no criminal record whatsoever, not even a traffic citation. In fact, other than the eleven years he had spent in the lower ranks of the United States Army, he seemed to have been hardly more than a cipher in the Detroit area, where apparently he had spent most of his life.

During the ambulance ride to the hospital, he offered no explanation for his presence at the house of Johnny American Horse, nor did he make any entreaty to his attendants, in spite of his obvious pain, or express interest in contacting friends, family, or minister. His only request of any kind was to the surgeon: If possible, he wanted a local rather than general anesthetic.

At 2:43 A.M. Edward T. Bumper opened his eyes wide on the operating table, stared up into the brilliant glare of lights overhead, and said, “I need to get to the airport.”

Then he died.

His fall partner in the home invasion was another matter. Raised in a state-run orphanage, released from juvenile court at age seventeen to the United States Marine Corps, Michael Charles Ruggles served eight years in the Third World, received a general discharge, and began to get into trouble again, as though his time in the Corps was simply a respite from his true career.

But the charges filed against him were those consistent with a run-of-the-mill miscreant rather than a professional killer: solicitation of a prostitute, jackrolling an elderly person, possession of marijuana, failure to pay child support, drunk driving, solicitation and battery of a prostitute, and passing counterfeit currency at a racetrack. In each instance the charges were dismissed without explanation.

But I knew none of these things until the following day, when Johnny American Horse called my office from the jail.

“Have you been charged?” I asked.

“No. They’re just talking to me,” he replied.

“Cops don’t just talk. As of this moment you answer no questions unless I’m present.”

“Amber’s with me,” he said.

“Did you hear me?”

At the courthouse a deputy escorted me to an interview room, where two plainclothes cops were sitting with Johnny at a wood table on which there was a can of Coca-Cola and a Styrofoam cup, a video camera mounted high on the wall. Johnny could not have looked worse. He had washed his skin clean, but blood splatter had dried in his hair and horsetails of it were all over his clothes.

“This ends now, gentlemen,” I said.

One of the detectives was a towering, bull-shouldered man named Darrel McComb, whose clothes always seemed to exude a scent of testosterone. “We were talking about baseball. Think those Cubbies are cursed?” He grinned.

I sent Amber and Johnny across the street to my office and went downstairs to see the district attorney. “Put Darrel McComb back in his kennel,” I said.

“Treated unfairly, are we?” she said, looking up from some papers on her desk.

“McComb questioned Johnny without Mirandizing him. He also ignored Johnny’s request for a lawyer.”

“Your client is not under arrest. So get lost on the Miranda. Also quit pretending Johnny’s an innocent man.”

“These guys tried to kill him, in his own house. What’s the matter with you?”

“He lay in wait for them with a tomahawk and a knife. Why didn’t he dial 911, like other people?”

“The Second Amendment says something about telephones?”

“Don’t drag that right-wing crap into my office.”

“I don’t want Darrel McComb anywhere near my client.”

“What’s wrong with McComb?”

“For some reason the words ‘racist’ and ‘thug’ come to mind.”

“Get out of here, Billy Bob.”

Twenty minutes later, after Amber Finley had driven Johnny back to the res, I glanced out the window and saw her father cross the intersection and enter my building, his face effusive, his hand raised in greeting to street people who probably had no idea who he was. Romulus Finley’s political detractors characterized him as an ignorant peckerwood, a Missouri livestock auctioneer who fell off a hog truck and stumbled into the role of United States senator. But I believed Romulus was far more intelligent than they gave him credit for.

He sat down in front of my desk, pulling a wastebasket between his feet, and began coring out the bowl of his briar pipe with a gold penknife. The indirect lighting reflected off the pinkness of his scalp.

“My daughter has already retained you?” he said, his eyes lifting into mine.

“Yes, sir, she has.”

“I wish she’d called me. It’s hard to keep them down on the reservation sometimes.”

“Sir?” I said.

“Can’t keep them down on the farm is what I mean. Or at least I can’t keep my daughter there. Damn if that gal isn’t a pistol.”

His language and use of allusion, as always, were almost impossible to follow. “What can I do for you?” I said.

“I just want to pay her fees and take her off your hands.”

“If she wants to discharge me as her attorney, that’s up to her,” I replied.

He cleaned the blade of his penknife on a crumpled piece of paper and put the knife away. He smiled. He was a stout, sandy-haired, sanguine-faced man, with manners that struck me as genuine. He clucked his tongue. “My daughter is a source of endless worry to me, Mr. Holland. Will you let me know if there’s anything I can do?” he said.

“I will.”

“Thank you,” he said, rising to shake hands. His grip was meaty and powerful, his eyes direct. “Did she leave with that Indian boy?”

“Excuse me?”

“Take exception to my vocabulary if you want. But that fellow American Horse is trouble. Not because he’s an Indian. His kind tear things down, not build them up. You know I’m right, too.”

“I don’t know that,” I said, nonsensically.

“Each to his own. Thanks for your time,” he said. “Tell that daughter of mine she’s fixing to drive her old man to the cemetery or the crazy house.”

BY THAT AFTERNOON no charges had been filed in the invasion of Johnny American Horse’s home, not against him, nor against the surviving member of the assassination team that had obviously been sent there to kill him.

Long ago, even before I fell in love with her, I had come to think of Temple Carrol as one of the best people I had ever met, certainly the most fun, perhaps the most beautiful, too. Her social attitudes were blue-collar, in the best sense, her personal loyalty unrelenting. She loved animals and hated those who would abuse them, thought all politicians worthless, and carried a nine millimeter in her purse. Bad guys messed with her once.

That evening she showed her P.I. badge to the deputy sheriff standing guard in front of Michael Charles Ruggles’s hospital room.

“You can’t come in,” he said.

“Really?” she said, flipping open her cell phone. “Let’s call the sheriff so you can tell him you’re countermanding his permission. He’s at the county commissioners’ meeting now.”

The nurse had left the blinds open inside the room so the man in bed could see the blue light in the evening sky and the rooftops of the town and the chimney swifts that swooped and darted above the trees. His head was propped up on the pillow, one cheek heavily bandaged; an IV was clipped to an index finger. When Temple entered the room, he tried to push himself higher up in the bed in order to look at her more directly. His face winced peculiarly at the effort, as though the tissue were dead and had been touched alive by electrical shock.

“Looks like you’re doing pretty good for a guy who has forty stitches in his cheek and two stab wounds in the chest,” she said.

“Who the hell are you?” he said.

“Gal who doesn’t want to see it put on the wrong guy. You don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to.”

“Answer the question, bitch.”

Temple held a capped ballpoint and a yellow legal pad in her hands, the cover folded back as though she were about to start taking notes. She sat down in a chair by the bed, placed the ballpoint in her shirt pocket, and closed the legal pad. She looked idly into space a moment.

“Let me line it out for you,” she said. “You tried to whack out a Native American political leader. You tried to do it in the middle of a United States government reservation, which shows how smart you are. You also managed to do these things in the geographical center of all political correctness, Missoula, Montana.

“So what does that mean? you hurriedly ask yourself. It means either the FBI is going to prove it’s an equal opportunity law enforcement agency by jamming a mile-long freight train up your ass, or you’ll do state time in Deer Lodge, where the bucks will take turns shoving something else up your ass.”

“That’s an entertaining rap you do. I like it,” he said.

“You’re going down for an attempted contract hit, Michael. That’s probably worth twenty years here. You want to take that kind of bounce to protect some rich guy?”

“Michael’s my first name. I use my middle name. Everybody calls me Charlie. Charlie Ruggles.”

“You’re looking at double-digit time, Charlie. Your bud gave you up in the O.R. They didn’t tell you?”

He looked at the light in the sky, then turned his head toward the nightstand, where a glass of ice water sat with a straw in it. “I can’t reach over to pick it up,” he said.

Temple lifted the glass to his mouth and held it there while he drew through the straw. She could feel his breath on the back of her wrist, his eyes examining her face.

“Thanks,” he said. “You got nice tits. Are they implants or the real thing?”

THAT NIGHT THE MOON was full above the valley and there were deep shadows inside the fir trees on the hill behind our house. Temple had been quiet all evening, and as we prepared to go to bed she put on her nightgown with her back to me.

“You still thinking about Ruggles?” I said.

“No, not Ruggles.”

She sat on the side of the bed, looking out the window. I placed my hand between her shoulder blades. I could feel her heart beating. “What’s the trouble?” I asked.

“Johnny American Horse is a professional martyr. He’s going to hurt us,” she said.

“I don’t read him that way.”

“That’s why he comes to you and not somebody else.”

“He’s our friend,” I replied.

She peeled back the covers and lay down, the curvature of her spine imprinted against her nightgown.

“Temple?” I said.

“Ruggles is a Detroit button man. So was the other guy. Johnny has to know who sent them.”

I couldn’t argue with her. Maybe in some ways Johnny was enigmatic by choice. People who claim mystical powers don’t spend a lot of time feigning normalcy at Kiwanis meetings. But I still believed Johnny was basically honest about who he was.

“I’ll talk to him tomorrow,” I said.

“It won’t do any good,” she replied.

Moments later she was asleep. I lay in the darkness with my eyes open a long time. We had a wonderful home in Montana, one hundred and twenty acres spread up both sides of a dirt road that traversed timber, meadowland, and knobbed hills. It was an enclave where distant wars and images of oil smoke on desert horizons seemed to have no application.

Why put it at risk for Johnny American Horse?

I heard a vehicle on the road, I supposed one of the few neighbors living up the valley from us. But a moment later I heard the same vehicle again, then a third time, as though the driver were lost.

I put on my slippers and went into the living room. Through the window I could see a paint-skinned pickup truck with slat sides stopped on the road and a man in a snow-white Stetson, a long-sleeved canary-yellow shirt, and tight jeans leaning on our railed fence, studying the front of our house.

I went back into the bedroom, slipped on my khakis and boots, then stopped in the hallway to put on my hat and leather jacket. In the living room I removed a.30-30 Winchester from the gun rack. Every firearm in our house was kept loaded, although no round was ever in the chamber. I heard Temple behind me. “What’s wrong?” she said.

“It’s Wyatt Dixon,” I replied.

I stepped out on the gallery and levered a round into the Winchester’s chamber. Wyatt positioned his hat on the back of his head, the way Will Rogers often did, so that his face was bathed in moonlight. I steadied the rifle against a post and aimed just to the left of his shoulder and pulled the trigger.

The bullet struck rock on the opposite hillside and whined away in the shadows with a sound like a tightly wrapped guitar string snapping free from the tuning peg.

Wyatt looked behind him curiously, then scratched a match on a fencepost and cupped the flame to a cigar stub clenched between his teeth. He flicked the dead match into our yard.

I ejected the spent casing and sighted again. This time I blew a spray of wood splinters out of the fence rail. I saw Wyatt touch his cheek, then look at his hand and wipe it on his jeans.

My third shot blew dirt out of the road six inches from his foot. I started to eject the spent casing, but Temple grabbed the barrel and pushed it down toward the gallery railing.

“Either put the gun away or give it to me,” she said.

“Why?”

“He knows you won’t kill him. He knows I will,” she replied.

I put my arm around her shoulder. She was wearing only her nightgown and her back was shaking with cold. “To hell with Wyatt Dixon,” I said.

We went back inside and closed the door. Through the window I saw him get inside his truck and puff his cigar alight. Then he started the engine and drove away.

“Billy Bob?” Temple said.

“What?”

“You’re unbelievable. You shoot at somebody, then say to hell with him,” she said.

“What’s unusual about that?”

She laughed. “Come back to bed. You know any cures for insomnia?” she said.

THE NEXT MORNING was Friday. Fay Harback was in my office just after 8 A.M. “Where do you get off sending your wife into a suspect’s hospital room?” she said.

“It’s a free country,” I replied.

“This isn’t rural Bumfuck. You don’t get to make up your own rules.”

“Have you charged Ruggles yet?” I said.

“None of your business.”

“I’m getting a bad feeling on this one.”

“About what?” she said.

“The other half of the assassination team, what’s his name, Bumper, had no record at all. Ruggles has at least a half-dozen arrests, including passing counterfeit, but the charges were always dismissed.”

Her eyes shifted off mine, an unformed thought buried inside them.

“Any Feds been to see you?” I asked.

“Feds? No. You’re too imaginative.”

“My client isn’t going to get set up.”

I saw the color rise in her throat. “That takes real nerve,” she said.

“File charges against Ruggles and we won’t be having this kind of conversation,” I said.

“The investigation is still in progress.”

“Seems open and shut to me. Who’s running it?”

“Darrel McComb.”

“You’re not serious?”

“If you have a problem with that, talk to the sheriff.”

“No, we’ll just give your general attitude a ‘D’ for ‘disingenuous.’ Shame on you, Fay.”

She slammed the door on the way out.

I HEADED UP to the Jocko Valley. Western Montana is terraced country, each mountain plateau and valley stacked a little higher than the ones below it. To get to the Flathead Reservation, you climb a long grade outside Missoula, between steep-sloped, thickly wooded mountains, then enter the wide green sweep of the Jocko Valley. To the left are a string of bars and an open-air arena with a cement dance floor where Merle Haggard sometimes performs. Across the breadth of the valley are the homes of fairly prosperous feed growers as well as the prefabricated tract houses built for Flathead Indians by the government. The tract houses look like a sad imitation of a middle-income suburb. Some of the yards are dotted with log outbuildings, rusted car bodies, parts of washing machines, and old refrigerators. Often a police car is parked in one of them.

But through it all winds the Jocko River-tea-colored in the early spring, later boiling with snowmelt, in the summer undulating like satin over beaver-cut cottonwoods and heavy pink and gray boulders. Johnny American Horse wanted to save it, along with the wooded hills and the grasslands that had never been kicked over with a plow. He also argued for the reintroduction of bison on the plains, allowing them to crash through fences and trample two centuries of agrarian economics into finely ground cereal. Some people on the res listened to him. Most did not.

I parked in his yard and sat down on the front steps with him. A sealed gallon jar of sun tea rested by his foot. A calico cat rolled in the new clover. Part of the mountains behind his house was still in shadow, and when the wind blew down the slope I could smell the odor of pine needles and damp humus and lichen and stone back in the trees.

“A couple of things are bothering me, Johnny,” I said.

“Like what?” he said, watching the cat trap a grasshopper with its paws.

“Why’d you have to use a knife and hatchet on those guys?”

“The only gun I own is the one the cops took away from me.”

“Why’d you lay in wait for them? Why didn’t you get some help?”

“This is the res. People take care of themselves here. Ask any federal agent what he thinks about Indians. An Indian homicide is just another dead Indian.”

“I think maybe you know who sent Bumper and Ruggles after you.”

He seemed to study a thought that was hidden behind his eyes. “Ever hear of wet work?” he asked.

“Maybe,” I replied.

“You were a Texas Ranger and an assistant U.S. attorney, Billy Bob.”

“You’re saying the G sicced these guys on you?”

“What’s the G? It’s just the guys who are currently running things. I trained with people just like Bumper and Ruggles. Some of the old-timers had been in the Phoenix Program.”

The screen door opened behind us. “You telling Billy Bob about your dream?” Amber Finley asked. Her eyes were the bluest, most radiant I’d ever seen, her complexion glowing.

“What dream?” I said.

Johnny got up from the steps and walked across the yard toward the barn, his face averted. Amber watched him, a hand perched on one hip. “Isn’t he something else?” she said.

“What dream?” I said.

“He just told me, ‘All those dudes are going down. There’s nothing to worry about.’ I wish I could have dreams like that. Mine suck,” she said.