In The Moon Of Red Ponies

Chapter 6

ON TUESDAY MORNING, when Johnny was about to be transported from the hospital to face the trumped-up attempted assault charges filed against him by Darrel McComb, he was formally placed under arrest for the murder of Charlie Ruggles and taken in handcuffs to a cell at the county jail. I caught Fay Harback at the coffee stand by the back entrance of the courthouse. “No,” she said, raising her hand prohibitively. “I don’t want to see you.”

“This is bogus, Fay. You’re being a dupe,” I said.

“How would you like to have this coffee thrown in your face?”

“My client is the victim, not the perpetrator. You’re helping a collection of assholes gang up on an innocent man.”

“Did I ever tell you, you make my blood boil? I want to hit you with a large, hard object,” she said. People were starting to stare now. “Come outside.”

We went through the big glass doors onto the lawn. It was cold in the shade of the building and the grass was stiff with frost. “Which collection of assholes are you talking about?” she asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“That’s beautiful. You just slander people in public without knowing why?”

“The Feds are involved in this stuff. An agent tried to warn me off last night.”

“Let me make it simple for you. American Horse’s tennis shoes matched a perfectly stenciled impression on the floor right next to Charlie Ruggles’s bed.” She raised a finger when I started to speak.

“Hear me out. Your client not only left behind a signature with his foot, he dropped a Jiffy Lube receipt on the floor. It has his name on it and his fingerprints. We found a pair of greens in a service elevator. They smelled of booze.”

“How could Johnny have gotten past the guard at the door? All the deputies know him,” I said

For just a second, no more than a blink, I saw the confidence weaken in her eyes. “The deputy went to help an elderly man use the bathroom. It’s not his fault,” she replied.

“Who said it was?”

“Johnny was in a bar down the street from the hospital. He’s a mercurial, unpredictable man. He killed Ruggles. There’s no conspiracy here,” she said.

“Hell there’s not.”

She looked into space, as though my words contained a degree of credibility which, for reasons of her own, she would not acknowledge. “I do my job. I don’t always like it. Don’t ever try to embarrass me in front of people like that again,” she said.

THAT AFTERNOON, I visited Johnny at the lockup. We sat at a wood table in a small room that contained a narrow, vertical slit for a window, through which I could see the old buildings and brick streets down by the train yards. Johnny wore a bright orange jumpsuit with the word JAIL lettered in black across the back.

“How do you explain the Jiffy Lube receipt and the prints of your tennis shoes in Ruggles’s room?” I said.

“Somebody must have taken the shoes out of the house and put them back later. The receipt for the oil change was in my pickup.”

His eyes wandered around the room. I touched him on the wrist to make him look at me. “You get pretty swacked Saturday night?” I said.

“No.”

“No blackouts?”

“Amber was with me all night. We were at the Ox, Charley B’s, and Stockman’s. I went down to Red’s for a few minutes to meet a guy who wants to buy my truck. But he wasn’t there.”

“You went to Red’s by yourself?”

“Like I said.”

“Has a Fed named Masterson been in here?”

“No. Who is he?”

“Johnny, nobody wants to believe in conspiracies anymore. People want to trust the government. They don’t want to believe that corporations run their lives, either. But everything you do and say sends them another message. You hearing me on this?”

“Not really,” he said.

They’re going to burn you at the stake, I thought. I banged on the door for the turnkey to let me out.

“You still my attorney?” Johnny said.

“Nobody else will hire me,” I replied, and winked at him.

DARREL MCCOMB BELONGED to an athletic club downtown, one frequented primarily by middle-class businesspeople during their lunch hour or just before they drove home from work. But Darrel did not go to the club for the tanning services it offered or for the state-of-the-art exercise machines most members used while they read magazines or watched a television program of their selection, the audio filtering through the foam-rubber headsets clamped on their ears. Darrel was there to clank serious iron, benching three hundred pounds, curling forty-pound dumbbells in each hand, the veins in his muscles rippling like nests of purple string.

He also liked to smack the heavy bag, getting high on his own heated smell, diverting an imaginary opponent with a left jab, then ripping a vicious right hook into the place where his opponent’s rib cage would be, under the heart, driving his fist so deep into the leather the bag rattled on its chain.

But on that particular Tuesday evening Darrel was disturbed for reasons he couldn’t adequately explain. As he sat in the steam room by himself, he experienced a sense of depression about his life and about who he was that few people would understand.

Not unless they had grown up abandoned by their parents in a town that was hardly more than a dusty crossroads inside several million acres of Nebraska wheat. Not unless at age fifteen they had blown an orphanage where the kids scrubbed floors with rags tied on their knees. Not unless they had piloted Flying Boxcars through AK-47 ground fire with a guy named Rocky Harrigan.

Rocky was a legend. He had dog-fought the Japanese in the skies over the Pacific, made airdrops to the Tibetan Resistance, and lit up the Pathet Lao with fifty-gallon drums of gasoline mixed with Tide laundry detergent. Then, in the mid-eighties, Rocky had hooked up with a CIA front in Fort Lauderdale, telephoned his young friend Darrel McComb, who was spraying crops and dodging power lines in Kansas, and invited him to join the fun down in Central America.

But planes crashed, names spilled into headlines, and the era of Ronald Reagan came to an end. Darrel McComb always believed he had shared a special moment in history, one whose complexities and dangers few people were aware of. The Iron Curtain had collapsed, hadn’t it? American companies were opening textile mills and creating jobs in Stone Age villages where Indians still lived in grass huts, weren’t they? None of that would have happened if it hadn’t been for men like Rocky and himself, would it?

Let the peace marchers and the bunny huggers light candles and sing their hymns, he thought. They would never be players. This was a great country. Guys like Rocky gave up their lives so the jackoff crowd could revel in their own ignorance. In Cuba they’d be diced pork inside somebody’s taco.

But the splenetic nature of his thoughts brought him little peace. What was really on his mind? he asked himself, sitting on the tile stoop in the steam room, his skin threaded with sweat. For an answer he only had to glance down at the erection under his towel.

Amber Finley.

He thought about her all the time, in ways he had never thought about a woman. In fact, women had never been an issue in his life. He went to bed with them occasionally and had even been married for a few months. An Army psychiatrist had once told him he was probably homoerotic, a categorization that oddly enough didn’t offend him. But the sight of Amber Finley filled his head with images and sounds that beset him like a crown of thorns, leaving him sleepless at night and throbbing in the morning.

What was it that attracted or bothered him most about her? The blueness and luminosity of her eyes? Her heart-shaped face? Or the throaty quality of her laugh and the irreverence in her speech? Perhaps the perfect quality of her skin, her education and intelligence and the fact she spent it like coin in lowlife bars with people like Johnny American Horse?

No, it was all of it. Amber Finley could walk down a street and make his innards drain like water.

He shouldn’t have lost it with that Indian kid. American Horse was going down anyway; he might even ride the needle for the gig on Ruggles. Why did Darrel have to make a martyr of him and probably earn himself a civil rights beef in the bargain? He’d flushed himself good with Amber, and acquired a dirty jacket on top of it.

He showered, dressed, and ate supper by himself in a workingmen’s café on Front Street. The evening was warm, the color of the sky as soft as lilacs, the flooded willows on the riverbanks clattering with birds. There were many places he could go-a movie, a concert in the park, a minor league baseball game, a bar where cops drank and he sometimes joined them with a soda and sliced lime. But Darrel had no doubt where he would end up as soon as the sun began to sink, and that thought more than any other filled him with an abiding shame.

Amber lived with her widower father, the senator, up Rattlesnake Creek, in a two-story home built on a slope above a sepia-tinted stream. Darrel parked his car and walked through a woods that looked down on the back of the house, the hot tub on the deck, and the lawn where Amber’s yoga class met on Tuesday evenings. His binoculars were Russian Army issue, the magnification amazing. He could see the down on her cheeks, the shine on the tops of her breasts, the way she breathed through her mouth, as though the air were cold and she were warming it before it entered her lungs. No woman had the right to be that desirable.

Was this what people called midlife crisis?

A black Mercury pulled to the front of the house, and two men and a woman got out and were greeted at the door by the senator. The woman looked familiar, but Darrel could not be sure where he had seen her. Then he heard a noise behind him.

A man in a cowboy hat and jeans was sitting on a big, flat, lichen-stained rock, shaving a stick with the six-inch blade of an opened bone-handled knife. Even though there was a chill in the air, the man’s corduroy shirtsleeves were rolled, exposing biceps that were as big as grapefruit.

“Late for bird-watching, ain’t it?” the man said, without looking up.

Think, Darrel told himself. He opened his badge holder. “I don’t know who the hell you are, but you’re interfering in a police surveillance. That means haul your ass out of here, pal,” he said.

The man closed the knife in his palm and stuck it in his back pocket. He picked a piece of wet matter off his lip and looked at it. “You don’t ’member me?” he asked.

“No.”

The man removed his hat and the afterglow of the sun fell through the trees on the paleness of his brow and the moral vacuity in his eyes, the chiseled, lifeless features of his face. “ ’Member me now?” he asked.

“Maybe,” Darrel said.

“I want in on it,” the man said.

“On what?”

“Chance to serve the red, white, and blue, sir. You want serious work done, I’m your huckleberry.”

“Is that right? Well, I think you’re crazy. I think your name is Wyatt Dixon and you’re about to get yourself put back in a cage.”

Wyatt fitted his hat back on and pushed himself up from the rock, advancing toward Darrel so quickly Darrel’s hand went inside his coat. Then he realized Wyatt Dixon was not even looking at him but instead was unzipping his jeans.

“Drunk a horse tank of lemonade this afternoon. Ah, that’s better,” he said, urinating in a bright arc down the side of the hill.

Wyatt’s voice was loud and had obviously carried down into the Finleys’ yard. Amber went into the house and came back out the sliding glass door with her father, both of them now staring up the hill. Don’t lose control. Handle this right, Darrel told himself. Never surrender the situation to perps.

He turned on Wyatt Dixon. “You’re in a shitload of trouble, boy. Wait right here till I get back,” he said.

Darrel went hurriedly down the incline, stepped across a series of rocks that spanned the stream at the bottom, and entered Amber Finley’s backyard, while she and her father and their guests stared at him in dismay. His shield was open in his hand.

“I’m Detective Darrel McComb, Senator. I was following an ex-convict by the name of Wyatt Dixon. He seems to have taken an interest in your house,” he said.

“Why would he be interested in us?” Romulus Finley asked.

“He was in Deer Lodge for a homicide. But unfortunately he’s out,” Darrel said.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“This man beat Johnny American Horse with a blackjack,” Amber said.

“I see,” Romulus said.

“I’ve intruded on you, but I thought you should know, I mean about this fellow up in the trees,” Darrel said. He folded his badge holder and put it away, glad to have something to occupy his hands.

“I appreciate your concern. But we’re not real worried about this,” Romulus said.

The two men and the woman who had arrived in the Mercury were on the patio now, watching Darrel as though he were part of a skit. Where had he seen the woman? Somewhere down in the Bitterroot Valley? She wore a suit and was auburn-haired and attractive in a masculine way. Her eyes seemed to look directly into his.

“I guess I’ll go. I’m sorry to have disturbed you,” Darrel said.

“It’s no problem,” Romulus said.

Darrel recrossed the stream and climbed the incline back into the woods, wondering if his story had been plausible at all or if he had looked as ridiculous as he felt.

But at least Wyatt Dixon was gone. From the shadows Darrel looked back down into the yard of Amber Finley. The auburn-haired woman dressed in the suit was standing on the deck, steam rising from the hot tub behind her. He thought she was gazing up at the treeline where he stood, perhaps wondering where she had met or seen him. Then he realized she was watching a child launch a kite into the sunset, and his presence in the Finleys’ backyard had been of no more consequence to those gathered there than his absence.

A white-tailed doe bolted out of the trees and thumped across the sod and down a gully. The woods felt dark and cold, the air heavy with gas, more like autumn than spring. Darrel struck the trunk of a larch with the heel of his hand, hard, shaking needles out of the branches, cursing the quiet desperation of his life.

AMBER CALLED ME at the office early the next morning and told me of Darrel McComb’s bizarre behavior at her house. “He was lying. He’s a voyeur,” she said.

“He told you he was following a man named Dixon?”

“Right. Who’s this guy Dixon, anyway?”

“A guy who left his pancakes on the stove too long.” I glanced out the window.

“What’s he want with us?” she asked.

“I’ll let you know. He’s looking through my window right now.”

After I hung up, I opened my door and went into the reception area just as Wyatt came through the front door. He wore a purple-striped western shirt with scarlet garters on the sleeves. The bottoms of his jeans were streaked with water, as though he had walked through wet weeds. He grinned stupidly at the receptionist, his gaze raking her face and breasts.

“What were you doing at the Finley place?” I said.

“Taking a drain,” he said, his eyes still fastened on the receptionist. He started to speak to her.

“Hildy, go down to Kinko’s and pick up our Xerox work, will you?” I said.

“Gladly,” she said, picking up her purse.

I walked inside my office and closed the door after Wyatt was inside.

“Nice little heifer you got out there,” he said.

“You have thirty seconds.”

“Got the goods on Darrel McComb. Seems like he’s been doing some window-peeking up the Rattlesnake. My official statement on the matter might do a whole lot to hep that Indian boy. I might also have some information about that senator always got his nose in the air.”

“What do you want for this?”

“You got to sign on as my lawyer.”

“Why me?”

“I need investors in my rough stock company. Folks don’t necessarily trust their money to a man who’s been jailing since he was fifteen.”

“Forget it.”

“We’re more alike than you think, Brother Holland.”

“You’re wrong,” I said.

“Tell me the feel of a gun in your hand don’t excite you, just like the touch of a woman.”

“We’re done here.”

“Violence lives in the man. It don’t find him of its own accord. My daddy taught me that. Every time he held my head down in a rain barrel to improve my inner concentration.”

“Get out.”

“Walked the rim of your pasture this morning. I’d irrigate if I was you. A grass fire coming up that canyon would turn the whole place into an ash heap.”

BUT MY MORNING INVOLVEMENT with Wyatt was not over yet. Two hours later Seth Masterson came into the office, sat down in front of my desk, and removed a Xeroxed sheet from a sheaf of documents inside a folder. “Read this,” he said.

The letter had probably been typed on an old mechanical typewriter; the letters were ink-filled and blunted on the edges. The date was only one week ago, the return address General Delivery, Missoula, Montana. It read:

Dear President George W. Bush,

I am a fellow Texan and long supporter of the personal goals you have set for yourself and our great country. I particularly like the way you have stood up to the towel heads who has attacked New York City and the Pentagon. With this letter I am offering my expertise in taking care of these sonsofbitches so they will not be around any longer to get in your hair. Let me know when you want me to come to Washington to discuss the matter.

My character references are William Robert Holland, a lawyer friend in Missoula, and Rev. Elton T. Sneed of the Antioch Pentecostal Church in Arlee, Montana.

Your fellow patriot,

Wyatt Dixon

“Is this guy for real?” Seth said. His legs wouldn’t fit between his chair and my desk and he kept shoving the chair back to give himself more space.

“You must have pulled everything available on him. What do you think?”

“He’s a nutcase. The question is whether he should be picked up.”

“Wyatt does things that give the impression he’s crazy. At the same time he seems to stay a step ahead of everyone else, at least he does with me. Is he dangerous? When he needs to be.”

“You seem pretty objective about a guy who kidnapped and buried your wife.”

I paused a moment. “Two years ago I tried to kill him. I got behind him and shot at him four times with a forty-five revolver and missed.”

Seth looked at me for a beat, then lowered his eyes. “Got a little head cold and can’t hear too well this morning. Keep me posted on this guy, will you?” he said.

“You bet. He was just in here.”

“This is quite a town,” he said.

“Why you bird-dogging Johnny American Horse, Seth?”

“I’ve got to get something for this dadburn cold. My head feels like somebody poured cement in it,” he replied.

SOME PEOPLE HAVE no trouble with jail. In fact, they use jails like hotels, checking in and out of them when the weather is severe or if they’re down on their luck or they need to get their drug tolerance reduced so they can re-addict less expensively. But Johnny didn’t do well inside the slams.

Fay Harback called me on Thursday. “Been over to see American Horse?” she asked.

“Not since Tuesday,” I replied.

“Go do it. I don’t need any soap operas in my life.”

“What’s going on?”

“I’m not unaware of Johnny’s war record. Maybe I’ve always liked him. I don’t choose the individuals I prosecute.”

“Yeah, you do.”

“I’ll say good-bye now. But you have a serious problem, Billy Bob.”

“What might that be?”

“An absence of charity,” she replied before hanging up.

I put on my hat and coat and walked over to the jail in a sunshower. The trees and sidewalks were steaming in the rain and the grass on the courthouse lawn was a bright green. Upstairs a deputy walked me down to an isolation cell, where Johnny sat on the cement floor in his boxer undershorts. His knees were pulled up in front of him, his vertebrae and ribs etched against his skin.

“It’s his business if he don’t want to eat. But he stuffed his jumpsuit in a commode. We probably mopped up fifty gallons of water,” the deputy said.

“It’s pretty cold in here. How about a blanket?” I said.

“I’ll bring it up with his melba toast,” the deputy said, and walked off.

“Why provoke them, Johnny?” I said.

“I wouldn’t wear the jumpsuit. But it was another guy who plugged up the toilet with it.”

“Why not just tell that to somebody?”

“Because they know I’m going down for the big bounce and they couldn’t care less what I say.”

He combed his hair back with his fingers. His hair was black and had brown streaks in it and in places was white on the ends. He looked up at me and grinned. “Dreamed about red ponies last night. Thousands of them, covering the plains, all the way to the horizon,” he said.

“You’re going to be arraigned in the morning. You have to wear jailhouse issue,” I said.

He shrugged his shoulders. “They’re going to ask for the needle?” he said.

“Maybe.”

“Ain’t no maybe to it, partner,” he said. His eyes seemed to glaze over with his inner thoughts.

AT 9 A.M. FRIDAY, Johnny stood in handcuffs before the bench and was charged with capital murder. His bond was set at two hundred thousand dollars. That afternoon I called Temple at her P.I. office.

“Johnny doesn’t have the bondsman’s fee and his place has two mortgages on it,” I said.

“And?” she said.

“I’d like to put up a property bond.”

“You’re going to risk Heartwood on Johnny American Horse?”

“They’re taking the guy apart with a chain saw, Temple.”

The line was so quiet I thought the connection had been broken. “Temple?” I said.

“Do it,” she said.

“You’re not upset?”

“If you weren’t the man you are, I wouldn’t have married you.”

How do you beat that?