In the Moon of Red Ponies: A Novel (14 page)

THAT EVENING
the sunset was orange on the hills and trees above our house, and before dusk I began opening the irrigation trenches that ran from the hillsides down through our pasture. We had no twelve-month creeks on our land, but the snowmelt and runoff in the spring gave us good grass, and during the end of summer we got by with temporary irrigation from a three-hundred-foot well. We kept six horses—a sorrel, a buckskin, two Appaloosas, a Morgan, and an Arabian I bought from a circus. From the far end of the pasture, as shadows grew across the valley, I could see the red metal roof of our barn and the one-and-a-half-story house we had built, with a wraparound veranda and cupolated corners that gave a wide-angle view of the valley and the snow-covered peaks of the Bitterroots in the south.

The air smelled cold and heavy as the water coursed through the irrigation trenches in the shade. Then the wind shifted and blew from the opposite hills, out of the sunlight, and I heard our horses nicker behind me and the sorrel, for no apparent reason, begin galloping through a stand of aspens toward the barn.

I stared up at the lighted hillside in the east and saw a flash on metal or glass among the trees. Then I saw it again. I went to my truck and got my binoculars from the glove box and swept the lenses across the hillcrest. A man in a sportsman’s cap and down vest was crouched next to a ponderosa trunk, looking straight at me. Two other men, both dressed in jeans and caps, stood behind him. All three men turned their faces in the opposite direction, then worked their way up the slope through the Douglas fir and disappeared on the other side.

I could feel my heart beating when I lowered the binoculars from my face.

I SAID NOTHING
about the men on the hill to Temple. That night she fell asleep with her back turned toward me, her hip molded under the thin blanket. The darkness was alive with sound—deer or elk thumping down the trails on the hillside, an owl screeching, a bear knocking over the garbage can in the barn, a hoof clacking like a punctuation mark on the top rail of the fence as an animal vaulted over it. I placed my hand lightly on Temple’s back and could feel the swelling of her lungs through my palm. A moment later she got up and walked to the bathroom, then returned to bed, covered her head with a pillow, and went back to sleep.

I woke before first light and drank coffee by myself in the coldness of the kitchen. As the stars began to fade in the sky, I saw a skinned-up truck with slat sides parked on the road and a hatted man in a thick canvas coat leading our buckskin gelding back through a break in the fence. I put on a coat and walked down to the road.

“Why are you here, Wyatt?” I said.

He slipped the lariat off the buckskin’s neck and popped him on the rump to encourage him though the collapsed fence rails. He hoisted the top rail into place and began hammering the torn nails into the post with a rock. “You got a mixture of crested wheatgrass and alfalfa in that pasture. Good dryland combo, but when elk come off a winter range a fence like this don’t even slow them down,” he said.

“Let that be. Tell me what you want and leave,” I said.

He tapped the nails snug and removed a thermos from inside the truck. He unscrewed the top with his thumb while he stared at me with a crazy light in his face. “Got me a Sharps buffalo rifle with a fifty-caliber barrel. At three hundred yards I can core a hole big as a tangerine through a cottonwood tree. I know all about the Indian got killed up the road yonder. Know about the pigtail they left in your postbox, too. You need backup, Brother Holland. I’m the huckleberry can do it, too. You know I am.”

He lifted his thermos to his mouth and drank.

“My God, what is that? It smells like a septic tank,” I said.

“More like lemon-flavored paint thinner. It’s my chemical cocktail. Medicaid will pay for it, but so far I ain’t had to take no money from the government. There was men watching you from up on that ridge last night.”

“How’d you know that?”

“I got connections.”

“I don’t think you do. I think you were probably spying on us, and just like me you spotted those guys up on the hill.”

“Suit yourself. That Indian went out full throttle and fuck-it, didn’t he? Know why? Indians ain’t afraid of dying. That’s ’cause they think this world is already part of the next. But white people ain’t got that kind of comfort. How’d you like them motherfuckers who did Lester Antelope to go to work on Miss Temple or that boy of yours?”

He upended his thermos and drank it empty, his Adam’s apple working smoothly, an orange rivulet running from his mouth, his lidless eyes waiting for my response.

LATER, I CALLED
our new sheriff, a stolid and unimaginative man who was more bureaucrat than law officer. I asked him what he had on the murder of Lester Antelope.

“It’s under investigation,” he said.

“I know that. I was at the crime scene. One of his pigtails was in my mailbox,” I said.

“I’m aware of all those details, Mr. Holland. You don’t need to raise your voice,” he said.

“Look, some men were watching me through binoculars yesterday. I think these guys are sending me and my wife a message.”

“I’m not quite sure what you’re talking about. If you want, you can come in and make a report. We’ll look into it. Sending you a message? About what?”

I walked across the street to Fay Harback’s office. I told her of my conversation with the sheriff. I also told her of Wyatt Dixon’s early morning visit to my house.

“What’s Dixon up to?” she said.

“I don’t have any idea.”

“We think we may have found the car that was used to abduct Lester Antelope. Or at least it fits the description given by the homeless man who saw the doll thrown from the window. It was burned in a canyon up Fish Creek. The tags were gone, but the vehicle ID matches up with a car that was stolen in Superior a couple of weeks ago. The sheriff didn’t tell you any of this?”

“He didn’t get around to it.”

“So you think the guys who murdered Antelope might come after you or Johnny American Horse now? Because you or Johnny might have access to the material that was stolen out of the Global Research lab?”

“They
think
I may have access.”

“No truth to that?”

“No.”

“Johnny doesn’t know anything about it, either?”

“He wasn’t involved.” I tried to hold my eyes on hers.

“I feel sorry for you,” she said.

“Why?” My face started to tingle, as though someone had popped me contemptuously on the cheek.

“You’re going to take his bounce,” she replied.

AT LUNCHTIME
Lucas came into the office, his jeans hitched up above his hips, the legs tucked into his boots. “You eat yet?” he said.

“Can’t do it. Got to work.”

He looked disappointed for a moment, then he smiled. “I got invited to play at the bluegrass festival in Hamilton,” he said.

“That’s good, bud.”

“Y’all coming?”

“Couldn’t run us off with a shotgun.”

He stared idly out the window at the trees on the courthouse lawn. “Weird thing happened this morning. Somebody stuck a crunched-up license plate in my mail slot,” he said.

“What kind of plate?” I said.

“Washington State. It was twisted into a cone and jammed into the slot. Why would somebody do that?”

“Where is it?”

“In my trash can. What’s going on?”

“Let’s go,” I said.

We drove over to his apartment and I removed the tag from his garbage can with a pencil and dropped it in a plastic shopping bag. I called Fay Harback on my cell phone and read the tag numbers to her. I heard her shuffling papers around on her desk.

“Bring it in. We’ll see if there’re any latents on it. It came off the burned vehicle we found up Fish Creek…Hello?” she said.

“Where’s Wyatt Dixon live?” I said.

Chapter 9

WYATT LIVED UP
on the Blackfoot River, on a grassy bench north of a sawmill and an unused railroad trestle. Several years back an ice jam had crashed through the cottonwoods, sweeping away the owner’s truck, automobile, and machine shop, depositing great chunks of frozen flotsam inside the downstairs area of the main house. Wyatt rented the house for a song. He strung canvas over the holes in the first story and moved into an upstairs bedroom that allowed him a view of the only two ways the property could be accessed—either by a steel swing bridge suspended over the river or by a single-track log road that wound over the hill behind the house.

The sky was still filled with light when I parked on the riverbank and headed toward the swing bridge. The wind blowing down the canyon smelled of damp stone, pine needles, and wood smoke, and a fisherman was down below in the current, flipping a dry fly out on the riffle, taking up the slack in his line with his left hand. The swing bridge pinged and bounced with my weight as I crossed it, then the sun dropped behind the mountain, filling the gorge with shadow, and I swore I saw a figure in the willows at the far end of the bridge.

Ain’t nobody home, Billy Bob. Better be glad, too,
L. Q. Navarro said.

Mind your own business,
I replied.

You’re trying to use Dixon as a cure for your problem. That’s like shopping in hell for an air-conditioning unit.

What do you suggest?

Inside his black coat he wore a white shirt with pale gray stripes in it. A red ribbon folded in the shape of a shepherd’s hook was pinned to the place where I had shot and killed him.
The problem is you haven’t figured out what he’s really up to. This boy ain’t your reg’lar psychopath,
he said.

I sure could use you now, L.Q. I hate myself for what I did down there on the border.

But he was gone. I turned around and walked back across the bridge, my boots clanking on the steel grid. The fisherman down below, who had witnessed my conversation with someone no one else saw, was looking at me strangely. I waved at him, but he didn’t respond.

I sat in my truck, trying to think. As L.Q. had indicated, I had never figured out Dixon. He was born twenty miles from the birthplace of Audie Murphy, on a dust-blown, locust-infested farm where his parents apparently raised children as they would livestock. Then the family moved to another rental farm, in an even more godforsaken place, not far from the birthplace of Clyde Barrow. Somehow it seemed more than coincidence that Wyatt’s early life was geographically linked to names that were so antithetically juxtaposed in connotation.

At age fifteen, Wyatt ran away from home and enlisted in the United States Army. At bayonet practice a drill instructor who had a particular dislike for Wyatt made the mistake of choosing him for a demonstration with a pugil stick. Wyatt broke the drill instructor’s jaw with the pugil stick. The Army found the drill instructor at fault but later realized it had underestimated Wyatt’s potential when he waylaid a black mess sergeant in a San Antonio alley, cut off his stripes, and stuffed them down his throat.

He picked chickens in a Texas slaughterhouse, hauled illegal Mexican beef, and did time in a Coahuila prison, where the guards made him kneel on stones with his wrists chained to a log stretched across his shoulders. He wandered the American West in stolen cars and pickups, sleeping under the stars, working cockfight pits, breaking mustangs in Nevada, gypo logging in the Cascades, running a bale or two of weed up from Baja when he ran short of cash. His body looked as though it were made from whipcord. The muscles in his forearms swelled into balloons; his grip was like steel cable. Then at age nineteen Wyatt discovered the world of a full-time, honest-to-God rodeo man.

As a bull rider, he would tie himself down with a suicide wrap and either ride to the buzzer or take his chances on being dragged, stomped, hooked, or flung into the boards. As a steer wrestler, he would fly from the saddle, grab the steer’s horns, and slam it to the ground with such force he and the steer would seem to disappear inside a brown aura of dust and desiccated manure. From Big D to Calgary, the crowds loved Wyatt Dixon.

Barroom women sucked his fingers, and mainline ex-cons, neo-Nazis, and outlaw bikers walked around him. His skin was stitched with scar tissue but clean of tattoos, the skeletal structure of his face like a Roman soldier’s. He spent large sums on fine boots and embroidered western shirts, drank tequila with a beer back, and belonged to Aryan supremacist groups out of convenience rather than need. He ate his pain, let his enemies break their fists on his face, and grinned like a jack-o’-lantern at the condemnation of the world.

It was Dixon’s courage that made no sense. Sociopaths are invariably cowards, and their cruelty exists in direct proportion to their own fear and self-pity. If they show any calm when they’re executed by the state, it’s because they’ve forced their executioner to do what they could not do themselves.

Wyatt Dixon didn’t fit the category.

As I started the truck, I remembered the two rodeo passes he had tried to give me and Temple at the café in Missoula, tickets I had brushed off the table onto the floor. Then I remembered seeing an ad in the morning paper. The rodeo, in Stevensville, began that weekend.

When I arrived the fairgrounds were teeming with people, neon-scrolled carnival rides revolved against a turquoise light in the sky, and crowds of rodeo fans were packing into the grandstands while Bob Wills’s original version of “San Antonio Rose” blared from loudspeakers. I bought a candied apple and sat up high in the stands, where I had a wonderful view of the bucking chutes and the arena. But I saw no sign of Wyatt. He usually worked as a clown, dressed in a cherry-red, bulbous nose, face paint, baggy pants, firehouse suspenders, and fright wig, staring the bull down, pawing the ground with his cleats, arching his back away from the horned charge with only an inch or two to spare, sometimes mooning the bull as it turned for another pass.

I watched the bulldogging and calf-roping competition, the ladies’ barrel race, and a comedy routine involving a monkey named Whiplash who, dressed in cowboy garb, charged about the arena strapped to a dog sprinting after sheep.