In the Moon of Red Ponies: A Novel (16 page)

“Am I late?” he asked, looking at his watch.

“I made reservations at the Depot for six-thirty,” she replied, walking ahead of him.

“I didn’t know we were going to the Depot,” he said.

“You don’t like eating there?”

“No, it’s fine,” he said.

“Good. That’s where I usually eat when I’m in Missoula,” she said. She opened the car door for herself and got inside, her purse on her lap, waiting for him to start the engine.

The restaurant’s main dining area and the bar across the foyer were crowded. Outside, on the terrace, a jazz combo played under a striped canopy, the sun a soft orange ball above the hills behind the railroad tracks.

“I’m glad you got reservations,” Darrel said.

“You have to. On Saturday night university types take over everything,” she said.

“It’s that kind of town, all right,” he said.

She ordered wine and he a glass of seltzer with a slice of lime.

“You don’t drink?” she said.

“Not too often. But I can if I want to,” he replied.

“When do you want to?” she said, and smiled when she said it.

“When I feel like it. I just never had the taste for it.”

“Give me the sirloin, well done, sour cream and chives on the baked potato. No butter,” she told the waiter.

“Yeah, same for me,” Darrel said.

During dinner he realized she spoke to no one at the other tables, although her eyes seemed to take note, without personal interest, of everyone in the room. She had firm arms, square shoulders, a small cleft in her chin, and medium-size hands with clipped, pink nails. She ate with a good appetite and midway through the meal ordered another glass of wine. “Sure you won’t join me?” she said.

“Why not?” he said, nodding to the waiter.

Later, she had Bavarian cake for dessert, and when the waiter brought coffee, she looked sated, happy, her face a bit flushed. She didn’t order anything else to drink and he knew she wasn’t a real boozer. “I always like the food here,” she said.

“I’ve been looking into that guy Dixon’s background. You know, the rodeo guy?” he said casually.

She picked up her spoon from her coffee saucer and looked at it and put it back down. “I think I already told you I strayed into a dalliance with Wyatt. It was my fault, not his. But I’m not really interested in hearing any more about him,” she said.

“The Feds say he writes letters to the President. He’s a definite head case.”

He looked out the window, waiting for her reaction. “Is this why you asked me out?” she said.

“I shouldn’t have brought this guy up. Cops have a hard time getting off the clock. That’s why they hang out together. Lot of times in late night bars. I’m glad you wanted to go to dinner tonight.”

She let her eyes rove around the dining room, her thoughts veiled. “Ever been married?” she asked.

“For a little while. I was in the Army, moving around from place to place.”

“You seem like a frank man. What do you think of me?”

“You’re a classy lady. I got a feeling we’re a lot alike,” Darrel said.

“Who knows?” she said.

“Want to take a walk down by the river? There’s a concert in the park tonight. Actually, my apartment is across the river from the park. Sometimes I listen to the music on my balcony,” he said.

“You saying you want to go to the concert or to your apartment?”

“Whatever,” he replied.

She rested her chin on her fist and looked directly into his face again. “You go to Vegas or Reno very much?” she said.

“Yeah, how’d you know?”

“Because I go there, too. Know why?” she said.

“ ’Cause you never know what’s going to happen next. Twenty-four hours a day, you can have any kind of adventure you want,” he replied.

She kept her eyes on his and kissed the air with her lips.

A FEW MINUTES
later, he and Greta were sitting on a grass embankment by the river and listening to a band pound out “The Eight-Thirty Blues.” The park was crowded with college kids, young couples with children, Frisbee throwers, skateboarders, hobos who slept in the willows along the riverbank, and punked-out street people who dealt drugs in the shadows by the public restrooms and looked as if they had been shot out of a cannon.

But Darrel had little interest in street dealers or the strips of maroon cloud on the mountains in the west or the yellow light that filled the sky or the breeze that blew off the water and smelled of fern and wet stone. Instead, his entire attentions were now focused on two people dancing on the clipped lawn in front of the bandstand—Amber Finley and Johnny American Horse.

Amber wore a knee-length black spaghetti-strap dress and Mexican cowboy boots, and danced with her fists held in the air, swinging her hips from side to side, kicking one booted foot when she made a turn, totally indifferent to the impression she made on anyone else. By contrast, Johnny American Horse looked like a post, his face shaded by a light-colored Stetson, his skin dark, his black jeans and tight-fitting silver shirt stretched to splitting on the leanness of his body.

Greta’s eyes followed Darrel’s line of vision.

“A penny for your thoughts,” she said.

“The country’s turning into a toilet,” he replied.

“It’s not that bad, is it?”

He picked a blade of glass off his shoe and flicked it into the breeze. “I guess not,” he said.

“You want to go?” she asked.

“I’ll go get us a couple of snow cones, then we’ll see,” he said.

He worked his way through the crowd to the concession stands that had been set up under a huge canvas awning. The band had stopped playing and he could see Amber and Johnny by the bandstand, talking to the musicians, Johnny’s arm draped across her shoulder. Darrel felt his jaw tighten, the fingernails of his right hand rake across the heel of his palm.

Then Amber left the lawn area and walked directly toward him, the black fringe on her dress swishing on her knees, the yellow light in the sky reflecting on her shoulders.

“Your snow cones, sir,” the kid at the concession stand said.

“What?” Darrel replied.

“Your snow cones? You want them?”

Darrel took one in each hand and found himself standing in Amber’s path, awkward, stupid-looking, like a giant clod just arrived from Nebraska, grains of colored ice sliding down his hands and wrists. Why was she bearing down on him? What had he done wrong this time? “Hi, Amber,” he said.

She turned, her blue eyes searching for the voice that had called her name. Then he realized she had been completely unaware of his presence in the crowd.

“What are
you
doing here?” she said.

“Checking out the music,” he said, trying to smile.

“
What
is your problem? Are you following me again?”

“No.”

“You peek through my windows, you come to my house uninvited, you beat up my boyfriend with a blackjack, and now you trail your BO into the concert I’m attending. Do you see a pattern here?”

People were turning to stare now. His face was burning, his armpits sweating inside his coat. He tried to find words to speak but couldn’t. He shoved his way through the crowd back toward the grass embankment where Greta waited for him. Behind him he thought he heard people laughing.

Greta pulled the snow cones out of his hands. “You look terrible. Sit down. What happened over there?” she said.

“Senator Finley’s daughter holds a grudge. It’s no big deal,” he said.

“Who cares? She’s a brat who should have had her butt pounded a long time ago,” Greta said. She got up from the grass and threw the snow cones in a trash barrel. “Come on, big fellow. Show me where you live.”

She walked a few steps toward the parking lot, then turned and waited for him to follow.

THEY DROVE ACROSS
the bridge and turned into a shady side street that bordered the river. But he couldn’t concentrate. He had started out the evening convinced he was investigating both ecoterrorists and a rogue intelligence operation. Now he’d been made a public fool and he was in the company of a woman whose complexities and motivations he couldn’t begin to guess at. He felt like a man being pushed into a fistfight after his arms had been torn off.

His apartment was located in a century-old refurbished brick building with a grand view of the river and the city. He walked out on the balcony and looked back toward the bridge and the park on the opposite side of the river where the dance was still in progress. Why care what
those
people thought? he asked himself. The civilian world was a joke, a giant self-delusion that had little connection to the realities of nations in conflict.

He remembered a moment of revelation in El Salvador back in the 1980s. A photographer had taken pictures of U.S. advisers carrying weapons in the field and several congressmen had threatened an investigation. The irony was that the El Salvadoran helicopters raking leftist villages with Gatling guns were receiving their coordinates from U.S. AWACS planes high overhead and no media knew anything about it.

Darrel wondered if Amber and her liberal friends at the dance had any idea what was done for them and in their name on the ragged green edges of the American Empire.

But moments of reverie like these were not entirely comforting to Darrel. He also remembered seeing a helicopter gunship coming in low over a rain forest, a molten sun behind it, the downdraft whipping the canopy into a frenzy, then the Gatling guns blowing a series of huts into a pinkish-brown cloud laced with dried thatch. There had been children as well as adult civilians in those huts, and sometimes in the middle of the night he heard the sounds they made before they died.

Greta was making a pitcher of sangria at his bar, although he had not asked her to.

“Still thinking about that spoiled twat?” she said.

“You never told me what you were doing over at Senator Finley’s place.”

“Mine to know,” she said, stirring the ice and red wine with a celery stalk. “But if you insist, I have friends who contribute to his campaign. I suspect you voted for Finley, didn’t you?”

“I don’t vote. I think politics is a sideshow.”

She filled two goblets with sangria, fitted orange slices on the rims, and handed him one. “Here’s to all the jerks who take sideshows seriously,” she said, and clinked his goblet.

“I don’t figure you.”

“What’s to figure?” she said. She drank from her goblet, then set it down and slipped her arms around his waist. He felt her stomach touch his loins like an electric current.

Later, after they had made love in his roll-away bed, she put on her panties and walked without her top to the bar and came back to the bed with their drinks. She had few wrinkles in her skin, no stretch marks, and her muscle tone was extraordinary for her age. She drank from her glass, then leaned over him and kissed him wetly on the mouth. “You didn’t say anything,” she said.

“About what?”

“How you liked it.”

“Good. I liked it real good. You’re quite a woman.”

She tapped him on the lips with a finger and winked. “You’re not bad yourself. Next time, though, give a girl a little compliment. Mind if I use your bathroom?” she said.

A moment later he heard the toilet flush and the faucet running. The band was still playing across the river, the sound of the music floating thinly above the roar of the current. He put on his boxer shorts and walked to the balcony. Somewhere in the crowd on the clipped lawn Amber Finley was still dancing with Johnny American Horse, the moon rising above the mountains into a turquoise sky, the two of them blessed with youth, the admiration of their peers, the knowledge that the earth and all its gifts had been created especially for them.

He had never felt so miserable in his life.

AFTER SUNSET
and another pitcher of sangria, Darrel drove Greta back to her bungalow in the Bitterroot Valley. When she unlocked the front door, neither of them could believe what they saw. Every room was a shambles. The furniture was turned upside down, mattresses and upholstery slashed and gutted, drywall torn off the joists, desk and dresser drawers dumped, even all the canned goods in the pantry and frozen food in the icebox raked on the floor.

The alarm had never sounded because the home invader or invaders had come through the roof, first chopping a hole in it, then smashing a dead-bolted attic door into kindling. The level of violence done to the bungalow created in Darrel’s mind a perpetrator of immense strength and destructive energies, someone with tendons in his arms and hands like steel cable and with absolutely no sense of mercy or restraint at all.

Greta Lundstrum sat down in a deep chair and wept.

“When was the last time you saw Wyatt Dixon?” Darrel asked.

Chapter 10

SUNDAY MORNING,
Amber Finley woke in Johnny’s bed and touched the place where he should have been but felt only the warm, empty space he had occupied. The Jocko Valley was still in shadow, the crest of the hills black-green against the light growing in the sky, the sound of the river loud on the rocks at the foot of the property. She and Johnny had slept with the windows open and the room was cold, and she wished he would come back to bed. In the kitchen she heard pans clanking on the stove and smelled coffee boiling and bacon frying in a skillet.

She raised herself up on her hands and yawned. “Johnny?” she said.

But there was no reply. She glanced down at his pillow, and in the indentation where his head had rested was a small blue-felt box. She picked it up and pried the top back on its spring. Inserted in a satin cushion was a gold ring with a tiny diamond mounted on it.

“I was going to surprise you with some apple flapjacks,” he said from the doorway, an apron tied around his hips, a spatula in his hand.

“Oh, it’s beautiful, Johnny,” she said.

“There’s a Methodist minister up at St. Ignatius who says he’ll marry us any day we want to set it up.”

“Let’s do it this week. Let’s do it tomorrow.”

He sat on the edge of the bed and slipped the ring on her left hand, his eyes lowered so she could not read them. “A couple of things we need to agree on,” he said.