In the Moon of Red Ponies: A Novel (26 page)

Farther up the road a steel-gray limo was parked in the dappled shade of cottonwood trees. Beyond the trees, I saw the helicopter that had buzzed the creek sitting idly in an open field where the grass was turning yellow, the pilot smoking a cigarette.

“That’s a P.I. badge, partner. It doesn’t carry a lot of weight on a rural road in western Montana,” I said to the man at my window.

“Whatever you say, sir. But Mr. Mabus would like the pleasure of your company,” he replied. He was thick-necked, his blond hair neatly combed, his gaze focused down the road so as not to give the impression his eyes were being invasive behind his shades.

“Need you to move your vehicle,” I said.

“Yes, sir, we’ll gladly do that. Will you first walk over and speak to Mr. Mabus?” He removed his shades and tried to smile. His facial skin was like pig hide, his eyes dead-looking in the same way a barroom bouncer’s are.

“All right, brother,” I said.

He opened the door for me and continued to hold it while I got out on the road. “You want to take your hat, sir?” he asked.

“No, because I’ll be coming right back. Then we’ll have this bullshit behind us,” I replied.

He smiled again, his eyes unfocused.

But I was making a point to the hired help, a man for whom restraint was built into his paycheck. The very fact that I was approaching Karsten Mabus’s limo indicated I was accepting his imperious behavior. He pushed open the back door and waited for me to get in. He was dressed in the soft, earth-tone fabrics of a gentleman rancher or horse breeder, one arm propped across the top of the creamy, rolled leather seat. Two young women in pin-striped suits and white hose sat across from him, their knees close together, their hands folded in their laps. “Please join us for a late breakfast or an early lunch,” he said.

“Where do you get off bracing me on the road, Mr. Mabus?” I said.

“I don’t believe they did that, did they? It was meant to be an invitation. Congratulations on your son’s scholarship,” he said.

“How do you know about my boy’s scholarship?”

“I contribute to a few educational endowments. The paperwork floats across my desk sometimes.”

“You mentioned my father’s accidental death on a previous occasion. Frankly, I resent the hell out of your intrusiveness into my family’s history.”

“Let’s clear this up, Mr. Holland. I own several ranch properties in western Montana. Their worth is somewhere around one hundred million dollars. I plan to subdivide and put the property up for sale over a five-year period. I need a good local attorney to oversee those sales, not someone from New York or Los Angeles—someone like you, a fellow who knows cattle, horses, indigenous grasses, irrigation methods, and land values. These two ladies here looked into your background. That’s how I knew about the circumstances of your father’s death. My purposes were purely business-oriented and professional. I apologize if I gave you any other impression.”

His speech was husky, as though in spite of his wealth he was perhaps a shy man, a bit diffident, but sincere and forthright. “Get in. Please,” he said, opening his hand to me.

It was warm inside the cottonwoods, and insects were worrying my neck and eyes, a shaft of sunlight shining into my eyes. I sat down on the leather seat, inside the coolness and leather comfort of the limo. The perfume of the two young women smelled like flowers in a garden. “Can you handle another client?” he said.

“I’m a one-loop operation. You need a firm,” I replied.

He laughed. “I like the way you talk, Mr. Holland. I’d rather pay you six percent on those ranch sales than a bunch of fraternity fellows in Denver.”

I realized he was offering me a situation worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not eventually millions. I started to speak, but he cut me off. “I’ll tell you a fairly well known secret. Terrorists will attack us again. Every government official and everyone in federal law enforcement knows it. It will be large scale and aimed at another American city, perhaps several of them. When that happens, half of the West Coast will want to migrate to small towns in Montana, Idaho, and Utah. What do you think the value of this property will be then?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care. I’m not a speculator, Mr. Mabus. On that note I’m going to thank you for your offer and say good-bye.”

“What can I say?” he said, lifting his hands in good-natured surrender. “Have a fine day. I admire your principles. My guess is you’re a hell of a guy.”

He shut the car door behind me, then rolled down the window on its electric motor and snapped his fingers several times at the men who had stopped my truck. They climbed wordlessly into their vehicles and drove away, the dust from their wheels floating back into my face.

Chapter 15

I SHOULD HAVE SEEN
it coming, or at least given more consideration to Darrel McComb’s prediction about Johnny American Horse’s legal fate; but like most people who believe that humankind is basically good and capable of conducting its affairs in a reasonable way, I daily avoided the inescapable conclusion that collective stupidity has often been the norm in the long and sorry history of human progress, and that perhaps the soundest argument for the existence of God is the fact that the human race has survived in spite of itself.

One week after the Fourth of July, charges were filed on Johnny for the shooting death of a federal agent. But when two dozen government lawmen and sharpshooters in bulletproof vests descended on his house, Johnny was gone, literally out the back door, up the hill and into the Mission Mountains, running with a survival knife, a new trade ax he had bought at the powwow, and one arm looped through a backpack.

Government helicopters buzzed the treetops in the high country for four days and agents on horseback threaded their way up rock-strewn ravines, only to find dead campfires, a hand line and fishing hook by a frozen lake, the cleated tracks of alpine shoes through a griz feeding area, a sweat lodge knocked together from fir boughs and blackened stones.

But it was not a safe bet Johnny was in the Missions. There were sightings of him up in the Swans, in the Bitterroots and the Cabinets, even over the Divide in the Bridgers and the Bear Paws.

Amber denied any knowledge of where he might be. She was held forty-eight hours in an isolation cell as a possible accomplice and questioned repeatedly by both FBI and ATF agents while her and Johnny’s house was torn apart. While she was being questioned and her home destroyed, her father remained in Washington and made no attempt to contact her or me, even though he knew I still represented her.

Six days after Johnny had hauled freight into the high country, I saw his new counsel, Brendan Merwood, at the café across the street from the courthouse. Brendan was eating steak and eggs at a table by himself, cutting his food neatly, spearing small bites into his mouth with the tines of his fork held upside down. He wore a long-sleeved pale blue shirt, with white cuffs and a rolled white collar. His posture was simian, his big head almost bald, except for the close-cropped hair around his ears and the back of his neck. The tan he’d worked on dutifully in Hawaii gleamed under the indirect lighting.

“Join me?” he said.

“Thanks, I’m meeting someone,” I lied, and sat down at the counter. I picked up a menu and began to read it.

“Too bad you got screwed on that bail deal,” he said.

I set the menu down and looked at him in the mirror. He had gone back to eating his food. I turned around on the stool. “Which bail deal?” I said.

“You didn’t know? Those Indian bondsmen Johnny hired didn’t process their paperwork. If you ask me, they chickened out. His bond is still on you. That must be the shits.”

When I got home that afternoon, I could hardly face Temple.

“We’ll owe two hundred thousand dollars?” she said.

“If Johnny doesn’t appear for trial in the murder of Charlie Ruggles.”

“This can’t be happening to us.”

“I checked with the court. The bond was never transferred. I called these Indian bondsmen five times. Their secretary kept telling me she had given them my messages but they’d been chasing down a bail skip in Butte. I drove up to the res and found one of them in a bar. He denies knowing anything about Johnny’s bond or transferring it from us to him.”

“Why did Johnny tell you we were off the hook?”

“He thought we were. That bondsman was lying. Somebody got to him.”

“I think Johnny fed us to the wolves.”

“I doubt if he knows this has happened, Temple.”

“How could he? He’s camping in the mountains while we’re about to lose our home.”

She went into the kitchen and started preparing supper. It was 7
P.M
. Thursday, the one evening of the week during summer we always saved to attend the open-air dance in the park by the river. This particular evening a bluegrass group was playing, and a late afternoon shower had dropped the temperature ten degrees and filled the air with the smell of flowers and lawn sprinklers striking warm cement. But in the kitchen I heard Temple slam a cabinet door and clang a skillet on the stove, then make a grunting sound as she struggled with a can opener, just before slicing her hand.

I turned off the stove and ran tap water over her hand. In her anger she tried to resist my help, but I held on to her, gathering her against me, pressing my face in her hair, holding her tight, even when she hit me in the back and sides with her fists, the cut on her thumb streaking my shirt with blood.

ON SATURDAY, LUCAS
came to the house, a torn envelope and a sheet of gold-and-silver-embossed stationery in his hand. “I cain’t figure this. Don’t them people know how to run their own business?” he said.

I took the letter from his hand and read it, then put it in my back pocket. I tried to keep my face empty. “I’ll give them a call Monday,” I said.

“How can they give me a scholarship, then take it back because I’m an out-of-state student? My application already said I was from out of state. It’s like they’re calling me a liar.”

“There’s a guy around here by the name of Karsten Mabus. He’s a donor to this educational foundation. I think he’s trying to squeeze me by going through you,” I said.

“What’s he want from you?”

“It has to do with Johnny American Horse.”

“Well, throw that damn letter away. I wouldn’t use the sonofabitch’s money to wipe my—”

“I’ll call Monday.”

He studied a distant place on the hill across the road, his thumbs hitched in his pockets, his brow furrowed under the brim of his hat. His cheeks were flushed, his eyes vexed, but I knew his disappointment would not last. Lucas was endowed with both a childlike innocence and a love of his art, and he didn’t care two cents for the world’s opinion or the material rewards it might offer or deny him.

His face seemed to reach a conclusion in his thought process. “Y’all eat breakfast?” he asked.

“Not yet. How about tanking down some pork chops and buttermilk biscuits with us?”

“Sure I’m not barging in?”

“Not at all.”

“Want to wet a line later on?” he said.

“You got it.”

I could have learned a lot from Lucas.

MONDAY MORNING
I called the educational foundation in Denver and tried to extract an explanation from the personnel there for the retraction of Lucas’s scholarship. I was put on hold twice, cut off once, and finally told by a man with a sonorous voice that a clerical error had been made, that Lucas was ineligible for the particular award that had been given him, and that he could apply in another category. “We’re sorry for the inconvenience,” he said.

“That’s my son you’re jerking around,” I said.

“Thank you for your inquiry,” he replied, and quietly hung up.

An hour later, I received an office visit from Brendan Merwood. He was a strange man, one I had never understood. His skill as a trial lawyer was well known throughout the Northwest, but he seemed to have no principles whatsoever. He was a glad-hander, a sycophant, and a toady for every meretricious enterprise in the state, as though his own merits and well-earned success as an attorney brought him no sense of validation. Even his pro bono work seemed to be a public exercise in self-flattery. Now, he sat in my office like a battle-scarred feral hog, reeking of aftershave lotion, effusive with so much goodwill that I believed Brendan Merwood was a genuinely frightened man.

“I think you got a bum deal on this bail bond business,” he said. “You tried to help Johnny in good faith, and look what happened. Both of you thought he’d be there for trial and never saw this tragedy with the federal agent in the making.” He shook his head to show his sense of mystification at the unfairness of the universe. “I just don’t think innocent folks should get hurt like this. That’s why I want to help.”

“What are you trying to tell me, sir?”

“You and I both know this is all connected in some way with ecoterrorism. Somebody is sitting on those materials that were stolen from Global Research. Those materials have got to get back into the right hands—either the government’s or the owner’s. Are my words getting through here, Billy Bob? Talk to Johnny’s wife. She’ll listen to you.”

“No, she won’t.”

He crossed his legs and pulled at one knee, as though it were injured, his eyes lifting toward the ceiling. “Once in a while you have to make a concession. You make the concession and you move on. That’s how the world works. This is a good community. We don’t need all this trouble,” he said.

“My wife and I didn’t cause it. But somebody is doing his best to destroy us.”

“I wouldn’t know anything about that. I guess people fight with the weapons that are available to them.”

“So do I.”

“I’ve heard about your history in Texas. I don’t think that’s going to work here, my friend. Believe it or not, I’m on your side,” he said.

“I think in your way you probably are. So thank you for coming in, Brendan. Tell the man you work for I’ll kill him if he tries to hurt my family.”

He shook his finger back and forth. “This conversation is one in which we didn’t communicate very well. That’s the only memory I’ll have of it. If Johnny gets in touch with you, tell him to surrender himself or to call me. I don’t want that boy hurt. God’s truth on that,” he said.