In the Moon of Red Ponies: A Novel (32 page)

“That was you said I wasn’t worth the broken rubber that got me born?” Wyatt asked.

“What?” Darrel said.

If Wyatt answered, Darrel did not hear him. Up on the hill a second shape, then a third, moved across the illuminated spot in the trees. His cut-down twelve-gauge pump was in the kitchen, along with a high-powered flashlight. He had a full magazine in his nine-Mike and five shells loaded with double-ought buckshot in the pump, enough to make everyone’s evening an interesting event. But he wondered at his own recklessness and whether his words to Dixon about repressed suicidal intentions were not better directed at himself.

He stepped back from the window. “If I don’t walk out of this, get on your cell and call for the meat wagon.” He flipped his credit card on Wyatt’s bed. “Then buy yourself a dinner on me.”

He turned back toward the window. He thought he heard someone sliding down the slope through slag, perhaps fighting to catch his balance. A fine mist, mixed with smoke, had drifted into the canyon, and the moonlight inside it gave off a sulfurous yellow glow. The floor creaked behind him. He turned curiously, having already forgotten about Wyatt Dixon and his exchange with him.

Wyatt stood shirtless and barefoot in the center of the room, wearing only a pair of jeans, one leg split to accommodate his cast, a Sharps buffalo rifle held at port arms. His mouth made Darrel think of the square teeth carved in the face of a Halloween pumpkin.

“Ain’t no man uses me, Detective. Ain’t no man comes in my home and wipes his feet on me, either,” Wyatt said.

He butt-stroked Darrel so hard across the jaw Darrel’s partial bridge flew from his mouth, his head snapping back into the wall. Then the floor came up and hit him in the face. He felt the room, the house, and the ground it stood on float away like a wood chip on the river’s surface.

Wyatt filled his hand from a box of fifty-caliber shells, stuffed them in his pocket, and shuffled through the kitchen and out the back door. Smoke or ground fog or a mixture of both had rolled off the river into the yard and hung as thick as wet cotton in the trees. He could make out three men at the opening of the potato cellar. He thought he saw two more, up on the hillside, where the old railroad bed used to be, before the tracks had been torn up and hauled away for scrap. What had McComb said? They were coming to pop Wyatt and take out McComb for extra measure. But why were they at the potato cellar? It contained nothing but a set of studded snow tires for his truck. It made no sense.

But the two men on the railroad bed did. They were going to flank the house or pop Wyatt when he moved into the backyard. He went back through the house, out the front, and circled around the side, deep inside the shadows, out of the moonlight.

A rusted tractor, spiked with weeds, its engine stripped for parts, was parked by the back corner of the house, a perfect shield between himself and the men up on the hill and the three using a pair of bolt cutters on the lock and chain strung across the potato cellar door.

The tractor had been used to drag logs off the hillside, and the owner had welded a steel cab over the seat in the event the tractor ever rolled. Wyatt positioned himself at the edge of the cab, took aim across the hood, and clicked back the hammer on the Sharps.

“What do you collection of pissants think you’re doin’?” he said.

Two of the figures automatically crouched down and one ran into the undergrowth at the base of the hill. One of the crouching men shined a flashlight on the tractor, then he and the man next to him opened up, the fire from their pistol barrels slashing into the dark, the rounds whanging and sparking off the tractor. Wyatt squeezed the trigger on the Sharps and felt the rifle’s weight heave into his shoulder. One of the men by the cellar was propelled backwards as though he had been jerked on a wire.

Wyatt worked the lever under the Sharps, ejecting the spent casing, fitted another cartridge into the chamber, and closed the breech. He took aim at one of the men up on the hill and squeezed the trigger. The bullet struck a boulder and whined away into trees. Wyatt sank to one knee and reloaded just as a man broke from the brush and ran up a deer trail into the timber. Wyatt swung his sights on the man’s back, pulled the trigger, and saw the man crash against a ponderosa trunk.

Wyatt’s eardrums were numb from the explosions of the fifty-caliber rounds and he could no longer hear the men running through the slag or the trees. The first man he hit had stayed down, but the second one was being lifted to his feet by the two men Wyatt had seen on the abandoned railroad bed. Wyatt stood erect, trying to keep his weight off his bad leg, worked the lever on the Sharps, and fumbled another round into the chamber.

But the home invaders were gone, except for a man with five days of unshaved whiskers and hair like black snakes who lay slumped against the door of the potato cellar, a hole as big as a thumb in his sternum. Wyatt picked up the man’s wrist and felt for a pulse, then set the man’s hand back in his lap. In the center of the man’s forearm was a red welt, like wire that had been threaded into a design under the skin. Wyatt touched it with his fingertips, felt the hardness in the tissue, then wiped his fingers clean in the dirt.

He stood erect by pressing his weight down on the rifle butt and limped back toward the kitchen door.

Darrel McComb stepped outside, holding his jaw. “Where are they?” he said.

“Gone, except for that one yonder. Sunk one in a second man, but my aim was off.”

“I could lie and mess you up, Gomer. But I’m letting this slide for now. What happens down the road is another matter,” he said.

“You a student of Scripture?”

Darrel waited for him to go on.

“Take a look at the mark on that fellow’s right arm,” Wyatt said.

McComb squatted down by the cellar door and clicked on a pen-light, moving it back and forth in the darkness. “What mark?” he said.

Wyatt limped back to where the dead man lay. The blood had already settled in the lower regions of the body and the face had turned unnaturally white, the eyes fixed and half-lidded. “Shine the light again?” Wyatt said.

He studied the dead man’s forearm, then touched the skin gingerly with the balls of his fingers. He held on to the rifle with two hands and pushed himself to his feet.

“Where you going?” Darrel said.

“To sleep.”

“There’s nothing on the guy’s arm. Why’d you tell me to look at it?” Darrel said.

“He was carrying the mark of the beast. But it ain’t there now. They don’t take it with them when they die. Don’t bust in my house again, McComb. Next time I’ll take your head off.”

Chapter 18

THE DEAD MAN
had been a Marine Corps veteran and inveterate gambler from Elko, Nevada. He had no criminal record, but he had gone into debt to moneylenders in Vegas and disappeared from the computer five years before. The insides of his arms and thighs were laced with scar tissue from repeated hypodermic injections. The most recent ones were infected.

The investigation into the homicide behind Wyatt’s house cleared Wyatt of any culpability, but not Darrel McComb. He was suspended from the department without pay, pending a determination by Internal Affairs regarding the general deterioration of both his private and professional life. He had now shown up in the middle of two firefights without adequate explanation, been witness to the death of a federal agent he was following without authorization, and broken into the house of an ex-felon. To make matters worse, Darrel had been on the premises while the ex-felon killed a man. One of the investigators from Internal Affairs, dead serious, asked Darrel if he had been recently tested for syphilis of the brain. Humorous insiders at the courthouse suggested that Darrel resign his job now and consider a career as a mortician’s assistant in a town that had never heard of him.

The following week I saw him on a steel bench on the walk by the river, feeding pigeons from a bag of caramel popcorn. In his scuffed, boxlike shoes, white socks, ill-fitting dark suit, and pale blue necktie printed with trout flies, he was probably the saddest-looking plainclothes cop I’d ever seen.

“Wyatt Dixon told me everything that happened,” I said.

“So?” he replied.

“If you’d been a little creative in your report, you could have skated and jammed up Dixon at the same time. I think you’re a stand-up guy, Darrel.”

“Fay Harback ratted me out with Internal Affairs.”

“Doesn’t seem like Fay’s style.”

“Yeah? Well, she dimed me good. Those I.A. guys think I’m having a nervous breakdown. They say it’s been a concern to the D.A.’s office for months. Ever try proving to people you’re not nuts?”

“Why were those guys trying to break into Wyatt Dixon’s potato cellar?”

“I spread the word the goods from the Global Research robbery were in there.”

“Through Greta Lundstrum?”

“Maybe.”

“You told the sheriff all this?”

“I don’t trust anyone in that courthouse. You want justice, you got to get it yourself.” He felt the inside of his swollen jaw with his tongue, his eyes slitted.

“Why do you hate Wyatt Dixon?” I asked.

“It’s enough I hate him. He’s a psycho. What do you care, anyway?”

“Sometimes we hate the people who remind us most of ourselves. It can flat eat you up.”

He nodded his head. “You a churchgoing man?” he asked.

“I guess.”

“Keep doing that. It looks good on you,” he said. He dumped his popcorn on the cement, then walked across the lawn of a Holiday Inn to a cul-de-sac where his car was illegally parked.

JOHNNY AMERICAN HORSE
was hurt. He had been hurt several times while federal agents and county lawmen chased him across the state—abrasions, sprains, and cuts from falls—but this time it was serious and he had lost the medical supplies Amber had sent him. Up in the Bob Marshall Wilderness a sharpshooter’s round had ricocheted off a boulder and driven a stone splinter deep into his left forearm. He had removed the splinter, bled the wound, and washed it clean in a stream, but two days later the edges of the hole were red and tender, a tiny pearl of infection in the center. He gashed the wound open with the point of his survival knife, an electrical current climbing instantly into his armpit, then heated the knife blade in his campfire and stuck the point inside his flesh.

He passed out and fell backwards into a patch of moss under a fir tree. When he woke in the morning, western bluebirds filled the branches, their breasts as orange as new rust in the sunrise. He made a poultice of birch bark, wrapped it on his arm with a leather boot-lace, and walked higher up on the mountain, out of the smoke of forest fires, into strips of snow among fir trees.

Fever took him the next day, although he wasn’t sure if it came from infection in his arm or bad water in a slough. He wandered deeper into the Bob Marshall, climbing to the top of the Grand Divide, from which he could see Marias Pass and the ancient home of the Blackfoot Indians. Farther east, beyond the roll of the plains, was the home of the Crow, the Northern Cheyenne, and the Oglala Sioux. The Blackfeet called the place he stood on the Backbone of the World. Somewhere in the distance, beyond the vastness of the landscape below him, was a place called the Sand Hills, where the dead went to live with the buffalo and the grandfathers who watched over the four corners of the universe. Far to the east, it was raining on the hills, and clouds veined with lightning moved across the sky like bison flecked with St. Elmo’s fire.

In that moment Johnny American Horse knew he would never be alone.

Canned food, a GI mess kit, and a canteen filled with apricot brandy, even a GI can opener tied on a thong to an obsidian arrow-point, had been left for him under rocks or hung in trees by other Indians, all of whom knew Amber and told her where Johnny was and where he was going. But the living were not the only friends Johnny had. Perhaps because of his fever, or perhaps not, he believed his odyssey across the Backbone of the World had intersected the Ghost Trail.

On it he saw the spirits of Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and the holy man Black Elk. But there were others on the Ghost Trail who had no names. Heavy Runner’s band, who had been massacred on the Marias River by the U.S. Army in 1871, still lived inside the morning fog and looked at him with hollow eyes from inside the trees. The hundreds of Blackfoot men, women, and children who had died of smallpox and were supposedly buried in a pit on Ghost Ridge outside Browning sat on rocks high overhead, beckoning, their agency-issue clothes hanging in rags.

When he passed them by and waved farewell, they did not appear to him again. Instead, a lone Indian woman materialized on a ledge, inside a mist, above a stream that boiled over rocks. She wore beaded moccasins and a white buckskin dress fringed with purple glass beads, eagle feathers tied to her braids. He did not have to ask who she was. For years she had been seen not only by Indians but by the military personnel who guarded the intercontinental missile silos positioned along the eastern slope of the northern Rockies. Soldiers standing sentry swore they had seen her inside secured areas that no unauthorized person could have entered, her dress glowing in the darkness, her large eyes filled with an indescribable sadness.

Once, when Johnny had lost his coat crossing a stream, she pointed to a cave behind a cluster of box elder. Inside it, he found a blanket pack rats had made a nest in and six cans of condensed milk. When he slipped on the edge of a crevasse and almost fell three hundred feet onto rocks, she appeared on the cliff and moved a ponderosa branch aside so he could see handholds cut into the stone by Blackfeet hundreds of years ago.

He circled back through the Bob Marshall, crossed the middle fork of the Flathead River, and kept going south toward the Swan Peaks, his arm throbbing, his fever like a warm friend inside his clothes. He no longer thought in terms of calendar days. In fact, he began to think of time as a self-contained entity that could not be compartmentalized. The present disappeared inside morning fog or the misty haze of smoke and rain that lay on the mountains at sunset, smudged out as though by a giant thumb, leaving only the woods, the creeks, the peaks against the sky, then suddenly a trapper’s log cabin hidden in a hollow, flint tools washed loose from a hill by snowmelt, a rusted ax head buried deep in a tree trunk, a rocker box standing starkly in a dry streambed, tepee rings on a shady knoll, a turkey track carved on a flat rock, pointing to the North Star.