In the Moon of Red Ponies: A Novel (38 page)

At Christmas, the leader of the hunters received a greeting card inscribed with a single line: “I’m still out here.”

“Why so lost in thought tonight?” Greta asked.

“Thinking about you, Greta. Want to dance?” he said.

“The food’s almost ready.”

“It’ll wait. Come on,” he said.

He put one arm around her waist and lifted her right hand in the air. Bunny Berrigan’s “I Can’t Get Started” was playing on the stereo. Darrel pulled Greta against him, pushing her arms around his neck, as though he were going to hug her. But he let his fingers slide up her side, until he felt a knot about five inches below her armpit. The balls of his fingers traced its outline against her shirt. The knot had not grown in size, but it was harder, the configuration more defined.

“Don’t,” she said.

“It hurts?”

“I told you, it’s an insect bite. It got infected.”

“Let’s take a look at it.”

“It’s time to eat.”

“Take off your shirt.”

“Come into the bedroom and I might do that,” she said, half smiling.

“The romantic jerk-around is over, Greta. You did me. Know the expression ‘First time shame on you, second time shame on me’? You sicced the lowlifes on me at Dixon’s place. I almost got my kite burned, Greta. Problem is, I was onto you and it didn’t work. You’re in deep shit, girl.”

Her face was only inches from his, the dance music still playing. She started to speak, her eyes wide with both fear and shock.

“No, no,” he said, touching her lips with one finger. “You don’t lie anymore, Greta. While you thought I was asleep, I heard you talking to your trained cretins. So I told you the Global Research goods were at Dixon’s place and I was going to take him down. Sure enough, your pals showed up that night, ready to pop both me and the peckerwood. You’re a Judas, Greta. For cops, that’s a category below drug dealers and pimps. Ever hear of the Contras?”

“Who?” she said, all of it going too fast for her now, her mouth twitching, an ugly smell from the kitchen wrapping itself around her face. “The food’s burning. I left the burner on high.”

“That’s good, because we’re not going to be eating it. I was with the Contras in northern Nicaragua, Greta, saw some mean shit go down that I don’t like to remember. I was an adviser to Somoza’s Rattlesnake Brigade, badass dudes who wired people up to field generators, got fed by the peasants, or burned the ville. But we had a problem—a turncoat was pipelining intel into the Sandinistas. One day out on the trail the lieutenant stops the column and says to him, ‘You got to dig a hole, then take a rest, man. We’re going give you a good meal, some rum, you want to get laid, there’s time for that, too, man. But then you got to rest.’

“The turncoat knows what’s about to happen. First he lies, then he lies and he lies and he lies some more, and when that doesn’t work, he begs on his knees. My job was to stay out of it, but I didn’t want to see the guy get whacked. I kept hoping he’d do the right thing, act dignified, not insult people with his lies. But he was a dumb guy and thought he could lie his way out of it, then he thought he could beg and make people feel sorry for him. Know what that did? It made it easy for everybody else. Someone finally shut him up with an AK, splattered his salad all over a ditch, and nobody could have cared less.

“If the guy had been stand-up and told the truth, if maybe he’d given up the name of his contact, chances are the others would have let him go back to his family. You hearing me on this? Don’t lie. Don’t degrade yourself. I’m the only person who can save your ass. No, don’t look away, don’t start crying, either. That stuff belongs on soap operas, not in big-people land, Greta. Why’d you kill Charlie Ruggles? Poor ole Charlie, sawed-off little jarhead gets snuffed by a broad, probably humiliating as hell for him.”

He thought she was going to faint. She sank heavily into a chair, her face splotched with color, her green eyes as round as Life Savers. “I had to. I lost control of my life years ago. My second husband was a martial arts instructor who did security work for Karsten Mabus. I went to work for him, too.”

“That means you
had
to smother a guy in a hospital bed?”

Her hands were fists, her arms folded across her breasts, her throat as taut as a chunk of sewer pipe. Then the fingers of her left hand seemed to spread protectively over the lump on her side. “Mabus owns people. You can’t guess at what it’s like,” she said.

Her face was uplifted, her eyes fixed on his now. The direction of the conversation was not one Darrel liked. The motivation in most crimes was money. Not sex, not power. It was money. Money could buy you all the sex and power you wanted. A premeditated homicide, in this case holding a pillow down on the face of a potential government witness, was done for money. But Darrel’s own questions about the mark or lump or whatever it was on Greta’s side would not let go of him.

“Dixon says the crew working for Mabus have the mark of the beast on them. I don’t like to even repeat bullshit like that, but what the fuck is he talking about?” he said.

She bent over in the chair, her hands pressed on the sides of her head. “I’m going to be sick,” she said.

“Are you in a cult?”

“Cult? You idiot!
Cult?
No one can be that stupid.”

Her skin had turned as gray as a cadaver’s, her upper lip beaded with moisture. Then she sniffed at the air again, remembering the food on the stove. She ran into the kitchen and shut off the flame under a pan filled with blackened onions and scorched hamburger patties.

“Turn around and look at me,” Darrel said.

Instead, she swung the pan at his head. He blocked her arm and food that smelled like it had been dug out of an incinerator splattered all over the walls. But she wasn’t finished. She struck at his face and tried to claw his eyes, and he had to pin her arms against her sides and squeeze them against her torso in a bear hug until the tension made her breath seize in her chest and her spine pop.

He saw her mouth open, and he knew what was coming next. He released her, and she ran to the toilet and threw up, then went into the dry heaves on her knees, clenching the edge of the bowl, her back shaking, her skin the color of cardboard.

Darrel sat on the rim of the tub and flushed the toilet for her, then wet a towel and put it in her hand. “Why’d you rat-fuck me, Greta?” he said.

“Because I hate you,” she replied.

“For once you’re probably telling the truth,” he said, his eyes flat, concealing the recognition that her words could still wound him.

He leaned over and raised her shirt, exposing a dry, star-shaped swelling under her arm.

“That looks like a jungle ulcer. We used to get them in Nicaragua,” he said.

“Rah-rah for you,” she said.

“It’s just a skin problem, so now we got that out of the way. You’re going to wear a recorder into Karsten Mabus’s house, Greta.”

“No, I’m not.”

“I still don’t think you understand my status. I’m effectively canned, in large part because of you. That means we’re not using rule books here. You wear a recorder, or I put out the word you’re a federal informant. I also stoke up Wyatt Dixon and let him know who sent that collection of killers to his house. Want Wyatt coming around to see you again, Greta?”

“I have melanoma. It’s already gone into my organs. You can’t hurt me,” she said. She tried to hold her eyes on his, but they watered around the edges and she blinked and looked away.

“Good try,” he said.

JOHNNY AMERICAN HORSE’S
window at St. Pat’s looked out upon a neighborhood of early-twentieth-century buildings and sidewalks shaded by dense rows of maple trees. The buildings were brick, solidly constructed, undiminished by time, but the porches were made of wood and the cracked paint on them gave the dwellings a look of weathered gentility. Blue-collar people and college students lived in the buildings, and on Thursday evenings during the summer many of them walked together down to the free concert and dance in the park by the river. The yards were green and cool, sometimes bordered by tulip beds, and the people who lived in the apartments planted vegetable gardens between the alleyways and the back porches, which were usually enclosed with latticework. If a man chose to live in town, this was a fine neighborhood to raise a family in, Johnny thought.

When he woke Tuesday morning he was handcuffed to the railing of the bed and could not see out the window into the street, but even before the soft edges of his sleep had disappeared from his mind, he knew there was something different about this day. He could hear the sweep of rain on the window glass—not a shower, either, but a hard, driving rain that ran off the eaves and through the guttering and over the hospital lawn into storm drains. Johnny could hear the wet sound of automobile tires on the slickness of the streets, a deep roll of thunder resonating in the hills, the thick flapping of an American flag someone had forgotten to take down from the hospital pole, and he knew the summer drought was broken, that the fires that threatened his ranch up on the Jocko were turning into steam.

He pushed the button for the nurse who would come to the room and then tell the U.S. marshal on the door that Johnny needed to be unhooked so he could use the bathroom. The rain clicked on the glass, and he could hear a freight train blowing somewhere west of town, perhaps heading into Alberton Gorge. After the marshal unsnapped the cuff on his wrist, Johnny stood by his bed and gazed out the window at the dark green sogginess of the maples on the street, the cars driving with their lights on in the middle of the day, and the columns of smoke rising from extinguished fires on the mountainsides. All that separated him from the outside world was a pane of glass and a thirty-foot drop onto a spongy square of flooded lawn.

He used the toilet, then waited for the marshal to hook him up again.

“It looks like you’re going to Fort Lewis tomorrow. Sorry to lose you, Johnny. You play a mean game of checkers,” the marshal said.

He was a heavyset, prematurely balding man named Tim, who had a small Irish mouth and big hands, and was evidently addicted to the candy bars he carried in his pockets as a surrogate for the booze he was trying to get rid of at Twelve-Step meetings.

“Who told you that about Fort Lewis?” Johnny asked, lying back on the bed, the handcuff chain pulling tight on his wrist.

“Forget I mentioned it. That’s true, you have the DSC from Operation Desert Storm?”

“Yeah, you want it?”

“Shouldn’t kid like that,” Tim said.

A floral delivery man tapped on the door and Tim let him in. The delivery man started to set a vase of cut flowers on the table by Johnny’s bed. “Let me see that first,” Tim said.

Tim peeled back the decorative foil wrapped around the vase, shifted the flower stems around in the water, and examined the greeting card inside the small envelope attached with a paper clip to the foil. Then he set the vase down on the table. “Looks like somebody sent you a nice bouquet. Can I ask you something?” he said.

“Sure,” Johnny said.

“How’d you get messed up like this?”

“It was easy. I was me,” Johnny said.

“You sound like you might be a Twelve-Step guy yourself.”

“I’m not,” Johnny replied.

As the marshal and the nurse left the room, Johnny glanced through the opened door and saw a group of painters pass by, carrying buckets, tarps, ladders, and brushes, all of them dressed in paint-flecked caps and coveralls. The last man in the group was an Indian from the res. His eyes, as unreadable as obsidian, swept across Johnny, then the door closed.

Johnny removed the card from the envelope on the flower vase and opened it. It read:

They still won’t let me visit you, but look across the street at noon and you’ll see your gal with the 8:30 blues. We’re going to beat this, baby.

Love, A.

Johnny stared at the paper clip on the envelope, then looked at the glass in the window that separated him from the outside world. He looked at the glass a long time, then gave up whatever thoughts were on his mind and ate the breakfast an orderly brought in on a tray. At eleven-thirty, just before he was scheduled to be cuffed to a wheelchair and rolled down the corridor for X-rays, Johnny slipped the paper clip into his mouth between his gum and cheek.

The rain had turned to hail, and it bounced on the windowsill as brightly as mothballs against the grayness of the day. When Johnny closed his eyes and listened to the hail and the roll of thunder in the hills, he imagined a vast landscape where the mesas rose into steel-colored stormheads forked with lightning while down below the hooves of red ponies shook the earth. At this moment, for no reason that made logical sense, he knew his dreams were real and not fantasies and that all the gifts of creation still awaited him, were still his, as tangible as a woman’s smile on the far side of a street on a rainy day.

THAT MORNING
I left the office and went home, unable to work, concentrate, or think on any subject except the telephone threat that had been made against Temple and the child she was carrying. I had now talked to the sheriff’s office, Fay Harback, and the FBI agent Francis Broussard and had gotten nowhere. Lucas had been set up on a bogus marijuana bust and suspended from the university, and Temple had almost drowned in the Blackfoot River after the brake-fluid line on our truck had been cut. No one was in custody for any of the damage done to my family, nor had anyone even been questioned. My own relationship with every law agency in the area had become that of gadfly and public nuisance.

Most television cop dramas make use of the following storyline: A likable individual is raped or assaulted, or a hardworking family loses one of its members to a serial killer, or a blue-collar stiff with a juvenile felony on his record gets jammed on a bad beef and is about to be sent to the pen. What happens? A half-dozen uniforms and five detectives with shields hanging from their necks show up at the crime scene and invest the entirety of their lives in seeing justice done. Every law officer in the script, male and female, seems to have an IQ of 180 and the altruism of St. Francis of Assisi. They verbally joust with the rich and powerful, walk into corporate board meetings where they hook up CEOs, and are immune to the invective flung at them by an unappreciative citizenry.