In the Moon of Red Ponies: A Novel (45 page)
THE PHONE RANG
in my kitchen while Temple and I were eating breakfast.
“Amber?” I said.
“Tell it to me fast. My batteries are almost dead,” she said.
“Where are you?”
“Tell it to me, Billy Bob. Hurry!”
“You and Johnny are free.”
“Free?”
“Darrel McComb caught some of Karsten Mabus’s thugs on tape. Johnny’s clear on the homicides.”
“Why didn’t Darrel tell us?”
“Darrel is dead.”
“Dead?”
“One thing at a time. How could Darrel know where you are?” I said.
“He brought antibiotics to Johnny’s cabin. He’d followed me there once during his”—she hesitated—“during his voyeur stage. He figured that’s where we were hiding. I can’t think through this. How did Darrel die?”
“Mabus’s men tortured him to death. Darrel had taped a recorder to his leg. He wouldn’t give Johnny up.”
“Oh, Billy Bob,” she said.
“What?” I couldn’t tell if she was expressing grief over Darrel McComb’s death or at something she hadn’t told me about yet.
“Johnny left before dawn with a gun. He believes the Feds have found us.”
The cell phone made a crackling sound, then went dead.
IN THE PREDAWN
darkness Johnny had heard the thropping sounds of a helicopter and for a moment he did not know if they came from his dreams or somewhere above the gulch. He lay awake as the grayness of the dawn grew inside the trees, then sat straight up in bed when he heard, this time for sure, a motorized vehicle working its way up the log road.
He dressed and slipped the sling of the Lee-Enfield over his shoulder, put on a slouch hat, and without a coat walked out into the cold, up the hill into woods that were speckled with frost. He followed a deer trail to the top of the gulch, then entered a long, flat area where the trees were widely spaced and he could make out the log road that accessed his cabin.
He heard the helicopter again, but the wind was behind him and he couldn’t be sure of the helicopter’s location. Then he saw electric lights flashing below the rim of a mountain across the valley.
Could a logging crew be working there? The big companies were logging old-growth timber now, lifting out three-hundred-year-old trees by helicopter in the early morning and late evening hours so the companies’ handiwork would not be seen in broad daylight.
But would they be logging when there was still fire danger in the woods, when a spark from an engine exhaust or even a chain-saw blade could set the undergrowth ablaze?
He dismissed the possibility of a logging crew. Someone else was out there. But so what?
Hokay hey
, he thought. They were dealing the play. Maybe they’d get a surprise about the hand they’d just dealt themselves.
The Everywhere Spirit and the grandfathers who lived with the four points of the wind would not fail him, he told himself. And with a renewed confidence in his vision of this world and the next, he rested behind a tree and watched the broken contours of the log road turn buff-colored and purple under the paling of the sky.
It did not take long for his worst fears to be confirmed. In the distance he saw government vehicles park on the log road and men file into the shadows of the trees, working their way up the slope in what would be a wide semicircle, sealing off any escape from his cabin.
Darrel McComb had turned out to be a rat after all, he thought.
He waited in the coolness of the trees, the Lee-Enfield’s leather sling wrapped loosely around his left forearm, his left knee resting comfortably on a bed of pine needles. He watched the wind puff the mist out of the trees on the valley floor, then the sky became as light-colored and textured as weathered bone, stained at the bottom by the radiance of a red sun.
The men from the government vehicles were almost through the timber and about to enter an old clear-cut where they would be completely exposed. What fools, Johnny thought. He got to his feet and tightened the sling of his left arm, steadying the carbine against a pine trunk. He was breathing hard now, his heart tripping, a stench like soiled cat litter rising from his armpits. For just a moment he thought he heard the clatter of armored personnel carriers and tanks lurching over sand dunes, then he heard nothing at all, only wind and pinecones bouncing down the hillside
He wiped his eyes on his sleeve and opened his mouth to clear a popping sound in his ears. Up on the hill behind him he heard feet running and twigs breaking. When he turned, he saw a flash of clothing, like an olive field jacket, moving fast through the trees. Somehow they had flanked him and gotten around behind him.
But who cared? He’d waste them front and rear, blow brains and feathers all over the brush, and let the devil sort them out.
On the far side of the clear-cut he saw sunlight glint on brass, on a helmet, on steel, then the government men began to emerge out of the shadows. Johnny aimed through the peep sight on the point man’s breast and felt his finger tighten inside the Lee-Enfield’s trigger guard. In less than a second, a .303 round would be on its way down-range, perhaps starting to topple before it cored through its target.
Then he saw the green workclothes of the man he was about to kill and the red, white, and blue patch sewn above his shirt pocket. The man came on into the clear-cut, oblivious to the threat up on the hillside, a string of black and Indian Job Corps kids behind him, all of them carrying tools and surveyors’ equipment.
“Johnny!” he heard Amber call behind him.
He stepped back from the tree and lowered the carbine, just as a helicopter lifted out of the next valley, its engine roaring, a huge log suspended by a cable from the airframe.
“Johnny, we’re free! I talked to Billy Bob! We can go back!” Amber shouted, waving her arms.
The world seemed to tilt against the horizon. Johnny dropped the Lee-Enfield from his hands, the sling sliding off his bad arm, his eyes swimming. Then he picked the carbine up again, pulled the bolt free, and threw it down the hillside. He smashed the stock across the pine trunk again and again, the wood flying from the metal parts, as though he were vainly attempting to hew down an intransigent monument to his own rage.
“Did you hear me?” she said, skidding down the side of the hill, fighting to keep her balance, the Army field jacket she wore streaked with dew from the trees.
But he sat down on a rock, his head in his hands, and could not answer.
Epilogue
WE HAD INDIAN SUMMER
that year. The nights were crisp, the days warm, the maples heavy with gold and red leaves all over Missoula. College kids climbed every day to the big white cement “M” overlooking the university, and hang gliders turned in lazy circles on the warm updrafts rising from Hellgate Canyon. The evening news at our health club showed brief clips of burned-out American Humvees in the streets of Baghdad but never images of the wounded or the dead. Nor did the camera visit civilian hospitals. The war was
there
, not here, and Indian summer came to us every morning like a balmy wind laced with the smell of distant rain.
I wished for a dramatic denouement to the events of the last few months, a clap of divine hands that would reassure us of an ontological order wherein evil is punished and good rewarded, not unlike the playwright’s pen at work in the fifth act of an Elizabethan tragedy. But neither the death of Darrel McComb nor the revelations of the recorder he had hidden on his person could usurp the tranquillity of the system or dampen our desire to extend the beautiful days of fall into the coming of winter.
But Darrel’s worst detractors had to take their hats off to him. He had created a preface on the tape, explaining how he had anonymously called in a fire alarm on Brendan Merwood’s office, then had planted the recorder in the restroom when he entered the building with the firemen. The material on the tape caused the resignation of Fay Harback, who was discovered to have accepted large unsecured loans from a Mabus lending institution, and it brought about the arrest of Greta Lundstrum for the murder of Charles Ruggles. But Greta died in custody of coronary failure. And the security men who had tortured Darrel McComb to death and who had probably murdered Seth Masterson fled the area and to this date have not been found.
Romulus Finley and Brendan Merwood denied any knowledge of wrongdoing of any kind and were widely believed. If their careers were impaired in any fashion, I saw no sign of it. They played golf together on the links by old Fort Missoula, lifting the ball high above the fairways, their faces glowing with health and good fortune and the respect of their peers. Mortality and the judgment of the world seemed to hold no sway in their lives, but I sometimes wondered if Romulus Finley did not find his own room in hell when he had to look into his daughter’s eyes.
If there was a dramatic turn in the story, it was one that few people will ever know about. After the federal and state charges against Johnny American Horse fell apart, I saw Amber and Johnny coming out of the old city cemetery on the north end of town. The sky was an immaculate blue, the saddles in the mountains veined with snow, the maple leaves cascading like dry paper across the tombstones. I stopped my truck by the entrance and waved at Amber, who seemed lost in thought, a scarf tied tightly under her chin, a clutch of chrysanthemums in her hand.
“Oh, hi, Billy Bob,” she said, as though awakening from sleep. “We couldn’t find Darrel’s grave.”
“It’s in back. I’ll show y’all,” I said.
We walked up a knoll, though trees, into shade that was cold and smelled of damp pine needles and fresh piled dirt. I could see rain falling on a green hill by the river, and the sun was shining inside the rain.
“You think the dead can hear our voices?” she asked.
“Maybe,” I said.
“The sheriff told us Darrel was probably tortured for hours. At any point he could have given up our whereabouts,” she said.
“They would have killed him anyway, Amber,” I said.
Johnny took the flowers from Amber’s hand and spread them on Darrel’s grave. Then he drew himself to attention and saluted.
“I think he’d appreciate that,” I said.
When we came out of the cemetery, the sunshower on the hill by the river had turned itself into a rainbow. I saw Johnny’s eyes crinkle at the corners, and I wondered if, in his mind, the Everywhere Spirit had just hung the archer’s bow in the sky.
So maybe this story is actually about the presence of courage, self-sacrifice, and humility in people from whom we don’t expect those qualities. Not a great deal was changed externally by the events I’ve described here. Wyatt Dixon’s newspaper friends in Dallas published the story of Karsten Mabus’s connections to the sale of chemical and biological agents to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, but no one seemed to care. In fact, Karsten Mabus is currently underwriting legislation in the U.S. Congress that will open up wilderness areas in this country for oil and gas exploration while, at the same time, his companies are receiving contracts for the rebuilding of Iraq’s infrastructure.
But as the old-time African-American hymn admonishes, I don’t study war anymore. I made my separate peace regarding my own excursion into violence at Mabus’s ranch, an event that left two men seriously wounded, consoling myself with the biblical account of Peter, who, after drawing blood with his sword in the Garden of Gethsemane, received only a mild rebuke from the Lord.
In fact, perhaps my greater sin was my presumption that violence, in this case the attempted assassination of Karsten Mabus, can change history for the better. As Wyatt Dixon suggested, Mabus cannot be gotten rid of by a bullet. Mabus is of our own manufacture, an extension of ourselves and the futile belief that the successful pursuit of wealth and power can transform avarice into virtue. His successors are legion and timeless. They need only to wait in the wings for their moment, then walk onstage to thunderous applause, their faces touched with an ethereal light.
I also knew that Mabus had a long memory and my story with him was probably not over.
But I refused to borrow tomorrow’s trouble and make it today’s concern. Our child would be born in spring, and each day Temple seemed happier and more lovely than the day before. During the fall she, Lucas, and I packed a straw hamper with supper and made a point of spending at least two afternoons a week fishing for German browns on the Blackfoot River, not far from the steel suspension bridge that led to Wyatt Dixon’s house.
The river was low, the coppery color of tarnished pennies, the scales of hellgrammites wrapped like spiderweb on the great round boulders that jutted out of the current. Right at sunset the browns would take an elk-hair caddis or blond wolf with such hunger and force they would slap water up on the bank. But German browns begin spawning not long after Labor Day, so we kept none of the fish we caught and instead replaced them in the river, holding their fat bellies cupped in our palms, while they rested, bursting with roe, their gills pulsing, waiting to reenter the current and disappear beneath the reflections of sky, trees, and human faces that can appear and dissolve more quickly than the blink of an eye.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 MY LAW OFFICE was located on the ol
Chapter 2 JOHNNY AMERICAN HORSE’S dreams did
Chapter 3 THE MAN NAMED EDDY was on the surge
Chapter 4 MY SON WAS Lucas Smothers. Illegiti
Chapter 5 DARREL MCCOMB and another detective