In the Moon of Red Ponies: A Novel (5 page)

The car was low-slung, the body weather-scoured almost paintless, the engine far more powerful than the age of the car would indicate. It passed his house in a rooster tail of dust and disappeared around a bend, beyond a grove of cottonwoods. Less than two minutes later it came back up the road, gradually slowing, pulling into the cottonwoods. The driver cut the headlights and in the darkness Johnny heard at least one car door squeak open on an ungreased hinge.

He stood up in the pines and strained his eyes at the road. The air was cold now, smelling of the river and damp stone and timothy grass that was sodden with dew in the fields. When the wind gusted across the valley floor the leaves swirled like water in the cottonwoods, and suddenly Johnny could see two men, standing as stationary as statues, amidst thousands of fluttering green leaves.

The men crossed the road and headed toward his house, stooped in simian fashion, as though somehow their abbreviated posture would make them less visible. One of them stopped and raised his hand in a clenched fist, as a foot soldier would in order to signal a halt. Then the two of them stepped carefully over the trip wire that Johnny had strung with tin cans, each containing a handful of gravel.

The two figures moved around the side of the house, peering in each window. One of them went to the shed and put his hand on the hood of Johnny’s pickup truck, as though to determine if the metal was still warm. He rejoined his companion, and the two of them stepped gingerly onto the back porch and went to work on the door lock.

Johnny followed a deer trail that wound laterally through the pines in the opposite direction from his house, then walked down the slope on the far side of his barn, so he could remain out of view and beyond the angle of vision of the two men picking the lock on his door.

As he came out of the horse lot, he let his heavy coat drop to the ground, moving quickly into the lee of his house. He worked his way toward the back corner, no more than ten feet from the men, who were still on the porch. He held his bowie knife in his left hand, the trade ax in the other, breathing slowly through his mouth, his back flat against the clapboards. Out in the darkness he heard horses nickering, their hooves thudding on packed earth.

The two men had been unsuccessful with the lock. One of them stood back and smashed the door out of the jamb with his foot, shattering glass on the floor. Both men burst into the house, crashing into the bedroom, only to discover that Johnny was not there.

“I told you he was onto us. You wouldn’t listen.” It was the voice of the man Johnny had seen shooting pool that morning, a man who wore roses and parrots on his arms to tell him who he was because someone had stolen all expression from his face.

“Turn off the light,” the other man said.

“We got to finish it, Eddy.”

“No.” One of the men clicked off the light in the bathroom. “Another day. We find his cooze, then we whack him.”

“The guy’s an Indian. He’s out there.”

“Tell me about it.”

Johnny heard them move into the front room and unlock the door. A moment later a board squeaked on the porch and the two men walked into the yard, into the moonlight, each of them turning in a 360-degree circle as they did. Johnny picked up a rock and pitched it over the peak of the house to the far side. Both men jerked around, staring into the shadows at the source of the sound.

The man named Eddy, who wore thick, horn-rimmed glasses, held a cut-down double-barrel shotgun in both hands, the shoulder stock wood-rasped into a pistol grip. The man with tattoos carried nothing in his hands but was reaching behind him now to extract the blue-black heavy shape of a semiautomatic stuck down inside the back of his belt.

Johnny closed his eyes briefly, heard the words
hokay hey
inside his mind, and hit the two men running, just as they were turning toward the sound of his work boots coming hard across the grass.

The man with horn-rimmed glasses seemed the more surprised of the two men, his eyes distorting like a goldfish’s behind the thickness of his lenses. But nonetheless he was able to raise his cut-down shotgun for what should have been a deafening explosion of flame and lead shot into Johnny’s chest. Instead, his angle of fire was obstructed by his friend, the man incapable of expression, whose weapon had caught in his belt.

Johnny whipped the trade hatchet into the neck of the man named Eddy and slashed his knife across the face of the man who did not know how to smile or to be sad. Later, he would not recall with any exactitude the struggle that followed, but he knew the blows he visited upon the intruders from an industrial city on the shores of a great lake were more than enough to ensure they would not present themselves to him again, at least not outside the bright edges of his sleep.

Chapter 3

THE MAN NAMED EDDY
was on the surgeon’s table four hours. His full name, according to his driver’s license and a GI dog tag tucked down in his wallet, was Edward T. Bumper of New Baltimore, Michigan, a lakeside community on the shores of Lake Erie. The next day an information check through the National Crime Information Center would indicate that Eddy Bumper had no criminal record whatsoever, not even a traffic citation. In fact, other than the eleven years he had spent in the lower ranks of the United States Army, he seemed to have been hardly more than a cipher in the Detroit area, where apparently he had spent most of his life.

During the ambulance ride to the hospital, he offered no explanation for his presence at the house of Johnny American Horse, nor did he make any entreaty to his attendants, in spite of his obvious pain, or express interest in contacting friends, family, or minister. His only request of any kind was to the surgeon: If possible, he wanted a local rather than general anesthetic.

At 2:43
A.M
. Edward T. Bumper opened his eyes wide on the operating table, stared up into the brilliant glare of lights overhead, and said, “I need to get to the airport.”

Then he died.

His fall partner in the home invasion was another matter. Raised in a state-run orphanage, released from juvenile court at age seventeen to the United States Marine Corps, Michael Charles Ruggles served eight years in the Third World, received a general discharge, and began to get into trouble again, as though his time in the Corps was simply a respite from his true career.

But the charges filed against him were those consistent with a run-of-the-mill miscreant rather than a professional killer: solicitation of a prostitute, jackrolling an elderly person, possession of marijuana, failure to pay child support, drunk driving, solicitation and battery of a prostitute, and passing counterfeit currency at a racetrack. In each instance the charges were dismissed without explanation.

But I knew none of these things until the following day, when Johnny American Horse called my office from the jail.

“Have you been charged?” I asked.

“No. They’re just talking to me,” he replied.

“Cops don’t just talk. As of this moment you answer no questions unless I’m present.”

“Amber’s with me,” he said.

“Did you hear me?”

At the courthouse a deputy escorted me to an interview room, where two plainclothes cops were sitting with Johnny at a wood table on which there was a can of Coca-Cola and a Styrofoam cup, a video camera mounted high on the wall. Johnny could not have looked worse. He had washed his skin clean, but blood splatter had dried in his hair and horsetails of it were all over his clothes.

“This ends now, gentlemen,” I said.

One of the detectives was a towering, bull-shouldered man named Darrel McComb, whose clothes always seemed to exude a scent of testosterone. “We were talking about baseball. Think those Cubbies are cursed?” He grinned.

I sent Amber and Johnny across the street to my office and went downstairs to see the district attorney. “Put Darrel McComb back in his kennel,” I said.

“Treated unfairly, are we?” she said, looking up from some papers on her desk.

“McComb questioned Johnny without Mirandizing him. He also ignored Johnny’s request for a lawyer.”

“Your client is not under arrest. So get lost on the Miranda. Also quit pretending Johnny’s an innocent man.”

“These guys tried to kill him, in his own house. What’s the matter with you?”

“He lay in wait for them with a tomahawk and a knife. Why didn’t he dial 911, like other people?”

“The Second Amendment says something about telephones?”

“Don’t drag that right-wing crap into my office.”

“I don’t want Darrel McComb anywhere near my client.”

“What’s wrong with McComb?”

“For some reason the words ‘racist’ and ‘thug’ come to mind.”

“Get out of here, Billy Bob.”

Twenty minutes later, after Amber Finley had driven Johnny back to the res, I glanced out the window and saw her father cross the intersection and enter my building, his face effusive, his hand raised in greeting to street people who probably had no idea who he was. Romulus Finley’s political detractors characterized him as an ignorant peckerwood, a Missouri livestock auctioneer who fell off a hog truck and stumbled into the role of United States senator. But I believed Romulus was far more intelligent than they gave him credit for.

He sat down in front of my desk, pulling a wastebasket between his feet, and began coring out the bowl of his briar pipe with a gold penknife. The indirect lighting reflected off the pinkness of his scalp.

“My daughter has already retained you?” he said, his eyes lifting into mine.

“Yes, sir, she has.”

“I wish she’d called me. It’s hard to keep them down on the reservation sometimes.”

“Sir?” I said.

“Can’t keep them down on the farm is what I mean. Or at least I can’t keep my daughter there. Damn if that gal isn’t a pistol.”

His language and use of allusion, as always, were almost impossible to follow. “What can I do for you?” I said.

“I just want to pay her fees and take her off your hands.”

“If she wants to discharge me as her attorney, that’s up to her,” I replied.

He cleaned the blade of his penknife on a crumpled piece of paper and put the knife away. He smiled. He was a stout, sandy-haired, sanguine-faced man, with manners that struck me as genuine. He clucked his tongue. “My daughter is a source of endless worry to me, Mr. Holland. Will you let me know if there’s anything I can do?” he said.

“I will.”

“Thank you,” he said, rising to shake hands. His grip was meaty and powerful, his eyes direct. “Did she leave with that Indian boy?”

“Excuse me?”

“Take exception to my vocabulary if you want. But that fellow American Horse is trouble. Not because he’s an Indian. His kind tear things down, not build them up. You know I’m right, too.”

“I don’t know that,” I said, nonsensically.

“Each to his own. Thanks for your time,” he said. “Tell that daughter of mine she’s fixing to drive her old man to the cemetery or the crazy house.”

BY THAT AFTERNOON
no charges had been filed in the invasion of Johnny American Horse’s home, not against him, nor against the surviving member of the assassination team that had obviously been sent there to kill him.

Long ago, even before I fell in love with her, I had come to think of Temple Carrol as one of the best people I had ever met, certainly the most fun, perhaps the most beautiful, too. Her social attitudes were blue-collar, in the best sense, her personal loyalty unrelenting. She loved animals and hated those who would abuse them, thought all politicians worthless, and carried a nine millimeter in her purse. Bad guys messed with her once.

That evening she showed her P.I. badge to the deputy sheriff standing guard in front of Michael Charles Ruggles’s hospital room.

“You can’t come in,” he said.

“Really?” she said, flipping open her cell phone. “Let’s call the sheriff so you can tell him you’re countermanding his permission. He’s at the county commissioners’ meeting now.”

The nurse had left the blinds open inside the room so the man in bed could see the blue light in the evening sky and the rooftops of the town and the chimney swifts that swooped and darted above the trees. His head was propped up on the pillow, one cheek heavily bandaged; an IV was clipped to an index finger. When Temple entered the room, he tried to push himself higher up in the bed in order to look at her more directly. His face winced peculiarly at the effort, as though the tissue were dead and had been touched alive by electrical shock.

“Looks like you’re doing pretty good for a guy who has forty stitches in his cheek and two stab wounds in the chest,” she said.

“Who the hell are you?” he said.

“Gal who doesn’t want to see it put on the wrong guy. You don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to.”

“Answer the question, bitch.”

Temple held a capped ballpoint and a yellow legal pad in her hands, the cover folded back as though she were about to start taking notes. She sat down in a chair by the bed, placed the ballpoint in her shirt pocket, and closed the legal pad. She looked idly into space a moment.

“Let me line it out for you,” she said. “You tried to whack out a Native American political leader. You tried to do it in the middle of a United States government reservation, which shows how smart you are. You also managed to do these things in the geographical center of all political correctness, Missoula, Montana.

“So what does that mean? you hurriedly ask yourself. It means either the FBI is going to prove it’s an equal opportunity law enforcement agency by jamming a mile-long freight train up your ass, or you’ll do state time in Deer Lodge, where the bucks will take turns shoving something else up your ass.”

“That’s an entertaining rap you do. I like it,” he said.

“You’re going down for an attempted contract hit, Michael. That’s probably worth twenty years here. You want to take that kind of bounce to protect some rich guy?”

“Michael’s my first name. I use my middle name. Everybody calls me Charlie. Charlie Ruggles.”

“You’re looking at double-digit time, Charlie. Your bud gave you up in the O.R. They didn’t tell you?”