James Burke - In the Moon of Red Ponies

“Get a job,” I said.

“Want to stick it to Darrel McComb? Got some information might hep you do that, counselor.”

“I doubt it.”

He sat up on the hood, hooking his arms around his knees. “Before I seen the light and changed my ways, I was in the Aryan Brotherhood. The only trouble with the A.B. is it’s infiltrated. Know how come that is, Brother Holland?”

Don’t let him set the hook, I told myself. But there was no doubt about Wyatt Dixon’s knowledge of criminality and his insight into evil. He was a genuine sociopath, totally without conscience or remorse; but unlike his psychological compatriots, Wyatt enjoyed sharing the secrets of the inner sanctum.

“Spit it out,” I said.

“Sometimes the G likes to employ folks that ain’t on the computer.”

“Such as yourself.”

“Not me, counselor. I wouldn’t get near them government motherfuckers with a manure fork. I’m just saying Brother McComb was not unknown to the fallen angels of backstreet bars. Also had a way of spreading money around when some work needed doin’.”

“When you can clean the collard greens out of your mouth, we might have ourselves a conversation.”

He unhooked his aviator sunglasses from his ears and rubbed a place next to his nose with his thumbnail. Perhaps because of the sky overhead, his eyes had taken on a degree of color, a grayish-blue, with pupils like burnt matchheads. He picked up a battered work hat, one with dents in its domed crown, and fitted it on his head. “About ten years ago Darrel McComb offered me five thousand dollars to do a job on a man-the tools could be of my choosing. Believe that?” he said.

“No.”

“Don’t blame you. If you seen what I seen of the world, you wouldn’t be no different from me. Study on that the next time you and Miss Temple are at the church house,” he said.

“There’s a parking ticket under your windshield wiper.”

“I declare, this life is sure fraught with trouble, ain’t it?” he said. He wadded up the ticket and tossed it on the sidewalk.

You didn’t get the last word with Wyatt Dixon.

I was tired of feeling like the odd man out, somehow allowed to know only the edges of a situation that even a morally insane person like Dixon seemed privy to. I called the Phoenix office of the FBI and told an agent there who I was. He did not seem impressed. I asked if he would call Seth Masterson in Missoula and tell him I’d appreciate his contacting me immediately.

“I’m not real sure where he is. But I’ll see if I can get a message to him,” the agent said.

“That’s really good of you. Keep up the fine work,” I said.

Fifteen minutes later Seth called my office. “Trying to light up my colleague’s pinball machine down in Arizona?” he said.

“Why do federal agents always sound arrogant over the phone?” I said.

“Search me.”

Seth was notorious for his laconic speech and his reticence about his job. In fact, a joke about him in the Phoenix office went as follows: There were three words in Seth’s vocabulary-“Yep,” “Nope,” and, when he was in a talkative mood, “Maybe.” But Seth also had a weakness.

“Want to meet a rainbow trout I know up Rock Creek?” I asked.

“That’s a possibility,” he replied.

An hour later he met me outside my office, dressed in khakis, a fly vest, and a bill cap with a green visor on it. We drove east up the Clark Fork in my Tacoma, through Hellgate Canyon, past the confluence with the Blackfoot River and into alluvial floodplain dotted with cottonwoods and bordered by thickly wooded mountains whose slopes were already dropping into shadow.

We turned off the four-lane at the juncture of Rock Creek and the Clark Fork and entered a long, steep-sided valley where the afternoon light had turned gold on the hilltops and the meadows were full of grazing deer and the creek was steaming in the cooling of the day.

Seth rode with the glass down, the wind in his face, as we passed beaver dams, flooded cottonwoods, and dalles where the creek coursed over boulders that were larger than my truck. I almost felt guilty at the pastoral deceit I had perpetrated on him.

“Gonna ask me a question or two?” he said, looking straight ahead, his eyes twinkling.

“You working the home invasion at Johnny American Horse’s place?”

“Yep.”

“But his spread isn’t on res land. He’s an independent ranch owner.”

“Doesn’t matter. The perps were crossing and recrossing a federal reservation during the commission of a felony,” he replied.

“So the Phoenix office is now investigating reservation crimes in the Northwest?” I said.

He grinned at me. “Think a wooly worm might bring those big ones up?” he asked.

Trout season had not opened yet, so we released the half-dozen rainbows and the one bull trout we caught, and walked back up through fir trees toward the truck. The sun had dipped down through a crack in the mountains, and the water and the rocks in the creek were bathed with a red glow. Upstream, a moose clattered across the stream and chugged huffing uphill into woods that were now black with shadow.

I unlocked the shell on the bed of my Tacoma and put my fly rod, vest, and waders inside. Seth was quiet for a long time, his eyes obviously troubled by an unresolved conflict inside himself. “I’ve been thinking about taking early retirement,” he said.

“Doesn’t sound like you,” I said.

“I don’t always like the cases I catch anymore. Get my drift?”

“I’m kind of slow sometimes,” I said.

“You’ve stepped into a pile of pig flop, Billy Bob. I’d get a lot of gone between me and Johnny American Horse.”

“Hate to hear you talk like that.”

“Not half as bad as I do,” he replied.

In the cab he pulled his hat down and pretended to sleep the rest of the way back to town.

That night I visited Johnny at St. Pat’s Hospital. He had taken stitches in one eyebrow, behind his ear, and on the jawbone. “Quit looking at me like that. I get out in the morning,” he said.

“You’re being charged with attempted assault on a law officer. Why’d you have to get in McComb’s face?” I said.

“Dude leaves a big footprint. This is still the United States. I fought for this damn country,” he said.

“When wars are over, nobody cares about the people who actually fought them.”

“Doesn’t matter. McComb tore up my home. He tried to hit on Amber. He didn’t do it because he’s a cop, either. He did it because he’s a white redneck and he knew he could get away with it,” he said.

“I’ve got to know why Ruggles and Eddy Bumper came after you, Johnny.”

He raised his hands and dropped them on the sheet. “My coalition has sued a couple of oil companies to stop them from drilling test wells on the east slope of the Divide. In the meantime we’re trying to kick a pipeline off the res. I kind of went out on my own on this anthrax stuff, too.”

“Say that last part again?”

“A private grudge I brought back from the first Gulf war, I guess. Sometimes I see things in my head, in broad daylight, that make me wish I wasn’t on the planet,” he said.

I didn’t want to hear it.

It was late and I was tired when I got back home. Temple had already gone to bed. I fixed a ham-and-egg sandwich and poured a glass of buttermilk and ate at the kitchen table. The moon was up and through the side window I could see elk and deer in the pasture and hear our horses nickering in the darkness on the far side of the barn.

I grew up on a small ranch in the hill country of south-central Texas. My mother was a librarian by profession and my father a tack and hot-pass welder on pipelines all over Texas and Oklahoma. Both of them dearly loved our ranch, in spite of the meager income it provided them. They also loved the Victorian purple brick home in which I grew up. They loved the horses, dogs, goats, cats, sheep, beehives, fish in the ponds (called tanks in Texas), and even poultry in the chicken run on our land. My father named our ranch “Heartwood,” and he burned the name into a thick red-oak plank with the intention of hanging it from the front gate.