James Burke - In the Moon of Red Ponies

“They drove him up our road to do it?” she said.

I nodded.

“Coincidence?”

“Maybe. Except the doll was thrown from the car up on I-Ninety. The abductors were headed in the opposite direction from us.”

“Maybe Lester was put in another vehicle.”

“Maybe. Johnny American Horse told me he’d had a dream about an animal trapped in a burning woods. He said he felt responsible for the animal’s fate.”

“I don’t care about Johnny anymore. I care about what he’s doing to us.”

“Guys like him and Lester are on their own. They don’t have many friends, Temple.”

“Forgive me. I guess I shouldn’t worry about the prospect of losing our home,” she said.

“It’s not that bad,” I said.

She walked to the sink and stood with her back to me, looking up the ravine at the trees misting over and disappearing inside the weather. I went to the pantry to get some food for supper, and I heard her use the name of God bitterly under her breath.

In the morning the sky was bright and clear, and the snow that had fallen during the night was melting in the trees on the hillsides. I walked down to the front gate to retrieve the newspaper from the metal cylinder next to the mailbox. As an afterthought I flipped open the mailbox in case I had forgotten to pick up the mail the previous day. Inside was a blood-spotted black pigtail braided from human hair.

Later that day I got hold of Seth Masterson. “I need some help,” I said.

“Sure, what is it?” he said.

I told him about Lester Antelope’s death up the valley from me and my discovery of his severed pigtail in my mailbox. “Yeah, I already got the paperwork on it,” he said.

“So?”

“There’s no federal jurisdiction here,” he replied.

“It’s a kidnapping.”

“Not per se.”

“We don’t have local resources to deal with what’s going on here, Seth.”

“You want my advice? Disengage from Johnny American Horse. Or buy yourself a high-end security system or a lot more guns.”

“How about losing the Okie-from-Muskogee routine?”

“We’re living in a different era, partner. Before it’s over, the body count will be higher than anyone could have ever imagined. I’m talking about right here at home. None of us will be unaffected. That’s just one guy’s opinion.”

In the silence that followed I could hear the receiver humming in my ear like wind in a cave.

That evening the sunset was orange on the hills and trees above our house, and before dusk I began opening the irrigation trenches that ran from the hillsides down through our pasture. We had no twelve-month creeks on our land, but the snowmelt and runoff in the spring gave us good grass, and during the end of summer we got by with temporary irrigation from a three-hundred-foot well. We kept six horses-a sorrel, a buckskin, two Appaloosas, a Morgan, and an Arabian I bought from a circus. From the far end of the pasture, as shadows grew across the valley, I could see the red metal roof of our barn and the one-and-a-half-story house we had built, with a wraparound veranda and cupolated corners that gave a wide-angle view of the valley and the snow-covered peaks of the Bitterroots in the south.

The air smelled cold and heavy as the water coursed through the irrigation trenches in the shade. Then the wind shifted and blew from the opposite hills, out of the sunlight, and I heard our horses nicker behind me and the sorrel, for no apparent reason, begin galloping through a stand of aspens toward the barn.

I stared up at the lighted hillside in the east and saw a flash on metal or glass among the trees. Then I saw it again. I went to my truck and got my binoculars from the glove box and swept the lenses across the hillcrest. A man in a sportsman’s cap and down vest was crouched next to a ponderosa trunk, looking straight at me. Two other men, both dressed in jeans and caps, stood behind him. All three men turned their faces in the opposite direction, then worked their way up the slope through the Douglas fir and disappeared on the other side.

I could feel my heart beating when I lowered the binoculars from my face.

I said nothing about the men on the hill to Temple. That night she fell asleep with her back turned toward me, her hip molded under the thin blanket. The darkness was alive with sound-deer or elk thumping down the trails on the hillside, an owl screeching, a bear knocking over the garbage can in the barn, a hoof clacking like a punctuation mark on the top rail of the fence as an animal vaulted over it. I placed my hand lightly on Temple’s back and could feel the swelling of her lungs through my palm. A moment later she got up and walked to the bathroom, then returned to bed, covered her head with a pillow, and went back to sleep.

I woke before first light and drank coffee by myself in the coldness of the kitchen. As the stars began to fade in the sky, I saw a skinned-up truck with slat sides parked on the road and a hatted man in a thick canvas coat leading our buckskin gelding back through a break in the fence. I put on a coat and walked down to the road.

“Why are you here, Wyatt?” I said.

He slipped the lariat off the buckskin’s neck and popped him on the rump to encourage him though the collapsed fence rails. He hoisted the top rail into place and began hammering the torn nails into the post with a rock. “You got a mixture of crested wheatgrass and alfalfa in that pasture. Good dryland combo, but when elk come off a winter range a fence like this don’t even slow them down,” he said.

“Let that be. Tell me what you want and leave,” I said.

He tapped the nails snug and removed a thermos from inside the truck. He unscrewed the top with his thumb while he stared at me with a crazy light in his face. “Got me a Sharps buffalo rifle with a fifty-caliber barrel. At three hundred yards I can core a hole big as a tangerine through a cottonwood tree. I know all about the Indian got killed up the road yonder. Know about the pigtail they left in your postbox, too. You need backup, Brother Holland. I’m the huckleberry can do it, too. You know I am.”

He lifted his thermos to his mouth and drank.

“My God, what is that? It smells like a septic tank,” I said.

“More like lemon-flavored paint thinner. It’s my chemical cocktail. Medicaid will pay for it, but so far I ain’t had to take no money from the government. There was men watching you from up on that ridge last night.”

“How’d you know that?”

“I got connections.”

“I don’t think you do. I think you were probably spying on us, and just like me you spotted those guys up on the hill.”

“Suit yourself. That Indian went out full throttle and fuck-it, didn’t he? Know why? Indians ain’t afraid of dying. That’s ’cause they think this world is already part of the next. But white people ain’t got that kind of comfort. How’d you like them motherfuckers who did Lester Antelope to go to work on Miss Temple or that boy of yours?”

He upended his thermos and drank it empty, his Adam’s apple working smoothly, an orange rivulet running from his mouth, his lidless eyes waiting for my response.

Later, I called our new sheriff, a stolid and unimaginative man who was more bureaucrat than law officer. I asked him what he had on the murder of Lester Antelope.

“It’s under investigation,” he said.

“I know that. I was at the crime scene. One of his pigtails was in my mailbox,” I said.

“I’m aware of all those details, Mr. Holland. You don’t need to raise your voice,” he said.

“Look, some men were watching me through binoculars yesterday. I think these guys are sending me and my wife a message.”

“I’m not quite sure what you’re talking about. If you want, you can come in and make a report. We’ll look into it. Sending you a message? About what?”