James Burke - In the Moon of Red Ponies

His apartment was located in a century-old refurbished brick building with a grand view of the river and the city. He walked out on the balcony and looked back toward the bridge and the park on the opposite side of the river where the dance was still in progress. Why care what those people thought? he asked himself. The civilian world was a joke, a giant self-delusion that had little connection to the realities of nations in conflict.

He remembered a moment of revelation in El Salvador back in the 1980s. A photographer had taken pictures of U.S. advisers carrying weapons in the field and several congressmen had threatened an investigation. The irony was that the El Salvadoran helicopters raking leftist villages with Gatling guns were receiving their coordinates from U.S. AWACS planes high overhead and no media knew anything about it.

Darrel wondered if Amber and her liberal friends at the dance had any idea what was done for them and in their name on the ragged green edges of the American Empire.

But moments of reverie like these were not entirely comforting to Darrel. He also remembered seeing a helicopter gunship coming in low over a rain forest, a molten sun behind it, the downdraft whipping the canopy into a frenzy, then the Gatling guns blowing a series of huts into a pinkish-brown cloud laced with dried thatch. There had been children as well as adult civilians in those huts, and sometimes in the middle of the night he heard the sounds they made before they died.

Greta was making a pitcher of sangria at his bar, although he had not asked her to.

“Still thinking about that spoiled twat?” she said.

“You never told me what you were doing over at Senator Finley’s place.”

“Mine to know,” she said, stirring the ice and red wine with a celery stalk. “But if you insist, I have friends who contribute to his campaign. I suspect you voted for Finley, didn’t you?”

“I don’t vote. I think politics is a sideshow.”

She filled two goblets with sangria, fitted orange slices on the rims, and handed him one. “Here’s to all the jerks who take sideshows seriously,” she said, and clinked his goblet.

“I don’t figure you.”

“What’s to figure?” she said. She drank from her goblet, then set it down and slipped her arms around his waist. He felt her stomach touch his loins like an electric current.

Later, after they had made love in his roll-away bed, she put on her panties and walked without her top to the bar and came back to the bed with their drinks. She had few wrinkles in her skin, no stretch marks, and her muscle tone was extraordinary for her age. She drank from her glass, then leaned over him and kissed him wetly on the mouth. “You didn’t say anything,” she said.

“About what?”

“How you liked it.”

“Good. I liked it real good. You’re quite a woman.”

She tapped him on the lips with a finger and winked. “You’re not bad yourself. Next time, though, give a girl a little compliment. Mind if I use your bathroom?” she said.

A moment later he heard the toilet flush and the faucet running. The band was still playing across the river, the sound of the music floating thinly above the roar of the current. He put on his boxer shorts and walked to the balcony. Somewhere in the crowd on the clipped lawn Amber Finley was still dancing with Johnny American Horse, the moon rising above the mountains into a turquoise sky, the two of them blessed with youth, the admiration of their peers, the knowledge that the earth and all its gifts had been created especially for them.

He had never felt so miserable in his life.

After sunset and another pitcher of sangria, Darrel drove Greta back to her bungalow in the Bitterroot Valley. When she unlocked the front door, neither of them could believe what they saw. Every room was a shambles. The furniture was turned upside down, mattresses and upholstery slashed and gutted, drywall torn off the joists, desk and dresser drawers dumped, even all the canned goods in the pantry and frozen food in the icebox raked on the floor.

The alarm had never sounded because the home invader or invaders had come through the roof, first chopping a hole in it, then smashing a dead-bolted attic door into kindling. The level of violence done to the bungalow created in Darrel’s mind a perpetrator of immense strength and destructive energies, someone with tendons in his arms and hands like steel cable and with absolutely no sense of mercy or restraint at all.

Greta Lundstrum sat down in a deep chair and wept.

“When was the last time you saw Wyatt Dixon?” Darrel asked.

Sunday morning, Amber Finley woke in Johnny’s bed and touched the place where he should have been but felt only the warm, empty space he had occupied. The Jocko Valley was still in shadow, the crest of the hills black-green against the light growing in the sky, the sound of the river loud on the rocks at the foot of the property. She and Johnny had slept with the windows open and the room was cold, and she wished he would come back to bed. In the kitchen she heard pans clanking on the stove and smelled coffee boiling and bacon frying in a skillet.

She raised herself up on her hands and yawned. “Johnny?” she said.

But there was no reply. She glanced down at his pillow, and in the indentation where his head had rested was a small blue-felt box. She picked it up and pried the top back on its spring. Inserted in a satin cushion was a gold ring with a tiny diamond mounted on it.

“I was going to surprise you with some apple flapjacks,” he said from the doorway, an apron tied around his hips, a spatula in his hand.

“Oh, it’s beautiful, Johnny,” she said.

“There’s a Methodist minister up at St. Ignatius who says he’ll marry us any day we want to set it up.”

“Let’s do it this week. Let’s do it tomorrow.”

He sat on the edge of the bed and slipped the ring on her left hand, his eyes lowered so she could not read them. “A couple of things we need to agree on,” he said.

“What?” she said, her face clouding.

“Your father has to know about it up front. I need to be there when that happens, too.”

“He doesn’t control my life. He doesn’t have anything to say about it.”

“He’s still your old man. He believes in what he does. He deserves to be treated with respect, don’t you think?”

She found his hand again and pressed it hard, then looked admiringly at her ring. “How’d you pay for it?”

“It’s called ‘credit.’ One other thing. If I go inside, we agree you can divorce me. In fact, I’d insist on it. I don’t want to create a jailhouse widow out of my best friend.” Johnny had small eyes, and they crinkled at the corners when he grinned.

“Don’t talk like that. Billy Bob is a good lawyer. We have a lot of friends who will stand up for you,” she said.

He stroked her hair and kissed her brow, then her mouth.

“I haven’t brushed my teeth,” she said.

He pressed her down on the pillow and kissed her mouth again, then the tops of her breasts and the long taper of her stomach and two red moles just below her navel. She curled her knees into him and held him across the back and put her face in his hair and bit his neck. She could feel her breath quicken and a flush spread through her thighs.

He sat up and took both her wrists in his hands. “I have to tell you something else,” he said.

The register in his voice had dropped, and she studied his eyes now because they, like his words, never lied to her. What she saw there made her ball her fists. “Say it, say it, say it,” she said.

“My dreams started again. Some of the stuff in them doesn’t make good sense. My uncle said my dreams would always be distorted, not clear like Crazy Horse’s were, because my mother was Salish and I’m only half Lakota.”