James Burke - In the Moon of Red Ponies

“Howdy doodie, Brother Holland?” Wyatt Dixon said. “Had my horse over to the vet’inary in the next hollow, then thought I’d take him for a ride up your ridge. Also wanted to give you a report on my reconnoitering efforts.” He popped the deerfly off his shoulder with one finger.

“Reconnoitering efforts?”

Wyatt lifted one booted leg over the horse’s withers and slid to the ground as smoothly as water sliding down a rock. His chest had small nipples and his underarms were shaved, his lats wedging out like the base of an inverted stump. He used one hand to pick up a poplar tree by the trunk, one whose root ball must have weighed a hundred pounds. He dropped it into a hole and kicked dirt on top of it. “We got us a client-attorney relationship, counselor?”

“No.”

“How about I give you a one-dollar bill? That makes it legal, don’t it?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Wyatt. Sometimes the more technicalities you get into, the more problems you have.”

“With my record, I guess I cain’t blame you for not trusting me. But I got to say I feel a little let down.” He pulled on his nose, his jaw hooked forward, his colorless eyes fixed on nothing. “Through my research activities, which I ain’t gonna describe, I come up with a couple of names.”

He handed me a piece of folded notebook paper. But I didn’t read it. I folded it again and stuck it inside the band of my hat. He watched me curiously.

“Are these the Indians who broke into a research lab?” I asked.

“They’re both white men. One is a freelance shooter, does five-grand hits out of Miami. The other one is some kind of child-molester pervert from San Fran. I heard about him in Quentin. He’d do a yard job on a man for thirty bucks. I don’t know what either one of them looks like. That’s the problem.”

“Why?”

“They’re already here. At least that’s what my reconnoitering seems to indicate. This plainclothes cop, Darrel McComb? He come to see you?”

“No.”

“He left his business card at my house. Makes me uneasy when a man bird-dogs my house.” Wyatt rubbed his shoulder, found a pimple, and popped it. He seemed to think a long time. But the only color in his eyes was in the pupils, so that his eyes took on no cast, no more than clear glass could. “Brother Holland?”

“What?”

“You wouldn’t try to slicker me on this deal, would you? ’Cause of deeds past? Get me to doing scutwork for you, busting the law, ripping folks’ ass, then when you was finished with me, drive an eighteen-wheeler up my cheeks?”

“If I wanted to get even with you, Wyatt, I’d hit you in the head with this posthole digger and bury you right here.”

He picked up his horse’s reins and flipped them back and forth across his knuckles. The curvature of his shoulders and spine was like a question mark. “No, you wouldn’t,” he said.

“What makes you so sure?”

“You converted to a papist, but you’re still a river-baptized man. I got the Indian sign on you, counselor.”

“I don’t know if I like your tone.”

“Them people painted acid on my cinch at the rodeo and liked to got me killed. So that gives you and me what’s called a shared agenda.” He stepped on a rock and mounted his horse. “I done changed my ways, Brother Holland, but the man ain’t been born who can use me and walk away from it. Tell Miss Temple I said howdy doodie.”

He kicked his horse in the sides and leaned forward with it as it ascended the arroyo, disappearing through the deadfall into the sun’s last red rays.

Back at the house I removed the scrap of notebook paper he had given me from my hatband and read the two names penciled on it: L. W. Peeples and Tex Barker. There was a third name, Mabus, written in the corner, at an angle, a notation that I suspected had been made there at another time and was unrelated to the issue of the two hired killers.

“What are you looking at?” Temple said.

We were in the living room, and outside I could see snow crystals blowing in the light from the gallery. I told her about Wyatt Dixon’s visit.

“I can’t find words to describe my feelings on this. This man is out of the abyss, Billy Bob,” she said.

“I’ll get rid of him.”

“When?”

“Can you run these two names through NCIC?”

“You know I can. How are you going to get rid of Dixon?”

“I’ll figure a way. I give you my word,” I replied, refusing to meet her eyes.

But by next morning I still had no plan for getting Wyatt Dixon out of our lives, or at least off our property and away from my office. Temple went through her San Antonio contact and ran the two names Wyatt had given me through the computer at the National Crime Information Center. She called me at noon.

“There’s nothing on these guys,” she said.

“No arrests at all?”

“The names don’t correlate with any particular individual. Can you imagine how many offenders have the nickname Tex?”

“How about the other guy-Peeples?”

“Yeah, there’re plenty of them. But none with the initials L.W. Billy Bob, do you actually believe a basket case like Wyatt Dixon is a credible source of information?”

The rest of the afternoon I tried to think of a solution to my situation with Wyatt. Lawyers don’t ask witnesses questions they themselves don’t know the answer to; wise men don’t make deals with the devil; and sane people don’t unscrew the head of a man like Wyatt Dixon and spit in it. Why had I been so foolish?

By 5 P.M. my head was pounding. There was only one way out of my problem, and the thought of doing what I had to do made sweat run down my sides.

I drove through the sawmill town of Bonner and on up the Blackfoot, then parked on the roadside across the river from Wyatt’s property. When I crossed the swing bridge, the water down below was roaring with sound, pink and green in the sunset, braiding around rocks that steamed with mist. Wyatt’s truck was parked by the half-destroyed house in which he lived, but I saw no sign of him in the yard or down by the riverbank. No lights burned inside the house.

I walked under a birch tree and stood in front of the ruined first floor and called out his name. But there was no answer. I threw a rock on the tin roof. A stone barbecue pit was smoking by the side of the house, a steak dripping fat into the coals. I threw another rock on the roof.

“Why not knock on the door like a white man?” a voice said from above.

I looked up into the birch tree. Wyatt sat on a thick limb, his back against the trunk, eating from a carton of peach ice cream.

“I came here to make a confession to you,” I said.

“I look like a papist minister?”

“That threatening note you found in your mailbox?” I was looking almost straight up in the tree, my vertebrae and neck tendons starting to stress. But that was not the real cause of my discomfort. I could actually feel my heart hitting against my ribs. “It was a fake. I wrote it. Your cinch breaking at the rodeo was an accident. I was in the stands and saw you get stomped and decided to make use of the situation.”

He continued to spoon ice cream out of the carton and put it in his mouth, his eyes hooded, his mouth as cold-looking as a slit in a side of frozen meat.

“I was playing with your head, Wyatt. I showed you a lack of respect, and for that I’m here to apologize,” I said. “But I’m also asking you not to come around us anymore. We’ve got to have that understanding.”

The only sound was the wind puffing in the tree and the water coursing along the riverbank, as steady as the sustained hum of a sewing machine. I swallowed as I waited for him to speak, then tried to work the crick out of my neck. I heard him drop the spoon into the empty carton.