James Burke - In the Moon of Red Ponies

Darrel had arranged a supper date with Greta that evening. And once again he knew his interests in her were far from purely professional. His memories of their tryst Saturday night caused sexual stirrings in him that made him wonder if part of him wasn’t still locked in adolescence. He was also starting to experience another problem, one that was like a sixteen-penny nail driven into his skull. He felt he had betrayed Amber by sleeping with Greta. It made no sense at all. Amber treated him as though he were a moral cretin, a bumbling loser she could dress down at a public dance. To get rid of his own guilt feelings, he let himself imagine Amber in bed with Johnny American Horse, her knees spread on top of him, Johnny’s hands cupped on her breasts, her mouth open and her eyes sealed with her passion. Then he felt such rage at the vision in his head he smashed his fist into a locker door while other cops stared at him, bewildered at his behavior.

He tried to eat lunch in a cafe downtown but couldn’t finish his food. He returned to the department, checked out a cruiser, and headed for Stevensville. At first Greta had been devastated by the damage done to her home, but she had quickly regained control of herself, substituting anger and resolve for loss and helplessness. In fact, Darrel was impressed. She had moved into a motel, put someone else in charge at her office, and hired carpenters, roofers, drywallers, and painters to repair her house. She worked side by side with them, firing a nailgun into studs, rolling paint onto drywall, rope-pulling bales of shingles onto the roof. The workmen showed up at 7 A.M., called her “ma’am,” and did not use profanity within earshot of her.

When he pulled into the driveway she was on the roof, in white painter’s pants, a cute white cap on her head. She climbed down the ladder, a hammer swinging from a cloth loop on her side. “How you doin’, handsome?” she said.

“Thought I’d check out how it’s going, maybe update you on a couple of things I found out,” he replied.

But she seemed uninterested. She tucked a strand of hair in her cap and watched a carpenter running an electric saw through a board. Then she turned back at him and smiled. “Want to have some lunch and maybe a little rest break?” she said.

He felt his loins tingle, his hand close on the steering wheel, and again wondered who was controlling whom.

“I already ate. I’m on the clock, anyway,” he said.

“Good, that makes two of us. I have to be back here by three. Follow me to my motel. There’s a restaurant next door where you can park the cruiser. I’m in room six.”

She pinched his chin, got in her SUV, and drove off.

He waited five minutes, filling out the log for the cruiser, then followed her. He parked on the far side of the restaurant, bought a roll of breath mints from the cashier, used the restroom, and exited the building by the same door he had entered. He cut behind the building, found Greta’s room on the back side of the motel, and knocked on the door.

She opened it on the chain, and through the crack he could see she already had her shirt off. She slipped the chain and let him in, then rechained the door and set the night lock. The curtains were closed, the air-conditioning unit turned on full blast, the room as frigid and dark as the interior of an icehouse. She worked her painter’s pants off and kicked them into a corner. “Come on, honey bunny, the clock’s ticking,” she said.

He couldn’t quite believe the facility and level of intensity with which she entered lovemaking-almost like a prostitute, but with an obvious and unembarrassed joy. She came before he did, then mounted him and came a second time with him, collapsing next to him, laughing, biting his ear.

“That one put me on the moon,” she said.

“I hear that a lot,” he said.

“Don’t take a compliment lightly,” she said, and hit him playfully with her knee. Then, before he could reply, she was in the shower.

Was she jerking him around as badly as he was beginning to think? Maybe it was time to find out. She came out of the bathroom, blotting at her hair with a folded towel, another towel wrapped around her. She touched at a red swelling under her arm, examining it, then saw him watching her and lowered her arm.

“Ever hear of two guys by the names of L. W. Peeples and Tex Barker?” he asked.

She faced the opposite direction, dropped her towel, and began putting on her undergarments. “No, who are they?” she said.

“Their names have turned up in the B amp;E investigation on your house.”

She was hooking up her bra now and he could see her face.

“These were the men who broke in?” she said.

“No, a source in the investigation says these names were written down someplace in your house. The perpetrator or perpetrators was after names and information, not money or jewelry. That’s what all this seems to be about, Greta-information. What do you say about that?”

She bent over and began putting on her painter’s pants. She lifted her eyes into his. “I say I think that’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.”

“You don’t know anybody named L. W. Peeples or Tex Barker?”

“What did I just tell you?”

Her eyes were unblinking, her indignation convincing.

“How about somebody named Mabus?” he asked.

She buttoned her painter’s pants, her face lowered now, her jaws flexing with the effort to fasten a button. She reached over to pick up her shirt from a chair, and in the side of her eye he saw the bright glimmer of fear. “You do know somebody named Mabus?” he said.

“I’ve heard his name mentioned in business conversations. I don’t know how he could have anything to do with the destruction of my house.”

“I think Wyatt Dixon had the name of this guy in his possession. Why would a hayseed like Dixon be interested in it?”

“I’m sure I don’t know, Darrel.”

She tried to look abstract and uninterested, but he could see the prickles in her throat.

“I like you a lot, Greta,” he said, almost surprised at the genuineness in his statement. “I think you’re in trouble and can’t tell anybody about it. Sometimes people just get in over their heads. It’s like making a wrong turn in a bad neighborhood. You don’t know how you got there, but suddenly you’re drowning in a world of hurt. If you can be square with me, maybe we can get you out of this.”

“Perhaps you mean well, but this scenario you’re describing is comic opera. Really, I mean it. You’re a nice guy, but-” She picked up her cute white hat and placed it on her head. “You’re looking at a Maryland country girl, Darrel. There’s no mystery here. Just an upper South gal trying to make it out here in the Wild West.”

He was sitting on the bed in his trousers and strap undershirt, his shoulders rounded. Her denial filled him with a sense of depression like a chemical assault on his system. It was always ordinary people who got in the gravest trouble with the law, he thought. In a peculiar way they retained their innocent belief in a benevolent society that was created especially for them, right up to the time they shuffled off on a wrist chain and entered the belly of the beast.

“Why so glum?” she asked.

“No reason. Thanks for the nooner.”

She wagged a finger at him. “I like you a lot, Darrel, but I don’t appreciate coarseness. My father was a minister and I grew up in a good home,” she said.

Late the next evening two men pulled up in front of a bar on the lower end of the Blackfoot River, not far from the confluence it formed with the Clark Fork. Their pickup truck had an Idaho tag, and fishing rods were propped up in the bed of the truck. The men stood outside the truck, drinking beer from cans, surveying the stilt houses on the riverbank, the independent grocery store across the state road, kids jumping from an abandoned steel bridge into the river, the smoke from the sawmill drifting up the walls of the Blackfoot Canyon. The evening light was a greenish-yellow, the air warm and cool at the same time, the bloom from cottonwood trees floating on the breeze.