James Burke - In the Moon of Red Ponies

But I didn’t get up from the couch. “I think I’ve gotten us into a bad one, Temple,” I said.

“If they come here, they’ll wish they hadn’t. Come on, Ranger. I can’t fall asleep by myself,” she said.

The dawn broke cool and misty on the Blackfoot, the sky crackling with electricity from an impending storm, the river green and swollen with rain. Smoke flattened off the chimney of Wyatt Dixon’s house and a light burned in the kitchen. Wyatt came outside in only jeans and a T-shirt, notched an apple in half while he watched the sun’s glow spread on the mountain crests, then fed half the apple off the flat of his hand to his Appaloosa and ate the other half himself. His T-shirt was printed with the words RODEO NAKED-YOUR CHEEKS NEED THE COLOR.

He heard rocks toppling down the hillside behind him, but when he looked up through the fir trees he saw two mountain sheep working their way up an arroyo and he paid no more attention to the sounds they made. A moment later someone started a vehicle on the dirt road that curved away around a wooded bend. Wyatt heard the transmission clank into gear, then the tires clicking on the gravel as the vehicle headed in the opposite direction. He went back inside, fired his woodstove, poured coffee grinds and water into a tin pot, and set the pot to boil.

Down the road someone was having a fight. He heard a woman shout, then a car or truck door slam, followed by more shouting. Enough was enough. He opened the kitchen window and stuck his head out. “Shut up that goddamn racket!” he yelled.

It was warm and snug in the kitchen, the iron lids on his stove etched with light from the firebox. The rest of the lower floor had been destroyed by river ice, but the kitchen had been built on higher ground and the glass was still in the windows, the shelves, icebox, and chimney intact. He heated a skillet, then poured flapjack batter into it and broke eggs on the side. He removed a jar of jam and a stick of butter and a loaf of bread from the icebox, toasted the bread in a separate skillet, and sat down to eat.

He looked up and saw a fat Indian woman with braids staring at him through the window. Before he could get up from the chair, she had gone around to the front of the house. A moment later, she was pounding on the door with her fist.

“Nobody home! Get out of here!” he yelled.

“Help me!” she cried.

He walked through the clutter in the front of the house and jerked open the door. “Was you the woman yelling her head off down the road?” he said.

She smelled of sweat, talcum powder, river damp, and alcohol, and her dress looked like a burlap tent fitted over a haystack. Her left eye was swollen and watery, as though it had been stung by a bee. “My husband says he’s gonna kill me and my baby. Call the police,” she said.

“See any phone wires going to this house?” Wyatt said.

“He’s got a knife. He took the car keys and run up the hill,” she said.

Wyatt walked out onto the grass. He gazed up the hill and at the trees and at the birds singing in them and at the steam rising off the river. Dry thunder rippled across the sky. He watched his Appaloosa in the railed lot in back of the house. The Appaloosa was eating grass through the fence, tearing it out in divots. “Where’s the baby at?” Wyatt said.

“In my car. I ran away. I was scared,” she said.

“Your baby is in the car and your old man is up on that hill and you’re here?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I ain’t no ‘sir.’ I tell you what. I got to take a shower. Bring your baby to the house and I’ll drive y’all into Missoula. I’ll leave the door unlocked. In the meantime, I don’t want to hear no more yelling or carrying on out here.”

He closed the door in her face.

The woman walked back down the road and around the bend the road made between two wooded hills. Wyatt stood among the water-damaged furniture in his living room, tossing a cell phone and catching it in his palm. She was a half-breed, he thought, one he had seen somewhere before. A truck stop outside Billings or Bozeman? He wasn’t sure. Truckers called them pavement princesses. This one looked more like Native America’s answer to the Bride of Frankenstein, he thought.

But the important fact was that she hadn’t asked him if he had a cell phone, even though it had been sticking out of his jeans pocket in full view. He flipped open his cell and brought up the numbers he kept in the memory bank. He looked at my number, pushed the dial button, then thought about it a moment and killed the call. He slipped the cell back in his pocket and went upstairs to the shower.

He turned on the water and put his hand inside the spray until steam began to drift out the open window. He pulled off his T-shirt and hung it on the outside doorknob, brushed his teeth in the basin, and spit. When he looked into the mirror, his own face reminded him of the edge of a hatchet. Through the window he heard his Appaloosa nicker in the lot.

The two killers, whose names were Tex Barker and Lynwood Peeples, worked their way down the slope through fir trees until they hit the dirt road. They moved quickly through the blueness of the dawn, into the lee of the house, flattening themselves against the side wall so they would not be seen from a window. They could hear the shower running upstairs and see steam floating through a screened window into the wind. They began working their way toward the back door while Wyatt Dixon’s Appaloosa spooked in circles.

When they entered the kitchen, the firebox in the stove was glowing, the circular iron lids immaculately clean with heat. A plate of flapjacks, eggs, and toast and a full pot of coffee sat on the table. The shorter man, Tex Barker, whose gnarled brow was too long for the rest of his face, snapped on a stun gun, and an electric thread danced between the two prongs on the end. His partner, Lynwood, carried a. 22 Ruger semiautomatic in one hand and in the other a cloth bag framed with wood hasps and a wood handle, one similar in design to a nineteenth-century carpetbag. The two men began walking up the stairs toward the sounds of water drumming on the sides of a tin shower stall.

At the top of the stairs they could see a T-shirt hanging on the outside knob of a door that was half opened on the bathroom. Tex Barker was in the lead, the stun gun tingling with power in his palm. Then Barker felt his partner grab him by the back of his belt. He turned and stared at him.

“His food’s getting cold on the table. Something’s wrong,” Lynwood whispered.

“What did you say?” Tex asked.

Lynwood was starting to back down the stairs, his cloth bag rubbing heavily against the wall.

“No. We take him,” Tex said hoarsely.

But Lynwood wasn’t listening. Force the play, just do it, Barker thought, and charged ahead to the top of the stairs, his stubby thighs knotting like a dwarf’s.

“Howdy doodie, boys?” Wyatt Dixon said, stepping out from a bedroom doorway and swinging a cast-iron skillet squarely into the center of Tex Barker’s face.

Barker crashed backwards into his partner, his nose broken and streaming blood. Lynwood Peeples tried to raise the Ruger and fire, but the iron skillet came down on his forearm, snapping something inside, and he felt his fingers straighten like useless sticks and heard the gun clatter to the foot of the stairs. Wyatt swung the skillet into Peeples’s mouth, splitting his lip, then down on the crown of his skull and the back of his neck. Peeples and Barker both rolled to the bottom of the stairwell, but Wyatt followed them down and swung again, this time catching Peeples on the elbow when he tried to protect his face with his arm.

Each blow snapped off teeth at the gumline, sent bruises all the way into the bone, slung blood on the walls. With one hand Wyatt picked up Peeples by his collar and shoved his face down on a stove lid and held it there. Barker was rolled up into a ball, but while Peeples screamed and fought to get loose from Wyatt’s grasp, Barker managed to pull a stiletto from his jeans and flick it open. He stabbed the blade deep into Wyatt’s thigh, just before the skillet came down again and almost ripped Barker’s ear from his head.