James Burke - In the Moon of Red Ponies

“The day Global gets its goods back is the day Johnny gets his death warrant signed. What a life, huh, boss?”

One sack on the table was filled with first-aid supplies.

“You don’t think you’re being watched or followed?” I said.

“They try. I don’t think they do a very good job of it. Did you see those telephone workers by the crossroads? I wonder why they all have the same haircut.”

“I wouldn’t underestimate them,” I said.

But my words were useless. I leaned against the doorjamb and watched her sort out the canned and dried food and medical purchases that she was obviously taking to Johnny. I wondered how long it would be before she was in the crosshairs of a telescopic lens.

“How badly is he hurt?” I asked.

“Bad enough.”

“Amber, you need to be aware Temple and I are about to lose our home. Johnny’s tribal bondsmen double-crossed him and us.”

Her back was turned to me. She paused in her work a moment, as though she were about to speak. Then she wrapped a bottle of hydrogen peroxide in a towel and placed it deep in a cardboard box.

“Did you hear me? Others are being hurt as well as you and Johnny. Seth Masterson got set up and blown into a pile of bloody rags because he tried to save Johnny and you from yourselves.”

This time she turned on me. “How serious do you think anthrax is? Or bubonic plague or the Ebola virus? Forget about the fact it’s down in the Bitterroot Valley. How do you feel about this stuff being used on human beings?” she said.

“That’s what they’re messing with at Global?”

“They’re the bastards who gave Saddam Hussein part of his biological warfare program.”

“Turn over your material to the media. You can do it anonymously.”

“It would never see the light of day.”

“I tried,” I said.

“Yeah, you did. Go burn a candle to yourself. I wish the tribal bondsmen hadn’t shafted you. One of them just made a down payment on a new house. Not on the res, either, since he’s obviously moving up in life. You got screwed and so did we and so did your friend the FBI agent. I don’t have anything else to say, except ta-ta. That’s the way it shakes out sometimes.”

I went back outside, got in my Avalon, and turned around on the edge of the yard. The air was dry and I could see a smoky sheen rising into the sky from fires that were burning close to Glacier National Park. Amber came out on the porch and waved for me to stop. The anger and self-manufactured cynicism had gone out of her face, replaced by a vulnerability I didn’t normally associate with her.

“Do you ever hear from my father?” she said.

“No, I don’t.”

“He was in town. I thought he might have called.”

“Sometimes my answering machine is off when the office is closed.”

“He’s mad about my marrying Johnny, but he always checks on me through third parties. That’s why I was asking,” she said.

I wanted to tell her to be careful, to wrap herself in whatever spiritual shield ancient deities could provide her. But how do you caution a fawn about a cigarette a motorist has just flipped from his car window into a patch of yellow grass, or tell a sparrow that winged creatures eventually plummet to earth?

That evening Temple and I moved about the house in silence, clicking on the cable news, clicking it off again when the other entered the room, busying ourselves in our self-imposed solitude with inconsequential chores, as though our feigned solemnity were a successful disguise for our depression and mutual resentment.

It was dusk, the valley purple with shadow, when she finally spoke out of more than necessity. “Wyatt Dixon called the house today. He wanted to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“I didn’t give him a chance to say. I told him I’d report him to the sheriff’s office if he called again.”

“I’ll have a talk with him.”

“He’s worthless. Let him alone.”

She walked down to the barn and turned on the valve that fed the irrigation line to the pasture. In the distance I saw the water burst from the pipe and spray in the wind. Then she came back in the house, showered, and went to bed. I went into the den I used as a home office and sat in the dark with L. Q. Navarro’s holstered. 45 revolver in my lap. It was a beautiful firearm, blue-black, perfectly balanced, with yellowed ivory grips and a gold-plated trigger guard and hammer. I sometimes wondered if my fondness for holding L.Q.’s revolver wasn’t a form of fetish, but actually I didn’t care whether it was or not. I loved guns then and I love them now, just as I loved L.Q. and his courage and his manly smell and his confidence that regardless of what we did, we were always on the side of justice.

The moon above the hills was the same pale yellow as the ivory on L.Q.’s revolver. I could hear heavy animals cracking through the underbrush on the slope behind the house and pinecones pinging off the metal roof when the wind gusted hard out of the trees. For a moment I thought I saw L.Q. moving about in the shadows, his jaws slack, his white shirt water-stained from the grave, death’s hold on him not up for debate.

In my mind’s eye I saw the beer garden strung with paper lanterns where we attended dances in Monterrey; the times he and Temple and I ate Mexican dinners in a sidewalk cafe by the San Antonio River, only two blocks from the Alamo; the ancient Spanish mission where he was married and I stood as his best man, the same mission where his wife’s funeral Mass would be celebrated six months later.

L.Q. and I had lived a violent life, marked by death and memories of nocturnal events that made me doubt our humanity, but it had its moments. I just wished I could reclaim them.

I felt Temple’s hand on my shoulder. “I’ve acted badly,” she said.

Her nightgown was backlit by the moon, and I could see the outline of her body inside it.

“No, you haven’t. You warned me about Johnny, but I walked into a buzz saw,” I said.

“Your goodness is your weakness. People use it against you. That’s why I get mad.”

“I don’t believe Johnny and Amber meant to hurt us.”

“We’re not going to lose our home, Billy Bob. We’re going to find out who’s behind all this and make their lives miserable.”

“L.Q. couldn’t have said it better.”

“What are you doing with his gun?”

“I hear sounds out in the woods. Sometimes I think it’s L.Q.”

She looked at me strangely. I learned forward in the leather chair in which I was sitting and dropped L.Q.’s revolver in my desk drawer. “Sometimes I still want the old ways back. I want to round up every greedy shit hog who’s feeding off this country and blow them apart,” I said.

She sat down on the arm of my chair and pulled my head against her breast and pressed her cheek down on my hair. I could feel her heart beating against my ear.

I didn’t know Wyatt Dixon’s cell phone number and the next morning I had to drive out to his house in order to talk to him. He was sitting on a rock patterned with the scales of dead hellgrammites, wearing neither shirt nor shoes, flipping a wet fly into the current, watching it float downstream.

“Doin’ any good?” I said.

“It’s too hot. They’re holed up in them pools.”

“Why’d you call my wife yesterday?”

“Your office was closed. So I rung you at home. I wasn’t trying to bother your wife, if that’s why your nose is bent out of joint.”

“She doesn’t want to hear from you. What does it take to get that across?”

His mouth was hooked down at the corners, his face as absent of emotion as clay. “There’s a yard bitch by the name of Wilbur Pickett, lives up at Ronan. I knowed him from some of my past activities before the Man on High got my attention. He says them boys who put that frog-sticker in me told him there’s an ex-Texas Ranger herebouts gonna get himself boxed up and shipped to the boneyard. The ex-Ranger and maybe his old woman, too.”