James Burke - In the Moon of Red Ponies

“How about giving me Mr. Pickett’s address?”

“Mr. Pickett has done caught air for other parts. Primarily ’cause he dimed them two boys with Darrel McComb and they found out about it.”

“My wife was mentioned in this threat?”

He retrieved the wet fly out of the riffle and flicked it out again.

“Asked you a question, partner,” I said.

“When you tell a man to repeat himself, you’re accusing him of lying. I don’t care for it, counselor.”

“Who’s paying these two guys?”

“I think you know.” He set his fly rod down on the rock. Perhaps because of the shade his eyes had taken on the pale blue cast of the sky, but nonetheless they looked like marbles placed inside a death mask. “That name ‘Mabus’ wrote down inside a pentacle won’t go out of my head. I ain’t got the education or experience to deal with them kinds of things by myself. The preacher at our congregation ain’t an educated man, either. But you and me? That’s another matter. Brother Holland, we could crank up the band.”

“Deal with what things?”

“Read the Book of John. I made a study of it in Deer Lodge.” His eyes clicked sideways and looked into mine.

“Don’t call my wife again,” I said.

Darrel McComb was in trouble with Fay Harback, but this time he was beginning to enjoy it. In some ways it felt good to be excoriated, to be the one wheel in the machine that didn’t automatically lock into gear when a lever was pulled. In fact, for the first time in his life he felt genuinely free.

Fay Harback removed her glasses and looked up at him after reading the document on her desk, a Xerox of a letter Darrel had written and mailed four days earlier. “Darrel, you cannot write to the United States attorney and say the kind of things you say in this letter,” she said.

Her tone was not unsympathetic. Actually, Darrel had just realized he liked Fay; he also liked her petite features and small face and the way her mahogany-colored hair lay thickly on the back of her neck. He couldn’t remember when he had felt so protective toward her.

“Darrel?” she said.

“Yes?”

“Are you listening?”

“You said I shouldn’t take it on myself to write the United States attorney. But why shouldn’t I? The First Amendment gives me that right.”

“You accused him of misusing his office.”

“Not exactly.”

She slipped her glasses back on and looked back down at the photocopy. “ ‘If you’d take the time to examine American Horse’s service record, you’d discover he was an expert marksman. The shooter on the hill behind American Horse’s house couldn’t hit a blimp with a guided missile. Maybe you guys used up the remnants of your brainpower while persecuting Richard Jewell, but this time out I suggest you give up the role of court jesters and not try to railroad another innocent man.’ ”

“Sounds pretty accurate to me,” Darrel said.

“I worry about you.”

“Why?”

“I think you’re having a nervous breakdown.”

“Maybe I was. But not now. Life is great.”

“I.A. still has you on the desk?”

“Some guys are cops twenty-four hours a day. What’s eight hours?”

“Not a good statement to make to the district attorney.”

But he wasn’t listening now. Through the window he saw Wyatt Dixon parking himself and his crutches on a bench under the maples, a group of bums and jailhouse riffraff greeting him, shaking his hand, as though he were a celebrity. “Before this is over, I’m going to cool that son of a buck out,” Darrel said.

Fay followed Darrel’s line of vision to Wyatt sitting on the bench, a silvery shirt stitched with purple roses stretched tightly across his back, a black hat with a red feather in the band perched high on his head. “What I see is a man enjoying the morning and not bothering anyone. And I didn’t hear that last remark,” she said. “God, you’re a fruitcake.”

But Fay’s political correctness and personal denigration of him did not diminish Darrel’s mood or the new sense of freedom that had somehow rooted itself in his life.

It took Greta Lundstrum to do that. He had begun the affair believing he was in charge, that he was using her as a means to solve a case no one else wanted to touch. But as time progressed, he wondered more and more about his own sexual dependency and if, in fact, he hadn’t developed a genuine affection for Greta. She was an Amazon-in bed, in her business dealings, with men who got in her face. He even wondered if there was not a perverse element in his erotic attachment to her, namely, her masculine qualities, the heated, muscular way in which she made love, the orgasms he could equate only with a volcanic upheaval.

That evening she greeted him at the door in straw sandals, white shorts high up on her thighs, and a nylon shirt whose color changed from copper to magenta.

“You’re early. I haven’t had time to dress,” she said.

“I think you look swell,” he replied. Actually, she looked better than swell. Even though she was a bit overweight, her robust posture and strong features gave her simple clothes a kind of working-class elegance, the uplifted heft of her breasts a tribute to her power.

But the protean nature of Greta’s personae filled him with conflicting thoughts. At the sink, she sliced the rind on a grapefruit, then ripped it loose from the pink meat with her fingers, rinsing her hands under the faucet as she worked, like a country woman cleaning game. Through the kitchen window he watched her fork the steaks off the grill on the patio, her eyes squinting in the smoke, and he knew this was the exact image of the blue-collar woman a man such as himself was supposed to love and build a home with. Maybe this was the life that was still waiting for him, but if so, why did the thought of it make his scalp constrict?

Was it because he was still infatuated with Amber Finley, now known as Amber American Horse? How did Rocky used to put it? There were three ways for a career noncom to ruin himself: He could fall in love with a whore, an officer’s wife, or a rich girl who hated her right-wing father and liked to get arrested at peace demonstrations.

But that was not the source of the tension band that was like an invisible hat cocked on the side of Darrel’s head. He wondered if Greta, the Amazon woman in bed, with her thick forearms and broad hands, could be capable of pressing a pillow down on a man’s face and holding it there while he struggled for breath and his heart exploded in his chest.

“Why you staring at me, handsome?” she said.

“You a survivor, Greta?” he asked.

She set the steaks and a plate of sliced tomatoes on the dining-room table and thought about his question. “Survivor in which way?” she said.

“I’ve been in situations where I was scared enough to do whatever it took to stay alive.”

“My life’s been pretty dull. At least until I met a certain someone,” she said.

“I wouldn’t hold it against you. I mean, if you got jammed up real bad and had to do something against your conscience.”

“You’ve got a wild imagination, Darrel. But I love you just the same.” She pursed her lips and made a kissing sound.

She had never used the word “love” to him before. During dinner he kept trying to read her eyes and sort out the way she always seemed to imply his concerns were unfounded or even irrational. Maybe he’d been a cop too long, he thought.

“Ready for dessert?” she said.

“Yeah, what is it?”

“Go in the bedroom. I’ll be along in a minute.” She carried the dirty dishes into the kitchen, a glimmer in her eye.

“No games tonight,” he said.

“Do what I tell you. You won’t be disappointed,” she said.