James Burke - In the Moon of Red Ponies

A tractor-trailer boomed down with ponderosa logs roared past her in the opposite lane, blowing dust and the smell of pine rosin and diesel smoke through her window. She crossed the river on a two-lane bridge into trees and drove down a dirt road that wound along the bottom of a hill whose sides were slashed with rock slides. Ahead she could see smoke blowing down the canyon from the sawmill, the sun’s reflection like hammered bronze on the river’s surface, and the roof of Dixon’s house, the pipe from a woodstove wisping in the breeze.

Maybe he won’t be home, she told herself, then felt a rush of shame at the fearful content of her thought processes. The. 38 vibrated next to her on the seat, and she touched it and pushed it against the backrest so it wouldn’t fall on the floor. The left front tire hit a rock, lurching the truck frame toward the road’s edge, forcing her to grab the steering wheel with both hands. In her rearview mirror she saw small yellow rocks cascading off the road into a green pool down below.

She came over a rise and looked down the road into the twilight and saw Wyatt Dixon in his yard, shirtless, one thigh still in a cast, dipping a sponge into a water bucket and wiping down an Appaloosa whose rump was blanketed with gray and white spots.

Dixon seemed to turn and look at her just as she came over the rise, frozen in time and place, as though in a sepia-tinted photograph, his skin as smooth as melted candle wax, his face slightly bemused, a dusty shaft of sunlight causing him to squint one eye. In that moment he seemed to become flesh and blood, no longer a phantom, no longer larger than life. Her fear and self-doubt seemed to die in her chest like a fever that has run its course, and the wind off the river was suddenly cool and sweet-smelling in her face, the world once more a place of birch and fir trees and aspens and wild roses on a riverbank. Wyatt Dixon was only a man-a pitiful, malformed creature whose mother had killed his father for the years of drunkenness and abuse he had visited upon her and then for extra measure tried to kill Wyatt, age thirteen, with a hay fork. How could anyone fear a man who had probably been born only because his mother couldn’t afford an abortion?

She rolled down the incline toward the back of Dixon’s rented property, touching the brakes, wondering if she should park by the back shed or simply pull boldly into his yard.

Except the brake pedal had no resistance under her foot and it sank to the floor as though it had been disconnected from its own mechanical apparatus. Suddenly Temple was speeding down the incline, while in front of her a jagged rock the size of a watermelon waited for the tie rod on her left front tire. She heard metal snap, felt the steering wheel twist crazily in her hands, then, as in a dream, saw the front of the truck dip over the edge of the road and take her with it, plummeting through space, upside down, into a green pool whose surface was swirling with dirty white froth from a beaver dam.

The air bag exploded against her chest, pinning her against the seat, but she got her fingers on the window levers and was able to close both windows before the cab filled.

Water pin-holed through the floor and dashboard, and river gravel crunched against the windows as the truck’s weight settled to the bottom of the pool. The crown of her skull was jammed into the headliner, and while the truck’s engine boiled like a woodstove in the current, she could feel water rising to her brow and she knew in that moment that she would die upside down, like Peter on his inverted cross, alone and abandoned, in her case twice condemned to incremental suffocation inside a premature grave, and she wondered what wickedness she could have done in this life to deserve such a fate.

She struck at the air bag with both hands and jerked impotently at the safety strap, then gave up and strained her head upward as the water crept over her eyes and into her nose. In high school, on a dare, she had held her breath for almost two minutes in a swimming pool. She wondered if she could do that now and, if she could, if it was actually worth the effort. She had become an expert in dying an inch at a time inside a place where no one could see or hear her. Inside that dark place, death didn’t come by stealth or a sudden rending of the heart. Suffocation was an animal trying to claw its way to light; it was muriatic acid setting the lungs aflame, shards of glass slicing through pink tissue; it was a steel saw cutting through the sternum while the victim was denied the right to scream.

For the first time in years she wanted to weep, to find the revolver that lay somewhere on the headliner and put a bullet into her brain.

She saw a shirtless man plunge through the river’s surface, clutching a gunny sack with a huge rock twisted inside it, air bubbles chaining out of the plaster cast on his thigh. A cloud of sand mushroomed around him when he struck the silt at the bottom of the pool. In his right hand Temple saw a bowie knife, one with a blood groove and a point that had been sharpened into a sliver of ice on a whetstone.

He stuck the bowie knife in the sand and tried to pull the door open with one hand while holding the rock in the other. But the door was wedged hard into the river bottom, and each time he tugged on it, he lost purchase and his feet floated out from under him.

He let go of the rock, grabbed the frame of the truck with both hands, and drove one boot through the window glass, releasing a torrent of water into the cab. Then his hands were inside the rim of the window, lifting the cab free of the sand.

He got his arm inside the window, drove the knife into the air bag, and sliced the safety strap off her chest. The cab filled in seconds. Temple could see Wyatt Dixon’s face inches from hers, his face dilating from lack of air. He tore the door loose from the frame, scraping it back in a shower of sand, then grabbed her with both hands and ripped her from behind the steering wheel.

The eight feet to the surface was like eight miles, then she seemed to soar through wet cellophane and fractured light into wind and trees and air that was as cold and pure as bottled oxygen. She treaded water and turned in a circle, expecting to see Wyatt Dixon, but she saw only a long, bronze-hammered riffle coursing down the center of the river, gray boulders etched with the skeletons of hellgrammites, and the eroded caverns under the bank that hummed with a sound like a muted sewing machine.

She ducked under the surface again and saw Dixon fighting to free his cast from where it had snagged on the edge of a beaver dam. But his situation made no sense: Why had he floated into the dam, rather than rising straight to the surface as she had? She dove down to the dam, but before she reached him he cracked the cast loose from his thigh and pushed himself toward the bank, where he was able to get one foot on the bottom and break the surface with his chin.

He crawled up on shore twenty yards down from her, vomiting water on the rocks, trembling like a dog trying to pass broken glass. She walked up beside him and sat down on a boulder, exhausted, out of breath, prickling with cold in the wind.

His face lifted up at hers, blood and water networking down his thigh, his back and side half-mooned by an old scar. “Tell you what, Miss Temple, next time you come calling, how about using the goddamn swing bridge?” he said.

“Why didn’t you swim up with me?” she said.

“Ain’t never learned how. My cell is up at the house. Can you put in a 911 for me? I think I done tore my stitches again.”

Temple went to the hospital for an examination, but she had no water in the her lungs and came home with me that night. Wyatt Dixon had to go back into surgery. When I visited him the next morning, his leg was in traction, a fresh white cast on his thigh.