James Burke: In the Moon of Red Ponies

But here, on each side of the street, was a different world, one of $19.95 motels, a self-service filling station that advertised itself as AMERICAN OWNED, and bars where women fought with knives and the clientele came to the door at 7 A.M.

He parked down by the river and entered the back of a bar that smelled of coffee, flat beer, and cigarette smoke that had soaked into the walls and vinyl booths. A swamper was swinging a wet mop on the floor, the bartender loading a cooler with long-necked bottles of beer. A man with peroxided hair, wearing a yellow muscle shirt and stonewashed jeans and polished military boots, split a nine-ball rack with such force the cue ball jumped the rail and rolled across the floor.

Johnny picked up the ball and set it back on the felt.

“Thanks,” the pool shooter said, his eyes flat.

“No problem,” Johnny said.

He sat at the bar, ordered a soft drink, and peeled a hard-boiled egg. The pool shooter ran the balls in a string down to the nine ball, chalking his cue before each shot, his eyes never leaving his game. Then he replaced his cue in the wall rack and started to leave the bar.

“Where’s your friend?” Johnny asked.

“Which friend?” the man asked.

“The guy you drove out with.”

“You lost me.”

“No matter what you guys are getting paid, if I was you, I’d give the money back.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s good to know. But I got no idea what you’re talking about,” the man said.

“Maybe I got you confused with somebody else.”

“Yeah, maybe you do,” the man said.

Johnny watched the man with roses and parrots tattooed on his arms go out the door and cross the street, then walk down an alley, where a car was parked. The man walked gracefully, light-footed, like a prizefighter, his back a triangle of sinew and muscle. Just before he reached the car, a Firebird, he turned and looked back at the bar.

When Johnny got back home, he strung tin cans on wires around his house and removed a box from under his bed containing a bowie knife that had been forged from a car spring, and a trade hatchet, with an oak handle and a half-moon hook on the head, given to him by his grandfather. He went into his toolshed and ground the hatchet on an emery wheel, then sharpened both it and the bowie knife on a whetstone and returned to the house.

The day was growing warmer, and through the window he could see flies hatching out of the reeds on the riverbanks, drifting onto the riffle, where rainbow trout popped them as soon as they touched the surface. He fell asleep in a chair on the porch and thought he heard dry thunder on the far side of the mountains that ringed his land.

Every Defense Attorney has clients who enter his life on a seemingly temporary basis, then become the human equivalent of chewing gum on the bottom of a shoe. Celebrity defense attorneys who appear regularly on CNN talk shows may lead glamorous lives, but the average practitioner of criminal law has a clientele with whom he does not want to be seen in public. These include grifters of every stripe, jackrollers, pimps, paperhangers, drug dealers, Murphy artists, cross-dressing prostitutes, court-assigned women who kill their children, and lifetime recidivists who are convinced they are criminal geniuses and try to outwit the system by lying to their attorneys.

Private investigators deal daily with the same bunch, although occasionally there’s one who doesn’t fit into the box. Temple called me that afternoon. “It’s Amber Finley again,” she said. “She’s in on a drunk and disorderly. She also hit a cop. Actually, she threw her underwear in his face.”

“Why is she calling you?”

“She’s burned herself with every attorney in town. At least with the good ones,” she replied.

“She wants me to represent her?”

“She’s not a bad gal, Billy Bob.”

“Answer is no.”

“You pretty busy now?”

“She can call her father. I don’t want to get involved.”

“She says she knows why Johnny American Horse was carrying a pistol.”

“How does she know anything about Johnny?”

“They’ve been seeing each other. At least that’s what she says.”

“Her old man must love that.”

“You want me to tell her to get lost?”

A few minutes later I walked over to the sheriff’s department and a deputy escorted me to a holding cell, where Amber Finley sat on a metal bench, her legs crossed, looking at the wall. She was around twenty-five and wore beat-up cowboy boots, jeans hitched tightly around her hips, a Harley T-shirt, and long earrings with blue stones in them. Her hair was blond and cut short, her eyes an intense blue. Even though she was hung over, her face still possessed the lovely features and complexion that Hollywood had idealized and turned into a national icon in the Technicolor films of the forties and fifties. But Amber Finley’s mind-set was far removed from that earlier, more innocent time.

She was a biker girl one night, a cowgirl the next. She drank in busthead bars and was probably the wet dream of the men and college boys who hung in them. But the clothes she wore and the life she led were a self-abasing deception. She spoke French and German, had an IQ of 160, a degree in English literature from the University of Virginia, and was the daughter of United States Senator Romulus Finley.

“How do you commit battery with undergarments?” I said.

“It’s easy when a cop kicks open your motel room while you’re dressing,” she replied.

“What were you doing in a dump like that, anyway?”

“To tell you the truth, I don’t remember.”

I paused a moment. “Your old man won’t spring you?” I said.

She seemed to think about it. “If I asked him, yeah, he probably would. Yeah, he might,” she said. She looked at me, as though confused by her own words and the sad implication in them. She got up and walked to the bars. I could smell the cigarette smoke in her hair and the mixed drinks that had gone sour on her stomach. “Get me out of here, Billy Bob. I’m really hung over this time.”

An hour later we walked out of the jail. “Why was Johnny American Horse carrying a gun around?” I asked.

“It’s those oil companies he’s trying to stop from drilling on sacred lands. He thinks they put a hit on him.”

“A hit? From an oil company? Maybe some of their CEOs are moral imbeciles, but oil companies don’t have people killed,” I said.

“Right, that’s why we’re taking over Third World countries-we don’t care about their oil. See you later, B.B. I’m going to sleep for three days.”

As the sun dropped behind the ridge of mountains on the west side of the Jocko Valley, Johnny American Horse walked the perimeter of his four-acre lot, examined the wire and tin cans he had strung earlier in the day, then continued on up the slope into the trees bordering the back of his property. The sun became a hot red spark between two mountains, and a purple shade fell across the valley floor just as the moon rose over the hills in the south. He sat for a long time among the trees, his arms folded across his knees, studying his land, the dirt road that traversed it, the dark green shine on the river winding out of the cottonwoods.

The men who had driven across the plains to find him were urban people, he thought. They would come for him at night because they were cowards and they killed for hire. They would drive their Firebird as close to his house as possible because they did not like to walk, nor did they feel confident when they were separated from the machines that gave them both power and anonymity.

But their greatest mistake would be their assumption that their prey thought as they did.

He returned to the house and turned off all the lights except the one in the bathroom, leaving the door ajar so that it shone on his bed. He stuffed a rolled sleeping bag under the blanket on the bed and pulled the blanket up onto the pillows. In the kitchen he filled a thermos with black coffee, threaded the sheath of his serrated bowie knife on his belt, and put on his sheep-lined coat and a shapeless cowboy hat.