James Burke - In the Moon of Red Ponies

She sat down in a chair across from him. She wore a white dress with purple and green flowers printed on it, a silver chain around her neck. Her hair was brushed in thick swirls, her cheeks ruddy. Once again she made him think of a country woman, someone who could knead bread dough, grind up hamburger, and handle a windstorm blowing her wash all over the lawn.

“Darrel, I’ve got a lot at stake in this. Don’t be clever or tease me,” she said. Her eyes were green and sincere, and they never blinked when she spoke.

“The Indians had the stuff from Global Research stashed in a barn up by Johnny American Horse’s spread,” he said. “Wyatt Dixon is con-wise and was onto these guys from the jump. That’s why he was following Amber Finley around. He found their stash and moved it to an old potato cellar behind his house on the Blackfoot. I’m going to take him down tonight. Dixon’s going to do the big exit on this one.”

“Say that last part again.”

“Tonight he gets his ticket punched. No transfers. Next stop, a long cylinder where he gets turned into a shoe box full of ashes.” Darrel laughed, watching her.

“That sounds mean,” she said.

He studied her face, the expression in her eyes, the pulse in her throat. “It doesn’t have to be that way. I thought it was what you wanted,” he said, his heart regaining a sense of hope he had all but abandoned.

There was a long silence. She turned from him and gazed out the window, biting down on the corner of her lip. She cleared her throat. “I don’t tell other people what they should do,” she said.

So much for pangs of conscience, he thought.

Then he pulled the string on her.

“The stuff from Global Research will have to go into an evidence locker for a while. But eventually it’ll get back to the owners,” he said.

Her expression clouded. She took his empty beer bottle from his hand and went to the kitchen to get him a fresh one. When she returned, her eyes were flat. “You don’t want to do something before you work?” she said.

“The highway is clogged with fire trucks. I’d better go.”

“You said, ‘ I’m going to take him down.’ Don’t you have to use backup?” she said.

“Did I tell you I was an M.P. in the Army?”

“No.”

“Know what an instructor told me off the record in M.P. school?”

“No,” she said, one hand on her hip, looking down at him curiously.

“When you escort a prisoner and a situation goes south, you bring back only one story. Isn’t that a howl?”

Wyatt Dixon did not dream in color, nor upon waking did he remember stories from his sleep or events that fell into any narrative sequence. His dreams were stark, in black and white, composed of indistinct shards, disembodied faces carved out of wood, voices that had no source, perhaps a bull exploding like a piece of black lightning from a bucking chute, or sometimes a razor strop hanging like a punctuation mark in the back of a closet.

In his dreams he both saw and smelled his father, an unshaved, jug-headed man whose overalls hung like rags on his body. The father did not speak in the dream; he simply stared, one eye squinting with an unrelieved anger that seemed to have no cause. But his hands were remarkably fast, a blur of light capable of delivering blows before Wyatt ever saw them coming.

When Wyatt woke from dreams about his father, he would sit for a long time on the side of the bed, his skin insentient, a sound in his ears like wind blowing in a cave. On this particular night he woke to his father’s presence in the room, as palpable as the smell of field sweat and smoke from a stump fire and fresh dirt peeled back over the point of a plowshare. His father stood in silhouette against the window, a revolver hanging from his hand.

“You wasn’t worth the busted rubber that got you born,” the father said.

Wyatt sat on the side of the bed. He wore no shirt and the cold from the river had invaded the room. “What are you doing here, Pap?” he said.

The figure stepped out of the moonlight, the revolver still pointed at the floor. “There are men coming to kill you. I suspect they’ll try to take me out at the same time. Do I have to hook you up again?”

Wyatt focused on the face looming above him and saw his father’s image disappear and another take its place. “How’d you get in, McComb?”

“It was pretty hard. I had to slip the lock with a credit card. Why don’t you invest three bucks in a dead bolt?”

“You said some men is coming here to kill me.”

“Old friends of yours.” McComb touched Wyatt’s cast with the barrel of his revolver.

“Take this dogshit of yours somewheres else.”

“What makes you think you got a vote in this?” Darrel asked.

Wyatt picked up a jelly glass partially filled with his chemical cocktail. He upended the glass, gargled, and swallowed. He licked the dirty residue from the inside of the glass, then set the glass back on the nightstand. “You ain’t no different from me, McComb. Anything I done, you done it twicet over. Except you hid behind the government and done it against a bunch of pitiful Indians down in Central America.”

Even in the dark Wyatt could see Darrel’s hand tighten on the grips of his revolver. “You’re a stupid, ignorant man. Question is, what do I do with you?” Darrel said. “Reason doesn’t work and neither do threats. Know why? Because guys like you wait all their lives for somebody else to snuff their wick. Every one of you knows your parents hated you from the first day your mother didn’t have the monthlies.”

Wyatt sat very still in the gloom, his hands flat on his thighs. Darrel waited for him to reply, but he didn’t. Wyatt’s eyes stared into space, the pupils like drops of black ink. A train whistle echoed along the canyon walls.

“Did you hear what I said?” Darrel asked.

“My chemical cocktails ain’t working no more,” Wyatt said.

“Say again?”

Wyatt continued to stare at nothing, his hooked jaw and Roman profile as immobile and chiseled as a statue’s. Darrel shook his head in exasperation, then heard rocks sliding on the hillside behind the house. He went to the back window and looked out at the trees and at the shadows they made in the moonlight. The potato cellar he had told Greta about was cut back into the face of the hill, shored up with pine logs, covered with a slat door. Pieces of gravel or dirt bounced down the hillside above the cellar and fell into the yard. Darrel strained his eyes at the shaggy outlines of the fir trees and saw the shape of a man move through a patch of moonlight, then disappear. He looked over his shoulder at Wyatt.

“They’re coming. You stay out of the way,” he said.

“That was you said I wasn’t worth the broken rubber that got me born?” Wyatt asked.

“What?” Darrel said.

If Wyatt answered, Darrel did not hear him. Up on the hill a second shape, then a third, moved across the illuminated spot in the trees. His cut-down twelve-gauge pump was in the kitchen, along with a high-powered flashlight. He had a full magazine in his nine-Mike and five shells loaded with double-ought buckshot in the pump, enough to make everyone’s evening an interesting event. But he wondered at his own recklessness and whether his words to Dixon about repressed suicidal intentions were not better directed at himself.

He stepped back from the window. “If I don’t walk out of this, get on your cell and call for the meat wagon.” He flipped his credit card on Wyatt’s bed. “Then buy yourself a dinner on me.”

He turned back toward the window. He thought he heard someone sliding down the slope through slag, perhaps fighting to catch his balance. A fine mist, mixed with smoke, had drifted into the canyon, and the moonlight inside it gave off a sulfurous yellow glow. The floor creaked behind him. He turned curiously, having already forgotten about Wyatt Dixon and his exchange with him.