James Burke - In the Moon of Red Ponies

Wyatt stood shirtless and barefoot in the center of the room, wearing only a pair of jeans, one leg split to accommodate his cast, a Sharps buffalo rifle held at port arms. His mouth made Darrel think of the square teeth carved in the face of a Halloween pumpkin.

“Ain’t no man uses me, Detective. Ain’t no man comes in my home and wipes his feet on me, either,” Wyatt said.

He butt-stroked Darrel so hard across the jaw Darrel’s partial bridge flew from his mouth, his head snapping back into the wall. Then the floor came up and hit him in the face. He felt the room, the house, and the ground it stood on float away like a wood chip on the river’s surface.

Wyatt filled his hand from a box of fifty-caliber shells, stuffed them in his pocket, and shuffled through the kitchen and out the back door. Smoke or ground fog or a mixture of both had rolled off the river into the yard and hung as thick as wet cotton in the trees. He could make out three men at the opening of the potato cellar. He thought he saw two more, up on the hillside, where the old railroad bed used to be, before the tracks had been torn up and hauled away for scrap. What had McComb said? They were coming to pop Wyatt and take out McComb for extra measure. But why were they at the potato cellar? It contained nothing but a set of studded snow tires for his truck. It made no sense.

But the two men on the railroad bed did. They were going to flank the house or pop Wyatt when he moved into the backyard. He went back through the house, out the front, and circled around the side, deep inside the shadows, out of the moonlight.

A rusted tractor, spiked with weeds, its engine stripped for parts, was parked by the back corner of the house, a perfect shield between himself and the men up on the hill and the three using a pair of bolt cutters on the lock and chain strung across the potato cellar door.

The tractor had been used to drag logs off the hillside, and the owner had welded a steel cab over the seat in the event the tractor ever rolled. Wyatt positioned himself at the edge of the cab, took aim across the hood, and clicked back the hammer on the Sharps.

“What do you collection of pissants think you’re doin’?” he said.

Two of the figures automatically crouched down and one ran into the undergrowth at the base of the hill. One of the crouching men shined a flashlight on the tractor, then he and the man next to him opened up, the fire from their pistol barrels slashing into the dark, the rounds whanging and sparking off the tractor. Wyatt squeezed the trigger on the Sharps and felt the rifle’s weight heave into his shoulder. One of the men by the cellar was propelled backwards as though he had been jerked on a wire.

Wyatt worked the lever under the Sharps, ejecting the spent casing, fitted another cartridge into the chamber, and closed the breech. He took aim at one of the men up on the hill and squeezed the trigger. The bullet struck a boulder and whined away into trees. Wyatt sank to one knee and reloaded just as a man broke from the brush and ran up a deer trail into the timber. Wyatt swung his sights on the man’s back, pulled the trigger, and saw the man crash against a ponderosa trunk.

Wyatt’s eardrums were numb from the explosions of the fifty-caliber rounds and he could no longer hear the men running through the slag or the trees. The first man he hit had stayed down, but the second one was being lifted to his feet by the two men Wyatt had seen on the abandoned railroad bed. Wyatt stood erect, trying to keep his weight off his bad leg, worked the lever on the Sharps, and fumbled another round into the chamber.

But the home invaders were gone, except for a man with five days of unshaved whiskers and hair like black snakes who lay slumped against the door of the potato cellar, a hole as big as a thumb in his sternum. Wyatt picked up the man’s wrist and felt for a pulse, then set the man’s hand back in his lap. In the center of the man’s forearm was a red welt, like wire that had been threaded into a design under the skin. Wyatt touched it with his fingertips, felt the hardness in the tissue, then wiped his fingers clean in the dirt.

He stood erect by pressing his weight down on the rifle butt and limped back toward the kitchen door.

Darrel McComb stepped outside, holding his jaw. “Where are they?” he said.

“Gone, except for that one yonder. Sunk one in a second man, but my aim was off.”

“I could lie and mess you up, Gomer. But I’m letting this slide for now. What happens down the road is another matter,” he said.

“You a student of Scripture?”

Darrel waited for him to go on.

“Take a look at the mark on that fellow’s right arm,” Wyatt said.

McComb squatted down by the cellar door and clicked on a pen-light, moving it back and forth in the darkness. “What mark?” he said.

Wyatt limped back to where the dead man lay. The blood had already settled in the lower regions of the body and the face had turned unnaturally white, the eyes fixed and half-lidded. “Shine the light again?” Wyatt said.

He studied the dead man’s forearm, then touched the skin gingerly with the balls of his fingers. He held on to the rifle with two hands and pushed himself to his feet.

“Where you going?” Darrel said.

“To sleep.”

“There’s nothing on the guy’s arm. Why’d you tell me to look at it?” Darrel said.

“He was carrying the mark of the beast. But it ain’t there now. They don’t take it with them when they die. Don’t bust in my house again, McComb. Next time I’ll take your head off.”

The dead man had been a Marine Corps veteran and inveterate gambler from Elko, Nevada. He had no criminal record, but he had gone into debt to moneylenders in Vegas and disappeared from the computer five years before. The insides of his arms and thighs were laced with scar tissue from repeated hypodermic injections. The most recent ones were infected.

The investigation into the homicide behind Wyatt’s house cleared Wyatt of any culpability, but not Darrel McComb. He was suspended from the department without pay, pending a determination by Internal Affairs regarding the general deterioration of both his private and professional life. He had now shown up in the middle of two firefights without adequate explanation, been witness to the death of a federal agent he was following without authorization, and broken into the house of an ex-felon. To make matters worse, Darrel had been on the premises while the ex-felon killed a man. One of the investigators from Internal Affairs, dead serious, asked Darrel if he had been recently tested for syphilis of the brain. Humorous insiders at the courthouse suggested that Darrel resign his job now and consider a career as a mortician’s assistant in a town that had never heard of him.

The following week I saw him on a steel bench on the walk by the river, feeding pigeons from a bag of caramel popcorn. In his scuffed, boxlike shoes, white socks, ill-fitting dark suit, and pale blue necktie printed with trout flies, he was probably the saddest-looking plainclothes cop I’d ever seen.

“Wyatt Dixon told me everything that happened,” I said.

“So?” he replied.

“If you’d been a little creative in your report, you could have skated and jammed up Dixon at the same time. I think you’re a stand-up guy, Darrel.”

“Fay Harback ratted me out with Internal Affairs.”

“Doesn’t seem like Fay’s style.”

“Yeah? Well, she dimed me good. Those I.A. guys think I’m having a nervous breakdown. They say it’s been a concern to the D.A.’s office for months. Ever try proving to people you’re not nuts?”

“Why were those guys trying to break into Wyatt Dixon’s potato cellar?”