James Burke - In the Moon of Red Ponies

The next morning he thought someone might have shot at him, but he couldn’t be sure. Dry thunder had been echoing in the canyons, and a violent gust of wind could snap a tree limb as loudly as a rifle shot. But the second time he heard a popping sound, he also saw pulp fly from the trunk of a dead larch. He left the trail, zigzagging through the forest, not stopping until he had crested a hill. He slid at least two hundred feet down an arroyo into a streambed, next to a row of nineteenth-century sluice boxes strung out on the rocks like a miniature wrecked train.

That night he came out of the mountains into a wet glade spiked with cattails, where he watched a cinnamon bear and two cubs cornering and swatting fish out of a slough. He crossed the glade, following the Indian woman, whose moccasined feet left soft green depressions in the reeds she walked through. He entered mountains again, where he found a cairn with a deer antler protruding from the top of the pile. Under the rocks were cans of sardines and boned chicken, a package of nuts and dried fruit, a box of Hershey bars, toothpaste and a brush, aspirin, bandages, iodine, and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. He pulled the poultice from his arm and a smell like rotten eggs rose into his face. He poured the disinfectant onto the wound and watched it boil in the moonlight, then washed it clean with brandy from his canteen. In the distance he could see a ranch house surrounded by a rick fence, inside of which were red horses racing through a meadow, under the moon.

He lay back in the grass to sleep, but the Indian woman squatted next to him and looked entreatingly into his face.

“What is it?” he said.

She placed her hand on the disturbed pile of stones. As she did, a white light shone through the pile as though it emanated from the earth rather than her palm. Crumpled between two pieces of slag was a letter inside a Ziploc bag. It was written in longhand, and it read:

Dear Johnny,

The FBI have doubled their surveillance on me and I can’t get to the materials to move them. People being what they are, I’m afraid it’s a matter of time before someone gives us up. But even if we fail, I will always love you and be proud of what we have done together. Lester Antelope gave his life and died bravely for our cause. I only hope I can be as brave as he.

Your gal with “The Eight-Thirty Blues,”

Amber

How long had it been since they had danced to “The Eight-Thirty Blues” under the stars at the Thursday evening concert on the river? It seemed a lifetime ago. He put the letter inside his shirt and fell asleep in the grass. Through the ground he could hear the drone of automobiles on a highway.

He woke just before dawn, the mountains like a black bowl around him, the sky and stars swept clean of smoke and dust, the air dense with the smell of ozone and distant rain. He ate a can of boned chicken, washed his face in a stream, and brushed his teeth. He started to examine the wound in his arm for infection, but the bandage was still clean and taped solidly in place, and he felt no pain when he touched its surfaces. He decided to let well enough alone.

Just as the light went out of the sky and the stars faded into the morning, he thought he saw the Indian woman among a grove of cottonwoods farther down the stream, waiting for him. But when he approached her, the wind gusted through the trees, and a large doe clattered out of the grove and churned up the hillside. Then it stopped and stared back at him.

“It’s only me,” he said.

He thought the wind would gust again and change the animal’s shape back into that of the Indian woman. Instead, the doe flipped its tail in the air, exposing the white fur underneath, and galloped away, two spotted fawns running behind its hooves.

It was evening and the sun had gone all the way across the sky when Johnny came out of the mountains onto the highway and the world of truck stops, tourist cabins, and cracker-box real estate offices knocked together from fresh-planked pine. In a general store he bought a denim shirt, new jeans, socks, underwear, a razor, and soap. He shaved and changed into his fresh clothes in a filling station restroom, then looked into the mirror and went back to the general store and bought a straw hat that he pushed down low on his head.

A highway patrol car passed him as he walked toward a truck stop where a half-dozen tractor-trailers were parked. He used the outside mirror on a parked pickup truck to watch the patrol car disappear up the road, then bought a fried pie and ate it on a wood bench in the shade of the cafe. Through the trees on the opposite side of the road he could see a blue lake and a man in a red canoe fishing in the shadow of a cliff. The wind was cool and surprisingly free of smoke, the sky streaked with lavender horsetails in the south. Again he thought he smelled rain.

Above him, a piece of paper flapped from the thumbtack that held it to a message board.

The sheet of paper had been rained on and sun-dried and was curled around the edges, but he could clearly see the bold lettering printed across the top: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?

The picture under the caption was an enlargement of a mug shot taken in the early morning hours at the Missoula County Jail. Johnny looked at the face in the photo-the eyes half-lidded, the jaws slack with booze-and hardly recognized himself.

A couple of log truck drivers came out of the cafe. One of them sniffed the air and looked at Johnny, his face disjointed. Johnny lifted his eyes into the driver’s and held them there.

“You doin’ all right, buddy?” the driver asked.

“Yeah, I’m all right. How ’bout you?” Johnny said.

The driver didn’t answer. He and his friend got into their rigs and pulled onto the highway.

Why had the man stared at him like that? An attendant at the gas pumps was using the pay phone, looking briefly in Johnny’s direction. When Johnny stood up from the bench, threadworms swam in front of his eyes. He walked into the side lot of the truck stop and approached a driver standing by a rig boomed down with ponderosa logs, the engine hammering under the hood.

“Going toward Missoula?” Johnny said.

“I might be,” the driver replied. He was a short, hard-boned man with olive skin and a colorless cloth cap pulled down tightly on his scalp. He wore laced boots, black jeans, and a long-sleeved khaki shirt that was sweat-ringed at the armpits and flecked with black ash from a grass fire. He had a cold and was blowing his nose into a bandanna.

“I’d appreciate a ride,” Johnny said.

The driver’s eyes ran over Johnny’s person, lingering in places they shouldn’t have. “Climb in,” he said.

When Johnny pulled himself into the cab, he felt as though the tissue in his body were being separated from his bones. The trees along the road, the blue lake, and the fisherman in the red canoe seemed to spin around the truck’s cab. As the truck drove south and crossed a stream strewn with white rocks, he thought he saw the Indian woman looking back at him from a stand of aspen trees. He raised his hand to wave at her, then realized the driver was staring at him.

The driver’s ears were filmed with soot, and the initials “K.K.K.” were inked across the top of his right wrist.

“You in the Klan?” Johnny said.

“I put that tattoo on me when I was a kid. Wish I could take it off, but looks like I’m stuck with it.”

“You ought to take it off.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Johnny said.

Then his head sagged on his chest and he felt himself dropping away inside the steady motion of the rig, the whir of the tires on the asphalt, and the predictable vibration of the logs under the boomer chains. He didn’t know how long he slept, but he dreamed he was drunk, stumbling on a street, trying to hold on to a parking meter while passersby looked at him with a mixture of pity and revulsion. A terrible odor rose into his nostrils, but not one of vomit or jailhouse stink. It was infinitely worse-a fetid, salty stench like whorehouse copulation, a rat trapped in a wall, an owl incinerated in a chimney. In the dream he was still on the street, incapable of caring for himself, but all the passersby had fled and he was left alone against a backdrop of skeletal trees, deserted houses, and a white sun that was crumpling the sky into a carbonized sheet of blackened paper.