James Burke: In the Moon of Red Ponies

Make entry as hard as possible for them, he told himself.

He locked all the windows and both the front and back doors, then walked back up the slope with his thermos in his coat pocket and his grandfather’s trade hatchet swinging from his right hand.

He sat on the ground inside the cover of the trees, his back against a boulder. He could smell elk and deer droppings in the pine needles and the tannic odor of horses in the gloaming of the day. The surrounding hills were black now, but the sky was still full of light from the sun’s afterglow. He unscrewed the top from his thermos and drank, then screwed the cap back on. He heard the sound of an automobile coming down the dirt road, rocks pinging inside the fenders.

The car was low-slung, the body weather-scoured almost paintless, the engine far more powerful than the age of the car would indicate. It passed his house in a rooster tail of dust and disappeared around a bend, beyond a grove of cottonwoods. Less than two minutes later it came back up the road, gradually slowing, pulling into the cottonwoods. The driver cut the headlights and in the darkness Johnny heard at least one car door squeak open on an ungreased hinge.

He stood up in the pines and strained his eyes at the road. The air was cold now, smelling of the river and damp stone and timothy grass that was sodden with dew in the fields. When the wind gusted across the valley floor the leaves swirled like water in the cottonwoods, and suddenly Johnny could see two men, standing as stationary as statues, amidst thousands of fluttering green leaves.

The men crossed the road and headed toward his house, stooped in simian fashion, as though somehow their abbreviated posture would make them less visible. One of them stopped and raised his hand in a clenched fist, as a foot soldier would in order to signal a halt. Then the two of them stepped carefully over the trip wire that Johnny had strung with tin cans, each containing a handful of gravel.

The two figures moved around the side of the house, peering in each window. One of them went to the shed and put his hand on the hood of Johnny’s pickup truck, as though to determine if the metal was still warm. He rejoined his companion, and the two of them stepped gingerly onto the back porch and went to work on the door lock.

Johnny followed a deer trail that wound laterally through the pines in the opposite direction from his house, then walked down the slope on the far side of his barn, so he could remain out of view and beyond the angle of vision of the two men picking the lock on his door.

As he came out of the horse lot, he let his heavy coat drop to the ground, moving quickly into the lee of his house. He worked his way toward the back corner, no more than ten feet from the men, who were still on the porch. He held his bowie knife in his left hand, the trade ax in the other, breathing slowly through his mouth, his back flat against the clapboards. Out in the darkness he heard horses nickering, their hooves thudding on packed earth.

The two men had been unsuccessful with the lock. One of them stood back and smashed the door out of the jamb with his foot, shattering glass on the floor. Both men burst into the house, crashing into the bedroom, only to discover that Johnny was not there.

“I told you he was onto us. You wouldn’t listen.” It was the voice of the man Johnny had seen shooting pool that morning, a man who wore roses and parrots on his arms to tell him who he was because someone had stolen all expression from his face.

“Turn off the light,” the other man said.

“We got to finish it, Eddy.”

“No.” One of the men clicked off the light in the bathroom. “Another day. We find his cooze, then we whack him.”

“The guy’s an Indian. He’s out there.”

“Tell me about it.”

Johnny heard them move into the front room and unlock the door. A moment later a board squeaked on the porch and the two men walked into the yard, into the moonlight, each of them turning in a 360-degree circle as they did. Johnny picked up a rock and pitched it over the peak of the house to the far side. Both men jerked around, staring into the shadows at the source of the sound.

The man named Eddy, who wore thick, horn-rimmed glasses, held a cut-down double-barrel shotgun in both hands, the shoulder stock wood-rasped into a pistol grip. The man with tattoos carried nothing in his hands but was reaching behind him now to extract the blue-black heavy shape of a semiautomatic stuck down inside the back of his belt.

Johnny closed his eyes briefly, heard the words hokay hey inside his mind, and hit the two men running, just as they were turning toward the sound of his work boots coming hard across the grass.

The man with horn-rimmed glasses seemed the more surprised of the two men, his eyes distorting like a goldfish’s behind the thickness of his lenses. But nonetheless he was able to raise his cut-down shotgun for what should have been a deafening explosion of flame and lead shot into Johnny’s chest. Instead, his angle of fire was obstructed by his friend, the man incapable of expression, whose weapon had caught in his belt.

Johnny whipped the trade hatchet into the neck of the man named Eddy and slashed his knife across the face of the man who did not know how to smile or to be sad. Later, he would not recall with any exactitude the struggle that followed, but he knew the blows he visited upon the intruders from an industrial city on the shores of a great lake were more than enough to ensure they would not present themselves to him again, at least not outside the bright edges of his sleep.

The man named Eddy was on the surgeon’s table four hours. His full name, according to his driver’s license and a GI dog tag tucked down in his wallet, was Edward T. Bumper of New Baltimore, Michigan, a lakeside community on the shores of Lake Erie. The next day an information check through the National Crime Information Center would indicate that Eddy Bumper had no criminal record whatsoever, not even a traffic citation. In fact, other than the eleven years he had spent in the lower ranks of the United States Army, he seemed to have been hardly more than a cipher in the Detroit area, where apparently he had spent most of his life.

During the ambulance ride to the hospital, he offered no explanation for his presence at the house of Johnny American Horse, nor did he make any entreaty to his attendants, in spite of his obvious pain, or express interest in contacting friends, family, or minister. His only request of any kind was to the surgeon: If possible, he wanted a local rather than general anesthetic.

At 2:43 A.M. Edward T. Bumper opened his eyes wide on the operating table, stared up into the brilliant glare of lights overhead, and said, “I need to get to the airport.”

Then he died.

His fall partner in the home invasion was another matter. Raised in a state-run orphanage, released from juvenile court at age seventeen to the United States Marine Corps, Michael Charles Ruggles served eight years in the Third World, received a general discharge, and began to get into trouble again, as though his time in the Corps was simply a respite from his true career.

But the charges filed against him were those consistent with a run-of-the-mill miscreant rather than a professional killer: solicitation of a prostitute, jackrolling an elderly person, possession of marijuana, failure to pay child support, drunk driving, solicitation and battery of a prostitute, and passing counterfeit currency at a racetrack. In each instance the charges were dismissed without explanation.

But I knew none of these things until the following day, when Johnny American Horse called my office from the jail.

“Have you been charged?” I asked.