James Burke - In the Moon of Red Ponies

“No,” I said, glancing involuntarily up the hill behind our house.

“They must have strung a half mile of crime scene tape through them woods. Ain’t that where American Horse got busted last night?”

“What do you want, Wyatt?”

He got out of his truck on his crutches and propped his butt against one fender, then began paring his fingernails with a toothpick. “Them boys that shanked me in the leg? A buddy of mine seen them in Hamilton yesterday. That means they still aim to take me out, or else they’d be to hell and gone down the road by now, know what I mean?”

“What do you want me to do about it?”

“Ain’t many I can talk to. Ain’t many gonna understand. But you and me share the same kind of upbringing. You growed up in a church where the preacher preached hell so hot you could feel the fire climbing up through the floor. It was a three-ring circus, with folks talking in tongues, drinking poisons, sticking their hands in a boxful of snakes. Tell me I’m wrong.”

“You’re wrong,” I lied.

He kept his eyes on his nails. “The man I killed behind my house with my Sharps had the mark of the devil on his arm.”

“I don’t want to hear this.”

“I seen it. I touched his skin. I ain’t a drunk or an addict, counselor. I ain’t crazy, either, at least not no more. Them people is acolytes of Satan himself.”

How do you talk to a man for whom the devil is more real than God? But I tried. “Isn’t there enough evil in human beings without looking for the devil as the cause of our problems? You’re a smart man, Wyatt. Why not deal with the world as it is and not get lost in the next one?”

“You’re a naive fellow, Brother Holland.”

“Oh?”

“One child gets the daylights slapped out of him for messing his diapers and grows up picking cotton from cain’t-see to cain’t-see in a hunnerd-degree heat, but he don’t turn out much worse on a personal basis than a rich kid whose daddy give him everything he wanted.

“But maybe right down the road there’s another kid, with ordinary folks, maybe a little shiftless but ordinary just the same-”

“Wyatt-” I said, holding my hand up for him to discontinue.

“No, you hear me out. That same kid grows up cruel to the bone. He don’t enjoy sex unless he’s hurting someone while he’s doing it, and when he finally gets to the joint, he lets everybody know he’s the huckleberry who’ll bust a shank off in your back for a deck of smokes. Worse, he ain’t got no fear of God ’cause he murdered all the light in his soul. That’s the ones got the mark of the beast on them, counselor. I been jailing with them since I was fifteen years old.”

His description of a sociopath was possibly the most credible I had ever heard, and I wondered if it came from self-knowledge rather than his experience. Then I realized he had read the question in my eyes.

“I ain’t one of them kind. Least I don’t think I am. But you never know, do you?” he said.

He opened the driver’s door to his truck and threw his crutches inside.

“What’s your purpose here, Wyatt? Do you just want to be a source of worry and irritation and grief? Is that why you come here?”

“Maybe you and American Horse both owe me. I got confidence in you. You’ll figure it out directly. Lordy, you got a nice place here,” he said, surveying the house and the deep green of our pasture under the pall of yellow smoke that hung over it.

Just before the sun slipped in a red orb behind the ridgeline, an FBI agent named Francis Broussard served a search warrant on our property. He was a trim, rosy-cheeked, olive-skinned man, with a fresh haircut, a dimple in his chin, and a Cajun accent. “We’ll be working our way over the top of the mountain and into your backyard. We’ll try to get out of your way as soon as we can,” he said.

“Mind telling me what you’re looking for?” I asked.

“I think you know. Yes indeedy, I surely do,” he said.

“ Yes indeedy? ”

“Come on up the hill and help us out. I’ll make note of your cooperation in my report. That might give you greater credibility later.”

“I’m glad to know y’all are in a lighthearted mood.”

He held a clipboard in one hand and wore a blue windbreaker with the abbreviation for his agency in bright gold letters on the back. He gazed abstractly at the haze on our pasture and the purple shadows spreading across the valley floor.

“Is there something else you need?” I said.

“Yeah, I hate to ask you this. But could I use your bathroom?” he replied.

For the next hour, Broussard and the agents under his supervision fanned across the hillside and worked their way down through the timber toward the house and the barn. The wind began to blow out of the east, clearing the ash from the sky but feeding the fires that were raging on the Idaho line. When I stood in our front yard, I could see streamers of sparks rising in the west and twisting columns of smoke that were filled with light, almost like water-spouts on the ocean. Then I heard an agent shout to his colleagues up on the hillside.

I saddled my Morgan, whose name was Beau, and rode him onto one of the switchback deer trails that zigzagged up to the ridgeline behind the house. The fir and larch trees looked mossy and shapeless in the evening shade. Up ahead I could see a dozen FBI and ATF agents shining their flashlights across rocks and deadfalls and arroyos that were littered with leaves and pine needles and the detritus from years of snowmelt. Even though the tips of the trees were bending in the wind, smoke was trapped under the canopy, the air was dense and acidic, and I was starting to sweat inside my clothes.

With the exception of the agent in charge, Francis Broussard, none of the agents even bothered to look at me, which told me they had already found what they were searching for and hence my presence was of no interest to them.

“Glad you dropped up to see us, Mr. Holland,” Broussard said. “See that broken place in the deadfall? Something heavy, with hard edges, probably metal ones, bounced down the hill and crashed right through a bear’s lair. Pretty interesting, huh?”

“You bet,” I said.

“Except whatever came crashing down the hill is no longer here. Know why not?” he said.

“You got me.”

“Somebody hauled it out, probably with a rope and a horse. Step down here, if you don’t mind.”

I swung down from the saddle and looked at a torn area of broken leaves and dirt on the edge of the deadfall, where he was now shining his flashlight.

“See the hoofprints and the drag marks going back up toward the log road? I bet somebody had a rope looped around a big, heavy metal box and towed it up the hill there. What do you think, Mr. Holland?” he said.

“I’m probably not qualified to make an observation, Mr. Broussard.”

“Notice anything unusual about those hoofprints?”

“Was never much of a tracker.”

“The horse wasn’t wearing shoes. What’s that tell you, Mr. Holland?”

“Nothing.”

“The horse we’re talking about has hard feet. Like an Appaloosa might have. You own an Appaloosa, Mr. Holland?”

“Two of them. But the last time I looked, they were both shoed.”

“I’ll take your word for it. Know why anybody might want to drag a heavy metal box up the hillside?”

“When you find out, let me know.”

“You don’t like us much, do you?”

“I like you fine. I just don’t like some of the causes you serve.”

“You were a Texas Ranger and an assistant U.S. attorney?”

“That’s right.”

“Ever listen to that shock jock on the radio, guy was a disgraced FBI agent, did a federal bit for a B and E, always putting down the government?”