James Burke - In the Moon of Red Ponies

“Yeah, I’ve heard him,” I replied.

Broussard’s eyes looked straight into mine for a beat. “He’s an interesting study,” he said. He clicked off his flashlight and walked up the hill, his back to me.

A gust of wind blew through the tree trunks. The sweat on my face felt as cold as ice water.

But I didn’t have time to worry about Francis Broussard’s condemnation. Somebody riding an unshod horse had rope-dragged the goods from the Global Research burglary off our property. It had to be someone who had access to the ridgeline, someone perhaps riding an Appaloosa, a breed known for its hard feet. The only candidate that came to mind was Wyatt Dixon. He used a farrier and veterinary service in the drainage just over the hill from us, and he had a way of finding excuses to wander onto our property. Could he have seen Johnny’s flight up the mountain and followed him?

I went back into the house and told Temple of my conversation up the hillside with Francis Broussard and the removal of the metal box.

“Well, maybe it’s over, then,” she said.

“I think Dixon took it.”

“Who cares?”

“You’ve got a point,” I said.

I began fixing a cold supper for both of us. I opened a bottle of wine and poured Temple a glass and one for myself.

“I think I’ll just have some Talking Rain to drink,” she said.

“You feel all right?” I asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“On Saturday night you always have a glass of wine.”

“I’m just not in the mood. Want to take a walk? We can eat when we come back.”

“Sure,” I said.

I put the food back in the refrigerator and followed her outside. The valley was dark now, the sky still blue, the evening star twinkling in the smoke to the west. I heard the phone ring inside. “I’ll be right back,” I said.

I picked up the phone receiver in the hallway. Through the front window I could see Temple waiting for me in the yard, the gallery light shining on her hair, one knuckle pressed against her chin, her face lost in thought.

“Hello?” I said into the receiver.

“Hey, glad we caught you at home, dickwad,” a voice said.

I checked my caller ID. The call number was blocked. “Say it,” I said.

“You got other people’s property. That’s not nice.”

“You’re wrong.”

“The Indian dumped a lockbox on your property. It’s not there now. Where do you think it went? It grew wings and flew up in a fucking tree?”

The accent was eastern seaboard, maybe Jersey or Rhode Island, the question mark at the end of a sentence as barbed as a fishhook.

“You got a line into the Feds?” I asked.

“What we got a line into is your old lady’s womb. Want your baby to get born? If not, we got a guy does beautiful work with a coat hanger.”

“What?”

“There’s nothing about your life we don’t got. That includes your old lady’s medical records. Deliver our goods and you don’t got a problem. Think I’m blowing gas? When you get off the phone, ask your son what kind of day he’s had.”

“You listen, you motherfucker-”

“We’ll be in touch. Buy better rubbers or stay out of other people’s business,” he said.

The line went dead.

I went outside, my hands shaking so badly I had to put them in my pockets.

“What happened?” Temple said.

“A guy just threatened you. He said you’re going to have a baby. What’s he talking about?”

I saw the blood drain in her face. “I just found out yesterday. I’m pregnant. I was going to tell you tonight. I didn’t know how you were going to take it.”

“How I was going to take it? You thought I didn’t want a child of our own?”

“How am I supposed to know? Half the time, we’re worrying about every person on the planet except ourselves.”

“That’s not true.”

“Yes, it is. And it’s because of your goddamn guilt over shooting L.Q. Navarro. It’s always your goddamn guilt and the obsessions you drag like a junkyard with you from one day to the next.”

I couldn’t speak. My words were like fish bone in my throat. I felt my heart twist as though someone had inserted a cold hand into my chest. I went back into the house, my ears ringing. I could hear her feet coming hard behind me.

“Who was it that called?”

“A piece of human garbage who said he was going to use a coat hanger on you. A man who’s done something to Lucas.”

“Lucas?”

“Yeah, one of the people I evidently don’t have time to care about,” I said, hardly able to punch his number into the telephone.

She sat down in the living room, her hands clasped together, pushed down between her thighs. “Don’t let them do this to us, Billy Bob,” she said.

But they already had.

On Saturdays, Lucas sometimes swam or shot hoops at the university gym. That afternoon he had changed into his workout clothes, stuffed his gym bag in a locker, snapped his combination lock on it, and joined a basketball game on the court. Sunlight flooded through the high windows, and the slap and squeak of basketballs and the slam dunks through the steel hoops echoed in the cavernous building like a testimonial to all that is good and wholesome in traditional America.

Then the ear-splitting cacophony of the fire alarm rose into the rafters. The building was evacuated in minutes. Lucas stood among a crowd of students in gym clothes and wet swimsuits and watched firemen, campus and city cops, and a bomb-squad unit with leashed dogs stream inside, some of them carrying fire protection shields on their forearms.

A half hour passed and the emergency personnel began exiting the building. A false alarm, everyone said. Wow, what a drag. What some guys will do for a few kicks. How about that for sick?

But something wasn’t right. City cops and campus cops had crossed the street onto the shady lawn where the students were standing. The cops circled behind the crowd, forming a gray-and-blue cordon through which no one could leave.

“Women students can go, everybody else back inside! Women students can go, everybody else back inside!” a cop wearing a cap and bars on his collar was saying.

“I’m bisexual. How about me?” a kid next to Lucas shouted.

The crowd laughed; the cops didn’t.

The male students filed back into the gym and stood listlessly on the polished floor, one or two of them picking up basketballs, arching them through the air, twanging them off steel hoops. Ten minutes later two older men in suits and ties, university administrators of some kind, joined the cops, then cops, students, and administrators went into the men’s dressing room. Someone clanged shut and locked a metal door behind them.

As Lucas looked into the rectangular depth of the room, the rigidity of the lines, the tea-colored light, he felt as though he were staring into the interior of a coffin. It was the same strange emotion that had invaded his system and poisoned his blood as a child after his mother had died and he had been left in the care of a harsh, inept stepfather who believed joy was an illusion and brotherhood a sucker’s game.

At the far end of the room a cop had pulled up a choke chain on a bomb-sniffing German shepherd. Every locker on either side of the dressing benches was closed, except one. The shaft on the combination lock had been snapped in half by bolt cutters and all the locker’s contents raked out on the floor. Lucas swallowed as he recognized his Wrangler jeans with the wide belt and Indian-head buckle threaded through the loops, his beat-up Acme cowboy boots, his snap-button checkered shirt, his gym bag that he had packed with a towel, soap, fresh underwear, and socks.

But items that didn’t belong to him were there, too: a string of Chinese firecrackers, an open manila envelope with a sheaf of papers protruding from it, and a Ziploc bag fat as a softball from its shredded green contents.