James Burke - In the Moon of Red Ponies

One of the administrators, a man with meringue hair and tiny veins in his soft cheeks, was holding a hand-tooled wallet in his palm. He opened it and studied a celluloid window inside. “Which of you is Lucas Smothers?” he asked.

“I am,” Lucas said.

“You want to explain this?” the administrator with meringue hair said, nodding at the piled items on the floor.

“That wallet and those clothes and that gym bag are my stuff. I don’t know where them other things come from, if that’s what you’re asking me,” Lucas said.

“Son, how can part of these things be yours and part not be yours, when all of them were in the same locker?” the administrator said.

Unconsciously, Lucas shifted his weight from one foot to the other, the same way he had done when his stepfather hurled accusations at him, totally irrational ones, that he couldn’t answer. “Why would I have firecrackers in my locker?” Lucas said. Then he realized he had stepped into the old trap of defending himself, legitimizing his accuser.

“How about the baggie here? You wouldn’t be a user or purveyor of marijuana, would you, Mr. Smothers?”

“A pur-” he began, unable to process the word.

Everyone was looking at him now. His skin felt tight against his face, his body shrunken inside his sweat-stained clothes. Don’t lose your temper, don’t smart off, just don’t say anything, he told himself.

“I ain’t never used dope. The person who says I have is a dad-burned liar,” he said.

“Frankly, I don’t care if you use dope or not, Mr. Smothers, because you’re not going to be around here very long. Know what’s in that envelope?”

“No, ’cause I ain’t ever seen it before.”

“They’re stolen LSATs and the answer sheets that go with them. How much you get for these, son?”

Lucas could feel his eyes watering, the room morphing, the faces around him distorting, going out of shape. “I didn’t steal no LSATs or whatever they are. I didn’t carry no reefer in here, either. I work two or three jobs-”

He couldn’t finish his statement. All the correct grammar he had learned in composition courses had disappeared and he was once again the kid in strap overalls standing in the principal’s office of a rural junior high school, in trouble, tongue-tied, his cheeks pooled with color, the years of his stepfather’s belittling remarks thundering in his head.

“Go wash your face, then accompany these officers. There’s a price to pay when you break the law. My advice is you own up to your problems here and get them behind you,” the administrator with meringue hair said.

Lucas stared at nothing. The room was silent, the faces of everyone around him now indistinct, somehow separate and no longer a part of his life. Outside, he could hear people whocking the ball back and forth on a tennis court.

“What are you doing?” the administrator said.

Lucas stepped out of his tennis shoes and peeled off his T-shirt, gym shorts, and jockstrap, then stood naked and raw with stink in the middle of the room, taller than anyone around him, his gaze now turned inward. “Gonna take a shower and put on fresh clothes,” he said. “Then when I get to the jailhouse I’m gonna call Billy Bob Holland and tell him to sue y’all. How you like them apples, sports fans?”

He smiled at his own question, his head tilted quizzically, his eyes squeezed shut.

Lucas’s heart was always bigger than the adversity the world handed him, but as I sat with him in his jail cell that night I had a hard time participating in the optimism and indifference Lucas always used as a shield when he was badly hurt. In all probability he would be charged with possession of stolen property and narcotics. If he was really unlucky, the latter charge would include intent to distribute. Bail would not be set until Monday morning, which meant he would have to stay in jail through the weekend. Suspension from the university was a foregone conclusion.

“So what? My summer courses are over. We’ll get all this straightened out by fall. This don’t bother me,” he said.

The stainless-steel toilet attached to the wall gurgled when somebody in another cell flushed his. I was sitting on the edge of Lucas’s bunk, looking at the tips of my boots, unsure of what to say, reluctant to rob him of his courage. He got up and walked to the bars, shirtless, his back like an inverted triangle, his shoulders wide and knobby.

“I still cain’t quite put it all together, though. Can you figure it out?” he said, smiling halfheartedly, trying not to give recognition to the cunning of the people who had undone him.

“Some pretty slick guys opened your locker, planted the dope and stolen exams and firecrackers inside, then called in a bomb threat. They knew the cops would search the gym with explosive-sniffing dogs. The gunpowder in the firecrackers brought the dogs straight to your locker.”

“These are the same guys who jerked me around on the scholarship?”

“The same guys,” I replied.

“What do they want?”

“They think I have some records that were stolen from a biotech research lab. A guy called me this evening and told me he knew Temple was pregnant. He said a friend of his might abort the baby with a coat hanger.”

“Y’all gonna have a baby?” he said, the evil represented by the phone caller not even registering on his consciousness.

“Yeah, she was going to tell me tonight.”

“Man, that’s great. Wow, I cain’t believe it. I’m gonna have me a little baby brother or baby sister. Way to go, Billy Bob, you son of a gun,” he said, his whole face lit by his grin.

I slept little either that night or the next. Early Monday morning, I tracked down Special Agent Francis Broussard at the Federal Building on East Broadway. He was standing over a desk in a small office, sorting papers in piles from a manila folder, his back to me, when I tapped on the jamb of the doorway. He looked at me peculiarly. “You all right there?” he said.

“No, my son’s in the can on bogus charges and an anonymous caller threatened to mutilate my wife and unborn child with a coat hanger,” I said.

“Is this connected with American Horse?”

“What do you think?”

“How about changing your tone of voice?”

“Know a guy name of Karsten Mabus?”

“Do I know who he is? Yeah, who doesn’t?”

“You damn well better do something about him.”

“Why don’t you go get a cup of coffee and a couple of aspirin and come back when you’re feeling better, Mr. Holland?”

“Ever been a victim of a violent crime, Mr. Broussard?”

“That’s the last personal statement you’re going to make to me this morning.”

“I think Wyatt Dixon has the goods stolen from Global Research. He rides an Appaloosa. He has strange biblical convictions about our man Karsten Mabus.”

“The cowboy clown with horse pucky between his ears who writes letters to the President? He’s the source of all our trouble?”

“Excuse me for saying this, but you’re starting to piss me off.”

“Which means, if you don’t get what you want here today, you’re going to kick some ass on your own? My advice, Mr. Holland, is you clean those thoughts out of your head, take care of your son, and stay out of federal business.”

“What bothers me, Mr. Broussard, is I think you bastards have probably used the Patriot Act to tap my phones. That means you already know about the threat to my wife and our unborn child but you’re pretending otherwise. If I had the goods from Global Research, I’d turn them over to y’all or return them to the owner. But I can’t do that, so I’m stuck. What would you do if you were in my shoes?”