James Burke - In the Moon of Red Ponies

He crossed against the light, swaying like a drunk man through cars that braked to a halt or swerved around him, their horns blowing.

A half hour later I drove to Community Hospital, located in the middle of the old federal reservation that was once Fort Missoula. In the 1870s Negro bicycle troops had been stationed there, ostensibly to help remove the Flathead Indians from the Bitterroot Valley and to control the Nez Perce, who, under Chief Joseph, almost defeated the United States Army. But today the old two-story, whitewashed stucco barracks, with their red-tile roofs, were administrative offices for the U.S. Forest Service, the parade grounds a golf course, and the Negro troopers who had ridden bikes with iron wheels rested under the maples inside a piked fence.

The names of the two shooting victims had been published in the morning paper. A receptionist gave me their room numbers.

“Can I talk with them?” I said.

“You have to ask the nurse,” she replied.

Their rooms were next to each other on the second floor. I walked past the nurse’s station as though I already knew where I was going and had permission to be there. The man who had taken a round in the rib cage was out of intensive care, sleeping in a flat position, an IV taped to his left arm. His hair was dark and curly, his jaws unshaved, his arms unmarked by tattoos. I didn’t recognize him.

The second man, whose name was Jared Green, was another matter. He was sitting up in bed, watching the television set on the wall, a glass of fruit juice in his hand. His hair was blond, neatly combed, his head large, his facial skin like pig hide.

“You doing all right?” I said through the open door.

He clicked off the television set with a remote control. “Who are you?” he said.

I stepped inside the room. “You stopped my truck out on Rock Creek. You asked me to walk over to Karsten Mabus’s limo. How you feeling?” I said.

“When the dope wears off, I’ll tell you.”

“You took a round through the leg?”

He flipped back the sheet to show me the knot of bandages around his knee. “Mr. Mabus send you?” he said.

“Not exactly.”

“Nobody’s been out to see me except the foreman. I got surgery scheduled for three o’clock this afternoon. The food here blows. Tell the nurse this catheter is like a snake hanging on my joint.”

“Good luck,” I said.

“Hey, come back here. Why you here?” he said at my back.

I drove back down a long street lined with maples flickering in the wind, past the golf course and several upscale retirement homes, then turned into the traffic that would take me back downtown. I clicked on the radio, the volume louder than normal, my hands tighter on the steering wheel than they should have been. I wanted to be around noise, stopped at the red light next to a car filled with high school kids or family people. I wanted to be in a crowded restaurant, at a rodeo, a state fair, a baseball game. I wanted to be anywhere except inside my head with my own thoughts.

Back at my office, I called Temple and gave her the names of the two shooting victims and asked her if she could run them.

“Sure. But what’s the point?” she said.

“I just want to know who’s working for Karsten Mabus.”

She waited a beat before she spoke. “Where’d you go last night, Billy Bob?”

“For a carton of ice cream.”

“I’ll call you back later,” she said.

It was almost quitting time when my phone buzzed. “It took me a while,” she said. “These guys have lived all over the place, at least until they went to work for Mabus. That’s the funny thing about them. They floated around the country, getting in trouble wherever they were, then they found a home with Karsten Mabus and changed their ways. Which guys like them don’t do.”

“Start with Jared Green,” I said.

“He was a trainer at health clubs in Miami and Los Angeles. He was also a prostitute for an escort service in Naples, Florida. He was in a reformatory at Tracy, California, and spent eight months in the Broward County Stockade for breaking his girlfriend’s jaw. He should have gone to Raiford, but the D.A. couldn’t get her to testify. He’s the one who got kneecapped?”

“He’s the one.”

“Same guy who stopped you on Rock Creek Road?”

“How’d you know?”

“Because you seem to have a personal interest in him.”

“Can’t you just give me the information, Temple?”

She paused, then ignored my irritability and went on. “His friend, Albert Burgette, has a bad-conduct discharge from the Navy and used to be a long-haul truck driver. He and some others guys also ran a home-repair scam. Each spring they’d roam around the West, knocking on the doors of elderly people, telling them their roofs had ice damage. Burgette was also charged with the hit-and-run death of an eleven-year-old girl, but it didn’t stick. The cops in Fresno think his friends threatened a witness.

“In other words, both guys are genuine scum. Now do you want to tell me why you’re so interested in these characters?”

“I guess you’re right, they’re not important.”

“Where’d you go last night, Billy Bob?” she said.

At 5 P.M. I locked up the office and crossed the street to a workingmen’s bar. I sat in back, near a brick wall with a painted-over window in it that gave onto an alleyway, and ordered a beer and a double shot. It was a cool, dark place, with a lighted jukebox and neon ads for western beers on the wall. The people who drank at the bar were from the neighborhood and talked about sports and the opening of the streams that had been closed because of the forest fires, or they made jokes about their tabs and their jobs. I wanted to buy them a round, be among them, and have no cares other than the traffic I would have to negotiate before I was home, enjoying a fine supper.

But the images of two bullet-wounded men would not go out of my head.

I went back to the bar twice more for doubles, with a beer back. When I was on my fourth round, a huge shape stepped between my table and the glare of light through the front door.

“Didn’t know you were a drinking man,” Darrel McComb said.

“I’m just about to leave,” I replied.

He sat down at the table anyway, with a longneck and an empty glass. His jaws were gritty with stubble, his clothes rumpled. “Tell American Horse he gave me the key,” he said.

“The key?” I said.

“It’ll make sense down the road.” He poured beer into his glass and salted it. “One day I’m going to write the history of what happened down in Central America. Hitler said the victors write the history books. But sometimes the victors leave big blanks in the story, know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I think so,” I said, realizing he was either drunk or entering a new and perhaps terminal stage in his career. “Say that again about Johnny American Horse?”

“You bet, kemosabe,” he said. He drank from his glass, then smelled himself and smiled bleary-eyed into my face. But he forgot whatever it was he intended to say.

I patted him on the shoulder as I left the bar, perhaps glad to have the problems I did and not someone else’s.

I bought a hot dog and a Styrofoam cup of black coffee on the corner and ate the hot dog on a bench before I tried to drive home. After I pulled into the driveway I went straight into the bathroom, brushed my teeth, rinsed my mouth with Listerine, and showered the smell of booze and cigarette smoke off my skin and out of my hair. But I didn’t fool Temple. Not about anything.

“Make a stop on the way home?” she said.

“I ran into Darrel McComb. He said something about Johnny American Horse providing a key for him. I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about.”