In the Moon of Red Ponies: A Novel (34 page)

He pushed himself up on the shovel he had stolen out of the barn. When he looked up at the sky, the treetops and stars were spinning. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to see the driver’s face again. Did Death drive a truck and have a perverse gleam in his eye?

He stumbled down the hill toward his destination, no longer sure of either his sanity or the breath he drew. But of one conclusion he was certain—he would not arrive at his destination without help.

One of the bondsmen who had betrayed him lived on a small ranch, back against the hills, where he grew feed on thirty acres he had acquired by marrying a white woman. Parked in the dirt driveway was a patrol car used by the tribal police. The two-story clapboard house was dark, the keys in the ignition of the car.

Johnny threw his tote sack and shovel inside, started the engine, and drove without headlights through the back of the property and up the hill toward the headwaters of the Jocko River.

The cemetery that Lester Antelope had used to hide the goods from the Global Research break-in was located two hundred yards off the road, in a swampy notch fed by springs that leaked from green and yellow rocks. The cemetery was an environmental disaster created by the founder of a right-wing cult that had been run out of Sanders County, an area that normally gave refuge to groups as extreme as the Aryan Nation and Christian Identity. For Christmas, the cult’s founder had given his wife a coffin; after his divorce, he published her phone number and address in
Screw
magazine.

His eccentricities also included his demand that all deceased cult members and their loved ones be buried in his cemetery and that none of them be embalmed.

Johnny kicked aside a plastic cross on a grave and pushed his shovel into a lichen carpet dotted with poisonous mushrooms. He peeled back layer upon layer of humus and soil that was thick with worms and white slugs. The smell was not bad at first, but two feet down it struck his face—an odor that was like sewer gas, feces, and decomposing fish roe, the same odor he had smelled in the truck driver’s cab. He tied a bandanna over his nose and mouth and worked faster, flinging dirt and pieces of cloth and bone from the hole, until the shovel clanked against a metal box. He grabbed it by the handle, ripped it loose from the soil, and heaved it up into the leaves and pine needles, his eyes watering, the cloth of his bandanna sucked into his mouth.

Johnny heard a helicopter somewhere above the mountains, then the thropping of the blades drew closer, echoing off canyon walls behind him, searchlights piercing the treetops. He froze in the cemetery, his face tilted at the ground so it wouldn’t reflect light, his body contorted into a stick.

The downdraft of the helicopter roared over him, swirling pine needles off the ground, then was gone as quickly as it had come. Johnny dragged the box to the patrol car, shoved it into the backseat, and headed back down the road in the dark, his lights off.

He drove back through Missoula and caught the highway into the Bitterroots, passing a city police car parked on the shoulder. At Lolo, he turned west just as emergency lights appeared in his rearview mirror and a helicopter zoomed by overhead. He passed the dirt road we lived on and turned up a drainage between low hills, then cut across a field and bounced up a log road that climbed steadily through fir and pine trees and burned snags left by an old fire. He drove over the crest of the mountain into heavy timber, his headlights off now, the log road strewn with broken rock. Down below he could see our house and the pasture in the moonlight.

He stopped the stolen patrol car, pulled the lockbox from the backseat, and flung it down the side of the mountain into the trees.

Then he continued up the log road, back toward Missoula, or wherever the road went, the sides of the vehicle sparking off boulders, the frame bouncing on the springs, rocks exploding against the oil pan, tree limbs smacking across the windshield.

The oil and heat indicators were lit on the dashboard, and he could hear piston rods knocking in the engine. From both north and south he saw helicopters headed toward him, their searchlights blazing.

He twisted the wheel on his vehicle and drove off the shoulder of the log road, crashing down the mountain through the undergrowth, pine seedlings whipping under the frame. The helicopters followed him down, flooding the woods with a white brilliance that left no place to hide. His vehicle went over a log, shattering the drive shaft, spun in a circle, and dead-ended against a boulder.

He opened the door and fell onto the ground, dragging his tote sack with him. He could see the heavy, armor-vested, helmeted shapes of his pursuers moving up the hill toward him.

He crawled away in the trees, his tote sack wrapped around his right wrist. His left arm was on fire, his heart hammering in his ears. Once again, he smelled the odor of a grave on his clothes and skin.

So this is how it plays out, he thought. You get popped at point-blank range in the woods or wrapped in chains and returned to jail, one of a series you’ll never leave. Either way, you’re about to be brought out of the mountains like a gutted animal hung from a stick, a lesson for all those who would imitate you.

Maybe it was time to let the other side pay some dues, he thought. He estimated he could get two, perhaps three, and with luck maybe even four of his pursuers before he went down himself. Why not? They had seen only his back while they had chased him all over the state. Johnny would never get the people who had killed Lester Antelope, but he could take several of this bunch as surrogates. They wouldn’t be expecting a street drunk to come at them with only a knife and trade ax. Time to paint the trees, fellows.

Besides, what did he have to lose? His power was gone. The Indian woman had left him at the highway, where the woods ended and the white man’s world began. The Indian way of life was dead, and Johnny American Horse and those like him were self-deluded fools to believe otherwise.

He blackened his face and hands with dirt, then reached inside his tote sack for a weapon. But his hand found only canned goods and broken glass. He dumped the sack’s contents on the ground. His knife and trade ax were gone.

A circle of flashlights shone in his face, then someone racked a shell into the chamber of a cut-down ten gauge. Johnny sat back against a tree, his bad arm in his lap. Red circles of light burned into his eyes and receded into his brain.

“Squeeze it off and be done with it,” he said.

“Are you kidding? Those shells are expensive. Hold up your wrist, Running Man Who Thinks with Forked Brain,” an FBI agent said.

The other agents laughed and lit cigarettes and talked about the National League pennant race. How about those Atlanta Braves?

IN THE PREDAWN DARKNESS,
Amber thought she was having a dream about a violent wind, then she realized the sounds surrounding her were real. The house shook, the doors rattled against the locks, and a glass pitcher on a kitchen windowsill shattered in the sink. She looked out her bedroom window and saw lightning in the clouds, like streaks of gold inside pewter. The air was filled with pine needles blowing from the trees on the hillsides, then the front screen door sprung back on its hinges and snapped back into place as loudly as a pistol report.

She got up from her bed and began closing windows, sure that the rain everyone had prayed for was about to drench the countryside. When she entered the living room she saw a yellow glow flickering on the porch, like the flame given off by a guttering candle. Then the entire yard filled with a warm yellow radiance, burning away the shadows, reaching all the way back to the barn, carving the horses out of the darkness.

Amber pulled opened the door, thinking she was about to see her first instance of ball lightning. Instead, the yellow light constricted upon itself, forming an envelope around an Indian woman wearing a white buckskin dress fringed with purple glass beads that were shaped like teardrops. The wind ripped through the house, blowing pictures off the walls, spinning the Rolodex on the telephone stand.

“Who are you?” Amber asked.

The Indian woman didn’t answer. She pointed toward the south, in the direction of the Bitterroot Mountains.

“Please tell me who you are,” Amber repeated, stepping out on the porch. Her bare foot came down on a cold, sharp-edged object. She stepped backwards and looked down at Johnny’s trade ax and, next to it, his survival knife.

“Where did you get these? Why did you bring them here?” Amber asked.

The Indian woman’s shape broke into hundreds of fireflies and disappeared. When Amber went back in the house, one of the Rolodex cards had been torn from the spindle and lay on the floor. The names on it were those of William Robert and Temple Holland.

Chapter 19

THE NEXT DAY
was Saturday. Johnny was in St. Pat’s Hospital, under arrest, his arm pumped full of antibiotics, but I was not allowed to see him, since I was no longer his attorney. Amber came out to the house that afternoon and told me of the Indian woman who supposedly had left Johnny’s survival knife and trade ax at her door. I tried to listen without letting my feelings show, but I could not help but believe her bizarre account hid an element in Johnny’s story she didn’t want to share.

“The Indian woman saved Johnny’s life. If he’d attacked the agents, they would have killed him,” she said. “Johnny thought she’d deserted him, that he’d lost his power.”

“I think somebody found Johnny’s weapons along his route, recognized them as his, and returned them to your house. I also think there’s something you’re not telling me.”

We were in the living room and through the front window I could see ash drifting in the sunlight. Amber walked in a circle, tapped her knuckles on the stonework in the fireplace, and stared at the hillside and the wind ruffling the trees. “I think Johnny might have thrown the Global Research stuff up there on the ridgeline someplace,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“He’s not sure where he threw it. He was almost delirious. It could be anywhere. What was he supposed to do, let the Feds nail him with it?”

“He hid materials from a burglary on our property?”

“He didn’t hide it, he just got rid of it. In the dark. He didn’t know where he was. Maybe it’s not on your property. Why don’t you worry about someone except yourself for a change?”

“I hate to say this, but I don’t think anyone, and I mean
anyone
, can afford knowing you and Johnny. I’d probably tell other people about this, but I think they’d recommend I have a lobotomy.”

“He tried to protect you. That’s why he fired you and hired that piece of shit Brendan Merwood. That’s why he tried to get his bail transferred to those worthless tribal bondsmen.”

“I don’t care how you do it, but you get that stuff off our land.”

“I don’t know where it is or I would. So stick your self-righteous attitude up your ass, Billy Bob.”

She slammed out of the house. For the first time in my relationship with Amber, I felt a degree of sympathy for her father.

AN HOUR LATER
Wyatt drove his skinned-up, slat-sided truck across the cattle guard and parked in front of the house, his arm cocked on the driver’s window, an empty horse trailer bouncing behind him. “Just dropped my Appaloosa off to get his teeth floated and thought I’d see what you was up to,” he said. “You seen all them FBI and ATF agents up on your ridge?”

“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.