In the Moon of Red Ponies (Billy Bob Holland 4)

“Yes, sir,” Johnny said.

We walked outside into the brilliance of the morning, sunshine on the

hills above the town, birds flying through trees on the courthouse lawn, the noise of traffic, a world of normalcy as dissimilar from life inside a jail as the quick are from the dead.

That is, except for the presence of Wyatt Dixon, who was now sitting up in the shade, sailing playing cards into his inverted hat. His pale eyes looked up at us, a matchstick rolling in his teeth.

“Know that dude?” I asked Johnny.

“You betcha I do,” Johnny said. “He was shacked up with a girl on the res. Her ex and a couple of his Deer Lodge buds decided to remodel Wyatt’s cranial structure. One of them walks with a permanent limp now. The other two decided to start new careers in Idaho.”

Johnny reached down, picked up a small pinecone, and threw it at Wyatt’s head. “Hey, boy, I thought you were in the pen,” he said.

“Hell, no,” Wyatt said, his eyes looking at nothing, his matchstick flexing at an upward angle.

We walked to the corner, then crossed the street to my office. I didn’t speak until we were a long way from Wyatt Dixon.

“Why not just put your necktie in the garbage grinder?” I said.

“Telling a man you’re afraid of him is the same as telling him he’s not as good as you. That’s when you have trouble. Fellow as smart as you ought to know that, Billy Bob,” Johnny said. He hit me on the shoulder.

“Why were you carrying a gun?” I said.

He didn’t answer. Inside the office, I asked him again.

“A couple of guys are here to fry my Spam,” he said.

“Which guys?” I asked.

“Don’t know. Saw them in a dream. But they’re here,” he said.

“That’ll make a fine defense. Maybe we can get a couple of counselors from detox to testify for us.”

He told me he’d work off my fees at my small spread outside Lolo, then went to search for his pickup truck so he could drive back to his house on the reservation in the Jocko Valley.

IT’S PROBABLY FAIR to say that welfare dependency, alcoholism, glue sniffing, infant mortality, the highest suicide rate among any of our ethnic groups, recidivism, xenophobia, and a general aversion to capitalistic monetary concepts are but a few of the problems American Indians have. The list goes on. Unfortunately, their troubles are of a kind most white people don’t want to dwell on, primarily, I suspect, because Indians were a happy people before their encounter with the white race.

The irony is, except for a few political opportunists, Indians seldom if ever make a claim on victimhood. Individually they’re reticent about their hardships, do their time in county bags and mainline joints without complaint, and systematically go about dismantling their lives and inflicting pain on themselves in ways a medieval flagellant couldn’t dream up.

Johnny American Horse didn’t belong in the twenty-first century, I told myself. He lived on the threadworn edges of an aboriginal culture, inside a pantheistic vision of the world that was as dead as his ancestor Crazy Horse. I told myself I would help him with his legal troubles, be a good friend to him, and stay out of the rest of it. That was all decency required, wasn’t it?

Temple joined me for lunch by a big window in a workingmen’s café near the old train station on North Higgins. Across the street were secondhand stores and bars that sold more fortified wine than whiskey. Brown hills that were just beginning to turn green rose steeply above the railyards, and high up on the crests I could see white-tailed deer grazing against the blueness of the sky. The café was crowded, the cooks sweating back in the kitchen, frying big wire baskets of chicken in hot grease.

“Johnny was carrying a gun because of somebody he saw in a dream?” Temple said.

“That’s what he says.”

She bit a piece off a soda cracker and stared out the window at a freight passing through the yards, her mouth small and red, her chestnut hair freshly washed and blow-dried and full of lights. “I think Johnny’s looking for a cross. If he can’t find one, he’ll construct it,” she said.

I started to speak, then saw her eyes go empty and look past me at a group of men entering the door. Three of them were probably wranglers, ordinary blue-collar men, brown-skinned, their stomachs hard as boards under their big belt buckles, their hats sweat-ringed around the crowns. But the fourth man had teeth like tombstones and a vacuity in the boldness of his stare that made people look away.

“That bastard is actually on the street,” Temple said.

I set down the iced tea I was drinking and wiped my mouth. “Let’s go,” I said.

“No,” she replied.

Wyatt Dixon and his friends sat down at a table by the door. Outside, a trailer loaded with horses was parked in a yellow zone. It didn’t take long for Wyatt’s vacuous gaze to sweep the restaurant, then settle on us.