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

The cast or composition of his eyes was unlike any I had ever seen in a human being. They had almost no color and showed no emotion; the pupils were black pinpoints, even in bright light. They studied both people and animals with an invasiveness that was like peeling living tissue off bone.

He sat with one booted foot extended into the aisle, causing the waitresses to step around it, his eyes focused curiously on Temple’s face.

The waitress brought a chicken basket for Temple, fried pork chops and mashed potatoes and string beans for me. I looked back once more at Wyatt, then picked up a steak knife and started to cut my food. Temple scraped back her chair and walked to the pay phone by the front door, no more than five feet from Wyatt Dixon’s table. She punched in three numbers on the key pad.

“This is Temple Carrol Holland, down by the depot on North Higgins,” she said into the receiver. “A psychopathic bucket of shit by the name of Wyatt Dixon and some of his friends have illegally parked a horse trailer by the restaurant. Please send a cruiser down here so we don’t have to breathe horse sweat while we eat. Thank you.”

The level of sound in the restaurant dropped precipitously as she hung up the phone and walked back to our table. Wyatt’s jaw was hooked forward, exposing his teeth, a smile denting the corner of his mouth, like a thumbnail’s incision in tan clay. He told one of the wranglers to go outside and move the truck, then came to our table.

“Howdy doodie, Miss Temple?” he said, standing above us. “ ’Member me? Bet you still think I was one of them men dug a hole and stuck you in it.”

“Go back to your table, Wyatt,” I said.

“Let him talk,” Temple said.

“Truth is, I don’t know what I done before I got filled up on chemical cocktails and had my brains electrified at Warm Springs. But in this time of national trial, there is no excuse for one American doing mean things to another. Here’s two tickets to an ass-buster down in Stevensville. There you will find this humble rodeo clown entertaining the throngs of people that follows our greatest national sport.”

I brushed the tickets off the tablecloth onto the floor. “You’re about to have the worst day in your life,” I said.

He looked down at the tickets, then back at me in mock disbelief. A waitress stepped around him, a loaded tray balanced on her shoulder. He admired her rump a moment, then squatted down, eye-level with me. He was clean-shaved, his skin without tattoos or scars. I could smell horses and an odor like hay and buttermilk in his clothes. He looked at the steak knife that rested in my right hand. “I had a lot of bad nights up at the Zoo. A lot of time to study on things, Brother Holland. Glad I found Jesus. ’Cause I wouldn’t want to act on the kind of thoughts that was tangled up in my head,” he said.

Through the window I saw a city police cruiser pull to the curb.

“Your cab is here,” Temple said.

Wyatt glanced over his shoulder, then scratched his cheek. “I will not pretend I can contend with the smarts and humor of Miss Temple. Instead, I salute both y’all as fellow Texans and patriots defending the U.S. of A. against the ragheads that is attacking our great country,” he said. “I’ll be out to your ranch directly with a haunch of sirloin to slap on the barbecue. Y’all live up that gulch right outside Lolo?”

He grinned idiotically, his teeth shiny with his saliva.

Later, after he and his friends had eaten and gone, Temple and I sat in the quietness of the now almost deserted restaurant, the glass in the window vibrating with wind. I felt both inept and angry at myself for reasons I couldn’t define. I kept reviewing in my mind what I should have done to Wyatt Dixon, like a schoolboy who has been shoved down in the playground and done nothing about it.

“Forget it,” Temple said.

“He spit on us.”

“Don’t get the ego mixed up in this, Billy Bob.”

“I’ll see you at home,” I said.

“Where are you going?”

I paid the check and went out the door without answering.

THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY was a Northern California transplant by the name of Fay Harback. She was a petite woman with a small, attractive face and white skin, and hair that was mahogany-colored and thick on the back of her neck. She’d graduated at the top of Stanford Law and, like many of her fellow Californians in the aftermath of the Rodney King riots, had moved into the northern Rockies.

But her husband, an organic truck farmer, had bad luck in lots of ways. His ideals drove him and his wife into bankruptcy, and after he died in a hunting accident, she became an assistant district attorney, then ran for the D.A.’s job and won, largely because she had helped shut down an industrial waste disposal group that had tried to construct a PCB incinerator on the river, one that would have probably poisoned the entire valley.

I liked Fay and I liked her toughness in particular, even though she was sometimes ambitious, but I could never guess which way her wind vane was about to blow.

“Let’s see if I understand. I sent Wyatt Dixon up the road, but I’m responsible for the fact he’s on the street?” she said.

“I didn’t say that,” I replied.

“Look—” she began. She pinched her temples and got up from her chair and stood at the window. I heard her take a breath. “I screwed it up.”

“How?”

“Failure to disclose exculpatory evidence. A jailhouse gum ball claimed Dixon was shooting pool with him when the biker was killed. His only problem was he drooled when he was off his medication.”