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

“What dream?” I said.

Johnny got up from the steps and walked across the yard toward the barn, his face averted. Amber watched him, a hand perched on one hip. “Isn’t he something else?” she said.

“What dream?” I said.

“He just told me, ‘All those dudes are going down. There’s nothing to worry about.’ I wish I could have dreams like that. Mine suck,” she said.

Chapter 4

MY SON WAS Lucas Smothers. Illegitimate, raised by a tormented, uneducated foster father, Lucas was living testimony to the fact that goodness, love, decency, and musical talent could survive in an individual who had every reason to hate the world. He had my eyes and reddish-blond hair and six-foot height, but oddly I thought of him as my son rather than of myself as his father. When I had a moral question to resolve, I asked myself what Lucas would do in the same situation.

He was in his second year at the University of Montana and lived in an old, maple-lined neighborhood west of the campus. His small apartment looked like a recording studio more than the residence of a college student. Microphones, stereo systems, amplifiers for his electric guitars, stacks of CDs and old vinyl records, as well as his instruments—a banjo, mandolin, fiddle, stand-up bass, twelve-string mariachi guitar, and his acoustical HD-28 Martin—covered every available piece of space in the living room.

He answered the door barefoot, wearing no shirt, his stomach flat inside his Wranglers. Over his shoulder I saw a young woman go out the back door and clang loudly down the fire escape. “Who was that?” I asked.

“A friend who stayed over. She’s late for class,” he said.

“It’s two o’clock in the afternoon.”

“That’s what I said. She’s late,” he replied.

I nodded, as though his response made perfect sense. “Wyatt Dixon is out of prison,” I said.

“I read about it in the newspaper,” he said. He started picking up clothes from the floor, some of which included a woman’s undergarments.

“I ran him off our place last night. But he’ll be back. Watch yourself,” I said.

“He’s not interested in me.”

“People like Dixon hate goodness. They try to injure it whenever they can, Lucas.”

“I ain’t afraid. I know you sure as hell ain’t. So what’s the big deal?” He pressed a button on his stereo and the amplified voices of Bonnie Raitt and John Lee Hooker almost blew me out of the room.

BUT I COULDN’T get Wyatt Dixon off my mind that afternoon, or Johnny American Horse’s cavalier attitude about sharing information with me. I worked until late, my resentment growing. At 5:30 P.M. the courthouse square was purple with shadow, the trees pulsing with birds. I called Johnny at his house.

“You told Amber, ‘All those dudes are going down.’ How about some clarification on that?” I said.

“All power lies in the world of dreams. I have a dream about red ponies. It means I don’t have to worry about these guys who are after me,” he said.

“Then why were you carrying a gun?”

“Don’t represent me.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

I felt my old nemesis, anger, flare inside me like a lighted match. Don’t say anything, I heard a voice say.

“You got it, bud,” I said, and hung up the phone.

I wish it had all ended right there. But it didn’t.

THAT EVENING, Temple and I had supper at a Mexican restaurant in town. The streets were full of college kids, people riding bikes over the long bridge that spanned the Clark Fork, tourists visiting the art galleries that had replaced the bars and workingmen’s cafés on Front Street. A tall man in a hat and a western-cut suit walked past the restaurant window. His face was lean, his skin brown, his lavender shirt stitched with flowers. He could have been a cattleman out of the 1940s. But Seth Masterson was no cattleman.

“What are you staring at?” Temple said.

“That guy at the corner. He was a special agent in Phoenix.”