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

“Nice seeing you, Darrel. You try to jump Johnny American Horse over the hurdles again, I’ll be seeing a lot more of you.”

I heard him laugh to himself as I walked away.

TEMPLE AND I and my son, Lucas, had moved to western Montana from Texas only two years before. But moving to Montana marked more than a geographic change in a person’s life. The mountains and rivers of the northern Rockies are the last of an unspoiled America. To live inside a stretch of country that still bears similarities to the way the earth looked before the Industrial Age humbles a person in a fashion that is hard to convey to outsiders. The summer light rises high into the sky and stays there until after 10 P.M.; the stones in a river quake with sound in the darkness, giving the lie to the notion that matter does not possess a soul; the sunset on the mountains becomes like electrified blood, so intense in its burning on the earth’s rim even an unbeliever is tempted to think of it as a metaphysical testimony to the passion of Christ.

But I did not need the grandeur of the Northwest to make me dwell upon spiritual presences. The friend I’d slain, L. Q. Navarro, was never far from my sight, regardless of where I happened to be. Sometimes he stood behind me while I groomed our horses in the barn, or perhaps he walked past a window in the starlight, still wearing the ash-gray Stetson, pin-striped suit, and boots and spurs he had died in.

L.Q. had an opinion on everything. Usually I didn’t listen to him. Most of the time I wished I had.

Don’t stick a burr in that McComb fellow’s shoe, he said to me that night as I was loading a wheelbarrow in the barn and hauling it out to our compost pile.

He started it, I replied.

That’s what we’d always tell ourselves before we scrambled somebody’s eggs.

I don’t need this, L.Q.

You should have parked one between Wyatt Dixon’s eyes and put a throw-down on him. No serial numbers, no prints but his own.

Would you give it a rest? I said.

He climbed up on the stall and sat on the top slat. He had a black mustache and his hair grew in black locks on the back of his neck; his shirt glowed as brightly as snow in moonlight. This American Horse business is starting to develop a federal odor, he said.

You were always a closet states’-righter, L.Q. You just never accepted it. Now shut up.

When I looked up, the stall was empty. From up the slope I could hear an owl screeching in the trees.

I dumped the wheelbarrow on the compost pile just as the phone rang in the house. The message machine didn’t click on and the phone was still ringing when I entered the kitchen. For some reason I thought it might be L.Q. It wasn’t.

“What do you want, Johnny?” I asked.

He was clearly drunk. In the background I could hear country music and loud voices. “Come have a drink with me and Amber,” he said.

“Don’t make me get you out of jail,” I replied.

I heard someone pull the phone from his hand. “Drag your butt down here, you wet blanket,” Amber’s voice said.

“

Thanks for the call,” I said, and hung up.

LATER, IN THE EARLY HOURS of Sunday morning, a diminutive man, one for whom joy was an emotion he experienced only in stealing it from others, lay in the semidarkness of his hospital room, the maples outside alive with wind, the mountains to the east rounded softly like a woman’s breasts, the clouds veined with lightning.

The Demerol flowing out of the IV into his finger was the best dope he’d ever had. It made him neither high nor low but instead created a neutral space inside him that was like warm water in a stone pool or the fleeting sense of tranquillity he experienced after sexual intercourse. He paid little attention to the deputy who looked in on him occasionally or the nurses who came and went or a solitary figure in greens who gazed benignly at him out of the shadows, then reached down to puff up his pillow.

In fact, the Demerol made Charlie Ruggles feel so good about his situation he was sure the right people would once again show up in his life, as they always did, and set matters straight. It had started to rain, a warm, beautiful, steady rain that pattered on the tops of the maple trees. He could not remember a night that had been as perfect in its combination of colors and sensations. When he turned his head toward the figure in greens, the coolness of the pillow being placed across his face made him think of a woman’s kiss, perhaps from years ago, although in truth he did not recall any woman whose touch had been this cool and gentle.

Then a terrible weight crushed down on him, sealing his eyes, pressing his skin back from his teeth, as though he were trying to smile for the first time in his life.

Chapter 5

DARREL MCCOMB and another detective served the search warrant at Johnny’s house on Monday morning. What happened as a result became a matter of perspective. Amber Finley told one story, Darrel McComb and his partner another. I tended to believe Amber.

“What do you expect to find in his closet?” she said to McComb.

“A set of greens, the kind hospital personnel wear?” McComb said.

“You’re an idiot,” she said.