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

“I’m not real interested in this anymore, Wyatt. Johnny American Horse is using another attorney now,” I said.

“Won’t change nothing for him. Won’t change nothing for me or you, either. You was baptized by immersion. Not only baptized the old-time way, you’re an honest-to-God believer. Tell me I’m wrong.”

“I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Wyatt, but I don’t like you talking about my personal life.”

“They’re gonna come after me with guns and such. With you it’s probably gonna be different. They’re out there, counselor, probably watching us right now.”

“Who?”

“The ones working for this man Mabus.”

I tried to read his eyes. Perhaps he was insane, I thought, or he simply spoke out of the demented cultural mind-set that was characteristic of his class, called white trash in the South, a term that has much more to do with pathology than socioeconomic status. But I had come to learn that Dixon was not a stupid man. His lips were parted slightly, like strips of rubber pasted on his face, his empty eyes waiting for me to speak.

“Whatever cause you’re trying to enlist me in, I won’t be a part of it. You committed a vicious, unforgivable act against my wife. That’s never going away,” I said.

He let his hands hang between his thighs and stared at the sidewalk. Then he gathered up his crutches and got to his feet. “Tell Miss Temple I’m sorry. And you go to hell, counselor,” he said.

With that, he stepped off the curb into the traffic, jaywalking across the street to a café, jabbing a crutch into the door of a taxi that had blown its horn at him.

I COULD AFFORD to pay Lucas’s board and tuition at the university, where he had the improbable double major of music and dairy husbandry, but he would not allow it. Instead, he played several gigs a week at nightclubs and sometimes waited tables while carrying eighteen academic hours. His schedule took its toll, and often he was tired and barely able to stay awake when he came to dinner at our house.

But on Friday afternoon he was beaming as he came into my office.

“Win the lottery?” I asked.

“Pert’ near,” he replied, taking a torn envelope from his back pocket. “I got a full scholarship, all tuition and out-of-state fees paid, plus five hundred dollars a month living expenses.”

“How you’d pull that off?”

“Applied for every kind of financial assistance they got. This one just happened to come through.”

He handed me the awards letter. It was written on gold-and-silver-embossed stationery and was from a group called the Rocky Mountain Educational Foundation in Denver. “That’s great, Lucas,” I said.

“I’m taking y’all to dinner. The Golden Corral has got all-you-can-eat fish tonight,” he said.

“Sounds swell,” I said.

“Want to ask Johnny and Amber? I reckon they’re feeling pretty low these days.”

“I’m not Johnny’s attorney anymore.”

“Y’all have a blowup or something?”

“Johnny has his own time zone. I need to stay out of it.”

“You used to tell me a guy can have all the friends he wants when he’s in tall cotton. You always said your real friends are the ones who stick with you in hard times. When did you change your mind?”

A WEEK PASSED and still Johnny had not been charged in the death of Seth Masterson. I busied myself with other cases, fished in the evenings, and thinned out the trees and undergrowth around our house as we entered the fire season.

At sunset the heat rose from the ground and broke up in the wind, but even though the nights were clear and the stars bright, we could smell smoke lingering on the hillsides and see the glow of forest fires burning out of control in Idaho.

On the Fourth of July, Temple and I attended the Indian rodeo and powwow up on the res, ate buffalo burgers, fried bread, and snow cones, and watched hundreds of ceremonial dancers in heavy, feathered regalia perform in ninety-five-degree shade. I was sure I saw Johnny and Amber in the crowd, but when I waved they showed no sign of recognition.

Perhaps it was the heat and dust and the constant pounding by the elders on a giant rawhide drum, but I felt like a interloper at the ceremony, an effete sojourner little different from the tourists whose chief interest was buying Indian jewelry as cheaply as possible. After the dance ended, I tried to catch sight of Johnny and Amber amid the concession stands or by the rough stock pens adjacent to the bucking chutes.

Instead, I saw Wyatt Dixon perched atop a slat fence, his bad leg supported precariously, a solitary crutch balanced on his loins. His bare arms were red with sunburn, his face shaded by a white, lacquered, high-crown hat he wore low on his ears. He looked at me momentarily, then made a snuffing sound in his nose and turned his attention back to a couple of wranglers trying to load a bull onto a cattle truck.

I didn’t think Temple had seen him and I made no mention of his presence. But very little escaped her eye. “What’s with Dixon?” she said later.