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

He thought the wind would gust again and change the animal’s shape back into that of the Indian woman. Instead, the doe flipped its tail in the air, exposing the white fur underneath, and galloped away, two spotted fawns running behind its hooves.

It was evening and the sun had gone all the way across the sky when Johnny came out of the mountains onto the highway and the world of truck stops, tourist cabins, and cracker-box real estate offices knocked together from fresh-planked pine. In a general store he bought a denim shirt, new jeans, socks, underwear, a razor, and soap. He shaved and changed into his fresh clothes in a filling station restroom, then looked into the mirror and went back to the general

store and bought a straw hat that he pushed down low on his head.

A highway patrol car passed him as he walked toward a truck stop where a half-dozen tractor-trailers were parked. He used the outside mirror on a parked pickup truck to watch the patrol car disappear up the road, then bought a fried pie and ate it on a wood bench in the shade of the café. Through the trees on the opposite side of the road he could see a blue lake and a man in a red canoe fishing in the shadow of a cliff. The wind was cool and surprisingly free of smoke, the sky streaked with lavender horsetails in the south. Again he thought he smelled rain.

Above him, a piece of paper flapped from the thumbtack that held it to a message board.

The sheet of paper had been rained on and sun-dried and was curled around the edges, but he could clearly see the bold lettering printed across the top: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?

The picture under the caption was an enlargement of a mug shot taken in the early morning hours at the Missoula County Jail. Johnny looked at the face in the photo—the eyes half-lidded, the jaws slack with booze—and hardly recognized himself.

A couple of log truck drivers came out of the café. One of them sniffed the air and looked at Johnny, his face disjointed. Johnny lifted his eyes into the driver’s and held them there.

“You doin’ all right, buddy?” the driver asked.

“Yeah, I’m all right. How ’bout you?” Johnny said.

The driver didn’t answer. He and his friend got into their rigs and pulled onto the highway.

Why had the man stared at him like that? An attendant at the gas pumps was using the pay phone, looking briefly in Johnny’s direction. When Johnny stood up from the bench, threadworms swam in front of his eyes. He walked into the side lot of the truck stop and approached a driver standing by a rig boomed down with ponderosa logs, the engine hammering under the hood.

“Going toward Missoula?” Johnny said.

“I might be,” the driver replied. He was a short, hard-boned man with olive skin and a colorless cloth cap pulled down tightly on his scalp. He wore laced boots, black jeans, and a long-sleeved khaki shirt that was sweat-ringed at the armpits and flecked with black ash from a grass fire. He had a cold and was blowing his nose into a bandanna.

“I’d appreciate a ride,” Johnny said.

The driver’s eyes ran over Johnny’s person, lingering in places they shouldn’t have. “Climb in,” he said.

When Johnny pulled himself into the cab, he felt as though the tissue in his body were being separated from his bones. The trees along the road, the blue lake, and the fisherman in the red canoe seemed to spin around the truck’s cab. As the truck drove south and crossed a stream strewn with white rocks, he thought he saw the Indian woman looking back at him from a stand of aspen trees. He raised his hand to wave at her, then realized the driver was staring at him.

The driver’s ears were filmed with soot, and the initials “K.K.K.” were inked across the top of his right wrist.

“You in the Klan?” Johnny said.

“I put that tattoo on me when I was a kid. Wish I could take it off, but looks like I’m stuck with it.”

“You ought to take it off.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Johnny said.

Then his head sagged on his chest and he felt himself dropping away inside the steady motion of the rig, the whir of the tires on the asphalt, and the predictable vibration of the logs under the boomer chains. He didn’t know how long he slept, but he dreamed he was drunk, stumbling on a street, trying to hold on to a parking meter while passersby looked at him with a mixture of pity and revulsion. A terrible odor rose into his nostrils, but not one of vomit or jailhouse stink. It was infinitely worse—a fetid, salty stench like whorehouse copulation, a rat trapped in a wall, an owl incinerated in a chimney. In the dream he was still on the street, incapable of caring for himself, but all the passersby had fled and he was left alone against a backdrop of skeletal trees, deserted houses, and a white sun that was crumpling the sky into a carbonized sheet of blackened paper.

When he woke, he was by himself in the cab, parked by a motel with pink doors and green neon scrolled around the office. The summer light still hung in the sky, but the hills were dark, and he could see the glow of Missoula behind him. They had already driven through town and were not far from the reservation. What had happened? He took two swallows of brandy from his canteen, then drank again and felt the world begin to come back into focus. The truck driver was inside the motel office, counting the change the clerk had just given him. The driver crossed the lot and opened the cab door.

“Why are we stopped at the motel? Why didn’t you put me down in Missoula?” Johnny said.

The driver’s mouth looked small, his jaws fragile and too thin for the rest of his face. He glanced back at the office. “I tried to. You told me you wanted to go to the cemetery,” he said.

“I don’t remember that.”

“Sorry, fellow, but I can’t have that smell in my cab no more. I paid for your room. If I was you, I’d get ahold of a doctor.”

“You damn queer,” Johnny said.