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

“What did you call me?”

“You’re a queer or with the G,” Johnny said.

“Get out of my rig.”

Johnny stepped out of the cab, almost falling, and ran across a field and up an arroyo, his survival knife, canned food, medical supplies, and trade ax swinging inside the cloth sack in his hand. He ran until he collapsed behind a barn on a deserted ranch, high up in a vernal cup between two mountains. He lay on his back in the grass and mushrooms, panting, the stars hot and bright in the sky, his bandaged arm throbbing. When he removed the wrappings from his wound, he could hardly believe what he saw.

Johnny fished in his tote sack for his bottles of peroxide and iodine, but all he felt at the bottom of the sack was wetness and broken glass. He upended the canteen and drank until his throat constricted, with no sense of caution or restraint; he felt his heart slow and the brandy’s warmth settle in his stomach and spread through his limbs like an old friend. Then he filled his jaw with aspirin, found a shovel in the barn, and began walking.

He tripped over tangles of fence wire and in a creekbed was struck in the face by flying bats. He was up in the Jocko Valley now, back on the reservation—drunk, sick, his left forearm the color and texture of a pomegranate swollen with rot, its skin about to split. What had happened to the Indian woman? Why had she deserted him? Why had his power been taken from him?

But maybe the power he believed had been passed down to him from Crazy Horse was just another sham, a cheap illusion that provided an excuse for his personal failure and gave importance to a worthless alcoholic existence. Maybe he was exactly what most white people had always thought—another drunk Indian, a feathered joke dancing at powwows for the entertainment of tourists, a pitiful rumdum who got out of jail on Monday mornings and headed for any bar where he still had a tab.

An alcohol and drug abuse counselor at the V.A. had told Johnny there was a good chance he would end up a wetbrain. A day would come, the counselor said, when Johnny would experience a chemically induced seizure from which he would not recover. He would stumble along the streets, talking to himself, sometimes raging at strangers, his body crawling with stink, and never be aware that a change had taken place in his life.

Maybe that had already happened. Why had he insulted the truck driver who had tried to help him? More important, if indeed he had power, why had the Indian woman deserted him when he needed her most?

He sat down on a promontory that jutted out of a hill overlooking the Jocko Valley. He had thought the forest fires were out, or at least contained, but his perception had been an illusion, as perhaps all his other perceptions had been. Ash was drifting down on the trees like snowflakes, and in the west, beyond the crests of the mountains, he could see the reflections of fires in the clouds, even though he could not see the flames themselves. He remembered the truck driver who had given him a lift and remembere

d the soot on his skin and the smell of smoke in his clothes. The driver had been a strange man, his truck unmarked by a logo, with no identifiable license plate that Johnny could remember.

He pushed himself up on the shovel he had stolen out of the barn. When he looked up at the sky, the treetops and stars were spinning. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to see the driver’s face again. Did Death drive a truck and have a perverse gleam in his eye?

He stumbled down the hill toward his destination, no longer sure of either his sanity or the breath he drew. But of one conclusion he was certain—he would not arrive at his destination without help.

One of the bondsmen who had betrayed him lived on a small ranch, back against the hills, where he grew feed on thirty acres he had acquired by marrying a white woman. Parked in the dirt driveway was a patrol car used by the tribal police. The two-story clapboard house was dark, the keys in the ignition of the car.

Johnny threw his tote sack and shovel inside, started the engine, and drove without headlights through the back of the property and up the hill toward the headwaters of the Jocko River.

The cemetery that Lester Antelope had used to hide the goods from the Global Research break-in was located two hundred yards off the road, in a swampy notch fed by springs that leaked from green and yellow rocks. The cemetery was an environmental disaster created by the founder of a right-wing cult that had been run out of Sanders County, an area that normally gave refuge to groups as extreme as the Aryan Nation and Christian Identity. For Christmas, the cult’s founder had given his wife a coffin; after his divorce, he published her phone number and address in Screw magazine.

His eccentricities also included his demand that all deceased cult members and their loved ones be buried in his cemetery and that none of them be embalmed.

Johnny kicked aside a plastic cross on a grave and pushed his shovel into a lichen carpet dotted with poisonous mushrooms. He peeled back layer upon layer of humus and soil that was thick with worms and white slugs. The smell was not bad at first, but two feet down it struck his face—an odor that was like sewer gas, feces, and decomposing fish roe, the same odor he had smelled in the truck driver’s cab. He tied a bandanna over his nose and mouth and worked faster, flinging dirt and pieces of cloth and bone from the hole, until the shovel clanked against a metal box. He grabbed it by the handle, ripped it loose from the soil, and heaved it up into the leaves and pine needles, his eyes watering, the cloth of his bandanna sucked into his mouth.

Johnny heard a helicopter somewhere above the mountains, then the thropping of the blades drew closer, echoing off canyon walls behind him, searchlights piercing the treetops. He froze in the cemetery, his face tilted at the ground so it wouldn’t reflect light, his body contorted into a stick.

The downdraft of the helicopter roared over him, swirling pine needles off the ground, then was gone as quickly as it had come. Johnny dragged the box to the patrol car, shoved it into the backseat, and headed back down the road in the dark, his lights off.

He drove back through Missoula and caught the highway into the Bitterroots, passing a city police car parked on the shoulder. At Lolo, he turned west just as emergency lights appeared in his rearview mirror and a helicopter zoomed by overhead. He passed the dirt road we lived on and turned up a drainage between low hills, then cut across a field and bounced up a log road that climbed steadily through fir and pine trees and burned snags left by an old fire. He drove over the crest of the mountain into heavy timber, his headlights off now, the log road strewn with broken rock. Down below he could see our house and the pasture in the moonlight.

He stopped the stolen patrol car, pulled the lockbox from the backseat, and flung it down the side of the mountain into the trees.

Then he continued up the log road, back toward Missoula, or wherever the road went, the sides of the vehicle sparking off boulders, the frame bouncing on the springs, rocks exploding against the oil pan, tree limbs smacking across the windshield.

The oil and heat indicators were lit on the dashboard, and he could hear piston rods knocking in the engine. From both north and south he saw helicopters headed toward him, their searchlights blazing.

He twisted the wheel on his vehicle and drove off the shoulder of the log road, crashing down the mountain through the undergrowth, pine seedlings whipping under the frame. The helicopters followed him down, flooding the woods with a white brilliance that left no place to hide. His vehicle went over a log, shattering the drive shaft, spun in a circle, and dead-ended against a boulder.

He opened the door and fell onto the ground, dragging his tote sack with him. He could see the heavy, armor-vested, helmeted shapes of his pursuers moving up the hill toward him.

He crawled away in the trees, his tote sack wrapped around his right wrist. His left arm was on fire, his heart hammering in his ears. Once again, he smelled the odor of a grave on his clothes and skin.

So this is how it plays out, he thought. You get popped at point-blank range in the woods or wrapped in chains and returned to jail, one of a series you’ll never leave. Either way, you’re about to be brought out of the mountains like a gutted animal hung from a stick, a lesson for all those who would imitate you.

Maybe it was time to let the other side pay some dues, he thought. He estimated he could get two, perhaps three, and with luck maybe even four of his pursuers before he went down himself. Why not? They had seen only his back while they had chased him all over the state. Johnny would never get the people who had killed Lester Antelope, but he could take several of this bunch as surrogates. They wouldn’t be expecting a street drunk to come at them with only a knife and trade ax. Time to paint the trees, fellows.

Besides, what did he have to lose? His power was gone. The Indian woman had left him at the highway, where the woods ended and the white man’s world began. The Indian way of life was dead, and Johnny American Horse and those like him were self-deluded fools to believe otherwise.