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

I saw the blood drain in her face. “I just found out yesterday. I’m pregnant. I was going to tell you tonight. I didn’t know how you were going to take it.”

“How I was going to take it? You thought I didn’t want a child of our own?”

“How am I supposed to know? Half the time, we’re worrying about every person on the planet except ourselves.”

“That’s not true.”

“Yes, it is. And it’s because of your goddamn guilt over shooting L.Q. Navarro. It’s always your goddamn guilt and the obsessions you drag like a junkyard with you from one day to the next.”

I couldn’t speak. My words were like fish bone in my throat. I felt my heart twist as though someone had inserted a cold hand into my chest. I went back into the house, my ears ringing. I could hear her feet coming hard behind me.

“Who was it that called?”

“A piece of human garbage who said he was going to use a coat hanger on you. A man who’s done something to Lucas.”

“Lucas?”

“Yeah, one of the people I evidently don’t have time to care about,” I said, hardly able to punch his number into the telephone.

She sat down in the living room, her hands clasped together, pushed down between her thighs. “Don’t let them do this to us, Billy Bob,” she said.

But they already had.

ON SATURDAYS, Lucas sometimes swam or shot hoops at the university gym. That afternoon he had changed into his workout clothes, stuffed his gym bag in a locker, snapped his combination lock on it, and joined a basketball game on the court. Sunlight flooded through the high windows, and the slap and squeak of basketballs and the slam dunks through the steel hoops echoed in the cavernous building like a testimonial to all that is good and wholesome in traditional America.

Then the ear-splitting cacophony of the fire alarm rose into the rafters. The building was evacuated in minutes. Lucas stood among a crowd of students in gym clothes and wet swimsuits and watched firemen, campus and city cops, and a bomb-squad unit with leashed dogs stream inside, some of them carrying fire protection shields on their forearms.

A half hour passed and the emergency personnel began exiting the building. A false alarm, everyone said. Wow, what a drag. What some guys will do for a few kicks. How about that for sick?

But something wasn’t right. City cops and campus cops had crossed the street onto the shady lawn where the students were standing. The cops circled behind the crowd, forming a gray-and-blue cordon through which no one could leave.

“Women students can go, everybody else back inside! Women students can go, everybody else back inside!” a cop wearing a cap and bars on his collar was saying.

“I’m bisexual. How about me?” a kid next to Lucas shouted.

The crowd laughed; the cops didn’t.

The male students filed back into the gym and stood listlessly on the polished floor, one or two of them picking up basketballs, arching them through the air, twanging them off steel hoops. Ten minutes later two older men in suits and ties, university administrators of some kind, joined the cops, then cops, students, and administrators went into the men’s dressing room. Someone clanged shut and locked a metal door behind them.

As Lucas looked into the rectangular depth of the room, the rigidity of the lines, the tea-colored light, he felt as though he were staring into the interior of a coffin. It was the same strange emotion that had invaded his system and poisoned his blood as a child after his mother had died and he had been left in the care of a harsh, inept stepfather who believed joy was an illusion and brotherhood a sucker’s game.

At the far end of the room a cop had pulled up a choke chain on a bomb-sniffing German shepherd. Every locker on either side of the dressing benches was closed, except one. The shaft on the combination lock had been snapped in half by bolt cutters and all the locker’s contents raked out on the floor. Lucas swallowed as he recognized his Wrangler jeans with the wide belt and Indian-head buckle threaded through the loops, his beat-up Acme cowboy boots, his snap-button checkered shirt, his gym bag that he had packed with a towel, soap, fresh underwear, and socks.

But items that didn’t belong to him were there, too: a string of Chinese firecrackers, an open manila envelope with a sheaf of papers protruding from it, and a Ziploc bag fat as a softball from its shredded green contents.

One of the administrators, a man with meringue hair and tiny veins in his soft cheeks, was holding a hand-tooled wallet in his palm. He opened it and studied a celluloid window inside. “Which of you is Lucas Smothers?” he asked.

“I am,” Lucas said.

“You want to explain this?” the administrator with meringue hair said, nodding at the piled items on the floor.

“That wallet and those clothes and that gym bag are my stuff. I don’t know where them other things come from, if that’s what you’re asking me,” Lucas said.

“Son, how can part of these things be yours and part not be yours, when all of them were in the same locker?” the administrator said.

Unconsciously, Lucas shifted his weight from one foot to the other, the same way he had done when his stepfather hurled accusations at him, totally irrational ones, that he couldn’t answer. “Why would I have firecrackers in my locker?” Lucas said. The

n he realized he had stepped into the old trap of defending himself, legitimizing his accuser.