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

“What do you think?”

“How about changing your tone of voice?”

“Know a guy name of Karsten Mabus?”

“Do I know who he is? Yeah, who doesn’t?”

“You damn well better do something about him.”

“Why don’t you go get a cup of coffee and a couple of aspirin and come back when you’re feeling better, Mr. Holland?”

“Ever been a victim of a violent crime, Mr. Broussard?”

“That’s the last personal statement you’re going to make to me this morning.”

“I think Wyatt Dixon has the goods stolen from Global Research. He rides an Appaloosa. He has strange biblical convictions about our man Karsten Mabus.”

“The cowboy clown with horse pucky between his ears who writes letters to the President? He’s the source of all our trouble?”

“Excuse me for saying this, but you’re starting to piss me off.”

“Which means, if you don’t get what you want here today, you’re going to kick some ass on your own? My advice, Mr. Holland, is you clean those thoughts out of your head, take care of your son, and stay out of federal business.”

“What bothers me, Mr. Broussard, is I think you bastards have probably used the Patriot Act to tap my phones. That means you already know about the threat to my wife and our unborn child but you’re pretending otherwise. If I had the goods from Global Research, I’d turn them over to y’all or return them to the owner. But I can’t do that, so I’m stuck. What would you do if you were in my shoes?”

“Start my life over, to be honest.”

“Care to walk outside and talk about this more specifically? I’ll try not to make it too personal.”

“Stay out of the line of fire, Mr. Holland. And take your histrionics out of my office,” he said.

AT 11 A.M. I got Lucas out of jail on a five-thousand-dollar bond, then drove up to Wyatt’s place on the Blackfoot River. His truck was gone, but his Appaloosa was in the lot behind the house, nosing through a curlicue of fresh hay Wyatt had dumped on the ground. I climbed through the fence and lifted one of the Appaloosa’s hooves. There were small nailholes where the hoof had probably once held a composite shoe, but there were no shoes on the animal now. I had no doubt it was Wyatt who had found and rope-dragged Johnny American Horse’s lockbox off the hillside behind our house.

I heard a junker car misfiring up the dirt road, dust and oil smoke spiraling back from the frame. The driver, a tattooed man wearing a strap undershirt, with body hair as thick as monkey fur, braked to a stop in the yard. “What are you doing with Wyatt’s horse?” he said.

“Looking at his feet. Who are you?” I said.

“The neighbor. You another one of them federal men?”

“I’m Wyatt’s lawyer. Which federal

men?”

“They was here yesterday, looking at that animal’s feet, just like you. What’s this with the feet?”

“There’s a lot of fetishism going around.”

“What?”

“Where’s Wyatt?”

“He left here with the pastor from his church. I think they was going up to the res. What’s your name?”

“If Wyatt’s got any complaint about people trespassing on his land, tell him to call Francis Broussard at the Federal Building. Got that? Francis Broussard is the man to talk to. Francis Broussard would love to hear from Wyatt.”

IT WAS MIDAFTERNOON when I got up to the res. The sky was yellow with smoke, and I could see Forest Service slurry bombers coming in low on a hillside, laying fire retardant in a frozen pink spray across the canopy. Wyatt’s church building was an ancient brick-and-wood schoolhouse, one with dark-stained gables, not far from the Jocko River. Someone had run a dozer into the yard and pushed the rusted wrecks of cars that had sat there for years into a huge metallic junkpile, leaving behind road-size scars in the soft green sod.

The church was empty, but down by the riverside a rock sweathouse was leaking with both steam and chants in a consonant-heavy language I had heard only two or three times in my life. I wanted to be kind in my attitude toward the members of Wyatt Dixon’s church, but as a person raised in the rural South I’d known many like them, and as a child they had filled me with fear. The severity of their views, the ferocity of their passion, the absolutism that characterized their thinking were such that I always felt they had one foot in the next world and were heedless of this one. I also believed that, given the opportunity, they would destroy the earth rather than let it be governed by a creed other than their own.