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

Moreover, Wyatt’s church had a singular reputation for inclusion of brain-singed mercenaries and war veterans who stayed off the computer and moved about like gypsy moths through the mountains and rain forests of the Pacific Northwest. Some of them were harmless Libertarians or survivalists trying to re-create a nineteenth-century frontier ethos; but others were tormented men who could not purge their dreams of memories that no human being should have to carry.

I pulled aside the tarp that hung over the truncated door in the rock house, squatted down, and stepped inside. The heat and steam and astringent odor of male sweat covered my face like a wet cloth. In one corner the pastor sat on a stool in an oversized pair of black swim trunks, his skin as pink as a baby pig’s, his face smiling, a jolly, innocent man among men whose backgrounds had nothing in common with his own. Wyatt sat across from him on an old rug, wearing only a jockstrap, his knees pulled up in front of him, drops of sweat as big as dimes sliding down his face. But it was the three other men in the rock house who bothered me.

Perhaps I had been away too long from hands-on involvement with law enforcement and the realities of the criminal world. Perhaps I had become too much like the ordinary citizen who sees criminals only when they are in custody—free of drugs and booze, showered, clean-shaven, their hair freshly barbered, their tattoos hidden by buttoned collars and conservative neckties and long-sleeve shirts. It had been a temptation to think of Wyatt as a slightly fried, engaging, hillbilly eccentric; but one look at his sweathouse friends was a quick reminder that his jailhouse past and criminal frame of reference were not abstractions.

One man was totally naked, head shaved, perhaps six and a half feet tall, snake-belly white, the edges of his eyes tattooed with blue teardrops. An Indian sat next to him, his braids, sopping with moisture, tied on top of his scalp, his chest pocked with two lead-gray circular scars that looked like bullet wounds, his arms scrolled from wrist to armpit with jailhouse art that convicts call “sleeves.”

The third man had the flawless gray proportions of a granite sculpture, his abs recessed, elongated like strips of stone below the curvature of his chest, his phallus huge, his eyes dancing with an inquisitional light as though my casual glance at him were a personal challenge to his manhood.

“See you outside, Wyatt?” I said.

“This is a prayer meeting. Can it wait?” he replied.

“No,” I said, and stepped back outside, my shirt peppered with moisture.

He followed me, standing up on a pair of walking canes, but before I could speak he lumbered into the Jocko and sat down chest-deep in the current, holding on to a boulder with each arm while the ice-cold water boiled over his skin. Then he hobbled back up on the bank and began pulling on his clothes, one eye squinting at me. “You got a beef about something?” he asked.

“I’m taking your weight,” I said.

“For what?”

“You found the goods from the Global Research robbery. But some guys think I’ve got them and they’re coming down on my family to get them back.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“I’m in a bad mood, Wyatt. I don’t have a lot to lose at this point, get my meaning? You think you’re about to make the big score with the Global goods? Is that why you’re hanging with the Deer Lodge alumni in there?”

“I wouldn’t say that too loud if I was you.”

“You turn the goods over to the Feds or Karsten Mabus’s people, I don’t care which.”

“I thought you was a smart man, but I’m revising my opinion downward. I got a buddy to bust into them files. The day that Mabus fellow gets them files back, I’m a dead man and so are you.”

“Call The Washington Post or The New York Times. I’ll help you.”

“Yeah, they’ll run with that one—stolen goods turned over to them by an ex-con with a homicide in his jacket and a lawman who killed his best friend.”

“Nobody can accuse you of an excess of sentiment,” I said.

He tucked his shirt into his jeans, his mouth twisted into a button. “I’m always on the receiving end of your insults, counselor. It gets to be a drag.”

“What’s in those files?” I said.

“Stuff about anthrax, Ebola virus, mustard gas, the Black Death. I done told you before, I ain’t got the education or the experience to deal with a man like Mabus. But the two of us can come up with a plan. It takes smarts to whip the devil.”

“Let’s keep it simple and save the Bible lessons for your study group in there. You dump the goods. End of story.”

“No, you listen to me,” he said, pointing a finger at my face. “Them three ex–fellow travelers of the Lost Highway in the sweat lodge? The Indian took two rounds from a .357 Mag and crawled a half mile in a hunnerd-degree desert to kill the man done it to him. The tall fellow who looks like a big Q-Tip done hits for the Aryan Brotherhood in Quentin and Folsom. Each one of them teardrops tattooed on his eyes is for a man he done for free, just a favor for the AB. The iron man you seen in there, one with the crazy look in his eyes, has done committed crimes both inside and outside you don’t want to even know about.

“What I’m saying to you is men like that, men like me, ain’t no threat to the likes of a Karsten Mabus. A man like you is. If I had your education, I’d own this whole fucking state.”

“You’re mistaken, Wyatt.”

He picked up his canes and stared at the river, the trees bending in the breeze on the hillside, the smoke that mushroomed into the sky as yellow as sulfur. His eyes looked prosthetic, impossible to read, the crow’s-feet at the edges like artistic brushstrokes that were intended to give his face the human dimension it lacked. “When I first come out of the pen, I wanted to hurt you for what you done to me,” he said.

“Let’s stick to the subject,” I said.

“Not hurt you like you think. I wanted to get close to you and bring you down to where I was, make you into the very kind of man you hated. I figured that was about the worst thing I could do to anybody on earth. Anyway, that was then, this is now. It’s gonna take the two of us to shovel Karsten Mabus’s grits in the stove. Get used to the idea.”