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

“We need to take some pictures now. There’s a waiting room to your left, just past the double doors,” the X-ray technician said.

“Take good care of my man here,” Tim said. He walked down the corridor and through the double doors, nodding to the painters as he passed.

“You have any pain in your left arm?” the technician said.

“None,” Johnny replied.

“Did you feel a break in it?”

“No.”

“I guess the government just likes to be careful. How’s the wound progressing?” the technician said.

“Fine. You guys did a good job.” Johnny pressed his fingers against his jaw and cleared his throat.

“Well, let’s get you done here,” the technician said.

“I hate to tell you this, but I got to use the toilet real bad,” Johnny said.

“I wish you’d told the marshal that.”

“Just wheel me over to the restroom. I’m not going anywhere,” Johnny said, clinking the handcuff chain tight on the arm of the chair.

The technician took Johnny across the corridor and watched him fold up the wheelchair, work his way awkwardly into a stall, his right wrist still cuffed to the chair arm, then ease down on the toilet seat. “I’ll come back in a few minutes,” the technician said.

When Johnny heard the door click shut, he removed the paper clip from his mouth, straightened it, and inserted it into the lock on his handcuffs. It took him less than thirty seconds to spring the curved steel tongue that Tim had crimped into his wrist. Behind the door of the next stall he found a painter’s cap and pair of coveralls hanging on a hook. He ripped off his hospital gown, pulled on the coveralls, and fitted the cap down on his head. He stepped out into the corridor just as the painters were passing by.

The last man in line was an Indian who was struggling with a rolled tarp that sagged heavily across his shoulder. Johnny picked up the end of the roll, dropped it on his shoulder, snugging the side of his face against the canvas, and walked out the front door of the hospital into the rain-swept breadth of the outside world.

But what Johnny saw was more than simply the outside world. The building and sidewalks and cars and telephone wires were gone. Under an ink-wash sky he saw hills that had turned the bright gold of haystacks in late summer, the fir trees and ponderosa pine like miniature forests in the saddles. He could see black-horn buffalo grazing in the grass along the river, and he could see lightning in the clouds beyond the hills where the four points of the wind and the Everywhere Spirit made their home. He saw muscular fish that were the dull tint of dried blood working their way up a stream, beating themselves to death on the rocks in order to lay their roe and hold their claim on the earth. He saw bears, mustangs, deer, elk, and winged creatures that lived under the great bowl of heaven the Everywhere Spirit had made with His hands and filled with both sun and rain in order to bring life to the corn and the grass, and in the midst of all this he saw thousands of wickiups whose lodge skins were painted with the signs of the moon and the passing of the seasons, and he knew these presences had long ago been ingested by the great vastness of the Everywhere Spirit and they now lived inside Him, as they lived inside Johnny’s sleep, and hence they could not die.

And more important than all these things, he saw his wife, Amber American Horse, wearing the white buckskin dress of the Indian woman who had guided him through the Bob Marshall Wilderness, the purple glass beads that were shaped like teardrops on the fringe of her dress tinkling in the wind, her hand beckoning, as though both she and Johnny were about to embark on a journey from which neither of them would return.

TEMPLE CAME HOME early that afternoon, unsure of where I had been all day. “Why didn’t you answer the phone?” she said from the mud room, where she was hanging up her raincoat.

“I was in the barn,” I replied, although I wasn’t sure where I had been.

She walked into the kitchen. “Are you sick?”

“No, but I did something that I have a hard time squaring with—”

“With what?”

“Honorable behavior is the term I’m probably looking for.”

She waited for me to go on, her face sharpening.

“I called up Karsten Mabus and told him Wyatt had the goods from the Global Research break-in. It’s between Mabus and Dixon now,” I said. I felt my eyes shift off her face.

She was quiet a long time. Then she took a quart of milk out of the icebox and poured it into a glass, slowly, as though she couldn’t concentrate on what she was doing. “Do you want something to eat?” she said.

“No.”

“I didn’t stop at the grocery because I thought we might go out.”

“I’m not very hungry right now. We can go out, though, if you want.”

“It’s not important,” she said, looking out the window now at the wetness of the trees and the mist floating on the hillside. She picked up her glass of milk and drank from it. “So Dixon has become shark meat?”