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

“The prosecution will say he had jeans on under his greens. Why are you doing this?” she said.

“I want to let all that bad blood go. I’m sorry for what I did to Johnny.”

“So tell it to Johnny and Billy Bob.”

He got up and tried to brush the grass stain off the knee of his slacks. “If I acted disrespectfully to you, I apologize. I don’t mean to be a bad guy, but sometimes—” He didn’t finish.

No, you’re just a geek, she thought, then felt oddly uncharitable as she watched him try to tuck his shirt in with his thumb and disguise his pot stomach.

THE NEXT MORNING I drove up to Johnny American Horse’s small spread on the res. Amber’s Dakota was parked in the yard and she was sweeping a cloud of dust off the front porch. Johnny had just finished shoeing a sorrel mare inside the barn, a leather apron that was almost yellow with wear tied around his waist. He slapped the mare on the rump and watched her trot into the pasture, where she joined a sorrel stud. I leaned on the railed fence Johnny had made from shaved lodgepole.

“Ever see a pair with that much red in them?” he said.

“Not really,” I said.

“Gonna breed a whole herd of them.”

I looked at him to see if he was serious. “Sounds like a lifetime job,” I said.

He grinned and took off his apron and hung it over the fence. “You eat breakfast yet?” he said.

“A sixteen-year-old boy from the res was killed a while back by a white man whose truck he broke into,” I said, ignoring his invitation.

Johnny nodded, his eyes on the two sorrels in the pasture.

“That kid was your nephew?” I said.

“What about it?” he asked.

“The court released the guy who did it. It’s reason for a family member to bear a lot of anger toward the system. It’s the kind of stuff the prosecution is going to use against us. Why didn’t you mention you were the boy’s uncle?”

“I remember when a white rancher ran over an Indian kid hitchhiking outside Missoula and got a twenty-dollar traffic fine. The kid died. The only cost to that rancher was his twenty bucks. That’s the way it is.”

He opened the gate to the lot and came outside, then looped the gate secure. He propped his arms across the top rail on the fence. The wind was up, balmy and smelling of distant rain, denting the alfalfa and timothy in the fields, puffing pine needles out of the trees on the slopes. The two sorrels were running in tandem across the pasture, their necks extended, their muscles rippling. In the distance I could hear thunder echoing in the hills.

“You think all this is worth fighting for?” he said.

“Damn straight it is,” I replied.

“I think one day the bison will run free again,” he said.

I kept my eyes straight ahead and didn’t reply.

“Let’s go see Amber and drink some coffee,” he said.

THE NEXT MORNING, Fay Harback said she wanted to see me in her office.

“I’m a little busy. Why don’t you come over here?” I said.

“Let me define the situation a bit more clearly. How would you like to have American Horse’s bail revoked?” she replied.

The previous night there had been a break-in at an agricultural research lab outside Stevensville. The intruders were not amateurs or vandals. They had used bolt cutters on the gate chain, cut the telephone line on which the alarm system was dependent, and called the alarm service to report the downed wire, using the owner’s password.

Once inside, they had rifled all the hard-copy document files, downloaded computers, rounded up all the floppy disks they could find, and drilled the floor safe under a canvas tarp they spread over themselves to conceal the glow of their flashlights and the noise of the drill.

A man returning from a bar in town around 3 A.M. reported that he saw four men and a woman exit the back of the building and cross a field to a grove of cottonwoods, then drive away in a van. As he rounded the bend, his headlights swept across the group and he was sure of what he saw: the woman was white but the men were dark-skinned and wore pigtails on their shoulders.

“So you’re saying four Indians and a white woman broke into a research lab? What’s that have to do with Johnny?” I said.