I SHOULD HAVE SEEN it coming, or at least given more consideration to Darrel McComb’s prediction about Johnny American Horse’s legal fate; but like most people who believe that humankind is basically good and capable of conducting its affairs in a reasonable way, I daily avoided the inescapable conclusion that collective stupidity has often been the norm in the long and sorry history of human progress, and that perhaps the soundest argument for the existence of God is the fact that the human race has survived in spite of itself.
One week after the Fourth of July, charges were filed on Johnny for the shooting death of a federal agent. But when two dozen government lawmen and sharpshooters in bulletproof vests descended on his house, Johnny was gone, literally out the back door, up the hill and into the Mission Mountains, running with a survival knife, a new trade ax he had bought at the powwow, and one arm looped through a backpack.
Government helicopters buzzed the treetops in the high country for four days and agents on horseback threaded their way up rock-strewn ravines, only to find dead campfires, a hand line and fishing hook by a frozen lake, the cleated tracks of alpine shoes through a griz feeding area, a sweat lodge knocked together from fir boughs and blackened stones.
But it was not a safe bet Johnny was in the Missions. There were sightings of him up in the Swans, in the Bitterroots and the Cabinets, even over the Divide in the Bridgers and the Bear Paws.
Amber denied any knowledge of where he might be. She was held forty-eight hours in an isolation cell as a possible accomplice and questioned repeatedly by both FBI and ATF agents while her and Johnny’s house was torn apart. While she was being questioned and her home destroyed, her father remained in Washington and made no attempt to contact her or me, even though he knew I still represented her.
Six days after Johnny had hauled freight into the high country, I saw his new counsel, Brendan Merwood, at the café across the street from the courthouse. Brendan was eating steak and eggs at a table by himself, cutting his food neatly, spearing small bites into his mouth with the tines of his fork held upside down. He wore a long-sleeved pale blue shirt, with white cuffs and a rolled white collar. His posture was simian, his big head almost bald, except for the close-cropped hair around his ears and the back of his neck. The tan he’d worked on dutifully in Hawaii gleamed under the indirect lighting.
“Join me?” he said.
“Thanks, I’m meeting someone,” I lied, and sat down at the counter. I picked up a menu and began to read it.
“Too bad you got screwed on that bail deal,” he said.
I set the menu down and looked at him in the mirror. He had gone back to eating his food. I turned around on the stool. “Which bail deal?” I said.
“You didn’t know? Those Indian bondsmen Johnny hired didn’t process their paperwork. If you ask me, they chickened out. His bond is still on you. That must be the shits.”
When I got home that afternoon, I could hardly face Temple.
“We’ll owe two hundred thousand dollars?” she said.
“If Johnny doesn’t appear for trial in the murder of Charlie Ruggles.”
“This can’t be happening to us.”
“I checked with the court. The bond was never transferred. I called these Indian bondsmen five times. Their secretary kept telling me she had given them my messages but they’d been chasing down a bail skip in Butte. I drove up to the res and found one of them in a bar. He denies knowing anything about Johnny’s bond or transferring it from us to him.”
“Why did Johnny tell you we were off the hook?”
“He thought we were. That bondsman was lying. Somebody got to him.”
“I think Johnny fed us to the wolves.”
“I doubt if he knows this has happened, Temple.”
“How could he? He’s camping in the mountains while we’re about to lose our home.”
She went into the kitchen and started preparing supper. It was 7 P.M. Thursday, the one evening of the week during summer we always saved to attend the open-air dance in the park by the river. This particular evening a bluegrass group was playing, and a late afternoon shower had dropped the temperature ten degrees and filled the air with the smell of flowers and lawn sprinklers striking warm cement. But in the kitchen I heard Temple slam a cabinet door and clang a skillet on the stove, then make a grunting sound as she struggled with a can opener, just before slicing her hand.
I turned off the stove and ran tap water over her hand. In her anger she tried to resist my help, but I held on to her, gathering her against me, pressing my face in her hair, holding her tight, even when she hit me in the back and sides with her fists, the cut on her thumb streaking my shirt with blood.
ON SATURDAY, LUCAS came to the house, a torn envelope and a sheet of gold-and-silver-embossed stationery in his hand. “I cain’t figure this. Don’t them people know how to run their own business?” he said.
I took the letter from his hand and read it, then put it in my back pocket. I tried to keep my face empty. “I’ll give them a call Monday,” I said.
“How can they give me a scholarship, then take it back because I’m an out-of-state student? My application already said I was from out of state. It’s like they’re calling me a liar.”
“There’s a guy around here by the name of Karsten Mabus. He’s a donor to this educational foundation. I think he’s trying to squeeze me by going through you,” I said.
“What’s he want from you?”
“It has to do with Johnny American Horse.”
“Well, throw that damn letter away. I wouldn’t use the sonofabitch’s money to wipe my-”
“I’ll call Monday.”
He studied a distant place on the hill across the road, his thumbs hitched in his pockets, his brow furrowed under the brim of his hat. His cheeks were flushed, his eyes vexed, but I knew his disappointment would not last. Lucas was endowed with both a childlike innocence and a love of his art, and he didn’t care two cents for the world’s opinion or the material rewards it might offer or deny him.
His face seemed to reach a conclusion in his thought process. “Y’all eat breakfast?” he asked.
“Not yet. How about tanking down some pork chops and buttermilk biscuits with us?”
“Sure I’m not barging in?”
“Not at all.”
“Want to wet a line later on?” he said.
“You got it.”
I could have learned a lot from Lucas.
MONDAY MORNING I called the educational foundation in Denver and tried to extract an explanation from the personnel there for the retraction of Lucas’s scholarship. I was put on hold twice, cut off once, and finally told by a man with a sonorous voice that a clerical error had been made, that Lucas was ineligible for the particular award that had been given him, and that he could apply in another category. “We’re sorry for the inconvenience,” he said.
“That’s my son you’re jerking around,” I said.
“Thank you for your inquiry,” he replied, and quietly hung up.
An hour later, I received an office visit from Brendan Merwood. He was a strange man, one I had never understood. His skill as a trial lawyer was well known throughout the Northwest, but he seemed to have no principles whatsoever. He was a glad-hander, a sycophant, and a toady for every meretricious enterprise in the state, as though his own merits and well-earned success as an attorney brought him no sense of validation. Even his pro bono work seemed to be a public exercise in self-flattery. Now, he sat in my office like a battle-scarred feral hog, reeking of aftershave lotion, effusive with so much goodwill that I believed Brendan Merwood was a genuinely frightened man.
“I think you got a bum deal on this bail bond business,” he said. “You tried to help Johnny in good faith, and look what happened. Both of you thought he’d be there for trial and never saw this tragedy with the federal agent in the making.” He shook his head to show his sense of mystification at the unfairness of the universe. “I just don’t think innocent folks should get hurt like this. That’s why I want to help.”
“What are you trying to tell me, sir?”
“You and I both know this is all connected in some way with ecoterrorism. Somebody is sitting on those materials that were stolen from Global Research. Those materials have got to get back into the right hands-either the government’s or the owner’s. Are my words getting through here, Billy Bob? Talk to Johnny’s wife. She’ll listen to you.”
“No, she won’t.”
He crossed his legs and pulled at one knee, as though it were injured, his eyes lifting toward the ceiling. “Once in a while you have to make a concession. You make the concession and you move on. That’s how the world works. This is a good community. We don’t need all this trouble,” he said.
“My wife and I didn’t cause it. But somebody is doing his best to destroy us.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that. I guess people fight with the weapons that are available to them.”
“So do I.”
“I’ve heard about your history in Texas. I don’t think that’s going to work here, my friend. Believe it or not, I’m on your side,” he said.
“I think in your way you probably are. So thank you for coming in, Brendan. Tell the man you work for I’ll kill him if he tries to hurt my family.”
He shook his finger back and forth. “This conversation is one in which we didn’t communicate very well. That’s the only memory I’ll have of it. If Johnny gets in touch with you, tell him to surrender himself or to call me. I don’t want that boy hurt. God’s truth on that,” he said.
He left my office, shaking his head profoundly.
THAT AFTERNOON, as I pulled into the dirt drive at Johnny’s house, I saw Amber unloading boxes of groceries from her Dakota. I followed her into the back of the house without being invited. She had swept the floors clean of splintered wood and broken glass and had placed a throw rug over the stain where Seth Masterson had died.
“That’s a lot of food,” I said.
“Not in the mood for it, Billy Bob,” she replied.
“Brendan Merwood was in my office this morning. He knows you have the records that were stolen out of Global Research. He wants you to give them up.”
“The day Global gets its goods back is the day Johnny gets his death warrant signed. What a life, huh, boss?”
One sack on the table was filled with first-aid supplies.
“You don’t think you’re being watched or followed?” I said.
“They try. I don’t think they do a very good job of it. Did you see those telephone workers by the crossroads? I wonder why they all have the same haircut.”
“I wouldn’t underestimate them,” I said.
But my words were useless. I leaned against the doorjamb and watched her sort out the canned and dried food and medical purchases that she was obviously taking to Johnny. I wondered how long it would be before she was in the crosshairs of a telescopic lens.
“How badly is he hurt?” I asked.
“Bad enough.”
“Amber, you need to be aware Temple and I are about to lose our home. Johnny’s tribal bondsmen double-crossed him and us.”
Her back was turned to me. She paused in her work a moment, as though she were about to speak. Then she wrapped a bottle of hydrogen peroxide in a towel and placed it deep in a cardboard box.
“Did you hear me? Others are being hurt as well as you and Johnny. Seth Masterson got set up and blown into a pile of bloody rags because he tried to save Johnny and you from yourselves.”
This time she turned on me. “How serious do you think anthrax is? Or bubonic plague or the Ebola virus? Forget about the fact it’s down in the Bitterroot Valley. How do you feel about this stuff being used on human beings?” she said.
“That’s what they’re messing with at Global?”
“They’re the bastards who gave Saddam Hussein part of his biological warfare program.”
“Turn over your material to the media. You can do it anonymously.”
“It would never see the light of day.”
“I tried,” I said.
“Yeah, you did. Go burn a candle to yourself. I wish the tribal bondsmen hadn’t shafted you. One of them just made a down payment on a new house. Not on the res, either, since he’s obviously moving up in life. You got screwed and so did we and so did your friend the FBI agent. I don’t have anything else to say, except ta-ta. That’s the way it shakes out sometimes.”
I went back outside, got in my Avalon, and turned around on the edge of the yard. The air was dry and I could see a smoky sheen rising into the sky from fires that were burning close to Glacier National Park. Amber came out on the porch and waved for me to stop. The anger and self-manufactured cynicism had gone out of her face, replaced by a vulnerability I didn’t normally associate with her.
“Do you ever hear from my father?” she said.
“No, I don’t.”
“He was in town. I thought he might have called.”
“Sometimes my answering machine is off when the office is closed.”
“He’s mad about my marrying Johnny, but he always checks on me through third parties. That’s why I was asking,” she said.
I wanted to tell her to be careful, to wrap herself in whatever spiritual shield ancient deities could provide her. But how do you caution a fawn about a cigarette a motorist has just flipped from his car window into a patch of yellow grass, or tell a sparrow that winged creatures eventually plummet to earth?
THAT EVENING Temple and I moved about the house in silence, clicking on the cable news, clicking it off again when the other entered the room, busying ourselves in our self-imposed solitude with inconsequential chores, as though our feigned solemnity were a successful disguise for our depression and mutual resentment.
It was dusk, the valley purple with shadow, when she finally spoke out of more than necessity. “Wyatt Dixon called the house today. He wanted to talk to you.”
“About what?”
“I didn’t give him a chance to say. I told him I’d report him to the sheriff’s office if he called again.”
“I’ll have a talk with him.”
“He’s worthless. Let him alone.”
She walked down to the barn and turned on the valve that fed the irrigation line to the pasture. In the distance I saw the water burst from the pipe and spray in the wind. Then she came back in the house, showered, and went to bed. I went into the den I used as a home office and sat in the dark with L. Q. Navarro’s holstered.45 revolver in my lap. It was a beautiful firearm, blue-black, perfectly balanced, with yellowed ivory grips and a gold-plated trigger guard and hammer. I sometimes wondered if my fondness for holding L.Q.’s revolver wasn’t a form of fetish, but actually I didn’t care whether it was or not. I loved guns then and I love them now, just as I loved L.Q. and his courage and his manly smell and his confidence that regardless of what we did, we were always on the side of justice.
The moon above the hills was the same pale yellow as the ivory on L.Q.’s revolver. I could hear heavy animals cracking through the underbrush on the slope behind the house and pinecones pinging off the metal roof when the wind gusted hard out of the trees. For a moment I thought I saw L.Q. moving about in the shadows, his jaws slack, his white shirt water-stained from the grave, death’s hold on him not up for debate.
In my mind’s eye I saw the beer garden strung with paper lanterns where we attended dances in Monterrey; the times he and Temple and I ate Mexican dinners in a sidewalk café by the San Antonio River, only two blocks from the Alamo; the ancient Spanish mission where he was married and I stood as his best man, the same mission where his wife’s funeral Mass would be celebrated six months later.
L.Q. and I had lived a violent life, marked by death and memories of nocturnal events that made me doubt our humanity, but it had its moments. I just wished I could reclaim them.
I felt Temple’s hand on my shoulder. “I’ve acted badly,” she said.
Her nightgown was backlit by the moon, and I could see the outline of her body inside it.
“No, you haven’t. You warned me about Johnny, but I walked into a buzz saw,” I said.
“Your goodness is your weakness. People use it against you. That’s why I get mad.”
“I don’t believe Johnny and Amber meant to hurt us.”
“We’re not going to lose our home, Billy Bob. We’re going to find out who’s behind all this and make their lives miserable.”
“L.Q. couldn’t have said it better.”
“What are you doing with his gun?”
“I hear sounds out in the woods. Sometimes I think it’s L.Q.”
She looked at me strangely. I learned forward in the leather chair in which I was sitting and dropped L.Q.’s revolver in my desk drawer. “Sometimes I still want the old ways back. I want to round up every greedy shit hog who’s feeding off this country and blow them apart,” I said.
She sat down on the arm of my chair and pulled my head against her breast and pressed her cheek down on my hair. I could feel her heart beating against my ear.
I DIDN’T KNOW Wyatt Dixon’s cell phone number and the next morning I had to drive out to his house in order to talk to him. He was sitting on a rock patterned with the scales of dead hellgrammites, wearing neither shirt nor shoes, flipping a wet fly into the current, watching it float downstream.
“Doin’ any good?” I said.
“It’s too hot. They’re holed up in them pools.”
“Why’d you call my wife yesterday?”
“Your office was closed. So I rung you at home. I wasn’t trying to bother your wife, if that’s why your nose is bent out of joint.”
“She doesn’t want to hear from you. What does it take to get that across?”
His mouth was hooked down at the corners, his face as absent of emotion as clay. “There’s a yard bitch by the name of Wilbur Pickett, lives up at Ronan. I knowed him from some of my past activities before the Man on High got my attention. He says them boys who put that frog-sticker in me told him there’s an ex-Texas Ranger herebouts gonna get himself boxed up and shipped to the boneyard. The ex-Ranger and maybe his old woman, too.”
“How about giving me Mr. Pickett’s address?”
“Mr. Pickett has done caught air for other parts. Primarily ’cause he dimed them two boys with Darrel McComb and they found out about it.”
“My wife was mentioned in this threat?”
He retrieved the wet fly out of the riffle and flicked it out again.
“Asked you a question, partner,” I said.
“When you tell a man to repeat himself, you’re accusing him of lying. I don’t care for it, counselor.”
“Who’s paying these two guys?”
“I think you know.” He set his fly rod down on the rock. Perhaps because of the shade his eyes had taken on the pale blue cast of the sky, but nonetheless they looked like marbles placed inside a death mask. “That name ‘Mabus’ wrote down inside a pentacle won’t go out of my head. I ain’t got the education or experience to deal with them kinds of things by myself. The preacher at our congregation ain’t an educated man, either. But you and me? That’s another matter. Brother Holland, we could crank up the band.”
“Deal with what things?”
“Read the Book of John. I made a study of it in Deer Lodge.” His eyes clicked sideways and looked into mine.
“Don’t call my wife again,” I said.
DARREL MCCOMB was in trouble with Fay Harback, but this time he was beginning to enjoy it. In some ways it felt good to be excoriated, to be the one wheel in the machine that didn’t automatically lock into gear when a lever was pulled. In fact, for the first time in his life he felt genuinely free.
Fay Harback removed her glasses and looked up at him after reading the document on her desk, a Xerox of a letter Darrel had written and mailed four days earlier. “Darrel, you cannot write to the United States attorney and say the kind of things you say in this letter,” she said.
Her tone was not unsympathetic. Actually, Darrel had just realized he liked Fay; he also liked her petite features and small face and the way her mahogany-colored hair lay thickly on the back of her neck. He couldn’t remember when he had felt so protective toward her.
“Darrel?” she said.
“Yes?”
“Are you listening?”
“You said I shouldn’t take it on myself to write the United States attorney. But why shouldn’t I? The First Amendment gives me that right.”
“You accused him of misusing his office.”
“Not exactly.”
She slipped her glasses back on and looked back down at the photocopy. “ ‘If you’d take the time to examine American Horse’s service record, you’d discover he was an expert marksman. The shooter on the hill behind American Horse’s house couldn’t hit a blimp with a guided missile. Maybe you guys used up the remnants of your brainpower while persecuting Richard Jewell, but this time out I suggest you give up the role of court jesters and not try to railroad another innocent man.’ ”
“Sounds pretty accurate to me,” Darrel said.
“I worry about you.”
“Why?”
“I think you’re having a nervous breakdown.”
“Maybe I was. But not now. Life is great.”
“I.A. still has you on the desk?”
“Some guys are cops twenty-four hours a day. What’s eight hours?”
“Not a good statement to make to the district attorney.”
But he wasn’t listening now. Through the window he saw Wyatt Dixon parking himself and his crutches on a bench under the maples, a group of bums and jailhouse riffraff greeting him, shaking his hand, as though he were a celebrity. “Before this is over, I’m going to cool that son of a buck out,” Darrel said.
Fay followed Darrel’s line of vision to Wyatt sitting on the bench, a silvery shirt stitched with purple roses stretched tightly across his back, a black hat with a red feather in the band perched high on his head. “What I see is a man enjoying the morning and not bothering anyone. And I didn’t hear that last remark,” she said. “God, you’re a fruitcake.”
BUT FAY’S political correctness and personal denigration of him did not diminish Darrel’s mood or the new sense of freedom that had somehow rooted itself in his life.
It took Greta Lundstrum to do that. He had begun the affair believing he was in charge, that he was using her as a means to solve a case no one else wanted to touch. But as time progressed, he wondered more and more about his own sexual dependency and if, in fact, he hadn’t developed a genuine affection for Greta. She was an Amazon-in bed, in her business dealings, with men who got in her face. He even wondered if there was not a perverse element in his erotic attachment to her, namely, her masculine qualities, the heated, muscular way in which she made love, the orgasms he could equate only with a volcanic upheaval.
That evening she greeted him at the door in straw sandals, white shorts high up on her thighs, and a nylon shirt whose color changed from copper to magenta.
“You’re early. I haven’t had time to dress,” she said.
“I think you look swell,” he replied. Actually, she looked better than swell. Even though she was a bit overweight, her robust posture and strong features gave her simple clothes a kind of working-class elegance, the uplifted heft of her breasts a tribute to her power.
But the protean nature of Greta’s personae filled him with conflicting thoughts. At the sink, she sliced the rind on a grapefruit, then ripped it loose from the pink meat with her fingers, rinsing her hands under the faucet as she worked, like a country woman cleaning game. Through the kitchen window he watched her fork the steaks off the grill on the patio, her eyes squinting in the smoke, and he knew this was the exact image of the blue-collar woman a man such as himself was supposed to love and build a home with. Maybe this was the life that was still waiting for him, but if so, why did the thought of it make his scalp constrict?
Was it because he was still infatuated with Amber Finley, now known as Amber American Horse? How did Rocky used to put it? There were three ways for a career noncom to ruin himself: He could fall in love with a whore, an officer’s wife, or a rich girl who hated her right-wing father and liked to get arrested at peace demonstrations.
But that was not the source of the tension band that was like an invisible hat cocked on the side of Darrel’s head. He wondered if Greta, the Amazon woman in bed, with her thick forearms and broad hands, could be capable of pressing a pillow down on a man’s face and holding it there while he struggled for breath and his heart exploded in his chest.
“Why you staring at me, handsome?” she said.
“You a survivor, Greta?” he asked.
She set the steaks and a plate of sliced tomatoes on the dining-room table and thought about his question. “Survivor in which way?” she said.
“I’ve been in situations where I was scared enough to do whatever it took to stay alive.”
“My life’s been pretty dull. At least until I met a certain someone,” she said.
“I wouldn’t hold it against you. I mean, if you got jammed up real bad and had to do something against your conscience.”
“You’ve got a wild imagination, Darrel. But I love you just the same.” She pursed her lips and made a kissing sound.
She had never used the word “love” to him before. During dinner he kept trying to read her eyes and sort out the way she always seemed to imply his concerns were unfounded or even irrational. Maybe he’d been a cop too long, he thought.
“Ready for dessert?” she said.
“Yeah, what is it?”
“Go in the bedroom. I’ll be along in a minute.” She carried the dirty dishes into the kitchen, a glimmer in her eye.
“No games tonight,” he said.
“Do what I tell you. You won’t be disappointed,” she said.
A few minutes later she entered the bedroom in a black nightgown, carrying a tray with dishes of vanilla ice cream on it, the ice cream covered with a brandy-laced chocolate sauce. Also on the tray was a narrow box wrapped in satin paper and blue ribbon.
“Happy Birthday,” she said.
“How’d you know it was my birthday?” he asked.
“I have my ways. Open it.”
He sat on the side of the bed and unwrapped the satin paper from a black velvet box. He pushed back the top against the spring.
“That’s an expensive watch, Greta,” he said.
“You’re worth it.”
“Thank you.”
“Eat your ice cream before it melts.”
They made love, with her on top, her breasts hanging close to his face, her energies concentrated and unrelenting, as though she were determined to make this birthday the most memorable in his life. When she finally lifted herself off him, he was exhausted, happy, and totally separated from the dark speculations he’d had about her earlier. He slipped one arm around her, pulling her against him, stroking her hair and skin with his other hand. Then his fingers touched the swollen place under her right arm. It was reddish in color, hard, as though a tangle of wire had been inserted under the skin.
“What’s that?” he said.
“A horsefly bit me there,” she replied.
“Really? Pretty mean horsefly,” he said, his eyes crinkling.
“I’m going to shower. You take a nap,” she said, and kissed him on the cheek.
He didn’t know how long he slept. He dreamed about an island he’d once visited west of Tahiti. Not far from the beach, a pink reef lay just below the waves, and inside it was a cave surrounded by gossamer fans. As he swam toward the entrance, patches of hot blue floated overhead, like clouds of ink in the groundswell, forming shadows on the ocean floor. Then he realized the shapes were not shadows but the hard-packed, leather-hided bodies of sharks.
He sat up in the bed, unsure of where he was. Outside, the landscape was red, the mountains a dark purple against the heavens. Through the wall, he heard Greta talking to someone on the phone. “Don’t call here again, you dumb asshole,” she said. “He’s here now…Well, forget it, you’re not getting any more money…Fuck you. I can make one call and you and that other sack of shit will be taking a long nap under the Thompson Falls landfill.”
Darrel listened to Greta’s words, the ugliness in her voice, and looked wanly at the watch in the velvet box on the nightstand. Then he sighed resolutely, lay back on the pillow, and pretended to be asleep when she entered the room.
“I didn’t wake you up, did I?” she said.
“No, I slept like a stone.”
“You like your watch?”
“It’s grand.”
“I’m glad. I’ve never been happier than when we’re together,” she said. She sat down next to him and took his hand. She traced the scar tissue on his knuckles and the backs of his fingers. “Darrel, I think you’re right about Wyatt Dixon. I think it was Dixon who broke into my house and tore it up. He’s a hateful, vindictive man. The thought of him coming back here scares me.”
“Don’t worry, kiddo. We’ll take care of Dixon,” he said, patting her on the back.
“For sure?” she asked.
“You bet. Don’t let him cross your mind.” He looked at the time on his new watch. “Wow, I’d better get home.”
Later, when he got back to his apartment, he peeled off his clothes, flung them on the floor, and scrubbed himself with a hard-grained soap in the shower. Then he sat in the bottom of the stall for almost an hour, until the hot water tank was empty and his skin was so numb he could not feel the coldness that blazed out of the showerhead.