In the Moon of Red Ponies: A Novel (22 page)

“Dixon at a revival?” Darrel said.

“That’s right.”

“This man is a criminal.”

“He’s a polite man who always tips his hat to my wife. Why don’t you flatfeet stop picking on him?” the neighbor said, and slammed the door in Darrel’s face.

Darrel drove up to the Indian reservation in the Jocko Valley. It wasn’t hard to find the revival. Between a grove of cottonwood trees and a small rodeo arena and pavilion where the annual summer powwows were held, a huge, open-air striped canopy flapped gently in the warm breeze, the mountains blue and jagged in the distance. Darrel parked his unmarked car in the shade of the cottonwoods and watched the people who were arriving for the revival. They were both Indian and white, poor, uneducated, with the distorted physiques of people who ate the wrong food and had the wrong habits. He wondered how people who had already been so badly treated by life could allow what little they had to be taken from them by charlatans.

He could not shake the vague sense of anger that seemed to foul his blood. Why did Wyatt Dixon bother him so much? Because he had beat the system and was back on the street, lauded by people who had no idea of the man’s violent history? Yes, that was part of it. But in his heart Darrel knew Wyatt Dixon bothered him for other reasons as well, ones that went to a central dilemma in Darrel’s life. Darrel himself, lawman and soldier, had recruited men like Dixon for military and political operations that were shameful and dishonorable in nature. The qualifications for the job had always been simple: the recruits needed only to be disposable and totally devoid of humanity. Darrel had been their mentor, feeding them patriotic Valium when in reality the men Darrel reported to would not spit on them if they were burning to death.

The sky was yellow in the west, filled with dust and rain, the air smelling of mown hay and the watermelons someone was splitting apart on a wood table. The tent was filling now, a preacher mounting a stage above the rows and rows of folding chairs. Then Darrel saw Wyatt Dixon working his way on crutches down the aisle toward a chair an usher was unfolding especially for him. Dixon wore a shirt emblazoned with blue and white stars and steel-colored eagles with thunderbolts in their talons, one dark blue pants leg split up to the hip to expose the plaster cast on his thigh. He was gripping his hat between his fingers and the handle of his crutch, his mouth like a slit in his face.

Darrel got out of the car and took a seat at the back of the tent. Next to him a tall man, wearing sandals and eyeglasses that hung on a velvet cord around his neck, was setting up a tape recorder.

“What’s going on?” Darrel asked him.

“I’m a professor at the university. I have permission to be here, if that’s what you mean,” the tall man replied.

No, that’s not what he had meant, but he didn’t pursue it. The preacher introduced himself as Elton T. Sneed, then immediately went into a histrionic sermon that Darrel could only associate with an epileptic seizure. But the preacher’s performance, the Appalachian accent and heated gasping for breath at the end of each sentence, was nothing compared to what Darrel saw and heard next.

One by one people rose from their seats at the front of the tent and began to rant and shake, their faces lifted skyward, their eyes closed as though they were experiencing orgasm. But the sounds or words coming out of their throats were like none Darrel had ever heard. Wyatt Dixon rose, too, wobbling into the aisle on his crutches, his chin jacked in the air, a staccato stream of unintelligible language rising from his throat louder than anyone else’s.

“What is
that
?” Darrel said to the professor from the university.

“You’re listening to Aramaic, my friend. Something you can tell your grandchildren about,” the professor replied.

“It’s an Indian dialect?”

“It goes back nine centuries before the birth of Christ. It’s the language Jesus spoke,” the professor said.

“Right,” Darrel said. “Glad my tax money is going for a good cause out at the university.”

Darrel left the tent and went to a concrete building that contained showers and restrooms that were used by campers during tribal powwows. As he relieved himself in a trough, he could hear the tent session breaking up for dinner. If he was going to make a move on Dixon, now was the time. He used his cell phone to call directly into Fay Harback’s office, hoping she would be working late, which for her was customary.

“Fay?”

“Yes?” she said.

“I want to bring Dixon in as a material witness.”

“Witness to what?”

“The attack on his own person.”

“You want to lock up an assault and battery victim?”

“Got any better solutions for dealing with this guy?”

“Wyatt isn’t a guy you squeeze, Darrel.”

“Wyatt?”
he said.

“He’s neither a snitch nor a rat, so forget it,” she said.

“Whose side are you on?”

“You should try to relax,” she replied.

He disconnected the transmission. Had everyone in the courthouse lost their minds? He left the stalls in the cement building and went back outside into the twilight. Wyatt Dixon was laboring across the rough ground, a soft cowboy hat the color of chewing tobacco low on his forehead, a festive group of men and women on each side of him. They were the homeliest people Darrel had ever seen, their faces creased and work-worn, their teeth decayed, their eyesight diminished by injuries and diseases that were never treated. What did they have to be happy about?

But the faces here at the revival were not new ones to him. He had seen them in El Salvador, Guatemala, and northern Nicaragua. He had seen them staring at him out of windows in government jails, shantytowns, and miserable huts on the fringes of large pepper plantations. He had also seen them at the bottom of excavations just before a bulldozer shoved a mountain of dirt down on them.

His depression was coming back. Get rid of morbid thoughts. He remembered George Patton’s famous admonition: You don’t win wars by giving your life for your country; you win by making the other sonofabitch give his. For Darrel, that meant taking it to them with red-hot tongs. He waited until Wyatt Dixon was inside the entrance of the men’s room, then braced him.

“Think you can just walk out of the hospital and say, ‘Screw you,’ to the sheriff’s department?” he said.

“Why, howdy doodie, Detective McComb?” Dixon said, straightening himself on his crutches. “We’re fixing to have a potluck dinner. Dinner on the ground and devil in the bush. Want to join us?”

The men who had entered the restroom with Dixon were staring at Darrel as though he were a Martian. He held up his badge so all of them could see it. “This is police business. Get out of here,” he said.

But they didn’t move. Not until Dixon turned to them and said, “Y’all go ’head on. I’ll be there directly.”

“Why don’t you leave him alone?” somebody in the back of the room said.

“Who said that?” Darrel asked.

But no one answered. Instead, one by one they left the room, their faces filled with hostility, their eyes lingering on his.

“You fool ignorant people, Dixon, but you don’t fool me,” Darrel said.

“I got twenty-seven thousand dollars in the bank, own my own truck, personal gear, and a prize Appaloosa cutting horse. I’m on the square with the state and the Man on High, and you ain’t got bean dip on me, Detective. Seems to me you’re flirting with a civil suit. I’ve already talked to my friend Brother Holland about taking over some of my legal issues.”

“Holland is actually your attorney?”

Wyatt didn’t reply. His shoulders were hunched atop his crutches, his head tilted at an odd angle. His eyes seemed to be peeling away the skin on Darrel’s face now, burrowing into his mind, prying secrets from him Darrel shared with no one. Then Darrel knew why it was he hated Dixon so much. Wyatt knew his past and looked upon him as a fraud. “You think you know everything about me, don’t you?” Darrel said.

“You hire men of my kind to hurt folks who get in your way. That’s why I don’t have no truck with the government. The whole bunch of you are hypocrites,” Dixon replied.

“Hear me real good on this, asswipe. People like you have no right to live in this country. You belong in a cage on an ice floe in Antarctica. You’re one of those guys who’s still dirty after he takes a shower. Both of us know you’re up to something. I just haven’t figured out what it is.”

“Least I ain’t up to somebody’s windowsill, looking at some young girl’s boobs. Now, if you’ll step aside, I’m fixing to take a drain that’s gonna blow the porcelain off the bowl.”

Dixon creaked forward on his crutches toward a stall, his shoulder brushing against Darrel’s. Then Darrel had thoughts of a kind that had probably been working in his unconscious all day, like yellow jackets trapped under a glass jar. Strapped to his ankle was a small holster with a hideaway .25 auto in it, all serial numbers acid-burned and ground off on an emery wheel. All he needed to do was say Dixon’s name, wait for him to turn around, and use his nine-Mike to pop one into the center of his forehead. It would be a simple matter to fold Dixon’s dead hand around the .25 auto.

“Dixon?” he said.

Wyatt stopped and turned slightly, the eagle on his shirt bunching with the twisted motion he made against the armrests of his crutches. “Spit it out. I’m tired of this game playing,” he said.

“You’re a piece of shit,” Darrel said.

“I’ve answered to worse. If that’s all you got to say, I got to urinate,” Dixon said.

A shaft of sunlight shone through the airspace between the restroom wall and roof and made Darrel’s eyes burn and twitch. The trough against the wall stank of piss and through the open door of a stall he could see a toilet that was up to the rim with brown water. Outside, somebody had set off a string of firecrackers and they popped like lesions splitting on the surface of Darrel’s brain. Darrel looked directly into Wyatt’s eyes and believed he could actually hear Wyatt laughing at him, as though Wyatt had stolen his soul and wiped his feet on it.

Darrel caught his breath. “I’m taking you in as a material witness. Then I’m going to get a warrant on your place and tear it apart. I’m also going to get your bank accounts frozen. That’s just for openers. When I’m finished with you, you’ll wish you were still a dirty thought in your father’s mind.”

Dixon sucked a canine tooth, then turned back toward the urinal. “I don’t think you got too many arrows in your quiver, Detective. I’m taking back my recommendation to President Bush. You just don’t measure up, boy,” he said.

Darrel cupped him by the upper arm and spun him around. He could not quite believe the level of power he felt in Wyatt’s arm and he wondered for a moment if he had made an irreversible mistake. But Wyatt didn’t resist. Darrel snapped a handcuff on Wyatt’s wrist, then locked the other manacle on an iron pipe that was anchored in the cinder-block wall and the cement floor. Wyatt was now helpless, balanced precariously on his crutches.

“I told you I got to urinate,” Wyatt said.

“Maybe you can start a new career doing adult diaper endorsements,” Darrel said.

He returned to the grove of cottonwood trees and started his car, his heart beating. What had he just done? Made a bust that wouldn’t stick, allowed Dixon to treat him with contempt, and jammed himself up with the D.A.’s office. But it was too late to change course now. He had to brass it out or become a worse object of ridicule than he already was.

He drove his car to the restroom area, blowing his horn to discourage Dixon’s revivalist friends who had started to reenter the building. He hit the redial button on his cell phone and heard Fay’s voice on the other end. “I’m bringing him in. I’ll do the paperwork in the morning,” he said.

“You’re not doing this on my authorization,” she said.

“This guy is a menace. Are you going to back my play or not?”

“Come in tomorrow morning and we’ll talk. In the meantime, I don’t want—”

He snapped the cell phone shut, parked the car, and opened the back door so he could move Dixon quickly into the car and lock him to the D-ring inset in the floor before Dixon’s friends could cause more trouble. He entered the restroom, then stared dumbfounded at Wyatt relieving himself in the trough, one manacle hanging from his wrist. The iron pipe to which he had been hooked up lay on the floor like a broken pugil stick, each end festooned with a chunk of concrete or cement.

Wyatt shook himself off and put his equipment back in his pants. Blood was leaking from the gauze and plaster on his thigh. “Best whiz I ever had,” he said, his face beaming with visceral satisfaction.

THAT NIGHT,
Darrel McComb ended up in a skin joint and got drunker than he had ever been in his life. The early dawn found him on Greta Lundstrum’s doorstep, sick and trembling, afraid he would continue drinking through the day but even more afraid that he would get sober and have to look at himself in the hard light of day. The eastern sky was the color of a Tequila Sunrise, the mountains quaking with lightning. He sat on the steps and removed his piece from his clip-on holster and held it in both hands between his legs. He closed his eyes and imagined himself fitting the barrel between his teeth, touching the roof of his mouth, the astringent taste of gun lubricant mixing with his saliva.

Did Valhalla lie on the other side or only a great blackness? His life was a joke, hardly worth sustaining. One round fired upward into the brain would scroll his name on the wall, then it would be over.

Or perhaps he might take a few people with him. Behind him, he heard the door open.

Chapter 13

THAT SAME FRIDAY
morning, as I headed to work, I saw Seth Masterson’s Cherokee parked on the side of the dirt road that led from my house onto the state highway. The driver’s door was open and Seth was behind the wheel, eating breakfast out of a McDonald’s container. The sun had just tipped the mountains on the east side of the valley, and the light looked like a tiny pink flame inside the needles of the ponderosa tree he had parked under.