In the Moon of Red Ponies: A Novel by James Lee Burke Read Free Book Online Page A

shut to me. Who’s running it?”
    “Darrel McComb.”
    “You’re not serious?”
    “If you have a problem with that, talk to the sheriff.”
    “No, we’ll just give your general attitude a ‘D’ for ‘disingenuous.’ Shame on you, Fay.”
    She slammed the door on the way out.
     
    I HEADED UP to the Jocko Valley. Western Montana is terraced country, each mountain plateau and valley stacked a little higher than the ones below it. To get to the Flathead Reservation, you climb a long grade outside Missoula, between steep-sloped, thickly wooded mountains, then enter the wide green sweep of the Jocko Valley. To the left are a string of bars and an open-air arena with a cement dance floor where Merle Haggard sometimes performs. Across the breadth of the valley are the homes of fairly prosperous feed growers as well as the prefabricated tract houses built for Flathead Indians by the government. The tract houses look like a sad imitation of a middle-income suburb. Some of the yards are dotted with log outbuildings, rusted car bodies, parts of washing machines, and old refrigerators. Often a police car is parked in one of them.
    But through it all winds the Jocko River—tea-colored in the early spring, later boiling with snowmelt, in the summer undulating like satin over beaver-cut cottonwoods and heavy pink and gray boulders. Johnny American Horse wanted to save it, along with the wooded hills and the grasslands that had never been kicked over with a plow. He also argued for the reintroduction of bison on the plains, allowing them to crash through fences and trample two centuries of agrarian economics into finely ground cereal. Some people on the res listened to him. Most did not.
    I parked in his yard and sat down on the front steps with him. A sealed gallon jar of sun tea rested by his foot. A calico cat rolled in the new clover. Part of the mountains behind his house was still in shadow, and when the wind blew down the slope I could smell the odor of pine needles and damp humus and lichen and stone back in the trees.
    “A couple of things are bothering me, Johnny,” I said.
    “Like what?” he said, watching the cat trap a grasshopper with its paws.
    “Why’d you have to use a knife and hatchet on those guys?”
    “The only gun I own is the one the cops took away from me.”
    “Why’d you lay in wait for them? Why didn’t you get some help?”
    “This is the res. People take care of themselves here. Ask any federal agent what he thinks about Indians. An Indian homicide is just another dead Indian.”
    “I think maybe you know who sent Bumper and Ruggles after you.”
    He seemed to study a thought that was hidden behind his eyes. “Ever hear of wet work?” he asked.
    “Maybe,” I replied.
    “You were a Texas Ranger and an assistant U.S. attorney, Billy Bob.”
    “You’re saying the G sicced these guys on you?”
    “What’s the G? It’s just the guys who are currently running things. I trained with people just like Bumper and Ruggles. Some of the old-timers had been in the Phoenix Program.”
    The screen door opened behind us. “You telling Billy Bob about your dream?” Amber Finley asked. Her eyes were the bluest, most radiant I’d ever seen, her complexion glowing.
    “What dream?” I said.
    Johnny got up from the steps and walked across the yard toward the barn, his face averted. Amber watched him, a hand perched on one hip. “Isn’t he something else?” she said.
    “What dream?” I said.
    “He just told me, ‘All those dudes are going down. There’s nothing to worry about.’ I wish I could have dreams like that. Mine suck,” she said.

Chapter 4
    MY SON WAS Lucas Smothers. Illegitimate, raised by a tormented, uneducated foster father, Lucas was living testimony to the fact that goodness, love, decency, and musical talent could survive in an individual who had every reason to hate the world. He had my eyes and reddish-blond hair and six-foot height, but oddly I thought of him as my