In the Moon of Red Ponies: A Novel (28 page)

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.

Chapter 16

WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON
was hot and dry, hazy with dust and smoke, the highway scattered with ash that looked like the gray wings of dead insects. I was at a civil trial down in Hamilton when Wyatt Dixon called the house again. “Why, howdy doodie? Is the counselor there’bouts?” he said.

“Didn’t Billy Bob warn you about calling here?” Temple said.

“Come to think of it, he did. But since he ain’t at his office, and since I ain’t God and cain’t dial up Brother Holland’s head, I called his house. What y’all cain’t seem to understand is we’re all soldiers on the same side. I think this man Mabus works for the devil.”

“The fact you’re on the street makes me wonder if there shouldn’t be a three-day open season on people. I can’t change what the court has done, but I can make you a promise—”

“Done heard all that before, Miss Temple, and I ain’t interested in hearing no more of it. Tell your husband I’ll ring him later. Y’all don’t like it, the feeling is mutual. Brother Holland come to my house, making threats, and I ain’t gonna abide it. I think my chemical cocktails ain’t working too well these days. You can also tell him I’m starting to get tired of pulling y’all’s acorns out of the fire.”

The connection went dead.

Temple sat in a chair and tried to think about what Dixon had just said. Was he simply trying to provoke her and bait another trap? If so, what was his motivation? Or was he just trying to make her miserable, to live inside her head, to occupy her dreams and force her again and again to reenter the premature grave on which he had stacked stones one by one, while she lay bound and blindfolded, encased inside the hard-packed dirt, a rubber hose inserted in her mouth?

She leaned over in the chair and thought she was going to be sick. She heard rocks clattering on the hillside and knew the sounds were only those of deer or elk working their way down to the pasture. But the image they conjured out of her memory made her press her hands against her ears, then turn up the volume on the television set until the adenoidal voice of a newscaster talking about hog futures filled the house like an old friend.

She had come too far to lose it like this, she told herself. She would not accept the role of victim, not be manipulated by Dixon, not allow him breath inside her head. When Billy Bob came home, they’d have a talk, maybe go out to dinner, and decide once and for all—

She realized she was repeating the same patterns of behavior about Dixon over and over, somehow expecting different results. Each time Dixon had made contact with them, she had blamed her husband, acting grandiosely, speaking of the violence she would do, but ultimately pushing the problem and its resolution onto someone else.

Had she lost her courage? Worse, had she demeaned her husband in order to hide her own fear? She felt the blood drain from her head and had to sit down again. There was only one way to overcome fear, and that was to confront it. But she tried to shake the thought of confrontation with Dixon out of her head. Don’t be a fool, she told herself. You don’t enter the cage of a wild animal in order to prove your courage. You don’t allow degenerates and sadists to draw you into their maw.

No, you sit like a prisoner in your home, waiting for the phone to ring, flagellating your husband for your inability to deal with your problem.

She put her .38 on the seat of the Tacoma and drove through the tiny mill town of Bonner and on up the Blackfoot toward Wyatt Dixon’s house, passing company-owned cottages shaded by birch trees and orange cliffs from which high school kids cannonballed into the river.

Up ahead, on the left, she saw the swing bridge spanning the Blackfoot and Dixon’s ruined house perched up on a green slope. But she decided to cross the river farther down, on the vehicle bridge, and use the back road to approach the house so her truck and her revolver would both be close by when she confronted him, since she had already resolved she would do so unarmed.

A tractor-trailer boomed down with ponderosa logs roared past her in the opposite lane, blowing dust and the smell of pine rosin and diesel smoke through her window. She crossed the river on a two-lane bridge into trees and drove down a dirt road that wound along the bottom of a hill whose sides were slashed with rock slides. Ahead she could see smoke blowing down the canyon from the sawmill, the sun’s reflection like hammered bronze on the river’s surface, and the roof of Dixon’s house, the pipe from a woodstove wisping in the breeze.

Maybe he won’t be home, she told herself, then felt a rush of shame at the fearful content of her thought processes. The .38 vibrated next to her on the seat, and she touched it and pushed it against the backrest so it wouldn’t fall on the floor. The left front tire hit a rock, lurching the truck frame toward the road’s edge, forcing her to grab the steering wheel with both hands. In her rearview mirror she saw small yellow rocks cascading off the road into a green pool down below.

She came over a rise and looked down the road into the twilight and saw Wyatt Dixon in his yard, shirtless, one thigh still in a cast, dipping a sponge into a water bucket and wiping down an Appaloosa whose rump was blanketed with gray and white spots.

Dixon seemed to turn and look at her just as she came over the rise, frozen in time and place, as though in a sepia-tinted photograph, his skin as smooth as melted candle wax, his face slightly bemused, a dusty shaft of sunlight causing him to squint one eye. In that moment he seemed to become flesh and blood, no longer a phantom, no longer larger than life. Her fear and self-doubt seemed to die in her chest like a fever that has run its course, and the wind off the river was suddenly cool and sweet-smelling in her face, the world once more a place of birch and fir trees and aspens and wild roses on a riverbank. Wyatt Dixon was only a man—a pitiful, malformed creature whose mother had killed his father for the years of drunkenness and abuse he had visited upon her and then for extra measure tried to kill Wyatt, age thirteen, with a hay fork. How could anyone fear a man who had probably been born only because his mother couldn’t afford an abortion?

She rolled down the incline toward the back of Dixon’s rented property, touching the brakes, wondering if she should park by the back shed or simply pull boldly into his yard.

Except the brake pedal had no resistance under her foot and it sank to the floor as though it had been disconnected from its own mechanical apparatus. Suddenly Temple was speeding down the incline, while in front of her a jagged rock the size of a watermelon waited for the tie rod on her left front tire. She heard metal snap, felt the steering wheel twist crazily in her hands, then, as in a dream, saw the front of the truck dip over the edge of the road and take her with it, plummeting through space, upside down, into a green pool whose surface was swirling with dirty white froth from a beaver dam.

The air bag exploded against her chest, pinning her against the seat, but she got her fingers on the window levers and was able to close both windows before the cab filled.

Water pin-holed through the floor and dashboard, and river gravel crunched against the windows as the truck’s weight settled to the bottom of the pool. The crown of her skull was jammed into the headliner, and while the truck’s engine boiled like a woodstove in the current, she could feel water rising to her brow and she knew in that moment that she would die upside down, like Peter on his inverted cross, alone and abandoned, in her case twice condemned to incremental suffocation inside a premature grave, and she wondered what wickedness she could have done in this life to deserve such a fate.