Free In the Moon of Red Ponies: A Novel by James Lee Burke

he said.
    “When wars are over, nobody cares about the people who actually fought them.”
    “Doesn’t matter. McComb tore up my home. He tried to hit on Amber. He didn’t do it because he’s a cop, either. He did it because he’s a white redneck and he knew he could get away with it,” he said.
    “I’ve got to know why Ruggles and Eddy Bumper came after you, Johnny.”
    He raised his hands and dropped them on the sheet. “My coalition has sued a couple of oil companies to stop them from drilling test wells on the east slope of the Divide. In the meantime we’re trying to kick a pipeline off the res. I kind of went out on my own on this anthrax stuff, too.”
    “Say that last part again?”
    “A private grudge I brought back from the first Gulf war, I guess. Sometimes I see things in my head, in broad daylight, that make me wish I wasn’t on the planet,” he said.
    I didn’t want to hear it.
     
    IT WAS LATE and I was tired when I got back home. Temple had already gone to bed. I fixed a ham-and-egg sandwich and poured a glass of buttermilk and ate at the kitchen table. The moon was up and through the side window I could see elk and deer in the pasture and hear our horses nickering in the darkness on the far side of the barn.
    I grew up on a small ranch in the hill country of south-central Texas. My mother was a librarian by profession and my father a tack and hot-pass welder on pipelines all over Texas and Oklahoma. Both of them dearly loved our ranch, in spite of the meager income it provided them. They also loved the Victorian purple brick home in which I grew up. They loved the horses, dogs, goats, cats, sheep, beehives, fish in the ponds (called tanks in Texas), and even poultry in the chicken run on our land. My father named our ranch “Heartwood,” and he burned the name into a thick red-oak plank with the intention of hanging it from the front gate.
    But the man who had landed at Normandy, and who had walked all the way across Europe to the Elbe River, was killed in a natural gas blowout at Matagorda Bay and never got to hang his sign. So I hung it for him down in Texas, and now I had hung it above our gate in Montana, up a valley that was the most beautiful stretch of land I had ever seen.
    I brushed my teeth and lay down next to Temple. I felt her weight turn on the mattress and her hand touch my back. “Your muscles are stiff as iron. What’s wrong?” she said.
    “Heartwood is the best place I’ve ever been. It’s not one spread, either. It’s the place where I grew up and it’s the place we’ve built together, here, in Montana,” I said.
    She raised herself on her elbow so she could look into my face. “What happened tonight?” she said.
    “Seth Masterson tried to warn me off Johnny’s case.”
    “Who the hell does he think he is?”
    “You don’t know Seth. He broke all his own rules. Johnny American Horse is in the meat grinder. You were right. Johnny might pull us down with him.”
    She pressed her face next to mine. “Listen to me, Billy Bob. You tell the FBI to screw themselves. Nobody threatens us,” she said.
    I turned and looked into her eyes. They were milky green, the color of the Guadalupe River in summer, sometimes with shadows in them, the way the river was when it flowed under a tree. “You’re special,” I said.
    She pulled her nightgown over her knees and sat on top of me, then leaned down and kissed me on the mouth. I cupped her breasts, then heard her say “Wait.” She worked her gown over her head and I put her nipples in my mouth and ran my hands over her baby fat and felt my own hardness touch her stomach.
    I rolled on top of her, then she reached down and held me with her hand and placed me inside her, her knees widening, her face turned to one side, her eyes closing, then, slowly, her mouth puckering as though she were warming the air before she breathed it. Her skin was moist and pink in the glow of the moon through the window, then she began to come