from his teeth, his lips a strange, purplish color in the shade.
“How ’bout I take you down to the Oxford and buy you a breakfast of eggs and corned beef? Guaranteed to put a chunk of drill pipe in your britches,” he said.
“You get the hell away from me,” I said.
He twisted a finger in his ear and looked down the street at two college-age kids, a girl and boy, jogging through the intersection, both of them sweaty and hot, their faces bright. His eyes came back on mine. “I ain’t got no grief with you, counselor. Left that back at the joint. Know why?” he said, his eyes widening.
“Not interested,” I said.
“They dusted off the electroshock machine, wired me up, and made blue sparks jump off my Johnson. I was definitely in the spirit when they pulled them electrodes off my head, yes sir.”
“Electroshock isn’t used anymore.”
“They said in my case they was making an exception, although they didn’t give me no explanation on that. Put me naked in an isolation cell and hosed me down with ice-cold water, too,” he said, fitting his hand on his scrotum, watching the college girl jog by a few feet away. “I’m putting together a company to provide the best rough stock on the Northwestern circuit. Horses you couldn’t hold in with a barbed wire hackamore. Need you as my legal point man.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
He seemed genuinely puzzled, his jaw hooked forward like a camel’s. “I’ll pay you top dollar, cash money, Brother Holland,” he said.
“ Brother? ”
“I joined a church when I was inside. You are not looking at the same Wyatt Dixon who traveled the Lost Highway and went to the Wild Side of Life where the scarlet waters flow. You have probably noticed them are lyrics written by the greatest songwriters of our time. I hope you can feel the depth of sincerity in each of them poetic words.”
“I want you to work real hard on this concept, Wyatt. You come anywhere around me or my wife or son, if you send any of your neo-Nazi friends after us, if I see that barnyard, white-trash face anywhere near-”
I stopped. Each of my statements seemed to connect with and energize a neuron inside his head, causing his face to jerk, his mouth to flex, his legs to cave, his feet to splay, as though he were being struck with invisible blasts of air. He stared at me, his eyes dilated with awe.
“I did not believe it possible, but once again your word skills has done blowed away this simple rodeo cowboy,” he said. “I know now I have chose the right man to recommend me to President Bush. God bless you, sir.”
I went inside the office. Through the window I could see him stretched out under a tree on the courthouse lawn, the side of his face propped on his hand, watching the passersby, none of whom had any idea that a man wearing a shirt stamped with the colors and design of the Stars and Stripes was thinking thoughts about them that would cause the weak of spirit to weep.
I called Temple at home, but no one answered. I called the agency where she worked as a private investigator with a man and another woman. “He was waiting for me outside the office,” I said.
“He’s going to reoffend. Just wait him out,” she said.
“Temple?”
“Yes?” she said.
“If he comes around the house and I’m not there, shoot him,” I said.
“I’ll shoot him whether you’re there or not,” she replied.
The morning court judge was Clark Lebeau, known for his egalitarian attitudes, short tolerance for stupidity, and unusual sentences for people who thought they would simply pay a fine and be on their way. Businessmen found themselves working on the sanitation truck; animal abusers cleaned the litter boxes at the shelter; and drunk drivers mowed grass and weeded graves at the cemetery. Rumor had it he kept both a gun and a bottle of gin under the bench.
“What the hell were you doing with a pistol?” he asked from the bench.
“I guess I was gonna pawn it,” Johnny American Horse replied.
“You guess?” the judge said.
“I was pretty drunk, your honor.”
“The officers said it was under your coat. That means while you were passed out you managed to commit a felony. Where’s your goddamn brains, son?”
“Left them in the Oxford, your honor,” Johnny said.
I winced inside.
“You took a gun to a saloon?” the judge said.
“Your honor,” I began.
“Shut up, Mr. Holland,” the judge said. “You carried a gun into the Oxford?”
“I don’t remember,” Johnny said.
The judge rubbed his mouth. He was old and sometimes irritable but not an unfair man. “I’m letting you go on your own recognizance. Come back in here on a firearms charge, I’m going dig up the jail and drop it on your head. Am I making myself clear?”
“Yes, sir,” Johnny said.
We walked outside into the brilliance of the morning, sunshine on the hills above the town, birds flying through trees on the courthouse lawn, the noise of traffic, a world of normalcy as dissimilar from life inside a jail as the quick are from the dead.
That is, except for the presence of Wyatt Dixon, who was now sitting up in the shade, sailing playing cards into his inverted hat. His pale eyes looked up at us, a matchstick rolling in his teeth.
“Know that dude?” I asked Johnny.
“You betcha I do,” Johnny said. “He was shacked up with a girl on the res. Her ex and a couple of his Deer Lodge buds decided to remodel Wyatt’s cranial structure. One of them walks with a permanent limp now. The other two decided to start new careers in Idaho.”
Johnny reached down, picked up a small pinecone, and threw it at Wyatt’s head. “Hey, boy, I thought you were in the pen,” he said.
“Hell, no,” Wyatt said, his eyes looking at nothing, his matchstick flexing at an upward angle.
We walked to the corner, then crossed the street to my office. I didn’t speak until we were a long way from Wyatt Dixon.
“Why not just put your necktie in the garbage grinder?” I said.
“Telling a man you’re afraid of him is the same as telling him he’s not as good as you. That’s when you have trouble. Fellow as smart as you ought to know that, Billy Bob,” Johnny said. He hit me on the shoulder.
“Why were you carrying a gun?” I said.
He didn’t answer. Inside the office, I asked him again.
“A couple of guys are here to fry my Spam,” he said.
“Which guys?” I asked.
“Don’t know. Saw them in a dream. But they’re here,” he said.
“That’ll make a fine defense. Maybe we can get a couple of counselors from detox to testify for us.”
He told me he’d work off my fees at my small spread outside Lolo, then went to search for his pickup truck so he could drive back to his house on the reservation in the Jocko Valley.
It’s probably fair to say that welfare dependency, alcoholism, glue sniffing, infant mortality, the highest suicide rate among any of our ethnic groups, recidivism, xenophobia, and a general aversion to capitalistic monetary concepts are but a few of the problems American Indians have. The list goes on. Unfortunately, their troubles are of a kind most white people don’t want to dwell on, primarily, I suspect, because Indians were a happy people before their encounter with the white race.
The irony is, except for a few political opportunists, Indians seldom if ever make a claim on victimhood. Individually they’re reticent about their hardships, do their time in county bags and mainline joints without complaint, and systematically go about dismantling their lives and inflicting pain on themselves in ways a medieval flagellant couldn’t dream up.
Johnny American Horse didn’t belong in the twenty-first century, I told myself. He lived on the threadworn
