“I don’t believe that.”
“They’ve got the weapon, his latents, a phone call to Masterson originating at his house, and his lifetime record of throwing buffalo shit through window fans. You don’t believe the U.S. attorney is going to run a meat hook through both of this guy’s buns? Wow, why would they do a terrible thing like that?” He laughed out loud.
After the rain and heavy snowmelt in the spring, the weather had turned dry and hot, and fires had started to burn in Idaho. As I drove home from work that evening, the sky was hazy with dust and smelled of smoke, and freshly exposed rocks along Lolo Creek were white and webbed with river trash and the scales of dead insects. When I turned up the road that led to our ranch, locusts flew in clouds from the knapweed in the ditches and the normally beautiful evening seemed as stricken and poisonous as my thoughts.
I wanted to be gone from Johnny for many reasons-his messianic attitudes and his indictment of me as a white person being only a couple of them. From a legal and professional point of view, I was entirely justified in letting him go. I believed Johnny was knowledgeable about what could be considered an ongoing criminal conspiracy involving his wife and the Indians who had broken into Global Research. In the eyes of the Department of Justice these were ecoterrorists, and, as such, short shrift would be given them by the Office of Homeland Security. As an officer of the court, I had ethical obligations with which Johnny was not concerned.
Maybe it was a cheap and self-serving way to think, but any attorney who ends up in front of the bar or in jail because of his client probably deserves his fate.
I cut and watered the grass in the front and back yards, and scattered feed for the wild turkeys that came down from the hills in the evening to drink from the aluminum horse tank by the barn. But I couldn’t free myself from my problems of conscience about Johnny American Horse.
Then the phone rang inside and Johnny took me out of the box I had thought myself into-at least temporarily. “You’re hiring Brendan Merwood?” I said incredulously.
“He’s doing it pro bono,” he said.
“Merwood wasn’t conceived, he was poured out of a bottle of hair oil.”
“So he wheels and deals. He’s working for free. I’m not knocking it.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Maybe I don’t want to pull you down.”
“Merwood doesn’t do anything for free, Johnny.”
“Ever hear this one: What’s the difference between lab rats and lawyers? Lab rats have feelings. Just kidding. See you around.”
After he hung up I stared out the side window at the gloaming of the day, the horses in our pasture, the dry lightning that flickered above the hills. Temple came through the door with a bag of groceries. “What’s the matter?” she asked.
I told her of Johnny’s phone call.
“Maybe you should respect his decision,” she said.
“He’s doing it because he doesn’t want to hurt his friends.”
“Let it go, Billy Bob. For just once, stop protecting people from themselves,” she said. She began pulling heavy cans of peaches out of the sack and setting them down hard on the kitchen table.
That night I slept without dreaming and woke at first light, rested and empty of thought or concern about the day or all the problems that had beset me the previous evening. Temple had been right, I told myself. It was time to let go of other people’s quixotic struggles and to enjoy the day and the work I did and all the fine gifts a cool morning can bring. A doe and her fawn were drinking at the horse tank. A raccoon was scraping sunflower seeds out of the bird feeder on the deck; the trees behind the house were full of birdsong. Life could be a poem, if you’d only let it, I thought. Why live in conflict and endless self-examination?
I kept that mood all the way to the office. I was still confident about my new attitude as I crossed the street to the courthouse. Then I heard the unmistakable sound of someone’s rubber-stoppered crutches thudding on the sidewalk behind me. “Slow down there, Brother Holland. I’m pounding my vitals to jelly trying to catch up with you,” a voice said.
“Don’t want to hear it, Wyatt,” I said.
But he cut me off at the corner, aiming one crutch at me like a pistol. “Got to have your hep. This is serious, counselor. Ain’t many people I can go to on this one,” he said.
I knew I would have no peace that day unless I heard him out. I sat down with him on a steel bench under a maple tree. He looked in both directions, his jaw hooked, his eyes perplexed. “I got word them two yardbirds that put a shank in me was up holed up with a vet’inary in Ronan. But when I got up there they’d done flown the coop,” he said.
“I’m not real interested in this anymore, Wyatt. Johnny American Horse is using another attorney now,” I said.
“Won’t change nothing for him. Won’t change nothing for me or you, either. You was baptized by immersion. Not only baptized the old-time way, you’re an honest-to-God believer. Tell me I’m wrong.”
“I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Wyatt, but I don’t like you talking about my personal life.”
“They’re gonna come after me with guns and such. With you it’s probably gonna be different. They’re out there, counselor, probably watching us right now.”
“Who?”
“The ones working for this man Mabus.”
I tried to read his eyes. Perhaps he was insane, I thought, or he simply spoke out of the demented cultural mind-set that was characteristic of his class, called white trash in the South, a term that has much more to do with pathology than socioeconomic status. But I had come to learn that Dixon was not a stupid man. His lips were parted slightly, like strips of rubber pasted on his face, his empty eyes waiting for me to speak.
“Whatever cause you’re trying to enlist me in, I won’t be a part of it. You committed a vicious, unforgivable act against my wife. That’s never going away,” I said.
He let his hands hang between his thighs and stared at the sidewalk. Then he gathered up his crutches and got to his feet. “Tell Miss Temple I’m sorry. And you go to hell, counselor,” he said.
With that, he stepped off the curb into the traffic, jaywalking across the street to a cafe, jabbing a crutch into the door of a taxi that had blown its horn at him.
I could afford to pay Lucas’s board and tuition at the university, where he had the improbable double major of music and dairy husbandry, but he would not allow it. Instead, he played several gigs a week at nightclubs and sometimes waited tables while carrying eighteen academic hours. His schedule took its toll, and often he was tired and barely able to stay awake when he came to dinner at our house.
But on Friday afternoon he was beaming as he came into my office.
“Win the lottery?” I asked.
“Pert’ near,” he replied, taking a torn envelope from his back pocket. “I got a full scholarship, all tuition and out-of-state fees paid, plus five hundred dollars a month living expenses.”
“How you’d pull that off?”
“Applied for every kind of financial assistance they got. This one just happened to come through.”
He handed me the awards letter. It was written on gold-and-silver-embossed stationery and was from a group called the Rocky Mountain Educational Foundation in Denver. “That’s great, Lucas,” I said.
“I’m taking y’all to dinner. The Golden Corral has got all-you-can-eat fish tonight,” he said.
“Sounds swell,” I said.
“Want to ask Johnny and Amber? I reckon they’re feeling pretty low these days.”
“I’m not Johnny’s attorney anymore.”
“Y’all have a blowup or something?”
“Johnny has his own time zone. I need to stay out of it.”
“You used to tell me a guy can have all the friends he wants when he’s in tall cotton. You always said your real friends are the ones who stick with you in hard times. When did you change your mind?”
A week passed and still Johnny had not been charged in the death of Seth Masterson. I busied myself with other cases, fished in the evenings, and thinned out the trees and undergrowth around our house as we entered the fire season.
At sunset the heat rose from the ground and broke up in the wind, but even though the nights were clear and the stars bright, we could smell smoke lingering on the hillsides and see the glow of forest fires burning out of
