Moments later she was asleep. I lay in the darkness with my eyes open a long time. We had a wonderful home in Montana, one hundred and twenty acres spread up both sides of a dirt road that traversed timber, meadowland, and knobbed hills. It was an enclave where distant wars and images of oil smoke on desert horizons seemed to have no application.
Why put it at risk for Johnny American Horse?
I heard a vehicle on the road, I supposed one of the few neighbors living up the valley from us. But a moment later I heard the same vehicle again, then a third time, as though the driver were lost.
I put on my slippers and went into the living room. Through the window I could see a paint-skinned pickup truck with slat sides stopped on the road and a man in a snow-white Stetson, a long-sleeved canary-yellow shirt, and tight jeans leaning on our railed fence, studying the front of our house.
I went back into the bedroom, slipped on my khakis and boots, then stopped in the hallway to put on my hat and leather jacket. In the living room I removed a. 30-30 Winchester from the gun rack. Every firearm in our house was kept loaded, although no round was ever in the chamber. I heard Temple behind me. “What’s wrong?” she said.
“It’s Wyatt Dixon,” I replied.
I stepped out on the gallery and levered a round into the Winchester’s chamber. Wyatt positioned his hat on the back of his head, the way Will Rogers often did, so that his face was bathed in moonlight. I steadied the rifle against a post and aimed just to the left of his shoulder and pulled the trigger.
The bullet struck rock on the opposite hillside and whined away in the shadows with a sound like a tightly wrapped guitar string snapping free from the tuning peg.
Wyatt looked behind him curiously, then scratched a match on a fencepost and cupped the flame to a cigar stub clenched between his teeth. He flicked the dead match into our yard.
I ejected the spent casing and sighted again. This time I blew a spray of wood splinters out of the fence rail. I saw Wyatt touch his cheek, then look at his hand and wipe it on his jeans.
My third shot blew dirt out of the road six inches from his foot. I started to eject the spent casing, but Temple grabbed the barrel and pushed it down toward the gallery railing.
“Either put the gun away or give it to me,” she said.
“Why?”
“He knows you won’t kill him. He knows I will,” she replied.
I put my arm around her shoulder. She was wearing only her nightgown and her back was shaking with cold. “To hell with Wyatt Dixon,” I said.
We went back inside and closed the door. Through the window I saw him get inside his truck and puff his cigar alight. Then he started the engine and drove away.
“Billy Bob?” Temple said.
“What?”
“You’re unbelievable. You shoot at somebody, then say to hell with him,” she said.
“What’s unusual about that?”
She laughed. “Come back to bed. You know any cures for insomnia?” she said.
The next morning was Friday. Fay Harback was in my office just after 8 A.M. “Where do you get off sending your wife into a suspect’s hospital room?” she said.
“It’s a free country,” I replied.
“This isn’t rural Bumfuck. You don’t get to make up your own rules.”
“Have you charged Ruggles yet?” I said.
“None of your business.”
“I’m getting a bad feeling on this one.”
“About what?” she said.
“The other half of the assassination team, what’s his name, Bumper, had no record at all. Ruggles has at least a half-dozen arrests, including passing counterfeit, but the charges were always dismissed.”
Her eyes shifted off mine, an unformed thought buried inside them.
“Any Feds been to see you?” I asked.
“Feds? No. You’re too imaginative.”
“My client isn’t going to get set up.”
I saw the color rise in her throat. “That takes real nerve,” she said.
“File charges against Ruggles and we won’t be having this kind of conversation,” I said.
“The investigation is still in progress.”
“Seems open and 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.
