In the Moon of Red Ponies: A Novel Read Free Page B

the blueness of the sky. The café was crowded, the cooks sweating back in the kitchen, frying big wire baskets of chicken in hot grease.
    “Johnny was carrying a gun because of somebody he saw in a dream?” Temple said.
    “That’s what he says.”
    She bit a piece off a soda cracker and stared out the window at a freight passing through the yards, her mouth small and red, her chestnut hair freshly washed and blow-dried and full of lights. “I think Johnny’s looking for a cross. If he can’t find one, he’ll construct it,” she said.
    I started to speak, then saw her eyes go empty and look past me at a group of men entering the door. Three of them were probably wranglers, ordinary blue-collar men, brown-skinned, their stomachs hard as boards under their big belt buckles, their hats sweat-ringed around the crowns. But the fourth man had teeth like tombstones and a vacuity in the boldness of his stare that made people look away.
    “That bastard is actually on the street,” Temple said.
    I set down the iced tea I was drinking and wiped my mouth. “Let’s go,” I said.
    “No,” she replied.
    Wyatt Dixon and his friends sat down at a table by the door. Outside, a trailer loaded with horses was parked in a yellow zone. It didn’t take long for Wyatt’s vacuous gaze to sweep the restaurant, then settle on us.
    The cast or composition of his eyes was unlike any I had ever seen in a human being. They had almost no color and showed no emotion; the pupils were black pinpoints, even in bright light. They studied both people and animals with an invasiveness that was like peeling living tissue off bone.
    He sat with one booted foot extended into the aisle, causing the waitresses to step around it, his eyes focused curiously on Temple’s face.
    The waitress brought a chicken basket for Temple, fried pork chops and mashed potatoes and string beans for me. I looked back once more at Wyatt, then picked up a steak knife and started to cut my food. Temple scraped back her chair and walked to the pay phone by the front door, no more than five feet from Wyatt Dixon’s table. She punched in three numbers on the key pad.
    “This is Temple Carrol Holland, down by the depot on North Higgins,” she said into the receiver. “A psychopathic bucket of shit by the name of Wyatt Dixon and some of his friends have illegally parked a horse trailer by the restaurant. Please send a cruiser down here so we don’t have to breathe horse sweat while we eat. Thank you.”
    The level of sound in the restaurant dropped precipitously as she hung up the phone and walked back to our table. Wyatt’s jaw was hooked forward, exposing his teeth, a smile denting the corner of his mouth, like a thumbnail’s incision in tan clay. He told one of the wranglers to go outside and move the truck, then came to our table.
    “Howdy doodie, Miss Temple?” he said, standing above us. “ ’Member me? Bet you still think I was one of them men dug a hole and stuck you in it.”
    “Go back to your table, Wyatt,” I said.
    “Let him talk,” Temple said.
    “Truth is, I don’t know what I done before I got filled up on chemical cocktails and had my brains electrified at Warm Springs. But in this time of national trial, there is no excuse for one American doing mean things to another. Here’s two tickets to an ass-buster down in Stevensville. There you will find this humble rodeo clown entertaining the throngs of people that follows our greatest national sport.”
    I brushed the tickets off the tablecloth onto the floor. “You’re about to have the worst day in your life,” I said.
    He looked down at the tickets, then back at me in mock disbelief. A waitress stepped around him, a loaded tray balanced on her shoulder. He admired her rump a moment, then squatted down, eye-level with me. He was clean-shaved, his skin without tattoos or scars. I could smell horses and an odor like hay and buttermilk in his clothes. He looked at the steak knife that rested in