In the Moon of Red Ponies: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

160, a degree in English literature from the University of Virginia, and was the daughter of United States Senator Romulus Finley.
    “How do you commit battery with undergarments?” I said.
    “It’s easy when a cop kicks open your motel room while you’re dressing,” she replied.
    “What were you doing in a dump like that, anyway?”
    “To tell you the truth, I don’t remember.”
    I paused a moment. “Your old man won’t spring you?” I said.
    She seemed to think about it. “If I asked him, yeah, he probably would. Yeah, he might,” she said. She looked at me, as though confused by her own words and the sad implication in them. She got up and walked to the bars. I could smell the cigarette smoke in her hair and the mixed drinks that had gone sour on her stomach. “Get me out of here, Billy Bob. I’m really hung over this time.”
     
    AN HOUR LATER we walked out of the jail. “Why was Johnny American Horse carrying a gun around?” I asked.
    “It’s those oil companies he’s trying to stop from drilling on sacred lands. He thinks they put a hit on him.”
    “A hit? From an oil company? Maybe some of their CEOs are moral imbeciles, but oil companies don’t have people killed,” I said.
    “Right, that’s why we’re taking over Third World countries—we don’t care about their oil. See you later, B.B. I’m going to sleep for three days.”
    B.B.?
     
    AS THE SUN dropped behind the ridge of mountains on the west side of the Jocko Valley, Johnny American Horse walked the perimeter of his four-acre lot, examined the wire and tin cans he had strung earlier in the day, then continued on up the slope into the trees bordering the back of his property. The sun became a hot red spark between two mountains, and a purple shade fell across the valley floor just as the moon rose over the hills in the south. He sat for a long time among the trees, his arms folded across his knees, studying his land, the dirt road that traversed it, the dark green shine on the river winding out of the cottonwoods.
    The men who had driven across the plains to find him were urban people, he thought. They would come for him at night because they were cowards and they killed for hire. They would drive their Firebird as close to his house as possible because they did not like to walk, nor did they feel confident when they were separated from the machines that gave them both power and anonymity.
    But their greatest mistake would be their assumption that their prey thought as they did.
    He returned to the house and turned off all the lights except the one in the bathroom, leaving the door ajar so that it shone on his bed. He stuffed a rolled sleeping bag under the blanket on the bed and pulled the blanket up onto the pillows. In the kitchen he filled a thermos with black coffee, threaded the sheath of his serrated bowie knife on his belt, and put on his sheep-lined coat and a shapeless cowboy hat.
    Make entry as hard as possible for them, he told himself.
    He locked all the windows and both the front and back doors, then walked back up the slope with his thermos in his coat pocket and his grandfather’s trade hatchet swinging from his right hand.
    He sat on the ground inside the cover of the trees, his back against a boulder. He could smell elk and deer droppings in the pine needles and the tannic odor of horses in the gloaming of the day. The surrounding hills were black now, but the sky was still full of light from the sun’s afterglow. He unscrewed the top from his thermos and drank, then screwed the cap back on. He heard the sound of an automobile coming down the dirt road, rocks pinging inside the fenders.
    The car was low-slung, the body weather-scoured almost paintless, the engine far more powerful than the age of the car would indicate. It passed his house in a rooster tail of dust and disappeared around a bend, beyond a grove of cottonwoods. Less than two minutes later it came back up the road, gradually slowing, pulling into