In the Moon of Red Ponies: A Novel by James Lee Burke

most about her? The blueness and luminosity of her eyes? Her heart-shaped face? Or the throaty quality of her laugh and the irreverence in her speech? Perhaps the perfect quality of her skin, her education and intelligence and the fact she spent it like coin in lowlife bars with people like Johnny American Horse?
    No, it was all of it. Amber Finley could walk down a street and make his innards drain like water.
    He shouldn’t have lost it with that Indian kid. American Horse was going down anyway; he might even ride the needle for the gig on Ruggles. Why did Darrel have to make a martyr of him and probably earn himself a civil rights beef in the bargain? He’d flushed himself good with Amber, and acquired a dirty jacket on top of it.
    He showered, dressed, and ate supper by himself in a workingmen’s café on Front Street. The evening was warm, the color of the sky as soft as lilacs, the flooded willows on the riverbanks clattering with birds. There were many places he could go—a movie, a concert in the park, a minor league baseball game, a bar where cops drank and he sometimes joined them with a soda and sliced lime. But Darrel had no doubt where he would end up as soon as the sun began to sink, and that thought more than any other filled him with an abiding shame.
    Amber lived with her widower father, the senator, up Rattlesnake Creek, in a two-story home built on a slope above a sepia-tinted stream. Darrel parked his car and walked through a woods that looked down on the back of the house, the hot tub on the deck, and the lawn where Amber’s yoga class met on Tuesday evenings. His binoculars were Russian Army issue, the magnification amazing. He could see the down on her cheeks, the shine on the tops of her breasts, the way she breathed through her mouth, as though the air were cold and she were warming it before it entered her lungs. No woman had the right to be that desirable.
    Was this what people called midlife crisis?
    A black Mercury pulled to the front of the house, and two men and a woman got out and were greeted at the door by the senator. The woman looked familiar, but Darrel could not be sure where he had seen her. Then he heard a noise behind him.
    A man in a cowboy hat and jeans was sitting on a big, flat, lichen-stained rock, shaving a stick with the six-inch blade of an opened bone-handled knife. Even though there was a chill in the air, the man’s corduroy shirtsleeves were rolled, exposing biceps that were as big as grapefruit.
    “Late for bird-watching, ain’t it?” the man said, without looking up.
    Think, Darrel told himself. He opened his badge holder. “I don’t know who the hell you are, but you’re interfering in a police surveillance. That means haul your ass out of here, pal,” he said.
    The man closed the knife in his palm and stuck it in his back pocket. He picked a piece of wet matter off his lip and looked at it. “You don’t ’member me?” he asked.
    “No.”
    The man removed his hat and the afterglow of the sun fell through the trees on the paleness of his brow and the moral vacuity in his eyes, the chiseled, lifeless features of his face. “ ’Member me now?” he asked.
    “Maybe,” Darrel said.
    “I want in on it,” the man said.
    “On what ?”
    “Chance to serve the red, white, and blue, sir. You want serious work done, I’m your huckleberry.”
    “Is that right? Well, I think you’re crazy. I think your name is Wyatt Dixon and you’re about to get yourself put back in a cage.”
    Wyatt fitted his hat back on and pushed himself up from the rock, advancing toward Darrel so quickly Darrel’s hand went inside his coat. Then he realized Wyatt Dixon was not even looking at him but instead was unzipping his jeans.
    “Drunk a horse tank of lemonade this afternoon. Ah, that’s better,” he said, urinating in a bright arc down the side of the hill.
    Wyatt’s voice was loud and had obviously carried down into the Finleys’ yard. Amber went into the house and