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

toward the middle-aged man. The cowboy wore a heavy white long-sleeved shirt and a silver buckle that reflected light like a heliograph.
    “Whoa there, bud,” the cowboy said, grabbing the Indian man’s wrist. “You done hit your last woman for today. Least while I’m around.”
    “Stay out of—” the Indian man began.
    The cowboy grabbed the man’s arm and shook him with such power the man’s teeth rattled. “I’ll walk you to your truck. Don’t be hurting that young woman again, either. I hear about it, I’ll be back and you’ll be walking on sticks,” he said.
    He took the Indian man outside and watched him climb into the driver’s seat of an old pickup. “Hold on a minute,” he said. The cowboy went back inside the club and returned with the man’s hat, then dropped it inside the truck window. “That means you ain’t got no reason to come back.”
    He reentered the club, picked up his coffeepot and cup, and walked to the back, where Lucas still sat at a table by the bandstand, his Martin across his thighs.
    “Know who I am?” the cowboy said.
    “I do now. I ain’t got anything to say to you either,” Lucas replied.
    “I come out of the pen a different man.”
    “Tell it to somebody else, Wyatt.”
    “Me and you got a lot in common. I was a woods colt, too. My daddy knowed it and that’s why he made every day of my young life what you might call a learning experience.”
    “Got nothing to say to you.”
    “Want a beer or a soda pop?”
    “No.”
    “Maybe I’ll see you at the rodeo, then.”
    Lucas continued to tune his Martin and didn’t answer. Wyatt Dixon was framed against the light like a scorched tin cutout.
    “Johnny American Horse has got your old man jumping through hoops,” Wyatt said.
    Don’t bite, Lucas told himself, his heart tripping. “How?” he asked.
    “American Horse ain’t no shrinking violet. He’s a stone killer. Ask them two men he cut up with an ax and a knife. You get an Indian mad, run his pride down, make fun of his woman, he’ll either come at your throat or turn into a pitiful drunk like that ’un I just kicked out of here.”
    Lucas looked into space, this time determined not to speak again.
    “Here’s what it is,” Wyatt said. “American Horse’s sixteen-year-old nephew got executed by a white man. The word is executed. Boy was breaking into the white man’s truck and the white man come up behind him and put a bullet in his brain from three feet. That white man was turned loose with just an ankle bracelet on him. American Horse ain’t no mystic holy man. On the sauce he’s a mean machine out to put zippers all over white people. Take care of yourself, kid.”
    Wyatt set his coffeepot and cup on the bar and walked out the front door, his boots loud on the plank floor.
     
    “DIXON JUST DIDN’T seem like the same fellow,” Lucas said that night at the house.
    “Believe it, bud, he’s the same fellow,” I replied.
    We were eating dinner at the kitchen table; the moon was yellow on the side of the hill behind the house and up high snow was drifting on the fir trees.
    “People change. That’s what your church teaches, don’t it?” Lucas said, his eyes playful now.
    “The Bible doesn’t have a chapter on the likes of Wyatt Dixon,” I said.
    Later, the three of us washed and put away the dishes, then Lucas went out on the front gallery and watched the deer grazing in the meadow. He looked pale and handsome in the moonglow, his body lean and angular, his jeans high on his hips, his flannel shirt rolled above his elbows.
    Before he was born, his mother had run away from her husband, a hapless and violent man, and had moved in with me when I was a patrolman with the Houston Police Department, living in the Heights. After Lucas was born, his mother was electrocuted trying to fix a well pump her husband had previously repaired with adhesive tape from the medicine cabinet.
    Lucas’s early life should have embittered him against the world.