“Take a lesson from me, Holland,” he continued. “If you work your heart out for the G, if you hump a sixty-pound pack and an M-60 in a hundred-degree jungle with ants crawling inside your skivvies, if you’re a good cop who has to get by on speed and booze because broken glass is chewing up your guts, you eventually come to a philosophic conclusion about the realities of life out there in Bongo-Bongo Land: We’re not only expendable, we’re the people nobody even wants to hear about.” He smiled and cracked a lemon drop between his molars.
“You mean nobody cares?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“It’s funny you put it that way, because Johnny American Horse told me the same thing today.”
“I got news for American Horse. He’s going down for Masterson’s homicide. A done deal, my man.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“They’ve got the weapon, his latents, a phone call to Masterson originating at his house, and his lifetime record of throwing buffalo shit through window fans. You don’t believe the U.S. attorney is going to run a meat hook through both of this guy’s buns? Wow, why would they do a terrible thing like that?” He laughed out loud.
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AFTER THE RAIN and heavy snowmelt in the spring, the weather had turned dry and hot, and fires had started to burn in Idaho. As I drove home from work that evening, the sky was hazy with dust and smelled of smoke, and freshly exposed rocks along Lolo Creek were white and webbed with river trash and the scales of dead insects. When I turned up the road that led to our ranch, locusts flew in clouds from the knapweed in the ditches and the normally beautiful evening seemed as stricken and poisonous as my thoughts.
I wanted to be gone from Johnny for many reasons—his messianic attitudes and his indictment of me as a white person being only a couple of them. From a legal and professional point of view, I was entirely justified in letting him go. I believed Johnny was knowledgeable about what could be considered an ongoing criminal conspiracy involving his wife and the Indians who had broken into Global Research. In the eyes of the Department of Justice these were ecoterrorists, and, as such, short shrift would be given them by the Office of Homeland Security. As an officer of the court, I had ethical obligations with which Johnny was not concerned.
Maybe it was a cheap and self-serving way to think, but any attorney who ends up in front of the bar or in jail because of his client probably deserves his fate.
I cut and watered the grass in the front and back yards, and scattered feed for the wild turkeys that came down from the hills in the evening to drink from the aluminum horse tank by the barn. But I couldn’t free myself from my problems of conscience about Johnny American Horse.
Then the phone rang inside and Johnny took me out of the box I had thought myself into—at least temporarily. “You’re hiring Brendan Merwood?” I said incredulously.
“He’s doing it pro bono,” he said.
“Merwood wasn’t conceived, he was poured out of a bottle of hair oil.”
“So he wheels and deals. He’s working for free. I’m not knocking it.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Maybe I don’t want to pull you down.”
“Merwood doesn’t do anything for free, Johnny.”
“Ever hear this one: What’s the difference between lab rats and lawyers? Lab rats have feelings. Just kidding. See you around.”
After he hung up I stared out the side window at the gloaming of the day, the horses in our pasture, the dry lightning that flickered above the hills. Temple came through the door with a bag of groceries. “What’s the matter?” she asked.
I told her of Johnny’s phone call.
“Maybe you should respect his decision,” she said.
“He’s doing it because he doesn’t want to hurt his friends.”
“Let it go, Billy Bob. For just once, stop protecting people from themselves,” she said. She began pulling heavy cans of peaches out of the sack and setting them down hard on the kitchen table.
THAT NIGHT I SLEPT without dreaming and woke at first light, rested and empty of thought or concern about the day or all the problems that had beset me the previous evening. Temple had been right, I told myself. It was time to let go of other people’s quixotic struggles and to enjoy the day and the work I did and all the fine gifts a cool morning can bring. A doe and her fawn were drinking at the horse tank. A raccoon was scraping sunflower seeds out of the bird feeder on the deck; the trees behind the house were full of birdsong. Life could be a poem, if you’d only let it, I thought. Why live in conflict and endless self-examination?
I kept that mood all the way to the office. I was still confident about my new attitude as I crossed the street to the courthouse. Then I heard the unmistakable sound of someone’s rubber-stoppered crutches thudding on the sidewalk behind me. “Slow down there, Brother Holland. I’m pounding my vitals to jelly trying to catch up with you,” a voice said.
“Don’t want to hear it, Wyatt,” I said.
But he cut me off at the corner, aiming one crutch at me like a pistol. “Got to have your hep. This is serious, counselor. Ain’t many people I can go to on this one,” he said.
I knew I would have no peace that day unless I heard him out. I sat down with him on a steel bench under a maple tree. He looked in both directions, his jaw hooked, his eyes perplexed. “I got word them two yardbirds that put a shank in me was up holed up with a vet’inary in Ronan. But when I got up there they’d done flown the coop,” he said.