His eccentricities also included his demand that all deceased cult members and their loved ones be buried in his cemetery and that none of them be embalmed.
Johnny kicked aside a plastic cross on a grave and pushed his shovel into a lichen carpet dotted with poisonous mushrooms. He peeled back layer upon layer of humus and soil that was thick with worms and white slugs. The smell was not bad at first, but two feet down it struck his face-an odor that was like sewer gas, feces, and decomposing fish roe, the same odor he had smelled in the truck driver’s cab. He tied a bandanna over his nose and mouth and worked faster, flinging dirt and pieces of cloth and bone from the hole, until the shovel clanked against a metal box. He grabbed it by the handle, ripped it loose from the soil, and heaved it up into the leaves and pine needles, his eyes watering, the cloth of his bandanna sucked into his mouth.
Johnny heard a helicopter somewhere above the mountains, then the thropping of the blades drew closer, echoing off canyon walls behind him, searchlights piercing the treetops. He froze in the cemetery, his face tilted at the ground so it wouldn’t reflect light, his body contorted into a stick.
The downdraft of the helicopter roared over him, swirling pine needles off the ground, then was gone as quickly as it had come. Johnny dragged the box to the patrol car, shoved it into the backseat, and headed back down the road in the dark, his lights off.
He drove back through Missoula and caught the highway into the Bitterroots, passing a city police car parked on the shoulder. At Lolo, he turned west just as emergency lights appeared in his rearview mirror and a helicopter zoomed by overhead. He passed the dirt road we lived on and turned up a drainage between low hills, then cut across a field and bounced up a log road that climbed steadily through fir and pine trees and burned snags left by an old fire. He drove over the crest of the mountain into heavy timber, his headlights off now, the log road strewn with broken rock. Down below he could see our house and the pasture in the moonlight.
He stopped the stolen patrol car, pulled the lockbox from the backseat, and flung it down the side of the mountain into the trees.
Then he continued up the log road, back toward Missoula, or wherever the road went, the sides of the vehicle sparking off boulders, the frame bouncing on the springs, rocks exploding against the oil pan, tree limbs smacking across the windshield.
The oil and heat indicators were lit on the dashboard, and he could hear piston rods knocking in the engine. From both north and south he saw helicopters headed toward him, their searchlights blazing.
He twisted the wheel on his vehicle and drove off the shoulder of the log road, crashing down the mountain through the undergrowth, pine seedlings whipping under the frame. The helicopters followed him down, flooding the woods with a white brilliance that left no place to hide. His vehicle went over a log, shattering the drive shaft, spun in a circle, and dead-ended against a boulder.
He opened the door and fell onto the ground, dragging his tote sack with him. He could see the heavy, armor-vested, helmeted shapes of his pursuers moving up the hill toward him.
He crawled away in the trees, his tote sack wrapped around his right wrist. His left arm was on fire, his heart hammering in his ears. Once again, he smelled the odor of a grave on his clothes and skin.
So this is how it plays out, he thought. You get popped at point-blank range in the woods or wrapped in chains and returned to jail, one of a series you’ll never leave. Either way, you’re about to be brought out of the mountains like a gutted animal hung from a stick, a lesson for all those who would imitate you.
Maybe it was time to let the other side pay some dues, he thought. He estimated he could get two, perhaps three, and with luck maybe even four of his pursuers before he went down himself. Why not? They had seen only his back while they had chased him all over the state. Johnny would never get the people who had killed Lester Antelope, but he could take several of this bunch as surrogates. They wouldn’t be expecting a street drunk to come at them with only a knife and trade ax. Time to paint the trees, fellows.
Besides, what did he have to lose? His power was gone. The Indian woman had left him at the highway, where the woods ended and the white man’s world began. The Indian way of life was dead, and Johnny American Horse and those like him were self-deluded fools to believe otherwise.
He blackened his face and hands with dirt, then reached inside his tote sack for a weapon. But his hand found only canned goods and broken glass. He dumped the sack’s contents on the ground. His knife and trade ax were gone.
A circle of flashlights shone in his face, then someone racked a shell into the chamber of a cut-down ten gauge. Johnny sat back against a tree, his bad arm in his lap. Red circles of light burned into his eyes and receded into his brain.
“Squeeze it off and be done with it,” he said.
“Are you kidding? Those shells are expensive. Hold up your wrist, Running Man Who Thinks with Forked Brain,” an FBI agent said.
The other agents laughed and lit cigarettes and talked about the National League pennant race. How about those Atlanta Braves?
IN THE PREDAWN DARKNESS, Amber thought she was having a dream about a violent wind, then she realized the sounds surrounding her were real. The house shook, the doors rattled against the locks, and a glass pitcher on a kitchen windowsill shattered in the sink. She looked out her bedroom window and saw lightning in the clouds, like streaks of gold inside pewter. The air was filled with pine needles blowing from the trees on the hillsides, then the front screen door sprung back on its hinges and snapped back into place as loudly as a pistol report.
She got up from her bed and began closing windows, sure that the rain everyone had prayed for was about to drench the countryside. When she entered the living room she saw a yellow glow flickering on the porch, like the flame given off by a guttering candle. Then the entire yard filled with a warm yellow radiance, burning away the shadows, reaching all the way back to the barn, carving the horses out of the darkness.
Amber pulled opened the door, thinking she was about to see her first instance of ball lightning. Instead, the yellow light constricted upon itself, forming an envelope around an Indian woman wearing a white buckskin dress fringed with purple glass beads that were shaped like teardrops. The wind ripped through the house, blowing pictures off the walls, spinning the Rolodex on the telephone stand.
“Who are you?” Amber asked.
The Indian woman didn’t answer. She pointed toward the south, in the direction of the Bitterroot Mountains.
“Please tell me who you are,” Amber repeated, stepping out on the porch. Her bare foot came down on a cold, sharp-edged object. She stepped backwards and looked down at Johnny’s trade ax and, next to it, his survival knife.
“Where did you get these? Why did you bring them here?” Amber asked.
The Indian woman’s shape broke into hundreds of fireflies and disappeared. When Amber went back in the house, one of the Rolodex cards had been torn from the spindle and lay on the floor. The names on it were those of William Robert and Temple Holland.
Chapter 19
THE NEXT DAY was Saturday. Johnny was in St. Pat’s Hospital, under arrest, his arm pumped full of antibiotics, but I was not allowed to see him, since I was no longer his attorney. Amber came out to the house that afternoon and told me of the Indian woman who supposedly had left Johnny’s survival knife and trade ax at her door. I tried to listen without letting my feelings show, but I could not help but believe her bizarre account hid an element in Johnny’s story she didn’t want to share.