In the Moon of Red Ponies
A Novel
Chapter One
My law office was located on the old courthouse
square of Missoula, Montana, not far from the
two or three blocks of low-end bars and hotels
that front the railyards, where occasionally
Johnny American Horse ended up on a Sunday
morning, sleeping in a doorway, shivering in the
cold.
The city police liked Johnny and always treated
him with a gentleness and sense of fraternity
that is not easily earned from cops. He had been
awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for
bravery in Operation Desert Storm, and some cops
said Johnny's claims that he suffered Gulf War
syndrome were probably true and that he was less
drunk than sick from a wartime chemical
inhalation.
More accurately, Johnny was a strange man who
didn't fit easily into categories. He lived on
the Flathead Reservation in the Jocko Valley,
although his name came from the Lakota Sioux,
and his relatives told me he was a descendant of
Crazy Horse, the shaman and chief strategist for
Red Cloud, who actually defeated the United
States Army and shut down the Bozeman Trail in
Red Cloud's War of 1868. I do ... read full excerpt from In the Moon of Red Ponies: A Novel ebook
