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Horse.”
    â€œHate to hear you talk like that.”
    â€œNot half as bad as I do,” he replied.
    In the cab he pulled his hat down and pretended to sleep the rest of the way back to town.
    Â 
    THAT NIGHT I visited Johnny at St. Pat’s Hospital. He had taken stitches in one eyebrow, behind his ear, and on the jawbone. “Quit looking at me like that. I get out in the morning,” he said.
    â€œYou’re being charged with attempted assault on a law officer. Why’d you have to get in McComb’s face?” I said.
    â€œDude leaves a big footprint. This is still the United States. I fought for this damn country,” he said.
    â€œWhen wars are over, nobody cares about the people who actually fought them.”
    â€œDoesn’t matter. McComb tore up my home. He tried to hit on Amber. He didn’t do it because he’s a cop, either. He did it because he’s a white redneck and he knew he could get away with it,” he said.
    â€œI’ve got to know why Ruggles and Eddy Bumper came after you, Johnny.”
    He raised his hands and dropped them on the sheet. “My coalition has sued a couple of oil companies to stop them from drilling test wells on the east slope of the Divide. In the meantime we’re trying to kick a pipeline off the res. I kind of went out on my own on this anthrax stuff, too.”
    â€œSay that last part again?”
    â€œA private grudge I brought back from the first Gulf war, I guess. Sometimes I see things in my head, in broad daylight, that make me wish I wasn’t on the planet,” he said.
    I didn’t want to hear it.
    Â 
    IT WAS LATE and I was tired when I got back home. Temple had already gone to bed. I fixed a ham-and-egg sandwich and poured a glass of buttermilk and ate at the kitchen table. The moon was up and through the side window I could see elk and deer in the pasture and hear our horses nickering in the darkness on the far side of the barn.
    I grew up on a small ranch in the hill country of south-central Texas. My mother was a librarian by profession and my father a tack and hot-pass welder on pipelines all over Texas and Oklahoma. Both of them dearly loved our ranch, in spite of the meager income it provided them. They also loved the Victorian purple brick home in which I grew up. They loved the horses, dogs, goats, cats, sheep, beehives, fish in the ponds (called tanks in Texas), and even poultry in the chicken run on our land. My father named our ranch “Heartwood,” and he burned the name into a thick red-oak plank with the intention of hanging it from the front gate.
    But the man who had landed at Normandy, and who had walked all the way across Europe to the Elbe River, was killed in a natural gas blowout at Matagorda Bay and never got to hang his sign. So I hung it for him down in Texas, and now I had hung it above our gate in Montana, up a valley that was the most beautiful stretch of land I had ever seen.
    I brushed my teeth and lay down next to Temple. I felt her weight turn on the mattress and her hand touch my back. “Your muscles are stiff as iron. What’s wrong?” she said.
    â€œHeartwood is the best place I’ve ever been. It’s not one spread, either. It’s the place where I grew up and it’s the place we’ve built together, here, in Montana,” I said.
    She raised herself on her elbow so she could look into my face. “What happened tonight?” she said.
    â€œSeth Masterson tried to warn me off Johnny’s case.”
    â€œWho the hell does he think he is?”
    â€œYou don’t know Seth. He broke all his own rules. Johnny American Horse is in the meat grinder. You were right. Johnny might pull us down with him.”
    She pressed her face next to mine. “Listen to me, Billy Bob. You tell the FBI to screw themselves. Nobody threatens us,” she said.
    I turned and looked into her eyes. They were milky green, the color of the Guadalupe