Judas Horse

by April Smith

  “What’s it doing?”

  “Lying down. I think it’s throwing up.”

  “Are there whole regurgitated kernels?”

  “Seems like.”

  There are shifting sounds, as if she’s getting out of bed. The phone cuts out and then comes back.

  “I’m very worried about this.” I can hear it in her voice. “We need to find an avian vet.”

  I didn’t even know such people existed. “Where?”

  “How soon can you get down here?”

  Back in L.A., Donnato does not answer his cell. I leave a message that I am heading south with a carload of ducks.

  Those patches of green I saw from the airplane turn out to be fields of rye slashed by the interstate. They claim this is the “grass-seed capital of the world,” and I can feel the pollen stinging my eyes. For another hour, there is nothing but sheep and rain. The ducks, of course, immediately climbed out of the bin and are now floating around the car like unruly balloons. One of them is flapping away in the passenger seat, and I am getting strange looks from other drivers.

  As we pass a massive plywood plant, the cedary scent of sawdust fills the car, and I’m starting to feel relatively optimistic about pulling this off—until catching sight of a large mocking clown face, like the head of a court jester who failed to amuse, stuck on a pole at the entrance to an RV park.

  The RV park is ominously called Thrillville.

  I turn off the highway onto slick blacktop—another forty miles of vineyards and pastureland, fairgrounds and farm-equipment rentals, into the hills, past lonely ranch houses and ramparts of woods, down a couple of forking unmarked dirt roads, and finally a driveway that bumps into a shabby farmstead.

  The two-story house is so deeply settled into the grassy overgrowth, it appears to have absorbed groundwater up the walls and across the roof. Brown rot grows across the siding and spreads along the junction of the gabled dormers, where old shake shingles are peeling up.

  I stop the car on a patch of gravel in a light mist, wary of the country quiet. I did not imagine the place would be this isolated. The immense time and distance between here and backup is almost palpable.

  The house is neglected, but the farm seems functional. There are red barnlike outbuildings and a large silver greenhouse made of inflated plastic sections, a tractor, buckets, ladders, an old steel swing set, a limp American flag on a pole stuck in a bunker of crumbling concrete.

  A fat white cat is ambling across the grass, so I make sure the ducks are safely in the car, careful not to close the door on their silly feet. The effort to contain them, and the long drive with zero sleep, is making me really, really want to hand them off to Megan.

  The scent of lavender grows stronger and more alluring as I walk down the drive. There, lurking behind the house, is the hazelnut orchard, squatty trees with short trunks and thin branches, planted with mathematical precision, file upon file, clean as a mechanical drawing, every specimen eerily alike.

  I see a large man in a blue jacket moving in and out of the rows, carrying something—pruning shears.

  He disappears. I follow into the trees.

  Julius Emerson Phelps snips a bright green sucker. He moves deliberately through the trees, parade perfect and silent. The jaws of the shears snap precisely.

  Overcast days like this are flat. They narrow the perspective, as if each of us has been made in two dimensions, like that painting of the lion and the brown-breasted girl with the guitar. Heat rises from the earth and the mind hums with emptiness, like the intervals between the trees, like the leafy spaces through which the sunlight will penetrate, all the way to the ground. That is the tree farmer’s job right now—to thin and sculpt—so the foliage will grow back thickly, so if you stood beneath these canopies four months from today, 100 percent of the sky would be obliterated.

  Julius Emerson Phelps is the general, and the young trees are in training. They are training to widen the spread of their branches like bowls to catch the sun. As he leaves a trail of sprouts on the ground like casualties, his face recalls the trancelike look he wore at the jukebox back at Omar’s, lost in the taunting sleaze of Blue Oyster Cult, until suddenly he straightens up. The crows are talking to him no doubt.

  Maybe he noticed the nondescript car parked beside the house, a red 1993 Civic, one he has never seen before, with Oregon tags. The lady seems to go with the car—disheveled but clean, long, curly dark hair, a pleasing face, faintly exotic-looking, almond skin (Italian? Spanish?), average frame, or maybe smaller than average, but carrying forward with a confident stride. His eyes drop to the boots: worn. He withdraws behind another row. Observes. The pruning shears are weighty in his hands.

  I step through his silent cathedral like a tourist, staring up.

  He comes on me from behind.

  “You’re trespassing.”

  “Sorry! Didn’t see you.”

  “Sure you did.”

  “I’m Darcy. We met at the bar. I was also at the rally at the school.”

  “I have no memory of meeting you anywhere.”

  The moment he steps from the trees, a sexual force springs off him like slow claws down your back.

  “Really? I’m hurt. What kind of trees are these?”

  “Ornamental filberts.”

  “Megan said they were hazelnuts.”

  “Hazelnuts are filberts,” he says impatiently. “One and the same. We just don’t use the word filberts anymore. People don’t like the sound of it.”

  “Kind of like ‘You’re trespassing’?” I smile. “That doesn’t sound very friendly.”

  “How do I know you’re a friend?”

  I give him flirty. “I can’t believe you don’t remember—I stole three hundred bucks from the till and gave it to the cause, when I could have gone shopping.” I pretend to be entranced by the willowy branches just sprouting tiny leaves. “This is amazing. How do you do it? Every tree is the same.”

  His big developed shoulders shrug. His hair is in a dirty rat tail down the back. He wears a T-shirt under a grimy hooded sweatshirt, and a blue nylon jacket with a stripe down the arm. It was cold this morning. His light-colored jeans are dirt-stained at the knees.

  “That’s the way my mind works,” he says.

  I let him watch as I take in his eyes. I see a luminous intelligence. Seeking. Perching at a distance. Holding back.

  “I brought the ducks.”

  “What ducks?”

  “They were stolen from a foie gras farm last night. Megan is expecting me.”

  “When?”

  In the muffled silence of the orchard, our voices are undistorted and strangely intimate.

  “She said as soon as possible. One is sick. She was going to get a vet.”

  His eyes skim my unzipped windbreaker.

  “I need to pat you down.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Security check. In case you’re wearing a wire.”

  “A wire?”

  Electric shock goes through me, as if I really am wearing a listening device and he can tell. I stare at the crows walking cocksure across the rows and shrug with absolute wonder.

  “What am I, the bird police? Why would I wear a wire? I wouldn’t even know how.”

  Don’t make a thing out of it.

  “Give me your backpack.”

  “Megan didn’t say I’d have to go through a metal detector.”

  “Megan likes to think the world’s a happy place.” He finds a wallet. “Darcy DeGuzman?”

  “Yes.”

  He finds my cell phone and slips it in his pocket.

  “Hey! I drove down here in the frigging middle of the night! Megan’s very upset, in case you didn’t know. There’s a sick bird in the car!”

  “Open your arms and legs.”

  I comply, but if my heart keeps going like this, it will kill me.

  “May I ask what you’re doing?”

  “I’m just an old bandit,” he says. “Just doing my thing. If I touc
h you inappropriately, you have permission to kick me in the balls.”

  “If I have permission, it won’t be any fun.”

  His hands are expert, like I’m a perp spread-eagled on the hood of a car.

  “Are you done?” I ask Julius. “Okay?”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, ‘no’?”

  “You can leave the animals and go.”

  “I need my cell phone back.” I stamp my foot.

  He replies with a sardonic smile. If I’m reading it right, the subtext is, I could have you right now in the dirt.

  “Let me tell you something, darlin’. I am not the one who made me paranoid.”

  An instinctive part of him was watching from the moment I drove down the road. And it did not have to be his eyes.

  I am not the one who made me paranoid. Then who did?

  He flips my cell phone open.

  A screen door slams and Megan strides angrily across the yard, followed by a tall young woman in hip-sucking jeans, with a perfect face and boyishly cut blond hair.

  “Where are they?” Megan demands.

  Julius’s smile fades. “She says in the car.”

  “Why are you standing around playing games?”

  “We don’t have a clue who she is.” He’s scrolling through my cell phone.

  Megan rips it from his hands and gives it back to me. “Oh please. We have an emergency.”

  “Watch your mouth,” Julius says, his voice hard. “Before you say something we all regret.”

  “I could give a damn,” Megan mutters, already pulling at the door of my car. “Thank you for doing this, Darcy. Sara, help me out here.”

  Sara, the long-legged rescuing angel, shoos the ducks out of the car as Megan lifts the bin. The sick one is too weak to raise its head.

  “I am really, really afraid for this one,” Megan says.

  The girl strokes it. “He’s not going to make it, is he?”

  The screen door slams again, and a young man about seventeen, a baby neo-Nazi with a buzzed head, appears holding a shotgun.

  It’s the kid who streaked through the rally carrying the blood bomb.

  “What the fuck?” he announces.

  “Slammer!” Julius says. “Get back in the house.”

  Lower the gun, knucklebrain.

  “Thought you needed help,” he says.

  “I’ll tell you when I need help, pal.”

  In response, Slammer fires the gun into the trees. It is as if every living being on the farm is hit with the reverberation. Ducks flee in panic, dogs bark insanely, and I have the impression a herd of cows is trying to get out of the barn.

  Sheared-off branches fall onto the roof, then drop to the garden in slow motion.

  “He didn’t mean it,” Sara says, shaking visibly.

  Megan puts the bin with the dying duck on her hip, an arm around the girl, and walks them both away.

  Julius has taken the gun from Slammer, who surrenders it with a smirk.

  “We have a visitor,” he says quietly. To me: “You can leave now.”

  “What about the vet?”

  Julius’s voice is military, clipped. “Get back on the road and forget how you got here.”

  The inside of the car smells like a sour old pillow. Pinfeathers and droppings are everywhere. I turn on the engine and wobble off. Less than a quarter mile from the farm, I hear the chilling echo of a second shot. I could assign importance to it, or accept that I will never know.

  I am still reeling with a kind of exhilaration, still dumbly clutching the cell phone, when it vibrates in my hand.

  “You’re not there yet, I hope,” Donnato says.

  “Where?”

  “The farm.”

  “On my way back. Why?”

  He curses urgently. “Headquarters did not want you to make contact at this time.”

  “Headquarters?” My stomach lurches. “How did I mess up now?”

  My fingers tighten on the wheel in anticipation of the chastising to come. The mocking clown head on a stick is out there, a couple of miles down the road.

  Thrillville.

  “We have identified Julius Emerson Phelps,” Donnato says. “We believe his real name is Dick Stone. And he’s one of us. A former FBI agent who went bad in the seventies. If this is the guy, we have a potential problem.”

  Eleven

  Everyone sits down in a conference room in Los Angeles. It is a discreet briefing, with shades lowered. The major players in Operation Wildcat have been assembled, including the FBI’s second in command from Washington, Deputy Director Peter Abbott. All of FBIHQ reports to him. Son of a former congressman from Oregon, a decorated Vietnam veteran with a degree in international law, he’s the guy who travels in an armored limousine, ready to assume authority if the director takes a bullet. From the sound of him, he can hardly wait. Beneath the crisp gray suit and red silk tie, you can almost hear the purring motor of ambition.

  The deputy director seems to have a personal interest in Operation Wildcat. The Abbotts are a founding Portland family that made a fortune in railroads and diversified to construction and technology. Over the past thirty years, their real estate holdings in the Northwest have skyrocketed by developing the right-of-ways for defunct train tracks. Institutions like the Abbotts find it bad for the business climate when insurgent ecoterrorist groups blow up concrete trucks and laboratories. Almost as long as Peter Abbott has been with the Bureau, his family has pressured Washington to deal with FAN and ELF. Now that he is Washington, you can imagine the tone of drinks with Dad on the deck of the summer compound in the San Juan Islands.

  But the younger Abbott’s obligatory interest turned ravenous when we uncovered Dick Stone.

  “He is a traitor. To his country. To his fellow agents,” he says emphatically. “Make no mistake. He is not one of us.”

  “We’ve got a former FBI agent who’s bad,” Galloway agrees, “with federal warrants outstanding. He could have robbed banks and set up killings in other states. The dilemma is, when do we get Stone? Now, and blow the operation? Or do we play along with him and hope to get the bigger thing, which is FAN?”

  “I know this man,” Peter Abbott says. “I was his supervisor out here in the seventies when we were going after the Weather Underground. Stone started out all bushy-tailed, got hooked on drugs and liberated women, and went over to the other side. Years of living with scum have made him one of them.”

  “We were wondering why you’re here, sir,” Angelo interjects. He has not changed his Hawaiian shirt getup for the visitor. “There wasn’t a hell of a lot of interest in FAN from headquarters when Steve Crawford was killed. L.A. had to fight for Operation Wildcat. What made you get on a plane?”

  “I was deeply saddened by that agent’s death,” Abbott intones on key, “but enraged by the fact that a man I trained was responsible. He threw all our principles right out the window. Simply put, the identification of Dick Stone has caused us to reframe the mission. Stone is a dangerous fugitive who may have ties to international terrorism. The purpose of Operation Wildcat has shifted.”

  Nobody disagrees. We are all in awe of being in the same room with the adviser to the next Republican presidential candidate. Rumor is that Peter Abbott will resign from the Bureau to run the national campaign.

  Charisma. Conviction. Peter Abbott has both. You wouldn’t think so from the cherubic face and well-fed cheeks, the big sloping forehead and close-cut hair that starts halfway down his skull. Besides, I never trust people from Washington who wear those rimless glasses that try to make it look as if they aren’t wearing glasses at all.

  I have been lounging at the end of the conference table, wearing the ragged-out purple parka, dirty jeans, and work boots, insolently spinning a pen across the polished wood. For a dozen years, I have appeared in these halls perfectly put together in a pressed suit and laundered blouse, with manicured nails and polished shoes. Just off the plane from the clean air of Oregon, I haven’t washed my ha
ir since yesterday, and I find it unacceptable to listen to the politicking in this suffocating room.

  There are grander themes to respond to.

  The wild mustangs, for example. Mesteno, the legendary Kiger stallion—who here gives a damn about him?

  Darcy DeGuzman.

  “I understand the case turned on a single fingerprint off some…hazelnut brittle?” Abbott raises an ironic eyebrow. “My North Carolina grandma used to make brittle. I haven’t thought of that in years.”

  Appreciative chuckles.

  “I understand Agent Grey did some quick thinking and snagged the suspect’s prints.”

  I sit up, surprised to find him studying me with penetrating sea blue eyes.

  “Good job.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  And not only that; he also reads verbatim of my role in identifying Dick Stone. How Megan’s fingerprints on the hazelnut wrapper caused a hit off the NCIC data bank. How Megan Tewksbury turned out to be an alias and that the fingerprints of the woman using that name matched those of Laurel Williams, a young environmental scientist at UC Berkeley who disappeared in the seventies. Laurel was arrested during a protest march, and while in the custody of the Oakland police, she vanished. There was an investigation and the family sued the police department, but she never turned up. Nobody could explain how the young woman had escaped. If she’d escaped. A left-wing conspiracy theory persists that Laurel Williams was beaten to death in custody and disposed of in San Francisco Bay.

  Abbott produces a surveillance photo from an environmental protest that took place on the Columbia River Gorge in the early seventies. Against a haze of wooded cliffs, a young lady with a heartrendingly unspoiled face is engaged in an angry shouting match with a fortyish white male in a suit. I can see in her righteousness the same woman who tried to stop the fight in the bar. The confrontation here is on the edge of violence. Professor Laurel Williams has literally draped herself in an American flag, looking like an avenging Statue of Liberty—and even in black and white, the senior Abbott, sporting a curly ’fro, is red in the face. Protesters surge toward the podium, fingers stretching in the peace sign. Somewhere in the crowd is our young undercover agent Dick Stone.