Judas Horse

by April Smith

  “Your parents must be looking for you.”

  She shrugs. “They gave up on me in high school. They are not in my life. In the squat, Slammer and I made a pact to stick together, so when Julius showed up and said he could live on the farm, Slammer said if I couldn’t go, he wouldn’t go, either.”

  Dick Stone cruises the underbelly of Portland, recruiting street kids—young and vulnerable and not easily traced.

  I sip the tea. It tastes like twigs.

  “I left home, too. Moved to Portland from Los Angeles.”

  Sara is bemused. “I can’t see you on the street,” she says, which I find vaguely insulting. “Don’t ever go to Pioneer Square at night. You can’t imagine how those kids are living.” Her eyes fill again. “It’s so sad.”

  I give her a moment and ask, “Where are you from?”

  “Dirt,” she says, floating to her feet as Megan comes back through the curtain.

  “Let’s get you settled.”

  The three of us climb the dark-wood staircase to the attic room the girl and I will share. The wallpaper is fragile and old-fashioned, sweetheart roses, original to the house. I pick out the daily life of this jerry-rigged clan from the smells that have risen up the staircase on strata of hot air: cat food, musty rugs, herbal shampoo, sage incense, and weed.

  “Where is Julius?”

  “Out on his tractor,” Megan replies. “He’s always on his tractor.” And I hear it through the window on the landing before I can see Dick Stone through the panes of glass, a small figure in a straw hat on a red machine, going up and down the rows with unwavering resolve.

  At the turning of the stair, directly on the wall in front of us, is yet another timepiece, an antique wall clock in a simple wooden case, hands as thin as pencil lines, trembling past the hour. The steady drone of the tractor goes back and forth, a rhythm of comfort and plenty, in harmony with the swaying of the pendulum of the clock and the roses on the wall, and the scent of baking piecrust blooming up the stairs—promising to fill you up, whatever your emptiness may be.

  Seventeen

  Herbert Laumann’s sick baby is up two or three times in the night, so they take her into their bed. She is finally asleep, a soft, warm weight on her father’s chest, when he is forced by the alarm to face the dawn. From the quality of light peeping underneath the Roman shades, he knows the sky will be clear. No rain.

  Ambition, that indefatigable gear, gets the priority of the day turning in Herbert Laumann’s sleep-deprived brain. The priority is water. As deputy state director, the continuing drought in the eastern part of the state is first thing on his mind these days. It means he’ll keep on hearing complaints—from ranchers as well as his own district managers—because nothing has changed out here in the West in the past two hundred years. It is still the cattlemen versus the farmers in the fight for public lands and water, only now you’ve got the radical element mixed in.

  Guys like Laumann are in the middle, trying to balance the politics of multiple use; doing the eight-to-five civil servant bit because it’s better to be wearing a shirt and tie and commute and have the weekends on the boat with your family than be driving a rig through alfalfa and timothy grass like your father did 24/7, cracked red hands blown up like balloons, the inhaler always in the bib pocket.

  Being allergic to your life’s work is a tragedy.

  Still in bed, he reaches for cigarettes and gets one lit without singeing his baby’s hair or waking up his still-fat and irritable wife. He does not have to worry about waking Alex. On the cusp of being a teenager, the boy could sleep until noon.

  The first nicotine rush of the morning is like God’s own inhale before He blew life into the creatures of the earth. Laumann savors a divine pause. A lot of people would run from this FAN thing, afraid of becoming a target for extremists just for doing the job you were hired to do. There are lunatics everywhere; you have to stand up to them.

  Laumann replays his triumph at the animal rights convention. It pumps him up, gets him going: how he ignored the intimidation of four hundred people booing and hissing and got up on that stage; how he put that punk away with the courage of a father defending his children, just as every day he goes into his office and defends our precious public lands. Those accusations of him allegedly buying horses and selling them—to a slaughterhouse? Bumbled paperwork! Never happened! A deplorable and false personal attack, he insisted to the crowd. Then, a brilliant diversion: He invited the whole rowdy bunch to go out to the corrals and see how the horses are treated. Understand the BLM is the good guy, doing the right thing. At the end? He got applause! And the punk, Fontana? Thoroughly deballed.

  “Don’t blow smoke on Rosalie!” complains his wife without opening her eyes.

  “You take her,” he replies.

  Not even halfway out of his arms and the kid is screaming. The wife unbuttons her nightgown.

  Laumann pulls a plaid wool shirt over his pajamas and goes down the stairs, which smell of the new navy blue runner. He likes the feel, like walking barefoot on a carpet of lichen. Already he has lit a second cigarette, hit the coffee machine, the weather station on a small TV, and picked up the newspaper, running his eye over the headlines. He has to focus on these things before the other thing, the uneasiness, kicks in.

  He forces his gaze from the garden window. A cup of Irish vanilla, and he is at the computer, fully charged. He’ll send an e-mail to his district managers and drum up support for building that reservoir out near Steens Mountain, where the drought is impacting the rangeland. FAN will make noise about it. Screw them. These amateur thugs do not have what he has: the big picture.

  Laumann’s wife is running downstairs with the baby wrapped in a blanket. The baby’s face is pomegranate red and she is making rasping coughs.

  “Croup,” she says. She is a nurse; she knows.

  “Get her in the shower.”

  “I did. We have to go to the emergency room.”

  “What about Alex?”

  “Drop me and come back for him. Remember to take his tennis bag—he’s got a tournament.”

  Laumann stops typing mid-sentence, reaches for his car keys, lopes up the navy blue stairs, pulls on pants, runs downstairs, runs upstairs again for the car keys he left on the bed, checks on Alex, beautiful and asleep, runs downstairs, to find his wife already out, the back door banging behind her.

  They’ve been through this twice before, and each time the panic is the same. That is the real uneasiness. Damn it to hell. Rosalie’s tiny lungs. Damn, it almost makes him cry. Which impurities of the modern world are making her sick? What weakness did his father pass along? He stumbles through the early-morning air, icy cold, like mountain water, and thinks irrationally, I must provide.

  The Explorer pulls out of the driveway and accelerates fast.

  There is a pause, ten seconds of negative time, long enough for the dust to settle, and then a hard percussive shot and one side of the Laumann house volcanoes out, spewing lumber and new carpeting with orange fire-tongued breath, raining down the unspeakable.

  Eighteen

  The screen door in the kitchen opens hard, banging against the wall.

  “Attack of the vegetables!” Slammer shouts, lunging through with the energy of an entire basketball team. “Destroy all humans!”

  He is carrying crates of fresh-picked produce, wearing a denim jacket with the sleeves cut off to show a colorful swirl of tattoos on both arms, as if he dipped them up to the elbows in Easter egg dye.

  Sara takes the weight of one of the crates, heady with damp earth fragrance, and looks past his shoulder to the organic garden, where the sun has deepened the morning shadows. She stays a foot against the screen door, gazing at the beds of violet-tipped lavender. Her breath forms in the cold country air.

  “What?” Slammer asks.

  “Reminds me of home.”

  “Your parents must live in a pile of goat shit.”

  She smiles ironically. He stamps his filthy boots. Draping an arm
over my shoulders, he whispers, “The feds are here.”

  “Really? Where?”

  “Look.”

  Peering through the kitchen window, we can see the utility truck. A repairman is up in a cherry picker.

  Slammer had a good look when he went into the garden.

  “The feds wouldn’t be that stupid,” I say.

  “They’re on to us. The BLM dude’s house got vaporized, dog.”

  “Yeah, but why would they care about us?”

  He grins. “We blow shit up.”

  Me, innocent: “Did we blow up Laumann’s house?”

  The bomb was detonated by a cell phone. Same as the device that killed Steve. Herbert Laumann and his wife and baby escaped by minutes. Twelve-year-old Alex, asleep in bed, sustained third-degree burns. He is expected to survive. Angelo considers Bill Fontana and Dick Stone both suspects in the bombing. Fontana is in custody. The motive would be murderous rage. No question the hero of the movement was humiliated when the deputy state director invaded the stage.

  “I didn’t do that bomb,” Slammer says warily.

  “Was it FAN?”

  “We are FAN,” Sara says, wanting my attention. “But so are a lot of people.”

  I have noticed sibling rivalry never ends, even when you’re not related.

  “Allfather says they’re tapping our phones,” she jabbers on. “I hear clicking all the time when I’m talking, don’t you?”

  Yes, and that’s why we’re up in the cherry picker for the second time this week. Why can’t they get it right?

  “Sometimes I say, ‘Hey, Fed? Are you listening?’”

  I chuckle, but my throat is dry. “Make sure you only talk about embarrassing personal stuff.”

  Slammer, teasing: “Not Sara. Sara’s a little prude.”

  Sara’s cheeks turn pink. “You suck.”

  He gives an evil grin and snaps a carrot between his teeth. Completely the opposite of ethereal Sara, who could float away on the steam drifting out of the kitchen, Slammer (aka Jim Allen Colby) is always banging and stomping, eager to destroy whatever’s standing still, usually with a dim-witted expression of glee.

  The prominent ears sit equidistant between a fringe of light hair and a long chin, directly in line with the fair eyebrows and narrow eyes that appear to have been passed down through generations of con artists and thieves. His nose is flat and his lips are full (actresses would pay a lot of money for those plump lips), but on Slammer, they seem childlike, on the verge of lying—or, if that doesn’t work, blubbering.

  Megan describes Slammer as “a feral animal” when Dick Stone recruited him from under the bridges of Portland. The boy, if you believe him, is a warrior without a soul. His mission is to “expose cowards.” Incorrigible since he was kicked out of day care for attacking other children, he set fire to his father’s house and ran away from a detention center at age fourteen, pissing all over a lumber town up in the state of Washington, for a half-starved squatter’s life with a street family of violent youth—exactly the kind of hot-blooded seventeen-year-old you want in your army.

  And he is still uncontainable, shooting off guns, setting pesky little fires, stealing from the drugstore when they take him into town, flying down the sidewalk on a skateboard with his neck chains and do-rag and baggies that are halfway down his ass, a black-garbed neo-pirate, jumping the curb and flipping the bird to drivers too stupid to stop.

  Sara goes back to kneading whole-wheat dough. It is 10:30 in the morning and we are starting dinner. It takes a while when you bake your own bread and extract your own almond milk. For some families, I guess, food is a pleasant ritual; on the lost farm, it is another form of slavery.

  Everything is strictly vegan, and to Dick Stone’s specifications. The first night, I cut up sweet potatoes to be roasted in the oven, but Megan made me take them out, still sizzling with hot oil, and make the wedges smaller, because that’s the way Allfather likes them. The scorched fingertips were part of the initiation.

  Yesterday, we had to hand-rake every twig and piece of bird dropping from the orchard floor, which must be kept “smooth as a pool table,” according to Stone, because when the nuts drop, you don’t want chaff in the harvester. That’s fine, except hazelnuts don’t drop until September, and it’s barely June. Abruptly, he told Slammer he did not appreciate his “work ethic,” and made us all run twenty laps around the trees in the afternoon heat.

  Sara, not in any kind of shape, was struggling hard. Her legs were slow and rubbery and her face was hot pink.

  In undercover school, they would have asked, “What is the lesson learned?”

  “Sara’s getting heatstroke,” I told Stone on the pass. “She’s had enough.”

  He put out his foot and tripped me.

  The earth under my knees and in my mouth was soft. I got up and kept on running, so he could not see the look on my face. That was a killer moment, the hardest so far. To put aside your core values in order to accomplish the mission. I had to spit it out. I had to think about justice for Steve Crawford’s family. About the day the sky will be filled with helicopters, and Dick Stone will be in prison the rest of his life.

  I stare at the zucchinis with distrust. They are fat as blimps. I will need a computer model to figure out how to dice them into the tiny squares that Megan demands. I sharpen the ancient blackened carbon steel knife for the umpteenth time.

  “What’s up with Megan?” Slammer is asking. “Why is she in the basement all the time?”

  Megan has been working on her quilt, stretched on a frame that takes up almost the entire room. Since the action at the BLM corrals, which she calls “a total disaster,” she has abandoned the kitchen to the children, and we have heard raised voices behind the closed door of the master bedroom.

  “She’s sad.” Sara picks up the dough and slams it. “She thinks it’s our fault the cop died at the corrals.”

  “That’s so weak? The pigs were waiting in ambush. Fuck them. They brought it on themselves.”

  Slammer’s sitting on a kitchen chair, knees splayed, flicking bits of dough on the floor.

  “Stop that!” I snap.

  I am not going to make it if I have to chop zucchini and babysit a couple of spoiled, ignorant, hormone-deranged teenagers for the next six months, waiting for something that might not ever happen.

  Angelo Gomez warned about this very moment: “You’re driving yourself deeper,” he said of one of his own undercover assignments that lasted thirteen months. “Losing your identity and becoming part of the criminal element. I looked bad, smelled bad. I had a big beard all filled with food and crap. I lived a lie. I was a lie. I wore this big gold cross, and that’s what saved me. I’d lean against the bar so the cross would press against my chest, and something inside would keep me going.”

  “Look,” says Sara. “The pig’s still there.”

  The lineman’s truck has moved down the road, but he is still up in the cherry picker, a splotch of blue overalls below the branches of a pine tree, face hidden in the green. He seems disembodied—a faceless man in a generic uniform, the top of his body gone.

  The smell of burned brake lining seems to rise from the pots on the stove. I cannot look again, because I know it will be the face of the police detective that I shot, suspended between heaven and hell. Like a clumsy drumroll, my heart skips a beat and hits race pace in three seconds. The ghost outside the window, ordinary as a telephone repairman, splits my mind.

  Who owns me?

  “The cross would press against my chest,” Angelo said. “And I’d remember, There’s something else in life besides what I’m doing.”

  A crimson trail is crawling down the sink.

  I’ve sliced my finger and it won’t stop bleeding.

  Dick Stone lumbers into the kitchen, boots unlaced after the morning’s work.

  “I found this.”

  He shows us Darcy DeGuzman’s cell. He’s gone through my stuff.

  “Thanks.” I reach for it.
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br />   He swallows the phone in one big hand. “No personal cell phones allowed.”

  “Nobody told me.”

  Slammer and Sara have become alert. Suddenly, the boy is busy helping form the whole-wheat loaves.

  “No wallets.” Stone is holding the one he has confiscated from my pack. “No watches, either.”

  I remove my watch and smile feebly. “My time is your time.”

  He drops my things into the bib of his overalls. Tension crawls into the kitchen and hisses.

  Dick Stone waits, eyeing us.

  Megan is downstairs, unable to intervene.

  He raises an arm and presents a neon orange daypack.

  “Who wants to test this out?”

  “Me!” Slammer shouts.

  The bandit considers. “I want Darcy to do it,” he says, and you can see the hurt cross Slammer’s face.

  “Okay with me if Slammer really wants to.” I am pressing a paper towel around the finger cut.

  Stone, quietly: “I said Darcy.”

  Under a tree away from the house, Stone orders Slammer to help me put the backpack on. It weighs maybe fifteen pounds.

  “What does it do?”

  “Blows shit up,” Slammer replies. “You pull that cord.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  I try to wriggle out, but he’s latched the buckles.

  “No big deal. Just a little pop and red stuff sprays all over the place.”

  “Another blood bomb? Like the one at the school?”

  “New prototype,” Stone says briskly. “Ten times more powerful. For the Big One.”

  He adjusts something sticking out of the pack.

  “What’s the Big One? Hey, what are you doing?”

  He has flipped open my cell phone and is scrolling through the numbers.

  “Where is area code five six one?” he calls, backing away.

  “West Palm Beach, Florida.”

  “Nervous, Darcy?”

  “Not at all. Are you?”

  “My heart is going pitty-pat.” He reads a number. “Whose is this?”