Judas Horse ag-3

by April Smith

  The wind is cutting as the rescuers of lost animals gather around a picnic table adjacent to the parking lot. I scan the reddened faces squinting against splatters of rain. These are your good citizens, eminently sane. They believe in the sanctity of life. They want to be seen as compassionate. Middle-aged and mostly female (two lesbian couples), they are “guardians”—not owners — of hordes of abandoned dogs and cats, lizards and rabbits, and their phone numbers are always the ones on the oil spill emergency list. There are graying braids and nose rings, hiking boots and ponchos. You have to like a bosomy grandma wearing a cap that says Meat-free zone.

  The dangerous element is Bill Fontana. Even in the stormy desert his lean figure — the stomp-ass boots, a camouflage parka and watch cap — radiates a concentrated black energy. He works the eclectic crew gathered around the picnic tables with a sense of his own celebrity, shaking hands and kissing cheeks. I want to say, Ladies, he is not worthy of you. But he plays to their vanity, and they adore him like a son.

  “We stand for the essence of nonviolence.”

  Fontana speaks intimately, drinking in eye contact with each one. “This is an evolutionary moment. To make nonviolence an organizing principle. We are the people. This is the time.” I wish I could turn away. I have read so many transcripts of taped phone conversations of Fontana spreading the gospel that I know the rhetoric by heart. But I am nodding gravely, pitying the well-intentioned troops about to be led into a trap. They must know they cannot get away with this.

  There are no cars on the highway. Probably none for fifty miles. You can hear the drops of ice plinking softly on woven nylon hoods and shoulders. Behind the stage stop the proprietress keeps an aviary of chicken wire and tin. Red-and-yellow house finches hop and dive. Unsmiling, she flicks a pan of scraps into the snow.

  “You found it!” whispers a familiar voice, bringing with it the scent of almond soap.

  I turn to see that it is Megan, hurriedly zipping up a yam-colored parka. Flakes of frozen rain have gathered in her silver hair.

  “Hi!” I squeal. “Great to see you.”

  She gives me a motherly hug. “I’m glad I’m not late.” “No, we’re just getting started.” I look around. “Where is Julius?” “He drove to the preserve to scout out the horses.” “What about Slammer and Sara?”

  “Someone has to watch the farm.”

  “Are you scared?” I ask, lowering my voice.

  “Bill just said this is a nonviolent action.” “It’s just that I’m tired of empty gestures,” I say. “I want to do something that will make an impact.” Megan puts the collar of the parka up and snaps it into place. The wind blows her turquoise earrings. Her look becomes distant as she gazes toward the flatland.

  “You should be careful.”

  “Why?”

  “The FBI is here.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Megan: “Count on it.”

  “Seriously?”

  “They keep files on us. They come to our conventions, too. They think we don’t know who they are.” A strange paralysis kicks in, like hearing two radio stations at once. Which one to listen to? I become momentarily unbalanced. This is not playing a role in a bar. I am alone, in a windblown god-awful patch of nowhere at the end of time, eye-to-eye with someone who has placed her trust in me.

  “The FBI had someone spying on Julius,” she says.

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “He came up to Julius at the bar at Omar’s — this was months ago — a guy nobody ever saw before, and tried to sell him drugs. Julius said he should have had a sign on his back that said ‘Pig.’” Skeptically, I say, “How could Julius know he was from the FBI?” “The guy was an obvious asshole.”

  Acid burn creeps through my gut, like when you hear someone slur your religion.

  “Then what happened?”

  “He kept hanging around,” she says incredulously. “Julius wouldn’t talk to him. Nobody would. So I guess he left. Listen.” Fontana is giving orders: “We don’t want a lot of cars, so you’ll have to buddy up. Dress warmly and make sure you wear gloves. Eat. Rest. Meditate. Pray. We go in after dark.” I take in a draft of dry, cold air. It comes out as a sigh.

  “It’s all a game, isn’t it?”

  “No,” says Megan. “It’s a difficult and spiritual calling. To care about another species is the hardest thing to do.” Water drips off the tin roof of the aviary. The red-and-yellow finches peck in the snow.

  Thirteen

  Dick Stone has them in his sights. Hard to discern in the distance in a basin of bunchgrass. So far, he’s had no luck — the brown dots he spotted through the Army-issue field glasses turned out to be cattle. But these, at the limit of his vision, move like horses.

  He swerves off the highway into a gravel turnout, gets out of the truck and opens a gate in the barbed-wire fence that leads to hundreds of thousands of federally protected acres.

  He loops the gate closed and drives a slow half mile past markers that warn RESEARCH AREA — NO TRESPASSING, where he cuts the engine and eases the door shut. A ground squirrel streaks by. The quiet is a muffled roar, tangible, as if he’d plugged his ears with silence. Soon the crunching of the bandit’s boots on the granular volcanic dust becomes not his; nor does he care if the white wool Pendleton jacket with the colorful Navajo design draws attention from some nervous BLM patrol. It is not likely that they’d throw him against the hood of the Suburban, pat him down, and find the Colt.45 where he’s holding it right now, deep inside his jacket pocket.

  He trudges uphill through a valley framed by dark gray magma cliffs, some uplifted, some half-sunken in a spectacular collision ten thousand years ago. He has to watch his footing. The porous rocks are sharp. He’s lost the horses in the folds of the hills, but he knows they like to shade up under the junipers, where he saw them through the field glasses. When he gains the rise, he sees their colors in the bluebunch wheatgrass a hundred yards away. He smiles at their placid grazing and begins to circle slowly upwind.

  He spirals closer. His training as a sniper in the Army keeps him low. In the deep spaces of the canyon, the animals must seem to jump-cut to a larger size with every turn — from tiny toys to very large and present as he drops behind the willows and observes. The weather is changing fast. Over the butte to the west, a pulsing cloud like a black jellyfish is trailing dark ribbons of rain. The wind has shifted and the mustangs know he is there; finely muzzled heads rise and point alertly in his direction. He has come upon a band of thirty or forty — pintos, duns, and chestnuts, with half a dozen foals. Every individual is strong and perfectly formed, the essence of natural beauty.

  Or maybe he is thinking about bloodshed. Dinnertimes at the farm he would lecture us assembled radicals on how the Spanish horse — the bloodline of these mustangs goes back to the legions of Rome — defined the history of the New World. How the stamina of the Spanish breed was the means by which Cortés destroyed the Aztecs, Coronado fought the Shoshone, the Shoshone conquered its neighboring tribes and then, in grand restitution, wiped out the Spanish settlers on Deadman’s Trail.

  Horses, he would remind us, have made war possible on an increasingly staggering scale, just part of the continuum that led to Vietnam and beyond. And everyone knows the way those grandiose engagements always end — piles of body parts in a decimated field, the arrogance of politics, the incompetence of rank. What he withheld from us then was how he had been a victim, too, of smug and inept leadership in the FBI. Now he touches the gun inside his pocket like a talisman to calm the vengeful scenarios.

  Freed of the perversities of humankind, horses are peaceful and curious. If you show patience, they will accommodate your presence. He was certain the wild herd would spook, but they just look at him and go about their business, thirty yards away. They have relationships. They play, they fight, and they communicate. Let’s go over there, they seem to say. A spotted baby trots behind its mom. Another sits on long folded legs in the grass. A mare suddenly charges two
others, neck twisted and teeth out. Without judgment, with no malice, the interactions of the horses ebb and flow as ribbons of snow begin to stream across the valley. And now a brown and white pinto stallion has trotted close enough to check the bandit out. Neck arched, ears up, its eyes and nose are pointed at him with otherworldly focus.

  Pinned. He is pinned by the stallion’s gaze and made to see himself alone and out of place, trespassing once again. The stallion gallops indifferently away. The bandit hugs his knees and huddles on the ground, shamefully human.

  He loses sense of time.

  He becomes a Buddha under a willow tree, surrounded by four-legged gods — now twenty, now ten yards away. For the first time in his life, he experiences unconditional acceptance. He knows what freedom is. Their freedom is his freedom, too. His heart softens toward the cities beyond the silent rim of the mountains, a roar he cannot remember or imagine. Out there is a world of hurt, and all balled up inside it are the bad and evil things he has done. He listens to his own breathing, close in his ears. The horses, moving through the sage, are uncannily silent. The trouble is that the absence of sound itself is elastic, and it caroms off the basalt cliffs, hitting him with a thousand stinging thoughts. One of them might be repentance.

  The helicopter explodes above the ridge like thunder. The man in the Navajo jacket on the ground cries out and rolls, hands to ears, rocking like a child against the scream of annihilation. He is blasted by a turbulence of dry leaves and razor-sharp black stones and curls up to protect his eyes, and then, when it passes, he struggles to his hands and knees to survey the empty grass where the horses had been — with love and grief as profound as if he were a refugee returning to his childhood home, only to find it burning to the ground.

  The horses are running. Dick Stone is running with them, gunning the pickup along a parallel dirt road that climbs through the preserve. As the ridge falls away, he can see the entire Catlow Valley and the brown and white and buckskin-colored animals, led by the pinto stallion, fanning out before the helicopter, which is like a monstrous green bottle fly with ferociously buzzing wings, biting at their flanks no matter how adroitly they crisscross the salt flats, bearing down relentlessly until their coats turn dark with foam.

  The mustangs have galloped almost twenty-five miles without stopping, even the little ones. He thinks about their beating hearts and the working of their lungs. And now the black jellyfish cloud is loosing sleet, which hits the bandit in the face as he leans out through the open window to track the herd, because it is suddenly important that he not lose contact.

  Out of the foothills, wranglers in bright yellow rain gear ride from their hiding places on obedient quarter horses, and the bandit, having pulled up to the last overlook before the road turns east, stands in the freezing rain and watches as they channel the mustangs through a set of camouflaged fences that lead toward the corrals. The pilot of the chopper circles low. On its signal, an air horn blasts the valley, and the bandit sees another yellow-coated cowboy standing up in the sage, holding the lead of an unsaddled dun-colored mare with a black mane and tail.

  The cowboy releases her and the mare takes off eagerly, going at tremendous speed, because she has been trained to run for a grain bucket hanging at the end of the capture funnel. The tired herd sees her and follows. For several heart-stopping minutes she takes the lead. Then she flies down the chute neatly as an arrow, and the mustangs trample behind her into captivity.

  The bandit lowers the fogged-up field glasses with disgust. He hates the dun mare and her handlers. He has always reserved his deepest contempt for spies, for collaborators who can be bought for a bucket of grain.

  The cowboys have a name for the single animal that betrays the herd. They call it the “Judas horse.”

  Fourteen

  I am using the Oreo cell phone that works on a scrambled signal, sitting in the Civic outside the Big River Stage Stop with the heater going, watching tiny beads of hail popping off the windshield, grateful to Rooney Berwick, deep in the warren of the lab, for fashioning this invisible lifeline to my partners in the real world. The vehicles belonging to the radicals are scattered around the rest stop. Most of us have spent the rainy afternoon in our cars. It is 5:00 p.m., still hours before dark, and the turbulent early-spring weather continues to swing between boiling black cloud and seas of pearl blue.

  “What are you doing?” Donnato asks.

  “Well, right now watching it hailing. So far, we’ve had rain, sleet, sunshine, and snow — all at the same time. How is it where you are?”

  “Clear and cold. Looks like we’ll have good visibility tonight.”

  Donnato is speaking from the sheriff department’s county jail, the command center for the stakeout at the horse corrals. The department is headquartered in a flyspeck of a town twenty-five miles from the Big River Stage Stop. The town grew up around a massive lumber mill, but when it shut down, the place curled up and atrophied to empty taverns and one wind-busted main street where the last survivors are a decrepit movie house and a dilapidated Chinese restaurant.

  “The strategy for tonight has changed.” I’m looking at a hand-drawn map Bill Fontana has given us. “We’re taking three vehicles and leaving them in a turnout at Needle Gorge, highway marker two twenty-four, just east of the corrals.”

  “I’ll inform the SWAT team. Don’t worry. Once you’re in, nobody’s getting out of the compound,” Donnato assures me. “Be safe.”

  “You, too.”

  “Roger that.”

  I haul out of the Civic and for the second or third time during that long day wander into the Big River Stage Stop and poke through cans of motor oil and beef stew on the sparsely stocked shelves.

  There are many interesting things to look at, such as three different color portraits of John Wayne, and a collection of old snow globes with dried-up brown insides — a gorilla, a golfer, a steamboat. In a booth at the rear I find Megan and two other activists — Lillian, a seventyish bird-watcher, and her friend Dot. They are now stripped of their thick parkas, and their mousy white hair and plain wire glasses, their thin shoulders and veined hands reveal two elderly women, defenseless as nuns. How will they keep up with us in the dark?

  I wait for some acknowledgment in order to join them. They are talking about migrating birds. Spread across this surreal landscape, there are wetlands that provide sanctuary for hundreds of species. I hover at the edge of the conversation, drawn back to the banishment from the pack by my former friend Barbara Sullivan at the Los Angeles field office; boys may be stupid, but girls rip the heart out of you. Or is it that our hearts are already broken by the clumsy swipes of careless mothers? The undercutting remark, the florid slap across the face. Too jealous, too deranged, or, like my own mother, gone too early to make repairs.

  When the bird-watchers report they have seen three trumpet swans sailing along by the side of the road, I jump in with “Oh my God, how exciting!” and am finally invited to sit down.

  Now they are talking about rocks. Lillian and Dot turn out to be retired high school teachers with a lot to say — not only about birds but also about the joys of collecting minerals. Underneath her yam-colored parka, Megan is wearing a fuzzy sweater knitted with ropes of purple; her hair bursts out from tortoiseshell clips. Her eyes are bright and interested. The proprietress brings four coffees. When she is gone, Megan reaches into her knapsack and pulls out a silver flask. Dot reacts, all fluttery, but Lillian is eager and Megan matter-of-fact. I think about the empty wineglasses that littered the table at Omar’s.

  Megan pours a dark liquid into my cup. “Going to be cold out there tonight.”

  It is bourbon.

  “Wow, this helps,” I say gratefully. “I am so stressed.”

  “You’ll get used to it,” Lillian says. “Whatever you do, when they arrest you, don’t resist.”

  Dot taps her teeth. “The police broke my bridge in Atlanta.”

  I swallow the bourbon-flavored coffee. “No, not about freeing the h
orses. I mean I’m stressed about my life. I’m being kicked out of my apartment in Portland. I have to find another place.”

  Angelo said, “Make sure they know Darcy needs a place to stay.”

  Lillian laughs and waves her wrinkled fingertips. “Vasanas,” she says dismissively.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s a Sanskrit word for things of this earthly life,” Lillian says. “Bad habits. Mental bondage.”

  “Well, excuse my French.” I pout, and Lillian pats my hand.

  We pull into the total darkness of the turnout at Needle Gorge. The weather has cleared and it is as if the curtains of civilization have been drawn aside to show us the stars, lush and impenetrable, as they looked 200 million years ago from this same naked plateau. Our breath forms as soon as we are out of the cars. Immediately, there is giggling. Someone has to go to the bathroom. Someone else flicks on a small red beam to check the map.

  We follow the highway. I wonder what Fontana’s alibi would be if a sheriff saw us walking along in the dark single file. But for Darcy, this is the most thrilling thing she has ever done. I grip the sleeve of the conspirator in front of me with exhilaration. “Your first time?” whispers the woman kindly. “Stay by me. You’ll be okay.”

  We shuffle down a steep driveway, causing a small slide of pebbles. Two lights are shining from posts near the entrance to the site. Between them is a gate secured by a circle of heavy chain. Fontana snips the links with a pair of bolt cutters and we’re in.

  No more giggling now. Ahead is the compound of corrals, lit by a single lamp over the barn. I am shivering with cold, small tremors close to the bone. Suddenly, a spotlight appears above us, a circle of white around a huge fat owl in a tree. Its markings are beautiful, the eyes glossy black. There are shushes and rasping shouts. “Great horned owl!” And the flashlight snaps off. Lillian and Dot. The bird-watchers. Oh my God.