April Smith - Judas Horse

“Are you Darcy DeGuzman?”

“Who are you?”

They show their creds. FBI, Portland field office.

“We have your ducks.”

The male agent drags a plastic bin over the threshold. It contains four confused white ducks.

“I didn’t think it would be ducks. ” “Those were the orders.”

“Get them out of here. I can’t deal with this.”

“We just stole ’em,” says the female. “ No way we’re taking ’em back. I’m not crawling through bird poop again in this lifetime.” “Wait a minute. What’s wrong with him ?” One of the ducks is lying down in the bin.

“It’s sick.”

“Why’d you take a sick one?”

“What’s the difference? They’re all gonna die.” He points to green circles drawn around their necks. “That means they’re marked for slaughter.” Okay, this is absurd.

“What am I supposed to do with a sick duck?”

The female yawns. “Call your supervisor.”

“That is incredibly unhelpful, ma’am.”

“Sorry we woke you up,” she snaps. “We enjoy doing the shit work for Los Angeles.” And they’re sure to slam the door.

Three ducks are wandering around the apartment. The worst part is, it was my dumb idea to use rescue animals in order to get closer to Megan. I was thinking more along the line of puppies, but I know why Angelo authorized the poultry heist — to make it look like the work of dedicated radicals.

To get foie gras, a gourmet pâté, you force-feed the birds until their livers swell. French farmwives have been stuffing ducks and geese for hundreds of years, but it’s not so quaint when they’re kept in electrified metal cages with tubes down their throats. Activists have long been onto it as a rallying point. Foie gras is gruesome. It’s elitist. It’s what keeps people like Megan Tewksbury up at night.

I call her at Willamette Hazelnut Farm, using the number on the card. It is five o’clock in the morning. The apartment already smells like the monkey house at the zoo.

“Friends of mine broke into a poultry farm last night—” “What friends?” Megan is on it. She must get these wake-up calls often.

“Freedom fighters, let’s just say. They had no place to take them, so they left them with me. What do I do with a bunch of ducks?” “This is not an easy time,” Megan says warily. “Are you on a cell phone?” “Yes.”

“We have to hang up.”

“Okay, but listen — here’s why I’m calling — one of the ducks is sick!” “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.