April Smith: Judas Horse

As I approach, they stop talking.

“Tough morning,” I say.

“Very sad.”

Nobody says anything.

“Steve loved the mountains,” I remark. “I hope they talk about that.”

“You knew him,” Barbara replies accusingly, as if it is my fault he went to the mountains and met with a fatal accident.

“Yes,” I say. “I miss his smile,” and I walk away in a backwash of silence.

When you are involved in a shooting incident, the Office of Professional Responsibility talks to all your friends. During my investigation, rocks were overturned concerning Barbara Sullivan’s handling of bank robbery witnesses who had been waiting to be polygraphed. Instead of placing the witnesses in a secure area, she had allowed them to wait in the hall. It was a meaningless oversight that had nothing to do with my case, but with typical Bureau anality, they could not let it go, and Barbara Sullivan, a working mom who puts in twice as much as everyone else, received a reprimand. Not my fault, but that kind of thing accumulates nasty gossip, like a snowball in dirt.

Even though OPR found my case to be a righteous shooting — that the detective was a disturbed individual and the choice was either his life or mine, with a good chance he might have taken out a couple of civilians, as well — I had become tainted meat and nobody much wanted me around. Behind my back, Barbara called me “a cowgirl,” and it stuck. The word was I had tried to be a hero and lost all judgment. Who wants to partner up with that?

Don’t be stupid; this isn’t high school. But at the memorial service, I sit well away from Barbara and her friends in their identical black trouser suits, white shirts, and flat rubber-soled shoes.

If this isn’t high school, why do they all have to be blond?

Over the roar of the nearby 405 freeway, I listen to the Bureau chaplain honor our dead: “True heroes live a life of goodness, and enter the battle between good and evil to make the world a better place. These are not just names on a piece of paper. These are people just like us, who put themselves in harm’s way, knowing each day could be their last, whose loved ones were sometimes afraid to kiss them good-bye in the morning…until the day they made the supreme sacrifice. They gave the last measure of devotion to defending freedom.”

The roll call procession has begun. A bell tolls for every name that is read, and a photograph of each fallen agent is carried by an honoree who also bears a yellow rose. There had been a spat about who should carry Steve’s memorial, but it went to Jason Ripley, because he is the newest agent.

I am battling for control. My facial muscles are twitching and hot tears threaten to break. This is the task: Never let it show. Rows of graven faces reveal nothing but discipline.

I have noticed that as you get older, you do not regret the affairs you’ve had, but the ones you didn’t have. What nobody here knows is that Steve and I were not just buddies who met as kids in our twenties at the Academy and went through new agent training together. We did exactly what new agents are not supposed to do: We fell in love. And despite the prohibitions of the time, we were going to get married. The painful circumstances that tore us apart hit me all over again as Jason Ripley passes, bearing a large color photo of Steve’s earnest all-American face — a testament, in so many ways, for so many people, to what might have been.

Jason, a twenty-eight-year-old skinny farmer’s son from Illinois, is doing a credible job of appearing not to be terrified. It must scare the heck out of him, standing in for a dead man; called upon to demonstrate the egalitarian nature of death, along with other agents and support staff (each carrying a photo and one yellow rose), hauled out of the faceless building and exposed in full daylight, made to walk in a single line at the same funereal pace — the alert, the self-conscious, the burdened, the humble, the casual, the aggressive, the broken.

For months after the shooting incident, I had headaches and malaise. I was on every type of med but still couldn’t make it through the night without sweating through at least one pair of pajamas. I’d get up and read in the living room — one light burning, a desert wind rattling the empty garbage cans, a storm of tiny flowers driven off the pittosporum trees — and like the homeowner who has iced an intruder, or a soldier who destroys a tank, I gained the special knowledge only righteous shooters share: Even the most selfless action, even the defense of your country, doesn’t mean a happy ending. They save the worst for the so-called hero.

I killed somebody.

Who am I?

Galloway calls me into his office again. This time, it is just the two of us. I find him tilted all the way back in his chair, as if he is going to take a nap. His hands are clasped over his chest and his eyes are looking somewhere through the wall. He seems almost peaceful, snuggled up in his customary black turtleneck.

“Steve Crawford was murdered,” he says.

“No. How?”

“He was pretty much blown to bits.”

“In the woods ?”

Galloway agrees it sounds improbable. “Figure the odds.” When the molar in the jaw fragment married up to that of a missing federal agent, a crack team of investigators from the Portland police department and Oregon state police immediately returned to the site. SAC Galloway was there, along with the ASAC from the FBI’s Portland division. Galloway brought his green tactical parka and heavy boots; the locals wore windbreakers and jeans. As they tromped up the trail, two forensic anthropologists were arguing about whether or not the best way to clean bones is to boil them. You’d think science would have come up with the answer to that one by now.

The team had been formed in order to search for more remains. Cause of death was still unknown. It was a clear, cold day and the woods were dazzling under three inches of new snow. Conditions were judged to be good because the sun was out and the ground was already bare in spots. Might be a long shot, but you could get lucky. If you delayed until spring, the remains would migrate even farther. Besides, emotionally, nobody could wait.

When they reached the spot in the stream where the hiker had found the human jaw, they stopped and caught their breath. The thermos bottles and PowerBars came out. There were a lot of organized people trying to organize one another, so Galloway wandered off alone, climbed an outcrop, got up high, and wrapped an arm around a tree to steady himself on the slippery granite. He stared at the ice-colored water riding through the gorge.

His feet were cold and his thoughts morose. He was back in his childhood home in Brooklyn, New York. Cold linoleum, cold sheets, even the wall against his bed felt frigid. Seven years old, watching a blizzard whipping and wailing through the bars of the window guard, he was certain it would blow the brick apartment building away.

The sun was in his eyes now, reflecting off the placid snow that quilted the forest. Snow was different in the country. To his parents, “in the country” meant Westchester. He recalled a wooded place like this on a wintry day— Was it a Sunday? A botanical garden? — and him sledding on a found piece of cardboard. His parents had moved off behind a barren tree. There he saw his father open his mother’s coat, lift her sweater, and put his hand over her breast.

Galloway was lost in reverie about this particular image and why it was making him queasy, while a different part of his brain was seeking information about a depression it had noticed in the newly fallen snow: a space that resolved with more and more urgency as it began to melt away; a small, clearly defined circle in a cluster of young saplings; a sparkling white crater.