April Smith - Judas Horse

“The danger is high,” says Donnato. “You understand that, right? If Stone makes you, he will escalate fast.” “Like he escalated when he made Steve.”

That is the nasty irony: By placing an undercover in Dick Stone’s orbit, not only did we wake the beast but we armed him with righteous fury, too.

“I have to tell you, as your contact agent, that it’s your choice as the undercover to decide whether or not you feel comfortable with the level of safety we can provide.” Donnato’s look is deeply still and troubling. Feeling seems to overflow his eyes.

My head clears. Despite the fatigue, I find myself in a manic state of bungee-jump excitement. I want to get back — to the suspects, the drama, my role in it — to the roller-coaster ride. This is rapture, and there is no way back.

“It’s a go.”

“Then nail it,” Donnato says. “The prisoners are being released. Make sure you go home with Dick Stone.” It is 112 degrees in the tiny interrogation room. As we haul to our feet, Donnato surprises me with a daringly swift kiss on the mouth, leaving the sweet salt taste of apprehension and longing.

The ragged activists are standing in the blustery sunlight outside the facility that houses the county sheriff’s department and jail. All the prisoners have been released on bail except for Bill Fontana, who is still being held for questioning. We gather in groups, our hair matted and our clothes mud-stained, survivors trading stories.

Megan hugs me good-bye.

“This is not the end of it,” she vows. “We’ll be back.” “You will,” I say forlornly. “I have no idea what I’ll be doing. Maybe living in a crapped-up town like this.” The sandstone building that houses the jail blends into a residential area, the single part of town that does not appear to have been completely desolated by the closing of the mill. There is a brick library and a new high school, where male youth wearing baggy pants and sporting goatees linger along the fence, glued to their cell phones, like everywhere else.

“What do you mean?” Megan asks.

She doesn’t have to turn around to sense that Dick Stone is standing now beside her, backlit, every thread on the shoulder of his white Navajo jacket magnified by the cold light. She reaches for his hand and their fingers entwine.

“Ready to get out of here?” he asks.

“Just a sec. What are you going to do, Darcy?”

“I don’t know, Megan. I’m totally screwed. My landlord’s kicking me out. The cops impounded my car because it was parked overnight at the rest stop. It’ll cost a hundred and twenty-five bucks to get it back, and I don’t have a job right now; plus, I’ve been arrested again, so that’s on my record. And guys like Laumann get off scot-free.” “Be at peace and know that things are unfolding exactly as they should,” Dick Stone says enigmatically. He ties a bandanna around his big head. His tanned skin looks vibrant, as if it belongs in the daylight of the high desert; like he’s going out for pancakes, not as if he might have killed a man last night.

Wind slices our faces, bringing genuine tears.

“Really? The cops pulled my records. They saw I was arrested once before, for hacking a computer system down in L.A. They took me in for questioning and it got scary. They said if I didn’t want a felony charge, I’d have to give up names.” The wind cuts like diamonds.

“Names?”

“In the movement. Don’t worry. I didn’t.”

A pause. They believe me.

“You should have seen her last night, Julius, when she jumped into the middle of the horses to save poor Lillian. You were so determined, Darcy. I was so proud of you! You were utterly selfless,” Megan says. “You have a calling for this work.” We stand in silence in the shifting air. A big, fat, hairy tumbleweed gets stuck against the fence of the high school, where two kids are lighting cigarettes.

I hope they don’t set that thing on fire.

Dick Stone is watching me. I squint at his face in the billowy light but catch only the tail end of the look in his eyes, like the whisper of a closing door.

He knows.

“Could I crash with you guys? Just for a couple of days?” “Stay as long as you like,” Megan says.

“I hate to ask. This wasn’t the game plan.” My eyes are watering from the wind and an insane euphoria.

“She can share a room with Sara,” Megan’s telling Stone.

“I have skills,” I offer, although not too fast. “This thing isn’t over. Not until we free the horses for good.” “See?” says Megan.

Dick Stone doesn’t answer. He doesn’t argue, but he doesn’t agree, either, just squeezes Megan’s shoulder and fishes around in the big square pocket of the woolen Navajo jacket for the keys to the white truck. I pretend not to glimpse the butt of the Colt.

Patience. It’s important in our line of work.

It is a common American farmhouse, with a wraparound porch supported by spindle posts and decorated with carvings of Victorian lacework — the kind of house a young man rolling off a freight train from Missouri in 1898 would have said looked just like home. For a hundred years, it has survived searing valley summers and the creeping moisture of the winter with the worn-down crankiness of an arthritic farmer’s wife.

Waiting on the front steps beside Darcy DeGuzman’s knapsack, I am trying to make friends with the house, now that I have come to stay, but it keeps shrugging me off with discomforting distractions: rotted floorboards, sinks rusting in the weeds, a pen with two goats and the three surviving ducks, a lidded cardboard box on the porch with mysterious scratching inside.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, Megan tells me, lots of faraway places were starting to look like home, because factory-made houses could be sent across the country on the railroads. Megan’s grandfather did not have to crawl very far down the tracks to find a hog operation in the Willamette Valley remarkably like the one he’d just blown off in Jefferson City, Missouri. After a few thousand miles and a broken leg sustained in the decisive leap off the boxcar in which he had stolen a ride, this simple two-story homestead must have seemed like heaven to the boy when the farmer who owned the land pulled him from a ditch, dehydrated, two days later. At age fourteen, Megan’s grandfather apprenticed himself to the farmer on the spot, in the hope — like many of us have — that one day he would get back exactly what he had left behind.

That is how Megan’s family came to own the place, and why it is a sanctuary to this day. Because of the kindness of that anonymous farmer, Megan believes this land is blessed, and she will not refuse shelter to animals or humans in need. That is the history anyway. The story she tells. Knowing that she and Dick Stone have shared a secret life on this overgrown, isolated property, undisturbed all these years, suggests another reason to hold on to Grandpa’s goods.

The scratching in the box is making me edgy. Carefully, I open the lid, to discover half a dozen abandoned baby rabbits. I lift one out, holding the warm, soft body in my cupped hands as we share a wordless consolation.

It’s sad in this world without a mom.

A white pickup pulls into the driveway and Megan waves. I put the quivering bunny back.

“Welcome to the lost farm,” she says cheerfully, carrying bags of groceries. “Whatever nobody else wants ends up here. Can you believe someone left these babies at the dump?” “What will happen to them?”

“They’re ours.”

“You have a big heart, Megan.”

“I never had children, so I have animals. My neighbor once asked me to watch her llamas — she left to visit her sister and came back two years later.” Two years? My bullshit detector has started to ping, but Megan is laughing. It’s a joke. Loosen up. Megan is loose, in baggy work pants and an oversized orange linen shirt. Following her through the door, I see that since I last saw her at the BLM corrals, she has put streaks of raspberry and crimson in her ropy gray hair.