April Smith - Judas Horse

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.

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.

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.