April Smith - Judas Horse

“What does it do?”

“Blows shit up,” Slammer replies. “You pull that cord.” “I don’t think so.”

I try to wriggle out, but he’s latched the buckles.

“No big deal. Just a little pop and red stuff sprays all over the place.” “Another blood bomb? Like the one at the school?” “New prototype,” Stone says briskly. “Ten times more powerful. For the Big One.” He adjusts something sticking out of the pack.

“What’s the Big One? Hey, what are you doing?”

He has flipped open my cell phone and is scrolling through the numbers.

“Where is area code five six one?” he calls, backing away.

“West Palm Beach, Florida.”

“Nervous, Darcy?”

“Not at all. Are you?”

“My heart is going pitty-pat.” He reads a number. “Whose is this?” “My dad’s.”

“Pull the cord!” Slammer yells.

Sara’s beside him, arms crossed over her chest.

“Should I hit redial and find out?” Dick Stone asks. “You tell me.” Is this another head game? He was undercover. Does he know how the phony phone numbers work? Did the FBI use the same technique in the seventies?

“Go ahead and hit redial. Say hi to my dad.”

The relays worked at the off-site, but they haven’t been tested since.

Why does Stone hesitate, staring at the phone?

Slammer: “Pull the cord, dingdong!”

Now I see. Stone has rigged the cell so it will detonate the bomb inside the backpack — just like at Herbert Laumann’s house. Just like with Steve. A seven-digit key code on an FBI phone is about to make another undercover go up like a roasted guinea pig.

What a turn-on for him.

“You are such a chicken shit,” Slammer yells, and rushes me, roaring like a linebacker. I run, but he makes the tackle. We both go down and roll as Dick Stone warns, “I’m hitting redial,” and Slammer gropes for the cord and pulls.

The sharp report of a firecracker. The world goes silent. Burning vapor stings my legs, and in an instant we are both covered in slime, staggering in the center of a perfect twelve-foot circle of blood.

Dick Stone whoops with delight. “It works! The Big One, man!” Sara is bent over, laughing at our crimson horror-mask faces. “Look at you!” Stone lumbers toward me, giggling, the phone outstretched.

“Sorry, darlin’. Dad’s not home.”

This sounds extremely funny to Sara and Stone.

I put the phone to my ear.

“This is George DeGuzman. I can’t get to the phone right now—” The voice is familiar: George DeGuzman, Darcy’s dad, as played by SAC Robert Galloway.

Backstopping.

A screen door between the truth and me.

My fingers are trembling and slippery. It is hard to keep a grip. The phone wants to leap out of my hand.

Megan appears on the front steps, breathless from the run up the basement stairs at the sound of the explosion. She stares at the ludicrous scene, like a postmodern take on hell, Slammer and I swathed in bloody stigmata, blinded souls in a Day-Glo ring of red.

“Are you all out of your minds?” she says.

Sara and Stone are helpless, holding on to each other, wiping tears of manic laughter.

“We’re having some fun,” he manages to reply.

“He’s on to us.”

“Calm down.”

“He found the cell phone. Went through the numbers, like he knew exactly what he was looking for — a leak. A mistake.” “Were there? Mistakes?”

“No, but Mike, he took my wallet and watch. Removed all contact with the outside world. He’s watching me.” “Of course he’s watching you. He’s protecting the cult. Besides, he’s a raging paranoid. Reality check: You’re talking to me, so he has failed. Where is he now?” “Flailing.”

“Sailing?”

I have no patience. “He is flailing —pulling a rotor to clear the vegetation between the trees.” Dick Stone has not discovered the tiny Oreo phone, hidden in the barn under a heavy tack box. I volunteer to feed the animals at first light because it is the only time to be alone. I put on sweats and clogs and hurry across the yard, past the rabbit pen (their numbers dwindling — another one stolen or escaped) before the others wake. The worn barn boards ring with a note of optimism. Here is grain. Here a warm muzzle. The clang of the bucket, the needy cry. In the quiet, the dualities that shout inside my head like opposing political commentators settle down to nothing but the hollow thump of hindquarters on wood, the chesty cough, the uneventful silence in between.

At this same hour in a gated community of postmodern homes in Simi Valley, California, family life is stirring. A grueling commute to Westwood lies ahead for Mike Donnato, who takes my reports while getting dressed and his three sons off to school.

I go on to tell Donnato about the punishment in the orchard — being tripped up when I defended Sara, and the bullying with the loaded backpack.

“He was testing a blood bomb — more powerful — for what he calls ‘the Big One.’” Donnato considers. “Dick Stone is sounding like another David Koresh.” “Please God, no!”

Koresh, who believed he was the incarnation of Jesus Christ, was the leader of the Branch Davidians, a religious group that went down in flames during a suicidal standoff in Waco, Texas. It was another government debacle, as tragic and deluded as the FBI’s confrontation with Native Americans at Pine Ridge, South Dakota, where Jack Coler and Ron Williams were killed. In Waco, seven hundred agents and law-enforcement personnel, including Delta Force, attacked with Bradley fighting vehicles and tanks, recklessly shooting tear gas into the compound and causing an inferno. Koresh and some eighty of his followers killed themselves or were burned to death, including children.

Here on the lost farm, birds are singing their hearts out and wind ruffles the big-leaf maples. In the distance, cars begin their noisy claim to the country roads, and deep in the valley, a chain saw. Closer, there is the scrape of hooves on the old planks, and the faint ringing of chains in the cross ties. As I gaze through the wide doorway of the barn at the placid Victorian farmhouse, half-sunk in coronas of lavender, my stomach churns. The Branch Davidians believed their spread was a sanctuary, too.

“What’s the mood?”

“Megan is depressed, Stone is high. The kids are staying out of the line of fire.” “What’s going on with Megan and Stone?”

“She wanted to return these beautiful horses to freedom, and it all turned to shit.” “Sounds like an opening.”

“She’s a lot more practical. He’s all Action Jackson, flies off the handle.” “If there’s a wedge between them, drive it.” “Roger that.”

“Hold on a minute—”

I overhear Donnato speaking sharply to his wife, Rochelle, and wish I hadn’t. It’s the kind of talk that other people shouldn’t hear — the phone tap that blows the cover. If I were married to him, we would sound like that sometimes, too, which kind of kills the fantasy. On the other hand, would I rather be in an air-conditioned bedroom, arguing with a good-looking man in his underwear, or standing in a pile of horse manure?

I turn for solace to Sirocco, a pretty mustang mare with buckskin coloring and a white blanket with black spots on her rear. Three months ago Megan rescued her from a racetrack where she had been a companion horse to Thoroughbreds. She had fallen on the track and broken her hip. She was pregnant at the time and lost the baby. Now she is unrideable, suited only for a pet or the slaughterhouse.

Sirocco is patient with amateurs like me and doesn’t kick while I hide out in her stall. From here, I have good sight lines through the barn doors. Across the road, the tops of the hazelnut trees are still in darkness, but as the sun rises, golden light begins to play across the orchard floor, each rut and groove struck visible, as if a ghostly herd had left a thousand hoofprints filled with shadow. The crows are making a racket, pierced by the engine of Stone’s tractor starting up with an aggressive whine.