April Smith - Judas Horse

“We should hit ’em.” The boy is pointing and alert. “McDonald’s, man.” The drive-thru is bright as an alien spaceship. There is a line of cars.

The bandit asks, “Why?”

“Babylon profits by killing animals,” Slammer chirps. “Why not?” The bandit sighs. “It’s a cliché.”

I guffaw. He cocks an appreciative eye. He loves Darcy for being a little rebel, and right now, stoned as the rest of them, Darcy loves him.

Sara sits upright in the backseat. “McDonald’s is too corporate. Too big.” Slammer scowls. “You’re a freak.”

Kindergarten.

The bandit makes a U-turn and heads out of town.

“Sara has a point,” he instructs, and pulls out a well-worn piece of rhetoric: “Evil needs a face.” The road becomes a country lane, no lights. The houses are spread farther apart. Only by slowing down and scanning the fences caught in the hard white headlights do we notice a small metal sign that says THE WILKINS. Stone turns down a road that bisects a pasture and leads to a newly constructed four-bedroom home with a spindle-post porch — just the kind of hypocritical western touch that ticks the bandit off.

He pulls off the road, beneath a stand of juniper trees, and cuts the lights.

“ That’s the target.”

“Who are the Wilkins?”

“Our friend BLM Deputy State Director Herbert Laumann’s in-laws. The government whore is mooching off the grandparents now.” Because someone destroyed his house and his kid is still in the hospital.

My stomach tilts with the sickening recognition that old obsessions die hard.

Slammer whispers, like he’s seen a prophetic city: “Babylon.” Beneath the dashboard the prudent bandit has mounted a sophisticated scanner that picks up encrypted radio signals used by law-enforcement agencies. He fiddles, listens to the static. Nothing threatening on the airwaves.

The bandit holds up the bag of tricks. “Who wants it?” Slammer: “Me!”

Perversely, Stone hands the bag to Sara instead, watching the disappointment grow once again in Slammer’s face. But then, another whiplash turn of mood, and he offers the boy a Colt.45 pistol.

Like the scenario in undercover school, reality shifts to a perilous key. A screaming siren wakes me from this loopy daze. The kid is armed.

Slammer handles the gun. “What am I supposed to do?” “Figure it out, genius.” Stone gives me the video camera and unlocks the doors. “You have three minutes. Go.” We scamper down the driveway, past a couple of bicycles and a redwood tree house with swings, along a path to the backyard. A raccoon darts from the shadows. The yard is open, no cover. We hunker against the garage wall.

Sara, indignant: “Why’d he give you the gun?” “Because you’re a pussy.”

You can see the weed shining through Sara’s huge eyes. “He wants you to shoot Laumann?” “Let’s do it.” Slammer pushes unsteadily off the wall.

I grab his arm. “No! They have an alarm system,” I say, pointing to random telephone wires.

But Slammer is hyped. “Two more minutes! All we’ve got!” Absurdly, he gets on his belly and combat-crawls across the lawn. Seems like a plan, so I follow. Sara’s behind us, dragging the bag of tricks. This is good. We’re leaving loads of evidence — footprints, fibers off our clothes. Then the lights go on and figures appear in the downstairs windows.

“Freeze!” Slammer hisses.

We are too far away to make the people out.

“Get the video!”

Lying down in the sharp, wet Bermuda grass, zooming in on Herbert Laumann’s family through the camera lens, we discover a mother, father, and baby girl. The baby is sleeping on the mother’s shoulder. She walks up and down as the father yawns, rubbing his temples with two flat palms. They are all wearing nightclothes. The mother has a towel over her shoulder, on which the infant’s cheek is resting, blue-eyed slits staring into babyland.

Slammer says, “Babylon nation, prepare to die.”

The mother sits slowly at a table, balancing carefully to keep the baby still, as the father talks. His ordinary white bureaucratic all-American face — the face of evil — looks collapsed with exhaustion. He reaches out to touch the baby’s head — a cupped hand, a blessing.

“Are you really going to do it?” Sara whispers, mesmerized by the family on the tiny video screen, like a snow globe showing a scene of mystery and magic. In its light, a tiny floating square of light in acres of pitch-black farmland, the youngsters without a home and the spy with a soul of ash are watching transfixed, through a secret window, the simple arithmetic of two loving parents and a child. You would think they had never seen such a thing.

Prone, Slammer tries to sight the gun on wobbling elbows. He should take a lesson from Sterling McCord. The gun quivers.

“Wait!” I say, allegedly watching through the camera. “You don’t have a shot.” “I have it,” he grunts, but he lays the gun down to wipe his sweating palms on the wet grass.

I am a millisecond from disarming him.

He picks up the weapon but doesn’t shoot. The gun is shaking wildly. Comically. This is not surprising. In real wars, there are troops on the battlefield who refuse to fire, because they can’t. Unlike the movies, it doesn’t come naturally, killing another human being.

“Three minutes are way up,” I say gently. “We’re out of here.” Slammer slumps down to the grass and sobs. Helpless, deep, undifferentiated sobs. I lift the gun away.

Sara strokes his bristly head, then kneels and awkwardly puts her arms around his shoulders, laying her cheek on his back.

“Allfather will be mad,” she whispers.

“He can fuck himself,” Slammer replies.

I erase the videotape.

The following day, Slammer walks into the kitchen, to find Dick Stone sitting at the sloping counter with the broken tiles, reading the daily fish report — how many chinook salmon and steelhead have passed through the bypass systems of the lower Columbia River dams — and holding the Colt.45.

The gun is aimed at the doorway. At the next person to walk through the doorway, who would be Slammer, back from the grocery store.

The devil boy stops in his tracks.

“What up?”

“You tell me.”

The gun is pointed at Slammer’s belly.

“What?” Slammer shrugs and grins foolishly, as if missing the joke. “Can I at least put the groceries down?”

Slammer notices his voice has grown small. Besides the black hole of the barrel, Dick Stone is showing him the Look. Slammer, Sara, and I have talked about the Look. You can’t see his eyes when he does it: narrows them to a pair of emotionless chinks that the angry part of him seems to be just gazing through, like the faceless column of light that pulses behind the crack in the TV cabinet where the doors don’t shut. You have no idea what’s on. When Stone hunkers in like that, the worst part is the excruciating silent anticipation, because you know he’s slowly taking in your worthless mistakes and calculating the punishment. “The tax,” he likes to say.

Slammer lowers the grocery bags, shoulders aching, as if he’d been holding sacks of rocks.

“What’d I do?”

Slammer is drowning in panic. He is seventeen years old, a long way from last night’s tears, but the memory of terror is right there.

“Just tell me what I did wrong, okay? So we can talk about it maybe.”

The terror comes from Slammer’s incarceration in the Mississippi Training School, the type of state-run correctional institution for juveniles where they strip you naked and throw you in a freezing cell, hogtie you, and withhold medical care. Slammer had a toothache so bad and so unattended, the abscess ate into his jaw. He was put there in sixth grade for being chronically late to his regular school. This was because his birth mother was an alcoholic and slept all day. When he was released, he hitchhiked west to live with his father. The Mississippi Training School is currently under federal investigation.