April Smith - Judas Horse

“You did not complete the mission,” Stone replies, “you ungrateful little shit.” Now his eyes seem pinched and tired.

“I am grateful. You got me off the streets, man.” He bounces around the kitchen, flinging his arms.

“I gave you a job, to kill Herbert Laumann,” Stone says philosophically. “You failed.”

“Hey, I’m still up for the Big One.”

Slammer thinks he is showing loyalty by endorsing the bandit’s mysterious plan—“the Big One” that will “bring down the house.” Now he takes up another of the bandit’s themes.

“I didn’t do it because the FBI is watching us, dude. They’re tapping our phones, following us around—”

“Someone surely is. But the larger point I’m trying to get at,” Stone says, “is that people around here do what I tell them to.”

Discipline.

“Of course. That’s a given.” Slammer smiles with fine white teeth. The sight of his smile is beautiful and rare, like an eagle in flight. “You’re the Allfather.”

“I gave you a gun,” he says. “I gave you my trust. You abused it.”

“They weren’t home!” Slammer protests, thick lips blubbering. “I would’ve done it — but they weren’t home!”

“Come with me. I am the tax collector,” Stone says.

“Hey, what about the ice cream?”

“Put the ice cream away.”

Slammer may be wildly thinking of attack or escape, but in the end, he goes quietly. The bandit did not even have to show the gun.

It is dark when Sara and I get back from picking Megan up from the airport after Lillian’s memorial service. We took along a new black-and-white kitten we’d adopted in order to cheer Megan up. I am driving. I take my eyes from the road for an instant — to smile at Sara’s pretty profile as she teases the little guy with a tassel on her bag — when she looks up and shrieks, “Oh my God!” and I slam the brakes.

The tires kick up gravel and the pickup fishtails to a stop. In the white glare of the headlights we see Slammer’s head sticking out of a hole in the ground, in which Dick Stone is burying him up to the neck.

Slammer’s garish face is red and contorted and stained with tears. At eye level with the chassis of the truck, he has been screaming for us to stop.

We rush out of the car like fiends let loose, washed out almost to transparency by the hot light, all three of us shouting and reaching through ribbons of iridescent dust to stop it, stop him.

“What’s wrong with you?” Megan bellows at Stone as I grab for the shovel.

“He’s a traitor.”

We wrestle for the handle, and he’s strong, flailing wildly, like someone beating at the bars that imprison them.

“I gave him a gun. He didn’t do the job.”

“What job?” Megan cries, pulling futilely on his shirt. “What job? What job?”

“The boy has turned on me,” says Stone. “The FBI is all around us. What is he? A cocksucking little wimp ass piece of shit.”

“Talk to me, Julius,” I gasp, watching Sara emerging from the dark with a heavy pitchfork. “What do you want?”

Stone’s voice has dropped to a mocking growl. “Tell them about the atrocities. Tell them about the lies.”

“Help me,” Slammer sobs, twisting futilely in his grave.

Sara tries to dig the hard-packed dirt.

Megan is still tugging on Stone’s shirt, sliding her arms around him from behind. “It’s safe,” she croons. “We’re here on the farm and we’re safe. Let’s calm down.”

Stone’s is the grating voice of madness, coming from a hollow gourd: “Direct action is nothing to take lightly. Government lackeys have to die.”

My hands still grip the shovel. “Government lackeys like Herbert Laumann?”

“I want Laumann to die like a pig. Cut his throat, cut it like a pig’s—”

“He can’t hear you,” Megan gasps, wild-eyed.

Stone’s manic desperation short-circuits my ability to think. I have to fix it, take it in, do what it takes to relieve his confusion and pain, as I always did with my grandfather, Poppy.

“All right, all right. You want Herbert Laumann dead. You’re mad at Slammer because he didn’t kill him. It’s not his fault. Leave the kid alone. He can’t do it, but I can. I’ll do it for you, Allfather. I will shoot the guy, okay? I’ll shoot him fifty-two times, until he’s dead, really dead, okay? Give it to me! I can do it.”

He jerks the shovel away from me and raises it to strike, throwing Megan back.

“Darcy, watch out!”

“You’re a liar, too!” Stone tells me.

“I will. I promise! I know what it’s like. I once killed a man.”

Panting, we eye each other in the screaming headlights.

“And I’ll tell you something else!” I’m pointing the finger, dancing with a kind of hysteria. “You think Slammer betrayed your trust? You are not the only one, pal. I know what that’s like, too. When someone you are stupid enough to fall in love with turns on you and completely undermines you and destroys your life and there’s no way back and you have to kill him.”

Even through the blinding paranoid rage, he can see the truth of what I’ve done. What Darcy’s done. Stone lets the shovel drop.

“Come on, baby,” Megan whispers. “I have you, safe and sound. Come on now. You’re with me,” and she guides him through the shadows.

Sara and I dig Slammer out. Encrusted in damp earth for long, torturous hours, he has fouled himself.

We help him to his feet.

Sara is crying. Slammer’s arms are around us both, leaning heavily on our shoulders. As he walks, he sheds loose rocks and torn roots, a man so debased, he is made of dirt.

“We can’t stay here,” Sara whispers, but then she hears the kitten crying from where it is hiding under the truck, and thinks of the orchard of hazelnut trees, and the rescued ducks and goats, and Sirocco and the white foal, Geronimo, all living peacefully on the farm. She can’t understand the contradictions.

“God — I’m so sorry — I couldn’t see you until the last minute.” My voice is genuinely shaking. “What was he doing?”

“He said it was a test. Of fire and ice.”

A light is on upstairs. We move toward the house.

A trial of fire and ice. That’s the way you might describe my grandfather’s visit, when he flew out from California to attend my swearing-in as a new agent from the FBI Academy. Steve Crawford and I were in the same graduating class, of course, and had naïvely planned to announce to our families that we were getting married, anticipating that our excitement, on top of graduation, would make it one hell of a bang-up weekend celebration for all.

My grandfather was booked into the Days Inn at the very same mall where I would play out Darcy’s first contact with the counterfeiters when I returned more than ten years later for undercover school. Back when Poppy stayed there, the motel was newly built and did not smell of urine under the stairs, and behind the property there was just the Dairy Queen, where I would devour that memorable double cheeseburger — not a full-blown shopping strip with a multiplex and gym.

I spotted Poppy from the pool area, striding along the upper deck of the motel. You could tell he was in law enforcement by his sporty disregard of the surroundings (I’m here; get out of my way), an authority he always carried, licensed or not in that particular locality, as if the special nature of his calling extended worldwide supremacy to Everett Morgan Grey. Never mind the only felons were shrieking boys, cannonballing into the pool with huge atomizing splashes; my grandfather’s eyes were fixed on the door of his room with intention to prevail. He wore a white Panama hat, a brown suit, and a sport shirt open at the neck, exposing a freckled chest. His ham hand swung my mother’s old lacquered suitcase as lightly as if it still held dresses for my dolls.