April Smith - Judas Horse

“Crashin’ the party.”

“Who’s your friend?”

“Toby Himes,” says the black man, extending his hand.

In the rural crowd, Toby Himes is a standout, neatly dressed in pressed slacks and a windbreaker. He keeps his hands inside his pockets while surveying the scene. He sports a tweed snap-brim cap and a white goatee, and takes his time, not intimidated. At first, I make him for another cop.

Because it takes a minute to dial it in. The biker and the black man, having a drink in the dark? This isn’t random. They know each other. And Mr. Terminate is not eating ashtrays, or washing his hands in someone’s pitcher of suds.

He is calm, like Vesuvius on a good day.

This is so inconsistent with John’s attitude toward the darker nation that the hair goes up on the back of my neck and I hook a leg over the bench, curious to find out why.

I introduce McCord as the wrangler who saved me from the wild horses, tell them the story of the arrests at the BLM corrals and try to draw them in.

“Should we all go out and save the wild horses?”

“I’ll tell you about horses,” wheezes Mr. Terminate, and begins a tale that has nothing to do with horses. “Up in Colorado, some of the fellas came into a load of computer stuff.” “Just dropped from the sky, did it?” Toby Himes laughs and takes a sip of beer. “I know how that is.” “You know bull crap. Excuse my French, but this is top secret shit, vital pieces of our national defense system.” “A vital piece of our defense network is missing?” McCord says. “John, you know, that really helps me sleep at night.” “How’d they steal it?” I ask.

Mr. Terminate shakes his head and pours a little Jack into a plastic cup.

“That I cannot say. But I do know this. ” He points a pinkie with an inch-long curved fingernail, a built-in spoon for snorting coke.

“Those computers were sold to the Indians for a shitload of silver and turquoise. ” We are openmouthed. Toby Himes giggles.

“And then,” whispers Mr. Terminate dramatically, “ they buried it. ” Pause.

“Who buried it?”

“That I cannot say.”

But he furrows his eyebrows menacingly, as if telling a ghost story, which he probably is.

Toby Himes: “Get the story straight. The bikers buried it, or the Indians buried it?” Mr. Terminate looks confused. “The way I heard it from Julius is the Indians buried it. After they stole it back.” “The Indians stole it back?”

“The Indians damn right stole it back. Now, the fellas I know— ” “You mean Hell’s Angels?”

“That’s a dated concept, darlin’. We are businessmen.” Another sip of Jack. “ The fellas I know, that knew where the turquoise was buried, when it was buried on the reservation, happened to be in prison at the time. But before they got murdered, they got word to the outside.” Another dramatic pause.

“So,” ventures McCord after this baffling recitation, “did your boys ever find the turquoise?” Mr. Terminate chuckles. “Rest assured it is buried in a very safe place. You think I’m fibbing? You ask Julius. He’s the one got custody of it now.” “We’re asking you.”

“They say it’s buried beside a pipe.”

“A peace pipe!” echoes McCord with a straight face.

“All’s I know, there’s a marker, and it’s yellow. And a cage of wild beasts guarding it. But don’t go running out there.” “Don’t worry. We won’t.”

“Because the turquoise is guarded by an ancient Umpqua Indian curse!” “Thanks for the warning, John.”

When Toby Himes is ready to leave, I claim that nature calls and follow him up the road and get the tag number on his 1995 Dodge pickup. I figure if his talking to Mr. Terminate is nothing, it’s nothing. If it’s something, then it is.

Sterling McCord is waiting with two fresh beers, as I somehow knew he would be. We go a couple of rows back into the orchard and sit on the clean-swept dirt and lean our backs against a tree. We can hear the music clearly. The crescent shed still rocks with talk and laughter.

“What do you think?” he asks.

“About the turquoise?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I think John was making it up as he went along.”

“I heard the same story,” McCord tells me, “from an old-timer, works in town at the Seed N’ Feed. The curse, the same darn thing.” Against the current of two beers, the nearness of a tightly knit male body, and a summer night crazy with lavender, a nebulous connection forces itself to focus. Rosalind, administrative assistant and keeper of the family flame down in Los Angeles, told me Dick Stone worked undercover on a case called Turquoise. And now he allegedly has possession of so-called buried treasure. Is it real, or does turquoise have a double meaning? Some other layer of deception Stone has embroidered over the past, like the flying corn on his cap?

“There was a yellow fire hydrant out in the wash. Where we ran across the foal. Maybe that’s the marker.” McCord nods, chugging beer. “I saw it.”

“You did not.”

“I might look like a dog-eared fool, but occasionally I do pay attention.” He takes his time to grin real slow. I wish he didn’t have that brown spot on his gum where the tooth is missing.

“But why should I share the treasure with you?” he asks.

“Because you like me.” I notice that sparkly feeling creeping up from where it hides, damned if I’m on the job. “Let’s be honest. You liked me from the very first time you were rude to me.” “When was that?”

“When you saved my life. You said, ‘Hey. You shouldn’t be messing with wild animals.’ Hell of a thing to say to a lady in distress.” “That wasn’t rude, ma’am. That’s a fact.”

“What’s a fact?”

“I am never rude to beautiful ladies. Let’s go find the turquoise.”

The luxe interior of the Silverado softens the wallop of rocks and crevices along the access road leading out of the power station. The first time we drove it in the noonday sun, with Sara, panicked, between us, clouds of dust rose in our wake, and they may be rising still, but in this blackness it is impossible to see anything except what is pinned by the headlights.

McCord eases the truck off the road and cuts the engine. This time I am shivering as we stand at the edge, and not just from cold. Behind us, the power station, illuminated by security lights, looks like a futuristic prison. McCord, holding a flashlight, leads down the embankment, following something — an instinct or a trail — searching for the riverbed where we found the foal, but nothing looks familiar in the half-light. No old-woman tree. No ancient streambed with banks of dying roots. But alive inside of me, that complex delta twists and turns with desire, as if all the tiny sparks in this dark landscape had been melted together to form a glittering molten river of light, aching for the release of the sea.

Across the low terrain we can hear the distant party on the farm, like voices from a speaker in an old wrecked car. A lone wind thrums through my earrings as a drowsy voice argues the lessons learned: Never sleep with a suspect. But McCord isn’t a suspect. Is he?

“Where was it?” he asks.

I remember that as I sat by the foal and cooled its body with a rag, a small concrete bunker rose from the wheatlike grass. When McCord’s flashlight sweeps across it, I direct him that way. Climbing through an oak grove and then coarse shrubs with leathery leaves, we discover the bunker and a wire cage built over it.

“There’re your wild animals guarding the treasure,” McCord says dryly, running the beam over a gate valve with screw wheels enclosed in the cage.