April Smith - Judas Horse

Old-timers say the first nut drops on the first of September. Those late-summer days, each of us on the farm seemed suspended in a kind of waiting. Sara and I would climb the ladders in 106-degree heat to count the dried-up moths in the traps, then spend the rest of the day reading fashion magazines. Nobody cooked anymore. The vegetables were sold, allegedly to help pay for the Big One. Despite the abundance of the garden, we were living on pancakes.

Slammer was so creepily polite to Megan and Stone, I thought one day he’d go berserk and kill them with an ax. But Mom and Dad kept him busy, preparing for the harvest. Inside the steamy shed, Slammer and Stone labored over the homemade nut sorter, a ludicrous contraption of green scrap metal, gas motors and exhaust pipes, rusty conveyor belts, and plywood hammered together with no apparent logic. I was really looking forward to what happened when they turned it on.

In the heat, brushfires kept breaking out among the troops.

“He’s lying,” I heard Slammer whispering to Sara. “He’s flat-out lying when he says the Big One’s coming. It’s just to keep us here.”

“How do you know?”

“Because that’s him. He’s a liar. Don’t defend him, ’ho.”

“I’m not defending him, and don’t you dare call me that. It’s like nobody cares what I’m going through. Nobody cares if I walk out the door into the middle of the freeway.”

“If nobody gives a shit, why don’t you do it?”

Megan and I weren’t getting along, either. To prepare for brittle making, she had me disassemble and clean every part of the industrial stove in the sweltering basement. She kept hauling out giant spoons and candy thermometers, and I dreaded the hellish days and nights when we would have to keep pots of scalding sugar syrup boiling around the clock.

Indications are the harvest will be good, and standing in the full-blown orchard, I can’t help feeling pride in our fake little farming family. Stone’s prudent trimming has created thick new growth. Underneath the leafy canopy is an Alice-in-Wonderland world of cool shadows and secret whisperings. The cries of blue jays pierce the murky gloom, and the smooth orchard floor is chilly as marble.

“You wanted to talk to me?”

Stone avoids my eyes. Instead, he rises, turns his back, and wanders toward a tree, fingering the sprouts at the end of a twig. I wait in silence while he inspects the new green buds.

“How much do you know about the sex life of filberts?” he asks at last.

“Got to be more interesting than mine.”

“It’s one of the stranger perversities of nature. Filberts require cross-pollination from two different plants. Their sexual fulfillment depends on the wind.”

“I can identify.”

“That’s why we cultivate both the Ennis and the Butler variety.” He indicates two trees, which look the same. “The Ennis is the germinator and the Butler is the pollinator.”

“Let me guess: male and female.”

“Yes, but which is which?”

I squeeze a little green bean hanging off a shoot.

“Male. The flower is called a catkin.”

This is the value of high school biology.

Stone nods in a distracted way, the weary science teacher.

“Despite the lateness of the season, some of the female flowers are still rudimentary. This is the ovary.” He rolls a bud between his fingers and then crushes it beneath a thumbnail. “It hasn’t developed and it never will.”

“I see that.”

“I know who you are,” says Stone.

Very slowly, he turns his face. The seething rage echoes the time at the traffic light when the rock ’n’ roll commandos were on our way to off Herbert Laumann the first time. Stone’s half-bearded cheeks glazed in the red stop light. Three measured words to Slammer when he honked at the Iranians in the van. “Don’t…do…that.” And Slammer didn’t.

The hot breath of summer puffs against my clammy forehead. My palm goes involuntarily there, like a woman about to faint. Crows are barking in the far branches.

“Which of us is more pathetic?” The pain in his eyes is like a hot flash of metal.

“What do you mean?”

“You were duped by the Bureau, just like me. Skip the humiliating dance, Ana.”

“Why do you call me that?”

“I like you, Ana. Don’t blow it by being stupid.” He sinks back into the beach chair, rubbing his meaty cheeks like Don Corleone.

“You’ve been initiated into this group — kind of like being a ‘made man’ in the Mafia,” the psychiatrist said.

“I’d play it the same way,” he says, “so you don’t have to. I have an excellent source. As you no doubt learned way back, there are different kinds of sources. There are longtime sources and open sources, both on the Bureau’s payroll, and ‘pocket sources’—personal connections who won’t take money because they think cooperating with the FBI is the American thing to do…. But this old friend of mine, he’s impeccable. He is an inside source. Someone who’s been ripped off by the Bureau culture and is only too happy to fuck someone else in return.

“This impeccable source of mine, he tells me an agent named Mike Donnato is working the national security side of the house. He describes how Special Agent Ana Grey was outfitted with the cover of Darcy DeGuzman in order to penetrate FAN. We’re the terrorist cell and I’m the big bad guru.” He touches his chest softly. “I told you. I’m not the one who made me paranoid.”

He hasn’t killed me yet, so maybe there still is a way.

An image comes to mind from a documentary movie, in which a mountain climber falls through the snow into a bottomless crevasse and clings to an ice shelf 150 feet down. No way can he climb up. His only choice is to descend into the unknown — go deeper into the vertical shaft and hope to find a way out.

Keep making decisions. Even if they’re wrong.

Go deeper.

“You’re right. I am an agent. And you’re a former agent who dropped out in the seventies.”

“They’re still after me.” Stone allows a smug smile.

“Yes, they are.”

“More than thirty years later. The incompetence is really something. No wonder we’re losing the war on terror.”

“This impeccable inside source you describe. We thought there was a leak, but that it came from higher up.”

“Uh-uh. Bottom-feeder. Rooney Berwick is the name.”

But you won’t live to tell.

“What tipped you off to me?”

Dick Stone fishes around in the pocket of his shorts and shows me the five shell casings he picked up in Laumann’s driveway.

“Never leave your brass at the shooting scene. I made that mistake with the cop on the roof. Otherwise, I’m a pretty good sniper, because I’m a tight-ass finicky bastard. I always use the same brand — Remington. But there was only one Remington on the ground, the live round I loaded into the gun. The other four are Winchester. See?”

The tiny etching on each copper jacket says WIN-45.

“You switched the magazine for blanks, didn’t you, darlin’? Very slick, but the Bureau screwed up. The dummy bullets should have been Remington.”

Jason Ripley secured the blanks.

“A rookie,” I say bitterly. “He wasn’t thinking.”

“What do you expect?” Stone claps my shoulder sympathetically. “They’re not all as good as you and me.”

“I wasn’t that good, apparently.”

“You were doing fine. Until I talked to Berwick. The arrows started lining up.”

“Frankly, Dick, it’s a relief. I couldn’t have kept it going.”

“Enlighten me, Ana Grey. What were they thinking?” He removes the Colt from a holster under a loose guayabera shirt and holds it in both hands. “They already sent one of their clowns.”