Judas Horse (12 page)

Thirteen

Dick Stone has them in his sights. Hard to discern in the distance in a basin of bunchgrass. So far, he’s had no luck—the brown dots he spotted through the Army-issue field glasses turned out to be cattle. But these, at the limit of his vision, move like horses.

He swerves off the highway into a gravel turnout, gets out of the truck and opens a gate in the barbed-wire fence that leads to hundreds of thousands of federally protected acres.

He loops the gate closed and drives a slow half mile past markers that warn
RESEARCH AREA—NO TRESPASSING
,
where he cuts the engine and eases the door shut. A ground squirrel streaks by. The quiet is a muffled roar, tangible, as if he’d plugged his ears with silence. Soon the crunching of the bandit’s boots on the granular volcanic dust becomes not his; nor does he care if the white wool Pendleton jacket with the colorful Navajo design draws attention from some nervous BLM patrol. It is not likely that they’d throw him against the hood of the Suburban, pat him down, and find the Colt .45 where he’s holding it right now, deep inside his jacket pocket.

He trudges uphill through a valley framed by dark gray magma cliffs, some uplifted, some half-sunken in a spectacular collision ten thousand years ago. He has to watch his footing. The porous rocks are sharp. He’s lost the horses in the folds of the hills, but he knows they like to shade up under the junipers, where he saw them through the field glasses. When he gains the rise, he sees their colors in the bluebunch wheatgrass a hundred yards away. He smiles at their placid grazing and begins to circle slowly upwind.

He spirals closer. His training as a sniper in the Army keeps him low. In the deep spaces of the canyon, the animals must seem to jump-cut to a larger size with every turn—from tiny toys to very large and present as he drops behind the willows and observes. The weather is changing fast. Over the butte to the west, a pulsing cloud like a black jellyfish is trailing dark ribbons of rain. The wind has shifted and the mustangs know he is there; finely muzzled heads rise and point alertly in his direction. He has come upon a band of thirty or forty—pintos, duns, and chestnuts, with half a dozen foals. Every individual is strong and perfectly formed, the essence of natural beauty.

Or maybe he is thinking about bloodshed. Dinnertimes at the farm he would lecture us assembled radicals on how the Spanish horse—the bloodline of these mustangs goes back to the legions of Rome—defined the history of the New World. How the stamina of the Spanish breed was the means by which Cortés destroyed the Aztecs, Coronado fought the Shoshone, the Shoshone conquered its neighboring tribes and then, in grand restitution, wiped out the Spanish settlers on Deadman’s Trail.

Horses, he would remind us, have made war possible on an increasingly staggering scale, just part of the continuum that led to Vietnam and beyond. And everyone knows the way those grandiose engagements always end—piles of body parts in a decimated field, the arrogance of politics, the incompetence of rank. What he withheld from us then was how he had been a victim, too, of smug and inept leadership in the FBI. Now he touches the gun inside his pocket like a talisman to calm the vengeful scenarios.

Freed of the perversities of humankind, horses are peaceful and curious. If you show patience, they will accommodate your presence. He was certain the wild herd would spook, but they just look at him and go about their business, thirty yards away. They have relationships. They play, they fight, and they communicate. Let’s go over there, they seem to say. A spotted baby trots behind its mom. Another sits on long folded legs in the grass. A mare suddenly charges two others, neck twisted and teeth out. Without judgment, with no malice, the interactions of the horses ebb and flow as ribbons of snow begin to stream across the valley. And now a brown and white pinto stallion has trotted close enough to check the bandit out. Neck arched, ears up, its eyes and nose are pointed at him with otherworldly focus.

Pinned. He is pinned by the stallion’s gaze and made to see himself alone and out of place, trespassing once again. The stallion gallops indifferently away. The bandit hugs his knees and huddles on the ground, shamefully human.

H
e loses sense of time.

He becomes a Buddha under a willow tree, surrounded by four-legged gods—now twenty, now ten yards away. For the first time in his life, he experiences unconditional acceptance. He knows what freedom is. Their freedom is his freedom, too. His heart softens toward the cities beyond the silent rim of the mountains, a roar he cannot remember or imagine. Out there is a world of hurt, and all balled up inside it are the bad and evil things he has done. He listens to his own breathing, close in his ears. The horses, moving through the sage, are uncannily silent. The trouble is that the absence of sound itself is elastic, and it caroms off the basalt cliffs, hitting him with a thousand stinging thoughts. One of them might be repentance.

The helicopter explodes above the ridge like thunder. The man in the Navajo jacket on the ground cries out and rolls, hands to ears, rocking like a child against the scream of annihilation. He is blasted by a turbulence of dry leaves and razor-sharp black stones and curls up to protect his eyes, and then, when it passes, he struggles to his hands and knees to survey the empty grass where the horses had been—with love and grief as profound as if he were a refugee returning to his childhood home, only to find it burning to the ground.

T
he horses are running. Dick Stone is running with them, gunning the pickup along a parallel dirt road that climbs through the preserve. As the ridge falls away, he can see the entire Catlow Valley and the brown and white and buckskin-colored animals, led by the pinto stallion, fanning out before the helicopter, which is like a monstrous green bottle fly with ferociously buzzing wings, biting at their flanks no matter how adroitly they crisscross the salt flats, bearing down relentlessly until their coats turn dark with foam.

The mustangs have galloped almost twenty-five miles without stopping, even the little ones. He thinks about their beating hearts and the working of their lungs. And now the black jellyfish cloud is loosing sleet, which hits the bandit in the face as he leans out through the open window to track the herd, because it is suddenly important that he not lose contact.

Out of the foothills, wranglers in bright yellow rain gear ride from their hiding places on obedient quarter horses, and the bandit, having pulled up to the last overlook before the road turns east, stands in the freezing rain and watches as they channel the mustangs through a set of camouflaged fences that lead toward the corrals. The pilot of the chopper circles low. On its signal, an air horn blasts the valley, and the bandit sees another yellow-coated cowboy standing up in the sage, holding the lead of an unsaddled dun-colored mare with a black mane and tail.

The cowboy releases her and the mare takes off eagerly, going at tremendous speed, because she has been trained to run for a grain bucket hanging at the end of the capture funnel. The tired herd sees her and follows. For several heart-stopping minutes she takes the lead. Then she flies down the chute neatly as an arrow, and the mustangs trample behind her into captivity.

The bandit lowers the fogged-up field glasses with disgust. He hates the dun mare and her handlers. He has always reserved his deepest contempt for spies, for collaborators who can be bought for a bucket of grain.

The cowboys have a name for the single animal that betrays the herd. They call it the “Judas horse.”

Fourteen

I am using the Oreo cell phone that works on a scrambled signal, sitting in the Civic outside the Big River Stage Stop with the heater going, watching tiny beads of hail popping off the windshield, grateful to Rooney Berwick, deep in the warren of the lab, for fashioning this invisible lifeline to my partners in the real world. The vehicles belonging to the radicals are scattered around the rest stop. Most of us have spent the rainy afternoon in our cars. It is 5:00 p.m., still hours before dark, and the turbulent early-spring weather continues to swing between boiling black cloud and seas of pearl blue.

“What are you doing?” Donnato asks.

“Well, right now watching it hailing. So far, we’ve had rain, sleet, sunshine, and snow—all at the same time. How is it where you are?”

“Clear and cold. Looks like we’ll have good visibility tonight.”

Donnato is speaking from the sheriff department’s county jail, the command center for the stakeout at the horse corrals. The department is headquartered in a flyspeck of a town twenty-five miles from the Big River Stage Stop. The town grew up around a massive lumber mill, but when it shut down, the place curled up and atrophied to empty taverns and one wind-busted main street where the last survivors are a decrepit movie house and a dilapidated Chinese restaurant.

“The strategy for tonight has changed.” I’m looking at a hand-drawn map Bill Fontana has given us. “We’re taking three vehicles and leaving them in a turnout at Needle Gorge, highway marker two twenty-four, just east of the corrals.”

“I’ll inform the SWAT team. Don’t worry. Once you’re in, nobody’s getting out of the compound,” Donnato assures me. “Be safe.”

“You, too.”

“Roger that.”

I
haul out of the Civic and for the second or third time during that long day wander into the Big River Stage Stop and poke through cans of motor oil and beef stew on the sparsely stocked shelves.

There are many interesting things to look at, such as three different color portraits of John Wayne, and a collection of old snow globes with dried-up brown insides—a gorilla, a golfer, a steamboat. In a booth at the rear I find Megan and two other activists—Lillian, a seventyish bird-watcher, and her friend Dot. They are now stripped of their thick parkas, and their mousy white hair and plain wire glasses, their thin shoulders and veined hands reveal two elderly women, defenseless as nuns. How will they keep up with us in the dark?

I wait for some acknowledgment in order to join them. They are talking about migrating birds. Spread across this surreal landscape, there are wetlands that provide sanctuary for hundreds of species. I hover at the edge of the conversation, drawn back to the banishment from the pack by my former friend Barbara Sullivan at the Los Angeles field office; boys may be stupid, but girls rip the heart out of you. Or is it that our hearts are already broken by the clumsy swipes of careless mothers? The undercutting remark, the florid slap across the face. Too jealous, too deranged, or, like my own mother, gone too early to make repairs.

When the bird-watchers report they have seen three trumpet swans sailing along by the side of the road, I jump in with
“Oh my God, how exciting!”
and am finally invited to sit down.

Now they are talking about rocks. Lillian and Dot turn out to be retired high school teachers with a lot to say—not only about birds but also about the joys of collecting minerals. Underneath her yam-colored parka, Megan is wearing a fuzzy sweater knitted with ropes of purple; her hair bursts out from tortoiseshell clips. Her eyes are bright and interested. The proprietress brings four coffees. When she is gone, Megan reaches into her knapsack and pulls out a silver flask. Dot reacts, all fluttery, but Lillian is eager and Megan matter-of-fact. I think about the empty wineglasses that littered the table at Omar’s.

Megan pours a dark liquid into my cup. “Going to be cold out there tonight.”

It is bourbon.

“Wow, this helps,” I say gratefully. “I am so stressed.”

“You’ll get used to it,” Lillian says. “Whatever you do, when they arrest you, don’t resist.”

Dot taps her teeth. “The police broke my bridge in Atlanta.”

I swallow the bourbon-flavored coffee. “No, not about freeing the horses. I mean I’m stressed about my life. I’m being kicked out of my apartment in Portland. I have to find another place.”

Angelo said, “Make sure they know Darcy needs a place to stay.”

Lillian laughs and waves her wrinkled fingertips.
“Vasanas,”
she says dismissively.

“What does that mean?”

“It’s a Sanskrit word for things of this earthly life,” Lillian says. “Bad habits. Mental bondage.”

“Well, excuse my French.” I pout, and Lillian pats my hand.

W
e pull into the total darkness of the turnout at Needle Gorge. The weather has cleared and it is as if the curtains of civilization have been drawn aside to show us the stars, lush and impenetrable, as they looked 200 million years ago from this same naked plateau. Our breath forms as soon as we are out of the cars. Immediately, there is giggling. Someone has to go to the bathroom. Someone else flicks on a small red beam to check the map.

We follow the highway. I wonder what Fontana’s alibi would be if a sheriff saw us walking along in the dark single file. But for Darcy, this is the most thrilling thing she has ever done. I grip the sleeve of the conspirator in front of me with exhilaration. “Your first time?” whispers the woman kindly. “Stay by me. You’ll be okay.”

We shuffle down a steep driveway, causing a small slide of pebbles. Two lights are shining from posts near the entrance to the site. Between them is a gate secured by a circle of heavy chain. Fontana snips the links with a pair of bolt cutters and we’re in.

No more giggling now. Ahead is the compound of corrals, lit by a single lamp over the barn. I am shivering with cold, small tremors close to the bone. Suddenly, a spotlight appears above us, a circle of white around a huge fat owl in a tree. Its markings are beautiful, the eyes glossy black. There are shushes and rasping shouts.
“Great horned owl!”
And the flashlight snaps off. Lillian and Dot. The bird-watchers.
Oh my God.

The wide barn door is open. Inside, it smells of horse stink and hay. We creep past a system of green metal chutes, and then a box stall in which a spotted mustang mare and her foal are resting on a bed of straw. Even in the dimness, the up-close colors of their coats—their wild aliveness—makes your heart beat faster. There are muffled gasps from the group. The foal’s front legs are wrapped in bloody bandages from being run by the helicopter over the coarse gravel plain. Determinedly, we urge one another on, not suspecting this touching nativity scene may have been set up for that very purpose.

We hurry through another open doorway and find ourselves in a maze of log railings twelve feet high, way over our heads. The lengths of the runs and the height of the fences are much greater than they looked on Fontana’s sketch. You can feel a ripple of uncertainty: This is the United States government. We are small; this is big—maybe overwhelming. The lighting is poor. The far corrals blend into country darkness. Our boots sink into dry mulch that muffles sound. And then we see the horses.

The mustangs are completely silent. They circle their enclosures like fish, heads low, shoulder-to-shoulder in slow undulating patterns of chestnut and dun. A few break off and form other groups, and then they all flow together again. There is no nickering, no alarm at being captive, no rebellious kicking of heels—because the stallions and foals, I learn, have been separated from the rest. Leaderless, childless, the silence of the mares is haunting: a plaintive, voiceless female rebuke. Heard by whom?

Heard by us.

We surge forward to our assigned corrals to wait while Fontana moves down the line with the bolt cutters. It is hard to gain traction in the mulch and I feel like I am running in slow motion, but that is also because I am aware of other forces at play in the wings of darkness—armed officers speaking softly into body mikes, and invisible snipers on the barn roof. I jog past Megan, already posted at pen number four, where twenty or thirty slack-necked mares slink unconcerned toward the center. I am climbing the logs of the gate to grasp the padlock with stiff, cold fingers. I’m about ten feet up when the crack of a rifle shot echoes off the mountains.

I think it is Fontana, gone crazy, but then I realize the shot came from the darkness to the east, and Fontana is standing frozen like everyone else in the middle of the runs, having whipped around toward frantic shouts from the barn. My first thought:
Where is Donnato? Is he in the line of fire?
From my vantage point halfway up the fence, I see a black-suited SWAT officer toboggan sideways down the corrugated iron channels of the roof, then drop off the edge.

The SWAT team answers with automatic weapons and the horses spook in a thousand directions, hurtling against the rails, which are shimmying violently, as if about to blow apart. A muscular chest rams my toes and a huge equine head with bared teeth and rolling eyes sweeps over mine as I am flung off backward, hitting the ground and rolling and snapping my forehead on the foot of another post. Spitting hay and who knows what else, I get to my feet and see nothing but chaos up and down the track.

We head for the barn but are thrown back by deputies with assault rifles and in full riot gear. Two, now three and four are tackling Fontana. Some of us try to escape by straddling the railings, pinned at the top by the cops on one side and the skittish haphazard movement of the heavy-boned horses on the other. Someone is calling instructions over a bullhorn, while another numbskull has turned on the flashers of every sheriff’s vehicle in the county, surrounding the compound in strobing red.

Where is Donnato?

I have to fight my own instincts and training and wrestle back into Darcy’s identity, and continue to run, disoriented, like everybody else. Then Megan has me by the jacket, pulling and screaming incoherently, and we trip over each other and sprawl together in the dust and straw.

Megan is crying, “We have to get her out!”

White-haired Lillian is standing in the middle of a corral in her wilted, filth-encrusted blue parka, completely encircled by panicked animals. Her eyes are shut and she is standing absolutely still, as if some divine column of light will protect her from being trampled.

“Get out, Lillian! Get out!”
Megan is pleading, and I find myself scaling the gate. My mind flips to an unaccountably quiet scene: After inching through a massive traffic jam on the Santa Monica freeway, I came upon the accident. Highway Patrol officers were guiding motorists in slow and silent procession around the victim—a well-dressed African-American male who was lying in the middle of the road in the fetal position. His body was intact; a briefcase lay twenty feet away. There were no crushed vehicles, no cars involved at all. How did he get there? Did he think he could run across six lanes of traffic?

“Lillian!” I shout. “Look at me! Look at my eyes. I’m coming!”

Her face is shut down. She is praying, or dead standing up. The horses are running in random circles; the patterns that kept them bonded and calm now completely shattered. That’s okay. I’ll focus on Lillian and the divine light will guide me, and the raging waters will part.

But inside the pen, it is as if fear has shape-shifted into raging horses, attacking chaotically like a cavalry possessed. Pinned against the railings, I wait until the surge flows in the opposite direction, then dash across the mulch to drag Lillian to safety, but she can’t seem to move.

“Lillian, run. Run with me. I’ve got you—”

Like a sharp wind whipping back, the horses reverse direction and angle toward us. I see it in their shining dark eyes, which in my enlarged perception seem wise and close: the simple, unemotional impulse to flee.
They’re going to trample us and break through the fence.
Scores of deputies have massed at the fence. And then Lillian goes limp and collapses.

I grab at the fake fur neck of the parka before she goes down, cutting a gash in her neck with the zipper, then hoist the body in two beats—one, against my knees; two, into my arms—and stand in the midst of that ring of fire, holding the old woman aloft like some awful pietà, fingers probing the flesh of her throat for a carotid pulse as the gate opens and a cowboy on a paint bursts through at full gallop. The gate is closed, locking us into a surreal rodeo, a daring ballet in which the cutting horse, outfitted in silver, plunges fearlessly through the roiling mass, its body coiled to match, movement for movement, a mirror image of each individual animal, herding the mares one at a time into a tight bunch in the eastern quadrant of the circle, and keeping them there as the long-legged wrangler, wearing a beat-to-shit suede jacket and a battered, yellowed western hat, sits perfectly still, hands low and head tipped forward, as if he isn’t doing anything at all.

While the mares are held back, two paramedics enter the ring at assault speed, take Lillian from my arms, and carry her out of there in about fifteen seconds. At the same moment, the paint lets go of its position and prances backward in tiny steps until the cowboy reins it around on a dime. They’re leaving me here.
What the hell?