Judas Horse

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 pieta, 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?

But before the mares can break across the ground like billiard balls, he’s galloping right at me, hanging off the side of the horse like he’s about to scoop a bandanna out of the dust, but it’s me he’s aiming for, and I am lifted off the ground in the crook of an arm of steely strength, lifted into the air, and swung into the hard leather cradle of the saddle, the cowboy riding behind me now on the bare rump of the horse, and someone has opened a narrow passage in the gate. We canter out, as if passing through the eye of the needle.

His chest is pressed against my back. I’m smelling chewing gum and sharp male sweat, and although I’m bouncing wildly, staring at a careening world through the terrifying space between the horse’s ears, his suede- fringed arm remains strong and steady, and I feel the anchoring motion of his hips in rhythm with the horse. He won’t let you fall.

We come to a halt and I manage to slip off, completely dazed. Staring up at a man on a horse — rugged- looking, mid-thirties, five ten, 140 pounds, with stick-thin legs that jeans are made for and red leather cowboy boots you know he wears every day of his life — who has just saved your life can have that effect.

“Thank you, sir.” I offer my hand. “Darcy.”

“Sterling McCord.” He leans in the saddle to shake. “You okay?”

“Yes. Wow,” I say breathlessly. “That was quite a ride.”

“When are you people gonna get it? Messin’ with wild animals is not a hot idea.”

His rebuke is stern; more like a cop than a cowboy.

“I’m sorry. I guess you’re used to it.”

“I don’t like to see anyone get hurt.”

“I understand.”

“Hope your friend’s all right. You take care, now, Darcy,” he says, and canters toward some other pandemonium.

Over by the barn, the whirling lights of an ambulance illuminate a knot of paramedics around the SWAT team officer on the ground; a gurney waits, riderless.

Fifteen

Mike Donnato is waiting inside an interrogation room the size of an organic lentil. He wears a windbreaker with FBI across the back and greets me gruffly. The two grim sheriff’s deputies, who marched me over from the jail where we, the radicals, were held overnight, do not know I am undercover. The iron grip on my biceps makes that clear. Donnato instructs them to unlock the handcuffs, and we sit down and face each other across a small table as they pocket the keys and leave.

“We didn’t get breakfast,” I say right off. “And there are folks who need medical attention.” Donnato just rubs his reddened eyes.

“These boondocks deputies are real redneck pigs. I saw them shove an old lady and withhold water when we repeatedly asked for some. It’s bullshit, Mike—” “The officer who was shot last night died at the scene,” he says heavily. “His name was Todd Mackee, a sergeant on the Portland SWAT team. Single shot to the throat.” “I’m so sorry.”

“Took his head right off.”

I wet my lips. “Must have been one monster bullet.” Donnato nods. “Fifty-caliber. Not your average shooter.” I resist the urge to say how relieved I was last night, in my panic at hearing the shot, to realize Donnato would be here at the command center and not with the tactical team at the barn.

“Makes you sick,” he says.

“Oh God.”

I’m losing my resolve. Between the primacy of the mission and the bond I’ve made with Lillian, Dot, Megan, and the others, I’m done. After a sleepless night crammed four to a cell and with zero food, I have a killer headache and my breath could melt steel.