Judas Horse

never ends, even when you’re not related.

“Allfather says they’re tapping our phones,” she jabbers on. “I hear clicking all the time when I’m talking, don’t you?” Yes, and that’s why we’re up in the cherry picker for the second time this week. Why can’t they get it right?

“Sometimes I say, ‘Hey, Fed? Are you listening?’” I chuckle, but my throat is dry. “Make sure you only talk about embarrassing personal stuff.” Slammer, teasing: “Not Sara. Sara’s a little prude.” Sara’s cheeks turn pink. “You suck.”

He gives an evil grin and snaps a carrot between his teeth. Completely the opposite of ethereal Sara, who could float away on the steam drifting out of the kitchen, Slammer (aka Jim Allen Colby) is always banging and stomping, eager to destroy whatever’s standing still, usually with a dim-witted expression of glee.

The prominent ears sit equidistant between a fringe of light hair and a long chin, directly in line with the fair eyebrows and narrow eyes that appear to have been passed down through generations of con artists and thieves. His nose is flat and his lips are full (actresses would pay a lot of money for those plump lips), but on Slammer, they seem childlike, on the verge of lying — or, if that doesn’t work, blubbering.

Megan describes Slammer as “a feral animal” when Dick Stone recruited him from under the bridges of Portland. The boy, if you believe him, is a warrior without a soul. His mission is to “expose cowards.” Incorrigible since he was kicked out of day care for attacking other children, he set fire to his father’s house and ran away from a detention center at age fourteen, pissing all over a lumber town up in the state of Washington, for a half-starved squatter’s life with a street family of violent youth — exactly the kind of hot-blooded seventeen-year-old you want in your army.

And he is still uncontainable, shooting off guns, setting pesky little fires, stealing from the drugstore when they take him into town, flying down the sidewalk on a skateboard with his neck chains and do-rag and baggies that are halfway down his ass, a black-garbed neo-pirate, jumping the curb and flipping the bird to drivers too stupid to stop.

Sara goes back to kneading whole-wheat dough. It is 10:30 in the morning and we are starting dinner. It takes a while when you bake your own bread and extract your own almond milk. For some families, I guess, food is a pleasant ritual; on the lost farm, it is another form of slavery.

Everything is strictly vegan, and to Dick Stone’s specifications. The first night, I cut up sweet potatoes to be roasted in the oven, but Megan made me take them out, still sizzling with hot oil, and make the wedges smaller, because that’s the way Allfather likes them. The scorched fingertips were part of the initiation.

Yesterday, we had to hand-rake every twig and piece of bird dropping from the orchard floor, which must be kept “smooth as a pool table,” according to Stone, because when the nuts drop, you don’t want chaff in the harvester. That’s fine, except hazelnuts don’t drop until September, and it’s barely June. Abruptly, he told Slammer he did not appreciate his “work ethic,” and made us all run twenty laps around the trees in the afternoon heat.

Sara, not in any kind of shape, was struggling hard. Her legs were slow and rubbery and her face was hot pink.

In undercover school, they would have asked, “What is the lesson learned?” “Sara’s getting heatstroke,” I told Stone on the pass. “She’s had enough.” He put out his foot and tripped me.

The earth under my knees and in my mouth was soft. I got up and kept on running, so he could not see the look on my face. That was a killer moment, the hardest so far. To put aside your core values in order to accomplish the mission. I had to spit it out. I had to think about justice for Steve Crawford’s family. About the day the sky will be filled with helicopters, and Dick Stone will be in prison the rest of his life.

I stare at the zucchinis with distrust. They are fat as blimps. I will need a computer model to figure out how to dice them into the tiny squares that Megan demands. I sharpen the ancient blackened carbon steel knife for the umpteenth time.

“What’s up with Megan?” Slammer is asking. “Why is she in the basement all the time?” Megan has been working on her quilt, stretched on a frame that takes up almost the entire room. Since the action at the BLM corrals, which she calls “a total disaster,” she has abandoned the kitchen to the children, and we have heard raised voices behind the closed door of the master bedroom.

“She’s sad.” Sara picks up the dough and slams it. “She thinks it’s our fault the cop died at the corrals.” “That’s so weak? The pigs were waiting in ambush. Fuck them. They brought it on themselves.” Slammer’s sitting on a kitchen chair, knees splayed, flicking bits of dough on the floor.

“Stop that!” I snap.

I am not going to make it if I have to chop zucchini and babysit a couple of spoiled, ignorant, hormone-deranged teenagers for the next six months, waiting for something that might not ever happen.

Angelo Gomez warned about this very moment: “You’re driving yourself deeper,” he said of one of his own undercover assignments that lasted thirteen months. “Losing your identity and becoming part of the criminal element. I looked bad, smelled bad. I had a big beard all filled with food and crap. I lived a lie. I was a lie. I wore this big gold cross, and that’s what saved me. I’d lean against the bar so the cross would press against my chest, and something inside would keep me going.” “Look,” says Sara. “The pig’s still there.”

The lineman’s truck has moved down the road, but he is still up in the cherry picker, a splotch of blue overalls below the branches of a pine tree, face hidden in the green. He seems disembodied — a faceless man in a generic uniform, the top of his body gone.

The smell of burned brake lining seems to rise from the pots on the stove. I cannot look again, because I know it will be the face of the police detective that I shot, suspended between heaven and hell. Like a clumsy drumroll, my heart skips a beat and hits race pace in three seconds. The ghost outside the window, ordinary as a telephone repairman, splits my mind.

Who owns me?

“The cross would press against my chest,” Angelo said. “And I’d remember, There’s something else in life besides what I’m doing.” A crimson trail is crawling down the sink.

I’ve sliced my finger and it won’t stop bleeding.

Dick Stone lumbers into the kitchen, boots unlaced after the morning’s work.

“I found this.”

He shows us Darcy DeGuzman’s cell. He’s gone through my stuff.

“Thanks.” I reach for it.

He swallows the phone in one big hand. “No personal cell phones allowed.” “Nobody told me.”

Slammer and Sara have become alert. Suddenly, the boy is busy helping form the whole-wheat loaves.

“No wallets.” Stone is holding the one he has confiscated from my pack. “No watches, either.” I remove my watch and smile feebly. “My time is your time.” He drops my things into the bib of his overalls. Tension crawls into the kitchen and hisses.

Dick Stone waits, eyeing us.

Megan is downstairs, unable to intervene.

He raises an arm and presents a neon orange daypack.

“Who wants to test this out?”

“Me!” Slammer shouts.

The bandit considers. “I want Darcy to do it,” he says, and you can see the hurt cross Slammer’s face.

“Okay with me if Slammer really wants to.” I am pressing a paper towel around the finger cut.

Stone, quietly: “I said Darcy.”

Under a tree away from the house, Stone orders Slammer to help me put the backpack on. It weighs maybe fifteen pounds.

“What does it do?”

“Blows shit up,” Slammer replies. “You pull that cord.” “I don’t think so.”

I try to wriggle out, but he’s latched the buckles.

“No big deal. Just a little pop and red stuff sprays all over the place.” “Another blood bomb? Like the one at the school?” “New prototype,” Stone says briskly. “Ten times more powerful. For the Big One.” He adjusts something sticking out of the pack.