by April Smith
“I’m thinking about it.”
“Truly. I would never shoot a protected animal.”
“I already know how you feel about wild horses.”
It is the wrangler from the BLM corrals.
He digs into his ears and removes two soft plugs. “What is that you’re saying, ma’am?”
I am staring at him sternly, one hand on a hip. “Why are you following me?”
“No problem, ma’am. I’ll go.”
He may be using an ordinary hunting rifle, but nobody except an FBI agent calls anyone “ma’am.” The bastards have put a tail on me.
“We’ve met, remember? My name is Darcy.”
He wears a Nomex flight glove on his left hand and extends the right, the rest of his lean body shyly arching backward in an irritatingly boyish way.
“Sterling McCord, ma’am. Pleased to meet you again.”
“What are you doing out here?”
“Just gave a shooting lesson. Ever fire a gun?” He smiles wickedly. There’s a gap on the side of his mouth where a tooth is missing. “I bet you’d like it.”
“Come on, Sterling, if that’s really your name. I saw you at the BLM corrals, and now you’re here, a mile from where I happen to be living on a hazelnut farm, which is not my usual territory, but you know all that, don’t you?”
Sterling shakes his head.
“Sorry to bust your bubble, Darcy, but I had no idea I would have the pleasure of meeting you again. I’m just following the work, that’s all. Doing some cowboyin’.”
“For who?”
“Oh, a fella named Dave Owens, owns a little ranch just up the road.”
“Uh-huh. What kind of work are you doing for Dave?”
“All kinds. Just drove a trailer full of cattle down from Idaho. Dave has cutting horses; I work them with the cows. You know cutting horses? Well, they’re big money these days. Big show prizes. Dave’s a good boss, but he’s never there. He’s in the insurance business, down in San Francisco.”
“And this is your idea of ‘cowboyin’?”
McCord cocks his head away. “Truthfully, I don’t want to be a hand anymore. I want to be a horse trainer.”
“Sounds like a cover to me.”
“Cover for what?” Puzzled, he opens the lid of the cooler, offers a Corona. “Refreshment?”
“Guns and alcohol don’t mix.”
“I’m done. Sun’s hot.”
“All right.”
“Thank you,” he says mockingly. “Score one for my side.”
I accept a cold beer and reject a packet of fried pork rinds. My eye, drawn to the red boots (Are they ostentatious or not?) falls to the gleaming litter of spent casings on the ground. Lying in the carpet of brass, two or three of an unusual caliber stand out. Most commonplace rifles, like McCord’s, use .30-caliber bullets, but the shell I’m looking at is .50-caliber—harder to find because they are mostly used by Army snipers to knock out tanks.
And to kill cops.
Somebody out here has been taking shooting practice with the same unusual-size bullet that killed Sergeant Mackee.
While Sterling McCord pulls in the targets, I scoop two .50-caliber casings into the pocket of my shorts.
Silhouette targets are unusual, too, as most marksmen use bull’s-eyes. And this guy is consistently scoring body shots, which shows a fair level of skill.
“Where’d you learn to shoot like that?”
“U.S. Army, Delta Force.”
The openness of the answer is not what I expected.
“Delta Force? Isn’t that an elite”—I want to say unit—“thing? How do you get to do something like that?”
“You have to be invited” is all McCord says.
You have to have ten years’ service, be smart, have sniper-level skills with a rifle, and endure an eighteen-day selection course of physical deprivation and mental hardship that makes undercover school look like a sunny day in Tahiti.
“Is being in Delta Force like the movies? Secret missions, all that jive?”
“I don’t know about that. Delta Force was good to me, but right now, I’m going back to the only thing that makes sense, which is horses.”
I watch him clean the weapon. He is meticulous, patiently running a bore brush and guide rod from the back of the barrel toward the front. That’s how the pros do it.
“You ask about cowboyin’?” he says, concentrating on the gun. “I’ll tell you what it is. It’s livin’ in some itty-bitty trailer on the back of someone’s property out near the dump, being treated like dirt, getting into a fight with the boss because he’s some rich guy who doesn’t know dog doo about cutting horses, and then moving on after six months. But I figure whatever low-rent job they throw at me, I’ll do it if it makes me a better horseman.”
“I’m taking care of a horse.”
“Is that right?”
“Just learning how. I live on the hazelnut farm. Do you know Megan Tewksbury and Julius Emerson Phelps?”
He loads the cooler into the truck.
“No, but I heard the names from that other little girl lives over there.”
“Sara?”
He is latching up the doors of the Silverado.
“That’s right. She’s the one I was teaching how to shoot.”
“How do you know Sara?”
“Seen her around town. Told her my sorry story, just like I told you.” He shrugs. “And she says she wants to learn about guns.”
“She say why?”
“I never asked.”
“We’re…political, you know.”
“Not my business. So maybe we’ll meet up again. Stranger things have happened.”
I hesitate. “Did I say thank you, Sterling?”
“For what, Darcy?”
“Saving my life.”
“Back at the corrals? Nah, you were fine. Horses don’t generally want to kill you, if they can avoid it.”
McCord’s got the door open and one boot up on the running board.
He waits. Again, the patience as one wrist in a tight copper bracelet rubs at the back of his sweat-stained neck. His hair is spiky and dirty blond; his eyes, like the bracelet, are rimmed with copper, green at the centers.
“Can I give you a ride?” he asks as someone shouts, “Sterling! Wait!”
Sara Campbell, in a pair of cheeky cutoffs and a scant top, charges around the curve in the road, running in her awkward knee-knocking gait. Her face is flushed persimmon. She falters.
“Sara!” he calls. “What’s wrong?”
“Oh my God!” she sobs.
We both run toward her. I’m thinking, Dehydration! And, with a jealous edge, Something’s going on between these two.
She is panting. “I was hoping you’d still be here.”
“What’s the matter, hon?”
“On my way back, I saw a baby horse. It’s in the bushes—hurt really bad—and there’s sickening blood just pouring everywhere.”
“Blood where?”
She screws up her face. “Coming out of his eyes.”
“Get in the truck,” says McCord.
Twenty-one
The terrain rises and the vegetation becomes sparse as we roll out of the power station toward the mountains. Looking back from higher ground, you can see the cat’s cradle of high-tension wires and transformers enclosed by manzanita, like an alien marker on a planet made of sand; only in America could there exist a sanctuary both for birds and bullets.
Wheeling the vehicle with the palm of one hand, McCord swerves off-road to the riverbed where Sara saw the foal, east of where I crossed the wooded stream. The bulky black machine raises veils of dust as it lurches over the sandstone grist of an ancient floodplain, no doubt fertile as a jungle a million years ago.
“What does it mean if a horse bleeds from the eyes?”
“Snakebite,” says McCord. “The venom is an anticoagulant. They bleed out from everywhere.”
“Can they die?”
“Yes,
ma’am.”
“Down there!” cries Sara.
McCord brings the truck to the edge of a ridge. We scramble out, into the kind of baking heat you feel with all the skin on your body all at once. A sun-dark lizard skitters at our feet. Below, a stand of cottonwoods marks the trail the river took, but since the drought, it has not passed this way in years. Birds with different voices are hidden everywhere; some sweet, some warning.
“Look! Underneath the branches.”
A slender tree with a network of smooth willowy branches, bending to the ground like an old woman where the water used to flow, seems to gesture toward the body of a white baby horse lying on its side. All four legs kick out in a spasm that breaks my heart.
Coils of heat bake the sweat off my bare shoulders. The foal, where it lies, is fully exposed to the sun.
“Let’s see what we got,” says McCord. “Quietly. The wind’s comin’ that way. Don’t want him to smell us and get aroused.”
He motions that we get down into a squat and crab-leg it slowly toward the animal, stopping every ten feet to test the wind. Finally we are close enough to see it clearly in the lee of the branches. Its muzzle is swollen twice the normal size and bright red blood has covered its face, attracting glittering swarms of greenflies.
McCord reaches toward the chalky, almost translucent coat. It is not pure white; you can see dark clouds of pigment underneath, like a stormy desert sky. He runs his fingers along the neck, below a two-inch strip of bristly silver mane, and down the long and fragile legs, rosy with sores. In response, the baby tries to lift its head. Its face is long and delicately etched. The eyes are crying tears of blood. Pink-rimmed, with thick white lashes, they are opaque spheres of shiny blackened indigo.
“Shh now, just lie still.”
Sara, whispering: “Was he just born?”
McCord is checking the scrawny ribs. “He’s one month old and just about starved.”
“Is he wild?”
“Probably got loose from a ranch. Looks to be part Arab. The mom either took off somewhere or she’s dead. Anyone have a cell phone?”
Sara and I stare at each other, helpless and ashamed.
“We’re not allowed to have cell phones on the farm,” she says.
“Why’s that? So you can’t talk to your boyfriends?”
“We just can’t.”
I look at the ground and say nothing. My fingers clutch the Oreo phone in my pocket.
“Will this little guy live?”
“Depends if the toxin’s already in the bloodstream. We got to call the vet.”
I am about to curl up and die with guilt. I cannot make the call. To pull out the tiny phone now would be to expose myself.
You cannot blow a half-million-dollar operation on one stray horse.
“Don’t get near his face. It’s sore and we don’t want him to move or raise his head. Damn. Everybody in the world has a damn cell phone. I left mine at the damn house.”
“Why don’t you get in the damn truck and get help?”
McCord holds his answer. He climbs up the embankment with long strides.
The girl is standing with her arms and feet all crossed up. She looks anxiously toward the truck. “Is he just gonna leave us here?”
I’m running my hand down the thin, pale throat of the foal, feeling the shuddering nerves.
“Touch him. He’s soft.”
“I don’t want to. It’s disgusting.”
“Scary, huh?”
“Not at all,” says Miss Nothing Affects Me. “I just don’t enjoy watching something die, okay?”
“Then why were you taking shooting lessons?”
“Shooting lessons?” she says, as if she’d forgotten. “I don’t know. He was coming on to me at the ice-cream store, so I said to myself, ‘Okay, this is different.’ He’s cute, but kind of old.”
McCord skids back down the hill on his heels, carrying a bottle of water and an old shirt.
“Keep him quiet. Sponge him down to cool him off. The rattler’s most likely still around, so watch where you step.”
“Shit,” says Sara, jerking her feet.
“What’s wrong with his eyes?” Flies are walking on the darkened pupils.
“Oh,” says McCord matter-of-factly. “This little baby is blind.”
My stomach lurches. “Are you sure?”
McCord replies, “Yeah,” and passes a hand before the dark violet eyes of the horse, which do not blink. “Could be why he was abandoned. I’m going for the vet.”
McCord turns, but Sara grabs his arm.
“Just shoot him.”
The world goes silent, except for the clicking of crows and the dry maraca rattle of insects in the grass.
“Shoot him,” she insists.
McCord is astounded. “He’s not my horse to shoot.”
“He’s nobody’s horse. Scary, isn’t it?” she taunts, mocking me. “Why not? You have guns in the truck.”
McCord and I find each other’s eyes, if only to affirm that we’re the grown-ups here, not about to be manipulated by an overly indulged runaway brat. What, exactly, does she wish to kill? And what does she know about the acrid smell of the aftermath?
“Taking a life is serious business,” says McCord, and then I am certain of what I have suspected: that he’s been the places I’ve been.
“The horse is going to be blind the rest of its life,” says Sara with disdain. “What’s the point?”
The look between us deepens, not over the suffering of the child or the animal, but something much more tender and sad. McCord and I both know that way out here in the wash there are no landmarks beyond a yellow fire hydrant and a concrete bunker with some pipes in a mesh cage. This is where your heart is exposed, or where it’s buried.
He does not wait, but climbs the ridge.
“Sara!” I am giving orders now. “Get in the truck and go with Sterling.”
McCord looks down from the top of the embankment.
“Sara? Come on now. Come with me.”
And he holds out his hand patiently until she finally scrambles up. He pulls her over the top and the truck disappears.
Space unrolls in every direction. I take a breath full of sage. I sit beside the foal and sponge the blood off its face. Please don’t be in pain. Please forgive me.
The bees hum like a plucked string. I sit beneath a dead oak, against a mud bank where the broken root system is exposed. There are holes and burrows in the mud and it is stained with dried-out algae, like the cross section of a melted civilization. The smell of deadness is rank. The sky is white and far away, the sun a burning locus. Here at the bottom of the riverbed, the lives of the foal and I are as inconsequential as the flash of a mirror in a very great plain.
Hundreds of miles to the north, across a harsh volcanic basin, wild mustangs forage freely, fight, and play—until they are betrayed by the Judas horse for a bucket of grain. I remember how the captured mares would circle the corral, lost in silence, all the subtle scent and body messages with their babies and the stallions snapped.
Beneath my hands, the tiny horse is laboring to breathe. I stay with him, dabbling water with the blood-soaked cloth, as if I could accompany his sightless soul into the greater darkness. I feel a deep and wordless kinship, as if we are bound by some transparent force of kindness. I will not abandon you.
Am I the Judas horse, cynical and beaten? Or the innocent foal?
After a very long time, the amber lights of the veterinarian’s truck show above the ridge.
Twenty-two
July. Intruders are everywhere.
False dandelion invades the perfectly swept orchard floor, no matter how often Stone drives the flail, or makes us rake by hand. We are halfway through the development of the hazelnuts, and tiny larvae of the leaf-roller moth have appeared on the new clusters. Bad news. The larvae cause nut abortions, not a pretty sight. In the still heat of the afternoon, I am up on a ladder setting insect traps, using the work as a cover to c
heck in with Donnato.
I have discovered that poking around the topmost branches of the hazelnuts is an excellent way to conduct a covert conversation. For one thing, it’s great up there. You see things differently, like opening a secret hatch to a world of sky. Rooftops and mountains become your ground—and unlike hiding out in Sirocco’s stall, if Dick Stone ventures into the orchard, you would be the first to know.
“The fifty-caliber casings you found are a match to the slug that killed Sergeant Mackee,” Donnato is saying from L.A. “The shooter is the same as the one at the BLM corrals.”
“What about the Native American we took into custody?”
“He had a pretty good alibi. At the time of the shooting, he was in a local emergency room being treated for ulcers. Now we need the weapon.”
“The sniper rifle that matches the casings,” I agree, watching a white butterfly skimming perfectly through the leaves.
“Stone has it somewhere. Make a search,” he tells me, “room by room.”
“Got it,” I say without enthusiasm.
“You should be ecstatic.”
“About the casings? Yeah, it’s cool.”
“What’s up?”
“Just be straight, okay?”
“Always, buddy, you know that.”
“Do you have an agent tailing me? Because I can’t function that way, and frankly, I resent the hell out of it.”
“A federal agent?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”
“The cowboy? Come on. Good-looking, mid-thirties? He shows up at the corrals, working on the gather? Then he appears again, a mile from the farm, hitting targets like a pro?”
“At the same shooting range? You’re kidding. What kind of gun?”
“Don’t get excited. It was a hunting rifle, a .308.”
Your handler doesn’t tell you everything. While you’re alone and isolated undercover, the Bureau will be working things from the other end, putting operatives in place you don’t know about. They’ll say it’s for your safety, but it can make you paranoid fast.
“If you don’t like this guy, check him out,” Donnato says.
“I don’t like him,” I reply.
“Search his vehicle, for a start.”
