by April Smith
Laumann replays his triumph at the animal rights convention. It pumps him up, gets him going: how he ignored the intimidation of four hundred people booing and hissing and got up on that stage; how he put that punk away with the courage of a father defending his children, just as every day he goes into his office and defends our precious public lands. Those accusations of him allegedly buying horses and selling them — to a slaughterhouse? Bumbled paperwork! Never happened! A deplorable and false personal attack, he insisted to the crowd. Then, a brilliant diversion: He invited the whole rowdy bunch to go out to the corrals and see how the horses are treated. Understand the BLM is the good guy, doing the right thing. At the end? He got applause! And the punk, Fontana? Thoroughly deballed.
“Don’t blow smoke on Rosalie!” complains his wife without opening her eyes.
“You take her,” he replies.
Not even halfway out of his arms and the kid is screaming. The wife unbuttons her nightgown.
Laumann pulls a plaid wool shirt over his pajamas and goes down the stairs, which smell of the new navy blue runner. He likes the feel, like walking barefoot on a carpet of lichen. Already he has lit a second cigarette, hit the coffee machine, the weather station on a small TV, and picked up the newspaper, running his eye over the headlines. He has to focus on these things before the other thing, the uneasiness, kicks in.
He forces his gaze from the garden window. A cup of Irish vanilla, and he is at the computer, fully charged. He’ll send an e-mail to his district managers and drum up support for building that reservoir out near Steens Mountain, where the drought is impacting the rangeland. FAN will make noise about it. Screw them. These amateur thugs do not have what he has: the big picture.
Laumann’s wife is running downstairs with the baby wrapped in a blanket. The baby’s face is pomegranate red and she is making rasping coughs.
“Croup,” she says. She is a nurse; she knows.
“Get her in the shower.”
“I did. We have to go to the emergency room.”
“What about Alex?”
“Drop me and come back for him. Remember to take his tennis bag — he’s got a tournament.”
Laumann stops typing mid-sentence, reaches for his car keys, lopes up the navy blue stairs, pulls on pants, runs downstairs, runs upstairs again for the car keys he left on the bed, checks on Alex, beautiful and asleep, runs downstairs, to find his wife already out, the back door banging behind her.
They’ve been through this twice before, and each time the panic is the same. That is the real uneasiness. Damn it to hell. Rosalie’s tiny lungs. Damn, it almost makes him cry. Which impurities of the modern world are making her sick? What weakness did his father pass along? He stumbles through the early-morning air, icy cold, like mountain water, and thinks irrationally, I must provide.
The Explorer pulls out of the driveway and accelerates fast.
There is a pause, ten seconds of negative time, long enough for the dust to settle, and then a hard percussive shot and one side of the Laumann house volcanoes out, spewing lumber and new carpeting with orange fire-tongued breath, raining down the unspeakable.
Eighteen
The screen door in the kitchen opens hard, banging against the wall.
“Attack of the vegetables!” Slammer shouts, lunging through with the energy of an entire basketball team. “Destroy all humans!” He is carrying crates of fresh-picked produce, wearing a denim jacket with the sleeves cut off to show a colorful swirl of tattoos on both arms, as if he dipped them up to the elbows in Easter egg dye.
Sara takes the weight of one of the crates, heady with damp earth fragrance, and looks past his shoulder to the organic garden, where the sun has deepened the morning shadows. She stays a foot against the screen door, gazing at the beds of violet-tipped lavender. Her breath forms in the cold country air.
“What?” Slammer asks.
“Reminds me of home.”
“Your parents must live in a pile of goat shit.” She smiles ironically. He stamps his filthy boots. Draping an arm over my shoulders, he whispers, “The feds are here.” “Really? Where?”
“Look.”
Peering through the kitchen window, we can see the utility truck. A repairman is up in a cherry picker.
Slammer had a good look when he went into the garden.
“The feds wouldn’t be that stupid,” I say.
“They’re on to us. The BLM dude’s house got vaporized, dog.” “Yeah, but why would they care about us?”
He grins. “We blow shit up.”
Me, innocent: “Did we blow up Laumann’s house?” The bomb was detonated by a cell phone. Same as the device that killed Steve. Herbert Laumann and his wife and baby escaped by minutes. Twelve-year-old Alex, asleep in bed, sustained third-degree burns. He is expected to survive. Angelo considers Bill Fontana and Dick Stone both suspects in the bombing. Fontana is in custody. The motive would be murderous rage. No question the hero of the movement was humiliated when the deputy state director invaded the stage.
“I didn’t do that bomb,” Slammer says warily.
“Was it FAN?”
“We are FAN,” Sara says, wanting my attention. “But so are a lot of people.” I have noticed sibling rivalry 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 t
he 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.
“What’s the Big One? Hey, what are you doing?”
He has flipped open my cell phone and is scrolling through the numbers.
“Where is area code five six one?” he calls, backing away.
“West Palm Beach, Florida.”
“Nervous, Darcy?”
“Not at all. Are you?”
“My heart is going pitty-pat.” He reads a number. “Whose is this?” “My dad’s.”
“Pull the cord!” Slammer yells.
Sara’s beside him, arms crossed over her chest.
“Should I hit redial and find out?” Dick Stone asks. “You tell me.” Is this another head game? He was undercover. Does he know how the phony phone numbers work? Did the FBI use the same technique in the seventies?
“Go ahead and hit redial. Say hi to my dad.”
The relays worked at the off-site, but they haven’t been tested since.
Why does Stone hesitate, staring at the phone?
Slammer: “Pull the cord, dingdong!”
Now I see. Stone has rigged the cell so it will detonate the bomb inside the backpack — just like at Herbert Laumann’s house. Just like with Steve. A seven-digit key code on an FBI phone is about to make another undercover go up like a roasted guinea pig.
What a turn-on for him.
“You are such a chicken shit,” Slammer yells, and rushes me, roaring like a linebacker. I run, but he makes the tackle. We both go down and roll as Dick Stone warns, “I’m hitting redial,” and Slammer gropes for the cord and pulls.
The sharp report of a firecracker. The world goes silent. Burning vapor stings my legs, and in an instant we are both covered in slime, staggering in the center of a perfect twelve-foot circle of blood.
Dick Stone whoops with delight. “It works! The Big One, man!” Sara is bent over, laughing at our crimson horror-mask faces. “Look at you!” Stone lumbers toward me, giggling, the phone outstretched.
“Sorry, darlin’. Dad’s not home.”
This sounds extremely funny to Sara and Stone.
I put the phone to my ear.
“This is George DeGuzman. I can’t get to the phone right now—” The voice is familiar: George DeGuzman, Darcy’s dad, as played by SAC Robert Galloway.
Backstopping.
A screen door between the truth and me.
My fingers are trembling and slippery. It is hard to keep a grip. The phone wants to leap out of my hand.
Megan appears on the front steps, breathless from the run up the basement stairs at the sound of the explosion. She stares at the ludicrous scene, like a postmodern take on hell, Slammer and I swathed in bloody stigmata, b
linded souls in a Day-Glo ring of red.
“Are you all out of your minds?” she says.
Sara and Stone are helpless, holding on to each other, wiping tears of manic laughter.
“We’re having some fun,” he manages to reply.
Nineteen
“He’s on to us.”
“Calm down.”
“He found the cell phone. Went through the numbers, like he knew exactly what he was looking for — a leak. A mistake.” “Were there? Mistakes?”
“No, but Mike, he took my wallet and watch. Removed all contact with the outside world. He’s watching me.” “Of course he’s watching you. He’s protecting the cult. Besides, he’s a raging paranoid. Reality check: You’re talking to me, so he has failed. Where is he now?” “Flailing.”
“Sailing?”
I have no patience. “He is flailing—pulling a rotor to clear the vegetation between the trees.” Dick Stone has not discovered the tiny Oreo phone, hidden in the barn under a heavy tack box. I volunteer to feed the animals at first light because it is the only time to be alone. I put on sweats and clogs and hurry across the yard, past the rabbit pen (their numbers dwindling — another one stolen or escaped) before the others wake. The worn barn boards ring with a note of optimism. Here is grain. Here a warm muzzle. The clang of the bucket, the needy cry. In the quiet, the dualities that shout inside my head like opposing political commentators settle down to nothing but the hollow thump of hindquarters on wood, the chesty cough, the uneventful silence in between.
At this same hour in a gated community of postmodern homes in Simi Valley, California, family life is stirring. A grueling commute to Westwood lies ahead for Mike Donnato, who takes my reports while getting dressed and his three sons off to school.
I go on to tell Donnato about the punishment in the orchard — being tripped up when I defended Sara, and the bullying with the loaded backpack.
“He was testing a blood bomb — more powerful — for what he calls ‘the Big One.’” Donnato considers. “Dick Stone is sounding like another David Koresh.” “Please God, no!”
