Judas Horse (22 page)

Twenty-nine

Cars are parked way up the road. It is the midsummer festival at Willamette Hazelnut Farm. Megan is sticking close to Stone, who presents himself tonight in a neatly pressed western shirt, the red suspenders, and a crisp straw farmer’s hat—your happy host to the alternative lifestyle, urging people to gather in the large bubble shed, where a borrowed sound system plays a cheerful band out of Austin, Texas. Stone told me they had poured the concrete floor just for dances, which sounded pretty goofy, but with the silver blow-up panels animated by moving shadows and the doors thrown open, warm yellow light tumbles across the gravel road, illuminating the American flag, and you can believe in country music.

It is an eclectic blowout—a mix of neighboring farmers, “kindreds” from the pagan community, straitlaced hazelnut distributors from Portland, and random tourists from the local B and Bs, all happily passing the traditional Asatrú libation, great huge horns of beer.

Slammer is standing on the roof of the farmhouse with the local boys, totally hammered on rum. That has pretty much been his MO since the burial attempt, despite empty threats to beat the crap out of Allfather, which came in a whispered confab with Sara. They were huddled like frightened children at the foot of the stairs as Slammer struggled out of his filth-encrusted clothes. Sara quickly balled them into her arms, as if to shrink an unthinkable humiliation down to the size of a load of laundry.

“You can’t let him do that to you.”

“That’s him, dog.”

“We should get out of here. We should call the cops.”

“Are you serious? You want to go home?”

“No, but…He scares me.” Sara flushed pink and began to hiccup with tears.

“Poor little princess.”

“Guys!” I stepped between them. “Don’t get on each other.”

Sara had dropped the clothes and was staring at me defiantly.

“Slammer, you have every right to call the police,” I said. “Is that what you want to do?”

Slammer’s eyes went vacant. “Actually,” he said, “I’m kind of hungry.”

After that, you could hear pickups burning rubber at two o’clock in the morning and raucous male shouting as Slammer came and went with the locals. Nothing changed on the farm. Maybe Stone had made his point. Maybe he was waiting to make another.

I see Sterling McCord has arrived and is talking to Sara, who doesn’t want to stand still and listen. He’s been on her case about Geronimo—how it would do her good to care, really care, for an animal, get up at dawn and muck the dung, not just mouth off about it—but she’s laughing, tossing it off, flirting instead. Incapable, is more like it. Meanwhile, McCord has the loosest pelvis on the planet. He’s standing tilted back on his heels, as if in the saddle at a trot. He’s wearing a silver conch belt and his usual washed-out jeans, a midnight blue shirt open at the chest.

I have noticed that you can’t go wrong on wardrobe if you’re a cowboy.

The sorting equipment and red tractor have been moved outside, so there is room for line dancing. The song is something about “old Amos.” I draw back from the doorway and the shining, eager faces go past the American flag and into the colder shadows. Sara and McCord are free to get it on—but me, I’m on the job.
Undercover work—this is how it gets to you.
The loneliness digs down like fast-growing roots and cracks your resolve. This is exactly when you are supposed to call your contact agent. Dose of reality. Remember who you are. It is 9:36 p.m. and Donnato is most likely home with his family.

Candles are still burning in jars on a half-cleared table near the orchard, illuminating a forest of smudgy fingerprints on abandoned wineglasses. An older couple is camped out at one end, picking at brownie crumbs in an aluminum pan. I move past, fishing out the last Heineken from the frigid waters of the cooler.

“Looks like Noah’s ark,” Sterling says from behind.

I turn toward the lighted shed and smile.

“They’ve got all the animals, right?”

“And they’re all gonna be saved. Any more beers?”

I give him the Heineken and pull out a Coors.

“I could use a set-down,” he suggests. “How about yourself?”

At the other end of the table, in the half dark, an enormous white man is holding forth to a slight man of color—the first black face I’ve seen in Oregon. As we sit, I recognize the voice: like a sixteen-wheeler groaning uphill in second. That’s when I realize the fuzzy shape in the diffuse light is Mr. Terminate.

“John! It’s Darcy! From Omar’s bar.”

The other couple take a good look at John and decide to get out of there, leaving us with the dour biker, massive thighs dwarfing a folding chair, clutching a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He has left the black top hat at home, revealing long, thin tresses trailing off a half-bald dome.

“What are you doing here?” I ask.

“Crashin’ the party.”

“Who’s your friend?”

“Toby Himes,” says the black man, extending his hand.

In the rural crowd, Toby Himes is a standout, neatly dressed in pressed slacks and a windbreaker. He keeps his hands inside his pockets while surveying the scene. He sports a tweed snap-brim cap and a white goatee, and takes his time, not intimidated. At first, I make him for another cop.

Because it takes a minute to dial it in. The biker and the black man, having a drink in the dark? This isn’t random. They know each other. And Mr. Terminate is not eating ashtrays, or washing his hands in someone’s pitcher of suds.

He is calm, like Vesuvius on a good day.

This is so inconsistent with John’s attitude toward the darker nation that the hair goes up on the back of my neck and I hook a leg over the bench, curious to find out why.

I introduce McCord as the wrangler who saved me from the wild horses, tell them the story of the arrests at the BLM corrals and try to draw them in.

“Should we all go out and save the wild horses?”

“I’ll tell you about horses,” wheezes Mr. Terminate, and begins a tale that has nothing to do with horses. “Up in Colorado, some of the fellas came into a load of computer stuff.”

“Just dropped from the sky, did it?” Toby Himes laughs and takes a sip of beer. “I know how
that
is.”

“You know bull crap. Excuse my French, but this is top secret shit, vital pieces of our national defense system.”

“A vital piece of our defense network is missing?” McCord says. “John, you know, that really helps me sleep at night.”

“How’d they steal it?” I ask.

Mr. Terminate shakes his head and pours a little Jack into a plastic cup.

“That I cannot say. But I do know
this.
”

He points a pinkie with an inch-long curved fingernail, a built-in spoon for snorting coke.

“Those computers were sold to the Indians for
a shitload of silver and turquoise.
”

We are openmouthed. Toby Himes giggles.

“And then,” whispers Mr. Terminate dramatically, “
they buried it.
”

Pause.

“Who buried it?”

“That I cannot say.”

But he furrows his eyebrows menacingly, as if telling a ghost story, which he probably is.

Toby Himes: “Get the story straight. The bikers buried it, or the Indians buried it?”

Mr. Terminate looks confused. “The way I heard it from Julius is the Indians buried it. After they stole it back.”

“The Indians stole it back?”

“The Indians damn right stole it back. Now, the fellas
I know—
”

“You mean Hell’s Angels?”

“That’s a dated concept, darlin’. We are businessmen.” Another sip of Jack. “
The fellas I know,
that knew where the turquoise was buried, when it was buried on the reservation, happened to be in prison at the time. But before they got murdered, they got word to the outside.”

Another dramatic pause.

“So,” ventures McCord after this baffling recitation, “did your boys ever find the turquoise?”

Mr. Terminate chuckles. “Rest assured it is buried in a very safe place. You think I’m fibbing? You ask Julius. He’s the one got custody of it now.”

“We’re asking you.”

“They say it’s buried beside a pipe.”

“A peace pipe!” echoes McCord with a straight face.

“All’s I know, there’s a marker, and it’s yellow. And a cage of wild beasts guarding it. But don’t go running out there.”

“Don’t worry. We won’t.”

“Because the turquoise is guarded by an ancient Umpqua Indian curse!”

“Thanks for the warning, John.”

When Toby Himes is ready to leave, I claim that nature calls and follow him up the road and get the tag number on his 1995 Dodge pickup. I figure if his talking to Mr. Terminate is nothing, it’s nothing. If it’s something, then it is.

S
terling McCord is waiting with two fresh beers, as I somehow knew he would be. We go a couple of rows back into the orchard and sit on the clean-swept dirt and lean our backs against a tree. We can hear the music clearly. The crescent shed still rocks with talk and laughter.

“What do you think?” he asks.

“About the turquoise?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I think John was making it up as he went along.”

“I heard the same story,” McCord tells me, “from an old-timer, works in town at the Seed N’ Feed. The curse, the same darn thing.”

Against the current of two beers, the nearness of a tightly knit male body, and a summer night crazy with lavender, a nebulous connection forces itself to focus. Rosalind, administrative assistant and keeper of the family flame down in Los Angeles, told me Dick Stone worked undercover on a case called Turquoise. And now he allegedly has possession of so-called buried treasure. Is it real, or does
turquoise
have a double meaning? Some other layer of deception Stone has embroidered over the past, like the flying corn on his cap?

“There was a yellow fire hydrant out in the wash. Where we ran across the foal. Maybe that’s the marker.”

McCord nods, chugging beer. “I saw it.”

“You did not.”

“I might look like a dog-eared fool, but occasionally I do pay attention.”

He takes his time to grin real slow. I wish he didn’t have that brown spot on his gum where the tooth is missing.

“But why should I share the treasure with you?” he asks.

“Because you like me.” I notice that sparkly feeling creeping up from where it hides, damned if I’m on the job. “Let’s be honest. You liked me from the very first time you were rude to me.”

“When was that?”

“When you saved my life. You said, ‘Hey. You shouldn’t be messing with wild animals.’ Hell of a thing to say to a lady in distress.”

“That wasn’t rude, ma’am. That’s a fact.”

“What’s a fact?”

“I am never rude to beautiful ladies. Let’s go find the turquoise.”

T
he luxe interior of the Silverado softens the wallop of rocks and crevices along the access road leading out of the power station. The first time we drove it in the noonday sun, with Sara, panicked, between us, clouds of dust rose in our wake, and they may be rising still, but in this blackness it is impossible to see anything except what is pinned by the headlights.

McCord eases the truck off the road and cuts the engine. This time I am shivering as we stand at the edge, and not just from cold. Behind us, the power station, illuminated by security lights, looks like a futuristic prison. McCord, holding a flashlight, leads down the embankment, following something—an instinct or a trail—searching for the riverbed where we found the foal, but nothing looks familiar in the half-light. No old-woman tree. No ancient streambed with banks of dying roots. But alive inside of me, that complex delta twists and turns with desire, as if all the tiny sparks in this dark landscape had been melted together to form a glittering molten river of light, aching for the release of the sea.

Across the low terrain we can hear the distant party on the farm, like voices from a speaker in an old wrecked car. A lone wind thrums through my earrings as a drowsy voice argues the
lessons learned: Never sleep with a suspect.
But McCord isn’t a suspect. Is he?

“Where was it?” he asks.

I remember that as I sat by the foal and cooled its body with a rag, a small concrete bunker rose from the wheatlike grass. When McCord’s flashlight sweeps across it, I direct him that way. Climbing through an oak grove and then coarse shrubs with leathery leaves, we discover the bunker and a wire cage built over it.

“There’re your wild animals guarding the treasure,” McCord says dryly, running the beam over a gate valve with screw wheels enclosed in the cage.

“What is it?”

“Flood control.”

We stand there like two idiots, staring in silence at the work of some engineering drone twenty years ago.

“Nice,” I say.

“Thought you’d like it.”

“Give me dried hoofprints and the smell of old manure any day.”

McCord laughs. At least he has a sense of humor about himself. I can feel the giggles rise like bubbles…. Maybe that’s how it will begin.

“One thing about wranglers,” he says. “We take you to the best places.”