Nightwing

by Martin Cruz Smith

  Now in a new environment of desert and mesas, the vampires hunted as they always did, with patience and intelligence. They passed over two flocks of unsheared sheep and a dead rabbit, poisoned and set out for coyotes. Arroyos were dark ribbons in the moonlight. Tiger salamanders stirred in the damp beds of the arroyos, feeding off insects and being fed on by night snakes. The bats slipped untouched by the spines of fifty-foot saguaros. The petals of night-blooming cereus spread milky white.

  A different sound mixed with the high-pitched chatter of the bats. It traveled on the breeze from miles away, a nasally plaintive country-and-western song. As one, the thousand bats veered, their own chatter increasing in intensity, the membranes of their powerful wings stroking faster. This certain kind of sound, they knew, meant Man. Man and his animals, conveniently gathered. A lake of life.

  Two miles ahead, Isa Loloma, fourteen years old, his arms and back aching from a day of shearing sheep and binding their greasy wool, sat in the cab of a Dodge pickup sipping from a warm can of orange soda and listening to his transistor radio. The truck had no engine. Its wheel hubs sat on blocks. Its whole purpose was simply to scare away coyotes and that purpose it served very well. Isa’s nights were long and lonely.

  The night played tricks. Sometimes the Navajo station out of Gallup would fade and in its place would come stations from Houston or Kansas City. Voices would talk to him about steak palaces and local astronauts. Then he only had to lay his hands on the truck’s steering wheel and close his eyes to imagine that he was driving his own Eldorado down the freeway of some Anglo city, that he was wearing a custom shirt with mother of pearl snaps and sitting on an alligator skin wallet stuffed with $20 bills.

  Tonight, the Gallup transmission droned steadily on. Every Piggly Wiggly Supermarket in Bernalillo County, the voice from the ether said, was pleased to honor food stamps. There was going to be a social dance at the Tuba City Chapter. Sports results were brought courtesy of Massey-Ferguson tractors.

  Isa made the soda last. When his eyelids started to grow heavy, he climbed out of the truck and rubbed his legs and ran in place to start his blood moving. Still yawning, he drew his father’s old Browning Auto-5 shotgun from the blanket on the cab seat. The sheep were quiet. He’d take one turn around the flock and come back for a nap.

  Something fluttered by him. A nighthawk, he thought. The only problem with sheep was during the spring, when coyotes came in for the lambs, or during shearing if the clipping was done badly and cut up the sheep, then the smell of blood would make coyotes bold. But Isa was a good clipper. He left the sheep shorn down to their pink skin without a nick.

  He walked for about fifty yards before he became very awake. He could hardly see the sheep, although he heard a constant rustling. The sheep were there, he knew they wouldn’t leave the grass. There was that rustling, a busy, papery rustling that came from every direction. He fought a first, childish impulse to run. And then, just a few feet in front of him, he saw the pale blue of a sleeping sheep’s head. Baby, he scolded himself.

  Strangely, he could make out the legs but not the body of the sheep. He could see the head of another sheep, but not its body either. A wing grazed the boy’s long hair, fanning his cheek. Something touched his foot. There was a rusted flashlight with weak batteries in his pocket. He aimed the flashlight at the nearer sheep. A pale, yellow beam picked out the steadily breathing nostrils of the sheep. The light slid back over the curly head.

  At first, the sheep’s flanks seemed to be covered by a gray blanket. Then two of the bats raised their eyes to the beam and he saw the blanket was a dozen bats lying on a sheet of blood. The next sheep had its own blanket of bats and, as Isa swung the flashlight around, he saw that all the sheep were covered in the same manner, sleeping under the feeding. The bats were larger than any he’d ever seen before and the ones he’d disturbed only glared at him with open mouths. He shined the light downwards and kicked off a bat that was climbing up his pants.

  With all his strength, Isa swung his father’s shotgun at the sheep.

  The bats, as a community, were first aroused by the explosion of the shotgun. Two bats were dead. Those closest scattered, only to land a short distance away. The community as a whole drew in, ringing the source of the noise. There were no leaders, except in that the communal instincts would first be carried out by the most aggressive individuals, the females, among a very aggressive species of animal. The instincts were to protect the Food and to repel an aggressor, which they could clearly see was a single man. In a sense, then, more Food. The ring drew tighter.

  The Food was a marvelous thing. There were few animals in the world, and no other at the bats’ level of intelligence, whose every organ and sense were so designed and attuned solely for the taking of sustenance, and perhaps this was true because no other animal was so uniquely surrounded by it. From every other warm-blooded animal they could feel the pulsing of the Food, or taste it in the air so rich with sweat and exhalations. As a result, to the bats there were no natural enemies, not even man. There could be no enemies, when all was the Food.

  A bat darted by the boy, easily dodging the stroke of a shotgun stock. Another bat flashed by him, slicing his nose. The boy turned in a circle, flailing the air. The agitation, his labored breathing and the pounding of his heart, excited the bats. A whirlpool of them swirled around him, just out of reach of the shotgun. From straight above, one dived and tore open his ear. He fell and at once his back was covered with bats, which clung to his shirt as they ripped through to the skin. Another bat landed on his hand and the boy dropped the shotgun, rose, and began to run.

  They followed the running boy until he reached the truck, dived through its door and rolled the window up. For a while, the bats clustered on the hood and windshield. Then, one by one, they returned to the sheep. To the feast.

  C H A P T E R

  T H R E E

  “When I die and go to hell,” Selwyn squinted at the sun, “that place is going to look awful familiar.”

  He clutched the flask in his breast pocket as Youngman steered around a hole in the road. Selwyn’s wife Esther and one of his half-breed daughters rode in the back of the deputy’s jeep. The teenage girl was dolled up for social attention in a black dress trimmed in red. Looming ahead was that center of the Hopi universe called the Black Mesa. From the giant mesa four fingers stretched southwards into the desert. They were called, from west to east, Third Mesa (with the pueblos of Hotevilla and Oraibi), Second Mesa (with the Shongopovi and Shipaulovi pueblos), First Mesa (Hano and Walpi), and Antelope Mesa (with the ruins of Awatovi). Seen from the road below, the mesas appeared a single, flat-topped wall of stone reaching to the horizon in either direction. Only two fragile clouds intruded on the sky.

  “Did Anne tell you where she was going to camp?” Youngman asked.

  “Didn’t ask. She wouldn’t give me the time of day or the year anyway, Romeo. She’s after your balls, you know that. Rich white girl, that’s the worst. I mean, she is not for you. Now, take my girl Mae here. You could do worse.” He weighed Youngman’s lack of interest. “Typical. They want blankets, I have pots. They want white girls . . .”

  “Hey, Selwyn, you never told me. Why did you give up the missionary business?”

  “Never did. It gave up on me. I got another germ, see?”

  “No.”

  Selwyn took advantage of a relatively smooth stretch of the unpaved road to suck his flask.

  “It’s my theory that religion is like a disease. A great religion’s like an epidemic. Take Christianity, Mohammedanism, Buddhism. Just like epidemics. Start in one place, always spread along the trade routes, flourish for a few hundred years and die out. Or get overrun by a new epidemic. I was sent here like a germ, to infect you people. Instead,” he shrugged, “you infected me.”

  “With what?”

  “A very dry mouth,” Selwyn tipped his flask again.

  As they neared it, Third Mesa jutted out towards the road, an escarpment of rock shea
red cleanly at its top except for decaying, boxlike structures of adobe. Old Oraibi was still inhabited, barely, as if by the survivors of some disaster.

  Esther nudged Youngman’s back.

  “I have to do Mae’s legs. Pull over at Spanish Place.”

  Youngman pulled off the road beside a mesquite tree and a weathered tin sign that read, “Warning. No outside visitors allowed in Oraibi. Because of your failure to obey the laws of our tribe as well as the laws of your own, this village is hereby closed.”

  Selwyn went behind the sign to urinate. Mae’s white cotton leg wrappings had come undone, revealing a pair of 59¢ athletic socks. While Esther wound the traditional wrapping again, Youngman stretched his legs up on the windshield and smoked.

  There was nothing much to distinguish this strip of the highway from any other, although some Hopis said it was here that they greeted a Conquistador named Pedro de Tovar and his troops in 1540.

  He was supposed to be the Pahana, the White Brother whom the Hopis had left a thousand years before, when they first began their long diaspora out of Mexico. Oraibi was established in 1100; the other pueblos followed as other clans arrived at the Black Mesa. Together, they waited for the bearded white brother whose arrival would signify the completion of the world. Pahana didn’t arrive the year he was expected; in the person of Cortez, he was busy bringing down the Aztec Empire. Keeping watch, the Hopis cut a notch in a stick for each year their Brother was late.

  There were twenty notches when de Tovar appeared on the horizon. Hastily, the Hopis prepared for this epic culmination. Fire Clan and Bear Clan priests ran down to the desert and drew a line of welcoming blue cornmeal before the horses and armored men. De Tovar looked on in confusion, and so it fell to the Catholic priest to make a decision. “Why are we here?” he yelled. “Santiago!” the troopers answered, lanced the Hopis in their way, and rushed up the mesa, quickly subduing the pueblos.

  For the greater glory of God, the Hopis were made Christians and slaves. They were sent down mines in search of gold, silver, mercury, and oil-saturated shale that burned like coal. Indians found conducting pagan rites were whipped and torched with burning turpentine. For 140 years, the Hopis endured their error about de Tovar, until the Tewa called Popay sent to them a knotted cord indicating the night of rebellion throughout the pueblos of the Southwest. At the Black Mesa, the moment of revolt was signaled by the call of a screech owl. The Castillo soldiers were slaughtered at the church doors, the priests were knifed at the altar, their steel pikes were buried and the church razed to its last stone. In all, over five hundred Spanish died during their retreat to Mexico, and although the Hopis were subsequently overrun by Spanish and Mexicans and Americans the tribe became infamous for its reluctance to convert again.

  They settled down to wait for the real, the true Pahana.

  Selwyn emerged from behind the sign zipping his fly.

  “The Bible says that Jesus went into the wilderness and there he fasted for forty days.” He shook his pants. “Sort of interesting exactly how long the Son of God could take living like a Hopi, huh?”

  “You’re a cynical bastard, Selwyn.”

  “Not compared to you. I just talk that way. Booze keeps me innocent.”

  “Except for your kidney.”

  Two cars came flashing up the road to the mesa. The first was a new Buick Le Sabre, shiny in spite of its patina of dust. As the car went by, Youngman caught sight of its driver, a square-faced Indian in a business suit talking on a car phone as he steered. A sticker on the bumper read “Dine Bizeel.” “Navajo Power.”

  “Walker Chee!” Mae looked in awe after the car of the Chairman of the Navajo Tribal Council.

  “Headpounder.” Youngman used the Hopi epithet for Navajos, earned by the Navajos’ old habit of crushing the skulls of their prisoners.

  The second car was a Cadillac. Behind the wheel was a man unknown to Youngman, a white in shirtsleeves and a tie. He glanced at the Indians on the side of the road, sunglasses making one decisive swipe.

  Inside the Land Rover, after a night of signal tracking, Paine was asleep. Sweating and dreaming in the morning heat.

  He was back in Mexico.

  He and his father were immunologists under contract to the Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Pecuarias, working out of the agency’s Vampire Bat Research Station in Mexico City. The research station’s aim was to control derriengue, rabies transferred by vampire bites. The Paines’ particular mission was to find why the vampires were largely immune to the lethal virus they carried.

  Paine’s closed eyelids glistened. He was back in the Sierra Madre del Sur, near the Guatemalan border. In the cave. He and his father and Ochay were following the beams of their helmet lamps, feeling their way along a ridge two hundred feet above the cavern floor. The cavern wormed its way half a mile into the mountain. Its general shape was ovoid, the walls below the ridge smoothly curved to the floor, the walls above arched another hundred feet up to giant stalactites and the bat roosts. Paine was a team leader and point man. He was attached to a nylon rope strung through saw-toothed pitons he hammered into the limestone wall. Joe Paine and Ochay were close behind, unattached, moving hand over hand along the rope, both men bearing a red canister of poison on their backs. No vinyl overalls this trip because of the climbing, only goggles and gas masks to endure ammonia rising from the bat dung. Without a mask, a man could survive a maximum ammonia concentration of 100 parts per million for an hour; near the mouth of the cave they’d registered the concentration at 4,000.

  “Deeper, we’re not there yet,” Hayden Paine said.

  Dr. Joseph Paine was getting too old for this kind of work. Gray hair sprouted like owl feathers from under his sailor’s cap and the oppressive weight of the canister bowed his knees. As a point of pride, though, he refused to restrict himself to lab work in the capital. Besides, he could control his son.

  Ochay probably wouldn’t have come without the old man along. All the Mexicans from the station knew the son was a crazy glory seeker who chose the largest roosts in the most inaccessible mountains. Of the ten original members of the team, only Ochay and Hayden Paine had escaped bites or falls or ammonia exposure. The whole expedition would have been scrapped if the old man hadn’t arrived.

  In the lead, Paine dug in the crampons of his boots. The ridge of slick limestone was twenty inches across; a glistening stalactite, half-born from the wall, completely blocked the way.

  Behind Paine, his father pulled his mask away to talk.

  “That’s it for today. We can tie the canisters here and come back tomorrow.”

  Paine ignored the advice. With his left hand he swung his axe hard around the protrusion into the wall on the other side. He tugged the axe handle. It seemed solid enough. Clutching it, he swayed around the stalactite and stretched himself to where the ridge continued. As he hammered a fresh piton, the echoes of his blows resounded along the recess of the cavern. A few bats squealed in complaint.

  Two million bats occupied the cave. White Ghost bats. Carnivorous Spear-Nosed bats. Nectar-sucking bats. Minute insectivorous bats of a dozen varieties. Meat-eating Vampyrum Spectrums with three-foot wingspreads. Fishing bats. And the colony all the others roosted far away from, the true Vampires, Desmodus.

  “Pass the tanks,” Paine ordered.

  Joe Paine and Ochay hooked the canisters to the rope. From the far side, Paine watched the tanks jiggle around the stalactite and with anxious tenderness he pulled the poison onto the ridge.

  “Come on.”

  “I can’t make it,” Ochay answered.

  “The vampires are farther on.”

  “I can’t—”

  A shriek cut them off. There was a scuffle on the cave roof where the Vampyrum Spectrums hung. Ochay’s hand lantern followed the fall of a pink Spectrum infant to the floor.

  The floor was a world of its own, a steaming brown soup of digested nectar, meat, insects, and blood. Twenty percent protein, it supported pools of bacteria. Ove
r a million mites, scavenger beetles, toads, and mountain crabs to a square yard. Giant cockroaches and venomous snakes. For them all, guano was a steady rain of food, or food for their food. The fall of an unlucky bat was a bonanza for them, and seconds of agony for the bat.

  “Let’s go.” Paine yanked the rope.

  Joe Paine slid around the stalactite first and then Ochay. The latter was shaking.

  “You’re taking too many chances.” Joe Paine clung to the wall. “Ochay—”

  “If I can do it, so can he.”

  “But we’re running out of air. I suggest—”

  “But you’re not the leader of this team. I am.”

  Paine pushed on. As they went deeper into the cave, the ridge narrowed to twelve inches, to ten, to six. Paine had to drive in a piton every second step, while his father and Ochay struggled behind with the canisters.

  “He’s scared,” his father whispered to Paine. “You should understand that. He’s scared of you. I think I’m scared of you now, too.”

  “I can do it without you.”

  “Could you?”

  In overhead grottoes, shapes twisted, ears attuned to human voices. Even through his mask, Paine could smell the change in the ammonia, getting fouler, more penetrating.

  “This is the last cave you go into. I’m going to see to that,” Joe Paine said.

  “We’re almost there.”

  It was the end of the rope, not the diminishing air, that finally halted Paine.

  “Madre de Dios,” Ochay was sobbing.

  Paine had brought a selection of wet and dry poisons in the expedition’s trucks. For a cavern as large as this, he’d selected Cyanogas. The bottom half of each tank was compressed air, the top half a compartment of poisonous dust. He strapped the two canisters together so that they’d lie flat and lowered them by a separate rope from the last piton until their tops hung level with the ridge. After he adjusted the tank nozzles to achieve a ninety-degree range, he set the timer on each nozzle at thirty minutes. When the timers ticked down, the tanks would release a hundred-foot spray of Cyanogas which, in contact with the cavern’s moisture, would change into hydrocyanic acid lethal to every life-form it touched, including the men who brought it. The strapping and adjustments Paine made with a mechanical deliberateness.