Nightwing

by Martin Cruz Smith

  “Here!” Anne shouted from the van door.

  Henry staggered against the door, closing it. He leaned against the van even harder as others tried to push him down or pull him away, climbing over him and each other.

  “Get back! Let me open it!” Anne shouted from inside.

  They didn’t hear her. She heard them. Shrieking. Anne had never seen such huge bats before and, since the campers had stopped fighting the bats to fight each other, the bats swarmed over them at gross leisure. The efforts of the campers became grotesque, as if they were swimming in slow motion. Swimmers no longer identifiable one from the other. Just screams and gaping eyes and a hand that smeared blood over the window.

  Anne kicked the door open. Two figures rushed in, and the second slammed the door shut and locked it.

  “The others . . .”

  “Shut up.” Franklin pushed her away.

  The others beat on the windows, but futilely. A combination of horror, confusion, and loss of blood started to take its effect. One, a woman in a coat of bats, clutched her left arm and toppled backwards. In a second, her face was covered. Smothered.

  “We have to let them in.” Anne struggled against Franklin.

  “And let the bats in, are,you crazy?”

  “You can’t let them die.”

  “You got us into this. Help me hold her, Henry.”

  A wet forearm reached across Anne’s throat. At first, she thought they were strangling her, but they were only pulling her into the backseat, away from the door handle.

  Claire crawled under the van to scrape the bats off her back. A steady stream of bats slid under the vehicle after her. Another figure knelt, hands in prayer, arms and body under clusters of bats. Finally, the screaming subsided, overlapped by the scuttling of claws on the roof of the van, and by the cries of the bats, too high-pitched for human detection but a subtle, incessant pressure on the consciousness.

  Franklin started the motor and turned on the headlights.

  A figure walked towards the van swinging a burning stick. His shirt and hair were on fire. A cloud of bats hovered over him.

  The van started, lurched over Claire, and stalled. The burning man beat his stick against a window while the generator whined and caught. The van ripped through an ocotillo bush.

  “You can’t leave them,” Anne said.

  “Shut her up,” Franklin ordered.

  Anne fought off Henry. Everything she touched was raw flesh.

  The van rammed a saguaro, smashing the right headlight as blood continued to pour into Franklin’s eyes. But he managed to find room to gain speed. A bat or two fluttered ahead. He pushed the accelerator to the floor mat, dodging the tall saguaros and running over smaller cactus and bushes.

  By chance, he found the dirt road Anne had taken to the campsite. The road was uneven but straight and the van rocked at 60, outdistancing the last of the bats.

  Thank God, he thought over and over again. Thank God.

  For half an hour, Franklin raced after the beam of his single headlight. Henry had lapsed into shock, while Anne, numbly let her head loll with the weaving of the van. In the middle of the nightmare, she wanted no feeling. Franklin glanced at her through the rearview mirror.

  “I’ll do the call on the radio,” he said.

  “There’s no radio. It’s back at the camp, everything’s back there.”

  “The least you can do is give me a cloth. I’m still bleeding.”

  “Then let me drive, I know the road.”

  “Have you turn around? No way. And when we get out of here, you leave the talking to me. Just remember, you’re the one who got us into this. Did you ever see bats like that before?”

  “No one ever saw bats like that before,” she said in a flat voice.

  “Except here,” he laughed bitterly. “How’s Henry doing?”

  “Not much pulse, but more than the ones you left.”

  “Look, you can thank me that you’re alive. We barely got out of there. I did what had to be done. When we reach help, I’ll do the explaining.”

  “Go to hell.”

  How could bats act like that? Franklin asked himself. Rabies. The girl didn’t have any medical supplies with her and, besides, she wasn’t bitten. She had nothing to worry about. He was the one who needed help.

  A white rag of cloud hung in the moonlight. Franklin kept wiping blood from his eyes. The road was disappearing now under stretches of windblown sand. A mesquite tree slapped at the windows.

  “You don’t know the way,” Anne said. “You have to let me drive.”

  “I’m the one who may die,” he blurted out, and hearing the words in his mouth became aware of the chill creeping through his body. He didn’t think of the night air or of lower blood pressure, only of the rank clamminess and a smell something like ammonia. The tires skidded on sand.

  “Watch where you’re going,” Anne warned. She leaned forward. Franklin was breathing noisily through his mouth and his eyes were glassy under red lids. “You’re going into shock. You have to pull over. Do it slowly.”

  Clinging to the wheel as if to life, he concentrated on overtaking the single beam of light, which was narrowing and turning red.

  “Slow down.” Anne spoke deliberately in his ear. “You have to let me take the wheel.”

  As Franklin had lost the power of speech, he concentrated all the more on the ruby shaft of light. It glittered with night insects, with wings and eyes, with warm promises. Incredibly, he was overtaking the light. The red road expanded and welcomed him.

  “I’m going to take the wheel now.” Anne reached over his shoulders. As her forearm touched his collarbone his shirt stirred, and a bat raised its head from the damp burrow it had made in Franklin’s chest to give Anne a scarlet grin.

  The road curved. The van went straight, shearing off two giant saguaros at the base and ploughing through tamarisk trees before it hit a dune and rolled on its back.

  C H A P T E R

  F O U R

  Isa Loloma felt cold. He was in the Months of the Hawk Moon and snow was covering him. The snow fell on his eyes and on his brain and between his ribs onto his heart.

  Isa Loloma, dry and hot, fought in his fever against the straps that held him spread-eagled on a hay wagon in the sun outside Youngman’s hogan. His wrists and ankles were raw. On his shoulders, the back of one hand, and, worst, on his neck were bulging, reddish buboes. Lymph nodes become swollen moons of disease, around which the rest of Isa’s life would gravitate.

  His parents were in the hogan.

  “I went up in the morning like always to get him.” Richard Loloma twisted the brim of his hat. “Sheep was all dead. I figured a cat got at them. The boy was okay except for some scratches and acting crazy. We put him to bed but he went and got a fever and those bumps, so we come in to see Abner.”

  “It’ll ruin us probably without the sheep. I don’t know, maybe we can get some new sheep,” Irene Loloma said, “but he’s the only boy we got.”

  The father turned his hat in his hands, two inches at a time, while Irene respectfully clasped her hands against her apron, as if she and her husband were in a marble hall of justice instead of standing on dirty floorboards.

  “Abner’s dead.” Youngman said. “Miss Dillon’s off in the desert. Did you give him aspirin?”

  “He can’t keep it down.”

  “He’s real hot,” the man added. “He gets shaking and you can’t hold him down.”

  Youngman didn’t want to look at the boy. He didn’t know anything about medicine. There was a clinic in Tuba City and the Lolomas could reach it by afternoon. All the same, he pulled himself from the chair. If it made them feel better, he told himself.

  “You’ll check him out?” the woman asked.

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  He was hung over from Selwyn’s bad whiskey and the white sun hammered on his forehead. Youngman stood by the hay cart squinting when he saw the boy’s sweat and the glossy, pink swelling on the boy’s neck,
and then the lines of Youngman’s face went flat. The boy started shaking and straining, twisting like a bow until only his shoulders and heels touched the cart. His mother reached to comfort him.

  “No!” Youngman said. “Get back.”

  “Why? I was—”

  “Don’t touch him, don’t get within five feet of him. Go to the trading post and get some blankets. On the way back go to the freezer. There’s a cut up elk of mine in there. Wrap the meat in the blankets and bring it back to me.”

  “Sure,” Richard Lolomas said uncertainly.

  “Wait, one more thing. You get any flea bites lately, either of you?”

  “No.”

  Youngman returned to the hogan and radioed Cecil Somiviki. Cecil’s wife answered and said the sheriff was away at Shongopovi washing snakes for the dance.

  Youngman sat in front of the radio. It was a Saturday. If he radioed Arizona Public Health for forty-eight hours he might get them to answer, just maybe get a doctor. The nearest town was Flagstaff. It was swimming pool and drowning season there; they weren’t going to send one of their ambulances way into the reservation.

  Then, there were the Navajo clinics at Tuba City and Ship Rock.

  He turned to a band he’d never used before, the one to the Navajo capital.

  “Calling Window Rock. This is Hopi Deputy Duran calling Navajo Police. Come in, please.”

  “This is Window Rock. Did you say Hopi? Over.”

  “I’m at Gilboa.”

  “We know where you operate from, Duran.”

  “I have a possible case of bubonic plague here.”

  An hour later, a white “Navajo Air” Beechcraft eight-seater, trimmed in blue with a yellow Navajo sun on the tail, taxied directly in front of the hogan. Two Navajo police in glossy black-and-white plastic helmets stood by while gloved and masked doctors removed the cold meat Youngman had laid beside the boy to keep him cool. Isa was slid onto a chrome table and zippered into a transparent oxygen tent attached to an air cooler and germ scrubber on the bottom of the table. His parents watched with fascination, as if their son were being transformed into someone alien. They kept glancing at Youngman for reassurance, but Walker Chee was in charge.

  “It’s not necessarily plague,” Chee told Youngman. “We run a watch on all the possible carriers of the plague flea. Rats, prairie dogs, rabbits, ground squirrels. We’ve got it pretty much under control. Kid probably has cat scratch fever.”

  “Sure. I’m just a little surprised you came with the doctors, what with all the power plants you have to run a watch on,” Youngman said.

  “Anything I can do to help.” Chee was in a turquoise jumpsuit with monogrammed pockets. He lit a small cigar. “You were right on the ball giving us that call. I was wrong about you. A lot of guys would’ve let these folks go on to a medicine man and then, God forbid we have a case of the plague here, we could have had a problem of more infection. You are definitely going to get a good report out of this.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Youngman said in a monotone. He watched the doctors briskly roll the boy to the plane. Very smooth.

  In spite of his dislike for Chee, Youngman had to admit he was impressed. At thirty-eight, Chee governed an area larger than many states. If his flashy smile and suits made the cover of Business Week, maybe it was because he deserved it. He had brought in those power plants, and medical clinics, and power shovels to rip coal out of the mesa, and uranium surveys of the desert, and a digital watch assembly plant in Ship Rock, and an Indian community college, and teams of white investors from Phoenix and Dallas. Youngman was very impressed that a man like Walker Chee, who was not a doctor, would personally supervise the care of a Hopi boy. Also, skeptical.

  “Don’t have any cases on your land?” Youngman asked.

  “Of plague? None in the whole Navajo nation.”

  “Any last year?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Because I remember three years ago you had twenty cases of bubonic plague.”

  The doctors returned to fumigate the hay cart with sulfur dioxide.

  “Let me level with you, Deputy. The life of any individual on my nation’s land or your nation’s is valuable to me. You can’t put a price on people. But, with all the other stuff on our agenda—unemployment, education, and general health care—I just wish a couple of cases of plague were the biggest problem we had.”

  Finished with the cart, the doctors trotted up to Chee. One was a young Navajo, the other was older and white. The two Navajo police pushed the Loloma couple forward. Youngman recognized the bigger policeman, a muscleman called Begay.

  “What’s going on?” Youngman asked.

  “Don’t worry,” Chee slapped his back, “there’s enough room in the plane for all of us.”

  “Why?”

  “Quarantine, of course. Just a couple of days at the clinic until we get lab reports. The doctors can tell you, this is standard procedure set down by the government. It’s purely for your protection.” Chee gave the faintest nod to his police, who slipped by the Lolomas to either side of Youngman. “Go ahead, ask the doctors.”

  Youngman was wearing his .38. He rested his hand on the grip as casually as he could.

  “It’s definitely plague, then?” he asked the white doctor.

  “Hold on.” Chee raised his hand. “I told you, they can’t make a diagnosis now. Look, Deputy, you asked for my help here. Since I’m giving it to you, you do what I say. You hop like a bunny over to that plane.”

  As the sleek plane dominated Gilboa, Chee dominated other Indians. Usually, sheer force of personality was enough, but there were other ways. He took a step back, and the doctors followed suit.

  “What bit him?” Youngman asked.

  “Huh?”

  “You say you keep a watch on flea carriers. I saw those wounds. You tell me what animal bit him.”

  Chee was momentarily sidetracked.

  “Folks say a cat or coyotes got the sheep. Probably the same thing got him. We’ll know when the kid talks.”

  “If he talks, and that could be too late for someone else. You talk, doctor, tell me what kind of wounds those were.”

  “Well,” the pahan doctor seized the opportunity to cover anxiety with professionalism, “a good question. They can’t be teeth marks because they’re more like the gouges you see from claws. There aren’t the puncture marks you expect from canine teeth. On the other hand, they can’t be claw marks because they’re far too sharp. There isn’t the bruising you expect to see, and the pattern is of a single crater instead of four or five lacerations as is the usual pattern for claws. In fact, the only way I could describe them is a gouge one might receive from two grooved razors held close together.”

  “Cat, coyote, rat, prairie dog? Mouse? What?”

  “I can’t say. I never saw wounds like that before,” the doctor said.

  “What does all this prove?” Chee lost patience.

  “I’ve seen wounds like that before,” Youngman said. “And I’ve seen the stains that go with them.”

  Begay moved closer.

  “You’re going to check out where the boy was attacked, aren’t you?” Youngman talked fast. “You’ll never find the place without the Lolomas or me. Let’s see if we can find something else. Since you want to be a help.”

  Paine got to the campsite too late.

  “ ‘Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous, beastie,’ ” he slid up the door of a 12" X 20" lucite cage next to what was left of Claire Franklin, which was dried blood, a skull crushed on a tire track, and an abdominal cavity gutted and as empty as a drum. Almost empty. “ ‘Thou need na’ start awa sae hasty, wi’ bickering brattle. I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee, wi’ murd’ring pattle.’ ”

  Paine kicked the dead woman’s back, and a kangaroo mouse jumped from the stomach into the cage. The cage door slapped shut.

  The rest of the three corpses were as badly mutilated by scavengers. The effect scavengers created, it always seemed to Pain
e, was an after-the-party air. Bits of skin and clothes were strewn here and there in the dirt like torn streamers. Bodies, a coffee pot, hamburger buns and marshmallows scattered in weary repose. Only flies and ants still at work, and a horned toad waiting for the ants. A scene for Dürer, he thought.

  He opened a Coke from the campers’ food chest and sat down.

  “The reason I’ve asked you here, the topic for today is, What do you think of Death? You’re all worn out, I know, but it’s more than likely you have some constructive insights. Group therapy may be new to you. It’s not to me, so I will lead this session. A topic we might begin with is whether from your vantage point you see death as a mere continuum of life, whether you see yourselves as now existing in part at least as a vulture or a prairie dog, a communion of flesh in the Catholic view. I realize people hate to talk about it. They avoid the subject, it’s a conversation killer. If it helps I can tell you this. All the really deep, all the really great thinking on the subject of death is done during a plague. Granted, millions die during a war, but all the thinking is wasted on patriotism and strategies. Take a plague. Strategies are useless and patriotism is ridiculous. Pure death, nothing but death is finally met.

  “For example, you probably recall what bad poetry Robert Frost wrote about a woodpile rotting in the woods. No real sense of life or death. Just mildew. Compare it to Nashe’s In Time of Pestilence. ‘Brightness falls from the air; queens have died young and fair; dust hath closed Helen’s eye. I am sick, I must die. Lord have mercy on us.’ ”

  Paine chugged soda down a dry throat.

  “Death is an intimate thing. That’s so easy to forget. Just like sex, a very intimate thing. Nowadays, people like to be deceased, not in ‘death’s embrace.’

  “The fascinating thing about plague, you see, is that it’s death personified. I mean, death as a person. A lover. There was a case reported in A Journal of the Plague Year of a dying man who ran through the streets of London kissing pretty girls, deliberately infecting them: Killing them. People said he was mad. It’s my opinion, however, that at the time he was running through the streets he had given up his soul and he was Death with two legs and two lips.