Nightwing

by Martin Cruz Smith

  “I think you’re beginning to understand. Plague is a kiss. Without that kiss, that flea bite, plague dies. Now that’s the amazing part. Death can die, too. Yes, love makes us all vulnerable. Even Him.”

  Paine finished the Coke and dropped the aquamarine bottle on the ground. He picked up the caged mouse on his way to the Land Rover and looked at distant spires of rock.

  “ ‘Twinkle, twinkle little bat, how I wonder what you’re at. Up above the world you fly, like a teatray in the sky.’ ”

  The Bell UH-1 “Iroquois” copter rattled fifty feet above its shadow as metal pipes rained down on the dead sheep. The center of each pipe was baited with meat, the open ends were lined with insecticide.

  “Don’t see those ammonia stains you’re talking about.” Walker Chee surveyed the carcasses through binoculars.

  “We’re not close enough. Go down,” Youngman yelled over the engine noise.

  “Not on your life!”

  The copter peeled off into a wide circle. Inside, the patrolmen rolled canisters to the bays, and as the copter passed over the sheep and Isa Loloma’s truck again Begay dumped more poison, bags that exploded on contact with the ground in a dust of cornmeal spiced by a lethal anticoagulant called warfarin.

  “I have a meeting with Piggot at my office in one hour. Let’s step on it.” Chee told the pilot.

  “I can show you the same bites and stains on the horses in Joe Momoa’s corral,” Youngman said to the doctors.

  “No,” Chee answered.

  “Whatever attacked the boy and the sheep attacked the horses.”

  “Says you.”

  “Then what attacked them?” Youngman pointed back at the receding hill. “A cat goes after a flock, it picks out one sheep. Coyotes’ll scatter sheep over kingdom come. That’s eighty sheep back there, slaughtered.”

  “Duran,” Chee shook his head, “you see one sick kid and you scream ‘Plague.’ You see some dead sheep and horses and you say it’s a mystery. We’ve been dealing with plague control for years. We’ve done it with the Indian Bureau and experts from the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. Plague is spread by rodent fleas. Any rodent within miles of that hill is as good as dead now. We know how to handle this problem, if you’ll just let us get on with it.”

  “Those sheep weren’t killed by prairie dogs.”

  “But plague is spread by rodent fleas. Get it through your head, Deputy. I haven’t got time to check out every vulture lunch you find.”

  “Because you got to get back to your whites.”

  “Right. Because it was the white oil company that gave us this helicopter so we could dust those sheep for you. Because it’s the white utilities give us satellite pictures to help our irrigation program. Yeah, you figured it out. Because in spite of you people, I’m going to bring some money into red hands. If you don’t like it, you can always step outside.”

  Chee lit a cigar for his grin.

  “You’re scared, Duran. You’re scared of anyone successful, especially another Indian. I could show you some computer technology we’re setting up at the clinic that would knock your eyes out, but I’ve changed my mind. I’m not going to have you pestering the doctors. Besides, this desert is quarantine enough for you. Just wash yourself down with some green soap and burn your clothes before you go near anyone. I can’t help you.”

  Chee settled back, listening to the jets’ whine and the rotors’ strokes, a rider secure in his element. Youngman watched the ground.

  Anne sawed through the distributor cable and carried it with her to sit in the shade of the overturned van. Henry was sprawled unconscious on the sand. Franklin watched through slitted eyes. Both of his legs were broken from the accident. The two smaller fingers of Anne’s left hand were broken and tied together. She peeled insulation off the cable with Franklin’s penknife.

  He spat cactus pulp onto the ground.

  “It’s no use.”

  “It’s all we have. We left everything with the bats.”

  When she’d peeled all the insulation off, she separated the copper strands, coiling and putting aside all but one. Beside her was the one item of use she’d found in the van, a fishing pole they’d planned to use on Joe Momoa’s trout stream. One end of the single copper wire Anne formed into a quarter-inch loop, through which she passed the free end of the wire. With every movement of her broken fingers, pain throbbed to her elbow. Worse, her fingers were slippery. On her fourth try, she attached the wire loop to the end of the fishing pole and drew the free end through the pole’s top eye.

  Franklin looked on without interest. The trauma of his injuries was secondary to the fact that he refused to eat or drink. The mathematics of survival in the desert were simple. Without shelter or water, a healthy man would last one day. Since Franklin was only losing ten pounds of body fluid a day in the shade, he had about two more days to go. Henry, with a fever, little pulse, a coma, Anne gave hours.

  “Pray for me,” Franklin asked.

  “No.”

  She put a pebble in her mouth to control her own thirst. It took her ten minutes just to hook the wire and tie on fishing leader. An experimental tug on the leader snapped the noose at the end of the pole shut.

  “Yea, tho I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death—”

  “You’re wasting energy.”

  “Should I save it?” he said. “This is easy for you. It’s always easy for heroes. I have it a little more difficult, my dear. I am a bad man,” he laughed weakly. “And I believe in God. It’s a contradiction that I’ve been able to maintain during life, but as I near death my situation becomes sharply uncomfortable.”

  “And you’re wasting lung moisture with every word.”

  “The very least of my problems. You know that bat that was on my chest—”

  “You were in shock long before you showed it. You wouldn’t have felt a knife in your chest.”

  “The Bible tells us bats shall roost on false idols. It’s an omen.”

  Anne’s broken fingers had puffed up. She wrapped them up again with her middle finger for support.

  “You’re going to leave us, aren’t you? When the sun goes down. Trading post can’t be more than forty miles away and you know the way. You can make it in a couple of nights.”

  “Maybe they’ll send someone out for us,” she said.

  “No. I remember you told us we wouldn’t see a soul until we reached the hills. We’re not expected back for three more days. What do you think, two more days before anyone gets worried? Before your deputy comes looking for you? A week, then. I’m sure you’ve figured this out already. You’ll go tonight while you still have the strength.”

  Earlier, she’d climbed the dune the van had hit. From there she could see, north, the distant edge of the mesa. South, the blue haze of the San Francisco Peaks. In between, nothing, not a hogan or a shepherd, nothing but wasteland and the thick shimmer of superheated air which, where the ground was flat and barren, presented the illusion of water.

  She sat and re-formed the noose at the end of the pole.

  “You are a beautiful woman. You shouldn’t die out here.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Maybe an Indian can live out here—”

  “That’s right. You learn to live. You learn to live differently.”

  Anne removed her sweat-damp shirt and tied it into a hat. Her bare breasts, nipples dark against pale, freckled skin, shifted with each movement. She put on Franklin’s windbreaker, picked up the fishing pole, and left the van.

  Fifty yards away, by the shallow gully of a dry arroyo pitted with burrows, she stopped and waited ten minutes, until her presence became part of the arroyo along with a beetle climbing over minuscule boulders and a nose that repeatedly sniffed the air before emerging as a mouse on the run. Upside-down, a spider traveled seemingly on air from one side of the gully to the other. A Chihuahua whip-tail lizard as long as Anne’s finger dug for scorpions.

  She felt the sun’s hands on her back,
a ball of sweat running down between her shoulder blades. The colors of the desert, when one spent enough time looking at it, were the colors of a woman. At a distance, the texture of skin stretched over the soft curves of hips, white in the sun, pale dun in semi-shade, in deep shade the blue of the underside of breasts. If she were naked, Anne thought, she could become indiscernible against the skin of the desert.

  The lizard’s tongue flashed like a ribbon. There were no male Chihuahua whiptails, only females that reproduced by cloning as if males were as needless a luxury as leaves on a cactus. Working industriously, sensing a scorpion below, the lizard didn’t see a five-foot-long whip-snake gliding over the arroyo bed.

  The whipsnake slid with his head held high and moving slowly from side to side the better to gauge the distance of his strike. He was smooth-scaled, striped on the side and creamy as marble on the belly. Concentrating on his prey, he nosed the copper noose.

  The lizard darted down the arroyo as Anne pulled the leader. The whipsnake swayed in the noose until Anne set it down and crushed its slim head under a rock.

  Half the snake meat she’d cook, half would be eaten raw for the moisture.

  She refused to die.

  Sixty million years ago, as the long Day of the Dinosaurs faded, an explosion of versatility was taking place among a newer class of life called mammals. Some mammals grew great, striving to fill the niche being vacated by the dinosaurs. Others developed speed afoot or fins to swim. A few tree shrews, small insectivores gifted with nimble fingers and voracious appetites, developed loose folds of skin along their ribs that enabled them to glide between branches.

  Gliding was made easier as their three outer fingers grew longer and webbed. Teeth changed, the incisors crowded out by larger canines. The collarbone extended, ribs flattened out, and the sternum became ridged to support powerful chest muscles, while the heart and lungs swelled. The upper arm shrank more. Thumb and forefinger shrank. Webbed outer fingers grew still longer, the third finger as long as the animal’s head and body. Gliding became flying, and there were bats. By the Age of Man, there were an estimated two thousand forms of bats.

  Paine listened for them in the dark.

  He sat bathed in the yellow glow of the Rover’s interior light idly flipping a copy of Playboy he’d picked up in the office of Chee’s doctor in Window Rock. The sheen of the pages transformed the nudes. Breasts were as glossy as fingernails. The centerfold blonde was as slick as soap.

  On top of the Rover, a unidirectional microphone rhythmically swung back and forth 360 degrees. In the center of the mike were six aluminum tubes, each designed to vibrate sympathetically like a tuning fork to a single frequency, however soft, at a distance of a thousand yards. The calls of many different bats might make one tube hum; only the echolocating call of the vampire could make all the tubes respond. Inside the truck, the pistol grip of the microphone shaft twisted next to Paine’s ear. One wire trailed from the grip to a battery and a second wire led to a distortion-free signal amplifier that, in turn, was jacked into an oscilloscope on the seat beside Paine. Across the green face of the scope was a white line as straight as a ruler.

  Chee’s doctor had given Paine an injection. He was full of sewage now; a sludge of 3,000 million formalin-killed plague bacilli coated with aluminum hydroxide floated through his veins. What he wanted was new ears for new voices.

  The night was so full of voices. Owls, frogs, hawks, lizards, mice, insects, coyotes, the entire desert was a reservoir of mews, barks, howls, and screams. Cries heard and unheard. Which was why he had to use the oscilloscope, because human hearing ended at the meager frequency of 20,000 cycles per second.

  From the magazine page a pouty face stuck out its tongue.

  Animals adapted in different ways to survive. In humans adaptation was outwardly evidenced by the size of the skull and sexual apparatus. The distended penis, enlarged breasts, full lips, and buttocks. Among bats? The wings. And the ears so magnified and as convoluted as crowns. The ear tragus as separate as a dagger. A cochlea wound round like a seashell and interlaced by muscles that allowed the ear to hear the echo clearer than the call, a call that could go to 200,000 cycles per second, ten times the range of man.

  Touch was what most mammals relied on in the night, when colors changed to shades of gray. Rodents packed themselves into the security of close burrows. Humans groped, hoping for the feel of soft skin, surrounded by fantasies and limitations, blind in the dark.

  Paine put the magazine aside, and smiled.

  Jezebels, Ochay would have said. Every day until his death, the Mexican was either kneeling in prayer or pressing religious tracts on the other members of the team.

  After his death, Ochay had his revenge. High in the Sierras, hill Indians had vandalized Paine’s truck and he lost his personal library of Milton, Shakespeare, and Lewis Carroll. All that was left was Ochay’s New Testament, a well-thumbed copy with the most horrific judgments and prophecies thoughtfully underlined. It was Paine’s only reading matter for the next six months.

  All of Revelations was underlined. St. John the Divine howling in the wilderness, stuffing the luggage of future madmen. “They have as king over them the angel of the bottomless pit . . . The rest of mankind who were not killed by these plagues did not repent of the works of their hands . . .” Better the chains of Marley’s ghost than Ochay’s book, Paine had thought more than once, though there were parts he did find interesting. “Then I saw an angel standing in the sun and with a loud voice he called to all the birds that fly in midheaven, ‘Come, gather for the great supper of God, to eat the flesh of kings, the flesh of captains, the flesh of mighty men, the flesh of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all men, both free and slave, both small and great.’ ”

  The oscilloscope shivered and cast a “print” of white dots. Only one microphone tube was responding; a wrong “print.” The Arizona sky was full of small insectivorous bats—guano bats, cave bats, red bats, pygmy canyon bats, fringed bats, and death’s head bats, which bore white “eyes and mouth” on their black belly fur—all wheeling in their nightly chase after grasshoppers and moths, blasting the air with high-intensity cries somewhere around 140,000 cps. The sensitive tubes of Paine’s microphone would tremble sympathetically at 73,000 cps, because the larger vampire bats were “whispering” bats, sending out low-intensity cries not through their mouths but through their nostrils. Like breath. The microphone continued its steady sweep. The oscilloscope line returned to level.

  Over the last few nights, the bats seemed to be coming from the west. The most likely origin was the San Francisco Peaks. He as good as crossed off the bat roosts of Mansion Mesa to the southeast.

  Sympathy was a concept Ochay and St. John never could grasp, Paine thought. For them, the reach to God or the skid to hell, anything but the reality of the world. But sympathy was one of the most interesting of all biological phenomena.

  Metal humming to batsong. Flesh with the crispness of magazine paper. Those were simple examples of mechanical sympathy. Sympathy between life-forms was more subtle.

  The truth was that death was no rending of the skies asunder, no clash of angels, no chariots of fire. Death was a filaria worm that was brought by a fly bite, grew on the pigment in human skin, and crawled out through the eye. Or a cancer virus that seemed to leap off the slide and begin metastasizing in mid-air. Or leprosy bacilli that turned limbs into withered ornaments. The joke was that among immunologists there was no immunity, and among parasitologists there was no prevention. Did the body recoil or throw up defenses against the seductive attraction of the invader? Rarely. As a statistical fact, among researchers the flesh yielded with tender anticipation. With sympathy. Cancer researchers had the highest cancer rate. Filaria researchers went blind. The specialist in leprosy became a lazar. The very point to saying a disease or parasite was endemic to a region was that there they were everywhere, and that there was no escape. Especially when you were not trying to escape, but rather relentlessly pursuin
g. Where intimacy was a professional necessity. People were always amazed at immunologists who studied the progression of a disgusting disease through their own bodies. Yet, if you were going to catch it, what the hell else could you do about it? The cancer blossomed, the worms fattened, and the man pared himself for specimens. An occupational hazard. You became, quite literally as the invasion spread, exactly what you studied. “Which is why,” Joe Paine used to point out in Mexico City, “we’re so damn clever.”

  The oscilloscope line trembled, just barely.

  Paine watched the microphone’s rotating shaft and the needle turning in the compass. The oscilloscope line was flat, shuddered, and was flat again. A tremor, not even enough for a print. Paine tapped the compass nervously.

  “We’re so clever,” Joe Paine used to say, “because our subject is rabies. We picked one with a cure.” Which was about the only mistake Paine could remember his father making. Because the subject was bats.

  His head jerked. The oscilloscope line was flat, flat, flat . . . a tremor . . . flat, flat, flat . . . a print. A faint one of low intensity slashing down an octave with three harmonic streaks. From the west, according to the compass.

  Inside the stationary sleeve of the microphone shaft, microswitches rode over cams. Four idents set the revolutions of the shaft. He twisted the sleeve one click to an arc of 180 degrees running west from north to south.

  On the oscilloscope, the prints were slightly stronger and twice as frequent. Those would be the lead females, casting soft, regular, searching whispers ahead of the main group. About eight hundred yards off, he estimated, and traveling around twenty miles per hour. On a clipboard map, he noted the direction and time of contact.

  Despite the cool night air, he perspired. Most bat “prints” were graceful shadows shaped like bells or diamonds. The voices of vampires were ragged, almost human. More bats came within range of the microphone. Northwest, he decided, and twisted the sleeve another click, cutting the arc to 90 degrees. The oscilloscope line was shivering almost constantly. They were coming right at him.