Nightwing

by Martin Cruz Smith

  The only problem she had was him. He remembered the first time he and Anne camped together, up on Dinnebito Wash. Camping was a formal word for it. Just catching enough trout to eat. Making love on a blanket.

  On the second night, she’d started talking about her family, and on the third night she asked about his.

  “No family and no stories,” he said.

  “I saw those sketches you did. That terrible bloody face in all of them. It looked full of symbolism to me.”

  “Symbolism hell,” he answered. “That’s Masaw.”

  To entertain her, he told her stories about Maski Canyon. The story about how Masaw escaped bloody and burned from a flaming pit that could never be put out. The story about the city of the dead. When she asked him to take her there, he put her off.

  “What you mean is, this place doesn’t really exist, does it?” she laughed.

  “Something like that.” He took the easy way out.

  “Like ‘somewhere over the rainbow’?”

  “Let me put it this way. If you’re there, you’re lost.”

  One thing bothered her.

  “How can you do the drawings if you’ve never seen Masaw?”

  “Abner tells me what to draw.”

  “He sees Masaw?”

  “Abner has connections.”

  “Abner’s going to poison himself with datura someday.”

  “That, too.”

  Wrong, as it turned out, Youngman thought.

  Abner and Anne, the only two people he cared about. One dead and the other leaving. But only leaving the reservation, not him necessarily. Not unless he insisted on staying, and what for? To end up as shriveled as Stone Man or a pariah like Abner? Chee almost had him out of his job already. Cecil refused to investigate what had happened to Abner’s body.

  Why not go with Anne? Or, phrased the way most whites would like to put it, why live like an Indian? Why live dirty on scrub land, sweating all day and freezing at night. With some vocational training he could work nine-to-five in an air-conditioned office and own two suits and an economy car and have two weeks’ vacation. Or, if he had sufficient cunning, become a professional Indian like Chee. Not that Anne would ever put the question that way. For her, it was merely a matter of love. Of “commitment,” as she put it. But Youngman was already committed. Being born a reservation Indian was the same as committing a crime and being sentenced to life in isolation. Quarantined with the perverse sickness that made life among whites the same as suffocation. The evidence-symptoms of this crime-disease: self-pity, suspiciousness, stupidity, and pride. Was there an Indian of the twentieth century, Youngman asked, who wasn’t schizophrenic? And who didn’t use it as an excuse? Did anyone do it as well as him?

  Youngman heard steps crossing the plaza and Harold Masito sat beside him, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette of mesa tobacco, stuff that was three times stronger than store-bought. The Bear Strap priest wore his shirt formally buttoned at the neck. In the sideways angle of the sun, his face was as rough as sandstone.

  “No clouds yet.” He stared at the mountains.

  “Not yet.”

  “You trying to think ’em up? Can’t think ’em up. We do our part and the rains come. Couple of days, maybe more. Not instant. Maybe we get a breeze tonight. Get a real rain, not like yesterday.”

  “I was thinking of Abner, really,” Youngman said. “Abner and bats.”

  They sat in silence for a minute, watching a mesquite ball roll over the ground far below. It bounced over some soda cans that had been pitched from the mesa. The cans could be used. Cut up and put over corn shoots in the spring.

  “I been thinking about Abner, too,” Harold said. “We shouldn’t never chased him off the mesa.”

  “You thought he was a witch, remember.”

  “He was. But he had the power. Only kind of power we got is Masaw, this land. Abner could talk to Masaw and we chased Abner out, and now we keep losing the land. Me, I thought I was a pretty brave fellow. I shouldn’t of been scared of Abner. You weren’t.”

  “I didn’t think he was a witch.”

  “And now?”

  “No. Someone else seems to, though. They robbed his grave. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

  “You mean, he’s not in it.”

  “Yeah. That’s not mysterious to me. The only thing I can’t figure is what killed him. I never saw wounds like that before. Weren’t any tracks.”

  Harold passed the cigarette.

  “Tracks are only there when you see ’em. Abner did things right. I seen him last night, in dreams. That’s why I come out here to you now.”

  “Oh?” Youngman was bitterly amused. “Now that you’ll talk to him, what did Abner have to say?”

  “He said for me to help you ’cause you don’t know how to read.”

  “Uncle, I can’t do much but I can read, thank you.”

  “Words.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You find any words when you found Abner?”

  “No.”

  Harold grunted as if he’d made a point.

  “So what was I going to read?” Youngman asked with exasperation. “Some scribbles of sand on the floor? Look, it’s a little late for you to come around on Abner’s behalf. I didn’t chase him off the mesa, you did. With witch stories—”

  “He stole the tablet. He told me in my dream.”

  “What?” Youngman was stopped short.

  “He stole the Fire Clan tablet so the Pahana couldn’t come back. The real White Brother has a corner of the tablet and when he comes we’re supposed to put the tablet back together and everything will be okay. We always had that tablet even before we got to this world so we’d know the Pahana when he got here.”

  “Before this world?”

  “From the Mayan world. Abner could read Mayan.”

  “Oh.” Youngman kept a straight face. “He never mentioned it to me.” How about Greek and Latin, he thought to himself.

  “We had to leave the Mayans ’cause life was too easy there.”

  “Sounds like a good reason.”

  “Here with Masaw we have to tend to the ceremonies to get any rain and corn at all. That’s how we stay close to the right way. I know it’s hard but we were chosen—”

  “Not chosen,” Youngman lost his patience. “Fucked. We are the God-fucked of the earth. Look at us! Walking around in rags, eating corn other people wouldn’t throw to pigs, sleeping in hovels, and what do we do but spend all our time congratulating ourselves on being the most God-fucked and hopeless people on earth. Because that’s what we are and nobody did it to us, we did it to ourselves. And we’re so fucking dumb we’re proud of it.”

  As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Youngman was ashamed. Harold regarded him with shock.

  “I’m sorry, uncle. That was unfair and stupid. Okay? You were telling me about the tablet Abner stole.”

  “There is such a tablet.”

  “I’m sure there is,” Youngman tried to mollify Harold.

  “We took it to Washington to President Taft, I remember, to see if he was the Pahana.”

  Let me guess, Youngman thought.

  “Was he?” he asked.

  “No.” Harold stayed downcast.

  Youngman found himself disconcerted by the memory of the altar Abner had set up in his shed. Abner had left a place on the altar for the tablet.

  “Anyway, it doesn’t matter,” Harold’s face brightened, “now that Abner gave it back to Masaw. The Pahana missed his chance. You aren’t going to leave the reservation, are you?” Harold added.

  “Why should I?” Youngman was surprised.

  “Talk is you’re going to get fired. Chee’s in there saying he’s going to give us a lot of help but he wants you fired.”

  “The elders wouldn’t do that and neither would Cecil.”

  “Not up to Cecil. And Chee, he’s a good talker. And maybe it’s ’cause you took up with that white girl. You think there was no bad f
eelings about that?”

  “Just between her and me.”

  “Well, that’s the way it is,” Harold shrugged and slapped his palms down on his knees. “Gotta get back. My boy he brought up some ice cream in a ice bucket. You finish this.” He gave Youngman the last of his cigarette.

  Fired, Youngman thought. He hadn’t thought much of his job until now. Except that it wasn’t worth a damn and if he couldn’t hold a job like that what could he do?

  “Abner told me another thing in that dream,” Harold said.

  “Yeah?”

  “He said for you to show me those pictures you took of him.”

  Youngman sat up and exhaled a stream of pungent smoke that fluttered against the air. The prospect of being fired remained in his mind but it did occur to him that he hadn’t told anyone about the pictures he took of Abner dead in the shack. No one else knew about them except Anne and the campers. Maybe they’d talked to Selwyn.

  “Okay,” he said slowly, “I’ll bring them. I don’t have them on—”

  He touched his shirt pocket and felt something flat, and brought out the Polaroid snapshots of Abner spread-eagled on the ground. Youngman thought he’d filed them away with the death report; he’d been sure he hadn’t put them in his pocket.

  “I guess I was wrong. What do you want them for?”

  “To read for you.” Harold took the pictures.

  He’d forgotten to file the snapshots, that was all, Youngman told himself.

  The old Bear Strap Clan priest studied the photos slowly, one by one.

  “Coyote is you. Shrike is Masaw’s bird, brings him messages. Fire is . . . ,” Harold frowned, “fire is broken. Spirals and swastikas are backwards. They’re backwards. He did it.”

  Harold’s face fell like a wall crumbling. His eyes were first surprised and then furious.

  “We shouldn’t of chased him, we should of killed him.”

  “Read the rest for me,” Youngman asked.

  Harold ripped the photos in half and threw them into the wind that rose up the mesa wall. Youngman tried to snatch some out of the air, but the shredded pictures skipped away, over the drop to the desert.

  “Not going to read any more.” Harold stood. “Not going to help you. So long.”

  Youngman stared at the bits of paper fluttering higher into the sky. Now, he’d never know what Abner did.

  “Maybe the Fire Clan priests can help,” he turned to say, but Harold was already slipping into his house.

  The last light of the day was fading. The square stone-and-mud houses of the pueblo were turning to smaller squares of light, the off-white of gas lamps. Voices and the sounds of meals echoed through the alleys. Cottonwood leaves drifted over the plaza.

  Youngman stirred himself, stretched, and headed for the road to the parking lot. Cecil had invited him for dinner. Near the end of the plaza, though, Youngman found himself standing by the third kiva, where the totem of the Fire Clan hung from the top rung of the ladder that led down to the underground chamber. It was very unusual, practically sacrilegious, for the priests to stay in the kiva during a Snake Dance. It was definitely worse for anyone to disturb them, though.

  He stood by the ladder, listening for a word, the shake of a rattle, a murmur of movement below. He blocked from his mind the sounds of the houses, the shuffle of wind. The kiva was totally silent. Juniper branches tied to the ladder below the entrance hole blocked any view of the chamber, but Youngman caught the odor of spoiled food.

  He shook the ladder tentatively. There was no response. Stone Man had said eight priests were in the kiva: one of them should have noticed the ladder. Although they could have left last night or the night before without anyone noticing. The kiva could be empty. He watched a black beetle with wings marked scarlet climb from the entrance up the ladder. A carrion beetle.

  A laugh reverberated in an alley. The plaza was still empty except for Youngman. A second beetle came after the first.

  Youngman started down the ladder. As his boots pushed through the juniper branches he was sure he’d be greeted by angry challenges. There were no challenges, not a sound but the creaking of the ladder rungs. He shook another insect from his hand. The kiva was cold. Not cool. Cold that made his shirt cling to his back. And dark. The pale shaft of light that came through the entrance hole faded before it touched the floor. When Youngman reached bottom, the light died on his face. He could see nothing but the gray dome of the kiva ceiling curving into black space. The air was thick, hard to breathe, and slightly sweet.

  He lit a match.

  He was surrounded by a circle of men sitting against the walls of the kiva. All the men were stripped to the waist. Some held prayer sticks. One who stared at Youngman had his lap covered by cornmeal and colored sand. There wasn’t a mark on them, except that their skin had turned black as if singed and foam had dried to a crust on their mouths and chests, and they were dead.

  The Navajo helicopter sat in the floodlights set up around the plaza. A rack of germ-killing ultraviolet lights was aimed at the kiva, from which climbed, clumsy as a moon-walker, a figure in airtight vinyl coveralls. The cloth of the suit was impregnated with diethyltoluamide rat repellent. The face plate showed eyes and an oxygen mask. A similar figure followed and, together, the two men carried a sagging cocoon of the same shiny material to the helicopter. It was the fourth sealed bag they’d carried to the helicopter from the kiva. They went back for more.

  “Ten o’clock.” Walker Chee looked at his watch. He, Youngman and Cecil, and the village elders watched from Stone Man’s roof, a hundred feet away. The entire village, many of them wrapped in blankets against the night chill, were on the roofs and silently watching the floodlit scene. “Lucky this didn’t happen this afternoon.”

  “Yeah,” Youngman agreed. “All we’d need is a few hundred whites racing out of here saying there’s an epidemic.”

  “Wait a second, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I want to know what you’re both talking about,” Cecil interrupted. “Epidemic of what?”

  “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Chee answered. “They could’ve died of anything. He said they looked burned.”

  “I said they looked burned. They weren’t burned,” Youngman corrected him.

  “Anyway, another copter is on its way. All I meant before was that it’s lucky we don’t have to inoculate that crowd you had this afternoon. That’s,” Chee glared at Youngman, “how wild rumors get started.”

  “And just what the hell are you going to inoculate them against?” Youngman demanded.

  “We’ll use general antibiotics like streptomycin.” Chee turned to the elder. “I’m just trying to help you people. Sheriff, are you going to get your deputy off my back?”

  A sixth silvery cocoon was being carried from the kiva. The same pueblo elders who had been buying the most important sales pitch of Walker Chee’s life just hours before studied the Navajo chairman now with open suspicion.

  “A lot of people here don’t take to needles of no kind,” Cecil said. “Matter of fact, seeing’s how this fucks up the Rain Dance, not a good idea for you to be giving orders here.”

  “This is a lot more serious than any Rain Dance!” Chee lost his temper.

  “Tell us,” Youngman suggested. “Start with how you’re going to want this whole village quarantined.”

  “Look,” Chee told Cecil, “you want a jailbird for a deputy, that’s your business. I don’t have to deal—”

  “You gonna want this place quarantined?” Cecil asked.

  “As a precautionary measure—” Chee found faces watching him from all the near roofs. “It’s a normal measure.”

  The seventh cocoon was laid out in the helicopter. One of the two figures in overalls waved to Chee. The second figure returned to the kiva with a flame thrower. A stream of fire spewed into the underground chamber.

  Stone Man recoiled. “I saw eight priests go down there.”

  Chee took
a hand radio from his belt and spoke into it.

  “Doctor, you got all the bodies out of there, didn’t you?”

  The radio answered in the affirmative, although Youngman hadn’t seen either of the men in airtight coveralls use a radio of their own. Which meant they had collar mikes and earphones.

  “Good,” Chee said. “There weren’t any more bodies, just seven,” he told Stone Man.

  “Did they see a small stone tablet?” Stone Man asked.

  Chee shrugged, but passed on the question.

  “Every item was accounted for. There was nothing like you describe,” the radio answered.

  “Give me the radio,” Youngman said.

  “You’re out of the picture.” Chee shook his head. “Your people fired you tonight.”

  “Give him what he asks for.” Stone Man stared at the desecrated kiva. Tears stood in his eyes. “Do it.”

  Youngman put his hand out.

  “Duran,” Chee lowered his voice, “you saw those bodies. There weren’t any wounds on them. No swelling, buboes, nothing. Don’t try to make something out of nothing. Don’t start a panic.”

  “Thank you.” Youngman took the radio. “Doctor, which one are you? Raise your hand.”

  The figure without the flame thrower raised his right hand.

  “Doctor, what killed the men in the kiva?”

  The voice that answered was nasal and clipped, a white voice. The doctor who had come to Gilboa for Isa Loloma, Youngman guessed.

  “There are no clear indicators. The evidence of froth does lead us to believe there were pulmonary complications.”

  “A disease, then.”

  “Or toxic agents. Maybe a disease.”

  “A highly contagious disease.”

  “Not necessarily. The situation of the chamber is highly abnormal. Close quarters, shared food, lack of hygiene, et cetera. A disease that isn’t normally contagious at all could become so.”

  “Did you see any fleas or flea bites?”

  “Not so far.”

  “Swollen places?”

  “No swelling at all. I can assure you there was no indication of bubonic plague, if that’s what you’re getting at. These precautions we’re taking are normal prophylactic methods in dealing with a possibly contagious and undetermined disease. Again, I must mention toxic agents. What they ate or breathed. The public hygiene of the pueblo itself leaves a great deal to be desired.”