Nightwing

by Martin Cruz Smith

  After searching through the rest of the house, they carried the two bodies in sacks to the helicopter and went on to the renovated barn. The upper section had been redone as a paneled rec room with ping pong and billiard tables. In a place of honor was a framed photo of Joe with Senator Goldwater. Joe himself was in the bathroom beside a toilet full of vomit. His limbs were limp, but his torso was still stiff from rigor mortis. Chee commented optimistically on the lack of buboes, and the doctor pointed out black spots on Momoa’s face. Capillary hemorrhage, another sign of plague.

  “The young man, the one with the wounds, died first. I’d guess that he transmitted fleas to the others,” the doctor said as they dragged Joe into the rec room to stuff him in a bag. “As long as they didn’t have any visitors, we may get by.”

  “Of course, we’ll get by,” Chee agreed.

  “Like hell,” Youngman said.

  He stood in front of the maps on the rec room walls. Most of the maps were Joe’s Mormon items: Biblical Israel, the diaspora of the Jews, and the travels of Brigham Young. On another wall was a large topological map of the reservation. The Painted Desert was in the middle, the Black Mesa at the top, Dinnebito Wash to the northwest, Antelope Mesa to the east.

  “You’ve got three stiffs here,” he marked Dinnebito Wash with the pool chalk, “seven here,” he marked Shongopovi on the Black Mesa, “one here,” he marked the desert east of Gilboa where the boy had been attacked. “And one more here you don’t even know about,” he added a mark for Abner southeast of Gilboa, “because he died from loss of blood before he got a chance to develop any disease.”

  Youngman connected the marks, drawing a rough equilateral triangle about thirty-five miles to a side.

  “In other words, in an area around five hundred square miles something you can’t even identify has killed or fatally infected twelve people and you two are still doing charades. Have you contacted Phoenix yet? Washington? Anyone?”

  “No,” the doctor admitted unhappily.

  “There’s no cause for alarm,” Chee said.

  “Then take your space suit off. Go ahead.”

  “Don’t be childish. What I meant was, there’s no reason to start a scare. We have a few deaths here, not anything else.”

  “You have an epidemic. Just the start of one, but that’s what you’ve got. Not ‘a problem,’ doctor. Not just a few deaths, because there’ll be more rolling in. Damn it, look at that map. You tell me there hasn’t been any plague activity among animals and the truth is you don’t know what animals are spreading plague. Spreading it already over half my reservation. Yours’ll be next. Quarantine the whole Hopi Nation, is that your answer? Quarantine the Navajo Nation? Arizona and New Mexico, too?”

  “You’re a panic starter, that’s what you are.”

  “Yes. That’s exactly what I’m going to do, unless we make a deal.”

  “Ah. You want us to fly out to Albuquerque, put a little money your way?”

  “No. You assume only the family here was infected, and I think you’re right. But someone was supposed to be here. Whites, in fact, a group of campers who were going to bunk here and fish Joe’s stream. They didn’t make it, or one of those campers, a nurse, would have tended the family.”

  “She couldn’t have helped them,” the doctor said.

  “Well, she would have given them more than aspirin. Anyway, she isn’t here and she hasn’t checked in anyplace else, and that puts her,” he pointed to the middle of the triangle, “there. There are seven people in that van. I want both your copters in the desert tomorrow looking for them. From then on I shut up, that’s the deal.”

  “You’re crazy. We had two cases of plague of our own up towards Moenkopi yesterday—”

  “Oh, you did? You didn’t tell me. So that makes it fourteen cases and, what, about six hundred square miles. And you were keeping that a secret?”

  “Those copters have to be on hand for emergencies. Not running errands for you.”

  “But that’s the deal. Otherwise, I’ll call every health department official in the state tomorrow. By the way, why do you want to keep this such a secret?”

  “Begay,” Chee stepped back, and the patrolman stepped towards Youngman.

  “Begay,” Youngman said, “come any closer and I’ll rip that cute cloth helmet right off your head. Want to take a chance on plague just for Chairman Chee?” While Begay hesitated, Youngman drew a revolver from the deep pocket of his coveralls. “Joe always kept a loaded Colt .44 behind the dryer in his laundry room. He believed in safety.”

  “Okay,” Chee shrugged, “it looks like we have a Mexican standoff.”

  “No, it looks like you give me two copters.”

  “A compromise. One copter, up until an emergency.”

  “Both, until we find them. Look, Chee, I know when I’ve hit a nerve and right now your nerves are singing. What are you trying to hide? You can tell me, we’re on the same team, right?”

  “Okay,” Chee put a glove up, “just to shut you up. And I mean about everything. About tonight or anything else, you know nothing and you say nothing.”

  “Two copters at dawn at Gilboa. Only pilots and doctors.”

  “Excuse me,” the doctor interrupted, “we have ten minutes of air left in our tanks, and you did say there were four members of this family. We’ve only found three.”

  “We’ll check the garage downstairs,” Youngman said. “After you.”

  The garage was empty, but lit. The end wall was padded for handgun practice; a fresh paper target hung from a clothesline. Tire chains, fan belts, and wrenches arranged by size filled up the side walls. Joe’s lovingly polished pickup sat in the middle of the floor, along with a BMW cycle.

  “Ben’s Harley is gone,” Youngman noticed.

  “Then he left before the others got sick.”

  “No, someone had to go for help with the phone wires down.”

  “You were the only one to say there might be sick folks up here.”

  “He didn’t make it.” Youngman was still thinking. He stayed slightly apart from the others, with his hand on the gun. “Ben used to work for the telephone company. He stopped to fix the wires.”

  He didn’t bother adding that the phone was dead. Their air tanks were running out. After one circuit around the house, they returned to the copter on the lawn and dumped Joe’s body inside with his wife and son.

  “We forgot to turn the lights out.” Begay looked back at the house. “Weird. We should of turned the lights out.”

  Begay was right. The lights in the garage, the rec room, kitchen, every bedroom and hallway had been left on by the Momoas. The house blazed against the dark hills.

  The collie had followed the bodies to the copter and sat forlornly by the skids.

  “Everything’s under control here, doc, wouldn’t you say?” Chee remarked.

  The question was an order. Youngman, his gun on his lap, was fascinated by Chee’s desperation.

  “Fourteen deaths in two days is not ‘under control,’ ” the doctor said softly.

  “With cooperation, though, we can handle it.”

  Through his visor, Youngman watched the doctor’s eyes move from Chee to him and to the dog.

  “You better put that dog in a sack,” he said.

  “The sack’s airtight,” Begay protested. “He’ll suffocate.”

  “That’s the idea. Dogs have fleas.”

  By flying over the hill road on the way back, they found Ben Momoa. His Harley Davidson 750 was leaning against a telephone pole. Ben hung by a repairman’s belt from the top of the pole. In the helicopter’s lights, his clothes shredded and black with blood, he might have been the sacrifice of a gruesome rite.

  Chee himself went down in a sling to hoist Ben up.

  “Maybe I can do the same thing for you sometime, Duran,” he shouted up.

  The moths heard them coming, heard the net of whispers cast before their coming. Some of the insects dropped to the ground and others began despe
rate evasive maneuvers. But the bats passed by them, ignoring the moths, listening for the echo of a different prey altogether.

  The inner ear of the bats contained, in fact, two separate organs of sense: one for mid-air orientation, another for hearing. The one for hearing, the spiraled cochlea, was proportionately about a thousand times longer than a human’s and rich in “trigger” hairs. The hairs stirred to the slightest echo, which was simultaneously interpreted as an insect or an obstacle or another bat, opposite from a human system which heard a voice clearer than its shadow. And when the echoes were reflected from something large and warm and alive, from the Food, the cries and the echoes increased to machine-gun rapidity.

  Mixed with the echoes was the bleat of a goat.

  There were four goats tethered to a tamarisk tree, three of them asleep. The fourth shifted its hooves nervously, ears pricked to the rustle of the wind. As the rustle settled down, so did the goat and nibbled at the tree’s bark. Some grass even grew around the tree; wherever a tamarisk stood there was bound to be water. Then the goat backed up as something hopped towards it. Curious, the goat thrust its nose forward and the thing hopped into the air and flew.

  By now, more than a hundred bats were on the ground. Membranes folded, resting their weight on their hind legs and the wrists of their wings, they hopped or ran rapidly around the tree. There was a feeding order and there were preferences. Better young and tender Food than old, better pregnant and blood-gorged Food than male, best the oestrous Food with an overflowing scent that turned hunger into a frenzy. The big bats, the females, surged forward. The Food thrust its nose out again, slit eyes bulging, and the nearest bat stared back in return first at the eyes and then at a dark patch on the Food’s shoulder before leaping, stroking the air twice and landing on the patch. Two incisors scooped away hair and skin, and the bat’s long red tongue darted to meet the blood filling the crater and tinging the air with warm sweetness. The outer edges of the tongue curled down around two grooves on the underside of the tongue, forming the sucking channels. A second bat landed, lighter than a touch, on the other shoulder. The Food ran back and forth on the end of its rope. The other Food remained sleeping as blankets gathered over them. More incisors bit. Ground and air seemed to close in on the goats and envelop them. The first bat was already releasing a black, pitchy urine, and the rest of the bats swarmed to tap the Food. Filling themselves, they paid no notice to the tamarisk tree and the hanging bulbs that bathed them in ultraviolet light, or to the Land Rover sitting thirty yards away, where Paine opened a window vent just enough to insert the barrel of an air gun. Running the length of the barrel was an ultraviolet-sensitive sniper scope. The crosshairs rested first on one bat and then on another, leisurely choosing the right specimens for dissection. From their activity, the bats didn’t seem to be affected by plague, but only the scalpel and microscope would tell.

  It would take hours for all the bats to feed. He could pick his shots.

  C H A P T E R

  S I X

  Youngman kept seeing the bright lights of the Momoa house through his sleep. He woke in the dark remembering the red-haired man who wanted part of Abner. Who asked Frank about bats.

  Paine was from Chee. Chee knew all along.

  By sunrise, Youngman had covered his jeep with brush on a hill about a mile out of Gilboa. He lay on his stomach under a mesquite tree and watched through field glasses.

  The helicopters came straight out of the sun, making Youngman’s eyes water. They landed in tandem on the street in front of the hogan and two figures emerged from each copter, wearing white and carrying medical bags. They came out of the shed ten seconds later holding handguns. Four uniformed Navajo patrolmen joined them from the copters; Youngman recognized Begay. They ran to the trading post, where they stayed five minutes. Then they returned to the copters, climbed on, and took off. The copters circled low around Gilboa, trying to pick up tire tracks and not finding any because Youngman had covered them. After a while, they quit and headed north towards the mesa in case he’d gone that way.

  Youngman drove back to his hogan. He wasn’t feeling clever. He should have extracted Chee’s promise in public, or set the meeting place at a pueblo, or told Cecil what was up. Instead, he’d stupidly isolated himself in the middle of the desert.

  The first thing he did was try to radio Cecil, only the Navajos had pocketed half the tubes from the radio, so he threw his rifle and bedroll into the jeep and drove on to the trading post. Selwyn was in his bathrobe at the counter. He lifted his hand proudly and showed off a dead fly.

  “Where’s your radio transmitter, Selwyn?”

  “Broken. I showed it to those Navajos and they tried to fix it, but they couldn’t. It’s broken for good. I guess. You just missed them. They’re looking for you.”

  “Give me some rifle shells and some .44’s, too.” Youngman still had Joe’s Colt. “And Spam, a six-pack, and salt tablets.”

  Selwyn swept the fly away and started filling the counter.

  “Regular radio’s working. I heard about that fire at Momoa’s place.”

  “What fire?”

  “Whole family burned up,” Selwyn dusted off the beer cans. “Last night. You didn’t hear about that? Well, you wouldn’t care, you hated that bastard as much as me.”

  Youngman wiped a display case and squinted through the glass.

  “You still got those transistor radios. I’ll take one and some batteries. Put it on my account.”

  “Sure, what else? You know, Youngman, I hope someone invents cash soon.”

  Youngman took the goods and went out to the porch.

  “Been up since five,” Selwyn followed him, bathrobe flopping around bare feet. “One of the first signs of growing old, insomnia. You in trouble, Youngman?”

  The deputy was searching the sky in case one of the copters doubled back. The shadows of dawn were already drying up.

  “You in trouble, huh?”

  “Yeah, but no more than anyone else. Take care of yourself, old boy.” Youngman stuffed his purchases except for the transistor radio into his bedroll and slid behind the wheel. “I always meant to tell you, nothing wrong with your daughters. Keep their windows shut tonight.”

  “What?”

  But the Indian’s jeep was gathering speed, headed on the road west.

  Anne listened to the van radio through the shattered windshield.

  She’d buried Franklin in the hour before dawn and spent a day’s worth of strength. She’d spent the next day’s strength simply washing herself with gasoline siphoned from the fuel tank. By now, they had to be searching for her, though. By now, Youngman was coming.

  The radio accompanied her reverie.

  . . . As you all know, yesterday’s Rain Dance at Shongopovi was marred by the tragic death of seven elders at the pueblo. At first it was feared that the deceased were victims of swine flu, which is particularly dangerous to persons of advanced age. Autopsies showed, however, that the seven died of food poisoning from spoiled foods left in their ceremonial chamber. Other tragic news comes from Dinnebito Wash, where the popular family of Joe Momoa died in a fire at their ranch home. The fire started in the basement, according to official spokesmen of the Tuba City Fire Department, and then spread rapidly through the ventilating system. Four persons died. And now here’s a message from Hubbell’s Trading Post, where you’ll always find . . .

  Heat waves began percolating from the sand. Anne’s knees were cut up from scrambling after lizards. Tentatively, she felt her armpits and groin for swelling. Nothing yet. It was funny, she thought. She’d always been aware of the endemic plague in the desert and not once had she seen a real case. Then a week before she leaves the desert, a man dies of plague before her eyes and she doesn’t even recognize the signs. The lassitude. Fever. Buboes. The word “bubo” was funny. Like bauble. An adornment.

  Motionless, she again experienced the sense that she was vanishing into the desert. Part of her found this disorienting but comforting. Thi
s “oneness” was the Hopi Way, and she was amused that she’d only felt it on the point of death, and she considered that this might be the secret of the Hopis’ super-religiosity, because they were always on the point of extinction.

  Another part of her continued to calculate survival. Usually, there was rain within two or three days after a Snake Dance. It was the time of year, of course. With enough water to drink and cloud cover, she might be able to walk the desert. On the other hand, it might be wiser to collect as much rainwater as she could and stay by the van since that was what Youngman would be looking for. He’d be coming from Dinnebito Wash if he’d gone there to meet her at Momoa’s. Only, the radio said Momoa was dead.

  The sand rippled. A small mirage lapped at the two new graves. By noon, she knew, the whole desert would look like an ocean, like the ocean it once was a million years ago. Momoa was dead, she repeated to herself. Burned. So if she and Franklin and the others had reached the ranch and bunked over, they would have died in the fire anyway.

  The radio went on, draining the last of the van’s battery.

  . . . That was Johnny Cash’s latest. Johnny’s going to be at the All Indian Powwow in Flagstaff, by the way, and you’re not going to want to miss that. A time to get together with old friends and make new ones. Hey, who says you can’t get a good recapped tire for half the price you’d pay for a new one . . .

  A skink twisted its head to study Anne. She didn’t have the energy to reach for her fishing pole. If Momoa was dead, how would Youngman know she didn’t get out of the desert? She tried to concentrate, but half her mind was wandering on its own. Answers slipped away from her grasp.

  . . . A health advisory note I want to pass along. Officials say they haven’t determined the source of the food-poisoning incident on the mesa. There may be more cases. This is serious. Signs to look out for, they say, are stomach pains, dizziness, fever, or any suspicious marks or swellings, or throwing up or diarrhea. If you have or you know anyone who has these symptoms, contact the medical clinics in Ship Rock or Window Rock or here in Tuba City at once. Say, wouldn’t you like to get in on the CB radio fun . . .