Nightwing

by Martin Cruz Smith

  “Tomorrow you’ll be in good enough shape to get out of here.” He took her hand. “And that’s just what we’re going to do. Far away. Paine’s driving us to the highway tomorrow.”

  “You changed your mind.”

  “Yeah, and all it took was you almost getting killed. If you still want me to go with you.”

  Against her drawn face, Anne’s eyes were larger than ever. Almost lost in one of Paine’s shirts, she looked more like a child than ever. Youngman thought a hug would break her.

  “You’re sure?” she asked.

  “My reservation days are over and I’m going to join the living. I finally figured it out. You’re my ticket from here because I love you enough to be where you are, wherever that is. Look what happens when I let you out of my sight.”

  “I knew you’d come for me, Youngman, really I did.” She took his hand.

  “Just relax. Tomorrow, we’ll make a fresh start out of here, to begin with.”

  Paine joined them with two plates of curdled-looking eggs. He hadn’t wanted any company. On the other hand, the presence of the deputy and the girl made Paine aware of the loneliness he’d lived in so long. He was drawn to them the way a permanently cold person might idly be drawn to a fire, realizing he could see the glow without feeling the warmth.

  “How did you guess?” He handed Youngman a plate.

  “The answer wasn’t hard. It was just impossible. The attacks were made by a night animal that didn’t leave tracks, an animal that could fly to the top of a telephone pole and had teeth. But that kind of animal doesn’t kill people, not with teeth like that. Never saw any animal with teeth like that. But I thought about a family of people dying and huddling inside a house with all the lights on and I remembered about a Mr. Paine asking a deputy down at Five House Butte if he’d seen any bats. From then on I knew I was right even if I couldn’t prove it. You proved it for me.”

  “We have a lot to thank you for,” Anne told Paine.

  “Like hell,” Youngman interrupted. “He’s just involved in one of Walker Chee’s rip-offs. You think he’s doing this for the poor Indians? To clean up a reservation? No, but to tidy things up for a new strip mine or keep the tourists rolling in, now that’s worth Mr. Paine’s hire. That’s all he is. A hired man. You tell me if I’m wrong, Paine.”

  Before Paine answered, his radio came alive with call numbers. When he tried to ignore the signal the radio called him by name even more insistently. He glanced at the Indian before moving to the table where the radio sat. Although the signal was ragged with static, Youngman already recognized Walker Chee’s voice.

  “Get back here to Window Rock,” Chee said.

  “You called me at the wrong time.”

  “That’s an order. We’ll set up some defense systems. I’ve explained everything to my friend Mr. Piggot and he’ll get us all the equipment we need.”

  Paine turned with the mike so that he could watch the deputy and the girl. The girl listened intensely, the deputy smiled in a different direction.

  “Like what?” Paine asked.

  “Anything. Piggot has connections.”

  “Like what?” Paine repeated.

  “We’ll set up a defense perimeter . . .”

  “Around the desert?”

  “At special points. We’ll get nets . . .”

  “How high? How wide?”

  “And arc lamps, floodlights . . .”

  “Lights are where people are, they don’t mind lights.”

  “Let me finish,” Chee said. “The big thing is we’ll have small planes with DDT. As soon as radar picks up the bats . . .”

  “It won’t. Vampires fly under radar.”

  “Goddamn it, we wouldn’t be in this fix if you’d finished the fucking bats like you said you would.”

  “I will.”

  “You say that every day and every night is worse.”

  “I’ve been tracking them. I’m getting close.”

  There was a pause before Chee came on again.

  “Where are you right now?”

  “I can’t say exactly.”

  “But you’re close to the bats, you said. Where do you think they are?”

  “I can’t be positive about that, either. But, I’d guess,” Paine watched Youngman’s eyes slide towards him, “Mansion Mesa.”

  “Mansion Mesa. Okay, Paine, I’m ordering you to start for Window Rock now.”

  “No.”

  “You haven’t been paid yet, Paine.”

  “I haven’t killed the bats yet. Signing off.”

  “Paine—”

  Paine flicked the receiver off and wrapped the mike cord around his hand.

  “We’re nowhere near Mansion Mesa,” Youngman said. “That’s forty miles southeast of here.”

  “That’s right.”

  Paine ripped the mike cord from the radio.

  “But now you can’t tell them where the bats really are,” Anne said.

  “Now no one can tell them.” Paine threw the mike as far as he could.

  “That’s all right.” Youngman poured himself some coffee. “He can’t tell them where to find me.”

  “Youngman was right about you,” Anne told Paine. “You’re here for the companies. Well, I’d like to know just what company I should be grateful to for saving my life.”

  “What does it matter?” Youngman shrugged. “I don’t care. I’m finished here. As soon as we get to the highway that’ll be the end for us.” He lifted his mug. “Cheers.”

  Anne removed her hand from Youngman’s. Momentarily, she felt as distant from him as she did from Paine. She was not distant, she thought. They were. Paine, large, a tan that was ghostly pale in contrast to Youngman’s skin, hulking but somehow absent. Youngman, dark and lean, and encased in so much cynicism that he seemed almost untouchable. Together they’d rescued her and now she felt almost superfluous to either of them.

  Youngman pulled his rifle close to his knee while Paine slipped a CO2 cartridge into an air gun.

  “You kill bats, that’s what you do for a living?” Anne asked.

  “Uh huh.”

  “There’s a good living in that? Bat killing?” Youngman asked.

  “From Mexico south, pretty good.”

  “And you kill them with that?” Youngman looked at the air gun.

  “No. With that.” Paine pointed the gun at a red canister marked DANGER in English, French, and Spanish that leaned against the rear door of the Rover. “Cyanogas. That’s if you have to go into the cave. You never go into the cave if you can help it. If you can help it, you get them through an old food source.”

  “Like?”

  “Cattle, usually. Bats will return to a herd they’ve already fed off. They sort of ‘own’ different herds in a territorial way. You smear ‘Vampirol’ on an old wound.”

  “I like it.” Youngman lit a cigarette. “Vampirol. Sounds like something for unwanted body hair.”

  “It’s honey and strychnine. It works, but it’s a slow way of killing them.”

  “Do you hate bats?” Anne asked.

  Paine laid the gun down and went into the Rover. He returned with a bottle of Napoleon brandy and three paper cups.

  “We’re out of their usual flight path.” He filled the cups and gave one to Anne. “Let’s—”

  “This is a party?” Youngman was amazed. “What the hell makes you think I want to drink with you?”

  “Sorry, Chee told me you were a wino.”

  “What else?”

  “A shiftless, ignorant reservation bum.” Paine held the cup out.

  “You know what a piñon is? A white nut.”

  “So?”

  Paine kept the cup steady. Anne expected Youngman to push Paine’s hand away, but instead he took the cup.

  “Honey and strychnine, huh?”

  “That’s the easy way of doing it.”

  Paine threw back his brandy in a swallow.

  “Crazy, fucking pahan,” Youngman muttered and downed h
alf of his cup.

  “What’s that?” Paine refilled his cup.

  “I was just saying we get all kinds of white nuts around here. Usually, they want to bag a mountain lion or a wolf. First time I ever met one who was after bats.”

  “You don’t think much of them.”

  “Never thought about them at all, Paine.”

  “Think about them. Think about an animal that aero-dynamically is more maneuverable than a fly. That possesses a system of echolocation more sophisticated than the navigational technology of a military bomber. That sees in the dark as well as a cat. That, unique in nature, has made the leap of efficiently converting the blood of other vertebrates into its own blood.”

  “A hell of a salesman, isn’t he?” Youngman made an aside to Anne.

  “I’m not talking about just a drop of blood,” Paine said. “When a wild vampire bat feeds, it can drink one and a half times its own weight in blood. Because of the anticoagulant in the vampire’s saliva, its victim loses as much blood again in excess of what the bat drinks. Over a year, a single vampire can drain twenty-eight quarts of blood, the entire blood volume of a good cow, or about six humans.”

  “Is that so? How can any animal drink 150 percent of its own weight and get off the ground?”

  “They piss. They piss while they’re drinking. The blood meal is absorbed by the cardiac region of the stomach and the blood fluid goes right on through.”

  “There were these tarry stains around Abner and the horses that were attacked.”

  “Piss.”

  “Yeah, that’s efficient,” Youngman laughed. “I’ll give the little fangers some credit. A little smelly.”

  Paine smiled agreeably.

  “You ought to go into a cave of vampires sometime. One year in Mexico, I gassed a hundred caves. I killed over 50,000 vampires. Interesting killings.”

  Anne studied the dark red of her brandy. It was Youngman who finally filled the silence.

  “So what is it? You have a high boredom level or you’re totally insane? A white man of your talents could make a million selling insurance. Why vampires?”

  “The study of vampire bats—”

  “You didn’t say ‘study,’ you said ‘killing.’ Anne asked you before. You hate bats?”

  Paine refilled Youngman’s cup.

  “It’s a job. I’m a professional, a man for hire, you said so yourself.”

  “What if Chee doesn’t pay you? Doesn’t that worry you?”

  “He’ll pay me. Pay me double when I’m through.”

  Paine threw down another cup of brandy.

  “Idiot Chee, trying to keep this secret,” Youngman remarked.

  “No, no, he was just acting normally.”

  “That’s normal?”

  “Seventy years ago there was an outbreak of plague in San Francisco. State officials refused to believe it. A federal investigator arrived and was beaten up by a mob. California only accepted help after Washington threatened to quarantine the whole state. That’s normal.”

  “But it’s not normal for vampire bats to be here. Why are they?”

  “Most bats around here migrate over the border by the seasons. Vampires were just south,” Paine answered evasively, “and I suppose they finally joined in. Arizona, Texas, New Mexico have caves with millions of bats in each. It’s a regular paradise for them.”

  “For you, too, then. Funny how the bats and you showed up at the same time. And then the bats start spreading plague? That’s one hell of a lot of coincidence. I mean, you’re not exactly good luck, are you?”

  “There’s something I don’t understand,” Anne said. “I thought it was a fact that only rodent fleas could transmit plague.”

  “It’s a commonly known fact,” Paine said. “Like only dogs carry rabies.”

  “What’s rabies got to do with plague?”

  “Bats. Every year, hundreds of thousands of cattle die from a paralysis like hydrophobia, rabies. In 1950, the disease spread to Trinidad and it spread to people. They killed all the dogs on the island, but people still got it. In fact, it wasn’t until vampire bats started attacking them in the daytime that people realized what the real source was, a little late for the eighty-nine victims already dead.”

  “How did bats pick up rabies?” she asked.

  “A wild animal they fed off. The interesting part was that the rabies changed in the bats to a slightly different variant of the disease. And that the majority of the rabid vampires were immune to the disease themselves.”

  “I thought any animal with rabies died.”

  “Then you see my point. Any other animal would. At any rate, you said that only rodent fleas carry plague. The truth is that dozens of different fleas are capable of carrying plague and those fleas can be found on man, monkeys, cats, dogs, camels, sheep, even birds. And bats. How could the vampires avoid becoming plague hosts here? Every warm-blooded animal is their food and plague is endemic to the animals of this area. When you consider the method of feeding, the oral contact, the profusion of blood and the attraction of blood for fleas—”

  “Save it,” Youngman said. “Save it for Chee and his friend Piggot, or the Army, or whoever has enough money to be worth scaring. You’re wasting it on us.”

  “But someone should be told,” Anne said. “What about the Center for Disease Control?”

  “Yeah,” Youngman laughed, “they did a bang-up job on swine flu.”

  “Chee is handling that kind of information flow,” Paine answered Anne. “Anyway, even if they did get a team here from the CDC in Atlanta, they don’t know how to handle vampires, and they’d end up trying to reach me in Mexico. I’m here already and I know where the bats are.”

  “Well, I don’t understand you! You talk about an epidemic of plague but we heard you send Chee the wrong way. Are you that crazy?” Anne asked.

  Paine was dismayed. The convivial, nearly party air he thought they’d all been enjoying was fading all too suddenly under the force of the girl’s outburst. He lifted his paper cup. There was nothing in it. When he set it down he did so clumsily because he was trying to avoid her angry stare and the cup fell over and rolled towards her.

  “That’s all right.” Youngman picked up the cup and poured some more brandy in it for Paine. “I understand you. You’re the bat killer. You want to do it yourself.”

  Two helicopters moved one behind the other towards the sun. In each ship were four men dressed in airtight vinyl suits, and four bombs and DDT. Paine was right about one thing, Chee realized. As soon as the oil companies heard the words “vampire bat” they’d panicked.

  “This is the way we stop a fire in an old field,” Piggot said. “We blow it up.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe we should have waited so we could bring Paine.”

  “Look, we had troubles with fruit bat swarms at our Indonesian wells. We just blasted their roosts. You don’t wait for any so-called expert to do it for you. Or any goddamn ecology study. This is where the vampires are so this is where we’re going to start, and we’re going to keep on until we blow up every goddamn bat cave around here if we have to. That is, if you want any oil revenues. I take it you do.”

  “You’re talking about millions of bats. The Hopis aren’t going to stand for that kind of slaughter, not on their land.”

  “You want to pull out, Chee, just say the word and we’ll turn around.”

  Chee couldn’t pull out, as both men knew. Tribal funds were sunk in low-cost housing, Nevada mortgage speculation, land reclamation, and banking. The operating budget for the next year had a projected deficit of $2 million, a deficit that would bring Indian Bureau investigations of misuse of federal money. In his own mind, Chee’d done nothing wrong. He hadn’t started worldwide inflation, or caused the Nevada mortgages to be foreclosed. But he knew investigations would scare off private investors he’d courted all around the country. On the other hand, the consortium of oil companies Piggot represented was willing to hand over $2 million for a twenty-year le
ase on the Maski Canyon and a 10 percent royalty on any oil produced. To begin with, Chee thought his only problem was that the canyon was in joint Navajo-Hopi territory. Then the bats came, and the plague.

  A red sun was poised over the horizon. Sgt. Begay rode in the lead copter with the white doctor who’d been at the Momoa ranch, and after Youngman’s “impossible” suggestion had made telephone queries from San Diego to Mexico City until he’d found a zoologist who recognized the wounds, and then gone straight to Piggot. Chee fired him. It didn’t matter. As the doctor expected, Piggot paid well enough for the information.

  “All I’m saying,” Chee rephrased his protest, “is maybe we should wait and coordinate with Paine. In case some bats get away.”

  “Chee, you know how many geologists know more about oil than me? Maybe a thousand and they’re all piss-poor and a lot of them work for me and the reason is that I have nerve. That’s all the oil business is. Nerve and faith. That’s why I’m taking a chance on you. You thought some bats were going to scare me off a strike? See how you wasted time on your expert? You should have come to me at the start.”

  “But he knows these bats.”

  “And I know dynamite.”

  “It’s almost sunset. The bats are going to be coming out.”

  “Good. We blow up the ones coming out and seal the rest in for the DDT to finish off.”

  “There are a lot of bats.”

  “That’s why we’re going to this one first. Look, Chee, you want to be an important man, a hero, and you want to be rich. You go along with us and that’s what you’ll be, and you know it.”

  Chee shut his mouth. Piggot was using almost the same argument Chee had used on Duran, only Chee’s argument was a fraud and Piggot’s was the bottom line. It was always the same bottom line on a white man’s contract. The helicopters were Piggot’s, not given to Chee, only loaned for geological surveying.

  “Two miles at ten degrees south. We have visual contact,” the lead copter reported.

  “Let’s coast.” Piggot took the mike.

  Both copters swayed slightly sideways to get a better look at Mansion Mesa, a relatively small mesa with an irregular top and crumbling talus walls that did suggest a dilapidated, oversized mansion set down in the middle of the desert. In the full furnace gaze of the setting sun, the mesa glowed orange-hot. A layer of volcanic rock made the mesa top uninhabitable for humans, but the center of the mesa was hollow, a vast cavern occupied by blind salamanders, beetles, cockroaches, coral snakes, pseudoscorpions, and hundreds of colonies of different bats.