Nightwing

by Martin Cruz Smith

  Youngman went out of the mine to the Rover. The road was dark under the cliffs barely trimmed in orange.

  “The sun’s going,” Anne said.

  “Where’s the siphon?”

  “You didn’t ask me to find it.”

  “I know, but where is it?”

  Youngman’s face was black with dust, except for the red of his eyes. He was unrecognizable. Anne found a kit panel in the back of the Rover and in the panel a siphon tube with a bulb. Unasked by Youngman, she also took out two empty jerry cans. She was halfway through filling up the second can when the siphon tube went dry.

  “Nothing more in the tank. It’s empty. How do we get out of here?”

  “Roll. There’s enough in the fuel line to get us started.”

  “Okay,” she agreed. “Be careful. I love you.”

  “Yes. Keep the lights on so I can see my way out.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  Youngman picked up a can in each hand and was about to go when he remembered something.

  “Have you got a match?”

  She put a book of matches in his pants.

  “Good luck.”

  He went into the mine. At the midway point, the mine curved and he left the illumination of the headlights behind him. The mine had been straight before. The jerry cans grew heavier. Youngman could lift his feet no more than an inch. He reached the cave and, between the pool and the ruins, started pouring from the heavier can a line of gasoline connecting the ring of shale piles.

  The sinkhole was a halo of light around which the cave ceiling vibrated. By the hundreds, bats spread their wings in anticipation of sunset and a steady rain of urine sprinkled the floor. Youngman concentrated on drawing his steady line of gasoline.

  “Flea, look.”

  Smoke drifted from the chimneys of the pueblo. The ladders stood strong and upright and poles with clan feathers marked the handsome houses. Up five stories, windows were lit in welcome and on the inside walls Youngman saw the shadows of people. The smell of bread and the sounds of life spread through the cave.

  “Stop, Flea. And look.”

  The halo around the sinkhole diminished to a crescent. Around it, bats gathered so thickly they hung from each other and beneath the sinkhole massed a stationary cloud of wings. The musical laugh of a woman came from the pueblo.

  He retraced his route across the pueblo. He could hear children, the sound of men gambling, the gossip of girls, the boiling of stew in an oven. Each pile of shale was a bough of cottonwood and the broken Fire Clan tablet was whole and surrounded by prayer sticks. Gasoline hit the ground as blue cornmeal. From one house came a song he hadn’t heard in years. “Somewhere, somewhere, far away, Sibopay. What was I at Sibopay? When was I born? Where did I come from? Where am I going? What am I? I asked myself at Sibopay.” Out of the corner of his eye he saw people at the windows, faces that vanished when he looked up and reappeared as he looked away. After a day without food, the aroma of fresh piki bread was overpowering.

  “Join them, Flea. They wait for you. Your people, Flea. Waiting for you.”

  A white-bellied shrike flitted over Youngman’s head and flew towards a row of stars. When it reached the stars, the bird’s wings turned to leather and the stars became the last drops of sun on the rim of the sinkhole.

  Youngman stumbled down from the pueblo. He only had to finish dousing the shale piles leading back to the mine.

  “Flea, stay with us.”

  Gasoline spilled over his pants. The more he poured, the heavier the can grew, until he was dragging it along the ground.

  Wingtips grazed walls, roof, and cave floor. By the hundreds, more bats dropped and spread their webbed hands. The cave was filled with the thousand of them, a wheeling, living shadow going round and round, colorblind eyes fixed on a final candlelight of sun on the sinkhole, waiting for their moment of emergence. Wings, eyes, mouths flashed past Youngman, rose like a wave to the sinkhole and fell away from the light.

  Youngman poured out the second can of gasoline in a straight line in front of the mine exit. He’d light the ring of shale piles first and ignite the exit as he left. A bat flew over his shoulder. He didn’t hear the bat’s whisper or its change in tone. Two more bats flew by his face, their eyes turned on him. Another went by. He felt a slight nick. Blood flowed from his ear. A whisper spread through the cave up to where the hanging, pink newborn cried. Youngman shook his head at another bite along his neck. It was too dark now to see the bats coming at him anyway.

  He pulled out the book of matches. As he started to light one, a wind knocked the book out of his hand. He went down on his hands and knees and felt the ground. Wings and teeth landed on his back. Something scuttled towards him along the floor. His fingers closed on the matches. Deliberately, he peeled another match from the book and struck it. A bat darted away from the flame and Youngman threw the match. He rolled away, crushing the bats on his back.

  From the first burning shale pile, two blue flames raced to the other piles, meeting on the ruins. From each pile rose a flame thirty feet high. A new line of fire appeared and shot into the pool in the center of the cave, which ignited into flat, glassy flame. A line of red swept into the ruins. Others blossomed into life from the ring and zigzagged over the floor and up the walls. Behind him, blocking the mine, was a sheet of fire.

  The bats that weren’t burning rose to the sinkhole and the electrified mesh. As a cloud, they boiled over the flames. Youngman turned in amazement. The entire cave was on fire, a palace of lights. More oil seams erupted in flame from the walls and the shale fires grew, spewing dense, black smoke.

  For Youngman, bats and smoke became one, a one that took the shape of a giant crouched beneath the roof, a face of flames in agony over a ragged, black cloak. Blind, milky eyes stared in disbelief.

  “FLEA! . . . WHY? . . . IT WAS FOR YOU . . . FOR YOU!”

  “I know!” Youngman cried. Tears started from his eyes.

  “EVERYTHING . . . FOR YOU!”

  A truck pulled in front of Youngman and its door swung open. Anne was at the wheel, shouting.

  “Youngman! Youngman, here!”

  Through the fire, he saw the pueblo melting. Adobe walls split into red dust. Windows raged. Inside, figures of flame danced wildly, running from room to room without escape.

  “Youngman!” Anne screamed.

  He fell into the truck and at once she swung the Rover around, clumsily on slashed tires.

  She aimed directly for the fire blocking the mine and broke through. Within the mine, the Rover caromed off the walls. The last gas in the truck’s fuel line ran out as they crashed onto the road, and from there they rolled, down, down, almost to the desert when the dome of the cave rose on a fireball into the sky.

  C H A P T E R

  T E N

  The explosion ran like a pulse through a subterranean network of seeps and around the cave smaller caves erupted in series. Along a tracery of shale seams on the surface, blue flames spread like couriers, running parallel, converging and spreading again. Where vertical seams met, flames spewed through the canyon walls in search of more shale, which cracked and exposed rich veins of oil. Fire licked its way up the higher western plateau of the canyon, touching off fireballs that dwarfed the first, that rose into the night to rain fire onto the canyon. So the fire continued to spread, by the blackened teeth of basalt mines and across lava fields of twisting forms. The first fire engines and mobile lab from Tuba City tried to fight their way to the bat cave, only to retreat when the fire began to cut off the road behind them. They pulled back a full mile from the base of the canyon as Parks Department helicopters cruised overhead to release trails of phosphate-enriched water.

  In the minutes before dawn, the fire subsided even as it widened. From one end to the other, Maski Canyon was lit by blue flames.

  Youngman and Anne watched from the fire engines and emergency vehicles that huddled on the desert floor. Standing on the hood of his car, Piggot watched the flames’
progress through field glasses.

  “That first explosion lit up the mesa. Sounded like a bomb.” Walker Chee stepped on a cigarette butt. “Whole canyon must be laced with oil and shale.”

  Like campfires, Youngman thought. The canyon was alive with blue campfires. His face was blistered. His neck and ear were bandaged and a blanket covered his back.

  Another oil seep erupted, orange turning to blue. Turbines wheezing in desperation, a helicopter peeled away from the rising flame.

  “Useless. Absolutely useless.” Piggot jumped down from his car and threw his glasses onto the rear seat. “That’ll burn for years, maybe forever. Kiss it good-bye, Chee.”

  “Where’re you going?”

  “Venezuela, Indonesia, Alaska.” Piggot got into the front seat. “Somewhere, someone wants to do business. All I gotta do is find him.”

  “We have a contract!” Chee shouted after the moving car. He watched the rear lights of the Cadillac vanish before he turned back to the canyon, where he could watch two $2 million going up in smoke.

  One of the Disease Control mobile labs took the space vacated by Piggot. A young investigator in vinyl coveralls, his fresh cheeks dusted with soot, eyed Youngman and Anne curiously before reporting to Chee.

  “There’s no way of telling when we can check out that cave. The main thing is, are all the bats dead?”

  “Ask him.” Chee shrugged and walked away in disgust.

  The investigator was eager but tentative about approaching Youngman. The Indian he saw was dark, as red-eyed as an animal, and naked to the waist.

  “They’re dead,” Youngman said.

  “I hope that’s correct. If they are, then the major vector of the disease is eliminated and the rest will be basically a quarantine operation.” The investigator studied Youngman more carefully. “If you understand what I mean.”

  The investigator’s uncertainty reminded Youngman of Paine.

  “I try,” Youngman said.

  “And I hear that a man was left in the cave?”

  “In the mine.”

  “A friend?”

  “Yes.” Youngman looked at Anne. “The Hopi people owe him a great debt.”

  The investigator made notes. He asked Anne about the fire, the cave, and the bats; she answered that they’d set the fire with gasoline, the cave was ordinary in all respects and that there was no chance of any of the bats escaping. While she talked, she slipped her arm through Youngman’s. When he closed his notebook, the investigator was very pleased.

  “Thank you. There’s an ambulance on the way for the two of you. You’ll be in a hospital for a couple of days of observation but I bet you can use the rest. You’ve had an amazing escape.”

  “Do you think so?” Youngman asked flatly.

  “Well . . . yes,” the investigator blurted. “Unbelievable.”

  “Good.”

  The investigator went in some confusion back to his truck, and drove off to the rank of fire engines sitting out the dawn.

  Youngman spread his blanket over Anne so that they could lean together. Around the canyon the sky paled.

  “You’re going to make Paine a hero, aren’t you?” Anne said.

  “He was.”

  Or Abner was, and Harold, even Chee. Give them their due, everyone was right, Youngman thought. All but him, perhaps.

  “But you did it,” she said.

  “I don’t know what I did. I hope no one ever knows what I did.”

  The features of the canyon began to emerge in the morning light. The different colored sandstone walls were all charred black. Cliffs, gutted, hollow-eyed, disjointed, wore a mask of black. Black smoke rode over the morning wind without moving.

  “I hope I never know.”

  The flame lights looked like the stars of a universe that had died and collapsed upon itself. As the sun rose at Youngman’s back the stars faded and, one by one, disappeared.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  MARTIN CRUZ SMITH has lived in many parts of the country, including New Mexico, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. He comes naturally by his interest in the American Southwest and its Indians, for he is one-half Pueblo. A three-time nominee for an Edgar Award, his previous books about gypsies in America and espionage in the Vatican have been translated into five languages. Mr. Smith lives in New York with his wife and his two daughters.