Archaeopteryx

by Dan Darling

  “When’s your start date?” I asked, mostly to be cruel. I could tell by the way they were talking that any employment remained purely hypothetical. Once Rex actually started a job, he lost all enthusiasm for it.

  “Soon’s we get all the details ironed out,” Flowers shot back.

  “What did you do for the army again?” I asked, even though I knew perfectly well. Flowers and Rex had been glorified garbage men, driving trucks all over Kuwait and Southern Iraq during the Gulf War collecting American scrap.

  “Stick here,” Rex said to the Captain, “is an animal expert.”

  The Captain tilted his head up at me. The back of his thick neck bunched into folds, like a tortoise trying to find the moon. “That right?”

  “That,” I said, “is not right.”

  “He’s a zoologist,” Rex said.

  “Zookeeper,” I said.

  “Goddamned expert in insects, spiders, snakes―all kinds of reptiles and poisonous monsters,” Rex said. “The craziest fucking things. Stick knows ’em all.”

  The Captain raised his eyebrows. “You know desert animals?”

  I stared at him.

  “Stick knows everything in this desert and every other desert,” Rex said.

  “We could use a man knows the deserts of New Mexico.” The Captain shrugged.

  “Stick is the deserts of New Mexico,” Flowers said.

  “Stick”―Rex glared at Flowers―“is a local―what’s the word?―resource. People find a weird thing under a rock, they take it to Stick. You know that bird thing, that incident with the birds?”

  The Captain squinted. “You mean that event at the Bosque?”

  “That’s the one,” Rex said.

  “That tragedy?” the Captain asked.

  Rex nodded. “The same one. They asked Stick to drive down there and give them his opinion.”

  “That right?” The Captain looked at me with something like admiration.

  “That,” I said, “is not right.”

  The Captain didn’t seem to hear me. “You go down there the day after it happened?”

  I sipped my beer.

  “He did,” Rex said. “I saw him that exact day. He went on behalf of the university to collect specimens and give them his take and whatnot.”

  “That right?” the Captain asked.

  I sighed. “That’s almost half right.”

  “We could use a man who knows the animals of the New Mexican desert,” the Captain said. “You know critters―like mosquitoes, ticks, flies, bats, and such―from other places, too?”

  “He knows it all,” Flowers said. “He’s got them in his zoo. He studies them all day long.”

  “A man who knows New Mexico, a man who knows all kinds of reptiles, insects, amphibians―critters of all types,” the Captain said. “We’d consider such a man to be a valuable asset. I could very well have some work to throw your way.”

  “I thought the Minutemen didn’t hire people,” I said.

  “I’d pass along a recommendation to a third party,” the Captain said, “is what I’m saying to you. A well-moneyed party.”

  “I don’t need a job.” The last thing I wanted was to get on the crazy bus with Rex, Flowers, and this Captain.

  “Oh, I know,” the Captain said. “You work for the zoo. That’s why you’re valuable. We would ask one or two days a week. A Saturday of very well-compensated work.”

  “I work at the zoo on Saturday,” I said.

  “Your day off, then,” the Captain said. “Our affiliate pays handsomely, especially for an expert. And an expert like you―you’re a goddamned one of a kind.” He guffawed as he looked me up and down. “We’d make it worth your while.”

  “I am not for sale.”

  The three of them laughed. I hadn’t meant it as a joke.

  The Captain reached across the bar and swatted at my wrist. “Think about it. We want to―the company I work with―wants to hire you. You’re our man. We’ll talk turkey another day. Right now, we’re out on the town. We’re having fun.” He held up his beer can. Rex and Flowers rammed his can with theirs and the three of them sucked down whatever was left. I gave them another round. They cracked their cans open, chugged them, and erupted in snorts of beer-foam laughter.

  I sipped my beer. I was the bitterness of the world.

  It didn’t take any prodding on my part for Rex and Flowers to fall over each other to tell me the Captain’s story. He’d served in the army―just as they had―which had undervalued his vast talents and never promoted him past corporal. However, as they continued to tell me, after having served his tour and owned his own small roofing business for twenty years, he’d been a founding member of the Minutemen in New Mexico, which he’d joined both to relive the glory of his military days and out of a deep-seated fear of Mexican takeover.

  An ex-brigadier general had dubbed the Captain with his unofficial rank. The general was also affiliated with the Minutemen, though too old to actually venture out to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border. The general did, however, get hoisted into the bed of an all-wheel drive vehicle every now and then and driven around the desert so he could brandish a shotgun at menacing juniper bushes and prickly pear cacti and such. Apparently―according to the gushing of my three guests―he was a visionary leader of American liberty.

  I understood the Minutemen to be a bunch of beer-swilling Anglo gun-enthusiasts, who lived in a state of delusion that the entire region, from Texas to California, hadn’t been stolen by force from Mexico. They tried to live out some Sons of the Revolution fantasy by hunting down poor families looking for work, scaring the devil out of them, and then turning them over to the special incarceration system that the United States used to house them before deportation―a system that didn’t worry about treating them as if they had any human rights.

  Not that I really cared. Mexicans, Anglos, Native Americans―I carried blood from all three groups, and regardless of race, they all treated me like something that had just crawled out of Loch Ness.

  The case of beers wound down until the last dozen cans or so floated in lukewarm water that marked the demise of all my household ice cubes. At that point, I kicked everyone out. I knew they’d be over the legal limit and didn’t care. Drunk driving was one of the great sports of Albuquerque. It put your abilities to the test and the stakes were high. I dumped the extra beers in a plastic bag and made Flowers take them with him.

  The Captain was last out the door. He held out his hand. This time, to expedite things, I took it. It looked like a whale swallowing a dolphin. The captain’s sleeve slid up his forearm, exposing a large, red welt with a gash in the center.

  I gripped his hand bone-tight. “Wasp sting?”

  He shrugged and pulled the sleeve down. “Dunno.”

  “Nasty… I can take a look.”

  “Just a mosquito bite.” The Captain yanked his hand back. “Think about my offer.”

  I gave him the smallest of nods.

  “Before I go…” He made both his hands into guns and pointed them at me. “Favorite animal at the zoo. Shoot.”

  “Painted box turtle.” I didn’t even have to think about it. “Name of Esposita. Unique white color pattern on her shell.” I could look at her and feel content about everything else in my life. She could move an inch across her terrarium over the course of an hour, and to me it was high theater.

  “Box turtle.” He shook his head. “Incredible.”

  It wasn’t incredible. That was the point. Any kid could own a box turtle. They were common, hardy, and lived a hundred years.

  “Nice to meet ya,” the Captain said and walked away.

  It had not been nice to meet him, except for during that final minute. I recognized his wound. I’d seen it on a dead whooping crane only a week before.

  spent the rest of my weekend in my apartment trying not to think about the twin welts I’d seen on the Captain and the whooping crane. It wasn’t my business. I finished my book on ants, re-learning a bunch of stuff
I’d learned years ago and forgotten. I ate a few meals. I tinkered with the pipes under my kitchen sink, which were draining more slowly than they might have, and made the situation slightly worse. I fed Ralph a couple of earthworms harvested from my garden. They weren’t much sport for him, but it was winter. Not a lot of life was twitching.

  On Thursday, the dark sedan followed me to work. I couldn’t get a look at the driver. He hung back pretty well and didn’t enter the zoo parking lot. I sat in my truck contemplating a course of action for about twenty minutes, then decided to try and forget all about it.

  A Federal Express envelope lay waiting on my desk in the Reptile House. I read the label, hoping it was addressed to someone else and had ended up on my desk by mistake. No such luck. The world was after me. It was hell-bent on pestering me until I cracked. Its agent in this case was Melodía.

  Inside the envelope, I found glossy eight-by-tens. They were not pictures of a beautiful woman or a vacation I had won to a faraway paradise, which was probably good since to me the beautiful woman would have to be blind to be interested, and paradise would be a desert island. Instead, I found a picture of a bullfrog splayed on its back, its skin incised from throat to crotch and staked to a dissection board. Its insides lay exposed like a dirty secret.

  The next photo was a close-up of the frog’s stomach. Frog stomachs were supposed to be pinkish-red, cylindrical, and circled by thin lateral bands of darker red. They were cute, all cuddled up to the liver. This frog’s stomach was purple with green striations. A puncture wound drove right through the middle. It was not cute at all.

  I flipped to the next picture, an incised frog stomach. A vague form lay within the digestive slime. It had several legs and a bulbous eye. The fourth and fifth pictures showed a half-melted monster washed clean of stomach fluids. Digestive acids had eaten away the left side of the head and most of the appendages. However, you could see that it once had six three-jointed legs, the front pair of which were tilted forward and probably used for manipulation. The most intact leg ended with a hooked claw. The half of the head that remained sported a wicked mandible. The head and thorax were short; the abdomen long and slender. Four wing joints flanked the thorax, the wings missing. The abdomen ended with a stinger, undoubtedly the agent behind the wound in the frog’s stomach.

  The creature was half-gone, its chitin digested to the point where I couldn’t discern coloration. The fifth picture captured it next to a ruler: the thing was nearly two inches long―even after its body had shriveled in stomach acid. The only flying, stinger-bearing insect I’d ever known to approach that length was the tarantula hawk wasp. Tarantula hawks didn’t have mandibles. Their front legs didn’t tilt forward. Their heads and thoraxes were more slender than those of the creature in the photo. The position of the eye on the head was different.

  I put the photos back in the envelope, slipped them into the bottom drawer of my desk, and tried to forget they existed. Trying to forget things was the order of the day, apparently.

  Thursday was busy. I had animals to feed. I had supply requests to submit. I had terrariums to tidy. I also had to prepare my reticulated python for shipment. She was going to visit the Denver Zoo to be ogled by a whole new city full of normals. I’d fed her a rat on Monday. By now, she’d be as docile as a baby. Her whole body would have essentially shut down, save for the digestive system. In that state, she was travel-ready. I only had to prepare a kennel for her and print out care instructions. After closing, I walked back through the zoo, behind the walls, down the dark corridors and narrow alleys between animal enclosures. I stopped at the employee door that let out into the parking lot and half-kneeled so I could look through the small window.

  It took me a minute. Then I found it: a dark sedan sitting by the curb next to Tingley Field, a park with a duck pond. When I squinted, I could spot the newspaper through the passenger window. It was him: Newspaper Man. For some reason, after several days off, he was after me again. I felt like walking over, rapping on his window and telling him that I wasn’t worth the effort. I knew no secrets. I had no enemies or allies. No one should have cared about my comings and goings. I considered going back to the Reptile House and working until he left. There was always more to do. The Reptile House was my second home. However, as soon as 6:00 p.m. struck, my routine began to itch. It demanded I go home, cook something, and eat it.

  I had an idea.

  I walked back to my office and phoned Rex.

  “Wha?” His voice was bleary, as if he wasn’t fully awake.

  “I need you to do something for me,” I said, “right now.”

  “Course.” Rex cleared his throat. “Whaddaya need?”

  “Drive to the zoo.”

  “Car’s broken down, eh?”

  “No. I need you to drive to the zoo and park by Tingley Field. Wait for me to leave the parking lot. A man will follow me in a dark gray car.”

  “What kind of car?” Rex sounded alert.

  “Four-door. Sedan. Inconspicuous.”

  “Got it,” Rex said.

  “I’ll drive home. You see where he goes once I’m there.”

  The receiver rustled against Rex’s mustache on the other end of the line. “Can do. Want me to call Flowers?”

  “Why would you call Flowers?”

  “Just in case.”

  “Do not call Flowers,” I said. He’d likely show up in his ice cream truck. “Come by yourself.”

  “Be there in ten minutes.”

  The perk to having a friend who believed in UFO crashes and Mexican takeover conspiracies was that he didn’t ask questions when you called him up and made a request that most people would think paranoid. I guess I was lucky.

  I went back to the parking lot and waited inside the employee door. I let the minute hand on my watch track a quarter circle before I walked to my vehicle. Mine was one of only a half-dozen cars left. I tried to stride with my normal swift gait, as if unaware of Newspaper Man’s presence. Once behind my truck’s tinted windows, I scanned the cars parked on the street that ran between Tingley Field and the zoo. The dark sedan was still there. A hundred yards or so south of that on the park side, I spied Rex’s truck. An extended cab, jacked-up muscle truck with a gun rack and spotlights didn’t make a great tailing vehicle. I guess I hadn’t thought my plan quite through. Still, Newspaper Man wouldn’t likely expect to be followed.

  I took a deep breath and drove home. For most of the way, I could only see Newspaper Man trailing discretely, intermingling himself with traffic. But on the trek up long, straight Fourth Street, I glimpsed the distant bulk of Rex’s truck. He seemed to be doing a subtle enough job.

  I arrived home and entered my apartment without looking back to see if Newspaper Man had parked a block or two away or had simply rolled on. I released Ralph onto the savannah of my living room floor where, according to my calculations, a cricket should still have been roaming. I pieced together some soft tacos for myself, but when I sat at my bar, I was too nervous to eat.

  I decided to drink instead. A half-dozen Chama River Brewery beers sat cooling their heels in my refrigerator. I took one out, cracked the cap off, and drank it down. I opened another. I sat at the bar. All was quiet. No roar of Rex’s truck. No footsteps. Even Ralph crouched softly in a crook of the wall and floor beneath one of my big bay windows. He listened for that cricket, hiding somewhere, too petrified to chirp.

  My phone rang. I considered hitting it with a beer bottle, then realized that it was probably Rex. He had a cell phone. I answered.

  “Did you get the photos?” Melodía asked.

  “Nope,” I said, trying to keep the disappointment out of my voice. “I don’t accept articles from Federal Express. Government employee solidarity and all.”

  “Come to my lab,” she said.

  “I’m a USPS man. Until death.”

  “Come to my lab,” she said. “I’ll let you have the first look.”

  “Impossible! You’ve already looked.”

  �
��So you admit you got the photos.” Her voice was bubbly and playful.

  She had me. “Yes… That is a hell of a half-digested wasp.”

  “That’s no wasp,” she said. “If it is, it’s a new species.”

  “What you need―” I started.

  “A new species, Stick! Can you imagine? A new species of insect hasn’t been discovered here for decades.”

  “What you need is a DNA test,” I said. “Not a zookeeper.”

  “You’re not excited,” she said.

  “I’m sure you can do a DNA test with all that fancy lab equipment.”

  “You don’t want to come to my lab and look at a new species of giant wasp?”

  I flinched at the word. Giant. Thankfully, she couldn’t tell over the phone. “It’s not a new species. It’s just a damned big, weird-looking wasp. Every other month, some redneck claims to have shot the chupacabra. They peddle out a four-legged corpse with dermatitis and a scrunched-up face, and the internet goes crazy. One DNA test later: coyote.”

  “Come on, Stick. I’ve looked at the journals. The front legs aren’t right. The eyes, or what’s left of them, are not those of a tarantula hawk wasp. They’re more like―”

  “I’m very busy.”

  “They’re more like fly eyes,” she said.

  “I’m in the middle of something. Good-bye.”

  The line went quiet. Ralph crept along the baseboard on the opposite side of the room. Did he smell that cricket? Could he feel the vibration of its little hops through the floorboards?

  “Please,” she said. “I need to share this with someone.”

  I could have told her a mysterious man with a newspaper followed me home. I could have told her that my best friend had brought a white supremacist into my house two nights ago and that they’d offered me a job persecuting people with whom I shared ancient blood. I could have told her that the next morning I was sending away my favorite python for six months.

  Instead I said this: “I’ll send Marchette over. You can share it with him.”

  The dial tone yelled in my ear.