Archaeopteryx

by Dan Darling

  I didn’t hear from Rex until late. I should’ve been asleep, resting my body. My legs hurt all the time. My knees, hips, and ankles hurt. Every joint in my feet. Sitting in a chair stressed my bones. Walking to the refrigerator for a fresh beer jostled them. Pressing the pedals of a car made my ankles and knees creak like old pines. Over the course of a day, what began as a dull ache built up to a low-power flame that burned through the lower half of my body. We won’t talk about my spine, neck, and shoulders.

  I needed eight or so hours of horizontal time each day. Lying down hurt my joints in all new ways, but it also alleviated the pain caused by being up and about. So I awoke with a slow ache in my hips, elbows and fingers that ebbed over the course of a day’s activity. That’s right: sleeping hurt my fingers. Why?

  What a stupid question.

  The universe knew no why. It was a senseless, endless, cycle of destruction. I wanted to write that on a postcard and send it to Tanis Rivera, wherever she was. Just for fun, as I sat at my bar waiting for Rex and not resting my aching body, I checked to see if I still had her card. I did. The address was a P.O. Box in Tijeras, a suburb to the east of Albuquerque that lurked in a saddle of the Sandía Mountain range. No employer listed. I wondered what sort of eccentric zealot would hire an animal theologian.

  A few minutes past midnight, my phone rang. I picked up.

  “Buddy,” Rex said. “You weren’t kidding.”

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “That guy really was tailing you,” he said. “What’re you mixed up in?”

  “Did you follow him?”

  “I can protect you. The Minutemen are powerful people. We have a lot of guns.”

  “No guns,” I said. “Where are you?”

  “At the river. Seriously, I’ll get guys outside your apartment. We have a shed. Enough AR-15s to take down―”

  “Please tell me where you are.”

  “North Valley,” he whispered. “South of Corrales. He turned down a side street and onto a dirt road. Led to the river. I didn’t follow. It’d be too conspicuous. Anyway, I’m in the bushes. I’m watching. A blue van was waiting for him. One of those hippie vans that kids hang around in not shaving themselves and smoking reefer.”

  “Who’s he meeting?” I asked.

  “Two women. One with long gray hair. Face looks like it got tired of crying a long time ago.” Rex said. “The other’s dressed like a cowboy. Stetson and everything. You want me to take ’em?”

  It took me a second to process this offer. “Go back to your truck.”

  “I only have the cowboy gun and a .22 rifle in the truck,” he said. “Anyway, you point a revolver at someone, they’ll listen to you.”

  “Go back to your truck.”

  “Bullets all do the same thing, no matter what type of gun.”

  “Come here. Drive to my house right now.”

  “I’m just saying.” Rex’s voice was fierce. “You don’t follow my best friend.”

  “I appreciate that,” I said. “All I want you to do is drive to my house and tell me what you saw in person.”

  “You don’t follow the greatest friend I’ve had since we were six,” he said.

  There are moments when your routine has been fractured. During these moments, people say things they don’t normally say, and do things they aren’t normally called on to do. At that moment―when Rex offered to pull a gun on three people―I felt something. I didn’t like it. It made me want to grab Rex and hug him and place my palm protectively over the top of his head. This was a brief glimpse into real human emotion. It made me feel a little drunk. I dampened it back down with a sharp dose of pragmatism.

  “Rex, I need you to write down the license plate.” Giving him a set of discreet instructions would trick him out of walking up to the trio and pointing his revolver at them. He was like all the rest of us raised in our poor Albuquerque barrio: conditioned to follow orders.

  He cleared his throat. “Right.”

  “Do you have a pen?”

  Shuffling echoed over the phone. “Pencil. Wendy’s receipt. Got it.”

  “Come see me,” I said.

  He inhaled slowly. “Be there in ten.”

  While I waited, I realized I should have let Newspaper Man follow me around as long as he wanted. I could have led him to my father’s house in the slums. I could have led him back and forth from the zoo, at exactly the same times, day after day. I could have taken him on my weekly Sunday 6 a.m. grocery run. He could have timed me. I was one of the most efficient shoppers this world had ever seen. I could have “accidentally” dropped my shopping list in the parking lot and the receipt in the gutter outside my house. He could have stumbled on each one, like breadcrumbs leading to the secret truth of my boring life. They would match exactly. I charted everything I was going to buy on my shopping trips and stuck to the list. No impulse buys. Nothing unplanned. That was my normal life. There was nothing in that life worth following me for.

  Rex parked his truck outside and stomped down my stairs. I was waiting in the doorway for him. He brushed by me and paced the length of my big continuous kitchen and den. I shut the door and resumed my bar stool, where I drank beer and listened to my knees ache.

  Rex stopped pacing and pointed a quivering finger at the window. “What’s he following you for?”

  I shrugged.

  “I’m not racist,” Rex said.

  I sipped my beer.

  “I’m not racist, but there’s something going on in this city,” he said, “with the Hispanics.”

  “Some people say they prefer to be called Chicanos.” I didn’t bother to remind him that I was, at least in part, one of them. My dad was about as Chicano as you could get.

  “Hispanic, Latino, Chicano, Mexican―who the hell cares?” Rex said. “They’ve got people sticking up for them all across the state. They’re soaking up all sorts of welfare money. The country’s in debt, and meanwhile, they’re making their fortunes as drug-dealers, gun-runners, and job-stealers.”

  Rex liked to rant. One day he’d rant about banks, the next day about undocumented Mexican fruit-pickers, the next day about unions or Wall Street or the Federal government.

  “Why?” he shouted. “Why are they after you?”

  I walked to my fridge and got Rex the last beer. As always, as soon as he saw the glistening bottle, his face softened. The seams at the corners of his eyes and mouth relaxed a little. He lifted the beer a couple of inches above the bar and held it aloft there. His gaze, as if drawn to a lover, flicked down the bottle and back up. He brought it to his lips, swallowed a mouthful, and sucked the foam from his mustache.

  This was how to tame a Spartacus Rex. Let him rant a little, let him pace, then drug him.

  I sipped my beer.

  Rex climbed onto one of my stools and leaned his elbows on the bar. Now that he’d exhausted his rage, every line of his face drooped. He looked ten years older than he was. “What could they want from you?”

  I shrugged. “It’s a mystery.” The answer had something to do with the Bosque, the dead birds, Melodía, or all three―but I wasn’t about to tell Rex that. He’d had enough excitement.

  Rex sighed. The rush of air through his nostrils rustled his mustache. His eyes took on a faraway quality. “Remember when we used to camp?”

  I smiled. I didn’t plan it. I didn’t rehearse it. The smile just happened.

  “Just you and me,” he said. “We used to pack up your truck.”

  There were memories you had. They made you happy. You didn’t need even a second to think about it. You were just happy.

  Rex smiled, too, in that fierce way he had. His voice was sharp like a can opener. “We’d buy all sorts of meat. Canned milk. You’d bring peppers and beans. You’d fry all day over the campfire.”

  I could smell those trips. Pine needles, dry leaves, wood smoke, the sting of peppers and the salty roast of meat.

  “You’d cook everything over those fires. Spanish rice. Baked pota
toes. Steaks.”

  “We’d go in the autumn,” I said.

  “The cold wind,” he said. “That cold dusk wind. The sun would set and the air’d be ice.”

  I could taste that air. So crisp, so clean, like drinking ice water with your lungs.

  “Remember washing your face in the river in the morning?” he asked.

  I remembered washing the dishes in the river. I’d scrub them with sand and grit in the bubbling mountain current until my fingers were numb. It took hours to get them warm again, but the dishes were never cleaner.

  “We need to do that,” Rex said.

  I nodded, knowing we’d never get around to it.

  “No times like those,” Rex said. “Let’s promise: we’ll go camping.”

  “It’s a promise.” I didn’t really believe in promises. They were rooted in words. Without words, the concept of the promise wouldn’t exist. A promise was an attempt to make words―the most transient of all things; you utter them and they cease to exist―permanent. In my experience, it never worked.

  “Scout’s honor,” Rex said. We shook on it. Rex’s eyes wandered across the room and found Ralph climbing up the seam between the refrigerator and the sink. “Your spider’s going to fall into your garbage disposal one of these days.”

  I went over and put my hand in the air below where he clung. He climbed down into my palm. I carried him to the terrarium and put him inside. “I leave the plugs in the drains when I’m not using them.”

  Rex nodded. “Smart. So, are you going to tell me why this guy was following you?”

  “Would if I knew,” I said.

  “People don’t just get followed,” Rex said. “There’s always a reason.”

  I shrugged.

  “You owe somebody money?” he asked.

  I shook my head. I had no debt and a shocking amount saved. I was one of the few middle class people in the country with a bright future for my retirement―which I wouldn’t live long enough to see.

  “Normally, I’d ask if you made an enemy.” Rex shook his head. “If you touched somebody’s wife, or cheated at cards, or talked the wrong politics. But you―you don’t do things like that.”

  “I do not.”

  “Any sort of union stuff going on at the zoo?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I stay out of it.”

  “Think. Has anything different happened lately?”

  I pretended to think about it. “I met your Captain the other day.”

  Rex furrowed his brow at me. “No, the Captain’s okay. He’s a good guy.” Rex glowered into space, tried to take a pull of beer but found the bottle empty. He turned to me. “You weren’t followed before you met him?”

  “Nope.” I lied. I didn’t need Rex turning private eye and going around harassing park rangers, asking questions at the zoo, and God forbid, poking his nose into Melodía’s sanctum.

  “What about the bird thing?” Rex asked. “That’s new. Any reason anybody would follow you for that?”

  “I can’t think of a reason.” I really couldn’t. All I’d done was collect samples. I was an errand boy. “That was an act of nature, and no one knows I was involved.”

  Rex gave me a flat stare. “Let me tell you, good buddy. Everybody always knows when you’re involved.”

  He was right, but I didn’t like hearing it.

  “It’s time for bed.”

  “Right.” The little man rinsed out the beer bottles, put them in my recycling bin, and pushed in his bar stool. He turned to me and stuck out his hand.

  I took it.

  Rex made his way halfway through the door before he turned back. “You should think about the Captain’s offer. Make some money; make some new friends. The Minutemen are good guys. And they could help you with that Hispanic on your tail.”

  “I’m not working for the Minutemen,” I said. “But I’m glad you’re making some money off them.”

  His face sobered. “Fair enough.”

  “Good night,” I said.

  “Night.” He clomped up to his truck and roared away.

  The clock read 1:15 a.m. I would wake up, like it or not, in a little over four hours. My body was programmed. I was involved in nothing―no investigations, no plots, no paramilitary organizations or conspiracies of any kind. Still, when I lay in bed my eyes would not stay shut.

  he next morning, I was too exhausted to feel bad about the way I’d treated Melodía the night before. Other people have described being tired to me. Their eyelids are droopy. Their minds wander. Their precious necks are stiff. When I’m tired, it constitutes a medical condition. I worry that every movement could crack something―a crack that could herald my slow, inevitable death.

  I moved carefully during the day after a night of little sleep. I considered obstacles and planned my way around them. I drove at the speed of an old lady and with the heightened attention of a martial artist. I perceived threats and reacted to them well in advance. I took the back roads―I always took the back roads. Once at the zoo, I planned my day to maximize restful postures. I clustered similar tasks, so that every time I rose from my chair it was to accomplish as much as possible with minimal movement. With these precautions in place, I’d never broken a bone.

  By the end of my work day, my body felt heavy, like it was made of very old oak. I set my wooden body in my chair. Sitting at my desk all by my lonesome, I got to feeling guilty. I sighed. I drank some water. I watched the painted box turtle, the wisest of all reptiles. She sat still. She blinked her eyes one by one, punctuated by very long pauses, as if every blink measured out one small unit of geologic time. I picked up the phone.

  “I’m sorry,” I said when Melodía answered.

  Silence.

  “I’m a bad friend.” I didn’t explain the details of my plight to her. When people are feeling upset, they don’t need you telling them all the justifications for you treating them the way you did. They need a firm declaration of culpability. “It was selfish. It was late at night. I was grumpy. I wanted to go to bed, but I should have listened to you instead. I should have gotten in my truck and come over and looked at that monstrosity you’ve discovered.”

  The box turtle blinked both eyes at once. Anyone not versed in box turtles wouldn’t have noticed.

  “Are you even there?” I asked. “Am I spilling my guts to an empty line?”

  “I’m here,” Melodía said.

  “I’m saying I’m sorry.”

  “I know.”

  “You deserve better treatment,” I said.

  “I do.”

  “Can I come over and make it up to you?” I was practically begging. The thought of Melodía throwing herself around her lab all alone was killing me.

  She sighed. “Don’t put yourself out. I know you’re only doing it because you feel guilty.”

  “I’m Catholic,” I said. “All of my good deeds come from guilt.”

  She stifled a laugh. “You’re thinking of Irish Catholics. Our New Mexican church doesn’t work like that.”

  “Let me come over anyway. I feel guilty because I’ve done wrong.”

  “I don’t want you hanging out with me just because you feel like you’ve done wrong. I want you to want to.”

  “I do want to. You’re one of the few people on the planet I actually like.”

  “I know that’s true,” she said.

  I could hear the smile in her voice. It was remarkable how well telling the truth worked sometimes. “I’ll be over in thirty minutes.”

  “Don’t rush.” The tightness was gone from her voice. “Come over after work. I’ll order Chinese.”

  “How about Los Cuates?” I asked. Los Cuates was a local Mexican restaurant that had been in the city for decades. “I’ll pick it up on my way.”

  “Okay, but I’ll buy.”

  “I’ll buy as part of my apology. This is America. Money talks.”

  She laughed.

  After we hung up and I turned to my final tasks of the day, my hea
d was fully in the game. Try it sometime: wrong someone, feel bad about it, apologize, convince them to forgive you. You’ll feel better than you did even before you wronged them in the first place. It fills your head with all sorts of feel-good chemistry.

  By the time I’d finished at the zoo for the day, called in the order to the restaurant, and walked to the parking lot, I’d temporarily forgotten about the night before. Maybe it was because I was exhausted. Maybe I was still high on forgiveness hormones. Maybe working all afternoon with the box turtle watching over me had lulled me into a Zen state. She was a hell of role model, our box turtle. Nothing much fazed her. And if it did, she’d just retract into her shell and chill out for a few days. I envied her.

  I walked to my truck and ignored the odd pedestrians doing double takes. I drove to Los Cuates, picked up the food, and pretended the Spanish exclamations tumbling from the kitchen were about how hot the salsa was. It was easy since my father had been meticulous about sheltering me from the linguistic aspects of my heritage. I carried the food down to Melodía’s lab without a significant fuss. I found the door, as usual, closed. I knocked and tried the knob. It opened to a pretty happy Melodía. She lounged back on a lab stool, her long legs crossed at the ankle, her feet atop a desk. She wore boot cut jeans and flat shoes. Her lab coat hung on the back of the stool and the top buttons of her white blouse were undone. Her hair was gathered and staked into itself with bobby pins to form a comely mass of black and chestnut curls atop her skull. Half of her face wore a contented smile.

  “You smell good,” she said.

  “That’s the sopapillas.”

  “I hope you remembered the honey,” she said.

  A sopapilla was a New Mexican fry-bread adapted from pueblo Native American fare that, when made properly, puffed up into a pocket that you could dribble honey into. Eating one was an experience worth living for.

  I set the bag down on the highest counter in reach and hit my head on a florescent light fixture, cussing more than called for. I allowed myself to enjoy it―I let Melodía enjoy it, too. I hammed it up, rubbing my temple and scowling at the light as if it were a vexatious enemy.

  We settled into our food. I’d purchased a couple of combo plates―blue corn tortilla chicken enchiladas, hard tacos with guacamole, beef tostadas―served with refried beans and Spanish rice. Melodía organized her food into little compartments on one of the dissection trays we used as plates. I piled mine all together. I enjoyed the collision of spice-levels, tastes, textures, and temperatures. We kept the conversation light as we ate. We talked about gizzards for a little while. She listened to me praise the merits of the box turtle. I complimented her on her hair. She explained that it was a result of her neck getting too hot and lack of a scrunchie. I told her that however it happened, it worked. We had a conversation like two semi-normals.