Archaeopteryx

by Dan Darling

“It’s a free country,” I said.

  “Not on private property, it’s not,” the guard said. “Anybody who steps onto our property is ours. I could cuff you and throw you in a room and nobody could say bupkis.”

  “I can’t wait to see how that turns out for you,” I said from my vantage point way overhead. It was all just talk. I was sticking around. Whoever was coming for me might spill something about Marchette.

  I shouldn’t have been shocked by the stocky, fifty-something, baldheaded man who opened and closed the door, letting the alarm do a loop around the room again. I wondered if it signaled a fire or an escaped lion.

  “Mr. Stick.” The Captain stuck out his hand. It was his thing. He couldn’t get enough of shaking hands. “What brings you out here?”

  “I’m on vacation.” I took his hand. It was a small, dense lump in my palm. “I’m hitting all the hot tourist spots.”

  “Ha. You’re a crack-up. You come here to take my offer?”

  I scanned his arm. The welt, identical to the one I’d seen on the whooping crane, had healed, but it looked like it had been a nasty process. “Is this where I’d be working?” I asked. “Is this Minuteman Central Command?”

  “Like I said, the Minutemen don’t hire. You’d be contracting with Typhon Industries.”

  “Doing what, exactly?” I asked.

  He chuckled. “We’ll give you the details when you commit. It’s all a little hush-hush around here. So, you in?”

  “I’m actually here for a meeting with a colleague. It’s a pure coincidence that you work here. It’s quite a surprise.”

  “There are no coincidences in the world, my friend.” The Captain clapped me on the back and steered me away from the reception counter. The guard left us and returned to his post. “Everything’s part of everything else. There’s an order holding it all together.”

  “Tell it to the tornadoes, Captain.” I regretted using his fake title as soon as my mouth made the sounds.

  “That’s what we Minutemen do,” he said. “We’re wardens of order. We keep the world working according to the rules.”

  “And I thought you were just Mexican-haters. Boy, do I have egg on my face.”

  “Mexican-Americans are part of our country,” the Captain said. “I don’t hate Mexicans. I hate law-breakers.”

  I didn’t like the way we were pacing slowly across the foyer, his hand on my back, as if we were co-conspirators having a deep conversation. I was tired of deep conversations. I was tired of conspiracies. I wanted my albino Western rattlesnake back.

  I pulled away from him and stopped walking. “Save it. I’m part Chicano. I think the Minutemen are delusional. They believe that range-roving around the desert toting assault rifles is some sort of patriotic act. I think it’s idiotic. And maybe a form of terrorism.”

  The Captain’s eyes got beady. He clenched his jaw the way men do to show how manly they are. “That’s not nice talk. Not nice at all. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were calling my boss idiotic―and worse. He wouldn’t like that. He also won’t like it when I have to tell him that you’re turning down his job offer―again.”

  “Tell him I’ll put it in writing if he wants. I’ll get a big tattoo of the word no if he wants me to. I’ll hire a biplane to sky-write it for him. I’m here looking for a man named Simon Marchette. Where is he?” I was doing my own masculine pantomime. I loomed. I let my voice shake the earth.

  The Captain gave me the stare-down. I’d seen it all before at the zoo. The spider monkeys liked to give that same look to each other when they were feuding over a favorite toy. He wasn’t nearly as good at it as his receptionist was. “Never heard of him.”

  “That’s sad,” I said. “He won the lottery. I’m here to give him the good news. Guess I got confused about his place of business.”

  The Captain worked his jaw some more. He spoke through clenched teeth. “I guess that means you’re leaving.”

  “Guess so,” I said. “I’ll let you get back to your fire drill.”

  He smiled. It was a little less inviting than his glower. “Guard! Get this guy out the front door.” He walked away. His arms stood out from his torso the way men’s arms do when they spend a lot of time lifting weight. It made him walk funny.

  The guard escorted me to the entrance. I went willingly. As he held the door, I caught a glimpse down the collar of his shirt. He’d been bitten―just as the Captain and the whooping crane had.

  “Nasty sting you got there,” I said.

  The real person broke through the guard’s veneer―and I recognized him. He was the kid with the meaty shoulders I’d seen that first day at the Bosque. He put his fingers on the bite. He stretched his mouth and widened his eyes the way people do when they’re recalling something painful. “Damnedest bite I ever got. Bled for a day. Swelled up like I was growing a second head.”

  “What the hell got ya?” I asked.

  Meat Shoulders shook his head. “Some damned huge bug. Size of a dragonfly, but evil. They’re all over the facility. We’ve got bug lamps, we spray the place down with poison, but they keep coming back. Must be breeding nearby.”

  I whacked him on the shoulder. “Heal.”

  “Thanks pal,” he said. “Sorry about all the ruckus. Things are a little tense around here.” He was a good guy. Once you broke him open, his pulp was soft and juicy.

  “I’ve been on edge too. The bird thing. Down at the Bosque.”

  A guarded expression slid over his face like a visor. “Yeah.”

  “I saw you down there the day after it happened. Didn’t I?” I was trying to make my tone casual and doing a shoddy job of it.

  “Could be,” he said. “We run patrols all over.”

  “Another guy was with you. He was bandaging your arm. Your van was torn to shreds.”

  Meat Shoulders’ eyes wobbled around in their sockets. They couldn’t fix on anything, like a compass at the North Pole. He opened his mouth, but at that moment, the receptionist cleared her throat. It sounded like someone whetting a knife. “I have to get back to my post.”

  I left.

  I needed insect traps. Thanks to the guard, I knew where to put them―but I’d have to be sneaky about it. I tried to envision Melodía’s look of surprise when I brought her a live, adult specimen of the bug she’d been trying to hatch. It would be the perfect present to get her to forgive me.

  arrived home at midmorning. My apartment smelled like beer bottles and dust. Even though the temperature outside was only pushing forty degrees, I opened a few windows. I turned a fan on low to get the air circulating. Ralph didn’t appreciate any of it. He was trying to sleep the day away, as was his God-given right as a nocturnal creature. Normally, he slept in a nest he’d built in a corner of the terrarium nearest the wall, where the heater was. When I started letting all sorts of noise, light, and wind into the room, he scuttled into his plastic shelter.

  I decided to clean my apartment and hope that maybe my life would follow suit. I dusted the furniture. I wiped down the door and windowsills, the baseboards, the light switch guards, all the kitchen fixtures, and the top of every surface in my bedroom and bathroom. I carried the rugs outside and beat hell out of them. I swept my wooden floors and replaced the rugs. I wrapped my hands in plastic bags―no kitchen glove made for humans would fit me―and did some serious scrubbing of sink, tub, and toilet. I rubbed my kitchen sink until it shone like sterling silver. I attacked my stovetop with a wire brush. Finally, I took the trash out. Only when I’d brought the trashcan back inside, did I realize that I’d cleaned the place in hopes that Melodía would drop by later that evening. We’d only been fighting for a day, and I already missed her.

  Once my cleaning was done, I had practically the whole day to myself. I decided to spend it making horsefly traps.

  The first step in creating a homemade flytrap is preparing the bait. Normally, a sugary solution works best for horseflies. Only the females drink blood; both females and males eat all sorts of
other things like pollen, fruit, and vegetable matter. I could have prepared a sugary bait and taken my chances. But the guard, the crane, and the Captain had all been bitten by blood-hungry females. When a female seeks blood, it is a sure sign she’s mating and laying eggs. I wanted to catch a female, so the first step in creating the particular trap I needed was acquiring blood. I made a few calls and found a butcher that could sell me pig’s blood. The shop was located in the old neighborhood, not too far from my dad’s house. I drove there, purchased a gallon of fresh blood, and was back on the road to my place by noon.

  The weather turned. A savage wind swept down from the mountains and raked its claws across the city. I drove home, blasting the heater the whole way as the gusts swatted my truck around. They wanted to wrestle me off the road and throw me into the tumbleweeds. The trees in my neighborhood twisted their craggy, bare limbs in agony. Dirt around the arroyo manifested as a dust devil before shattering against a chain link fence. It was one of those crystal blue days with icy gales that cut the skin from your ears and sliced through whatever layers you draped over your sad mortal coil. New Mexican wind was invisible and cruel: you looked out your window at the pretty sunshine, and when you opened your door, it leapt on you like a starved wildcat.

  I parked my truck and rushed for the front door. I had it unlocked, opened, and closed again before I noticed the shortish middle-aged Chicano man at my bar. He sat with his back to the wall and his left elbow on the bar top. His feet dangled two feet above the floor. He wore a fedora, trench coat, dusty brown wingtips, droopy dark green socks, and a cheap dark green suit. He had a trimmed beard and sunglasses on his face, and he held a little revolver in his right hand.

  It was the man who’d been following me. The Newspaper Man.

  “You the plumber?” I asked.

  “Far from it.” The pitch of his voice was a little high, with that slight Spanish vowel twist that English-fluent New Mexicans often have―even some Anglos. “You might say I’m here to fix something―but it ain’t pipes.”

  “Can I get you a spider?” I gave him my cruel giant sneer. “Or maybe you’d like me to carry you outside and toss you into the arroyo?”

  “You’re big, for sure.” He hefted the gun. “Lots of target to poke holes in.”

  I set my brown grocery bag of blood on the end of the bar closest to me. I folded my arms and leaned against the wall by the door. I’d seen my share of guns. During our teen and twenty-something years, Rex and I had shot up quite a few bottles, cans, and old cars. That had been one aspect of our early adulthood that was typically New Mexican.

  Newspaper Man smirked. “You think you’re something special. Biggest, strongest lug in the whole state―hell, the whole damn country maybe. These days, big and strong don’t matter. Iron.” He hefted his little gun. “That’s what matters.”

  “You’re confused,” I said. “This isn’t a Humphrey Bogart movie. This is my apartment.”

  He made a show of looking around. “Nice place. Must get plenty of black mold and millipedes. You own?”

  I showed him some teeth.

  “Don’t answer. I already know. I’ve talked to your landlady. She smells like rosewater and chicken fat. She thinks I’m a city employee taking a survey of citizen satisfaction with the new tree-planting initiative. I’ve seen your voting record―you’re not even registered. Never voted in your life. I know your employment history. I’ve seen your university transcripts. I have a copy of your driver’s license in my wallet. Hell, I even know what library books you checked out as a kid.”

  I didn’t like people mentioning my childhood. “If you know everything, then what do we have to talk about?”

  “I’m here to tell you. You think you’re special. You think just because you rent a leaky basement and have a job cleaning turtle droppings, you can walk all over the city talking to whoever you want. Poking around in business you don’t understand.” He wagged a finger of his free hand at me. “I’m here to tell you.”

  “So, tell me.”

  “There’s a war on,” he said.

  “Are we talking about the war on Christmas?” I asked. “Because I hear that one’s not going so well.”

  “I’m talking about a real war. In this city. We got a Guantanamo Bay for undocumented Latinos buried in the ground just the other side of the Sandías. We got secret weapons. We got puppet-masters pulling strings. We got brother versus brother, sister versus sister. We got cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, spy-versus-spy.”

  “Don’t forget about predator and prey.”

  “We got a man with his eye on this whole city,” Newspaper Man said. “A man with his eye on you, zookeeper. His name’s John White, head of Typhon Industries. Ever heard of him?”

  “Name’s pretty generic,” I said. “I probably heard it and forgot it.”

  He gave me a sour smile. “Sure. You can be cute. You can go on and be cute until you find yourself buried in a metal box two stories underground. Pale as a fish. Living on a slice of bologna every breakfast and one again for dinner―and whatever cockroach wanders between your fingers.”

  “Sounds great,” I said. “Sign me up. Better yet, get the hell out before I call the cops.”

  “Call ’em,” he said. “They love to laugh.”

  “Who doesn’t? The idea that you break into my house on my day off and hold a gun on me and tell me about some secret war. Funny.”

  “It’s not ha-ha funny,” he said. “It’s got a dark streak you can appreciate, though. Funnier part is that you don’t even know what’s cooking. All the smells are wafting right in your face and you sniff ’em real deep. And you say, yum. Steak. When actually what’s cooking are your shoes. Somebody’s lit your feet on fire. They’ve piled charcoal under you and stuck pine needles in your socks and sprayed you up to the shins with lighter fluid. They struck a match and you didn’t even hear it. They lit you up and you’re burning and you say, yum. Dinner.”

  My little visitor loved his analogies. “All I smell is ten-dollar cologne.”

  “Point is, you’re on fire.” He tilted his hat back on his head. “Ever since you stuck your nose in that bird business.”

  “That was somebody else’s nose I poked. It was a proxy nose. And, trust me, I regret it.”

  “Doesn’t matter that you regret it,” he said. “What matters is, now you’re in, you get out. A cheap guy like you, no friends, no property, no family―hell, you don’t have much to lose. You have to cling to the little you’ve got.”

  “Obviously, you’re not doing a very good job of following me. Lately, it seems like all I’ve got are friends. They call me in the middle of the night. They show up at my place of employment. They try to get me mixed up in all sorts of plots and plans that aren’t any of my business. I don’t like business of any kind. I just want to sit quietly alone in a dim room and count the bugs on the ceiling.”

  His cheeks turned a little red and his mouth tilted up at the edges. “You knew I was tailing you?”

  “In this state, it’s not hard to catch a guy following you. Some stretches of road, you don’t see another car for miles.”

  Newspaper Man took off his sunglasses and put them in his inside pocket. His eyes were chestnut with pleasant wrinkles at the corners. He looked like he knew how to smile―it stood at odds with his tough guy act. As he set his hat on the bar and mussed his hair, he rested the butt of the gun on his thigh, the barrel straying to one side. “I’m embarrassed. I didn’t think you knew.”

  “I had a guy follow you,” I said.

  He cocked his head. “Really?”

  “You like visiting the river.” I leaned back and let him chew on it.

  He made a show of shrugging it off. “So you followed me. So what?”

  “So nothing.” I said. “You like to have secret meetings in the woods in the middle of the night. Good for you. You like to meet people in vans with the license number―” I fished the Wendy’s receipt from my pocket and read it to him.
r />   “Fine. Tit for tat. I follow you; you follow me. So what?”

  “So, you can tell me what this is about or I can have the Minutemen track down that van.”

  He sighed and thumped his fist on this thigh. “It’s about the birds.”

  “The birds died,” I said. “End of story. It’s sad and all, but at the end of the day, that’s what nature is.”

  He shook his head. “Those birds did not die a natural death. We know this.”

  “How?” I asked. “Did you ask your Ouija board?”

  “We know it because they know it.” He gave me a conspiratorial wink.

  “And who’re they?”

  He laughed. “You really are in the dark, aren’t you?”

  I walked into the kitchen and opened the fridge. Three Tecates kept my vegetables company. I took two out and showed one to him. He gave me a half-hearted nod, so I opened them and threw the bottle caps out. I walked around the bar and handed him one of the bottles. “Mind if I put my groceries in the fridge?”

  He shrugged his non-gun side. “Sure. You don’t want your milk to spoil.”

  “This isn’t milk.” I lifted one of the half-gallon containers of blood out of the bag. “It’s blood.”

  I put it about six inches in front of his face. His eyes ballooned. I had my grip around his pistol hand before he even knew I was going for it. I squeezed until he dropped the beer bottle and his mouth cranked open. The bottle rolled across the bar, spewing foam and beer, and shattered on the kitchen tile. An involuntary sing-song whistled out of his talk-box. I squeezed harder. He clawed at my fingers with his free hand. It was like a baby trying to open a walnut.

  When I let him go, the gun fell to the floor. He didn’t make a move for it. I picked it up, flicked the safety, and stashed it in my freezer. Then I put the blood in the fridge.

  He sat at the bar, red-faced, kneading his hand. I let myself stand there a little while, calming down. I never got into altercations―not anymore. Those days were behind me. I was a calm, gentle, patient caregiver. The burst of adrenaline my body delivered when I seized the little man’s gun made my vision shimmer around the edges. I grabbed for my beer too hard. I drank too fast. When I opened the third beer, I almost broke the neck off the bottle.