by Dan Darling
The final picture I found showed a young Marchette, again smiling, with his arm draped around the shoulders of another man. This one had an average Anglo face, with brown hair, brown eyes, and forgettable features. He looked to be about medium build and height. I almost passed it by, but then noticed the caption: “Dr. Simon Marchette and Dr. Jacob Charon at Las Huertas Hot Spring, 1998.” I went to the image’s webpage, but found the article it had accompanied had been deleted. All that remained was a picture of the two men floating in cyberspace. I recognized the other man by his name: I’d met him on the day I’d first gone to the Bosque to gather dead birds. His face was so bland that it’d slipped from my memory altogether.
Three things lined up: the date, Las Huertas Hot Springs where I’d made a few stinger-wielding friends the night before, and the fact that Typhon Industries was located in that spot. It didn’t take a detective to figure out that 1998 must have been the year Marchette had gone to work at Typhon Industries and that this Dr. Charon was also employed there. It confirmed what I’d already suspected: if I wanted to find Marchette, grab him by the vest, and ask him what the hell was going on, the Typhon Industries Complex was the place to start. I’d tried the direct approach; I occupied my afternoon developing a more subtle plan. I ended up sitting around realizing how little I knew about anything besides the slimy, scaly, and skulking things of the world.
My mind eventually turned to Melodía. All this was about her.
I tried her lab number, her cell, and her house. All three played generic voice messages. After work, I went home, showered, and stepped into fresh clothes. I brushed my teeth and combed my hair. I tried to stare at my face objectively enough to decide whether I liked my stubble or should shave it off. My few days’ growth of dark beard was sparse across the low cheeks, but grew heavy along the jaw line, chin, and upper lip. The hollows below my cheekbones were deep and bare. It was not part of my routine to think about my looks. In my twenties, I used to stand in front of this same mirror and hate myself. It had been my hobby. I’d stand there and behold the gaunt, brown, bony face staring back and wonder why the universe spun out abominations. I’d look until I broke down and thumped my face with my fists or wept terrible giant tears into the sink. My face looked worse wet. At some point in my early thirties, I’d stopped looking in the mirror. I used it to shave and comb my hair. But I didn’t really look at myself. That shimmering square could lead a person back into dangerous territory.
I walked away from the mirror without shaving and drove to the university. Melodía’s lab was locked and dark. I drove across the city to her house, far out on the West Side. In the spare desert neighborhoods, my tail was exceedingly obvious. A blue van, much like the one Rex had described to me over the phone, followed me to Melodía’s house, where it hovered by the curb a block distant.
I rang the doorbell and banged on the wood. Nothing stirred except the west wind sweeping in from the desert. It had nothing good to say.
The van fell in behind me again as soon as I started driving home. I drove all the way there, not really knowing what to do about it. I just wanted to miss my best friend in peace without it becoming a spectator sport. Lava built up in my stomach. I drove past my house and headed toward the river, following the directions Rex had given me when he’d tailed Tony to the Rio Grande. I found the dirt road he’d described and traced it to the riverbank. The waters were black in the night sky. I killed my truck’s lights before I’d even come to a stop, parked it behind some scraggly winter trees, and jumped out.
The van had killed its lights, too. It sidled down the dirt road, crunching rocks under its tires and growling each time the driver gave it a little gas.
I moved among the trees, matching their tall winter skeletons. I made more noise than I would have liked to, but stayed invisible in the long angular shadows. The van eased to a halt a few yards from the riverbank. The passenger window rolled downward with the halting motion of a hand-cranked mechanism. No one moved inside. The forest was silent. The river made no sound as it funneled water toward the dark ocean far away.
The passenger window cranked back up, and the door opened, emitting a blue-jeaned leg atop a cowboy boot. The leg led a body into the night, a holstered bowie knife at the waist. A leather jacket gleamed in the moonlight, and a Stetson cast a deep shadow over the woman’s face. Long straw colored hair trailed down the woman’s back. I held still as she crept toward the riverbank, peering left and right. All else was still and quiet. Her gaze lingered on the spot where my truck sat behind the screen of trees. Figuring the person would spot me, I stepped out of my hiding place and put myself between her and her van.
She spun. Her hand went to her knife but quickly dropped to her side. “It’s you.” Her voice was rasping and tough, like a cowboy’s.
“Yeah? And who the hell am I?”
“You’re the archaeopteryx,” she said.
The word stunned me. My childhood leapt into my throat and wouldn’t allow me to breathe. Before I knew it, I had her leather jacket in my fists and was sputtering curses into her face. Her Stetson fell off, revealing hard coils of whipcord hair. I knew no words. I knew only thirty years of pent up rage, loss, and frustration.
The van shed other occupants. They leapt on me, pried at my wrists, and levered my arms. A fist beat on my oaken back. I was stronger than a dozen normals put together. No mortal could budge me. The tough woman gripped my wrists and stared her own lifetime of hate back at me. We were like two mirrors trying to burn each other alive by reflecting the high noon sun.
The standoff continued until a hard foot stamped on the back of my leg. I fell down on one knee. Arms constricted my neck and head in a chokehold. A different pair of fists rattled my right kidney. Leather Woman snaked free of my fists and planted the point of a boot in my solar plexus. Fault lines crackled through my skeleton. I swiped my arms behind me at whoever was in love with my neck, but it was like a windmill pawing at a still day.
As I continued to struggle, a dark form swooped from the tree line and collided with Leather Woman. The black-furred animal was the size of a bulldog, with a heavy tail and stout body. It’s wings spanned a normal’s height. The two staggered in a tangle of wings and arms and fell toward the river. The thing detached right before they hit the water. It cracked its leather wings against the air as it gained altitude, then flapped across the river in the manic way bats do. It traced the far shoreline for a few yards and disappeared into the forest. From the depths of the trees, a shriek like a lamb being tortured echoed across the river.
I recognized that shriek. A little kid named Daniel had described it pretty well when I’d removed a dead snake from his lawn.
The water by the riverbank wasn’t deep. The woman thrashed around some, but when she stood, it only came to her knees. Her hair was a stringy mess. She wiped mud from her face with both hands and yanked them away from a rake down her right cheek. Blood leaked from the wounds onto her soaked white shirtfront.
I rose, shrugging off my assailants, and reached my arm out over the water. “Gimme your hand.”
She stuck out the arm she wasn’t using to hold her face together. I pulled her up the riverbank gently, and her comrades pitched in. Mud booted her jeans up to the calves. Her hat was probably nestled in the mud of the river bottom. Microorganisms would move into it. They’d raise babies. It’d become a nice little habitat.
Leather Woman took her hand away from her face while a young guy in skinny jeans and a floppy haircut examined her. The scratches were about two inches long, jagged, but not very deep. She’d need some butterfly bandages, a gauze dressing, and whatever shots you give someone who’d been attacked by a gargoyle.
“I have a first aid kit in my truck,” I said to a young woman with copper hair and Doc Martin boots. I could still feel the tread of one of those boots on the back of my knee.
“We have our own. What in the good Lord’s name was that?” The Leather Woman spoke with a good rural twang.
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sp; “Devil,” I said. “It lives in a tree outside my apartment.”
“You must be a real savory character with devils watching your back.”
“I’m a saint. You can tell because I don’t stalk people around the city and then ambush them in the forest.”
Leather Woman turned to me as Floppy Hair came back with a first aid kit. “We weren’t fixing to bushwhack you. We have a message for you, but we had to wait for seclusion to deliver it.”
“Why not just have Tony Chavez do it? He’s your man, right?”
Floppy Hair pressed gauze to the woman’s wounds. She waved him away and held it there herself.
“Tony has other duties. There’s a lot of pieces to this puzzle.”
“What’s your message?” I asked.
“Stop looking for Simon Marchette.” Her eyes were hard and gray. “He’s safe and secure. We’ll keep him that way.”
“Who says I’m looking for him?” I asked.
She snorted. “You ain’t subtle. Everybody knows what you’re doing whenever you’re doing it.”
“He’s my friend. He goes missing, I look for him. Plus, he stole something from me.”
“We know what he stole from you and your lady friend―”
I stuck my finger in her face. “Unless you want another fight, don’t mention her to me.”
“Don’t take offense,” she said. “I’m not trying to upset you. I’m telling you: he took what he did for your own good. Now it’s gone and so is he. Best to let sleeping dogs lie.”
I felt exhausted. Whether it was the adrenaline rush of the fight ebbing or simply my life catching up with me, all I wanted was to go home and find a prone position. “Thanks for the message. It was real considerate.”
“It’s for your own good,” she said. “Keep clear of this thing and let Simon go.”
“If I’m supposed to listen to your advice, you should probably tell me your name.”
“They call me Crazy Patty,” she said.
“Figures,” I said.
As I walked toward my truck, she yelled at my back. “Any idea what that varmint was? It wasn’t a bat and it wasn’t a bird.”
“It wasn’t a plane,” I said without turning around.
Nobody laughed.
“This city’s going to hell,” she said.
“Hell on Earth has always been a New Mexican specialty.” I slammed my door.
t the zoo the next day, the word buzzed so loud even I heard it: all three of our female Tasmanian devils were pregnant. Ultrasounds had confirmed it, and thorough exams had ruled out hidden sex organs. All three were strictly female, and we hadn’t had a male around in more than a year. I listened to a few people gush about it in the mailroom, where I stopped to pick up my pay stub. I’d also received a promotional flyer for the Gamut Circus and Freak Show. I tore that in half right through the face of an oily-mustached ringmaster and retreated to my corner of the zoo.
I quickly became preoccupied with the tiger salamanders. They weren’t eating enough. We had two of them and I was trying to figure out which one of their appetites was lagging behind. The three of us sat still for half an hour. A handful of crickets bounced around the vegetation in the bottom of the terrarium. They were the only ones having a decent day.
Just before noon, I gave up and went to the bat cave. Abbey sat at her desk amidst a catastrophe of paperwork. She wore the usual green zoo polo, lace up boots, khaki shorts, and spot of guano in her red hair, which she’d tied up in a charmingly sloppy ponytail.
“Thank God,” she said when she saw me. “I’m dying in here.”
It was the end of the fiscal quarter, when our receipts were due to accounting. I did mine on a daily basis. Other zookeepers experienced minor crises every three months.
Abbey pushed the mass of paper away from her like a meal she’d finished with. She shoved a chair at me with her foot. “Take a load off.”
I sat, feeling like a yeti cramming himself into a child’s car seat. Once I was as comfortable as I could get, I sighed and mussed a hand through my hair. “I need you to tell me I’m crazy.”
She stabbed a finger at me. “You’re crazy!”
“Thank you. That comes as a great relief.”
“Any time,” she said. “Would you like a fruit punch?”
“Sure.”
She opened a mini fridge under her desk, took out two Capri Sun drink pouches, and tossed one to me. I hadn’t seen a Capri Sun since the white kids brought them to elementary school in their lunch boxes. It took me an eternity to get the plastic off the tiny straw and jam it into the heart of the bag. It took me two sucks to empty it.
“We’re all crazy.” Abbey sipped her pouch. “We’re humans.”
I liked Abbey.
“What in particular makes you crazy, John Stick? I imagine you didn’t come over here to talk about the general depravity of our species.”
I crumpled the pouch in my fist and tossed it in the trash. The motion hurt my ribs, still sore from Crazy Patty’s kick. “I know why the Tasmanian devils are pregnant.”
“You must be a genius. Everyone else around here is stumped.”
“Before I tell you, I want you to settle something else for me. I saw a bat near the river last night. I’m going to describe it, and I want you to tell me what kind it was.”
“No prob. There are under a dozen that it could have been. Let’s see how quickly I can figure it out.” She rubbed her hands together and slapped her thighs. “Go!”
I focused on the few seconds I’d seen the thing and found myself wishing I had Abbey’s photographic memory. I opened my mouth, but no words wanted to emerge.
Abbey fidgeted with her drink pouch until she couldn’t wait anymore. “Was it a Mexican free-tail? They’re common. Was its tail connected to the wing tissue?”
“I know what those look like. That wasn’t it. The tail was free, but it was big.”
“The tail or the bat?” she asked.
“Both. The tail was long and heavy. The bat was―well, it was big.”
“How big?”
“It was night. I might not have seen it perfectly, but I’d say the wingspan was at least four feet.” The actual wingspan had been at least six feet, maybe seven. I understated it. I wanted to ease Abbey into the warped reality I lived in.
“Did it have golden fur?”
I shook my head. “Black.”
She tapped her chin with her fingertips. “Describe the ears.”
“Round,” I said. “Very pink inside.”
“Not pointy?”
I shook my head.
Abbey folded her arms across her chest. Her cheeks welled red. “You’re a liar. There’s no such bat.”
“Maybe I saw it wrong. It moved pretty fast.”
She crunched her brow and the pupils of her eyes shrunk into angry pits.
“I said something wrong. Tell me what.”
She pursed her lips. “Sometimes guys make fun of me.” Her voice was tight and hard.
That took me by surprise.
“Bat lady. That’s what they call me. In high school, it was bat girl. It wasn’t a compliment. They thought I was weird.”
“Normal people are the ones I call names. We weird people have things figured out.”
Her eyes relaxed and the edges of her mouth tugged upward. “What names do you call them?”
“Normals,” I said.
She looked disappointed.
“The point is, I’m not making fun of you. I’m serious. I saw some flying creature last night, and I need to figure out what it was.”
She leaned back in her chair and swung her feet back and forth. “Let’s start from the top. Let’s pretend we’re scientists. No assumptions. Let’s gather evidence and come to an objective conclusion.”
I liked Abbey’s style. “Lead the way.”
“Round ears with pink insides. Black fur. Large wingspan. Nocturnal. Long tail.”
“Heavy too,” I said.
�
��Long, heavy tail. Did it look fat?”
“The tail?” I asked. “Yes.”
“Describe the legs.”
“I didn’t get a good look. Short, I think.” I envisioned the claw marks in Crazy Patty’s sun-worn skin. “Four toes.”
She cocked her head. “You didn’t get a good look at the legs, but you counted the toes? That’s curious.”
I opened my mouth, but once again didn’t have any words to shoot through it.
She grinned big. Her teeth were just a little crooked. “You’re hiding something. How fun. Did you see any markings on the coat?”
“Not on the back,” I said.
“Did you see the front?”
I shook my head.
She kept smiling. “Bats fly. I know you think you’re very tall, but even you probably see flying beings from below. You’re telling me you saw the side of the bat that usually faces the sky, but not the side that faces the earth.”
I nodded. I’d seen the back because it had swooped along the ground and then planted its feet on Crazy Patty’s face, with its back to me.
“Was it sunbathing?”
I smiled at her.
“Sometimes, in detective novels, the protagonist comes up against a witness who’s only telling part of the truth. It’s fun to be the protagonist.”
“That makes me the lying witness,” I said.
She nodded, grinning like an excited kid. Her green eyes bloomed big and her eyelashes reached all the way up to her eyebrows. “Any vocalization?”
“It screamed. Sounded kind of like a lamb from hell.”
“What you’re describing isn’t a bat.” She laced her fingers together, crossed her legs, and set her hands on her knee. “It is a Tasmanian devil. They’re black, have round ears with pink interiors, thick tails where they store their fat, and distinctive vocalization. However, they don’t have wingspans. They have forelegs.”
“Now you know why I’m crazy,” I said. “Call the men in white coats.”
“What else do you want to know?” she asked.
“Anything would be helpful. When it comes to mammals, I’m in the dark.”