Archaeopteryx

by Dan Darling

  “Well, they’re marsupials.” She bounced up to her knees in the chair. “I love marsupials! Have you ever seen a little baby marsupial crawl from the womb to the pouch? It’s like watching a living jelly bean.”

  “Sounds like a good snack for my pet tarantula.”

  “You’re bad. So,” she said, regaining her professional demeanor, “that’s why you’re here. You’re here because you saw a Tasmanian devil with wings last night and you think it’s the same one that impregnated our females. Their cage is open-air. You think it swooped in and ravished them.”

  “In a nutshell.”

  “Why are you talking to me? You should be telling the Australia exhibit people about it. They’ll be happy to hear you’ve solved their mystery.”

  “Yeah. I’ll walk right over and do that.”

  “Ha! I can’t wait to see their faces.”

  “I have more questions before I go make their day,” I said.

  “Shoot.”

  “What do Tasmanian devils eat?”

  “They like carrion, but will eat just about anything they can get.”

  “Do they drink blood?” I thought about the albino rattlesnake I’d recovered from the lawn of the skinny boy.

  She stared at me levelly for a few seconds. “What is up with you, John?”

  “I already told you.”

  “Oh yeah. You’re crazy. Okay. First you’re talking flying marsupials and now you’ve moved on to vampires.”

  I decided to level with her. “Last week I got a call to handle a dead snake in the North Valley. It had been drained of blood, but not otherwise predated.”

  “The one that Simon stole from your lab,” she said. “Continue.”

  “Also last week, I saw a big bat-like creature outside of my house. Then last night I saw it again near the river. I believe that creature might have also killed the rattlesnake.”

  “Things always look bigger at night, you know. They also look bigger when they surprise you. When people get scared or attacked by an animal, they consistently exaggerate its size. Villagers in Thailand describe hundred-foot-long serpents. Sailors see squids the size of whales. Fear hormones enhance the senses. Perception gets distorted.”

  “Maybe that’s it.” I felt exhausted. The notion that maybe I’d been chasing the phantoms of my own warped perception made me want to go to bed for a week.

  “Some idiot probably kept a flying fox as a pet and it got loose,” Abbey said. “The flying fox has a five-foot wingspan. They’re huge. Some of the other details don’t match up, but that could be your answer. It was not a vampire bat. They’re tiny.”

  I nodded. I fought the voice in my head that said if a wasp and a horsefly could blend into a super blood-sucking chimera, why not a Tasmanian devil and a vampire bat?

  “Just out of curiosity, when you saw the bat outside of your house, what was it doing?”

  “Sitting in a tree watching me.”

  Abbey leapt up from her chair, donned her green zoo cap, threaded her orange ponytail through the closure, and picked up a black canvas bag.

  “Sudden urge for lunch?” I asked.

  “No. We’re going to your house so that you can show me the exact spot in the tree where your visitor was perched.”

  “What’s in the bag?” I asked.

  “A low frame rate digital video camera. We’re going to catch your bat on tape and prove it’s within the parameters of the normal animal kingdom. Let’s go.”

  “You’re just trying to avoid doing your paperwork.”

  I drove since Abbey owned a Volkswagen Beetle and there was no way I’d fit into it. My neighborhood was quiet, as always. The sun was so strong you could feel it pressing you into the earth. I led Abbey down the stairs into the shade of my patio where winter temperatures still crouched in the shadows.

  “This is beautiful.” She bent over and pinched the soil in one of my planters. “This must be insect central in the spring. I bet you have all kinds of bat visitors.”

  “Probably.” I wondered if Ralph could take on a bat. A South American spider, the Bird-Eater Goliath, predated on small birds and bats, but it had the advantage of a web.

  “So, where’s the spot?”

  I positioned my stepladder under the tree and pointed out the branch. Abbey climbed up with a flashlight between her teeth and a magnifying glass in the back pocket of her shorts. She spent several minutes scrutinizing the claw marks on the branch and the surrounding limbs, twigs, needle clusters, and trunk. Then she descended the ladder and rummaged through the foliage below.

  “Bingo,” she said.

  I leaned over to see what she’d found. Puddles of black, tarry spoor lay amidst the stalks of flora.

  “This is the guano of a very large bat. Most bat guano is off-white or brown and pill-shaped.” She put a finger in the center of one of the puddles and sniffed at the dark stool that clung to her fingertip. She made an appropriate face. “Yuck.”

  “What does it smell like?” I asked.

  “Ammonia.”

  “Give me a sniff.” She held her finger up and I snorted a little air across it. I regretted it. “Should I bother to guess what kind of bat makes stool this disgusting?”

  “You already did. Vampires. Their urine is just as bad.”

  “The urine around the dead snake was pretty damn strong,” I said.

  “You found urine around the snake?” she asked.

  I nodded

  “Vampire bats have to drink so much during a feed that they urinate while they’re still in the act.” Abbey shut her eyes and stood very still. The birds of early spring chirped around us. A half block away, some kids shouted at each other in the careless way that kids do before they’re aware of how foolish their human noise sounds.

  “This is no time for meditation,” I said.

  Her eyes stayed shut. “When I’m dreaming, sometimes if I close my eyes in the dream and squeeze them really tight, when I open them up again, I wake up.” She squeezed her whole face and gave me several seconds to scrutinize her nose crinkles. Her eyes popped open, and her pupils contracted into small dark orbs.

  “You’re not dreaming,” I said.

  “It was worth a try.” She sprung to her feet and started bustling around my patio, peering into bushes and pawing at patches of soil. Her work produced a few plastic bags of guano and a few more of hair. I enjoyed watching another professional at work. “How far is the river from here?”

  “The spot wasn’t far. A mile or so.”

  She stood and whacked her palms against the thighs of her shorts. “You have a stalker. It comes here often, judging from the amount of spoor. It must have followed you to the river.”

  I shook my head. “Not possible. I drove there.”

  “Insectivorous bats use echolocation to hunt. Vampire bats are highly macrosmatic—they use smell.”

  “I know the lingo. Just because some of my people smell through their tongues doesn’t mean I’m a novice.”

  Abbey grinned. “Sorry. I talk to a lot of ‘normals.’ “ She put air quotes around the word with her fingers. “Anyway, a vampire bat can smell its prey from miles away, just like any good smeller. So can another creature that we’ve been talking about today, only it likes to smell carrion.”

  “The Tasmanian devil. Horseflies also have excellent smell.” My brain was making connections―finally.

  Abbey pulled a video camera out of her bag. “So, if this animal wanted to, it could have followed its nose and found you at the river. Bats are excellent flyers. It might have simply followed your truck from your home.” She fiddled around with some settings on the camera.

  “Fancy gear,” I said.

  “This is a motion activated digital camera,” she said. “The kind you use to capture rare animals in remote locations. This kind of camera caught the famous video of wolverines in Montana. I’ve been using it to figure out what Ferdinand gets up to at night.”

  “Ferdinand?” The name seemed vaguely fa
miliar.

  “My little problem bat. I come to work in the morning and he’s wet. Just soaking wet. I can’t figure out what he does to himself. Anyway, this project seems slightly more urgent.”

  “You’re saying,” I said as she moved the ladder to a nearby tree, “that this vampire bat or Tasmanian devil could have the ability to smell me from a mile away. Fine. But what motive could it possibly have? Does it want my blood?”

  Abbey climbed the rungs, positioned the camera in a crook of branches, and lashed it there with duct tape. “That’s a mystery.” Once she’d come back down, a light sheen of sweat stood on her forehead, a stray pine needle hung in her orange hair, sap clung to her hands, and bat droppings stained her index finger.

  “Wanna wash up?” I asked.

  “That’d be great. And maybe I could ask you for a glass of water.”

  Inside, the light on my answering machine blinked. I pointed Abbey toward the bathroom and prepared a couple of ice waters. She splashed around for a minute or two, walked back into the living room, jumped on one of my bar stools, and took the huge glass I offered her with both hands. She looked like a kid drinking out of a flower vase.

  “You have a message.” She hit the play button on my answering machine.

  The same man’s voice from the other day spoke cryptic Spanish in a gringo accent and the usual panicky pitch.

  “It’s just a prank caller. His passion in life is leaving me nonsense messages.”

  Abbey had frozen mid drink, staring at me wide-eyed. Her mouth hung open. Her bottom lip was huge through the distortion of the water glass.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “You don’t speak Spanish, do you?”

  “Never learned,” I said. “Do you?”

  “Of course. We live in New Mexico. How can you not speak Spanish? You can learn it just from walking around Old Town.”

  I didn’t tell her that strolling around the historic district chatting up bilingual strangers was outside my comfort zone. “Fine. I’m a bad New Mexican. What did he say?”

  A flush rose in her forehead and cheeks. “It was Simon.”

  It took me a second. “Marchette?” I wanted to smack myself for not recognizing his voice.

  “Yes. He’s in Truth or Consequences. He says he’s hiding out there.”

  “Did he say from what?”

  Abbey nodded again, slowly.

  “Well, spit it out!” I almost yelled.

  “El hombre quien maté los pajaros,” she said. “The man who killed the birds.”

  made Abbey translate the entire message word for word and write it down. While she worked, I spent some time kicking myself. When she’d finished, it read like this:

  Mr. Stick. I have left you several urgent messages. I hope you are safe. I am hiding in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. My hope is that using Spanish slows down anyone listening in. I am in the inn named for an intelligent rhinoceros. Come see me. The white man I am hiding from is powerful and he’ll silence anyone who exposes his operation for what it is. He is the man who killed the birds.

  “There’s an inn called the intelligent rhinoceros?” I asked.

  Abbey shrugged. “That’s what he said.”

  “The words ‘white man…’ what were they exactly?”

  “Señor blanco,” she said.

  “Could that mean Mr. White instead of white man?”

  She shrugged. “It could. Listen, I want to come with you to T or C. Simon’s my friend. If he’s having some sort of paranoid breakdown, I want to help him.”

  “He’s not paranoid.”

  “Well, then I want to come even more.”

  “Let me figure out what’s going on first. When I do, I’ll let you know.”

  Abbey’s eyes got steely. “Don’t go without me.”

  “I won’t,” I lied.

  Once I’d dropped Abbey off at the zoo, I drove south. Truth or Consequences was half an hour beyond the Bosque Del Apache. I figured if I got going right away and found the inn without trouble, I could interrogate Marchette and be back by bedtime.

  It was one of those New Mexican afternoons. The sun beat through the turquoise sky and hammered the world with gold. Tan winds swept in from the west, kicking up dirt devils and scouring the right side of my truck with sand. While the sun hung high, I drove with the windows down. When it settled closer to the horizon, bathing my cab in light and heat, I switched to AC. In this mile-high desert, the sun ruled everything. Seasons were relative.

  Truth or Consequences had earned its name from a game show contest back in the fifties. The winning city had the honor of naming itself after the TV show. Hence, “Truth or Consequences” wasn’t a sardonic reference to the history of lies, war, and ethnic conflict the state suffered from; it was a fun game to distract us from the realities of our impoverished lives. The name also made a lot of East Coast tourists swoon from the quaintness of it all.

  The town nestled in the river valley between the slate gray Magdalena Mountains to the west and the brown peaks of the Turtle Mountains to the east. It lay a few miles from Elephant Butte dam and its resultant lake, where people sped their boats around during the summer, water-skiing, jet-skiing, and generally pretending they lived in a different biosphere. T or C itself was a tourist town, with plenty of cheap motels, distinctively cute little inns with funky decor schemes and ancient furniture that people deemed “retro,” and that therefore didn’t need to be replaced when worn out. T or C also boasted a robust hot springs that provided geothermal energy for the town and healing waters channeled into spas and inns for the tourists to soak themselves in and swear by the wisdom of the noble savages who had discovered them a millennium before and from whom they’d been forcibly appropriated after that.

  I got off the interstate and rolled into town around four. The slanting afternoon light painted the west sides of the buildings in pale gold, rendering their cracks and stains in minute detail, like really tender portraits of old people. The main road led through strips of auto repair shops, a couple of diners, and a seafood joint at least a thousand miles from any salt water. The road turned west and took a sharp drop downhill, a waterfall spilling traffic into the flow pool of downtown. It consisted of a central square block around which four one-way streets eddied. On the edges of the square lay the library, civic buildings, and charming inns that had hand-painted signs proclaiming unique rooms, free breakfasts, and private hot springs. I trolled around, turning down the off-jutting parks and places and courts. Finding no leads, I explored the outlying vestiges of the southern edge of the town and found a scattering of gas stations and derelict motels. Nothing I’d seen so far had been named after a rhinoceros, or any other beast remnant of the Pleistocene age.

  I drove back to the town center and parked in front of the tourist information building, which doubled as a café. I ducked through the low 1950s doorframe, and when I straightened up again, found a little old Anglo man wearing glasses, a white apron, cowboy boots, and a bolo tie. His eyes were as wide as his glasses and he wielded a pink feather duster in one hand. The room featured a few tables along the east side, a cluster of spinning racks showing off clever greeting cards and scenic postcards, and a sales counter with a refrigerated case of pastries and an espresso machine.

  “I was just dusting,” the little old man said.

  “Lookin’ good.”

  “The place gets real dirty real quick.” He hadn’t moved since my entrance. He brandished the duster in the air over one of the display racks as if my presence had turned him to stone. “You know, what with the desert and all. Tourists don’t understand what it’s like living in the desert. Wind. Dust. Old buildings. It all adds up.”

  “You don’t have to tell me. I’m local.”

  “I’ve never seen you before.” He blinked once and when I didn’t disappear, he blinked harder.

  “Down from Albuquerque. Looking for a particular inn.”

  “Oh.” He dropped his arm, and his body relaxed
, as if the return to his job routine had transmuted him from stone back into human flesh. “Well, I sure can help you there. Which one you looking for?”

  “The Intelligent Rhinoceros,” I said.

  He squinted at me. “None by that name here. You must be thinking of a different town.”

  “You’re sure?” I asked.

  He beamed proudly. His face was round and the smile suited it well. “I know every inn, motel, hotel, and every other business in the city limits. Been living here my whole life.” He circled behind the sales counter. He lifted the apron over his head, revealing a white cowboy shirt printed with blue milkweed blossom and with peaked stitching on the pockets and epaulettes. He hung the feather duster on a hook on the wall beside a sign that said NO CHECKS.

  That he didn’t recognize it confirmed what I’d suspected since Abbey’d told me the name to start with. “The buddy that I’m meeting is tricky. I think he gave me the name in the form of a riddle.”

  The old man scratched his gray head and smiled. “What goes round the house and in the house but never touches the house?”

  “What?” I asked.

  “It’s a riddle.”

  I tried to force myself to think about it, but all I could think about was that I was wasting time. “I give up.”

  He shook his head sadly, took off his glasses, and polished them with his shirttails. “Now, a riddle is all about the person telling it. What does that person know? What do they care about? Do they do a lot of crossword puzzles? It may be a play on words. Do they like to make lewd jokes? It may be something crass about the fairer sex. You have to figure out your teller, then you figure out the riddle.” He put his specs back on. They gleamed. “So, what about this buddy of yours who told you to meet him at this Intelligent Rhino?”

  I’d never been good at riddles, probably because no one ever told me any. I wasn’t from a riddling family. Rex wasn’t a riddler. My snakes, lizards, and frogs told no riddles. If any animal were a riddler, it would probably have been Esposita, my painted turtle. And she was gone.

  “Well?” the old man said.

  “He’s a little guy. Early forties. Anglo. Bald and skinny.”