Archaeopteryx

by Dan Darling

  “You dropped off the map,” he said, without looking up. “We thought maybe they’d taken you to Hades along with your dad.”

  “Who says they didn’t?” I said.

  He took his eyes off his tablet and scanned me up and down. “You look like hell. You need a new dry cleaner.”

  “What I need is a taxi.”

  “I’ll give you a ride,” he said.

  “That’ll make it easier for you to follow me.”

  He gave me a tight smile. “I do my job. That’s all any of us do.”

  “Maybe that’s the problem. Everybody does what they’re paid to do. We’re all slaves to a picture of Washington.”

  Tony stood and tucked the tablet into a cloth case, which he stuck under his arm. “You’re cranky. Let me take you to my house and pour a cup of coffee down your throat.”

  He led me toward a parking garage.

  “I hope I’m not interrupting a stakeout. I know you probably have cheating husbands to photograph and fallen daughters to rescue.”

  “I was out here looking for you.” We jogged through a yellow light, framed on four sides by windshields of open mouths and gaping eye sockets. I was giving everybody a story to tell their kids.

  “You just happened to be in the right place at the right time?” I asked. “I haven’t been downtown in ten years.”

  “You were spotted. We have a safe house in your neighborhood. It’s part of our underground railroad. Ever since you were hauled away from T or C yesterday, we’ve had every eye looking for you.” He smiled up at me. “We’ve already brought your truck back for you, as a gesture of good faith. You’ll find it in the usual spot in front of your house.”

  “Thanks. What’s with the computer tablet anyway?”

  “It’s the newspaper of the modern age. Look around. Everybody uses them. I blend right in.”

  He’d taken my comment about his newspaper to heart. I chuckled all the way to the car.

  Tony’s house was an average home for Albuquerque, a little poor by regular American standards. It had sound gray siding, a peaked roof, a sheltered driveway, and a decent paint job. He’d xeriscaped his yard with white gravel and plenty of prickly pear and several desert candle yucca that crouched in globes of spikes on the earth. In the spring, they would each project a tall yellow blossom several feet into the air. No plant more beautiful existed on the planet.

  His house was clean, plain, and cozy. The furniture was earth-toned and old but in good shape. The morning’s newspaper sat on the dining room table, and a girl’s socks lay strewn across the living room floor. Tony went into the kitchen, which emitted the quick and quiet sounds of a man practiced in brewing a pot of coffee. I made one of the chairs around the dining room table work for me. My bones felt like they might just crumble to dust on the spot. As the coffee maker sputtered and steamed, Tony walked out of the kitchen.

  “They picked up your dad. I suppose you’re already wise to that.”

  I nodded. My rage had melted away. I felt too heavy to even speak, but I forced myself to open my mouth anyway. “Tony, I’ve been kidnapped, chained to a chair, and pummeled by a storm from hell. What do you want?”

  Tony smiled. It happened on his exterior, and like every other exterior human expression, there was no telling what secrets it masked. “We want to help you. We have access to lawyers. We can apply enough pressure to get them inside to help your father. Undocumented immigrants aren’t guaranteed legal representation. We can arrange that for you.”

  “And why would you do that?”

  “Because we want you on our side. We believe you could be key to this whole thing. Hell, you might even be a good man.”

  I sighed and let my head hang down on my chest. I put my elbows on my thighs and dangled my hands. When I lifted my head up again, it felt as dense and heavy as an anvil. “Tony, you obviously don’t know me. I’m not a good man. I’m a simple human with simple needs. You keep using this word: ‘We.’ I don’t know who that word refers to, and I don’t want to know. Every person I’ve met over the past three weeks has been an extension of some mysterious ‘we.’ I’m tired of it. I’m a person. Singular. I don’t want to have anything to do with anyone who refers to themselves as ‘we.’ I’m developing a plan to help my father. It’s still in the early phases, but at least it involves someone I trust: myself. So, unless you’re going to spill some truth in my direction, call me a cab so I can go home and sleep for a month or two.”

  He hooked his thumbs in his belt loops and leaned against the wall. “Fair enough. I’m a Good Friend. You met another of our order at the Brown Dog Inn.”

  “Yep. She was as weird as any of you.”

  “You could be one of us, too.”

  “I have one good friend, and she’s abandoned me.” I regretted saying it before my mouth even closed.

  “You could have thousands of Good Friends.” Tony said.

  “No thanks,” I groaned, stretching my spine. “Every new friend I make wants something from me.”

  “We help people. Let us help you.”

  “And who, besides me, do you help?”

  “Primarily undocumented immigrants. Good men, women, and children. People like your father.”

  “What do immigrants have to do with any of this?” I asked. “You’ve been after me long before my dad was taken.”

  “It’s got something to do with the birds. I got a call from a Good Friend the day the birds died. I’d worked for them before, so I wasn’t surprised to get the call. But I admit I was a little surprised he had me scoping the Bosque.”

  “Hold on. You said you got a call the day the birds died. What time?”

  “I don’t know. Two in the afternoon. No―make it half past one.”

  “The birds died at noon, almost exactly. How did a Good Friend find out about the birds and call you so quick?”

  Tony took his chin in his fingertips and massaged his beard.

  “Who’s your employer? Who exactly called you?”

  Tony shook his head. “I can’t disclose that. I’m a snoop. I don’t rat out my client.”

  “I already know the organization. What does the individual matter?”

  He kept shaking his head. “My client has asked not to be named. The Good Friends are a loose affiliation. We have a common goal, but no central leadership. We’re like the underground railroad. This particular member is in a vulnerable position. He or she wants to remain hidden.”

  “Doesn’t it seem strange to you that this mystery person found out about the bird deaths so quickly and thought to call you up to check into it?”

  “You’re saying that this person knew those birds were going to die?”

  “I’m saying that the more I look into this thing, the less I see nature and the more I see the face of a man.”

  “We both know the name you’re thinking of.”

  “John White,” I said. “I have reason to believe that he knew something was going to happen―something bad.”

  Tony got up. He rubbed his hand over his beard and stared out the window at the quiet midday street. “You’re saying my client is John White.”

  “Am I?”

  “You’re wrong, but not by much. My client is a defector within Typhon Industries. My client feeds me information from time to time―the location of field operations, anti-protester actions, details about the surveillance and tracking products Typhon Industries is working on. You know him. His name is Simon Marchette.”

  The preceding day had become somewhat of a blur in my mind. My body was mush and I had an adrenaline hangover from finding my childhood home burglarized by the Man and my father kidnapped. But at that moment, a word Marchette had used came out of my mouth. “Chupacabras.”

  Tony twitched.

  “You’ve heard of them.”

  “That word is under wraps, but it’s what Typhon Industries calls their beasties. We don’t know a whole lot about the chupacabras. As a gesture of good faith, I’ll tell you what I kn
ow. The name comes from Spanish. Means goat-sucker. It’s an animal from modern Chicano folklore. It sprung up around the time NAFTA passed. Some say it was a creature created by the American government to terrorize Mexican farmers. Others say it was a story made up to distract the population while the Dole Fruit Company and Monsanto moved across the border and started industrial farming outfits that put every small Mexican farmer out of work. Other people say it’s a monster born from the evil ways of our contemporary world.”

  “That chupacabra is a myth. Tell me about the real ones.”

  Tony leaned against the wall and crossed his arms. “You might have to face the fact that they’re one and the same. The chupacabra that you call a myth is a being that is part lizard, part coyote, part bat, and part alien, depending on who you talk to. It’s a hybrid beastie. You and I ran into a half dozen insects part wasp, part horsefly the other day. We know Typhon Industries runs genetic experiments. Is it such a stretch to believe that the wasps we saw the other night were manmade?”

  I kept my mouth shut about the Tasmanian devil-vampire bat I was trying to videotape outside my house. “You’re saying that the chupacabras are real and that a genetic industrialist created them. For what purpose?”

  “I have a proposition for you about that,” Tony said.

  “Great.”

  “We know the beasties are linked to Typhon Industries, a company that is both invested in genetic engineering and incarcerates undocumented people. It’s a subcontractor for Border Patrol and Immigration. Beyond that, we’re fuzzy. We have to figure out the link between the science side of the company and the prison. We need a man on the inside. The Minutemen have offered you a job. I propose you take it.”

  “And what do I get in return?”

  “We build a fortress of lawyers around your father. We get you regular visits. We make sure he receives due process. We wrap the deportation process up in miles of red tape. We mummify it. Meanwhile, we file documents to put him on the road to citizenship based on his marriage to your mother.”

  Infiltrating a chimera-breeding complex sounded as crazy as anything else I’d become involved in. “How about that cup of coffee?”

  “Is that a no?”

  “It’s not a yes. I’m not joining any revolutionary underground organizations until I’ve had a decent night’s sleep.”

  He grinned. “Lemme get you that cup of coffee, Good Friend.”

  “Don’t call me that!” I hollered at the doorway he’d gone through.

  We sat around and sipped coffee and I filled him in on what had happened to me over the past twenty-four hours. He ended up cooking some eggs, refried beans, and huevos rancheros sauce. We rolled it all up in flour tortillas and chewed while we drank more coffee. My body throbbed in gratitude. I’d been running on anger for a day. It wasn’t good nutrition.

  Tony dropped me back at my house, where I found my truck waiting for me. My plan was to sleep for sixteen hours and then go to the zoo. I made a call to one of the other keepers who looked after the Reptile House on my days off and asked her to check on the animals. She said something sarcastic about how everything managed to survive on my days off. I hung up, fell down on my mattress, and closed my eyelids. They kept snapping back open, like those dolls that you tilt and they roll their eyes as if they’re possessed.

  he next morning, I roused my battered body late and took it to work. By the time I walked into my room at the zoo the clock read almost nine. A memo waited for me. It addressed me by name and instructed me to report to the director’s office. I hadn’t seen the director in a year. I did my work. I stayed in my corner of the world, and the director sat behind his big mahogany desk and shot rubber bands at the moon for all I knew.

  But I was a dutiful employee. I reported to the director’s office. Behind his desk sat a slim woman in a pants suit with short salt and pepper hair and a big friendly smile.

  “You”―she let her eyes goggle as she looked me up and down―“must be John Stick.”

  “I guess I must.” I sighed.

  “My most notable and talented employee,” she said. “At least, so I have heard.”

  “Not to be rude, but whose employee am I?”

  “Georgia Tameed Schultz,” she said. “I’m the new director.”

  “What happened to Jim?”

  “He retired. I’m shocked you didn’t hear about it.”

  “When did he retire?” Jim had been the director since my teenage years. I’d assumed he’d sit in his office collecting dust until zoos were outlawed as socialist institutions.

  Georgia cocked her head. “Last week. It was sudden. The board of directors decided we needed new blood.” She spread her arms. “I am the new blood.”

  “Well, consider me the old.”

  She pushed a jovial laugh out of her lungs. “That’s charming.” She gestured at the chair opposite her desk.

  “I don’t tend to use chairs unless I’m going to be in one place for a while.”

  “Your choice. Every day we make choices. You just made one. Congratulations.” She leaned back in her chair and put her wingtip shoes up on the polished ruddy wood. The desk was perfectly empty save for a fancy looking gold pen in a stand-up holder. She laced her fingers behind her head and showed me some teeth.

  I waited.

  She smiled a little bigger. She looked very happy with her new job.

  I waited some more. One of the zebras, which lived in a pen right behind the director’s office, whinnied. Zebras were pretty on the outside but had unpleasant personalities.

  “You’re late for work this morning.” The director smiled as if it were the greatest thing in the world.

  “You can take it out of my flex time,” I said. “I must have over a thousand hours racked up by now.”

  She laughed and slapped her knee. “You are a delight. Just like everyone said you’d be.”

  “No one has ever used that word to describe me.”

  “I didn’t call you in because of how popular you are. I called you in because you’ve been very remiss in your duties of late.” She took her feet down, removed the gold pen from the holder, and scrawled across a pad of paper she removed from one of her drawers. When she finished, she returned the pen to the holder, slid the pad across the desk, and put her feet back up.

  I stood there.

  “Go ahead. I’ve written a special message just for you.”

  I picked up the pad. It was blank. “Your pen’s out of ink.” I tossed the pad at her shoes.

  “Surfaces, Mr. Stick. That’s all you can see.”

  “That’s true. Human eyes, and all that. I’m not an x-ray machine.”

  “I have video tape of you. Hours and hours and days of it. I’ve been sitting and eating popcorn and watching it in fast-forward. You spend a lot of time chatting with people, making non-work related phone calls, and destroying zoo property. You bring strange dead creatures from somewhere beyond the zoo campus and spend your time examining their corpses instead of feeding the living ones I pay you to maintain. You flirt a lot. You skip a lot of days. And you steal cameras.” She punched a button on a remote control and the TV mounted to her wall sprang to life. It displayed Abbey and I in her bat cave. The picture had a low frame rate. We moved as if the camera were a strobe light flashing out moments of our lives and stringing them together into a video flipbook. I watched as Abbey stuffed the camera into her bag in halting motions and we both left the room. Georgia Tameed-Schultz pressed another button and a camera over the parking lot displayed us getting into my truck.

  She twined her fingers behind her head and stuck her elbows in the air. “You’re a thief who doesn’t come to work unless it pleases you.” She made a clicking sound with her tongue. “Very naughty zookeeper.”

  “I’ll consider myself chastened. Go ahead and watch all of the footage from those cameras―which, when I tell the other keepers they exist, will cause a riot―and you’ll see me working fifty hours a week for the past fifteen years. An
d the camera’s coming back. We’re using it to track an animal involved with official zoo business.”

  She flashed her eyebrows at me. “This is fun. I’ll make you a bet. I’ll bet that you can’t guess what I wrote on that pad. If you do, I won’t call the police and report your little ginger girlfriend for theft. If you don’t, well, she’ll be a delicious treat for the women in county lock-up.” She kicked the pad back in my direction.

  “Are you going to try writing your message down again? That’ll be fun.”

  “I’ve already written it,” she said.

  “Did you write it with an infrared pen? Most humans can’t see that wavelength.”

  “Ha! Very good.”

  I left the pad where it lay.

  She took her feet down, leaned forward, and beat a little rhythm on the desk with her fingertips. She gazed at me with her big blue eyes. “Or better yet, let’s bet your job. If you can guess what I wrote, you may keep your job. If not, I’ll find another snake-handler.”

  I picked up the pad to verify that it was blank. “Does the board of directors know you have a gambling problem?”

  “I admire your irreverence. Especially toward someone who holds so much power over you.”

  “You won’t fire me. I’m a model employee. I only embezzle crickets.”

  She came around the desk and poked me in the chest. Her finger bones must have been reinforced with titanium. “You think this zoo is yours.” Her expression had gone from playful to ruthless in one move. “It isn’t. You work here―or, you used to.” She picked up the pad and held it up in my face. Ghostly green ink read You’re fired. “Appearing ink. I bought it at a magic shop. It’s one of my favorite things. You write with it and nothing happens at first. Then a chemical agent in the ink, as it interacts with oxygen, slowly turns green. Very dramatic. It’s the cousin of disappearing ink, which you write in and then it slowly vanishes. Just like you will do by the end of the day today.”

  “You can’t fire me,” I said.

  “It’s already done. Approved by the board of directors. And as a bonus―” She opened a drawer and brought out a thick sheet of stationary with a court’s stamp and judge’s signature. “As of 5 p.m. today, a restraining order will be in effect. You are not to come within a hundred feet of zoo premises.”