Archaeopteryx

by Dan Darling

  I stood there. My body wouldn’t move.

  “Get out. Go back to your snake house, pack your cardboard box, and leave.”

  The old Stick would have shuffled back to the Reptile House, packed his things, and faded quietly into oblivion. The new Stick at least had the guts to stick up for his friend. “Leave Abbey alone. The camera will come back. We’re using it to track a bat. That’s zoo business.”

  “You’re in no position to make demands, but don’t worry. We’ll keep the bat girl right where she is. In the dark.”

  I trudged back to my Reptile House. I spent an hour or so with the king cobra. He flared his neck at me and looped his body around my arm. I fed him a rat. After he’d swallowed it, he coiled up in my lap and went to sleep. He was a real puppy dog.

  After I returned the king cobra to his home, I packed up my things. My hands felt like they belonged to someone else as I added personal effects and papers to my cardboard box. Plaques of recognition and certificates of service. My favorite photos of zoo animals. Zoo jackets, uniform pants, and polo shirts with the zoo logo insignia that would fit no other human on the earth. It amounted to several boxes that I carted out to my truck. Lastly, I dragged my old, punched-in locker through the public section of the zoo. The metal scraped on the cobblestone and rumbled across the concrete. People stared. I wanted them to notice. I wanted people to see the man cast out from the place that he’d devoted his life to. I wanted my co-workers to see me leaving and feel the keen injustice of it all.

  Instead, they probably just saw a sad giant hugging a broken locker.

  No one followed me home. No one waited for me in the shadows of my patio. No one had broken into my apartment and put their feet up on my bar. No creatures skulked in the shadows of my trees, seeking out my company for obscure reasons. It was my old normal life, returned, only with no purpose.

  I stood inside the door of my house in the permanent twilight that crouched there. I was at the center of a web. Each strand connected me to somebody pulling―the Good Friends, the Minutemen, John White, Tanis Rivera, ten thousand dead birds, mutant hybrid chupacabras. The structure of the web remained a mystery to me. I couldn’t figure out the motives of anybody doing the pulling, but I was beginning to understand every strand was connected. A smarter man than me could have tracked down answers, traced each tendril back to its source, and divined the deeper meaning of it all. I wasn’t a detective. I was a zookeeper.

  I knew one thing about a web: if the creature caught in the middle thrashed around enough, the entire structure would collapse. I was a big creature. It was time to start thrashing.

  sat at my bar. The light flashed on my answering machine. Outside, dusk clutched its fingers around the air and choked the light out of it. I lifted the receiver in the darkness and dialed. I decided to tangle myself up with Tony first.

  “Call me Good Friend,” I said to Tony when he answered.

  “Don’t use those words on the phone.”

  “I’ve gone through purgatory and I’ve seen the light. I have a proposition for you that’ll make you and me pals forever.”

  “Swell. Better to talk about it in person. Hyder Park. Tomorrow morning at eight.”

  After we hung up, I listened to my answering machine. Abbey’s voice filled my apartment.

  “John. I heard. I’m coming over. I can’t believe―those bastards! I’m coming over right now.”

  Five minutes later, her feet cantered down my front steps and she hammered on my door. I opened up. Her orange hair had half fallen out of its ponytail and her face was beet red. She puffed through her nostrils like an angry racehorse.

  “I tried to lodge a formal complaint with the union, but they told me it had to be in writing. And they told me you have to do it.”

  “I’ll get right on that,” I said, even though I suspected that my firing was beyond the remedy of any union action.

  She slammed a fistful of crumpled papers on my bar. “I printed the forms out for you, but I got them all crumpled up because I couldn’t believe―damn those bastards!”

  “Relax. You’re going to blow an artery.”

  “Let’s look at the footage,” she yelled. “I bet we caught something.”

  Abbey retrieved the camera and hooked it up to my television. It took her several minutes of grumbling and fussing behind the big gray monitor. She emerged with spider webs in her hair and even redder cheeks than when she’d arrived. The camera was motion activated, but we still had to skip through several hours of tree branches bobbing in the wind. I was ready to declare the whole thing a bust. Abbey sat on the edge of my couch, hunched over the camera, her thumb on the fast forward button, a look of grim determination crimping her features.

  The frame of view shifted downward.

  “Dammit!” Abbey said.

  The camera had slipped in a particularly strong gust of wind. It hadn’t fallen from where she’d secured it to the tree, but now it shot the upper bare branches of my butterfly bushes and the truck of the pine tree several feet below the beast’s perch.

  Abbey was still holding the fast forward button, but looking at me. “Well, I guess we failed.”

  “Stop!” I said.

  She dropped the camera.

  The image froze. It captured a figure dressed all in black picking the lock on my front door. Abbey picked up the camera and pressed play. The figure disappeared inside my house. We waited in the silence of the night. Ghostly shadows dragged their fingers across the cobblestones. A quarter hour or so passed and the figure re-emerged. It flitted up the stairs and vanished.

  “You got burglarized,” Abbey said. “What are the chances?”

  The figure hadn’t carried anything substantial out of the house, and I didn’t own anything small of value that it could have stuffed in its pockets. Whoever it was hadn’t come to steal. And it was no coincidence that this person had broken in while I was shackled to a chair.

  Abbey was watching me. “You’re hiding something.”

  I sighed.

  “Don’t deny it!” She whacked me on the knee. “I can tell!”

  “I’m not hiding anything. I simply don’t have the words.”

  “Find them.”

  I tried. All I found was more air in my lungs that wanted loose.

  Her face softened. “Should we go through your stuff? See if anything’s missing?”

  I made my mouth into a crescent. It was the closest I could come to smiling at her. “I’ll do that myself. You take the camera and go on home.”

  She ejected the memory card and shook it in the air. “I’ll copy this and get you the footage. So you can show the police.”

  I had no plans to call the police. But I nodded anyway. When she was gone, I rummaged through my house. Nothing discernible was missing, nor did anything appear to have been tampered with. I racked my brain for places to hide a clandestine listening device. I checked the ceiling tiles, but none of them had been disturbed. I went through some cupboards, scrutinized dusty corners and out of the way nooks. I knew my house backwards and forwards. All was as it should have been. By midnight, I was stumped.

  I tossed myself on a barstool. I’d forgotten to liberate Ralph from his terrarium for his nightly romp. Normally, he would have been standing up and tickling the glass with his forelegs. Instead, he crouched in the shadows of his plastic castle, his eyes gleaming like polished obsidian.

  He was alarmed. It could have been all the activity of me turning over my apartment, but he’d been hiding there all night. Something had scared him before I’d even come home. I thought about it and smacked my forehead.

  I found the bug―no bigger than a thumbnail―buried in the cedar chips in a corner of Ralph’s terrarium. I tried to think up some clever words to say to whoever sat at the other end, but my brain was too tired for witticisms. I considered feeding it to a boa constrictor back at the zoo and letting its owners listen to a month or so of reptilian digestion, but realized that for the first time in twenty year
s I no longer had access to such an animal. Instead, I took the thing outside, put it on the cement and gave it a single rap with a hammer. It melted into metallic dust.

  I met Tony the next morning in Hyder Park, a hilly irregularly shaped patch of grass near the university notorious for drug deals. Tony was already there when I arrived. He sat on a bench in his trench coat, fedora, and sunglasses reading his computer tablet. A trashcan separated his bench from another one, where I sat. We didn’t look at each other.

  “You followed?” he asked of no one in particular.

  “How the hell should I know? I don’t think so, but I’m no secret agent. I’m just a normal guy―who got fired yesterday, by the way.”

  “We thought that might happen,” Tony said to his tablet.

  “And why, if you already knew, didn’t you tell me?”

  “We didn’t want you to panic. You’re in this pretty deep, Mr. Stick. Some might call your position inextricable.”

  “As of yesterday, I’m no longer in denial about that,” I said.

  “You’ve got to choose a side.”

  “Done,” I said.

  A smile tickled the corners of his mustache. “Glad to hear it. Now you’ve just got to prove it to us.”

  “I’ll take the job with the Minutemen. I’ll be your guy on the inside. I’ll get in with whatever operations they have. I’ll feed intelligence to you and your friends―”

  “Good Friends,” he said.

  “―and you use that information to wreck John White’s plans, whatever the hell they might be.”

  Tony spared me a glance from the corner of his eye. “Always suspect someone who offers something without wanting anything in return. What’s in it for you?”

  “Revenge.”

  He shook his head. “Not good enough. And don’t try using any other purple words with me. Justice. Truth. Freedom. This is America. Altruism is dead. We can get some lawyers on your father’s case.”

  “Fine. And one more thing. You’re a sleuth. I need a person found. If I give you information that can take down White Industries, or at least give them a black eye or two, you find my friend.”

  “Sounds like a bargain. You better feed us good info.”

  “Count on it. I’ve got a lot of free time on my hands.”

  “What’s this friend’s name?”

  “Dr. Melodía Hernandez,” I said. “She’s been missing for a week.”

  He stood and tucked the tablet under his arm. “We’ll get on it. In the meantime, surprise us with something we don’t already know.”

  I made sure to think about how much I hated the Captain as I drove to his house. There was no way he would believe sweetness and light. I thought about losing my job and my turtle, spending a night in handcuffs in the slums, being forced to wander all over town in the middle of the day. I thought about cops battering in the door of my childhood home and surrounding my father where he sat in his olive green recliner, the confused look in his old, moist eyes.

  I parked and strode across the Captain’s brown yard. I banged my fist against his kitchen window until his bald head appeared behind the glass. A frightened woman hovered behind him.

  “What do you want?” he asked, his voice muffled.

  “I want to track down Mexicans,” I yelled through the glass. “I want to lock them in cages. I want to put them on rafts and float them down the Rio Grande until they drift into the Gulf of Mexico. I want to put them to work in copper mines. I want to feed them to lobos.”

  The Captain emerged through his front door. “Would you keep your voice down.”

  “Hire me,” I said. “I want to be John White’s right hand man.”

  The Captain made a downward gesture with his hands like he was trying to stuff my voice into a barrel. “Come inside. Let me fix you a drink.”

  “I’m done drinking,” I said. “I’ll be at Typhon Industries tomorrow morning.”

  “Calm down, would you? It doesn’t work that way. These things have to be arranged.”

  I grabbed him by his lapels. I raised him to the tips of his toes and let him understand how I felt about him. I held him there until he understood my power. Then I dropped him on his heels, returned to my truck, and drove away.

  The Captain called me the next morning. “It’s all arranged.” His voice was tight.

  “When do I meet him?”

  “You’ll start in two days. We’ll give you a trial run. See if you’re as useful as everybody seems to think.”

  “I’ll be as surprised as anyone. I’ve never claimed to be useful.”

  The Captain grunted. He gave me directions to a location in the desert a hundred miles to the south. When we hung up, I was left with a couple of days to kill and no routine to kill them with. My house was quiet and my brain kept insisting on filling the silence with thoughts of my father. If I hadn’t gotten myself mixed up in this business, he’d be at his elementary school changing light bulbs and oiling door hinges. The teeming hordes of children would throng around him and fill him with that quiet certitude that life has meaning. Both of us had found good work; now we’d both lost it. And it was all because of the birds. I wished they’d had the good graces to fly north and pelt Colorado with their bodies instead of New Mexico.

  I got in my truck. My street was quiet. I drove a couple of circles through my neighborhood. I kept my speed under the limit and my truck’s engine noise to a minimum so as not to disturb the delicate harmony of the morning when most adults were at work and children were at school. Neither Tanis nor Tony stalked me. I felt strangely abandoned.

  I drove to Melodía’s place.

  She lived in a newly built home on the West Side in a patch of barren desert called Anasazi Ridge, one of many new developments clawing their way out into the unclaimed emptiness that stretched west of the city for a hundred miles. For a modest sum, any aspiring professional could purchase a quarter-acre of their very own dirt, clone a house on it, and spend the rest of their days in commuter-land splendor. Melodía’s place was the farthest of the far flung. Anasazi Ridge was a few loops of street beyond Splendid Vista, Paradise Hills, and other such neighborhoods that developers must have named while looking at pictures of wonderful places far away. West of her house, the desert was unending.

  I coasted up her driveway. A ridge of dust had gathered in front of her garage door. Her mailbox was stuffed beyond capacity. I got out of my truck and peered through a couple of windows anyway―which was hard because all her shades were, predictably, drawn. The place was dark. Emptiness sat on her living room sofa in a jacket and hat made of shadows. Her kitchen wasn’t the kind of cheery spic-and-span you see when someone’s using it day in and day out. It was the kind of clean you leave behind when you’re skipping town. It all confirmed the account the graduate student had given me: she’d gone somewhere premeditatedly.

  It made no sense. She would have told me. Sure, after the birds died, we’d had a few arguments, but that was normal. Since I was the only person she consorted with, she regularly treated me as her scratching post. I got to be the object of the joy, the rage, the frustration, the hope that every person experiences from day to day. It had been a privilege. We fought, we reconciled, a healthy and pleasant cycle. Something hidden from my view had broken that cycle.

  I circled her house. Deadbolts sealed her front and back doors. I lifted some rocks that looked suspiciously perfect, but none turned out to be hide-a-keys. She wouldn’t lose her keys anyway. I considered lifting her garage door and if it didn’t budge at first, cranking it open against its gears. That might draw unnecessary attention, so I checked her windows. The first few sat flush with the walls and didn’t move when I shoved them. But the fifth or sixth one I pushed on swung open. The frame splintered inward where someone had forced it―apparently, someone else had the bright idea of breaking in, too. Eyeing the size of the window, I wished I’d come during the night instead of in the broad sunlight of an early spring. I could only hope that since her house back
ed up onto the barren desert, no one saw me cram my long body through the aperture and land in an awkward tangle on her laundry room floor.

  All of her counters and side tables stood empty. The place stank of stale disinfectant. Rummaging through the drawers in her kitchen, the nightstand in her bedroom, and the papers in the stand-up file in her home office revealed nothing. Her answering machine harbored no messages. Her garbage cans held fresh bags. I went to the front window, watched the street until certain no one was around, then went out and got her mail. Her junk mail revealed nothing about where she’d gone. At a loss, I opened up her bedroom closet. It had sliding doors and spanned the entire wall. Inside, her clothes hung: dresses, button-up sweaters, jackets and coats, blouses and slacks, a half-dozen white lab coats. A few ingenious collapsible shelving units hung from the clothes bar as well. Made of cloth and wooden dowels, they probably had some clever Swedish name. Inside the shelf spaces nestled her socks, underwear, bras, leggings. A wooden shoe shelf sat beneath them. It held her sneakers, sandals, flats, boots, and a pair of plain black half-inch heels.

  The closet housed the things that, after Melodía woke every morning, she hung, draped, zipped, buttoned, or laced around her body. They smelled like her and each one cupped her ghost within it. I’d seen her wear them all. Her empty clothes hit me harder than Rex burning two-by-fours in a campsite, my father’s door battered in, or toting my punched-in locker through the zoo grounds from which I’d been banished. I ran my hand down one of her lab coats, pinched the soft material of a sock between my fingertips, and held it. I knelt by her shoe rack and silently thanked the items that helped my friend walk back and forth across the short spans of the earth that she’d come to occupy.

  A pair of black, dusty flats caught my eye. I took them out and held them beneath the light fixture of her bedroom. Orange dust powdered the soles and sides―the same dust I’d been tracking since the bird fiasco began. It shouldn’t have surprised me. If Typhon Industries was so deeply interested in me, an errand boy who’d gone to pick up the birds, it made even more sense for them to have gotten their hooks into Melodía, the actual scientist investigating the case. I’d agreed to work with them; maybe she had too. Maybe she had moved temporarily into an apartment in the East Mountains or within the Typhon Industries complex itself, where she could get quickly to and from a lab they’d assigned her. It would probably be an ideal life for her. She’d never have to leave the building. She’d never have to interact with an unscheduled human being.