Archaeopteryx

by Dan Darling

  The words she’d said at our last encounter came back to me: Take the job, she’d said. The change will do you good. She hadn’t been talking to me. She’d been justifying a choice she’d already made.

  drove south. Rex sat in the passenger seat wearing camouflage pants and jacket, cheap mirror sunglasses and a billed cap. He hugged his rifle, the butt between his boots and the muzzle resting against his shoulder. An ammo box jingled at his feet. We were on our first Minutemen mission.

  After around an hour, I pulled off the minor state highway at an exit that appeared to serve empty desert. It was a windless, cloudless day. I drove east on a dirt track. We wound through boulders, stands of shrub, pitfalls of prickly pear cacti squatting low in the terrain. We dipped through a small gorge where a nameless and forgotten stream had once run. Mesquite, yucca, and clutches of elm lined the shady bank, yearning for the past when water had trickled. I blazed up the far side of the gorge, my truck roaring like a warthog as we crested the edge. The world teemed with hardy plants digging their fingers into the earth, the sun scorched the earth from its perch on high, and the profile of the mountains loomed ahead. Civilization had vanished. The only link between us and the human world was the line of kicked-up dust that hung in the air between my back tires and the highway.

  After half an hour of bumping along, we rumbled over a high crest of land. The desert flatland below spread all the way to the foothills of the San Andres Mountains. A few hundred yards down the gentle slope huddled several off-road trucks jacked up on huge tires with spotlights mounted above the beds and a couple of white vans like the one Tanis had pulled in front of my house. Several of the trucks either had ATVs strapped in the beds or to trailers. Anglo men in fatigues, mustaches, and aviator glasses hung around drinking coffee and grinning at each other. They leaned on military rifles and thirty-ought-sixes. Hunting knives and pistols dangled in sheathes at their waists.

  I parked the truck and Rex got out. A few of the men glanced casually in his direction. I emerged and one of them nearly dropped his AR-15. They muttered and stared, and no one said anything nice. The closest van erupted in a cacophony of barking and howling. I knew that racket. It was the theme music of my new life. The Captain emerged from a group near the van and swaggered over in army boots, camouflage clothes, reflective sunglasses, and a nine-millimeter pistol next to his crotch. He bellowed my name so everybody could hear it.

  “John Stick.” He forced his mouth into a big fat smile, but the tension around his eyes told me he was still sore that I’d shown up at his house and scared the devil out of his wife a few days before. “Glad to have you on board.”

  I took his hand and squeezed, yanking him close. “I told you I want to meet the man,” I hissed. “Not come to a Timothy McVeigh lookalike contest in the desert.”

  “Take it easy,” he said under his breath. “Play the game and you’ll make some serious scratch. You’ll earn a place for your pal. There are steps you have to go through.”

  “I’m not here to go through steps. I meet John White soon, or I’m gone.”

  The Captain spoke through gritted teeth. His breath smelled like donuts and spearmint gum. “I haven’t even met him. He’s not a socialite. Come for a ride with us this morning. We’ll test you out. See how you fit. Then maybe in a week or two―who knows? Maybe we’ll get you in to see your dad.”

  I let his hand go and worked hard to keep from re-clasping my grip around his neck.

  “Want a cup of coffee? Donut?” he asked.

  “Let’s just get on with it.”

  The Captain nodded. “Whatever you say.” He turned to two men standing by the closest white van. One held a rope that went through the front passenger window connecting, I could only assume, to the animal losing its marbles inside. The man had his feet planted in the earth and was trying really hard to look like he wasn’t straining to keep from having his arms yanked off. It was Meat Shoulders, the kid I’d run into at Typhon Industries and the Bosque Del Apache. He looked less friendly in his militiaman getup. Beside where he dug his heels in the dirt, the whole van rocked back and forth. The dog’s barking sent spirals of birds twisting up from the surrounding desert, eager for quieter pastures.

  “Boys,” the Captain said to the two men. “Mr. Stick here wants to get on with it.”

  “Whatever he says,” said the one not holding the rope. His voice was like sandpaper on granite. He was a wiry guy with a lot of wrinkles and loose-hanging skin. He could have been forty-one or fifty-nine. He tugged at a chain around his neck until a key came out of his shirt and unlocked the back door of the van. A few other men edged up behind me. They nudged and coaxed me forward until I was face to face with the door. Sandpaper Voice looked all eight feet of me up and down. “You’re going to have to dive in there. Try not to hit your head.”

  Words came out of my mouth, but no one listened and they didn’t mean anything anyway. Half a dozen men pressed down on my shoulders and pushed the backs of my knees until I bent in half. Sandpaper Voice opened the door, and they crammed me through and slammed it behind me.

  I came face to face with a soggy monster the size and shape of a big dog with floppy, fleshy ears and eight eyes. Clusters of wiry hairs sprouted from its black, rubbery skin. It ran in place, its claws scrabbling at the plastic floor of the van, held back by the length of rope fastened to its collar and extending into a hole that led to the front of the van, through the window, and into Meat Shoulders’ firm grip. I prayed for the surety of his footing. The beast’s face was droopy, jowly, and devoid of hair. It opened up its round mouth and sucked at the air between us, revealing three interior jaws and dozens of saw-blade teeth.

  “Keep your goddamn hold on that rope,” I yelled, getting to my knees and pressing my back against the doors.

  A key ground into the van behind me.

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Stick,” the Captain said from outside. “He’s very friendly.” A chorus of man guffaws punched at the flanks of the van.

  “Let me out of here. I quit.”

  “This is what you signed up for,” the Captain said. “You’re our new Cerberus handler.”

  The van stunk like wet dog and old metal. The beast snuffled at the ground between us like a mop, lapping up my scent. It had huge slits for nostrils and compound eyes like an invertebrate’s that hung in drooping sockets. It lunged at me a couple more times, raising its sucker-like mouth to gulp at the air between each lunge. After a few tries, it sat back on its haunches and wagged its wide, flat posterior back and forth across the floor. Its loose, rubbery skin hung in folds around its neck and shoulders. The beast whined at me, and when I didn’t move, leaned its head back and emitted a long, aching howl.

  I was looking at a chupacabra, based on the rubbery skin, the drooping ears, the tripartite jaws, and the anterior and posterior suckers, a chimera of bloodhound and leech. I guessed hirodu medicinalis, or the European medicinal leech. Which, scientifically speaking, was absolutely impossible.

  “Scratch him behind the ears,” Sandpaper Voice rasped from outside the van. “He won’t hurt ya. He might just take a sip or two of your blood, is all.” The psychos all chuckled.

  Cerberus howled again. I clicked my tongue at him. He made a panting motion with his mouth, ruined by the fact that he had no tongue. He wagged his posterior suction cup playfully. I reached out my hand, and he put his paw in it and lolled his head to one side. I gently kneaded his paw with my fingers, discovering doglike pads and hard claws. His skin felt warm and tough like industrial rubber left out in the sun. He seemed content to sit there with his paw in my hand like a regular dog. I wondered if he wanted me to rub his belly while he suckled one of my arteries.

  “We’re letting go the rope,” the Captain yelled. “You heard me,” he said more quietly. “Let it go.”

  The rope went slack. I dropped the beast’s paw. He sat there for a few seconds slapping at the air, trying to get me to shake with him again. When I didn’t, he threw himself at my knees
, stuck his legs up in the air, and showed me his underbelly. He was a lot like a dog down there, except for one detail: he wasn’t a he. He was a very pronounced hermaphrodite. All leeches were. They were mutual inseminators. My new pal had the ability to give and receive genetic material.

  I rubbed his―or hers, or its, or whatever―rubbery belly. He groaned and hung his sucker mouth open in blissful appreciation.

  “How you two getting along in there?” the Captain asked.

  “Come on in,” I said. “I’ll show you.”

  “I’ll stay out here. Just make sure you two bond real good. You’re his new best friend.” His voice moved away from the van. “Alrighty boys, saddle up!”

  Boots stomped through the dirt in all directions. Truck doors opened and slammed. Feet leapt up into truck beds. Men climbed into either side of the van’s cab and Sandpaper Voice stuck his face up to the square window where the loose rope dangled through.

  “He likes you. Just like they said he would.”

  “He probably likes everybody,” I said.

  “Nope. Hates most of us. Gave me this.” Sandpaper voice pulled his face from the window and stuck his forearm into the aperture. It bore a scar that looked like three sharks had bitten him at once. The hound snarled at it. I rubbed his chest until he smiled again.

  All around us, the trucks growled their guttural songs. Tires spun out in the dirt, and we bounced along the bumpy terrain. There were no windows. I soon lost my bearings and couldn’t tell where we were headed. My new friend was unaware of anything other than my knees under his back and my hand rubbing his chest and scratching his sides. The two of us rattled around for an hour or so. After a few minutes, I sat with my back against the cab and my legs extended toward the doors. The beast flopped down along my leg and rested his head on my thigh. I ruffled the folds of his neck for him. Thin grayish drool leaked from his anterior sucker-mouth into my trousers. By the time the van lurched to a halt, he was snoring like a kid after Christmas dinner.

  They let us out. I held my new friend’s rope even though he tagged right along with me. The sunlight gleamed on his dark skin, and loping along through the dust, he looked as out of this world as anything I’d ever imagined. The men stayed pretty well clear of us, apart from doing some involuntary gawking. Our convoy had stopped at the base of a natural trail that wound up through the foothills toward San Andreas peak. The men unbuckled the straps holding their four-wheelers in place on trailers and in the beds of their huge pickups. They arranged themselves two to an ATV, a driver and a gunman. I wondered what sort of terrorism I was about to participate in.

  The Captain gathered everyone together. “We have a tip that some illegals are coming over these mountains. Coyotes dropped them off a day’s walk south of here to avoid the border patrol roadblocks near White Sands. They’re hoofing it through the foothills, thinking they can skirt around the main roads and get picked up north, past border patrol.” The Captain cast his eyes over my new shadow and I. “Looks like you’re living up to the legend.”

  I didn’t say anything to him.

  “This little pooch is going to pick up their scent.” He removed a gallon zip-lock baggie from his satchel. It held a woman’s blouse, soiled with dried sweat and dirt. My friend went nuts. He strained at his rope, and when I held him tight, he leapt straight up into the air and banged his otherworldly baying against the sky.

  “Atta boy.” The Captain held the garment out to Cerberus, who took it in his jaws, dropped it in the dirt, and snuffled its creases and folds. “Get a good whiff.”

  The men revved up their ATVs. Others piled into the beds of pickups with wheels as tall as a normal. Rex stood in the truck bed among them, his head reaching the height of their shoulders, a thin arm shoved through the press of torsos to hold onto the bar that ran along the back of the cab beneath the floodlights. He looked like a lost puppy. It was the same expression he’d worn most of his life when he forgot his tough guy act.

  Sandpaper Voice pulled his ATV up next to me. “You’re with me.”

  It was everything I could do to hold the hound’s leash. He’d been sweet napping in the back of the van, but after catching that scent, he’d become pure muscle. His haunches bunched with power and legs stocky and dark like polished tungsten powered him forward. A voice like an artillery battery crashed from his barrel chest. Like any carnivore, despite his sweetness to his master, he was a weapon.

  “Let him go,” Gravel Voice said.

  “We’ll lose him,” I said.

  “Not if you do your job. Slip him loose and get on.” He revved the engine. “We’re driving fast, so if you have a problem, yell Ned. That’s my name.”

  I got my hands down to his collar and unhooked the leash. He tore off across the dirt and through a prickly pear cactus that should have turned him into a porcupine. He didn’t seem to notice. In seconds, he’d disappeared around the shoulder of a hill.

  A dozen motors roared, and we were after him. Our ATV led the pack. I hugged Ned as if I were in love with him. He was one hell of a driver, bouncing at the knees for every bump we hit, dodging the pitfalls hidden by crackling elm and mesquite, tracing the natural contours of the earth carved out by the eons of wind, runoff, and gravity. For all his skill, it was still slow going. We sporadically lost sight of Cerberus. Then we’d see him again, standing atop a hill and raising his triple-jawed face to howl at the sun.

  “That’s for you,” Ned shouted over his shoulder. “He’s waiting for you. He doesn’t normally do that.”

  “I’m honored,” I said.

  “Love at first sight.”

  “Drive.”

  He did. We chased the hound for what seemed like an eternity to my battered groin, my knee joints, and my shoulder sockets, but was probably only an hour or two. As the sun hovered at a halfway point toward its zenith, spilling spring heat across the glittering rock and spines of the desert, we crested a ridge between the last of the foothills and the sheer mountain surge toward the heavens.

  A small ecosystem harbored in the valley there, where water flowed and the sun beat down for fewer hours of the day. Chihuahua pine, gray oak, and fir clustered at the low points. In a clearing bristled with brown and olive wild grasses, a dozen or so men and women stood atop boulders. Some of them shrieked. Some of them sent up pleas to God in the language of my ancestors. One woman hadn’t treed herself. She faced off with Cerberus. She wore dusty slacks, a denim jacket, and tennis shoes that looked like they’d trekked all the way from Mexico City. She held a stick in each hand. Cerberus crouched, leapt, and bayed. Each time he lunged too close, she lanced him in the face with one of her sticks. It was a standoff.

  Our cavalcade rumbled up in a cloud of billowing dust and men leaping from ATVs, bellowing phrases they’d heard on cop shows. They aimed their assault rifles from the hip like Rambo and brandished pistols in two-handed grips. The people they accosted cowered in ragged clothes and broken shoes, the whites of their eyes huge against their sunburned skin. What must we have looked like, a fleet of men riding four wheelers and armed with guns of war, a giant with a face like a bare cliff, and an eight-eyed hound from hell? What must these people have thought of America?

  I leashed Cerberus as quickly as I could. He alternately licked my hands and sprung toward the men and women, whom the militiamen rounded up and made kneel in the dirt with their fingers laced behind their heads. A couple of the militiamen made a pile of grungy backpacks. The Captain silenced any of the immigrants who spoke. The woman who’d fended off the hound with sticks stared straight at me while the others looked at the ground, stared straight ahead, or clamped their eyes shut. She had hard, high cheekbones, skin the color of the most fertile earth, a straight mouth, and eyes like foundry fires. She could have won a staring contest with continental drift. She looked like an actress hired to play a persecuted and resilient heroine in a Hollywood Western. And I was the brutish henchman of the arch-villain, sent to kidnap her people.

  Back at the ba
se camp, the Minutemen unloaded the prisoners from the back of the pickup truck and made them sit in the dirt near the second white van. A woman in blue scrubs who must have been a nurse stood outside of it fending off the militiamen who tried to hit on her. I did my best to keep the hound calm. Our prisoners must have thought he wanted to eat them. I wished I could have explained he was a tracker. They were quarry. A deep-seated genetic urge drove him, not a desire to consume their flesh. But I didn’t speak Spanish. One small reason to hate myself among many large ones.

  I called to Ned. “You want me to put him back in the van?”

  He shook his head. Two men flanked him. Each held a long pole with a loop of wire at the end, the tool that dogcatchers use to secure dangerous animals.

  “It’ll calm him down. Block out the scent. At least get him out of view so that maybe these people all don’t die of fright.”

  “We’re not done with him.” Ned snapped his fingers. The two men slipped their nooses around Cerberus’ neck and stood on either side of him, pulling the nooses taut. “Let the leash go. Your work is done. You and the little guy should leave now.”

  I dropped the leash. My new friend whimpered as they led him a few paces away. “You didn’t need me here today.” I said. “All you need is a GPS tracker or a strong retractable leash.”