Nightwing (10 page)

“No thanks, uncle.”

The old man sat on the sofa in thought. The bread cooled in his hands. Finally, Youngman lost patience.

“You treated him like dirt, worse than a pahan. You and the Fire Clan and all the elders. Now the poor guy is dead and you still act the same way. Well, why?”

“Abner was old, old,” Harold sighed. “Older than me. Hard to think he’s dead, but he’s among friends. I was his friend, as you say. It bothers me what we did, but it was necessary. And if he’s dead, like you say, then he’s got friends.”

“Uncle, that’s not what I asked. Just give me an answer. How could you treat Abner like that?”

“You’re more Tewa than Hopi. You’re a warrior—”

“Knock it off, uncle.” Youngman inched forward on his chair. “I was no warrior. I was a goddamn convict in Leavenworth. Abner deserved better company than that for a funeral and I want to know why that’s all he got. I want a reason.”

Harold picked up a prayer stick, then put it down and looked at Youngman.

“See, he talked to Masaw all the time and Masaw crawling up the mesa wall, that scared people. And Abner he’d go off to the pueblos of the dead people and come back smelling of the dead, and that was unpleasant for the rest of us.”

“You mean, Abner was a witch. That’s it? The whole thing? You all, all the priests, you believed that.”

“You know how it is,” Harold said. “Everything will be all right as long as we tend to things. As long as we do the ceremonies right, there’ll be rain and Masaw will protect us from our enemies. Okay. But Abner he went too far.”

“Too far?”

“He had Masaw walking around here every night. I seen him,” Harold said.

“Masaw?”

“Right. From far-off ’cause if he touches you, then you’re dead. You see what I’m talking about? Even Death gets hungry. It has a stomach to fill.”

“I’ll tell you what I saw. I saw the body of an old man. Not a witch. An old man who was a friend of mine and who had been a friend of yours and everyone else on the mesa. And if he acted crazy lately, maybe it was because all the priests up here, all his old friends made him that way.”

“You did a good thing to keep him company this last year.” Harold Masito averted his eyes from Youngman. “It makes me feel good to know we were right about you. Was there anything else?”

Youngman sighed.

“Well, uncle, there was. His possessions. What should I do about those, or who should I give them to?”

“I see. I’m afraid you’re late. The Fire Clan priests they already went down into a kiva and they won’t be up for a couple days. Anyway, they took the clan tablet from Abner a year ago.”

“What tablet?” Youngman asked.

“The Fire Clan tablet. Abner can’t stir up too much trouble without that.”

Youngman wasn’t interested in stories about a tablet and there was nothing left to do in Harold’s house. He thanked Harold for talking. At the door he stopped.

“One more thing, uncle. Did you hear anything about Abner wanting to stop the world?”

“No,” Harold answered curtly. He picked up a prayer stick and a fluff. The fluff escaped from his gnarled fingers and floated upwards, slowly spinning. “You sure he’s dead?”

Youngman went back out on the plaza. The sun was directly overhead, trying to melt the mesa. Youngman blinked through sunglasses at a silver water tower and his eyes fell to boys playing with a handmade top on a roof, and to the plaza. Rough ladders marked three holes spaced across the dusty plaza. The ladders led down to
kivas
, underground chambers. From the bow standard and horsehair on the two nearer ladders, he could tell they were occupied by Antelope and Snake priests who had already been in hiding for six days for the Snake Dance.

From a house two doors away, two men emerged. One was Walker Chee and the other was the white who’d been driving the Cadillac. Chee filled the doorway. Navajos were different from Hopis: they were bigger, fleshier, and their heads seemed squared at the corners. Chee embellished these attributes with hair razor-cut to the collar of a dark, three-piece suit, a silk tie, and thick fingers studded with turquoise rings. The white took off sunglasses. His features were broad and pink, drawn with the eraser end of a pencil. Neither man noticed Youngman in the shadows.

The white frowned.

“You said the deal was set.”

“Just a few more days, Piggot.”

“A few more days and a few more days, that’s all I’ve heard. I have crews standing by. What fucking game are you playing? And you were going to bring maps of the canyon. What happened to the maps?”

“The maps aren’t important,” Chee said.

“You know how expensive that kind of map is?”

“We don’t want maps here. Not here. Back off and leave it to me.”

“You’re stalling me, Chief. I’m trying to figure out why.”

A village elder joined the two men and Youngman took the opportunity to try to slip away unseen. He got to the middle of the plaza.

“Deputy, I want to talk to you,” Chee called.

Youngman came to a stop.

“Excuse me.” Chee left Piggot and the elder and approached Youngman alone. The tribal chairman moved with proprietary ease, ushering Youngman out of earshot of anyone else. Youngman was aware of being smaller and, in comparison, grubby. There were perhaps a thousand flies buzzing around the plaza. Not one of them would dare land on Chee. Chee dispensed a smile.

“You’re Deputy Duran, right?” he asked softly.

“Yes.”

“And you pushed around a Mr. Paine yesterday, is that correct?” Chee lowered his voice.

“I pointed out to him that he was on the wrong reservation.”

Eyes began appearing in the windows around the plaza. The white man was searching the soles of his shoes.

“Are you going to tell me I’m on the wrong reservation?” Chee asked.

“Are you confused?”

“No, I’m not. That’s how you and me differ. See, I got loads of my own Indians just like you. Dumb and poor. You get satisfaction out of that, fine. I heard about you before, Duran. You are the best living example of ignorance in Arizona, did you know that? You can’t help yourself and you can’t help anyone else. I bust my balls to bring some money to the mesa. I go to Washington, New York, Houston and show ’em an Indian doesn’t necessarily have to be drunk or dumb and as soon as I get someone out here to help us some jerk like you shows up and screws me. Now you think I do it so I can get my face on a magazine cover. Great, that’s your opinion. But there are three power plants and twelve proposed power plants on my reservation that say an Indian can do more than pose for nickels. And I’ve started the medical programs that’ll mean we don’t have to be the most disease-ridden people in this country. And the irrigation programs I’ve fought through the courts are just as much for Hopis as Navajos. So, do me a courtesy, Deputy, until you get as smart as the average toad, you hide yourself away the next time you see anyone who has anything to do with me. That a deal? And don’t you eavesdrop on me ever again.”

While Youngman stood and burned for an answer, Chee gestured to the white and the two men walked away from the plaza. The deputy heard the word “troublemaker” dropped, discarded the way a man would throw away an inferior item. Seconds later, the Buick and Caddy nosed into view and conspicuously squeezed through alleys to the mesa road.

Youngman could hear the soft roll of fat tires in the dirt. Why did he hate Chee? Because Chee was right?

“You’re laughing,” Stone Man said. “Is there anything funny?”

Stone Man was the village elder Chee had been talking to. He wore a rag around his head. His flesh was ropy. Youngman had the sense, and the fear, that he was looking at his future self.

“Not a thing, uncle. I guess all the Fire Clan priests are already in the kiva.”

“Yes. I think Abner Tasupi was the last to go down.”

“Abner? That’s not possible.”

Youngman walked across the plaza to a kiva almost on the edge of the mesa. The clan feathers on the ladder were stirred by a wind that blew straight out of the San Francisco Mountains, visible on the other side of the desert at a distance of seventy-five miles. A kiva was a link to that Underworld from which the first Hopis crawled; in other words, it was a dark, tobacco-rank chamber in which destitute people secluded themselves to prepare the ceremonies that would keep their miserable world together. Juniper bushes tied to the ladder below the entrance hole blocked Youngman’s view. Stone Man followed him.

“Abner’s dead.”

“Oh.” Stone Man concentrated. “Well, you know, I only seen him from the back. You know, I seen eight fellows go down and I just thought the last one was Abner.” He watched Youngman nervously toe the stones around the opening. “You say he’s dead, I must be wrong.”

Paine had stayed in Mexico after his father’s death. None of the Mexicans from the research station would work with him again but since the program was lavishly funded by American Agency for International Development money he was allowed to operate alone for a year. When he’d arrive in his Land Rover full of lab equipment and poisons the hill Indians would desert their village, a sight that always struck Paine as obscenely ridiculous because he came to kill death, not spread it. They’d watch, hidden, as Paine, his face strapped into a gas mask, carried into a cave canisters of barium carbonate, or arsenic trioxide, or thallium sulfate. When he left, the Indians would celebrate in the comic belief they’d driven off a demon.

Even when the Mexicans did cut off his funds, it didn’t matter. Heart researchers wanted to study the vampire’s circulatory system, sonar researchers wanted to test the vampire’s ears, and psychologists were fascinated by the vampire’s intelligence. No bat mastered a Skinner box faster than a vampire.

All the time, Paine was heading north following the survivors of the vampire colony from the cave where Joe Paine had died. One vampire roost, however large, was generally only part of a larger vampire colony. By implanting miniature radio transmitters on captive bats, he traced the survivors to new caves. When he poisoned those caves, the survivors would move to others.

Their hours and movements became his. The distinctive marks of their feeding were the compass points of his life. A cave of their poisoned dead was his defeat, because his tracking equipment always recorded more survivors and yet more caves and Mexico itself seemed a lightless hall of caves, which at night it very much was.

In this fashion, he tracked his bats up the Sierra Madre Occidental, along the oceanside Sierra de San Francisco and north to the foothills of Sonora. The hunt took two years and he did not know whether any of the original survivors still existed, but vampires were long-lived, intelligent, and adaptable. Finally, he had pursued his prey to the end of that hall of caves to the last cave before the American border. That evening, he tracked the silent chorus of a major colony of vampires crossing the border.

No true colony of vampires had ever been reported in the United States, which was a classic puzzle to zoologists. From Northern Mexico to Argentina, through the Andean highlands to the swamps of Guyana, vampires flourished. At the U.S. border they’d always halted. No one knew why.

But Paine’s bats didn’t come back.

He recognized his great opportunity. Since there were no other vampire bat colonies in Arizona for his to merge with, at last he could destroy them all. Paine didn’t anticipate his next problem, however. No one would believe him. County medical officers, when asked about vampire bat attacks, laughed in his face. He stopped asking about bats and used more general queries about nighttime attacks and unfamiliar wounds, still without success. The vampires had disappeared.

Paine started again with the Indian reservations, working north through the Gila River, Maricopa, Apache, Colorado, and Hualapai, finishing with the largest of all, the Navajo.

He had found Walker Chee on the Black Mesa. The Navajo Tribal Chairman was leading a group of white men around the lip of what had been part of the mesa and was now the Peabody Coal Co. stripmine. The mine was an enormous inverted pyramid dug by layers, a pyramid all the more dizzying because it was such a sudden and overwhelming vacuum in which eight-story electrically powered shovels were dwarfed to the size of toys. Paine hung back by two limousines parked away from the lip as Chee strutted back and forth, pointing out elements of the operation to the visitors.

“Over there, you can just see it,” Chee pointed to a chimney on the far side of the mine, “is the pulverizing plant. The Peabody people use fossil water to make a slurry of the coal and the slurry is gravity-fed by pipeline 275 miles around the Grand Canyon to the generating plants in Nevada.”

One of the whites kicked a stone into the mine. He turned to Chee; he had the sort of pink head on which sunglasses became the most dominant feature.

“About the Peabody folks. You’re givin’ them some trouble, aren’t you?”

“No trouble, Mr. Piggot. Renegotiating. We get 15 to 25 cents royalty per ton. The state of Montana gets a minimum of 40 cents. We just want to bring our royalties into line. You take oil—”

“That’s why we’re here,” the man called Piggot said. “We’ve been getting a 15 percent royalty. Arabs demand a minimum of 50 percent . . .”