Nightwing (14 page)

“Because I remember three years ago you had twenty cases of bubonic plague.”

The doctors returned to fumigate the hay cart with sulfur dioxide.

“Let me level with you, Deputy. The life of any individual on my nation’s land or your nation’s is valuable to me. You can’t put a price on people. But, with all the other stuff on our agenda—unemployment, education, and general health care—I just wish a couple of cases of plague were the biggest problem we had.”

Finished with the cart, the doctors trotted up to Chee. One was a young Navajo, the other was older and white. The two Navajo police pushed the Loloma couple forward. Youngman recognized the bigger policeman, a muscleman called Begay.

“What’s going on?” Youngman asked.

“Don’t worry,” Chee slapped his back, “there’s enough room in the plane for all of us.”

“Why?”

“Quarantine, of course. Just a couple of days at the clinic until we get lab reports. The doctors can tell you, this is standard procedure set down by the government. It’s purely for your protection.” Chee gave the faintest nod to his police, who slipped by the Lolomas to either side of Youngman. “Go ahead, ask the doctors.”

Youngman was wearing his .38. He rested his hand on the grip as casually as he could.

“It’s definitely plague, then?” he asked the white doctor.

“Hold on.” Chee raised his hand. “I told you, they can’t make a diagnosis now. Look, Deputy, you asked for my help here. Since I’m giving it to you, you do what I say. You hop like a bunny over to that plane.”

As the sleek plane dominated Gilboa, Chee dominated other Indians. Usually, sheer force of personality was enough, but there were other ways. He took a step back, and the doctors followed suit.

“What bit him?” Youngman asked.

“Huh?”

“You say you keep a watch on flea carriers. I saw those wounds. You tell me what animal bit him.”

Chee was momentarily sidetracked.

“Folks say a cat or coyotes got the sheep. Probably the same thing got him. We’ll know when the kid talks.”

“If he talks, and that could be too late for someone else. You talk, doctor, tell me what kind of wounds those were.”

“Well,” the pahan doctor seized the opportunity to cover anxiety with professionalism, “a good question. They can’t be teeth marks because they’re more like the gouges you see from claws. There aren’t the puncture marks you expect from canine teeth. On the other hand, they can’t be claw marks because they’re far too sharp. There isn’t the bruising you expect to see, and the pattern is of a single crater instead of four or five lacerations as is the usual pattern for claws. In fact, the only way I could describe them is a gouge one might receive from two grooved razors held close together.”

“Cat, coyote, rat, prairie dog? Mouse? What?”

“I can’t say. I never saw wounds like that before,” the doctor said.

“What does all this prove?” Chee lost patience.

“I’ve seen wounds like that before,” Youngman said. “And I’ve seen the stains that go with them.”

Begay moved closer.

“You’re going to check out where the boy was attacked, aren’t you?” Youngman talked fast. “You’ll never find the place without the Lolomas or me. Let’s see if we can find something else. Since you want to be a help.”

Paine got to the campsite too late.

“ ‘Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous, beastie,’ ” he slid up the door of a 12" X 20" lucite cage next to what was left of Claire Franklin, which was dried blood, a skull crushed on a tire track, and an abdominal cavity gutted and as empty as a drum. Almost empty. “ ‘Thou need na’ start awa sae hasty, wi’ bickering brattle. I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee, wi’ murd’ring pattle.’ ”

Paine kicked the dead woman’s back, and a kangaroo mouse jumped from the stomach into the cage. The cage door slapped shut.

The rest of the three corpses were as badly mutilated by scavengers. The effect scavengers created, it always seemed to Paine, was an after-the-party air. Bits of skin and clothes were strewn here and there in the dirt like torn streamers. Bodies, a coffee pot, hamburger buns and marshmallows scattered in weary repose. Only flies and ants still at work, and a horned toad waiting for the ants. A scene for Dürer, he thought.

He opened a Coke from the campers’ food chest and sat down.

“The reason I’ve asked you here, the topic for today is, What do you think of Death? You’re all worn out, I know, but it’s more than likely you have some constructive insights. Group therapy may be new to you. It’s not to me, so I will lead this session. A topic we might begin with is whether from your vantage point you see death as a mere continuum of life, whether you see yourselves as now existing in part at least as a vulture or a prairie dog, a communion of flesh in the Catholic view. I realize people hate to talk about it. They avoid the subject, it’s a conversation killer. If it helps I can tell you this. All the really deep, all the really great thinking on the subject of death is done during a plague. Granted, millions die during a war, but all the thinking is wasted on patriotism and strategies. Take a plague. Strategies are useless and patriotism is ridiculous. Pure death, nothing but death is finally met.

“For example, you probably recall what bad poetry Robert Frost wrote about a woodpile rotting in the woods. No real sense of life or death. Just mildew. Compare it to Nashe’s
In Time of Pestilence.
‘Brightness falls from the air; queens have died young and fair; dust hath closed Helen’s eye. I am sick, I must die. Lord have mercy on us.’ ”

Paine chugged soda down a dry throat.

“Death is an intimate thing. That’s so easy to forget. Just like sex, a very intimate thing. Nowadays, people like to be deceased, not in ‘death’s embrace.’

“The fascinating thing about plague, you see, is that it’s death personified. I mean, death as a person. A lover. There was a case reported in
A Journal of the Plague Year
of a dying man who ran through the streets of London kissing pretty girls, deliberately infecting them: Killing them. People said he was mad. It’s my opinion, however, that at the time he was running through the streets he had given up his soul and he was Death with two legs and two lips.

“I think you’re beginning to understand. Plague is a kiss. Without that kiss, that flea bite, plague dies. Now that’s the amazing part. Death can die, too. Yes, love makes us all vulnerable. Even Him.”

Paine finished the Coke and dropped the aquamarine bottle on the ground. He picked up the caged mouse on his way to the Land Rover and looked at distant spires of rock.

“ ‘Twinkle, twinkle little bat, how I wonder what you’re at. Up above the world you fly, like a teatray in the sky.’ ”

The Bell UH-1 “Iroquois” copter rattled fifty feet above its shadow as metal pipes rained down on the dead sheep. The center of each pipe was baited with meat, the open ends were lined with insecticide.

“Don’t see those ammonia stains you’re talking about.” Walker Chee surveyed the carcasses through binoculars.

“We’re not close enough. Go down,” Youngman yelled over the engine noise.

“Not on your life!”

The copter peeled off into a wide circle. Inside, the patrolmen rolled canisters to the bays, and as the copter passed over the sheep and Isa Loloma’s truck again Begay dumped more poison, bags that exploded on contact with the ground in a dust of cornmeal spiced by a lethal anticoagulant called warfarin.

“I have a meeting with Piggot at my office in one hour. Let’s step on it.” Chee told the pilot.

“I can show you the same bites and stains on the horses in Joe Momoa’s corral,” Youngman said to the doctors.

“No,” Chee answered.

“Whatever attacked the boy and the sheep attacked the horses.”

“Says you.”

“Then what attacked them?” Youngman pointed back at the receding hill. “A cat goes after a flock, it picks out one sheep. Coyotes’ll scatter sheep over kingdom come. That’s eighty sheep back there, slaughtered.”

“Duran,” Chee shook his head, “you see one sick kid and you scream ‘Plague.’ You see some dead sheep and horses and you say it’s a mystery. We’ve been dealing with plague control for years. We’ve done it with the Indian Bureau and experts from the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. Plague is spread by rodent fleas. Any rodent within miles of that hill is as good as dead now. We know how to handle this problem, if you’ll just let us get on with it.”

“Those sheep weren’t killed by prairie dogs.”

“But plague is spread by rodent fleas. Get it through your head, Deputy. I haven’t got time to check out every vulture lunch you find.”

“Because you got to get back to your whites.”

“Right. Because it was the white oil company that gave us this helicopter so we could dust those sheep for you. Because it’s the white utilities give us satellite pictures to help our irrigation program. Yeah, you figured it out. Because in spite of you people, I’m going to bring some money into red hands. If you don’t like it, you can always step outside.”

Chee lit a cigar for his grin.

“You’re scared, Duran. You’re scared of anyone successful, especially another Indian. I could show you some computer technology we’re setting up at the clinic that would knock your eyes out, but I’ve changed my mind. I’m not going to have you pestering the doctors. Besides, this desert is quarantine enough for you. Just wash yourself down with some green soap and burn your clothes before you go near anyone. I can’t help you.”

Chee settled back, listening to the jets’ whine and the rotors’ strokes, a rider secure in his element. Youngman watched the ground.

Anne sawed through the distributor cable and carried it with her to sit in the shade of the overturned van. Henry was sprawled unconscious on the sand. Franklin watched through slitted eyes. Both of his legs were broken from the accident. The two smaller fingers of Anne’s left hand were broken and tied together. She peeled insulation off the cable with Franklin’s penknife.

He spat cactus pulp onto the ground.

“It’s no use.”

“It’s all we have. We left everything with the bats.”

When she’d peeled all the insulation off, she separated the copper strands, coiling and putting aside all but one. Beside her was the one item of use she’d found in the van, a fishing pole they’d planned to use on Joe Momoa’s trout stream. One end of the single copper wire Anne formed into a quarter-inch loop, through which she passed the free end of the wire. With every movement of her broken fingers, pain throbbed to her elbow. Worse, her fingers were slippery. On her fourth try, she attached the wire loop to the end of the fishing pole and drew the free end through the pole’s top eye.

Franklin looked on without interest. The trauma of his injuries was secondary to the fact that he refused to eat or drink. The mathematics of survival in the desert were simple. Without shelter or water, a healthy man would last one day. Since Franklin was only losing ten pounds of body fluid a day in the shade, he had about two more days to go. Henry, with a fever, little pulse, a coma, Anne gave hours.

“Pray for me,” Franklin asked.

“No.”

She put a pebble in her mouth to control her own thirst. It took her ten minutes just to hook the wire and tie on fishing leader. An experimental tug on the leader snapped the noose at the end of the pole shut.