Nightwing (25 page)

“I can make you go.” Youngman swung the rifle towards her.

“No. That you can’t do.”

“Paine is crazy.”

“He can stop the bats.”

“Get in the truck.”

Anne said nothing but held his eyes on hers, not fighting his stare because she didn’t have the strength for that. Instead, yielding, letting his eyes go as deep as they dared, until the rifle dropped.

Youngman made a final attempt.

“I’ll trade you. I’ll stay here and wait while he drives you out past the quarantine. Then I’ll help him when he comes back. He may have maps. He doesn’t know the desert.”

“Then that settles it,” Anne said. “We’re all needed. We’ll do it together as a team. If,” she asked Paine, “that’s all right with you?”

“A team?” Paine took the rifle from Youngman. “A team is perfect.”

Maski Canyon was a maze of many canyons, some of eroded Kaibob sandstone with walls gouged and pitted by sand-bearing wind, others of sheer black Hermit shale, others of lava with slick obsidian seams. At one time, the canyon had grass as well and a people, ancestors of the Hopi, who raised corn and grazed goats in this impenetrable natural fasthold. Then, slowly, the wells died and the thin soil dried and blew away and the ancestors disappeared. Anyone lost in this forgotten home was accounted dead by the Hopi, who retreated across the desert to the Black Mesa; by the Navajo, who could find more grass among sand dunes; and by the pahans of Washington, who willingly ceded an outcrop of hell.

Until Landsat. The Landsat satellite was launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration on January 2, 1975. Since then, fourteen times a day, the satellite circled the earth measuring the radiation intensity of the ground in 1.1.-acre units. Within its multispectral scanner an oscillating mirror reflected light to detectors which converted the light into electrical voltages. The voltages were in turn converted into number values ranging from 0 to 63. Landsat beamed its data to a Goldstone, California station where the data was recorded on tape and shipped to the Goddard Space Flight Center, where the number values were reconverted back into black and white film, which was then printed through filters into color photographs. The photographs were stored at the Department of the Interior’s Earth Resources Observation Systems Data Center in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Although the photographs were costly, they were much in demand by developing countries eager to find signs of mineral deposits, by meteorologists mapping weather patterns, by civil engineers responsible for highway planning, and especially by petroleum companies. A group of such companies based in Houston noticed that one photograph of generally oil-dry Arizona displayed an almost insignificant and inexplicable leap in radiation intensity. Night photographs of the area, a stretch of the Painted Desert held jointly by the Navajo and Hopi tribes, showed an even sharper “dot” of radiation. Contact was made with the more progressive Navajos and helicopters were loaned for purposes of closer aerial study with infrared film. The cause of the radiation leap, they found, was not radiation at all but fire, a fire in a stark series of canyons that looked from the air like interlocked teeth, canyons with no trees or anything else to burn. Except oil. From deep underneath the surface, from an unsuspected oil pool, there was a seep. At some time, lightning had struck the seep and set it on fire, a fire that could have been burning for hundreds of years without anyone knowing. The burning seep was unusable, but where there was one there were likely to be others and there was sure to be oil.

From a distance of a mile, in the desert’s midday, Maski Canyon looked like the remains of an enormous creature that had fallen, burning, to earth. Instead of the flat top of a mesa, angular crags jutted at the sky. Through a shroud of dark lava broke seams of rust-red Supai sandstone and streaks of dull mica. There was no vegetation and, except for a flock of carrion crows, no life.

“Stop,” Youngman said.

The Land Rover rolled to a halt.

No reflection and no shadow, Paine thought as he stepped out of the truck. As if the canyon absorbed all light or cancelled it out.

Youngman climbed down, staring at the cliffs ahead. In a way, he was very amused. But Paine was heading in this direction when Youngman ran him down the day before. Youngman should have guessed.

“You know these canyons?” Paine asked him.

“He does.” Anne joined them. “All the Hopis do.”

“Give me your glasses,” Youngman told Paine.

Paine gave Youngman the binoculars and the deputy focused on the face of the mesa, sweeping slowly from left to right.

“It has religious significance,” Anne said. “I didn’t know the place actually existed at all.”

“Superstitions,” Youngman cut her off. “Ignorant witch stories. Nothing to concern you. You say the bats are up there?”

Paine pointed to a ragged gap in the cliffs.

“They fly through there. If we can get the truck up that far, we can go the rest of the way on foot.”

Youngman studied the walls of the gap and let the field glasses fall slowly to the base of the mesa, to a stripe of brick-red sandstone where he found what he had been searching for, a black double spiral about ten feet across and twenty feet above the ground.

“There must be a thousand caves up there, Paine. How are we going to find the right one?”

“They’ll lead us to it once we get the truck up—” Paine became aware of Anne’s concentration on Youngman. “Is there something about the canyon I should know?”

“You worry about the bats.” Youngman handed back the glasses. “I’ll handle the rest. What about the truck?”

“Okay.” Paine opened a map on the Rover’s hood. “According to this aerial survey Chee gave me—”

“You got it from Chee? Interesting,” Youngman remarked.

“There is a path wide enough for a truck in this sector.”

Youngman glanced at the map and back at the canyon. “Not a path. That’s a stream of volcanic dust. You’ll sink up to your windshield.”

“Well, the only other map I have is a satellite photo.”

“Then bring it out. Let’s see it,” Youngman said when Paine hesitated.

Paine did as Youngman said, laying out the yardwide acetate satellite photo on the ground. Hues of computer-emphasized color seemed to melt into the sand.

“These are hard to interpret,” Paine began.

Youngman turned the photo around.

“Sun here,” he held a finger up. “Sandstone canyons are the pink blotches. Shale is orange, lava collected the most heat so it’s red. These darker spots are exposed obsidian.” Youngman went on for a minute translating the shades of color into ridges, canyons, cooler dry wells, the turquoise fields. “This dot is the burning oil. I spent a year looking at this kind of photo, except they were taken by reconnaissance planes. We always looked for burning oil.” He ran his finger along the eastern edge of the canyons. “There are two ways up to the ridge. Maybe both blocked, maybe one. You and Anne take the truck half a mile west along the base of the canyon, you’ll find a break. Go slow. The only danger is volcano dust on your way but you don’t want to get trapped. I’ll go east. There’s a faster way there, but it’s usually blocked by rocks.”

“She was right,” Paine said. “We do make a good team.”

Youngman said nothing but waited for Paine and Anne to get into the Rover.

“I wish you’d come with us,” Anne said.

“Later.”

He waited until the Rover grew small along the western base of the canyon and then he began running east, towards the double spiral on the sandstone.

Paine downshifted and turned the Rover up the path Youngman had told him about. Except for a rubble of loose mica-bright slate, he couldn’t see any obstacles ahead and he was encouraged.

“The Indian was right. Youngman, I mean,” he looked at Anne to see whether he’d offended her. Her mind was elsewhere. He said louder, “Youngman’s quite an interesting guy.”

“I suppose he is.” She watched the path. The Rover was steadily climbing, shooting slate from all four wheels. The walls ahead were pale, ossified sandstone.

“But he doesn’t have to be,” she added. “ ‘Interesting’ is really a very small word. A bored word. Vampire bats are ‘interesting,’ plague is ‘interesting,’ Indians are ‘interesting.’ All of them are, from a distance, as a thrill. Life is ‘interesting.’ ”

“Death is, too,” Paine said firmly.

Anne glanced at him; there were times when she glimpsed more than the gulf in communication between them.

For an hour, the Rover picked its way into the canyon and then the path turned slowly, inexorably back down to the desert.

Under the double spiral drawn on the canyon wall, growing as the only vegetation on a small hillock, was the datura. Almost as tall as a man, the plants bore pale violet, trumpet-shaped flowers. Youngman sank to his knees before them.

Right where Abner always said they were, he thought. Because no Hopi could enter Maski Canyon without datura in his mouth. It was the “way,” as much as any road.

All his life, he had turned his back on the “way” and everywhere he turned the “way” was in front of him. His manipulation of Paine and Anne, sending them on a useless road so that he could be alone, was minor in comparison to what Abner had done to him. Because here he was; after everywhere, he was here. But, he told himself, he still didn’t believe.

A black-and-white shrike feather vibrated among the coarse leaves of the datura.

Still, a person had obligations. Youngman tore up one of the plants and hacked off a yellow-white root. He cut off a button-sized segment from the root and stuffed the rest in his pocket. He put the button in his mouth, and gagged. The taste was alkaloid and bitter, and at first he thought he was going to throw up, but after he rolled it under his tongue the nausea ebbed. Youngman got to his feet, turned right, and ran along the base of the canyon to where sheets of pocked lava came down to the desert in overlapping folds which hid a road of graded earth and mica. Without breaking stride, he turned into the canyon.

The datura, he noticed with relief, had no effect. He breathed the thin air comfortably and watched the sky narrow by steps into blue wedges between canyon walls.

The road was torturous, a series of seeming cul de sacs, and cruelly steep. There was shadow but no shade. The walls radiated an enervating heat that seared the windpipe and lungs. Youngman breathed through his nose at the start of the climb, but after a half an hour the oxygen demands on his legs were too much and he opened his lips. In minutes, his tongue thickened into a wooden lump, while the datura button swelled. His eyes fell from the sky to the vari-colored walls, and from the walls to the ruts that marked the road.

It was the Castillo priests who built it three centuries ago, their ox carts burdened by double loads of flammable stone that had bitten into the road. Their knotted whips that came down on the Hopis struggling to control the overloaded carts, because oxen were valuable and souls were cheap. For fifty years, until the priests were killed and whips burned, their bells melted, their mission razed, and their road abandoned.

Sunspots danced over Youngman’s eyes. As he dropped to rest he saw waiting for him, sitting high on a sandstone outcrop that jutted over the road, the silhouette of a small man wearing nothing but a ragged cape.