Nightwing (4 page)

“Scat!”

After a supper of Monterey Jack and tortilla, Youngman draped his roll over his back to keep warm. The stars overhead were sharp and hard. Once, he swung a flashlight beam around the stream to catch the eyeshines of the nocturnal animals congregating there. Spider eyes were silver, toad eyes were red. Moving, they made tiny trails of lightning.

Youngman hadn’t been forced to stay in the Army; Hopis could choose conscientious objector status. But he stayed and screening tests showed he had a highly developed sense of spatial relationships, so he was upped to sergeant, trained to read aerial photographs through three-dimensional viewers, and shipped to Andersen Air Force Base in Guam. Every day, and every night, three-plane squadrons of eight-engine B-52’s flew off Guam to North Vietnam, each plane carrying twenty tons of bombs. Their targets were picked from photographs taken by reconnaissance U-2’s shuttling back and forth from Thailand and Guam. Day photos could be transformed into maps with code numbers and coordinates. Night photos were infrared puzzles and no one was better than Youngman at deciphering the mottled reds, greens, and blues that signified the heat of human activity, the cool of forest canopies, and the chill of water at night. The enemy could burn refuse, or hose down power stations. Youngman was never fooled, and the long-distance rain that he sent out was always accurate. It was a fascination to him, a game. A year into his tour he received his first service decoration and a rest-and-recreation leave in Bangkok, where he was offered Vietnamese finger necklaces and scalps at reasonable prices. And a purse of private parts sewn together.

That night in Bangkok, while Youngman slept between two whores, he heard his father laughing. So that was the joke, Youngman thought. That was the joke all along. Joe waving a wooden penis. Dancing backwards, one leg over the mesa edge. The finger necklace. Standing on his hands. The bombers easing their weight from the runway. The wrinkled purse. The beautiful maps of fire. The deer rifle in the mouth. People liked to kill each other. That was funny.

“No.” Youngman sat up between the whores.

He returned to Guam and, a month later, was court-martialed for deliberately misreading recon photos and sending night raids of B-52’s to bomb the China Sea. Youngman’s answer was that he’d decided to take the war seriously, and he didn’t feel like making war any more. He could have gotten twenty years, but bombers habitually dropped their loads into the sea either because a raid had been aborted or, just as often, because a pilot was near the end of his six-month tour. Also, Youngman’s unusual assignment from the Army to Guam muddied the jurisdiction of the court. He got two years.

At the start, it wasn’t so bad. There were Indians at Leavenworth Stockade; he educated himself through the library and he had a soft job in the photographer’s studio until, with a month left in Youngman’s sentence, a guard emptied a water pistol full of urine on him. It was only a routine joke by a bored prison guard, but Youngman tore the slicer off a photo cropper and cut the guard’s arm to the bone. When Youngman came out of the prison stockade a month later, he received two more years to serve, the first quarter in solitary, a close, unlit cell painted black. Towards the end of his second sentence, when Youngman was on a road-grading crew, one of the other Indians bolted, idiotically since there was nothing to run to except miles of flat, freshly turned Kansas prairie. As the guard in charge of the crew raised his shotgun to fire, Youngman knocked him down and said he would bring the escaping man back. Youngman was gaining on his friend when he was cut down from the back by two loads of 30-30 pellets. He spent two months in the hospital, and received two more years. From then on, the guards left him alone and he made no more friends.

His first winter back on the reservation, he happened by Abner’s garage. The Fire Clan priest had long been run off the mesa as a witch, but he recognized Youngman.

“Your car broke down someplace?” Abner stepped out of the garage wrapped in a blanket.

“Haven’t got a car.” Youngman set his backpack down. There was a rain barrel by the oil drums. He cracked the ice on the top to scoop up a drink.

“Long walk to the mesa.”

“Not going to the mesa,” Youngman answered.

“Well, there’s no place to stay out here,” Abner said belligerently.

“There’s everyplace to stay out here.”

The old man put his back to the chilled sun to see his visitor better.

“You with the Bureau or the companies now, which?”

“With no one.”

“Then what are you doing?”

“Walking.” Youngman turned to swing his pack to his shoulder. “Just walking. Okay?”

“Wait,” Abner stopped Youngman from leaving. “Sit a second.”

Youngman shrugged and squatted, keeping the pack balanced on his shoulder. Abner squatted facing him. After a couple of minutes, Youngman let his eyes slide from Abner’s and studied the terrain, which at first seemed as flat as a drumhead and only with patience yielded the shadow of leafless bushes and the faults of arroyos. When he finally looked back at Abner the old man was grinning.

“I said a while ago you were empty inside,” Abner told him. “I see now that you are real, a full person.”

“So?”

“So, I got some wine inside.”

From then on, Abner said, they were friends.

In the hills above Dinnebito Wash Youngman lay down and let night sounds fill his head. He fell asleep watching a star called Hotomkam travel west.

While the sun had been setting, a baby was born. Blind and hairless, it fell into a cradle formed by the membrane between its mother’s legs. Instinctively, it chirped through milk teeth while its mother spread her baby’s wings and sniffed scent glands that would distinguish it from all other infants in the dark. Only then did she allow it to climb to a waiting nipple. As it fed, she watched with bright eyes and oversized ears as the rest of the colony stirred from their torpor. Life was spreading. In the next niche, a male wrapped his wings around a female, his stomach to her back and his teeth dug into the nape of her neck, copulating. The female’s own weight locked the tendons of her toes into a grip on the cave roof that even death could not release. Nearby, two males fought, screaming and drumming their wings against the roof. They circled each other, hair stiff around their jowls, until they rushed together, using their wings as clubs. One fight set off others, circles of tension that grew as daylight faded. The large members of the colony, the females, looked on with mild interest. The mating couple disengaged, the male to join other males, the female to preen. A week-old baby unfolded stubby wings and chattered. The great colony’s mating, fighting, and births coincided until the shaft of light that fell through the cave roof narrowed to a thin stream and a different, greater need took hold. Others of their order might seek the twilight; these would wait for the dark. In the manner of upside-down spiders, wings mantled, padded claws reaching for rock, all the hundreds of adults moved sideways or backwards towards the ebbing light at the sinkhole. Squat faces fringed with whiskers concentrated on the mark of a dissolving day. As that mark faded, a ten-year-old female unfurled her wings and flew upward. One after another, the rest followed, in seconds more than a thousand streaming up through the sinkhole, climbing and trumpeting cries that directed them to their proper position in the flight. Biologically, they were miracles of evolution. Fourteen-inch wings, their membranes five times more sheer than surgical gloves, propelled them as fast as swallows. Downy fur, gray on the back and brown in front, cut wind resistance. Color-blind eyes magnified the light of emerging stars so that the canyon glowed for them and, ahead, the desert was brushed with silver. They drifted above the canyon ridge like a cloud but as they reached the desert they flew ever lower, until they were a tide flowing a bare three feet above the desert floor. In front and around them spread a net of silent cries and echoes that returned to large, tender ears marked by a separate tragus. Each bat flew so close to its companions that their tide seemed a solid mass, and yet the tide flowed unchecked through cactus and brush. The terrain was new to the bats but not altogether different from their Mexican home. Hungry, their flattened spade-shaped noses soaked up the animal smells on the night wind. A stream of moths approached the bats, scattered and escaped. The bats swung into the wind, where smells were rich and traveled far. A nighthawk following the moths changed its course, abruptly wheeling upward and away. Unlike birds, the bats couldn’t soar. They only flew and they flew only for the Food, their wings beating air fourteen times a second in a steady, purposeful rhythm until the warm smell they sought tinged the air. Minute particles of sweat and plasma transferred from the air to the folds of their nostrils. The tide swung again and the all-but-silent screams increased in urgency. A thousand mouths opened, revealing the distinctive chin and long canines and, unlike teeth of any other bat or animal in Creation, incisors which were as curved and sharp as blades. Biologists called the bats Desmodontidae, a name suggesting those teeth and despair. Vampires.

C H A P T E R
T W O

T
he morning sun warmed Abner’s shed, a dirty-white Public Health Service van, and five tourists who anxiously watched Youngman’s jeep drive up. Youngman put most tourists in two categories. Soul-toters, who tended to be young, scruffy, and desperate to “get into” Indian religion. And camera-toters, who were older, cleaner, and only desperate to get back to air conditioning. The three women and two men beside the van were definitely of the second category, although a little bit better dressed than most, in expensive casual outfits. One of the men had been sick down the front of his pastel shirt. Youngman got out of his jeep. He didn’t see Abner.

When he asked if he could be of any help, one of the women put her hand over her mouth.

“Abner’s giving you trouble?” Youngman tried a smile on her. “Don’t pay him any mind, he’s that way with everyone.”

“No, he’s . . .” The man with the spoiled shirt pointed towards the shed. “God help him.”

By now, Youngman wasn’t listening. He ran around the van, past the creosote bushes with their rusting trucks, and into the shed.

The doorway and the ground around it where the rabbit had been killed were splattered with blood. A trail of blood went around the sand painting and through the ring of red sand to the drawing of the caped man, where the blood painted in a head around the mouth and crying eyes. At the figure’s right hand, the red border was broken, swept aside and marked by a prayer stick decorated by shrike feathers. Another prayer stick pinned a cigarette pack Youngman had thrown away the day before into the figure of the coyote. And in the center of the painting, sprawled over the double serpentine, lay Abner, dead, still in his kilt, wearing a mask of raw rabbitskin. His own skin, from his feet to the crown of his head, was sliced away so completely that bone showed at his fingers and knees.

Youngman wasn’t the only person staring with disgust and awe. Just inside the door was another tourist in a windbreaker, a short man with a confident bearing and a smooth, marbled face. On the other side of the painting was the Health Service nurse, a blonde girl in faded jeans.

“When did you get here?” Youngman asked her.

“Ten minutes ago.”

The tourist knelt by Abner. He cleared his throat and took a Bible from inside his windbreaker, but before he could speak Youngman hauled him up by his collar.

“No missionary work here.”

“Red or white,” the man held up his Bible, “a person deserves a final blessing.”

“He was a priest of the Fire Clan,” Youngman said.

“Maybe he was Christian as well.”

“Not even dead.” Youngman turned to the girl. “Did they touch anything?”

“No,” she answered angrily. “And they’re not missionaries.”

“We’re with a foundation.” The tourist adjusted his jacket. “We only try to help—”

“Same thing.” Youngman cut him off. “Why are you here?”

“Miss Dillon volunteered to show us around the reservation and take us to your famous Snake Dance. We arrived a few days early so we thought we’d get some camping in as well. I’m John Franklin.” Franklin had an amplified baritone, the kind that carried well in a boardroom. In Abner’s shed it was too loud.

“Did you examine the body?” Youngman asked the girl.

“There was nothing I could do for Abner, so I looked for tracks. In case we have a rabid coyote running loose. I didn’t know when you were going to be around. That’s why we stopped here, so I could ask about you.”

“Did you find any tracks?”

“None.” Anne Dillon had a tanned, oval face with deep-set eyes. She was almost as good a hunter as Youngman and he knew it well.

“I took a look at the body,” Franklin interjected. “The blood looks quite fresh to me. This attack of wild dogs or whatever must have occurred right before we arrived.”

With his boot, Youngman nudged Abner’s leg.

“He’s stiff. About ten hours dead.”

Youngman led the way back to the van, where the other missionaries huddled as if the morning weren’t already warming up to its regular oven quality.