Nightwing (6 page)

“Then you say yourself a prayer tonight.”

“He could do a lot of things.”

“Not any more.”

Lightning jigsawed over Gilboa. As a bolt hit the outdoor freezer, the inside of the store turned silver, then black from the backflow of electricity. The generator started again. The lights inside the store cast a waxy glow. Youngman hurried to pick up the goods he’d come for.

“Put it on my bill.”

“What else?” Selwyn was feeling better. “Maybe I can still get one of those sob sisters in there to buy a pot.”

Like sails, the clouds split. In half an hour, they’d drop three inches of water, a quarter of the year’s total rainfall, enough to turn arroyos into rapids and break open the armored seeds of smoke trees, ironwood and blue paloverde. Gilboa’s road turned into rutted mud and waves spewed from the jeep’s tires as Youngman drove the hundred yards to his hogan.

A Land Rover was parked in front of the office. He had to run through the mud before putting his shoulder to the door.

Abner was still lying in the corner but the sheet was pulled back and kneeling over the exposed body was another white man.

“You missionaries don’t give up easy.” Youngman shut the door.

The white looked up. He was Youngman’s age, deeply tanned, with close-cut red hair, wide blue eyes, wide smile, dressed in rough khakis and big, so big that the body at his feet looked like a doll. His hands were covered by rubber gloves and, instead of a Bible, they held a scalpel and a glassine envelope.

“Won’t be a minute.” The voice was modestly official.

“You won’t be a second. Stand up.”

Reluctantly, the visitor did as he was told, stooping to prevent his head from touching the ceiling. He rolled the glove off his right hand and held it out to Youngman.

“I apologize for what this must look like. My name’s Hayden Paine.” He held his hand out for ten seconds before dropping it. “Well. Just give me a chance to clean up and I’ll explain everything.”

“If I were you, I’d start talking now.”

Paine smiled, totally at ease despite his bloody gloves, the closeness of the hogan, and the drumming of the rain.

“I’m stopping at all the law enforcement and health offices on the reservation. This will satisfy you, I believe.” He handed Youngman a folded paper. While Youngman read it, Paine crouched by an aluminum case. He removed his second glove and dropped both into a plastic bag, washed his hands with alcohol and cotton, and taped the glassine packet.

“To Whom It May Concern,” Youngman read the letter, “Mr. Hayden Paine is conducting a medical survey that may be of great benefit to our nation. He has full authority to travel the reservation, and to call on the assistance of all officers of the reservation in conjunction with his survey.” The letterhead had an embossed seal of a sun, mountains, and crossed sheaves of corn. It was signed by “Walker Chee, Chairman of the Navajo Tribal Council.”

“I have more identification if you want it.” Paine locked his case.

“I don’t want it. You’re on the wrong reservation.”

“This is Hopi territory, I know, but—”

“You haven’t explained anything yet. You were desecrating a body when I came in and you still haven’t told me why.”

“The medical survey, as explained in—”

“There’s no explanation in die letter. What kind of survey?”

Paine showed no more than a slight social embarrassment. He took the letter back.

“It’s very technical, Sheriff.”

“Deputy.”

“Deputy. I’m doing a serologic study of antibodies. By identifying antibodies in the blood samples of the local population, I’ll be able to identify diseases endemic to this area. Some diseases can’t be found any other way. It’s a complicated process and if I tried to explain it further, I doubt you’d understand. No layman would,” Paine added quickly. “All I can say is that this kind of study is necessary to raise the level of health here. I’ve been having the most trouble getting samples from the older people on the reservation and when I saw the body here I took the opportunity. I meant no discourtesy to the dead man or to you, believe me. If anything, I need your help.”

Paine’s voice had risen to a shout as the drumming of the rain increased in volume, punctuated by kicks of thunder. Paine waited impatiently for the din to fade. Youngman liked the rain; anyone who lived in a desert would. More than that, the downpour forced Paine to be quiet. It forced him to drink his own rain of words. To Indians, words were a white weapon. Indians always found it interesting to watch a white try to be silent. Youngman folded his arms and waited. Silence could be informative.

Paine maintained a broad smile. He was about thirty. His tan was a veneer marred only by a smudge of lost sleep around the eyes. A minute passed under the hard rain.

Paine sighed. He had a big chest and heavy arms, light copper hairs down to the wrists, which were marked by curved scars. A bolt hit outside, probably on the Land Rover, Youngman thought. Paine only glanced aside at the crash. Confident and self-controlled. The storm continued to work to its climax. It wasn’t so much rain that opened desert seeds as violence. Paine’s smile had relaxed to amusement.

The blue eyes were clear as pools, untroubled and unruffled. Totally neutral. There was no pigment in blue eyes, Youngman remembered. It was all refraction. Dead eyes, Abner called them. Used to call them. Paine held the mutual gaze patiently, still amused. Water ran under the floor boards of the hogan. Five more minutes passed while lightning concentrated on the meager elevation of Selwyn’s store.

Selwyn’s generator faltered. The bulb in the hogan dimmed to the power of a cigarette, and at that level slowly pulsed with each feeble beat of the gas-powered generator. Youngman watched Paine’s eyes slide towards the body. Paine’s hands curled into fists and uncurled. The eyes slid back. Youngman saw the blue eyes shadow and the pupils narrow to points. He picked up his rifle. The bulb faded to a single orange filament.

Youngman reached into Paine’s shirt pocket and took out the glassine envelope. Paine’s hand clamped around the deputy’s wrist.

“I need it!” Paine shouted.

The muzzle of Youngman’s rifle burrowed under Paine’s jaw. Paine rocked slightly back, his head against the wall. His fingers let go of Youngman, who screwed the barrel into the jaw.

“You lied,” Youngman said in a flat voice. He was sure the other man understood. “I don’t know what about, but you lied.”

He took two steps back and lowered his aim to the doctor’s belt buckle. Paine gestured with his hand and stopped himself at the glint of the hammer’s rise.

“You’re making a mistake! Deputy, I need that sample! You don’t know what you’re doing! Please!”

Youngman’s foot shoved the aluminum case over the floor.

“Go play with the Navajos. They’ll believe anything.”

Paine’s expression said he couldn’t hear Youngman over the thunder, so Youngman opened the hogan door. The storm spilled in. The road outside was a shallow river.

“You could be next,” Paine warned. At least, Youngman thought that was what he said because with the door open not even a shout was intelligible. Paine gathered his case and went into the rain, having to stop to unlock the Land Rover. Youngman watched from the hogan doorway and noticed the Health Service van pull in behind his jeep. Why, Youngman asked himself, would anyone lock his car in a place like Gilboa? He waited until the Land Rover moved away, lights on and wipers thrashing the windshield. At a distance of fifty feet, only its rear lights could be seen through the rain.

Anne Dillon threw open the door of the van. Youngman climbed in, as wet as if he’d stood under a shower, and dropped his hat and rifle onto the firewood on the backseat.

The van was better insulated than Youngman’s office. A person could talk.

“I see you’re still busy promoting tourism.” She turned to Youngman. “I’m sorry about Abner.”

“So am I.”

“But what I came for was an apology.”

“I apologize.”

“That’s not good enough. I finally get these foundation people to come all the way out here from the Midwest and the very first thing you do is insult them and embarrass me. Since when are you the guardian of all that’s sacred around this place? You made a fool of me. Then you apologize and I’m supposed to forgive you.”

“Well, you’ll try. You’ll try like hell.”

Anne’s eyes were blue, but rayed with spots of brown. Sometimes, very analytical eyes.

“You know, Youngman, that’s an incredibly cruel thing to say. I don’t have to love you. I can try like hell to stop doing that.”

“What does it matter?” he asked.

“What does that mean?”

“I mean, you’ve got one more week before you leave the reservation for good and go back to your trust fund and backgammon or whatever rich folks do in Phoenix. I thought we were going to have the week together but it looks like you’re busy with your birdwatchers, or missionaries, whoever they are. What is it they do anyway? Give money to the needy? Or only to the romantically needy? Where does their money come from?”

“Some religious groups, mostly corporations.”

“Better yet. A romantic tax deduction. That’s tops. Speaking as one of the needy, you understand. So do that, have your kicks. Better yet, share your kicks with them. White Goddess of the Hopi, saint of eye salve.”

“If we’d had the whole week together, is this what you were going to tell me?”

“What else?”

He watched the rain smashing into the windshield because she was staring at him. It took him a while to notice her eyes welling.

“No,” Youngman said. “I wouldn’t have said any of that. I’m a jerk, and I’m goddamn jealous.”

She pulled him against herself. Her fingers dug into his back and he felt a tear hot on his neck.

“Jealous I accept,” Anne whispered. “The rest you can stuff.”

“I’ll have a whole week to stuff it.”

“I wish they hadn’t come, now. They’re waiting for me.”

As they kissed, his hand slipped into her shirt and brushed a breast softly so that its tip hardened against his palm.

“It won’t be a whole week with them, just four days,” she said.

Anne shifted, stretching out on the seat.

“Maybe I should go with you.” Youngman covered her.

“Um, that kind of romantic needy they’re not ready for. That’s just my hang-up. Can they see from the trading post?”

“They can’t see a thing.”

Anne had come to the reservation two years before, using volunteer paramedical service as her escape from Phoenix and a family fortune that was based on buying desert cheap and selling it dear as test range acreage to the Air Force. Life for the Dillons was the Southwestern dream: Arabian horse shows, golf in Scottsdale, a box at the Sombrero Playhouse, and monogrammed tennis balls from Neiman-Marcus. In Anne’s eyes, the dream was a kind of sleeping sickness that infected everyone she knew. This whole class of sleepwalkers lived out their lives seemingly unconscious of Chicano barrios, black slums, and Indian poverty. By the time she was in college she’d diagnosed one peculiar syndrome of this “sleep,” the idea prevalent in this privileged class that somehow they were the true natives and that everyone else, particularly the poor of different colors, was an interloper. Hence, Chicanos were more likely to be called Mexicans. Blacks were Nigras. A dead Indian was an interesting item of Western Lore, but a live Indian was a social ill. And it was easy to live out this dream because accepting the rights of these less fortunate groups—especially the land and water rights of the Indians—led inevitably to uncomfortable sensations of guilt. Phoenix did not believe in guilt, it was not part of the life-style.

Guilt. Anne worked out of Hotevilla Pueblo on the mesa. Driving a hundred miles at a time throughout the mesa and into the desert to provide antibiotics and basic surgery to outlying pueblos, she had a great deal of time to consider social guilt as a motivation. Early on, she decided it stank. Indians stank, the pueblos stank, and the chronic running sores she dealt with day after day had a tendency to stink. After six months she thought she was ready to quit and trade in her jeans for tennis whites. From nothing less than perversity, she stayed for another six months and curious things happened. Either Indians stopped stinking, or she stopped smelling them. Increasingly she found herself surprised to be treated as a white by white tourists visiting the reservation. And she met Youngman.

Their paths had crossed a number of times before, enough to form an unspoken dislike between them. On this occasion she’d gone to the hill country around Moencopi, an area claimed by both the Hopis and Navajos, to treat a boy bitten by a rabid coyote. Navajo police and Youngman arrived to destroy the animal, which had taken refuge in a storehouse. While the Navajos waited outside the storehouse with their rifles, the Hopi deputy went in with a blanket and a pistol. At the cost of one bite through the blanket, he shot the coyote. For the next four days, Anne treated the boy and the deputy with a series of painful injections in the abdomen. On the very first day she told Youngman he deserved the pain for going into the storehouse instead of waiting. He answered that the family’s chickens and rabbit pens were at the top of the storehouse and if the coyote had broken into them half the family’s yearly food supply would have been wiped out. She was on hand with medicine, so what did he have to lose? Except pain.

Within a month, she was meeting Youngman regularly at different places on the mesa and in the desert. They reversed the usual order of a relationship, starting with the physical release of sex, and then talking and releasing loneliness. Love, each felt, came in spite of them. Now, with her leaving the Health Service and the reservation, love was nothing less than a burden, the embarrassing souvenir.

She clung to him, holding him inside her. But the storm was fading into squalls. Cold, liquid shadows ran over her arms.

“I’ve got to go. You can wait another four days, can’t you?”

“Selwyn’s girls haven’t seduced me yet.”

“Not for lack of trying. They’d kill me if they had a chance.”

“Well, watch out for falling pots.”