Nightwing (7 page)

“I really have to go.” Anne kissed him and pushed him up.

They sat up and pulled their clothes back together. The rain was easing, almost over.

“Who was that you kicked into the street?”

“Nobody. He had some phony story about a study of antibodies in the blood to find diseases.”

Anne buttoned the rest of her shirt in silence.

“How do you know it was phony?” She brushed her hair back.

“I just did.”

“Youngman, that’s exactly the study the Health Service was supposed to do years ago. And you kicked him out? Don’t you know how many Hopis I have to treat for pernicious anemia or blood parasites?”

She felt her anger rising, she couldn’t help it.

“It was a phony story,” Youngman repeated.

“How many go blind every year from venereal disease, or deaf from aural atresia? Why didn’t you let me talk to him? He didn’t have any accreditation?”

“A letter from Window Rock,” Youngman admitted. He didn’t mention what Paine was doing to Abner, he didn’t want any defense.

“Oh, that was it. He only had a letter from the Navajos and that wasn’t good enough for you. Thank you very much. Maybe I would have had a different opinion.”

With every word, she felt him withdrawing and shutting her out. What’s the use, she thought. Together, they were the perfect example of centrifugal force. Why was she exhausting herself against it? Youngman fumbled in the glove compartment for cigarettes.

“Smoke your own,” Anne said.

“Yours are stale.”

“So?”

“Might as well smoke them now.”

Besides his stubbornness, his habits of poverty also irritated her. In fact, smoking up stale cigarettes was one of his prison traits.

“You don’t trust Navajos, you don’t trust whites. Are you paranoid? You hate outside help so much, why do you tolerate me?” she asked.

“I love you.”

“It’s that simple?”

“What could be simpler?”

“Well, I’m leaving this place for good in seven days, Youngman. Are you coming with me?”

“To Phoenix?”

“It doesn’t have to be Phoenix. It can be anywhere. Mexico, if you want.”

“And what would I do there?”

“You happen to be one of the very few Hopis who could make it off the reservation. You know photography, painting. I have enough money for the two of us until you get started.”

“You could stay here, you know.”

“I have stayed. I’ve been the audience for all your battles against the imaginary slights of anyone who tries to help you. Like the way you treated Franklin.”

“He’s going to help me?” Youngman laughed.

“His foundation represents, among other sources, a number of drug companies. What the Hopi people need is a donation of medical supplies and money for a clinic of your own. I was hoping that the last thing I did before I left was guarantee that donation, but so far I’ve spent most of the morning apologizing for you.”

“Don’t!” Youngman’s face darkened. “Don’t ever apologize for me to those people.”

Anne looked out the side window, towards a rainbow that was already fast evaporating. She was more depressed than angry. “Those people” were the pahans, Anglos, whites. By some fluke, Youngman didn’t include her with her own type. The day would come of course, when he would . . . and she was begging him to follow her off the reservation? How crazy was she?

“Maybe it is just sex,” she whispered to herself.

“Maybe.” Youngman’s hearing was too good.

She was damned if she was going to cry in front of him again, so she found the key and started the engine.

“We’ll desert camp for a couple of days and go on to Joe Momoa’s to fish. We’ll come down to the Snake Dance with the Momoas. I’ll see you there.”

“Don’t go.”

“Why not?” Anne rested her hands on the steering wheel.

Youngman didn’t know. He’d said it quickly, not as a conclusion of any thought but from a sudden rush of images through his mind. Joe Momoa’s horses, a sand painting, Abner’s eyes, a stain of black pitch. The smell of that pitch.

“Look,” Anne touched Youngman’s hand. “When I get back we’ll go off for a couple of days alone.”

“It’s not that.”

“Then what?”

Mostly the smell. Once inhaled, it seemed to work into the blood.

“Something Abner said yesterday.”

“Oh.” She could see them. Two Indians drunk under the sun. “That’s it?”

“Why don’t you just go to the mesa now and wait for the dance? If they want to see a lot of Indians, that’s the place to go.”

“They want to go camping.” Anne shook her head and put the van into gear. When she said nothing else, Youngman climbed out and shut the door.

He looked through the window. His black hair hung damp across his forehead. From the driver’s seat of the van, he seemed hardly bigger than a boy.

Anne could think of nothing else to say except that he was wrong. He was too bitter, too silent, too lean, too dark. Too Indian.

Youngman watched her drive to Selwyn’s and then went back into the hogan.

The dead were supposed to be buried before sundown. Youngman didn’t believe in that sort of stuff but Abner did and Abner, after all, was the dead man.

Youngman pulled up a floorboard where there was still a pool of water underneath and washed Abner’s hands and face. With the white paint from Selwyn’s, he decorated Abner’s arms and legs with dotted lines and over Abner’s left eye drew a half moon, the insignia of a priest. He combed Abner’s hair and strung feather fluffs to the hair, wrists, and ankles. He filled the dead man’s palms with cornmeal. Luckily, rigor mortis was past because he had to bind the fingers tight around the cornmeal. He rubbed the rest of the cornmeal over Abner’s face, which was difficult where the flesh was shredded. With his knife he cut holes into the white cotton sack so that it made a “cloud mask” for Abner’s head. Nothing went to waste in the desert, not even the dead; they were obligated to return as rain. After he wrapped Abner in the sheet, he bent and tied the legs into a kneeling position. Abner made a small corpse. Youngman carried him under one arm and a planting stick with the other out to the jeep.

Youngman drove about fifteen miles out of Gilboa until he reached a rise crowned yellow by paloverde trees. There he dug down through two inches of wet soil and three and a half feet of dry sand, laid Abner in the grave in an upright position facing east, and sat down for a smoke.

“Well, uncle, you should have some family here to say a few words. I guess you’re stuck with me. Frankly, I’d rather ask you some questions than give a speech. I sure as hell don’t know if you were a good man or not. To tell you the truth, I don’t even know how important that is.

“You fool them. Don’t come back as a cloud. You come back as a cactus, huh.”

Within the eyeholes of the cloud mask Abner’s lids were shut. A pink spot appeared on the mask around the cheek. As that spot blossomed, other spots grew. Abner was still bleeding.

“Hey, old man, you’re dead,” Youngman said.

Not only the mask was turning red, the sheet was as well. Points of rosy red that spread. Youngman didn’t have the nerve to lift the mask so he lowered himself into the grave and pulled open the sheet. All the wounds that covered Abner’s chest and arms were wet and running. Maybe the ride in the jeep opened the cuts, Youngman told himself. But dead cuts don’t bleed. He reached inside the sheet to Abner’s wrist, which was wet and cold and had no pulse. Then he saw Abner’s hand. It had snapped the string that had closed it and lay open on clots of blood-soaked cornmeal.

As the sun set, an evening wind followed, swaying the branches of the paloverde trees like yellow froth. Youngman filled in the grave and covered it with stones to discourage scavengers. On top of the stones he stood a planting stick, the symbolic ladder from the grave to the spirit world. Wind rattled the stick against the rocks.

“Relax, Abner. Let go of that stick.” The stick stilled. “Try being dead for a while. You might prefer it.”

Youngman drove the same way back to Gilboa. He stopped once to look behind. By then, the last flush of sunlight was hitting the rise, turning the paloverde trees a brilliant red.

According to the Koran, Jesus created the first bat. During the fast of Ramadan, when no believer may eat from sunrise to sunset, Christ was in the hills outside Jerusalem and couldn’t see the western horizon. Taking clay in his hands he made a winged creature into which he blew life. This creature—a bat—flew into a cave from which it emerged each nightfall to flutter around Jesus and tell him of the setting sun.

The ancient Egyptians regarded bats because of their nipples as examples of maternal care. The Chinese character for bat was also used for “happiness,” and some South Pacific peoples prized bats as sexual totems.

But in the New World, the bat was god. His Mayan name was Zotzilaha. Whole cities and peoples bore his name and throughout Mexico temples carried his image: a striding man with the wings, face, teeth, and tongue of a bat, holding a severed human head in one hand and a heart in the other. Zotzilaha, the Bat God who controlled fire, was transformed into the Aztec’s supreme Sun God, Huitzilopochtli, who demanded sacrificial mounds of human hearts cut out by priests attired in bat-skin capes. In 1519, the year prophesied for the return of a lost White Brother, Cortez arrived in Mexico. Armed with a prophecy, and aided by rebellious tribes, he took Montezuma prisoner. The Spanish chronicled attacks of “bloodsucking” bats, but by then the Aztec Empire had fallen.

Gods die, peoples change, and nature persists. For centuries after Cortez, the vampire bats held sway in the Mexican jungle and in the last twenty years, for no reason discernible to man, had been reported moving steadily north. It was a migration of the night, recorded only by random and unscientific accounts of slaughtered goats, cattle, even people in the Sonora mountains.

Now in a new environment of desert and mesas, the vampires hunted as they always did, with patience and intelligence. They passed over two flocks of unsheared sheep and a dead rabbit, poisoned and set out for coyotes. Arroyos were dark ribbons in the moonlight. Tiger salamanders stirred in the damp beds of the arroyos, feeding off insects and being fed on by night snakes. The bats slipped untouched by the spines of fifty-foot saguaros. The petals of night-blooming cereus spread milky white.

A different sound mixed with the high-pitched chatter of the bats. It traveled on the breeze from miles away, a nasally plaintive country-and-western song. As one, the thousand bats veered, their own chatter increasing in intensity, the membranes of their powerful wings stroking faster. This certain kind of sound, they knew, meant Man. Man and his animals, conveniently gathered. A lake of life.

Two miles ahead, Isa Loloma, fourteen years old, his arms and back aching from a day of shearing sheep and binding their greasy wool, sat in the cab of a Dodge pickup sipping from a warm can of orange soda and listening to his transistor radio. The truck had no engine. Its wheel hubs sat on blocks. Its whole purpose was simply to scare away coyotes and that purpose it served very well. Isa’s nights were long and lonely.

The night played tricks. Sometimes the Navajo station out of Gallup would fade and in its place would come stations from Houston or Kansas City. Voices would talk to him about steak palaces and local astronauts. Then he only had to lay his hands on the truck’s steering wheel and close his eyes to imagine that he was driving his own Eldorado down the freeway of some Anglo city, that he was wearing a custom shirt with mother of pearl snaps and sitting on an alligator skin wallet stuffed with $20 bills.

Tonight, the Gallup transmission droned steadily on. Every Piggly Wiggly Supermarket in Bernalillo County, the voice from the ether said, was pleased to honor food stamps. There was going to be a social dance at the Tuba City Chapter. Sports results were brought courtesy of Massey-Ferguson tractors.

Isa made the soda last. When his eyelids started to grow heavy, he climbed out of the truck and rubbed his legs and ran in place to start his blood moving. Still yawning, he drew his father’s old Browning Auto-5 shotgun from the blanket on the cab seat. The sheep were quiet. He’d take one turn around the flock and come back for a nap.

Something fluttered by him. A nighthawk, he thought. The only problem with sheep was during the spring, when coyotes came in for the lambs, or during shearing if the clipping was done badly and cut up the sheep, then the smell of blood would make coyotes bold. But Isa was a good clipper. He left the sheep shorn down to their pink skin without a nick.

He walked for about fifty yards before he became very awake. He could hardly see the sheep, although he heard a constant rustling. The sheep were there, he knew they wouldn’t leave the grass. There was that rustling, a busy, papery rustling that came from every direction. He fought a first, childish impulse to run. And then, just a few feet in front of him, he saw the pale blue of a sleeping sheep’s head. Baby, he scolded himself.

Strangely, he could make out the legs but not the body of the sheep. He could see the head of another sheep, but not its body either. A wing grazed the boy’s long hair, fanning his cheek. Something touched his foot. There was a rusted flashlight with weak batteries in his pocket. He aimed the flashlight at the nearer sheep. A pale, yellow beam picked out the steadily breathing nostrils of the sheep. The light slid back over the curly head.