Empire of Dust (18 page)

"All you have to do is prove they're manmade, and we're finished with the drawings."

"Not that easy. You know what happened with the crop circles? By the time the hoaxers came forward and actually showed how they did it, a whole cottage industry had sprung up. People were writing books and magazines about this crap. And instead of saying, 'Oh yeah, boy, we got fooled, are we suckers,' they said that just because some of the circles were hoaxes doesn't mean they all were. If people want to believe, they're going to believe, even if you turn on the lights when the medium's got the luminescent ghost puppet over his hand. 'Oh, look what the spirits did to your hand, oh Great Bamboozle!' "

Laika laughed in spite of herself. "The only one we have to convince is Skye. From there on, it's up to him to educate the masses."

Yazzie was where he'd said he would be when Laika had talked to him the night before. His big white Plymouth was parked along Route 118, just off the exit from Route 40. He was leaning on the car, and he waved when he saw them.

There were dozens of cars parked along the road, and several vans that Laika thought might contain video crews. As they joined Yazzie and walked toward the drawing itself, she saw many people taking photographs, and two men with video cameras. The videographers were accompanied by necktie-wearing men with microphones and designer hair, who were interviewing some of the onlookers.

"We'd prefer to stay out of camera range," Laika told Yazzie.

He nodded. "The badge won't let any of them near you. This is reservation land, after all."

"And you're a reservation cop," Joseph said. Yazzie grinned.

As they drew closer to the giant drawing, they saw that it had been defaced in many places by footprints, and that people had been digging in the trench. There were some holes that were over three feet deep. A man in a baseball cap with a cartoon drawing of an oval-faced, slit-eyed alien was sitting on the edge of one of the holes, sweating profusely and holding a shovel across his lap. "What are you digging for?" Laika asked him.

"You a reporter?" the man asked in return, in a flat Texas accent.

"No. I'm . . ." She was about to utilize her cover and say that she was with the government, but then she remembered the government conspiracies most saucer nuts believed in. "We're just curious about all this. You think it's, uh. . . ." She pointed upward.

The man snorted a laugh. "What else would it be? As for what I'm digging for, it's glass."

"Glass?" Joseph said, and then nodded. "Ah, fused sand, right?"

"You betcha. I know for certain that this thing couldn'ta been done without
enormous
heat and pressure, and if I find some glass, that'll prove it."

"Well, good luck," Joseph said, and they walked on. When they were at least a hundred yards from the sightseers, Joseph took some samples of the sandy soil in glass tubes. "I know what I'm going to find," he said. "Sand."

"I take it you don't think this was made by aliens," Yazzie said.

"Nope. Do you?"

"Nope. I have to go with that medicine man—Indian gods." Then he chuckled to show he was joking. "Nah, probably just some coyotes."

"Pretty damn big coyotes," Joseph said, straightening up and putting the cap on the tube.

"Not real coyotes—tricksters. In the Indian legends?"

Laika nodded. "The eternal prankster, like Till Eulenspiegel or Punch or Brer Rabbit."

"Indian kids can get pretty bored if they're out of work," Yazzie said, looking at the broad expanse of desert and the thick trench cut through it in the shape of a bird. "Still, this is a massive piece of work. Don't know how they'd do it in one night."

"Maybe we should ask Tagore over there," Joseph said, pointing to a man who was seated in the lotus position on the sand, near the center of the giant bird's chest. He was wearing no shirt, and his sunburnt chest was an angry red in contrast to his brown arms and neck. A tattered knapsack sat next to him.

"'Morning," Laika said. "You look like you've been here awhile."

"Since it happened," the man said in a voice as dry as the sand. "I saw it happen."

"You
saw
it?" Joseph said. "When it was made?"

The man nodded and tried to lick his lips. From the knapsack he took a plastic bottle of tepid water and drank just enough to moisten his mouth so that he could speak more easily. "I'm gonna be on television," he said. "The guys with the cameras? They're from local NBC and ABC stations. They think it might be on the national news. I won't get to see it, though. I'm not leaving here until they come." He looked up at the cloudless sky. "And then I'm going with them."

Laika knelt next to him. "When did you see it? That night?"

The man nodded. "It was late—early in the morning, I don't know when. I was on my way, gonna go down to Mexico, goin' without my lights, you can do that here, you know. It's so cool, no cars, just drivin' through the dark . . . and then I saw it. I saw the mother ship. It was just so quiet, man . . . and so goddam big . . ."

The man was tripping, Laika thought. He might have been on drugs at the time, but now he was zonked out on exposure and heat exhaustion. He was flying high, and he was going to crash hard. But before she helped him, she had to find out what he had seen. "This mother ship," she said, "what did it look like?"

"Oh, Christ, it was big, and lights all around, like in
Close Encounters
, you know? And then it sent down the baby ship, man, and I watched it, and it made the bird, it just skated over the surface, and wherever it went it drew the picture, man."

"Can you describe it?" asked Laika.

The man thought for a full minute before he answered. "No . . . it was just lotsa lights and
big
, and like, quiet, but I heard this, like, low
roar
, like something under the earth. . . ."

"Maybe the creatures came up from under the desert," Joseph said, earning a dirty look from Laika, and a look of interest from the man.

"Maybe they
did
," he said, then frowned. "But I saw 'em fly away. But maybe they
came
from under the ground, like the center of the earth, where it's hollow inside. . . ."

"I think we ought to get Ignatius Donnelly here to a hospital," said Joseph.

The man waved an arm weakly. "Nah, I'm okay. They're gonna come back, and I wanta
be
here. I think they'll take me then."

"Yeah, I have a hunch they will," said Joseph. "But they're going to take your corpse if you don't get out of the sun and get some liquids into you."

"He's right," Laika said. "You're sick. You need some medical treatment or you're going to get sicker."

"I don't know who you are," the man said, more testily, "but I'm not goin'
no
where!"

"Afraid you are," said Yazzie. "You're on Indian land, and I'm Officer Joshua Yazzie. Now, by my authority, I'm telling you that you either submit to us, get in our car, and let us take you to a doctor, or I'll have to call an ambulance, and you'll be financially responsible for that."

"Oh yeah? Well, you're gonna have to carry me out of here . . . chief!" the man snarled, swaying slightly.

Yazzie looked down at him with seeming amusement. "'Chief.' Nice. Never heard that before." Then he looked around to make sure no person or camera was watching them, leaned down slowly, as though he were going to whisper in the man's ear, and cold-cocked him on his right temple with the heel of his fist.

The man's eyes rolled up and he fell into Yazzie's waiting arms. Yazzie swept him up as easily as if he were carrying a baby, and smiled at Laika and Joseph. "I didn't want him to make a scene and attract attention, and it was only a matter of time before he lost consciousness anyway. Can we all agree that he fainted?"

Laika looked at the man's forehead. There was no trace of a mark. "Dead away," she said.

"Keeled right over," Joseph added, with an appraising look at Yazzie that told Laika he wouldn't use the chief appellation again, even behind Yazzie's back.

"I'll take him into Gallup—it's the closest hospital," Yazzie said. "You two find enough to amuse yourselves here for a while?"

Laika nodded. "When we get finished, we'll go to the first site. West on 40, a few miles this side of Winslow." When Yazzie and the man he carried were out of earshot, Laika looked hard at Joseph. "What do you think?"

"About what Looney Tunes said? I don't take it seriously at all. The guy was driving in the dark, probably going down to Mexico for peyote buttons. I don't think he saw shit."

"He thinks he did."

"Yeah, and he also thinks that the earth is hollow and that E.T. is coming back for him. And his description sounded like he really has seen
Close Encounters
too many times—he even mentioned the movie. The dude is not stable."

Laika and Joseph walked the entire perimeter of the drawing, but could find no spot where entrance or egress had been made to the whole. Much of the area had been trod upon, but the marks were deep enough that mere feet could not have erased them. Still, they both wished that they had investigated before hundreds of people had tramped around. If there were any clues, they were long since gone.

They talked to several people on their circuit of the giant bird, but in Joseph's words, most of them made the sunburned man look like Martin Gardner. Three men wearing white shirts and ties called themselves
silicalogists
, a play on the British cereologists, and had several battery-powered devices with switches and gauges, supposedly able to measure energy bursts remaining from extraterrestrial intrusions. They too were proud to boast that the television people had interviewed them.

When Joseph asked them if they had received any positive indications, they were quick to show him the needles jumping to the right of their gauges. But when he asked to examine their instruments, they declined, saying that they were too delicate for inexperienced people to handle. Joseph nodded smugly and walked away with Laika. "Their fingers were always on the bottom of the box," he said. "That's where the button is to make the needles jump. God, what a bunch of lamers. They're even too obvious for the Fox Network."

T
ony met Miriam Dominick in what passed for the lobby of her hotel. Two Indians, both wearing cowboy hats, were sitting on a sofa, and Miriam had been occupying a chair six feet away. When Tony entered, she was leaning forward as though she had been listening to the Indians, though Tony had heard neither one talking.

When she saw Tony, she smiled, stood up, and said, "See you later, fellas," to the Indians, who merely looked at her, following her with their eyes as she left the room.

"Friends of yours?" he asked.

She nodded. "I met them both a couple of years ago. They live here, share a room."

"Not on the reservation?"

"Not every Indian lives on the rez. It's up to them, where they're most comfortable. Danny and Silas like it in Gallup." She sighed. "There's not as much liquor on the rez."

"They alcoholics?"

"Yes. It's not a universal addiction among the Navajo, but there are a lot more than there should be." She shrugged. "I used to think maybe I could do something about it. I know better now." Then she brightened. "So what are we doing today? Looking for places where this man hung out?"

Tony had told her on the phone the night before about Ralph Begay and his drinking habits. "Yeah. Let's start with the Wet Moccasin."

It looked a little more upscale than most of the town's many bars. A hand-painted sign hung out front with the bar's name and a picture of a tan moccasin dripping water, whose painted drops ran along the bottom of the sign and down the brick wall. The front window was tinted a dark brown, with a neon Budweiser sign glowing behind it. There were no Indians sitting on the steps, as was the case with so many of the other bars.

Even at ten in the morning, the bar had a few customers. Three white men in T-shirts and cowboy hats sat in a booth nursing beers and sandwiches, and Tony guessed that they had gotten off nightshift work. Two elderly Indian men were sitting at a small round table, a pitcher of beer between them, and several people, white and Indian, were at the bar.

Behind it was a big white man with a dark tan. He glanced up from the morning paper when Tony and Miriam entered, and his eyes remained for a moment on Miriam before he looked at Tony and asked, "Help you?"