Nightwing (21 page)

“Where’s your radio transmitter, Selwyn?”

“Broken. I showed it to those Navajos and they tried to fix it, but they couldn’t. It’s broken for good. I guess. You just missed them. They’re looking for you.”

“Give me some rifle shells and some .44’s, too.” Youngman still had Joe’s Colt. “And Spam, a six-pack, and salt tablets.”

Selwyn swept the fly away and started filling the counter.

“Regular radio’s working. I heard about that fire at Momoa’s place.”

“What fire?”

“Whole family burned up,” Selwyn dusted off the beer cans. “Last night. You didn’t hear about that? Well, you wouldn’t care, you hated that bastard as much as me.”

Youngman wiped a display case and squinted through the glass.

“You still got those transistor radios. I’ll take one and some batteries. Put it on my account.”

“Sure, what else? You know, Youngman, I hope someone invents cash soon.”

Youngman took the goods and went out to the porch.

“Been up since five,” Selwyn followed him, bathrobe flopping around bare feet. “One of the first signs of growing old, insomnia. You in trouble, Youngman?”

The deputy was searching the sky in case one of the copters doubled back. The shadows of dawn were already drying up.

“You in trouble, huh?”

“Yeah, but no more than anyone else. Take care of yourself, old boy.” Youngman stuffed his purchases except for the transistor radio into his bedroll and slid behind the wheel. “I always meant to tell you, nothing wrong with your daughters. Keep their windows shut tonight.”

“What?”

But the Indian’s jeep was gathering speed, headed on the road west.

Anne listened to the van radio through the shattered windshield.

She’d buried Franklin in the hour before dawn and spent a day’s worth of strength. She’d spent the next day’s strength simply washing herself with gasoline siphoned from the fuel tank. By now, they had to be searching for her, though. By now, Youngman was coming.

The radio accompanied her reverie.

. . . As you all know, yesterday’s Rain Dance at Shongopovi was marred by the tragic death of seven elders at the pueblo. At first it was feared that the deceased were victims of swine flu, which is particularly dangerous to persons of advanced age. Autopsies showed, however, that the seven died of food poisoning from spoiled foods left in their ceremonial chamber. Other tragic news comes from Dinnebito Wash, where the popular family of Joe Momoa died in a fire at their ranch home. The fire started in the basement, according to official spokesmen of the Tuba City Fire Department, and then spread rapidly through the ventilating system. Four persons died. And now here’s a message from Hubbell’s Trading Post, where you’ll always find . . .

Heat waves began percolating from the sand. Anne’s knees were cut up from scrambling after lizards. Tentatively, she felt her armpits and groin for swelling. Nothing yet. It was funny, she thought. She’d always been aware of the endemic plague in the desert and not once had she seen a real case. Then a week before she leaves the desert, a man dies of plague before her eyes and she doesn’t even recognize the signs. The lassitude. Fever. Buboes. The word “bubo” was funny. Like bauble. An adornment.

Motionless, she again experienced the sense that she was vanishing into the desert. Part of her found this disorienting but comforting. This “oneness” was the Hopi Way, and she was amused that she’d only felt it on the point of death, and she considered that this might be the secret of the Hopis’ super-religiosity, because they were always on the point of extinction.

Another part of her continued to calculate survival. Usually, there was rain within two or three days after a Snake Dance. It was the time of year, of course. With enough water to drink and cloud cover, she might be able to walk the desert. On the other hand, it might be wiser to collect as much rainwater as she could and stay by the van since that was what Youngman would be looking for. He’d be coming from Dinnebito Wash if he’d gone there to meet her at Momoa’s. Only, the radio said Momoa was dead.

The sand rippled. A small mirage lapped at the two new graves. By noon, she knew, the whole desert would look like an ocean, like the ocean it once was a million years ago. Momoa was dead, she repeated to herself. Burned. So if she and Franklin and the others had reached the ranch and bunked over, they would have died in the fire anyway.

The radio went on, draining the last of the van’s battery.

. . . That was Johnny Cash’s latest. Johnny’s going to be at the All Indian Powwow in Flagstaff, by the way, and you’re not going to want to miss that. A time to get together with old friends and make new ones. Hey, who says you can’t get a good recapped tire for half the price you’d pay for a new one . . .

A skink twisted its head to study Anne. She didn’t have the energy to reach for her fishing pole. If Momoa was dead, how would Youngman know she didn’t get out of the desert? She tried to concentrate, but half her mind was wandering on its own. Answers slipped away from her grasp.

. . . A health advisory note I want to pass along. Officials say they haven’t determined the source of the food-poisoning incident on the mesa. There may be more cases. This is serious. Signs to look out for, they say, are stomach pains, dizziness, fever, or any suspicious marks or swellings, or throwing up or diarrhea. If you have or you know anyone who has these symptoms, contact the medical clinics in Ship Rock or Window Rock or here in Tuba City at once. Say, wouldn’t you like to get in on the CB radio fun . . .

No mention of a missing camping party. No mention of rain. It occurred to her it was important for her to be rescued, not only for her own sake but to warn about the plague. About the bats. Bats didn’t carry rodent fleas so the bats and the plague were unrelated, but . . . The effort of thought was tiring her out. It was so much easier to watch the growing mirage, to lose herself in it, to let her mind float. Hallucination was a sign of dehydration: a lack of water changed the whole chemical balance of the body, but it was so seductive. She enjoyed thinking she might see Youngman coming, wading towards her through a dusty surf.

Her mind went on in a crueler direction. There was a story Youngman once told her about a young man who went to the Maski Canyon, arriving at night at a fine, big pueblo built underneath the ground. Smoke rose from chimneys, children ran up and down ladders and beacon fires burned on the roofs. The young man was not only welcomed in this strange pueblo beneath the earth, he was washed and fed and taken to a great dance hall where festivities were just beginning. He’d never seen such laughing and dancing, and beautiful girls who ran around singing and joking, pointing to each other and shouting, “Hapa! Hapa! Is! Is!” “Dead! Dead! This! This!” The fun went on for most of the night, and when he was tired he was led to bed by the two most beautiful girls. They removed his clothes and theirs. He kissed their lips and breasts and spread their legs, making love to each girl in turn until they all fell asleep, the girls lying on top of him. He woke, shielding his eyes because the daylight was much brighter than he expected, and he saw that the reason was there was no ceiling. The room which was so fine at night was now filled with sand. Parts of the wall were collapsed and the windows were broken, and bits of the rafters that were left were falling down in the wind onto the floor. He sat up, and bones fell from his chest. The entire room was full of skeletons, two of them embracing him in their arms. In fear and disgust, he broke their clutch and ran . . .

Youngman wasn’t coming, she told herself. No one was, not in time. Not until she was something to be shoveled instead of loved. Her head rocked back and forth and she heard the clicking of lizard claws running over the van. She didn’t hear the fading voice of the radio.

. . . Another health advisory to pass along. A jack-rabbit turned in to health authorities has proven to have an animal form of plague. Hopi Deputy Youngman Duran turned in the rabbit and he is now being sought by authorities so they can administer necessary injections of vaccine. This is an infectious disease and people are advised not to approach the deputy, only to inform authorities of his whereabouts . . .

Instead of staying on flat ground, Youngman deflated his tires and crossed as many dunes as he could on the chance he might be able to spot the van. Or smoke signals or the glint of a mirror. Or vultures. From time to time, he turned on the transistor radio to monitor what Chee was doing, and also because he knew if the campers came out of the desert Chee would broadcast their arrival. The jeep whined, sliding sideways down through mesquite, chewing the brush in its wheels.

Youngman felt no bitterness towards Chee for lies and betrayal: it was as pointless as the desert being bitter at the sun. Survival was not a matter of morals. A snake didn’t debate the ethics of eating a ground squirrel; it was eat or die. The Navajos, 135,000 of them, were surviving. The Hopis, 6,000 of them, were not. They could blame the Navajos, blame the pahans, blame witches. It was the desert, their own home, that was killing them. It was a changing desert, drier since the Navajos and whites stole the rivers, seized water the same way a snake bit.

Staying alive supplied its own morality. By that standard, Chee was a hero and Youngman was, perhaps, a coward. That’s what they called him in the Army. Heap big coward.

The jeep would only do 50. Youngman kept his foot down, relying on his steering. Running away, it could be termed, he thought. Avoiding the responsibility of falling into lockstep once again. That’s why he’d come back to the desert in the first place, to escape a world he didn’t fit into. Probably, he admitted to himself, that was why he’d fought quarantine. Not from courage but because the threat of confinement, any kind of confinement after the years in the stockade, was enough to make him shake like a boy. He wasn’t even brave enough to face quarantine knowing that he had the answer. The answer to the bites, the running blood, the lack of tracks, the lights at Momoa’s, the night Abner died. He had it, and his only solace for not turning back was that no one would believe him because it was impossible. An impossible nightmare.

At midday, the sun seemed to pulse yellow and huge. Not only shadows, objects themselves shrank. It was a time when even lizards crouched under rocks. Prairie dogs and sand boas dug deep away from the heat.

Youngman was crossing a dry alkali hole when he heard the jeep’s engine block crack, and he shifted to neutral and rolled an extra hundred yards. The hood was too hot to touch so he kicked it open. The block was close to red hot, and crawling under the jeep on his back he found a hole in the radiator that a rock had punched and drained the radiator dry.

He rolled away and closed his eyes. Gilboa was thirty miles to the east, and the mesa forty miles north. There was a federal highway forty miles west.

“Damn.”

He’d done it. He’d finally reached nowhere, with no way out but to follow his own tracks.

Was it worth it?

Hayden Paine stood on the roof of his Land Rover.

Field glasses accentuated heat waves. Saguaro cactus seemed to undulate and dance, mesquite and yucca became floating islands, a canyon twenty miles off turned into a stately sailing ship standing above its own reflection. Occasionally, he thought he caught true movement out of the corner of his eye. He’d turn the glasses and the movement would fade, a chimera. Besides, his interest was the canyons. He hadn’t come to them as much as he’d been drawn. Each sunset, he’d tracked the path of the bats on his oscilloscope. Each sunrise, he’d driven another ten miles on a predicated path and tracked the bats again on the flight homeward. Studying the black and brick-red escarpments of the canyons, his excitement grew.