Nightwing (9 page)

“You’re taking too many chances.” Joe Paine clung to the wall. “Ochay—”

“If I can do it, so can he.”

“But we’re running out of air. I suggest—”

“But you’re not the leader of this team. I am.”

Paine pushed on. As they went deeper into the cave, the ridge narrowed to twelve inches, to ten, to six. Paine had to drive in a piton every second step, while his father and Ochay struggled behind with the canisters.

“He’s scared,” his father whispered to Paine. “You should understand that. He’s scared of you. I think I’m scared of you now, too.”

“I can do it without you.”

“Could you?”

In overhead grottoes, shapes twisted, ears attuned to human voices. Even through his mask, Paine could smell the change in the ammonia, getting fouler, more penetrating.

“This is the last cave you go into. I’m going to see to that,” Joe Paine said.

“We’re almost there.”

It was the end of the rope, not the diminishing air, that finally halted Paine.

“Madre de Dios,” Ochay was sobbing.

Paine had brought a selection of wet and dry poisons in the expedition’s trucks. For a cavern as large as this, he’d selected Cyanogas. The bottom half of each tank was compressed air, the top half a compartment of poisonous dust. He strapped the two canisters together so that they’d lie flat and lowered them by a separate rope from the last piton until their tops hung level with the ridge. After he adjusted the tank nozzles to achieve a ninety-degree range, he set the timer on each nozzle at thirty minutes. When the timers ticked down, the tanks would release a hundred-foot spray of Cyanogas which, in contact with the cavern’s moisture, would change into hydrocyanic acid lethal to every life-form it touched, including the men who brought it. The strapping and adjustments Paine made with a mechanical deliberateness.

“Por favor . . .” Ochay pleaded.

“We’re heading back,” Joe Paine told his son. “Maybe when you and I get to Mexico City, we’ll keep on going to the States.”

Paine wasn’t listening. He remained alone to make certain both timers were ticking down. When he was sure, he shined his hand lantern up to where the roof seemed to be covered by jagged brown stones. Then one of the stones spread its wings and shifted to bare its teeth at the light. Paine turned the lamp away before any more vampires were disturbed.

He released himself from the rope and knotted it to the last piton. His father and Ochay were about thirty feet away. They were making better time going than coming, already nearing the pearly stalactite they’d claimed they couldn’t clear. He checked the gauge of his air tank. Twenty minutes. Just enough time.

From the sudden lack of tension on the strung rope, before he’d seen it happen Paine knew someone was gone. With his lantern, he picked out legs flailing in mid-air, blackness, and the solid impact of a body hitting at the end of a long drive. Then the beam found Ochay, who’d cried all during his climb and never uttered a word when he slipped. He was sinking into the ooze.

“Spider!” Joe Paine shouted. “Spider on the rope.”

The rope jerked again in Paine’s hands and went slack.

“Hayden! Hurry up!”

Joe Paine hung three feet below the ridge on a thin shelf. Paine moved arm over arm along the rope.

“I’m slipping.”

Paine could see his father’s fingers spread flat over the slick rime of the limestone, giving ground. A tarantula, ten inches across at the legs, darted along the ridge towards Paine. He stomped it under his boot.

“Give me your hand.” He reached down.

“Can’t reach.”

Paine wrapped the piton rope twice around his left wrist and leaned as far as he could. His father heaved himself up, stretched a hand that was too short and too wet for Paine to get a grip on. The two men looked at each other for a moment and then Joe Paine started sliding. He slid down the incline of the cave, dropping ten or fifteen feet at a time and then sliding again until, very small in the beam of Paine’s lantern, he hit the bottom.

“Hayden! Throw me something!”

Paine wrenched the rope, almost losing his own balance as pitons sprang out of the soft limestone. He tied the slack rope around his axe and threw the axe down. It swayed at its limit of fifteen feet over his father’s head.

“They’re all over me! Jesus, they’re eating me alive!”

Ochay’s axe was still on the ridge. Paine slammed it deep into the limestone and hung himself by it. His own axe now dangled five feet over his father. He pulled his mask off.

“Get to the wall! Climb!”

“I can’t see! Hayden, they’re . . . Oh, God! . . . No!”

“Climb!”

“Oh, God!”

Silence, until the last call.

“Hayden!”

He woke, shaking as if in convulsions, a cramped hand locked around the leg of a truck seat. On his hands and knees, still trembling, he crawled to the Rover’s food locker and poured a quart of water over his head. He dug his fists into his eyes, erasing his father and Ochay and the others. It took him a minute to open and spill out the Valiums.

Had to sleep. Had to sleep. But, please, God, no more dreams. If he could just last until night.

“Don’t forget to pick me up on the way back,” Selwyn asked as he and Esther and Mae got out of the jeep at the base of the mesa, where Esther’s sister’s family of eight lived in an aluminum trailer, which was a runway of small children between the beer cooler and the television. Wearing gift shop headdresses, the children converged on Selwyn and began pommelling him with rubber tomahawks.

“And never intermarry,” Selwyn groaned.

Youngman drove alone back into the desert where the Snake Clan was rounding up snakes.

Cecil Somiviki and his younger brother Powell were sitting on the open tailgate of Cecil’s station wagon. Between them was a canvas sack that constantly shifted from the movements of the snakes inside—diamondback and prairie rattlers, bullsnakes, whipsnakes, garter snakes, but mostly small Hopi rattlers. The brothers were both stripped down to bathing suits and leather breech clouts; Cecil had a Stetson on and Powell wore sunglasses. From time to time, the older brother doused the sack with water to keep the snakes cool.

“What’s new?” Cecil greeted Youngman. He was tribal sheriff and, on the side, sold propane gas to the pueblos from his station wagon.

“Abner Tasupi died.”

“Son of a bitch! How’d that happen?”

“Some kind of animal attack. He was all chewed up.”

“Son of a bitch!”

Powell said nothing. He was nineteen and he frowned studiously over the tribal newspaper
Qua’ Toqti, The Eagle’s Cry,
as if conversation was a distraction below his dignity.

“Man, he was a crazy mean fucker. Oh, he was wild. Well, that’s the best thing I heard today.”

“He was just an old man, Cecil.”

“He was a killer. Everybody knows that. A witch.”

“You don’t believe that shit.”

“I don’t believe it, but it’s true. Why do you think we kicked him out? Oh, he was always up in Maski Canyon where the ghost pueblos are. Come back after he made up some corpse poison. I bet he killed fifteen, twenty men, more. There was a man he hated, he’d turn hisself into a black dog and pull the poor bastard right over the edge of the mesa. Even the headpounders were afraid of him. By the way, that Walker Chee was around and he wants your ass.”

“It’s not the first time.”

“This time he says you roughed up some pahan. I don’t want to know about it, but stop it. And what about Joe Momoa? Why are you always rubbing folks the wrong way? You always pick the wrong folks, too. Learn to get along, for my sake.”

A Snake priest came up to the station wagon. He had his arms outstretched and three or four rattlers in each hand, the diamondbacks pale and heavy, a sidewinder rough-scaled and horned, all of them twisting ineffectually. Cecil opened the sack while Powell picked up an eagle feather. As a Hopi rattler raised its mouth out of the sack, a wave of the feather made the snake duck. The priest dumped the snakes in, bummed a cigarette, and trotted back out into the desert.

“Did Momoa have a vet up at his place?” Youngman asked.

“I heard from Joe yesterday. All he said was he was going to shoot some night varmints in the Wash. Maybe he meant you.” Cecil smoked; ashes drifted over his belly. “You were away, you don’t know nothing about Abner. Hear about the time Arizona Public Gas sent some men down to Jeddito Wash? Abner gets wind of it. Does hisself up like Masaw. Sure. Crazy son of a bitch digs up a grave and dresses in a dead man’s clothes, covers hisself in rabbit blood and goes to Jeddito to make medicine.”

“Did it work?”

“What do you think? Those pahans see some nut in rags and blood shrieking his head off, you think they’re gonna stick around? Shit, man.”

Powell cleared his throat.

“Listen to this in the paper. ‘Although the pahans have drained the Gila River dry, although the pahans have stolen four times their legal share of water from the Colorado River, although they have raped Glen Canyon and the Little Colorado River, although they have stolen wholesale the San Juan River, the water table level under Phoenix is still falling so fast the city may be a ghost town in twenty years.’ ”

“Asshole,” Cecil yawned. “Before there’s a dry swimming pool in Phoenix, they’ll be up here to drain you for spit.”

“That’s just the kind of remark I could expect from you.” Powell was the star pupil of his mission school. He talked like a typewriter. “We don’t have any leadership, just old men and the nonpolitical types like you two. That’s why we have to join Chee; at least he’s a leader who knows how to read a contract. That’s why the Navajos have power plants and coal leases. Chee could get this reservation on the move again.”

“Yeah, he’ll move us right into a toilet an’ slap the lid on if he gets the chance.” Cecil rooted behind the snake sack for a couple of beers. He handed a can to Youngman. “You get anyone dumb enough to bury Abner?”

“Me.”

“Oh, oh. Well, you get that shed of his then. But what about his medicine? He was into all kinds of powers no one else could handle.”

“I don’t believe in that stuff.”

“No one does. But you better take care of it, or give it back to the Fire Clan. They’re all up in Shongopovi today.”

Youngman took the road up to the mesa, passing the turnaround area for Cal Gas trucks that couldn’t navigate the road any farther, going by orchards that produced small, wizened peaches, past corn stalks that would grow no higher than a man’s chest, on up to the new plywood-and-cement houses in Shipaulovi pueblo where Cecil lived and around the edge of the mesa for two more miles. Entering Shongopovi pueblo always brought about an immense depression in Youngman. More than almost any other pueblo, Shongopovi was the home of the old “Traditional” people. Retreating from Navajos, retreating from whites, making a last stand on the very rim of the mesa.

A garbage dump. A hundred forlorn houses of stone and dirt set on rubble. Flanked by slopes of concrete outhouses. Not a blade of grass and not a real street, only flies dozing in alleys, a wrinkled face at a broken window, and shadows chipping at adobe. Inhabited ruins around a dusty plaza suspended over the desert. No one ever took the long fall, of course. At Shongopovi, everyone shuffled into oblivion.

The sun was blinding. Youngman parked on the plaza in front of the house belonging to Harold Masito, a priest of the Bear Strap Clan, and went through a screen door into the cool, dark interior. Harold was on a sofa bed mending prayer sticks. The walls were decorated with color snapshots of his grandchildren and a needlepoint portrait of John Kennedy.

At one time, Harold had been one of the strongest men on the reservation. The muscles were gone now, leaving his big frame bent and his face shrunken around a heavy nose and jaw. He was one of the men who’d made Youngman a deputy.

“Abner is dead.” Youngman sat down respectfully on a folding chair.

“Huh,” Harold nodded. Carefully, he bound a fluff around the base of the stick.

“Two nights ago. You were a friend of his, so I thought you ought to know.”

“That so?”

Harold went on to a different prayer stick, arthritic fingers straining to be steady.

“That’s so. I had to bury him alone. He asked you and the other priests to go out to his place before he died.”

“I’m not Fire Clan.”

“But you used to be his friend. The least you could have done was made a visit. Two years, you didn’t visit him once and now he’s dead.”

“You’re angry.”

“Hell, yes. What am I, some bum. Some bum buried Abner. That doesn’t make any sense to me, uncle. Abner was somebody, he deserved a lot better than that. A lot better than everybody turning their backs on him and leaving him to die alone in the desert. Even when I was a kid, Abner was a great man.”

“Abner was a great man,” Harold said after a space of a minute. “But then he became crazy, dangerous. Before that, he was a very great man as you say. Maybe the greatest man in the world. Hungry?”

Harold went out the back screen door to where his wife was tending a horno, a stone oven. He returned with flat, steaming pan bread.

“Got no butter. You want margarine?”