Nightwing (16 page)

Paine pulled the battery plug from the microphone shaft and directed the microphone manually by the grip. The oscilloscope image exploded into snow, overloaded by input. He switched off the scope and the interior light, picked up sensitized, electronic binoculars and switched on his searchlight. He swung the beam up.

They came over, ten at a time, then twenty, then more than he could count, about twenty-five feet above the Rover, hundreds of them, one of the biggest vampire colonies he’d ever seen. Not fluttering like insectivorous bats, but rowing easily with long wings, covering the sky, coloring it with red wings the shape of knives.

The rider steered his heavy motorcycle down the mountain road. The road was bad, half the time on the edge of a drop, and if he hadn’t known it as well as he did he would have been reduced to a crawl in the dark. He maintained speed, as much from fear as anything else.

The lip of the road, weakened by rain, crumbled under his tires. He straightened out and downshifted. He was happy to have to concentrate on the road and when he reached a point where it was almost totally washed out he skillfully gunned the bike up the inside bank until he reached good road again.

He was lucky, he told himself, luckier than his brother. Someone had had to stay out by the corral at night to shoot whatever was attacking the livestock. His brother wanted to go and try out his new 30-30, which he took with a pump shotgun, two remote control lamps, and a bedroll. His brother never fired a shot. At midnight, he staggered in the kitchen door, bleeding from his head to his boots and screaming, “Bats!”

Which was crazy.

And he was luckier than his folks. The old lady took sick first. The old man had to tend both and then the old man took sick. None of which had to be serious if the storm hadn’t come along and knocked out the phone line. Jesus, how many times had he told them all they should have a radio at the ranch just in case? Maybe a million. If he didn’t get a doctor in time it was going to be their fault. A little planning went a long way. For one thing, the whole damn road had to be repaired, graded some places, if they intended to get trucks up for the piñon harvest. He’d probably have to run everything for a while.

He slowed to pick his way through some branches that had fallen across the road. A black line like a coach whip was tangled in the branches. He stopped and twisted the bike’s handlebars, swinging the beam until he found a telephone pole on the outside edge of the road. The line was the telephone wire.

He walked his bike to the pole and opened his engraved leather saddlebags. He really was lucky, but luck didn’t mean a damn thing unless you were prepared. Inside the bags were the line repairman’s lamp helmet, gloves, belt, and phone he’d taken when he quit Southwest Bell. It wasn’t stealing; everybody took things. Nobody was going to quarrel if he saved a few lives. He strapped on the belt and helmet, tried the light, which was faint but good enough. Eagerly, he climbed the pole stakes up to the disconnected wire.

On top of the pole, he had his first misgivings. He never had been so good at line work and the helmet lamp seemed much fainter thirty feet in the air than it had on the ground. If he just took his time, though, he could still save hours off trying to reach help on his bike. There weren’t any other homes with phones around Dinnebito Wash and there wasn’t a public phone until you were almost in Tuba City. He hitched his belt around the pole a notch tighter. The night was so damn dark; although he often liked dark nights for hunting coons, sometimes even deer. He’d stay in a blind until he heard noise and then hit the flood lamp. The animals would freeze, their eyes orange and panicked, and he’d put a bullet right through their lights.

The gloves were stiff from disuse. He was afraid he was going to drop the line phone if he made a mistake. The phone itself was simple enough: it had a dial on the grip and two wires attached to roach clips. His boots couldn’t get a firm hold on the stakes and that slowed him. Also, the roach clips were so rusted shut from disuse he had to scrape them clean with his buck knife. He was about to sink the clips in the wire when he found he wasn’t alone. Hanging upside down from the wire about ten feet away, a bat was watching him.

The clips slipped from his gloves but he recovered quickly. It was the biggest bat he’d ever seen, dull brown, with a squat nose and fringed head. Just a single bat, though, and after swallowing on a dry throat he laughed at himself. He hooked his knife on his belt to free both hands and clipped the phone onto the wire. The helmet beam slid up the wire. Five more bats hung on the wire.

There hadn’t been any bats on the line when he first climbed the pole, he was sure. He wasn’t afraid, but he did wish he’d brought up a varmint pistol. There was one in his saddlebags. He looked down at the bike. His beam barely reached the ground, but he could swear that it was alive. At first, he thought, with toads milling and hopping after the road, and then he looked straight down and saw that the whole bottom half of the pole was covered by them and they were climbing up, sideways and backwards, and he knew what they were and, however irrationally, what they were after. His heart knew and began beating on his ribs. The line swayed, tugging the phone in his hand. The line, in a matter of seconds, was solid with bats. He saw one with a baby clutched to its chest. The baby twisted its head to look at him.

“No!”

Something hit him in the center of the back and slapped him against the pole. He dropped the line phone to swing. Teeth bit through his pants. He punched downwards and his arm came up sliced from the elbow to the wrist. He stared at it, amazed. In a hanging march, the bats on the wire walked toward him. He tried to unhook his belt, but his gloves were too clumsy. He shook his left glove off and at once a bat covered the back of his hand. There were more on his back and others securing themselves to his legs. The bites were sharp but not terribly painful. More cold than anything else. He shook the bat off his hand and now his fingers were red and slippery. He’d always had luck on his side and if he could just get to his bike . . .

He kicked, and his other boot slipped from its stake. He hung from his belt and watched the bats crawling, head downwards, from the top of the pole. His legs kicked and churned like a man running in place for a short time, and for a long time after that they slowly rose and fell like a marathon runner staggering towards the end of his race under an unfair burden.

C H A P T E R
F I V E

A
line of men chanted “Ho-o-hah!” against the backdrop of the desert. They were painted all in black except for white across their foreheads and mouths and spots on their arms and back. Eagle feathers decorated their long hair, and fox skins hung from their blue kilts. With every sideways step, the turquoise strings around their necks and the tortoise shell rattles tied to their knees clapped in time.

“There’s my jerkwater brother.” Cecil Somiviki pointed out a dancer to Youngman. “The one in the wig. So scared he’s ready to shit silver dollars.”

About five hundred Hopis sat on roofs and ladders, eating piki bread and drinking Cokes, the young men dressed up like dark cowboys, girls in ceremonial trim. A delegation of Navajos, each glittering like a presentation case of silver jewelry, stayed together, but the white tourists, exhausted by their climb from the parking lot a thousand feet down in the squash fields and their foreheads burned pink over dusty sunglasses, spread around the edge of the dirt plaza. Youngman looked for Anne. Walker Chee was there, a velvet sash tied around his razor-cut hair.

“Headpounder’s still after your ass,” Cecil muttered. “Well, I can’t fire you today anyway. Oh oh, lady!” He reached across Youngman and grabbed an Instamatic a white woman had wrapped in her scarf. “No photos, ma’am, you read the signs.”

She had swallow-wing sunglasses and zinc cream on her nose.

“Signs?”

Her smile turned into an oval as Cecil opened the back of the camera and ground the film cartridge under his boot. He dropped the camera into a sack and gave her a numbered piece of paper.

“Collect it after the dance.”

“This is a religious ceremony,” Youngman told her.

“Outdoors?” she squawked. “Come on.”

“Remember,” Cecil said, “no tickee, no camera.” He and Youngman moved on along the perimeter of the crowd, keeping their eyes out for more cameras, or tape recorders, or sketch pads. “Damn Bear Strap Clan’s supposed to be catching these yo-yos down in the parking lot.”

The ladder from the Snake Clan
kiva
flew pennants of feathers and horsehair. Youngman was surprised to see feathers still flying from the Fire Clan kiva, as well.

“Yeah,” Cecil answered his question, “those old boys been down there for days. Hey, we got ourselves another amateur anthropologist.”

A white teenager clutched a torn airline bag that, under Youngman’s hands, revealed a Panasonic recorder and a Glad Bag of grass.

“Far out.” Cecil took the recorder. “What’s the matter with you today, Youngman? Usually you’re the one who finds all the goodies.”

In the center of the plaza was a standing bower of green cottonwood branches and a hole covered over by a board. The dancers stamped on the board, warning the spirits below that messengers were on their way requesting rain, singing, “Ho-o-ah, ho-o-ah, ho-o-aha, ho-o-ah!” One of the dancers held up the “messengers,” handfuls of snakes.

Youngman and Cecil worked their way to the front of the crowd, while those dancers called “gatherers” fanned out around the edge of the plaza. Their job was simply to gather any loose snakes before they got into the crowd. Antelope priests kept time with pebble rattles. Youngman felt adrenaline hitting him like Scotch. Cecil even was suddenly excited; except for his job, he would have been dancing. The crowd took a step back.

“Sonovabitch, sonovabitch,” Cecil kept repeating to himself.

The first dancer bit his snake about ten inches behind the head and supported the rest of the snake’s body with his left hand. By the dancer’s right shoulder was another dancer with an eagle feather “snake whip.” The tail of a six-foot diamondback dragged over the ground. They had to dance a snake four times around the cottonwood bower in the center of the plaza, and then pick up another snake and start again. That’s how they got rain.

“They pull the fangs, you know,” Youngman heard a white father telling his son.

Crouched, dancing on the balls of his feet, Powell Somiviki went by.

“Shit, he’s got the snake on the wrong side,” Cecil said.

Powell’s eyes rolled nearly out of sight. His knees wobbled. From the left side of his mouth and out of reach of the eagle feather, a blood-colored rattler pushed its snout along Powell’s cheek. The snake’s gaping mouth displayed two yellowish fangs. Youngman watched the snake wrap its tail around Powell’s arm, trying to coil for a strike. Powell danced away while the snake sought its angle.

“Sonovabitch,” Cecil said.

“Dad, I saw—”

“They milk them,” the father answered.

A black rattler darted away from the dancers and across the plaza, followed casually by a gatherer. Although the gatherer caught up, he didn’t stop the snake, a fact that wasn’t appreciated by the crowd until the big rattler was escaping between their legs. Shouting, they jumped against the houses or ran towards the road. The gatherer scooped up the snake by the tail and carried it back.

Powell was on his knees on the other side of the plaza. He’d only fainted. The sidewinder still hadn’t coiled sufficiently around Powell’s arm to strike and the dancer with Powell helped by unwrapping the rattler’s tail and reversing the head in Powell’s mouth.

“See what a college education does for you,” Cecil sweated. “You don’t know right from left. Stupid—”

The dance went on. Walker Chee excused himself to visit one of the outhouses along the side of the mesa. When he came out, Youngman was waiting.

“How’s the Loloma boy?”

“I gave a report to the elders.” Chee tried to slip by.

“How is he?” Youngman blocked the way.

“He’s in good hands. By the way, you people are missing a great thing here. You could auction off the Snake Dance to the television networks, you’d pull in a million dollars a year. For doing nothing, just what you always do. This could be the biggest attraction in the country.”

Youngman was amazed. Talking to Chee was like trying to catch a lizard by the tail. Even if you pinned him down, he got away.

By the time Youngman returned to the plaza, one of the dancers was bitten. A bullsnake had him by the neck until the shadow of an eagle feather passed over the snake’s eyes and it let go, hitting the ground with a thump. Powell danced over the bullsnake, a new rattler in his mouth, the rattler’s muzzle resting on Powell’s shoulder and its tail swaying almost in time to Powell’s steps. Man and snake, two parts of nature, intimately joined and not by chance; the legends spoke of the snake wife. What the whites, what even Navajos would never understand, Abner always said, was that the Snake Dance was a dance of life, not of death.

“That boy, he did okay,” Cecil winked at Youngman.