Nightwing (3 page)

Youngman was trucked off to mission school. Life there was comfortable enough. He had food, friends, a bed. In class, he stayed as mute as he could, watching. The teachers listed him as “slow, possibly retarded.” Until the age of fourteen, when several sets of oil paints were donated to the school.

He had a glib facility, a hunter’s eye for color. He didn’t speak much more than he had before, but he would sit in front of an easel every waking minute, painting landscapes, nothing but landscapes. They were shown and, to his surprise, they were bought. Youngman experimented with watercolors, tempera, and acrylic, obsessed not so much with art as with the revelation that he could make money. In one step he strode past every other Indian he knew, and past his father in particular. Within two years, he developed a technique with acrylic and varnish that gave his desert landscapes a hard, jewellike finish that was totally cynical and artificial. Youngman, alone, knew what he was doing. Not painting the desert. Killing it. On his canvas, birds were as bright and dead as souvenir pins, and falling rain had the quality of rocks. It was a style only whites could appreciate, but they were paying. At the galleries in Santa Fe and Phoenix, they paid a lot.

Flattered by whites, he responded in kind. He cut his hair and dressed in sports jackets. Found himself becoming a good-looking man though not pretty, his features were too angular for that. Only occasionally was he betrayed by a dark hostility in his eyes, his mother’s gift.

The University of New Mexico offered Youngman a full art scholarship. This was the second step up, Youngman told himself. He could be anything.

The summer before his first year at the university, Youngman returned to the reservation. The Snake Dance was being held at Shongopovi. For fun, Youngman joined the runners whose race across the desert signaled the start of the ceremony. For the first time in seven years, he wore a leather kilt and moccasins. He had always had stamina. Midway through the race, his moccasins were soaked through with blood. The pain encouraged him. He overtook the local boys at the base of the canyon and sprinted up the narrow trail to win. The Snake Clan was about to award Youngman the prize when they were stopped by a priest of the Fire Clan.

“This boy is not Hopi. Give the prize to a Hopi. Otherwise, all my clan will leave.” The priest was Abner.

“I am Hopi and I won,” Youngman protested.

“You are empty. I see inside you and nothing is there. This prize is only for real people.”

Humiliated, Youngman returned to Albuquerque, to college. But college was not what he’d expected. In most subjects he was stupefyingly ignorant even for an Indian. Of history, literature, science, or social studies, he knew next to nothing. Worse, he came to the fast dead end of his talent. As long as he painted the desert, however fraudulently, the images came easily. Faced with anything else, even an elementary life class, he revealed himself as a complete incompetent. It was as if he knew a single song with a single variation and otherwise was dumb. But there were a number of ways to take out his frustration. The university had other Indians, mostly Navajos who regarded a Hopi as inferior. Youngman picked fights with Navajo gangs, with white football players, with just about anybody. After a single year of failing grades, he was drafted. After one year in the Army, he was court-martialed and put in the stockade at Leavenworth, where he served the next six years of his life.

At the age of twenty-seven, Youngman was released and went to Los Angeles. He joined the Mexicans working as Indian extras in films, mixed colors for paint stores, and delivered cars for Hertz. One morning, delivering a rented Continental to Burbank, he was driving through the canyons that segment L.A. into an archipelago of concrete islands. Pulling off the freeway, he left the car to walk into the canyon, which had the color and texture of crumpled brown paper. Sitting still, he watched the shadows slide like cats over the hills. Day cats that leisurely stretched and curled on the warm earth. And still he sat. Towards sunset, thousands of fire-control sprinklers fanned the parched walls of the canyon with water bought and diverted from the rivers of Arizona. Round as marbles, the water rolled through the air and shattered in the last rays of the sun. One drop after another, million after million, exploding unheard against the moans of the freeway. Water that fell as rain in the Rockies, that flowed as the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, heading for the desert but rerouted to a sprinkler system. He laughed until he nearly cried.

Youngman delivered the car ten hours late, was fired and, the following morning, returned to the reservation, not much better off than when he’d left.

His first year back he spent relearning how to live. He taught himself again his own first language, which dry holes would yield water to a digging stick, how to mend clothes with a bone needle and to tell the difference between the tracks of a running deer and an unwary one.

At the end of the year, a pickup truck of old men pulled into his camp.

“You’re still here,” they said. “We expected you to be gone long ago.”

“I’m still here.”

“Are you going to stay?”

“Yes.”

“Then we will have to do something about you. You’re a troubled person. Never at rest. We can’t tell you to leave because we know our obligations. So we are going to put you to work. From now on you’re a deputy. You go up to Hotevilla tomorrow and sign up. Maybe, someday, we can get some good out of you.”

The old chiefs back into their pickup and left.

That was two years ago. Being deputy consisted largely of disarming drunks and making sure no tourists brought cameras into the pueblos when dances were held, Youngman had all the time he wanted to escape into the wilderness. He stayed out of trouble because he had the obligation to uphold the law. The old chiefs weren’t so dumb.

Youngman downshifted and climbed the jeep through a copse of junipers onto a dirt road. The Momoa ranch was in the hills above Dinnebito Wash. As the road wound its way up, the temperature dropped. Scrub gave way to more junipers, oaks, and piñon trees. In the hills was water, and water was wealth.

“You finally come,” Joseph Momoa welcomed the deputy. “Where the hell you been?”

Joe Momoa and his family had five thousand acres of timber and grassland that included two springs and pasturage for five hundred cattle and seven hundred sheep. His house was paneled in redwood and sat under a television aerial as large as a radar dish. The barn had been converted into a six-car garage and game room. Joe himself had been converted into a prosperous Mormon, along with his wife and his sons Joe Jr. and Ben. The Momoa men were alike in their aggressive bulk, flannel shirts, and flashy Acme boots. Joe drove an air-conditioned pickup. His sons hot-dogged it on candy-colored motorcycles. Among Hopis, they were Rockefellers.

“What have you got to show me?” Youngman asked.

“You’ll see.”

Joe led the way on a sloping path under piñon branches. Bastard doesn’t even walk like an Indian any more, Youngman thought with a sense of irony. For more years than he cared to dwell on, he hadn’t walked like an Indian himself.

“Piñon nuts oughtta bring in $10,000 this year,” Joe said automatically.

“How much in pines?”

Joe shot a scowl over his shoulder. Pines grew above the Momoa spread and every year hundreds of the trees were trucked out secretly and illegally.

“That’s your problem,” Joe Jr. said, one step behind Youngman.

They descended to a meadow of corrals and pens. Youngman could see sheep milling in their area. Cattle were lined up at their trough. The dogs on guard cowered at the sight of the Momoas.

“Now, you take a look at that.” Joe pointed to the middle corral.

At first, Youngman thought the corral was empty, but as he came through the gate he saw three quarterhorses lying on their sides. Their eyes were open and rolling. One struggled to its knees and Youngman could see that what first appeared to be a dark blanket over its back was caked blood and flies.

“Get a horse blanket,” he ordered Ben Momoa.

“Pa?” Ben took a step back.

“Do what he says.” Joe took a blanket from the top rail of the corral and threw it to his son.

The kneeling horse lolled its head in the manner of an animal drugged by locoweed. Flies heavy with blood bounced into the air as Ben waved the blanket at them. Youngman brushed the flies away from his face.

“What the hell happened?” he asked.

“You tell us,” Joe said.

The withers and haunches of the horse looked as if they had been shredded by a straight razor wielded by a madman. Youngman patted the horse’s head, ran his hand down the mane and stopped short. From neck to tail the horse’s back was pink flesh, dry blood and hanging strips of skin. The cuts weren’t deep.

“Keep waving that,” Youngman told Ben.

“I’m gettin’ sick.”

Not deep, more like gouges from a V-shaped leather punch. And there were more than Youngman could count. Some blood had dried in streaks down the horse’s legs and belly, but the horse had lost a lot more blood than that. The animal was groggy, but not in apparent pain. Youngman checked the tail. It was brown with dried blood; it should have been totally matted.

“Well?” Joe demanded.

Youngman looked at the horse’s hooves. They were smooth, not the way they’d be if the horse had struck out at anything. Youngman walked over to the other horses. They were in worse shape. The flies on them formed moving, buzzing hunchbacks. He examined their hooves, too. They were as smooth as marble, but the horses were dying from loss of blood. Three horses, half their skin flayed off, that didn’t fight back.

“I don’t know,” Youngman said.

He took a deep breath, stepping away from the mutilated horses. They didn’t even try to swat at the flies. Youngman scanned the ground.

“Ever let your dogs in here?”

“With horses? Never.”

Youngman could see nothing but hoof marks in the dirt. No deep ones, nothing suggesting excitement, nothing suggesting that anything but horses had been in the corral.

“Found the horses like this this morning?”

“Right.”

Youngman looked up at the clear blue sky. Eagles? Ridiculous. As his eyes dropped, he noticed something he should have seen before. Where blood stained the ground were wider, blacker stains. He picked up some of it between his fingers. It was sticky and smelled of ammonia.

“Jesus.” He wiped his fingers on clean dirt. “Well, I can’t figure it. Any of it.”

“Coyotes,” Joe said firmly.

“Coyotes? Your sheep, maybe. Or a calf. Not horses, no way. You’d’ve heard your dogs. The whole corral’d be torn up. There’d be tracks. No coyote bites like that.”

“Then a cat,” Joe insisted.

“No.”

“Then what?”

“I told you I don’t know.”

“There’s nothing left, damn it. I lost three horses, I’m going to have to shoot ’em. This is $600 in quarterhorse ripped up here an’ I want some action. I want you to start up a hunt an’ I don’t mean some half-assed trackin’. A real hunt. The Navajos have a helicopter. You get it an’ we’ll go over these hills an’ shoot every coyote an’ cat we see.”

“You’re not going to get the animal that attacked your horses that way,” Youngman answered.

“I say I will, an’ even if I don’t we’ll clean up these hills the way they should of been a long time ago.”

“Look, I know how you feel about losing some horses.”

“The hell you do, Duran. You don’t have a horse to your name. Now you get on the stick an’ fix up a helicopter for my boys an’ me. We got the rifles. Lots of em.

Youngman could see it. A helicopter over Dinnebito Wash, with the Momoa boys blasting away like machine gunners at anything that moved. Wouldn’t they have a good time.

The kneeling horse slumped onto its side. Flies settled on it in thick spirals.

“No Navajos, no helicopter,” Youngman said.

“Tribal council meets in two weeks.” Joe’s face reddened. “I’ll tell ’em about your drinkin’. I can smell it on you.”

“Get a vet’s report on the horses.” Youngman walked away. “If he says a cat did this, or a coyote, we’ll talk about it again.”

“Junior!” Joe yelled.

Joe Jr. stepped in Youngman’s way. He had forty pounds on Youngman, but after a moment’s glare Joe Jr. swallowed it and moved aside.

“What we need here is a real deputy,” Joe Momoa shouted after Youngman, “not a bum. Real deputies like the Navajos have. An’ I know you, Duran. You’re not even a real Hopi.”

At the house, Youngman got into his jeep. Instead of taking the road down the way he’d come, he drove higher into the hills. Without much effort he put the Momoa family out of his mind, but the sight of the horses lingered. There were mountain lions in the hills. The heights were their refuge. The cats were running away from man, not towards him.

Piñon trees and junipers fell away and in their place stood forests of Chihuahua pines, then Ponderosa pine as straight as the teeth of a comb and thickets of alder. The air developed a cold edge.

Momoa was right in a way. Properly speaking, Youngman wasn’t Hopi, he was Tewa Pueblo. The Tewas were the tribe that had driven the Spanish out of New Mexico. Two hundred years ago, when the peaceful Hopis were being overrun by Navajos and Apaches, the Hopis asked the Tewas to come and fight the Hopis’ war. The Tewas came, and fought, and stayed. The name of the Tewa hero was Popay. Flea. The same as Youngman’s.

By the time Youngman reached the shoulders of the hills, dusk was filling in the wash. The desert was a faint purple. Sun still hit the tops of the hills and would for another hour. Youngman replaced his boots with moccasins Abner had made for him. He gathered his rifle and bedroll and hiked for twenty minutes until he came to a stream which he followed to a spring, where he lay down on a moss-covered rock and dipped his face in the water.

As he lifted his head, he saw a rabbit watching him from under a pine branch. Youngman’s hand slipped into his rifle sheath. He could have the rabbit for supper and take the legs to Abner in the morning. The rabbit brushed a forepaw across its whiskers. With his elbow on the rifle stock, Youngman levered a bullet into the breech. He slid the rifle out. The rabbit hopped forward, a perfect target against a green background. Water rolled down Youngman’s face, off his chin. Abner already had a rabbit, it occurred to Youngman, and he wasn’t so hungry himself.