Archaeopteryx Read online

  returned to Albuquerque with a truck bed full of samples: ducks, geese, a sandhill crane, a couple herons, a dozen larks and finches. A roadrunner I’d found on a fence post, as if it had been struck dead in a classic Southwest tableau. A bald eagle with the egg goop of another bird crusted on its beak. But the best―in other words, the worst―was the whooping crane.

  In the 1980s, the forest service tried to save the endangered whooping crane by taking eggs laid in captivity and putting them in the nests of wild sandhill cranes. The sandhills run about five feet tall with brown plumage and red crowns. Whooping cranes are six feet tall and pure white. Somehow, though, it worked. The sandhills raised the whooping cranes as their own. At the Bosque, you could see a vee of long brown birds flying north with one white body among them.

  Cranes are less prejudiced than humans. Hating people who are different is a special thing we have going.

  This whooping crane I’d found probably represented in the realm of one percent of her entire species. Melodía would be happy I’d found her and would probably do all kinds of things to the body to determine why it died. When she figured it out, she’d write an article about it. People would read the article, and then they’d throw it in the trash. Eventually, the bird and the article would end up in the same landfill. But at least the humans would be able to say, hey, we understand something.

  I packed all the little birds I could into my duffel and tied up a few bundles of long-bodied wading birds. It took me a few loads to get them all down to Melodía’s lab in the basement of the university’s biology department. By the time I’d schlepped the last haul, she had the whooping crane laid out on a metal table and peered into its feathers with a magnifying glass like some old-fashioned sleuth.

  The bird stood as tall as a man―meaning a couple feet shorter than me―with long, slender limbs. Melodía was also tall and slender, with brown skin and dark brown curly hair. She had curvy hips, a tapered waist, and long hands. The right side of her face featured a narrow jaw and high cheekbone; the left looked as if it had been stuffed with plums.

  “Any clues?” I asked.

  “Too much dander,” she muttered. Talking to oneself was a habit of people who spend a lot of time alone.

  “I didn’t see any external marks,” I said.

  She gave me a look. Shut up and let me work, that look said.

  I leaned back against the wall and hit my head on a projecting vent. I constantly hit my head. Human beings tended to hang things at the height of my chin, especially in labs. Scientists needed lights, scopes, scales, instrument racks, and cupboards. It made for lots of things to duck.

  Melodía treaded her gloved fingertips through the birds’ feathers. Every few minutes, she’d take a razor blade and shave away a dime-sized area of skin.

  It’s hard to sit and watch a person do minute work. “Watcha looking for?”

  She met my eyes. “You don’t need to be here.” The slur in her voice was a little more pronounced than usual. Her tumors stretched her lips tighter in moist weather.

  “Thank you, Stick, for bringing me the birds,” I said.

  “Yes, Stick. I’m very grateful.” She didn’t sound grateful.

  “I’m happy to share my findings with you, since you were happy to be my errand boy in a run to the forest of death,” I said.

  “You’ve got a thousand hours of flex time,” she said. “You could take a month’s vacation and still have time left over.”

  She knew too much about me. “C’mon. Call it professional curiosity.”

  “You’re a reptile man. What do you care about birds, besides that they’re an evolution or two more sophisticated than the animals you handle?”

  “Mine and yours: they’re cousins.” I almost added just like us, but I didn’t. She didn’t like to acknowledge our freak status made us friends. She still envied the normals.

  She sighed. “I found bites.”

  That took me aback. Most insects would have been dormant for the winter. “Like bug-bites?”

  “See for yourself.” She held the magnifying glass out to me.

  I made it over to the table without bonking myself, took the tiny magnifying glass in my giant fingers, and leaned way down. She’d shorn the feathers away from half a dozen abrasions, upraised like mosquito bites, but with a jagged slice at the center instead of a pinprick.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “No insect bite like I’ve ever seen.” I’d seen quite a few. The reptile house at the zoo also housed arthropods―insects, arachnids, myriopoda, and the like. I’d dealt with every critter in New Mexico that bit, stung, spat, or clawed.

  “A tick?” she asked.

  I shook my head. Not many ticks lived in New Mexico, and they left a crater, not a welt.

  “Wasp sting?”

  No again. The tear at the center didn’t fit.

  “Horsefly?”

  I shrugged. Horseflies used their mandibles to slice the skin before lapping up the blood that poured out. “Have to be a hell of a horsefly. Biggest horsefly in New Mexico.”

  “But you’re not ruling it out.”

  I held up my hands. “Don’t let me rule anything in or out. I’m a simple zookeeper.”

  She scoffed. “All you do is read books and watch nature shows. You know as much as anybody.”

  “You need an insect guy,” I said. “I’m sure you have one here.”

  The skin around Melodía’s right eye flexed downward and the right side of her mouth tightened. Her left side stayed largely immobile. She hated admitting she had colleagues. It meant she might have to talk to them. “Don’t you know someone at the zoo?”

  “Not a PhD,” I said. “We’re amateurs.”

  Melodía’s body drooped like a wet garment on a clothes hanger.

  “I’ll get somebody to take a look, if that’s what you want,” I said. “But they won’t be a scientist. They’ll look at the bite, but they won’t be able to run tests like one of your university types.”

  She collapsed onto a stool and stared at the dead bird. Two Melodías existed: the playful, sarcastic Melodía who’d been here when I arrived―and the one weighed down by anxiety. She’d built up a phobia of meeting people face-to-face like others do a fear of snakes or heights. It paralyzed her. She’d been that way since we’d met in college twenty years before, and she’d only gotten worse with age.

  “There’s Dr. Ramón.” She kept her eyes on the bird. Her left eye was slightly bloodshot and stretched at the corner by her tumors. “He’s one of those popular professors who gets called ‘doctor’ and his first name. Everybody loves him. A harem of undergraduate girls follows him around pretending to be fascinated by cockroach behavior.”

  He sounded like my enemy.

  “I hate him,” Melodía said.

  “Tell you what. I’ll find this Dr. Ramón and ask him to take a look. Save you a trip.”

  “No,” she said.

  “I don’t mind.”

  Melodía raised her head and looked at me. Her face was half beauty and half travesty. “Goodbye Stick.”

  I left.

  I tried not to think any more about the dead birds. I wanted to enjoy my day off.

  My truck felt twenty degrees hotter on the inside than the outside. In the New Mexican winter, the sun made the interior of a truck paradise, like a greenhouse for one person. I sat there for a few minutes enjoying it. Then I drove home.

  I lived in the Northwest Valley, where I rented the bottom half of a house. It was technically a basement, half above ground, half below. A set of cement steps led to a garden and patio sunken into the ground at the level of my entrance, hidden by trees and shrubs. Fresh out of college, I’d only been able to find one place that would fit my height and budget. The widow who lived in the main level had given me a great deal, probably because she sensed a kindred spirit. Like me, she never had guests, rarely went out, lived a quiet life. I’d settled in. Now, many years later, I was nearing forty and she’d dwindled i
nto an old woman.

  Ralph, my tarantula friend, waited for me when I got home. He stood on the tips of his eight legs, his many eyes gleaming. He’d doubtless sensed me coming through the vibrations in the ground. I’d adopted him from the zoo, which displayed only female tarantulas because of their longer lifespans and larger size.

  After I’d liberated Ralph from his terrarium so that he could run around the apartment, I made myself some breakfast: avocado on toast with tomato slices, a spritz of lemon juice and a hefty dose of black pepper over it. I sat at my bar to eat, which to me stood at about the height of a kitchen table.

  I’d designed my life in this house below the earth to scale. I drank from big glasses. I ate with cooking spoons and salad forks. I sat on a brown sectional couch with extra sections so I could recline fully. I slept on two beds laid end to end. I owned custom made clothes and shoes, of which I took special care. To small objects, like my toothbrush, I’d attached long, fat handles. Handling tiny objects made my joints hurt. My condition had side effects: joint pain, brittle bone disease, and an enlarged heart to name the worst.

  When I finished eating, I sat and watched my garden through the bay window. Life abounded in the shadows beneath the branches of willow and cottonwood trees that grew in my landlady’s yard. I’d planted apple, peach, and cherry trees long ago. The unpaved sides of the patio housed dirt planters, where I raised ferns, holly, and hydrangea. In the darker parts, I cultivated stands of mushrooms. If I’d ever invited guests to my home, they would have wondered why I didn’t grow vegetables. I’d point to the fruit trees.

  However, in the spring, I let a good bit of the fruit drop and fester. I harvested and ate about half, brought some to my aging father who lived in the South Valley, and dispersed the other half back out into the garden over time. It makes good compost, a guest might say. True. But the real truth is that I didn’t grow plants in my garden―I grew animals. Worms, centipedes, earwigs, millipedes, fruit flies, gnats, common houseflies, horseflies, honeybees, wasps, hornets, a dozen types of beetle, crickets―they all love rotting fruit and moist topsoil. All of those animals draw predators: spiders, scorpions, garter snakes, toads―as well as birds and mice. I liked animals. I could sit on my patio in my lawn chair and watch the food pyramid in action.

  I could also catch a wide array of prey for Ralph.

  I’d turned my living room into a gladiator’s arena by sealing all the baseboards, allowing no cracks, crevices, or other avenues of escape. The doors had rubber skirts that hugged the doorframe. The bases of the couch and cabinets were similarly skirted and sealed. Every evening, I released a hapless victim―a cricket, a wolf spider, a millipede, a tiny garter snake or mouse―into this coliseum. Every evening, I lifted Ralph from his terrarium and let him loose to stalk and kill his prey. It made for an engrossing home life.

  Ralph was a prisoner. Hunting kept him occupied. Many of the zoo animals received live prey. However, their small enclosures didn’t allow for a satisfying hunt. My apartment roughly equaled the size of Ralph’s natural territory―except should he have gone in search of a mate. New Mexican desert tarantulas could stride miles in search of a mate. Ralph would never have that pleasure. We’d both embraced bachelorhood, trying to keep each other the best company we could.

  I didn’t think much more about the bird corpses I’d dropped off that morning. I handled dead creatures all the time. The scale of the death was horrific and it had occurred in the worst possible place, during the worst possible season―in summer, spring, or fall the birds would have been far away. Nature, however, powered itself with calamities. We New Mexicans lived on a soil dense with bodies.

  My earliest memory is of seeing a dead body: the archaeopteryx fossil. My mother had taken me to the Albuquerque Natural History Museum. The creature lay spread flat on a slab of rock, the bones of its four-limbed skeleton long and thin. It had the head and tail of a lizard. Imprints of feathers, light as brushstrokes, surrounded the skeleton of the bird-lizard, a hybrid of two beings. It marked either a moment of transition from one form to another or a moment of indecision by God. Its body had struck me as light, fragile. It looked as if you could crumble it to pieces between your fingers and throw the dust into the wind.

  After we saw that fossil, I thought to myself that my mother was just like it. She had gigantism as I did. She wore away over the years, her bones breaking, healing, and breaking again, until they wouldn’t knit together anymore. The small bones in her ears crumbled until she went deaf. One morning, her bones simply turned to dust, and she ceased to be.

  Maybe if I stayed below ground, I’d either disappear forever or the world would change. If I stayed out of sight long enough, one day I might emerge into the sun and find a whole world of stooped eight-foot men with gray beards and crackling knees, all deaf and sad.

  I entertained myself with thoughts like these during my long hours of solitude.

  I’d begun to nod off around eight, when a pickup truck lumbered to a stop outside my house. I said earlier that I could count my friends on two fingers. That muscle truck belonged to number two.

  A door slammed. Jackboots clomped down my stairs. Tree branches and bush fronds rustled. The spring in my screen door contracted, and it slammed open. Knuckles hammered on my inner door. Ralph, who’d been standing at alert since the truck arrived, scurried into a corner. Only one person in my world moved with such frustrated violence.

  “Stick.” His voice growled like a back-alley mutt―small, bullied, hungry, and frustrated from always losing to the bigger dog. “Old buddy. I know you’re there.”

  My door opened on Spartacus Rex, a short, wiry man with the big grey mustache and unruly graying hair of a long-haul trucker. Dandruff plagued his scalp, and twenty years of acne muddled his face. The child of a drunk and a mail-order bride, Rex was an outcast before he’d even left the womb. As fellow outcasts, we’d formed a quick friendship that spanned all the way back to elementary school.

  “Stick,” Rex said, the smell of boilermakers radiating from him.

  Before we met, everyone had called me Johnny. On our first day of friendship at the age of six, Rex had issued the proclamation that we call each other by our last names. He’d wanted to be in the military and soldiers often called each other by their last names. It had stuck. “You are the man.”

  “Thank you,” I said as we shook hands.

  Rex took in a deep breath and let it out. “Normals.” He shook his head and furrowed his immense brow ridge. “I’ve been up to my neck in them. They’re scumbags and liars. Buddy, after a whole night with normals, I’ll tell you how it feels to see you.” He teetered on his heels as he searched for the words. “It feels like home.”

  I stepped back and gestured with my arm. “Get in here.”

  “Okay, pal.” He walked by me and leapt atop one of my bar stools.

  I pried the caps from a pair of Tecates. I set one in front of Rex and leaned on the bar between my kitchen and living room. “You went out.”

  “It’s Tuesday,” Rex said. “You know Tuesdays.”

  Rex worked weekends, as I often did. Sometimes, he bounced at the Atomic Cantina or worked security at the El Rey Theater whenever they had a concert bound to be unruly. He was also a substitute doorman at a strip joint downtown called Knockouts. He celebrated Saturdays on Tuesday, a day he reserved for self-defilement.

  “A night out with the normals. Tell me about it.” I understood why he did it: he still had hope. He was too close to being one of them. I’d never be a normal, and I’d come to grips with it.

  “They’re rubes,” he said. “It’s not that they don’t like me.” They didn’t. “They like me fine. They just don’t understand that this”―he gestured around at my apartment―“this is all bullshit.”

  I nodded. I liked my apartment, but I understood he meant society.

  “They don’t get it.”

  “They do not,” I said.

  “We live in a system.” Rex’s mustache quive
red with intensity. “I try to tell them. We live in a system. That’s what I say.”

  “We do,” I said.

  “You have to see beyond the system to understand.”

  The clock read just shy of eight. Rex was the drunk guy at the bar ranting about the system before most people’s evening had even begun―on a Tuesday.

  He took a deep drink and leaned his forehead on his clenched fist. “There was this girl.”

  Rex always mooned over some strange girl and appealed to the normals to understand the system of oppression. Love and subjection ravaged Rex’s existence. He’d never solve either one of them.

  “Tell me about her.” I never had a girl on my mind. I’d dulled my desire for a mate over the years as a matter of emotional survival. Rex’s crushes never went well, but at least he tried.

  “Some pale, black-haired girl. Tattoos. Piece of metal through her lip.”

  Rex had a type. We all gravitated to people as wrecked as we were.

  “Listen to me rattling on.” The lines of his face had fallen, and he looked like a tired old man.

  “Rattle away,” I said.

  “How was your day? You should go to the bar with me, once in a while at least.” He threw a hand in the air. “Open invitation.”

  I chose not to go to bars or any public spaces unless absolutely necessary. “Flowers go with you?” Leon Flowers, the third man in our triumvirate, was the odd man out―he and I never spent time together unless Rex led the way.

  “Had some gig,” Rex said. Flowers performed as a birthday party clown and drove an ice cream truck.

  “So, this girl,” I said.

  Rex sighed. His posture drooped. “We’re not talking about me anymore. We’re always talking about me. That’s not how friendship works.”

  My boring life—even I didn’t want to talk about it.