Archaeopteryx Read online

  “So, tell me.”

  I shrugged.

  “Nature documentaries,” Rex said. “About what.”

  “Aphids.” I’d watched a video on aphids the night before.

  “Aphids.” He laughed. “Tiny little bastards. Tell me about them.”

  “Less than one percent of them survive to maturity,” I said.

  He shook his head. “That’s depressing. It’s about right for life in America, too. The Dream is dead to all of us little aphids down here in the dirt.” He barked out a laugh.

  I felt childish telling Rex about the things I’d learned from reading or watching documentaries. I’d shared a passion for animals with my mother and had spent hours of the day talking to her about them before her death. As an adult, I didn’t do much besides think about animals, read about animals, feed animals, clean up after animals, nurse animals back from sickness, dispose of the bodies of animals.

  “More about your day,” Rex said.

  I got us two more beers from the fridge and pried the caps off. “Sleep on my couch. No sense in wasting a Tuesday night.”

  “Alright, buddy.”

  “I insist,” I said.

  “Fine, but more about your day!”

  “Got a call early this morning.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Rex said.

  “Mass bird death at the Bosque Del Apache.”

  “Cranes and ducks―that kind of thing?” he asked. Everybody in Albuquerque knew about the Bosque. It amounted to a holy site.

  I nodded.

  “How many died?”

  “Ten thousand at least,” I said. “They were still counting. Looked like damn near every bird there.”

  Rex searched for words. He groped at the air with his oversized hands. “That’s nothing short of a tragedy.”

  Tragedies slid off my back. Tragedy was a human word. In nature, we called it reality. Animals died by the million every minute. Every creature had to destroy another creature to survive. Constant death formed the nucleus of our world. Still, the Bosque deaths sat like a thorn in my mind. I could still feel that whooping crane’s delicate bones resting in my arms.

  “They know what caused it?” Rex asked.

  I shook my head. “Not yet. I gathered samples for UNM.”

  “Hernandez is looking into it?” Rex waited for me to nod. “She’ll figure it out. Any guesses so far?”

  “Who knows?” I said. “Mass trauma. Lightning storm. Wind surge. Disease.”

  Rex winked at me. His crows-feet stood out like etchings. “C’mon.”

  “Fireworks or even a spotlight can cause mass confusion. Birds crash into each other. Birds crash into trees. Birds go blind and fly straight into the ground.”

  “You’re not thinking what I’m thinking?” Rex asked.

  I sipped my beer, bitter and ice-cold. “They’re near enough White Sands. A stealth flight or missile test could have caused enough turbulence. Strange sounds, bright lights. Who knows?”

  “You’re not thinking UFO?” Rex squinted up an eye.

  “I am not.” Many New Mexicans believed in UFOs. I didn’t.

  “It’s only a hundred miles or so from Roswell.” Rex shrugged broadly, as if conceding a point to himself. “Aliens are always messing with our wildlife.”

  I drank my beer.

  Rex drank his beer and leaned his elbows on the bar. Even on a stool, the bar’s height made him look small.

  We hadn’t seen each other in weeks. I assumed he’d been busy with odd jobs and booze. A woman may have come and gone. One of his ‘business ventures’ may have taken up his time, eradicated his savings, and gone south. Meanwhile, when Rex and I fell out of touch, I settled into my delicious routine. Sunrises and sunsets. Work and tranquility.

  It didn’t matter how long we went without seeing each other; our bond went back too far. As children, we had a lot in common. I was a freak with a dead mother, a father in perpetual mourning, and nothing but time to kill. The teachers gave me a lot of pitying looks and little help. Rex raised hell: he put ants down girls’ shirts, spent a lot of hours outside the principal’s office, and couldn’t do math. His dad hit him on the ears a lot. He couldn’t get the ringing in them to quiet down long enough to concentrate on anything. His teachers never flunked him in their eagerness to get rid of him. Our peers cast us out―children have innate freak-radar and ruthlessly mete out prejudice―and our teachers handled us with two fingers. In first grade, we’d banded together out of a will to survive.

  “Thank God for you, Stick.” Rex raised his beer bottle. “Saving the animals and solving mysteries.”

  A smile grabbed hold of my mouth before I could think of anything depressing. Few people could make me smile, but Rex had a knack for it. I tilted my bottle toward his. “Here’s to you. The most loyal friend.”

  “My promises never die,” Rex said. “That day your mom passed on―God rest her―I promised to be your brother. Thing is, I’m on to something. It’s big.”

  Rex always had a scheme.

  “You know the Minutemen,” he said. “They’re looking for ex-military guys.”

  The Minutemen, a group of vigilante rednecks who hated Mexicans, claimed to be defending the U.S.-Mexico border from drug-muling illegals. In reality, they mostly sat in the backs of their off-roaders with the floodlights on, drank Bud, and shot at coyotes with sniper rifles. Rex becoming one of them came as no surprise to me. “I thought they were volunteers.”

  “They have a new project,” Rex said. “They’re flush with cash through a partnership with some company that specializes in border security tech. Government contractors. And they need guys to help deploy it.”

  “So,” I said, “a private government contractor is hiring a vigilante group to help them test a security system on the Mexican border.” That combination sounded as absurd as anything else our society had coughed up.

  Rex nodded. “I could get you in on it.”

  I held up my palm. My father was Chicano.

  “They asked, do I have friends might be interested,” he said.

  I clinked my bottle into Rex’s again. “Cheers. Glad you’ve got a new job.”

  “Sorry I haven’t been around.”

  I shrugged. “You’re busy. Not a big deal.”

  “This Bosque thing. You find out why all those birds died, you tell me. I’m interested.”

  “It’s not my thing,” I said. “I did my part.”

  “Too bad,” Rex said through a yawn. “You’re the right guy to get to the bottom of it.”

  “I’m the wrong guy.” Our beers were gone. “I’ll get you a blanket.”

  “Thanks, pal.”

  I got a quilt and a spare pillow from my bedroom closet and tossed them on the couch. I retrieved Ralph from where he crouched in a far corner of the living room and dropped him in his terrarium so Rex wouldn’t accidentally step on him during the night. I rinsed each empty beer bottle and set them in the recycling bin. By the time I stretched out on my bed, Rex already snored on the couch.

  he mass bird death occupied the front page of The Albuquerque Journal two days in a row. It probably made national news, for all I knew. I didn’t use the internet much. I didn’t read anything except the local paper, and I didn’t talk to anybody who did.

  I’d told Melodía that I didn’t know a bug guy, but I did. I’d just forgotten about him. He came to the zoo’s reptile house once a week to check on our invertebrate collection. Most of the time, he worked at a private biomedical lab somewhere. His name was Simon Marchette. A skinny bald Anglo with thick glasses, he had the yellowed complexion of something that spent too much time in florescent light. He showed up at the zoo on Thursday―not his usual day. I hadn’t heard from Melodía since Tuesday, but I took the initiative to talk to him anyway.

  Marchette had his head in the Madagascar hissing cockroach terrarium. Imagine tickling three-inch long cockroaches onto their bellies to check for mites. They scuttle and wiggle their antennae and hiss. The
n you turn around and find your face in the stomach of a giant. Marchette took it in stride. He was alright.

  “Zookeeper Stick! You seek an update on the gromphadorhina portentosa, I presume.”

  “I do not,” I said.

  “They thrive! They thrive! What do you feed them?”

  I’d been feeding the hissing cockroaches fruit leftovers pilfered from the monkey enclosures. A rotten tangerine here, a mushy banana there. The cockroaches loved it. “I’m not here about the cockroaches.”

  “Ah-ha! Other business.” Marchette bowed. “Proceed.”

  “You’ve heard about the birds?”

  “Of course.” The scientist wagged his head. “Tragic. Of course, millions of insects die every minute of every day. No one thinks twice about it. But birds, I suppose, are another matter.”

  “One of the birds has a bite,” I said.

  “An insect bite?”

  I shrugged.

  “An arachnid bite?”

  I shrugged.

  “It couldn’t be a bat bite?” Marchette asked. “Could it?”

  I stood there.

  “You don’t know what type of bite it is. You wish me to examine this bite and determine its origin.”

  I nodded.

  “Ah! Of course, you only need send me, via electronic mail, certain details: fang-span, envenomation, etcetera. Any photographs would be helpful. Of course, out of professional curiosity, I should like to behold the victim myself, if possible. Is it here?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, where is the victim of this bite stored? Let us sally forth to examine it at once. Tally-ho!”

  “It’s in the lab of Dr. Melodía Hernandez,” I said. “She’s a biologist at the University.”

  “Excellent! I have a luncheon to attend. Would she be receptive to a professional visitation in the after-noon?”

  “I’ll call her,” I said. “Thanks, doc.”

  He gave me the double thumbs up.

  Melodía didn’t answer her phone. I left a message and considered my good deed done for the week.

  After work, I didn’t drive home. Thursday night marked my weekly visit to my father’s casita in the South Valley. He still lived in the neighborhood where I was born, one of the old, poor barrios of Albuquerque. To its west flowed the Rio Grande. To the east, the abandoned rail yards lay like relics of a forgotten America. Fifty years ago, my old neighborhood had been a manufacturing and shipping district. Now, the adobe houses crumbled, the factories loomed dark and hollow, and the rail lines led to nowhere.

  My dad was the only one on our street who cleaned the trash out of his yard. He kept his adobe patched and his roof relatively sound. He managed to sustain a couple of fruit trees, despite the ongoing drought. His faded blue Chevy pickup still ran.

  I parked where the cracked asphalt met his dirt yard. Mrs. Chavez, an old woman in a threadbare apron and ratty housedress, froze in her driveway. She’d known me for over thirty years and still stared at me as if some new monster were invading her neighborhood.

  My father’s house was neat, as always. The front door opened on the kitchen to the left and the living room to the right. Both small rooms had wooden floors that the years had warped and scratched, but that my father swept clean. A woven red rug lay as it always did between the small green lazy boy my father used and the large rocking chair I managed to fit into. TV trays flanked each chair. The bare walls bore two shelves. One held an icon of the Virgin Mary and a few candle stubs, the other held my father’s radio.

  My father, small, brown, and white-haired, stood at the double-burner stove. He wore tan slacks, brown shoes, and a white shirt. His reading glasses came from Walgreens. He shaved every morning and again before he cooked dinner. On the stove, two pots steamed―one with rice, one with beans. I didn’t have to see inside. He ate the same thing every day, except Christmas, my birthday, The Day of the Dead, and Cinco de Mayo. On those days, he made chicken enchiladas with mole sauce that took an entire afternoon to prepare. In the old days, he’d kill the chicken himself from the coop we once kept in the back yard. Nowadays, he bought it prepackaged from the Super Wal-Mart.

  “Hi Dad.”

  He blinked at the pots, a wooden spoon in his hand. He’d stand like that until the food was done.

  The ceilings hung low. Growing up, my spine had been flexible enough to stoop around. As an adult, his ceilings were agony. I always tried to time my visits so that I’d arrive as he finished cooking. Otherwise, I’d have to stand there with him for half an hour—his kitchen was too tiny for a chair, as were so many in old Albuquerque casitas—and my neck would pay the price the next day.

  “Have a cold beer,” my father said. He rarely used Spanish―and had never taught me a word of it―but he spoke with the accent typical of an old Chicano man raised in rural New Mexico.

  I got a beer from the fridge. My father never drank.

  I leaned my back against the wall, pushing my feet out and slanting my legs to reduce my height as much as possible. By tilting my head against the ceiling, I could almost straighten my spine.

  The pots steamed. Two plates sat on the small table opposite the kitchen sink, each holding several tortillas. A jar of homemade salsa, two forks, and a paper napkin sat beside the plates. My father used a pocket-handkerchief to wipe his mouth after he ate. He bought the paper napkins, the beer, and the salsa as special considerations for me.

  “You can turn on the radio,” my father said.

  I went into the living room and flipped the switch. He kept it tuned to an AM station that played Mexican polkas. That tinny accordion music sounded like home to me. A lot of families have stories they tell each other over and over, or old jokes they repeat. My father and I were both men of few words. We had his Mexican polka music.

  We ate about fifteen minutes later. He sat in his little green lazy boy and I made do with the big chair he’d bought for me when I was twelve. At that age, I’d been six feet tall. The chair had been comfortable. A year later, I hit my teenage growth spurt. By fifteen, I’d grown a foot. At my high school graduation, the longest gown they had stopped above the knee. My father had never bought a bigger chair. On his custodian’s salary, he could barely afford to keep me clothed and fed.

  We finished our food. My father extended the footrest of his lazy boy. He crossed his legs at the ankle, and his eyes drooped half-closed. He’d drift off within the next half-hour. I’d do the dishes, put any leftovers in his fridge, and head on home. This was our Thursday routine.

  “Little Rex came by,” my father said.

  “I saw him a couple nights ago.”

  My father and I sat in our chairs listening to an announcer rattle off rapid-fire Spanish. I couldn’t understand a word of it. The next song started up, a ballad, not the usual high-energy polka. A slow-pumped accordion and a woman with a deep voice shared the melody. I couldn’t understand the lyrics, but the woman’s voice brimmed with sadness.

  “What did he want?” I asked.

  “He came by to see if I needed any work on my truck.”

  “And?”

  My father shrugged. “I keep it in tip-top shape. He said he’d clean my roof. Take a look at my cooler. Do some weeding. Said he didn’t want to do it for money. I told him thanks and gave him a cold beer.”

  Rex liked my dad. His father had been a bastard.

  “I think he comes around here because he’s lost.” Spanish staged a coup in my father’s mouth when he got tired. His vowels rounded out and his consonants drifted toward his old language. “You can tell the way he looks up and down the old street, like he thinks it’ll say something to him. Show him what to do with his life.”

  Rex had waited too long to find meaning in his life. We all had.

  My father’s blinks got longer and longer. With his feet elevated, his arms on the armrests, and his eyes staring straight up at the ceiling, he looked like a patient in a hospital bed.

  My mother had spent the last three years of
her life bound to a hospital bed. Her body’d become too fragile for anything else. After my mother’s death, my father shipped every one of her things out of the house. I don’t know if he sold them, gave them to relatives, or took them to the Goodwill. My seven-year-old self simply saw our house emptying its contents. She’d done all the decorating. She’d hung our drapes and our family photographs. Her rugs and side tables and shelves full of knickknacks had filled our little space. When her things vanished, we ended up with a barren house.

  He’d kept it that way. I used to think my father, a simple man, didn’t see the need for ornamentation or clutter. He’d been a janitor by trade, after all. Much later, I discovered that my father’s blank house matched his state of permanent retreat.

  I’d learned that from him. I’d also learned it from the staring, hooting, whistling, gasping, mocking, hollering hordes of normals. I couldn’t buy a goddamn grapefruit at the grocery store without it becoming an event.

  My father’s eyes finally closed and he began to snore. I wondered what having a giant for a wife and a giant for a son had done to him. Asleep, he looked like a cute little old Chicano man who could’ve been a garrulous jokester, a storyteller, a wise old man that people sought out. Instead, he lived like a hermit. What had we done to him?

  I went to the kitchen and did the dishes in his low sink. It took me ten minutes and would give me two hours of back pain. Over the past few years, my joints had plummeted downhill like my mother’s. My knees squeaked. My rounds at the zoo of plucking up crickets and dropping them into the enclosures of reptiles, amphibians, and arachnids set my thumb joints on fire. My vertebrae ground like the rusting gears of an old clock. My body was moving toward its first big break.

  My mother’s brittle bones had started in her early thirties soon after she gave birth to me. At thirty-eight, I was overdue. Once my skeleton started to disintegrate, I knew what life had in store for me: a slow, crumbling death. I’d made a pact with myself. I stored it in a small safe in my closet loaded with hollow-point bullets, and it wouldn’t miss.

  I had my future planned out.

  I spread a knitted blanket over my father before I left.