Archaeopteryx Page 4

  y home below the earth sat in darkness. Ralph slept in his terrarium. The old woman upstairs had retired for the night. Everything was as it should have been.

  Until I saw the red light blinking on my answering machine. I never received messages―certainly not more than one every month or two. I sat at my bar and watched the light blink. I didn’t like it. My life didn’t need blinking lights. It angered me. It ruined my perfect subterranean darkness. My father hadn’t left me a phone message. Rex hadn’t left it―I’d seen him only two days ago. That left only one possibility.

  I opened a beer and drank it all the way down as I thought about the light. My answering machine had a tape. Even if I unplugged the machine, the tape would hold onto that message. The machine might forget the tape had ever been recorded upon, but I would know that the message sat there, imprinted on that magnetic strip. I could erase it.

  Or I could listen to it.

  I did.

  Melodía’s husky voice spoke in fragments. “Stick. I need you to come back to the lab. The whooping crane―Dr. Marchette found something. The crane―you won’t believe―just come see me tomorrow morning.” The tape ran quiet for a few seconds. “It’s Melodía. You’ll want to see this.”

  I didn’t. I wanted to wake up at dawn and go through my routine. I wanted to set up my coffee machine the night before and let its automated brewing cycle rouse me from sleep. I wanted to sit and sip my first cup while the world turned orange. I wanted to eat toast and a grapefruit and drink a glass of calcium-fortified skim milk in the first quite moments of the day. I wanted to take my calcium and vitamin D supplements on a full stomach and then drive to work. I had a rare blond tarantula there. I was trying to get her to mate. It was difficult. That was the day I’d set out for myself and that was the day I’d earned.

  Tumors. I’d had a tumor on my pituitary gland. My mother had one, too, I imagine. She’d never been to a doctor who’d bothered to check. She was too poor. I was too poor until I got my health insurance at the zoo. After a few years of wrangling with my insurance company, I’d hired some doctors to cut it out of me. My growth stopped, though by then I was twenty-five and bumped my head on the sky when I went outside. My doctor said that removing my tumor might save me from the disease that killed my mother. I had no faith he was right.

  Melodía’s tumors couldn’t be removed. They were entwined with her muscles, nerves, and vascular system. Whenever Melodía asked me for something, I said yes.

  I kept my own hours at the zoo, which were very regular. I had a routine and I intended to act it out, day after day, until my death. My routine left nothing around the corner. It left no room for my enemy, loneliness, to ambush me. I’d spent my twenties as the loneliest man on Earth. I took long drives around the most depraved parts of Albuquerque and lamented. I sat in my dungeon and wept like a Cyclops with his only eye gouged out. I tore my hair and asked: why? Back then, I believed a God existed to scream questions at. In those days, I realized a good life is a life every moment of which is planned, predictable, and safe.

  I didn’t break my routine lightly, and I sure as hell wouldn’t have done it for anyone besides Melodía.

  I showed up at the university around seven the next morning. The campus was sparsely populated. Still, a couple of girls in cargo pants and pixie cuts stopped smoking their clove cigarettes to drop their jaws at me. A skateboarder crashed into a bike rack. I didn’t check to see if he was okay.

  The door of the biology building was plastered with a poster promoting the Gamut Circus and Freak Show. It featured rearing horses, women in feathered blue sequins, and a girl with lobster hands. I tore it down and balled it up in my fist. I hunched down the sterile hallways of the biology building where I found Melodía in her lab. She stood at a microscope amidst a dozen birds in various stages of dissection. With the right side of her face in profile, she looked like a normal. Her lab looked like the den of a psychopath.

  “You should have told me you were coming,” she said.

  “I’ll just leave then.” I headed for the door.

  “Get in here. You have to see this.” She had the white-feathered corpse of the whooping crane stretched out beneath her microscope. It had lost patches of feathers and appeared shriveled. The whole room smelled like a morgue. “Come over and get a look.”

  “My people don’t like formaldehyde,” I said. “It reminds them of all the wrongs done to them.”

  She looked up from the scope. The bulging left side of her face still surprised me after all the years I’d known her. “Your people?”

  “Frogs,” I said.

  She snorted.

  “How many frogs have we slaughtered for the sake of biology? And for how many years? Ancestral memory,” I said. “They know that smell.”

  “Get over here.”

  “I feed them. I help them mate. I look after their tadpoles. They trust me.”

  “How do you help a frog mate?” she asked.

  “I show up smelling like formaldehyde, and they’re going to think I’m fattening them up for some classroom of sweating, acne-riddled, pubescent normals.”

  “You like frogs more than people,” she accused.

  I grinned.

  She stepped away from the microscope.

  I bent way down and looked through the lenses. Low magnification centered on a close-up of a wound, similar to the sliced-up flesh she’d shown me when I’d dropped the birds off. This one was bigger than the others riddling the crane’s corpse. The wound went deep and had a coating of pus.

  “Pus like that,” I said. “That’s a reaction to a sting.”

  “That’s what Marchette said.”

  “Short duration, though. Not the kind of pus you see in reaction to an infection or the kind of venom that could kill a bird.” I raised my eyes from the microscope and looked at Melodía. “Marchette said that, too, I bet.”

  She nodded.

  I poked around a little bit, increasing and decreasing the magnification. The wound had been scraped. At the bottom, it looked particularly manhandled. “You take some tissue out of here?”

  “I removed something I found at the bottom.” Melodía looked like someone trying not to betray her excitement.

  “What?” I asked.

  She motioned to another microscope.

  “Use your words,” I said. “What did you find?”

  She shook her head and motioned at the microscope.

  It hurt my back to bend over and peer through the instrument at a single slimy insect egg, a little lopsided, but moist and healthy. It hurt my neck, it hurt my shoulders, and it hurt my feet. I did it anyway, but I wasn’t enjoying myself.

  “An egg.” I straightened, careful to avoid hitting my head. “What’s in there?”

  “You tell me,” Melodía said.

  “Marchette already told you,” I said.

  She shook her head.

  “Cut it open,” I said.

  She stared at me.

  “You want me to tell you what I think without being influenced,” I said. “I’m not a scientist. I’m not a scientist for good reason. I don’t want to be consulted, collaborated with, or recorded for publication or presentation. All I want is to go to my Reptile House. I want to figure out how to tantalize a girl tarantula into meeting a boy tarantula, for her to fall in love, and for them to make beautiful, hairy, eight-legged babies.”

  She stared at me while making her right eye big and needy. The left one stayed crumpled at the corner and stretched at the bottom. Her tumors had been playing tug of war with it since we were kids.

  “That’s what I want.”

  She fluttered her eyelashes.

  I sighed. “You’ve got a bite that looks like it was inflicted by a goliath of a horsefly.”

  Her mouth spread into a smile as I talked. I could tell that she’d already heard everything I told her. She’d already researched it. She probably had articles from scientific journals on her computer. She had digital photos. Those e
yes: they sparkled beautifully with excitement. Beauty and excitement both annoyed me.

  “You know all this already.”

  She stood there.

  “The bite’s too big for a horsefly,” I went on. “Maybe some horseflies got too near the Trinity Site. They’re giant mutant horseflies now. They’re on the loose. Did you find bites on all of the birds I brought you? Is this a hypothesis for Birdmageddon or am I just entertaining you?”

  “This is the only bird with a bite,” she said.

  “Well,” I said. “Good day.”

  “What else?” She grabbed my elbow as I turned to walk out. Her touch felt good and it was an invasion of my routine. I’d scheduled intimacy with females out of my life. I didn’t need any of them touching me and making me feel an emotion.

  I pulled away. She noticed. It was awkward and I didn’t care. People deserved to feel awkward.

  “What else?” I said. “You have mutant horseflies and you want more.”

  She remained close, her long curly hair smelling of lavender and formaldehyde.

  “Horseflies don’t sting,” I said. “This wound was inflicted by horsefly-like mandibles, but a wasp’s sting has penetrated the center. Horseflies also don’t lay eggs in birds. They like disgusting piles of horse feces or any other kind of excrement. Brackish water. Rotting vegetation. That’s where they lay their eggs. And they lay egg clusters. Scores of eggs. Not a single egg.”

  She looked up at me, keeping a grip on her excitement. Like every person, she was small and far away.

  “Judging from the pus on the walls of the wound,” I said, “that bird was alive when stung. Judging from the amount, the venom wasn’t lethal. No limb or skin discoloration. Non-lethal venom. I only know one animal that stings prey to stun it then lays a single egg under the flesh of the still-living victim.”

  She mouthed the name of the animal as I said it.

  “The tarantula hawk wasp.” It was the New Mexican state insect, a two-inch monster with an excruciating sting.

  She finally let the excitement shine out of her. Half her face lit up. The other half stretched and twitched under the casement of tumor. It made me feel emotions.

  “Are you saying,” I said in a high-pitched mimic of her voice, “that I’ve discovered a mutant half-tarantula hawk, half-horsefly? A hematophage and a hymenoptera?” I switched back to my own voice. “No, I’m just a simple zookeeper.”

  “Marchette is very interested,” Melodía said.

  “I’m sure he is. I’ll bet he’d take that egg off your hands for big bucks.”

  She smacked my arm. “I’m a scientist. It’s not for sale.”

  “You’re going to hatch it.”

  “You bet I’m going to hatch it,” she said.

  “That should be either very science fiction, or very horror movie,” I said. “Either way, I’m sure you’ll have your hands full.”

  She smiled her most charming smile and cocked her head to emphasize her good side, flipping coils of dark hair from one side of her head to the other. Her nose crinkled and her eyelashes did something charming.

  I groaned.

  “I need two things from you,” she said.

  “Of course you do.”

  “Pretty please?”

  “Out with it!” I may have bellowed it too loud. I meant it to be a playful bellow, but Melodía’s expression lost its glee.

  Her gaze flicked over my face. “Two things.”

  I tried to look kind. I didn’t have much practice at it.

  “One. Incubate this egg for me.”

  That would be tough. I would have to simulate the warmth of a living being. I would have to monitor the pupa within the egg and provide it with proper nutrition when it hatched. If it was, indeed, the egg of a tarantula hawk, the larva would need a lot of sustenance. Tarantula hawks implant their eggs in living tarantulas. When the larvae hatch, they burrow into the body of their host, devouring flesh and organs until they mature into full-grown wasps. The tarantula was a cocoon of sustenance that sheltered the wasp until it metamorphosed. It was like the caterpillar-butterfly thing, only from your worst nightmares. Taking care of this egg and whatever emerged would be a challenge for any caretaker.

  “Okay.”

  “Two,” Melodía said. “Go back to the Bosque.”

  “No way. All the birds are dead. Nothing to see.”

  “You need to find the creature that laid this egg.”

  It was probably just a big coincidence. An abnormally large horsefly bites a nearly extinct whooping crane and drinks its blood. A tarantula hawk wasp stings the bird through the incision that the horsefly cut into the bird’s flesh. The wasp mistakes a five-foot white-feathered wading bird for an eight-legged arachnid. It implants its egg and flies off. Then, in a freak lightning storm, wind-swell, missile test, radiation surge, alien experiment, or stroke of God, the bird participates in a mass death. The laws of probability stated that even the most unlikely series of events happen.

  I shrugged.

  “Can you go today?” she asked.

  I shrugged again. I could buy a coffee on the way. I could listen to my Tom Waits CD. I’d be back by noon. My tarantulas only mated at night, anyway.

  “You’ll do it!” she said.

  “Can you hold onto the egg until I get back?”

  She smiled like a kid who’d forgotten all the evils of the world for a few precious seconds.

  A question distracted me as I walked back out into the land of gawking hipster girls and fragile skater boys. How do you track a horsefly?

  I walked through the university parking lot. A campus security vehicle rolled past. The two pale normals inside showed me their tonsils. A young couple on the sidewalk froze in their tracks. A scattering of solitary walkers craned their necks over their shoulders. The whole city contorted its body to get an eyeful, except for one person: a small man sitting on a bench not thirty feet away reading a newspaper. He didn’t even look up. I wanted to salute him. Instead, I gave the security guards one of my evil giant glowers and got into my truck.

  An hour later, I turned off at the exit for the Bosque Del Apache and drove around the marsh loop to the spot where the average man―my brain had already erased his name―had led me to the whooping crane. The sanctuary was nearly deserted, except for a couple of park ranger vehicles. The dead birds had been cleared away. The water in the center shone like blown glass. A casual observer would have said that the most fertile land in New Mexico was going to waste, that it was a damn shame, that they hoped new flocks of birds would come back to populate the place.

  I would never say that. Birds occupy the top of the food pyramid. The lower tiers of that pyramid teem with fathomless numbers of beings. Those tiers were throwing a party. Fewer monsters were trying to eat them. The crayfish, the frogs, the dragonflies; the wasps, the garter snakes, the blue-tailed lizards; the slivery minnows, the earthworms, the whiptail lizards―all of them were probably beginning to realize that they could poke their heads out without being devoured.

  I was after one of those little creatures. Humanity was the worst monster in the world. I was a monster among men, and I had ways of catching my quarry.

  The usual method for taking a biological sample of flying insects is to set traps. Netting. Sticky traps. You can bait either one with scents that attract the insect you’re after. You can get the males by baiting your traps with the pheromones of females and sometimes vice-versa, depending on the insect. You can bait your traps with live bait. That works well for wolf spiders and some types of ants. For web-dwelling spiders, you go find their web. The spider will be lurking nearby. The same goes for any other trap-dwelling insect. For hematophagous insects, you bait your traps with fresh blood. For pollen-collecting insects, you bait with pollen or set traps near food sources. Insects and their cousins, the arachnids, are the most successful beings on the planet. You can kill a thousand and know that they’ve already laid ten-thousand eggs to replace themselves. So, you catch the
m dead. That’s just how it is. Especially flying insects. Taking a sample of a population of flying insects is a euphemism for murdering a representative number and studying it.

  I wasn’t equipped with bait, traps, or any other murderous gear. It would have taken me a week to set it all up, a week longer to gather specimens, and a month to sort through them all. Never mind the permitting doing so in a national wildlife refuge would require. For some reason, I’d volunteered to come down here anyway. My blinders came on when I was with Melodía.

  Still, there were ways.

  I sorted them out in my head as I pulled onto the shoulder of the road near where I’d found the whooping crane and where a woman now poked around in the bushes. She wore a tan button-up top and high-waisted khaki slacks with the cuffs tucked into her knee-high rubber boots, coated in fresh mud. Her safari hat had one side snapped up, and a strap dangled beneath her chin. Her straight black hair hung in a ponytail. The insignia on her rain slicker told me she worked for US Fish and Wildlife.

  I pulled onto the road, figuring I’d come back later. But she’d spotted me. When she saw me leaving, she dashed through the brush, and leapt in front of my truck like a jaguar cornering prey.

  “I know you!” she yelled. She had dark skin, dramatic cheekbones, and a complexion that looked airbrushed. Her eyes sparkled like black suns. Her body curved and tapered in the proportions TV said we should value. She could have been a model for safari wear. I’d never seen her before—I would have remembered meeting a new person.

  “I recognize your license plate!” She recited the digits, as if that should have impressed me.

  I honked at her.

  Before I could do anything about it, the woman clambered on top of my hood. Sitting back on her heels, she slipped a business card under my windshield wiper, facing inward. It read: Tanis Rivera, Animal Theologian.

  She bounced to the ground, circled to the driver’s side door, and rapped on my window. I slapped my zoo ID against the glass.

  “I already know it’s you, John Stick.” She stood on her tiptoes hollering up at the crack in the window. She wore a grin that was half little kid and half carnivore. “Come out. I have a paradox for you.”