Nightwing by Martin Cruz Smith

No!”
    “Climb!”
    “Oh, God!”
    Silence, until the last call.
    “Hayden!”
    He woke, shaking as if in convulsions, a cramped hand locked around the leg of a truck seat. On his hands and knees, still trembling, he crawled to the Rover’s food locker and poured a quart of water over his head. He dug his fists into his eyes, erasing his father and Ochay and the others. It took him a minute to open and spill out the Valiums.
    Had to sleep. Had to sleep. But, please, God, no more dreams. If he could just last until night.

    “Don’t forget to pick me up on the way back,” Selwyn asked as he and Esther and Mae got out of the jeep at the base of the mesa, where Esther’s sister’s family of eight lived in an aluminum trailer, which was a runway of small children between the beer cooler and the television. Wearing gift shop headdresses, the children converged on Selwyn and began pommelling him with rubber tomahawks.
    “And never intermarry,” Selwyn groaned.
    Youngman drove alone back into the desert where the Snake Clan was rounding up snakes.
    Cecil Somiviki and his younger brother Powell were sitting on the open tailgate of Cecil’s station wagon. Between them was a canvas sack that constantly shifted from the movements of the snakes inside—diamondback and prairie rattlers, bullsnakes, whipsnakes, garter snakes, but mostly small Hopi rattlers. The brothers were both stripped down to bathing suits and leather breech clouts; Cecil had a Stetson on and Powell wore sunglasses. From time to time, the older brother doused the sack with water to keep the snakes cool.
    “What’s new?” Cecil greeted Youngman. He was tribal sheriff and, on the side, sold propane gas to the pueblos from his station wagon.
    “Abner Tasupi died.”
    “Son of a bitch! How’d that happen?”
    “Some kind of animal attack. He was all chewed up.”
    “Son of a bitch!”
    Powell said nothing. He was nineteen and he frowned studiously over the tribal newspaper Qua’ Toqti, The Eagle’s Cry, as if conversation was a distraction below his dignity.
    “Man, he was a crazy mean fucker. Oh, he was wild. Well, that’s the best thing I heard today.”
    “He was just an old man, Cecil.”
    “He was a killer. Everybody knows that. A witch.”
    “You don’t believe that shit.”
    “I don’t believe it, but it’s true. Why do you think we kicked him out? Oh, he was always up in Maski Canyon where the ghost pueblos are. Come back after he made up some corpse poison. I bet he killed fifteen, twenty men, more. There was a man he hated, he’d turn hisself into a black dog and pull the poor bastard right over the edge of the mesa. Even the headpounders were afraid of him. By the way, that Walker Chee was around and he wants your ass.”
    “It’s not the first time.”
    “This time he says you roughed up some pahan. I don’t want to know about it, but stop it. And what about Joe Momoa? Why are you always rubbing folks the wrong way? You always pick the wrong folks, too. Learn to get along, for my sake.”
    A Snake priest came up to the station wagon. He had his arms outstretched and three or four rattlers in each hand, the diamondbacks pale and heavy, a sidewinder rough-scaled and horned, all of them twisting ineffectually. Cecil opened the sack while Powell picked up an eagle feather. As a Hopi rattler raised its mouth out of the sack, a wave of the feather made the snake duck. The priest dumped the snakes in, bummed a cigarette, and trotted back out into the desert.
    “Did Momoa have a vet up at his place?” Youngman asked.
    “I heard from Joe yesterday. All he said was he was going to shoot some night varmints in the Wash. Maybe he meant you.” Cecil smoked; ashes drifted over his belly. “You were away, you don’t know nothing about Abner. Hear about the time Arizona Public Gas sent some men down to Jeddito Wash? Abner gets wind of it. Does hisself up like Masaw. Sure. Crazy son of a bitch digs up a grave and dresses in a dead