Nightwing Read Free

shows on TV. I’ll do it without them.”
    Abner unstoppered another bottle of black sand. He swayed delicately as he stepped around his painting, but he was steady enough when he bent over to draw a final figure within the ring of red. Painstakingly, he let the oily sand shape itself into a man without a head. A ragged cape hung from his shoulders; from the cape extended fingers. Abner opened a leather pouch and took out small bones, which he placed as a necklace. Where eyes and a mouth would have been, he put round corn cob sections. Under the eyes, trails of broken mirror glass, so that the headless figure seemed to be staring and crying at the same time.
    “Almost done.” Abner stood up, satisfied.
    He wiped his hands on a rag and rummaged in his trunk until he came up with a buck knife and a leather belt. Putting a foot on one end of the belt, he snapped it taut along his leg as a strap and slapped the knife blade back and forth across it.
    “If you’re going to end the world, one more day won’t make a difference,” Youngman said. “Wait until tomorrow.”
    “Radio said maybe rain tomorrow night.”
    “So?” Youngman almost laughed.
    “New clouds coming, Flea,” Abner said seriously. “Dreamed them up. My clouds don’t like rain.”
    Abner felt the edge of his knife. Then he crossed to the rabbit cage, lifted the animal out and strung it by its rear legs with a leather thong from the top of the shed door. The rabbit jerked from side to side and rolled its eyes.
    “What do your clouds like?” Youngman asked.
    Abner grabbed the rabbit by the base of the ears and twisted its head back, stretching the neck. He laid the knife across the white fur of the neck, and then his arm dropped.
    The old man stared hesitantly, standing awkwardly in the frame of light, one hand still gripping the squirming rabbit. Reflection made the blade luminous. Youngman felt the stare like a blind hand running over his face, as if recognition had suddenly been lost.
    “What do they like?” he repeated.
    The rabbit clawed the air. The knife blinked, turning in Abner’s hand.
    The old man was crazy, Youngman thought. Senile. Finally over the edge after a lifetime of datura, grass, peyote, and bad booze. Tripped on stories, prophecies, lies, and frustration. Not that Youngman especially loved Abner, he told himself, any more than a man could love a gnarled ironwood tree or a stone chimney. When the tree fell or the chimney split, though, there had to be a sense of loss. As if a touchstone had been taken away. But a medicine man plotting war in a junkyard shed against the offices of the Indian Bureau, against the power shovels and million-dollar bankrolls of the mining companies? That was not only pathetic, it was downright comic. Abner still thought the Hopis were the Chosen People. They weren’t chosen, they were marked for erasure.
    Abner’s eyes said he wanted to answer and that he couldn’t.
    “You won’t believe me, Flea,” he finally said.
    “Then why did you start raving about all this?”
    “Because you’re my friend. You’re part of it and you have to help. Don’t worry,” Abner became more reassuring, “we’ll kill them all.”
    “Just tell me what to do.”
    “Later, when I’m dead.”
    The wind that penetrated the shed grew an edge. Youngman thought about reopening the wine.
    “If you can wait that long, Abner, I guess I can.”
    As Youngman stood, the glossy coils of the serpentine seemed to shift. An illusion in the shadow. For Abner, though, from the altitude of datura, Youngman guessed the spirals were moving and gaining speed. He was still nagged by the suspicion that Abner might take a gun and start sniping at cars on the highway.
    “But if you’re ending the world different this time,” Youngman added, “I’d be curious how.”
    “Different.”
    “No floods, fire, ice, bombs. Guns, then? How?”
    “This time, Masaw will end it,” Abner said. “I’ll see him tonight.”
    “Tonight,