Nightwing Read Free Page A

you’re going to see him? The god of death, huh?”
    Abner’s concentration slipped to his painting and the unfinished figure with crying eyes and round mouth and no head inside a ring of red sand. The black body and cape shone, soft as fur.
    “If I do things right,” he said.
    Youngman lifted his hat and ran a hand through his hair. He felt helpless.
    “Okay,” he gave up. Leaving the shed, he stopped in the doorway next to Abner and the hanging rabbit, half in shadow, half in light. “If anyone can do it, you can.”
    On the way to his jeep, he heard the rabbit’s whimper cut short.

    He had been born into the Coyote Clan, the only son of an unemployed construction worker and a perpetually angry woman. Joe Duran, bear-sized, arms like posts, never brooded over lack of work. Once for a year he hauled bricks at White Sands for the Air Force, an experience he felt bestowed on him enough of labor’s honors. What Joe Duran did best was drink and hunt. He could go up the Dinnebito Wash with five rounds and stagger home with four kills. “Saved the last round for myself,” he’d tell Youngman. The third thing he did best was clown. Whenever clowns were needed for a ceremonial, Joe Duran was always the first tapped. Disguised in white powder, he would stumble drunkenly through a line of priests, or run after women spectators waving a wooden penis, or walk suicidally backwards along the edge of the mesa. Which struck everyone as terribly funny, although it was no different from the way Joe Duran acted any other day, and in time, of course, he drove his angry wife crazy. Youngman remembered watching his father wearing clothes backwards and standing on his immense hands on the highest point of the mesa, laughing while Youngman’s mother pitched knives and rocks. Finally, as a last grasp for sanity, she took up with a Navajo in Window Rock. Joe Duran followed them, killed them with his deer rifle, kicked the dead Navajo out of bed, lay down beside his wife and blew his own brains out. It was a common melodrama of reservation life.
    Youngman was trucked off to mission school. Life there was comfortable enough. He had food, friends, a bed. In class, he stayed as mute as he could, watching. The teachers listed him as “slow, possibly retarded.” Until the age of fourteen, when several sets of oil paints were donated to the school.
    He had a glib facility, a hunter’s eye for color. He didn’t speak much more than he had before, but he would sit in front of an easel every waking minute, painting landscapes, nothing but landscapes. They were shown and, to his surprise, they were bought. Youngman experimented with watercolors, tempera, and acrylic, obsessed not so much with art as with the revelation that he could make money. In one step he strode past every other Indian he knew, and past his father in particular. Within two years, he developed a technique with acrylic and varnish that gave his desert landscapes a hard, jewellike finish that was totally cynical and artificial. Youngman, alone, knew what he was doing. Not painting the desert. Killing it. On his canvas, birds were as bright and dead as souvenir pins, and falling rain had the quality of rocks. It was a style only whites could appreciate, but they were paying. At the galleries in Santa Fe and Phoenix, they paid a lot.
    Flattered by whites, he responded in kind. He cut his hair and dressed in sports jackets. Found himself becoming a good-looking man though not pretty, his features were too angular for that. Only occasionally was he betrayed by a dark hostility in his eyes, his mother’s gift.
    The University of New Mexico offered Youngman a full art scholarship. This was the second step up, Youngman told himself. He could be anything.
    The summer before his first year at the university, Youngman returned to the reservation. The Snake Dance was being held at Shongopovi. For fun, Youngman joined the runners whose race across the desert signaled the start of the