Blood Lite

"What happens to your ostrich?" Legs asked, treating the affair as a joke.

"Probably come to you," Willie said. "Treat him right or he'll get you. He can be mean and stupid. Kick a man to death right easy, run forty miles a' hour—"

"You know I don't believe in spirit guides," Legs said. "What if I don't?"

"You'll be knee-deep in shit," Willie said. "Ostrich shit."

Around midnight, a white Jeep Cherokee stopped in the street down below and let down a rear ramp. A tall, slender woman in camouflage coveralls stepped out of the Jeep and entered the building.

"Let her in," Willie said as the buzzer sounded.

Legs knew better than to argue, even when she wheeled Willie out of the apartment and, within minutes, pushed him up the ramp and into the truck.

As the Cherokee pulled away, the streetlight illumi­nated a decal of an ostrich on the back bumper.

By noon of the following day, Legs called Downtown to see if the old man had gone directly there, but no one had seen him. He decided that Willie was doing a favor for one of his Mob friends or there was always the possibility that senility had finally done what senility does. Besides, reporting a missing person was not a comfortable idea.

He remained mostly distracted by his own problems until, catching sight of the afternoon Janet Air Shuttle, he remembered what Willie had said when they'd last watched one together: They're coming to get me, adding later, Stay away from the Road to Rachel.

Never one to obey orders, Legs walked the mile or so to the closest car rental company and was soon on his way to Area 51, though what he hoped to do when he got there was anybody's guess.

Radio on full blast, he smoked part of a joint, munched on a candy bar, and enjoyed the winter sunshine. He felt good until he saw what looked like an unmarked cop car closing in on him. Glancing at the speedometer, he slowed down below the speed limit and veered onto Highway 375, which would take him to Groom Lake Road. The road was bumpy; the cop car stayed with him. After about twelve miles, with the cop still behind him, he swerved to the right down a narrow road, unmarked except for a broken-down shack and a sign that read dora's place:

GENTLEMEN WELCOME.

The car behind him made a U-turn. Legs gave a sigh of relief and kept driving until he saw a very large animal lying across the road. He put on his brakes and was about to get out of the car when a white Jeep Cherokee like the one that had taken Willie hurtled toward him.

He sat and watched the Jeep stop on the other side of the big bird.

The same tall woman he'd seen the night of Willie's disappearance stepped from the passenger side, holding a gun in her hand. To Legs, who knew little about guns, the weapon looked real. A man, also dressed in camouflage, stepped out of the driver's side, strode over to the animal, and kicked it. He realized suddenly that they were the Camo Dudes who patrolled Area 51, but since he had neither a camera nor a weapon, they would probably just ream him out and call the Lincoln County Sheriff's Department.

"This one's dead," the man said. "Told you he wouldn't make it to the road after what I shot into him." He looked at Legs. "Dead as you'll be if you don't do what you're told."

The woman pushed Legs toward the passenger side of his car and got behind the wheel. "You were supposed to stun it, not kill it," she said through the open window.

The man laughed. "What's one ostrich, more or less?"

The woman turned to Legs. "As for you, Mr. Cleve­land," she said.

"How—"

"Maybe your uncle might have told you a little too much about our business. Know what I mean?" Her laugh was not pleasant.

The man roped together the legs of the dead ostrich and looped it around the bumper of the van.

"Hope you're into ostriches, Mr. Cleveland," the woman said. "Dumb creatures. With Willie gone, some­one's got to take care of them."

Within twenty minutes, the van pulled up in front of a huge barn, barricaded by a wide iron bar. The man removed the bar and Legs was shepherded inside. Cor­ralled in the middle was a large flock of ostriches.

The smell was gross. He gagged.

"You'll get accustomed to it," the woman said.

Legs prayed silently for the cop who had been follow­ing him, vowing to G-d that if he got out of this, he'd give Willie's money to the Piutes, never gamble again or booze, never-

"All right, Mr. Cleveland," the woman said. "Time to meet our soldiers. They've been restless of late. You'll have to calm them down so that they follow instructions. Who knows, if you're good at your job—if they don't kill you—maybe we'll show you our other brigades. Noah got it right when he saved the animals."

Hoping to control his fear, Legs turned and focused on the troop of birds. The ostriches looked calm enough to him. Most of them had their heads spread flat on the sand. The rest milled around in an almost listless man­ner, nudging one another occasionally. They were just like Willie had described during his interminable recounting of his misspent youth.

According to Willie, his search for a spirit guide had led him to Walker Lake. While sleeping under a bush, he was awoken from a peyote dream by the poking head of a strange and hideous animal nuzzling him in the armpit. The animal looked like a three-hundred-pound sage hen. Its ski

The bird, for that was what Willie determined it was, stared at him and refused to move. When Willie pushed at it, it skittered to one side, but made no attempt to fly. He would have understood if he'd known anything about ostriches. However, he did not, yet.

What he did know was that he could not embarrass his family by going home. Not then. Not ever.

Thus began a lifetime of adventure for Nattee-Tohaquetta, aka Way-Out Willie. First he walked to Austin, Nevada, where he met a pretty young woman by the name of Dora who gave him shelter at her place of employment—the larger of Austin's two whorehouses. He quickly became a favorite of the rental ladies, who were quite happy to feed him in exchange for yard work and Indian tall tales. On his sixteenth birthday, they even took it upon themselves to initiate him into manhood in the pleasantest of fashions.

Nattee and Dora became a couple. She continued plying her trade, but pleasured him on the side. In what spare time she had, she taught him to read, a skill that allowed him to learn about his ostriches. Of most significance to him was the fact that his spirit guide was not unique and he deter­mined that he would earn the money to buy several more.

He did, and Willie's Ostrich Farm and Whorehouse was born.

All went well for him until his ostrich conspired to lead its fellows away from Willie's Farm and Whorehouse and onto the road that led from Austin to Belmont. Like a revolutionary army, sixty-three strong, they marched off, leaving Willie no longer the owner of an ostrich farm.

Rather than search for them, he sold his farm, split the money with Dora, who said nothing about being with child, and took off for Las Vegas to become a gambler.

The woman had called them "our soldiers," yet Willie had said they never attacked unless provoked.

Or trained? Legs thought.

Maybe he could find a way to free them, but what was the point if they killed whoever they'd been trained to kill? Or if they killed him.

Either way, it seemed to him, he was a dead man.

He was still staring at the birds when he heard a door open behind him. The man stood by the barn door they'd entered through while the woman stood near a storage closet he hadn't noticed before. She had stripped off her camo outfit and was standing in a pair of short shorts and pulling on one of those white suits that emergency work­ers wear when cleaning chemical spills.