Follow the Crow

by B. B. Griffith

  Follow the Crow

  Vanished: Book One

  B. B. Griffith

  Griffith Publishing

  Denver

  Publication Information

  Follow the Crow

  ISBN: 978-0-9899400-5-4

  Copyright: Griffith Publishing LLC ©2014

  First published 2014

  Written by B. B. Griffith

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means without the prior written permission and consent of the copyright owner.

  Enquiries should be made to the publisher:

  info@griffithpublishing.com

  Publisher Information

  Griffith Publishing LLC is a registered trademark.

  www.griffithpublishing.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  To Mom.

  For everything.

  Strange—is it not?—that of the myriads who

  Before us passed the door of Darkness through,

  Not one returns to tell us of the road

  Which to discover we must travel too.

  - Omar Khayyám

  Rubaiyat

  (Edward Fitzgerald, trans.)

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1: Ben Dejooli

  Chapter 2: Ben Dejooli

  Chapter 3: Caroline Adams

  Chapter 4: Ben Dejooli

  Chapter 5: Caroline Adams

  Chapter 6: Owen Bennet

  Chapter 7: Ben Dejooli

  Chapter 8: Caroline Adams

  Chapter 9: Owen Bennet

  Chapter 10: Ben Dejooli

  Chapter 11: Caroline Adams

  Chapter 12: Owen Bennet

  Chapter 13: Ben Dejooli

  Chapter 14: Caroline Adams

  Chapter 15: Ben Dejooli

  Chapter 16: Owen Bennet

  Chapter 17: Caroline Adams

  Chapter 18: Ben Dejooli

  Chapter 19: The Walker

  Chapter 20: Caroline Adams

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Ben Dejooli

  If you drive due west from the city of Albuquerque, New Mexico, for two hours and then cut north before you hit the city of Gallup, you’ll see a big stretch of glass—flat nothing dusted with sand, slightly lighter in color than the rest of the Red Rock Country to the north. It’s called the Chaco Flats, and it’ll go wavy on you in the distance, give you an unsettled feeling in your gut and make your eyes water to look at it if you catch it at mid-day. If you were tempted to turn back at this point, to get yourself back to humanity in Albuquerque or to cut northwest to Santa Fe, you wouldn’t be the first. You might even be tempted to keep going west, straight on to what passes for civilization at the shithole Nevada border towns, and if you did, I wouldn’t exactly blame you. But if you have enough gas in the tank and want to see one of the greatest feats of social engineering the United States ever attempted, head north through the flats and keep driving until you hit the Chaco Navajo Reservation.

  You can’t miss it. Drive far enough north and all roads eventually lead to Chaco. Whether or not you’ll be happy you came is another matter entirely. I promise you’ll find the rez. But that’s all I can promise. You’ll know it by the dented sign that says Welcome to the Navajo Nation. The dents come from buckshot fired by drunk kids with nothing better to do. For years we kept replacing it only to find it shot up again the next morning. Nothing says “shoot me” like a pristine white tribal sign leering at you along a seven-mile straightaway. I’m a tribal cop, and even I know that. But don’t let some shot-up sign scare you away. There’s plenty that’ll scare you, mind. Just not that.

  So say you drive from Albuquerque, and say you got the gas and the morbid curiosity once you hit the flats, and say you head north and pass the buckshot welcome sign, then you’d hit the welcome center. It’s nice. Renovated just last year. Come on in and take a seat, and we’ll show you a pretty video and an entire wall full of educational pamphlets about what it means to be Navajo, from patent (proud nation of warriors and statesmen) to present (it’s complicated). There’s a gift shop there too, and directions to our popular stopovers, including the Tribal Museum, Old Town, and the Wapati Casino.

  The employees at the welcome center won’t tell you this, because it’s one of the cushiest jobs in the rez and they don’t want to lose it, but we really hope that you hit the highlights and bounce out of here, hopefully a few bucks lighter. Maybe with a nice arrowhead collection or a little plastic tomahawk for the kids. Stick to the main road. Because if you don’t, you’ll start to notice things.

  For instance, if you were to turn left off the main road about a quarter mile past the welcome center but before the turnoff to Wapati, you’d see that the cleaner houses and apartments sort of disappear on you. You duck your head to check the car radio then look up, and all of a sudden you’re at a row of track homes. This is the Painted Sand development, and it’s not that bad, actually. What’s bad is another quarter mile south, where there aren’t even homes. Just metal boxes. Like a bunch of semi-trucks dropped their freight containers off the side of the road and left them there to slowly rust out but before that happened about six people moved into each one. This place doesn’t have a name. At the station we call it Boxes. You go there with your partner, and you keep your gun hand free.

  Today, if you were to drive past Boxes where the concrete turns to packed gravel and the gravel turns to dirt and the dirt turns to mud, you’d find a bar called Sancho’s. And today, if you were stupid enough to walk inside, you’d find me, Ben Dejooli, officer of the Navajo Nation Police, and my partner Danny Ninepoint. And if I saw you, I’d usually tell you to get the hell out for your own good, especially if you were white. But today I’ve got worse problems, and it looks like you’re along for the ride anyway. Maybe you’re a stubborn one, like me. Like most of us here at Chaco. Don’t get me wrong, we have a lot of nice places on the rez. Places that are beautiful and peaceful and welcoming. It’s just that the cops don’t go to any of them.

  Today, some poor Navajo ended up dead in the storeroom of Sancho’s, strewn out on the floor amid empty bottles, the sick still damp on his face, and a needle still stuck in his arm. His rubber tie-off dangles loosely from around his bicep. He’s purpled and stiff.

  “Found him when I opened up,” says Sancho, a ruddy-faced Navajo with a round, bearish head and a banded tail of black hair halfway down his back. I check my watch. Bars open early in Chaco, and the sun is already high in the sky.

  “That was almost two hours ago, Sancho,” I say. Danny gives me a quick, wary look from under the flat brim of his hat. Danny thinks I talk too much. Or maybe it’s that I just say the wrong things. He’s usually right. Danny was an NNPD veteran back when I started, and that’s going on six years now. He doesn’t like to let me forget it. But when things go south, there is no better Navajo to have your back. He usually finishes things before they start. They call him Ninepoint because he was already as big as a nine-point buck back when you’re that age when kids start giving you nicknames. So you can imagine how big he is now. He carries around a scalp knife with a bone hilt and a beaded leather wrist strap. He keeps it where his gun should be and his gun where his stick should be. It’s a clear enough warning: mess with Danny Ninepoint and he’s going straight for the knife.

  Sancho glares at me for a half second longer than a civilian should rightly glare at a cop. And a couple seconds longer than h
e’d ever glare at Ninepoint.

  “We didn’t find him ‘til later. We called you boys as soon as we stumbled ‘cross him.” He sounds like he’s talking about a raccoon that got stuck in the ducts. I squat down to get a better look at the dead guy. He’s puffy and mottled, but I recognize him as one of the old regulars who works the Wapati penny slots. He’s even got a Wapati Casino jacket on, muddy and frayed. Probably a comp. You sit for five years pumping coins into a box, and they’ll be happy to give you a buffet voucher and a jacket. The jacket looks well- worn. The guy’s old. Well-traveled. He doesn’t strike me as the type to overdose on heroin like some teenaged tweeker, but I keep that to myself for now.

  “You normally let your customers shoot up in your back room, Sancho?” I ask. Sancho doesn’t answer me. One of the barflies shifts forward in his chair. He doesn’t get up, exactly, but he’s letting me know he could get up and over real quick if he wanted to. He’s staring at me through the mirror behind the bar and rolling an empty shot glass. Danny sees it too and steps in.

  “Now just hold on here. Nobody is saying anyone did anything.” He points at the barfly. “And you, big fella, if I see you get up from that seat, I’ll paste you to it. You hear me? Mean mug the mirror all you want, but you stay set.”

  “Sorry, Ninepoint,” Sancho says on behalf of the bar, but he’s looking right at me. “It’s just that your partner’s been known to run his mouth, and I like my bar and my life here just fine.” His eyes glitter. He knows what he’s saying.

  See, Sancho doesn’t like me. Neither do any of Sancho’s regulars. Or most people on the rez, for that matter. Your average Navajo isn’t exactly buddy-buddy with Navajo Police, no different from the US cops and the civvies on the outside, but they’ll abide a steady presence like Danny. They know Danny. They trust Danny. Also, Danny doesn’t give them much of a choice. With me it’s different. There are two things a Navajo cop gets known for. The first is killing another Navajo. That’s bad, but people know that sometimes bad things happen. Hell, sometimes they’ll even allow that the other guy deserved it. The other is banishing a Navajo. That’s worse. Danny never did that. As far as I know, nobody on the Force has done that. Nobody but me.

  Technically NNPD can’t banish anyone ourselves. Only the tribal court can do that. When you’re banished it means you are no longer Navajo. It means you’ve been thrown from the Navajo Way. Our path is no longer yours to walk. Your soul has been untethered from the souls of the People, and you are now a wanderer. It’s a heavy hand. The heaviest. The only time it’s been used in Chaco in recent memory was in a case I helped build against Joseph Flatwood. A case that didn’t make me any friends, and that took away the best friend I had.

  This isn’t the first time someone’s jabbed me about the banishment like this. It won’t be the last. Still, it gets to me. It’s not like I don’t think about it every day already. That case ripped my family apart. It ripped my life apart. Flatwood and I ran together. He was my best friend right up until the second I decided to banish him. Now he’s dead to me, but sometimes, when I dream about the old days, we’re still raising hell together.

  I know I should back down from Sancho, but I can’t. I’ve never been very good at letting things be. “I cut Joey Flatwood loose, and he and I were friends. Imagine what I’d do to a shitbreath old pusher like you.”

  “Now Ben—” Danny says, but stops when the big fella and the man to his left, both of them built like fire-hydrants, get up from their seats. We’re trained to defuse situations, but I never liked Sancho, and I never liked his bar. And right now, I just don’t feel like defusing.

  “You’re what’s wrong with this rez, Sancho,” I say. “If it was up to me I’d dump you and your drunk fuck friends out in the middle of the flats then come back here and burn this place to the ground.”

  When I get in Sancho’s face he backs down, even though he’s a good foot taller than me. He wasn’t lying when he said he cared about his business, such as it is. But the big fella and his friend don’t back down. They’re the type to get liquored up at ten in the morning hoping for something like this to go down. The type who think Navajo cops aren’t real cops. The type who think Indians shouldn’t police other Indians. There are a lot of people that think like these two, and for them, this is payday.

  The quiet one decks me first. I shoulda known. It’s always the quiet one. To my credit, I do stay on my feet. I’m small, but I’m wiry. I can bend. He damn near knocks me to the floor, but I pop back up like a toy and jack him once in the throat while I reach for my stick. He clutches his neck, and I flip my baton from its holster. Sancho is screaming something in Navajo that I know I should understand, but everything starts to spin and I don’t recognize this type of spin. I’ve been hit plenty of times, even knocked out a time or two, and I know that spin. That’s a suck-the-world-out-from-under-you spin where one second you’re on your feet and the next you’re on your face. This time it’s sort of like when you stand up too fast, but worse. Like if you stood up too fast with a hangover and a sack of sand around your neck. There’s a high-pitched ringing in my head. It’s so loud I feel like it’s coming from my face where he popped me. In my daze I think that maybe if I cover my face it’ll mute the sound, so I do. I almost fall over, but I steady myself on a bar stool.

  Under normal circumstances I’d probably be in for an ass kicking, hitching up like that in the middle of a fight like I need a tap out and a glass of water, but I’ve got Danny Ninepoint with me. By the time I shake the spins from my head, Joe and his quiet, sucker-punching friend are sprawled out on the floor, and Danny is pulsing one fist like it’s just warming up and pulling his long black hair back around with the other.

  “You alright, Dejooli?” he asks, and I can tell he’s none too happy with me either.

  “Yeah, just…wasn’t expecting that.”

  “Maybe you should have,” he says, and it’s a reprimand and it stings, still, even after six years. But the good thing about Danny is that’s where it ends. I try to straighten up, but the buzzing lingers and Danny must see it on my face.

  “Watch the door,” he says. “I’ll write all this up.”

  I nod, grateful for some air. I hadn’t noticed it before, but Sancho’s smells like sulfur. Which is fitting, I suppose.

  Outside I wave away a few of the rig monkeys fresh off the night shift looking for a drink, and they grumble but leave all the same and wait in the shadows for us to finish up. For some reason the smell is slow in going away, and maybe it’s the adrenaline, or the knock to the head, but everything around me is intensely bright. The ruts in the dirt are sharp and clean, the rust on the cars looks like rich mud. The dirt-spackled yellow of the tenement houses seems saturated, almost like it’s glowing. When the fall sun breaks from the clouds, I can barely feel the heat it gives, but it flashes like a bomb of light. I cover my eyes and I turn away until it’s cloudy again. When I turn back, a crow sits on top of our squad car, on the light array, and it’s staring right at me.

  The Navajo have a rhyme and reason for every living thing under the sun, and I’m going to be honest with you, I forget most of them. And if you were to point out a crow on any given day and ask me what it means I’d look at you like you’re a lunatic. But this crow is different. This thing is massive, almost as tall as the driver’s side window, and the flashing hazard lights don’t faze it at all. Its eyes glisten black, then yellow, black then yellow, in time with the lights, and as it shifts in the light I see a peculiar coloring, almost like it’s striped in dark red underneath the ink black of its outer feathers. I realize I’m expecting it to do something, like talk to me, or point the way to an ancient secret with its bony beak. Instead it takes a huge shit on the squad car, then squawks once and flies away just as Danny walks out of the door. He walks out alone. The fire behind his eyes is calmed. His face is wide and smooth and unknowable once more. Sort of like the Chaco flats.

  “Can’t help but notice you didn’t arrest anyone,” I say,
resisting the urge to massage my temples.

  “If we arrested every drunk Navajo we came across we’d have paperwork out the ass. You know this.”

  “How about every drunk Navajo who assaults a cop? How ‘bout that, Danny? In a sane world that guy is in jail.”

  Danny Ninepoint gives me that flat gaze that says I still don’t understand. I’m not sure how I still can’t understand after six years, but I somehow don’t. I’m trying, but I keep not understanding.

  “Sancho’s run that bar for almost twenty years now.”

  “So?”

  “So you tell me what happens to guys like the big fella and all his drunk friends when they get their stipends and show up at Sancho’s only to find we’ve shut it down because some boozebag swung at a cop. I booked the big guy once before on a disturbance call because he was hopped up on paint thinner. I let him out of the tank the next morning, and he asks for a ride right here. These are the type of guys who ask cops for rides to bars, Ben. I’d rather they be Sancho’s problem.”

  I see his point, but I’m not willing to concede it yet. “And the dead man? We just gonna let that one slide too?”

  Danny looks away, and for a split second I think he’s gonna say yes. But then he shakes his head.

  “Of course not. I reported him to IHS. They’ll give us the autopsy. I know what you’re thinking, but Sancho isn’t a pusher. He’s an asshole, but he’s not a pusher. He’s not lying when he says he wants to keep his business. He’s not stupid. This place is his life.”

  I know Danny doesn’t mean to bring up Flatwood. Danny doesn’t hold it over me like the rest of the rez. It was Danny who told me to stick to my guns in the whole mess, to see it through, to take the stand against Joey. But it still stings.

  “Look, the point is this is just what it looks like. That old gambler probably lost a bit too much at Wapati, went to a place he knows, Sancho or one of these guys forgot to check the back, and he settled in for one last kick. That’s it. No need to get anybody arrested.”