Follow the Crow

by B. B. Griffith

  I still don’t feel right about the whole thing, but my head is killing me and the place smells like a million matches, so I nod. Danny claps me on the back with his bowl of a hand. In the car, the radio buzzes from dispatch, crackles a code, and waits for a response.

  “C’mon, we got shit to do,” Danny says.

  On the drive out I look for the crow. I see a lot of crows, but I don’t see the one from before. I think I’d recognize that one if I saw it again, even at a glance.

  Chapter 2

  Ben Dejooli

  The rest of the day I’m thinking about Sancho’s and that dead gambler. Danny and I go on a few more calls after lunch—routine stuff, a minor wreck outside of Wapati between an uninsured beater and some poor family in a minivan who cut through Chaco on their way to Farmington up north. We drove down along the floodplain to make sure it was all clear, meaning no tweekers or squatters. Sometimes people think the rains are done by this time in the fall, but we usually get one or two more big ones before the end of October, and they’ll sweep that entire flood channel clean in a second. Dirt, debris, animals, people, all of it.

  The whole time we’re making rounds I want to bring up Sancho’s, but I know Danny is done with it. He’s old school. After he files a thing away in his mind, it’s over. He’s also seen a lot more dead Navajo than me. But it’s more than just the OD. It’s the whole scene back there. It was bad all around. The drunk and the dead and the smell of burning. Nobody should spend their last seconds on this earth holed up on the floor of Sancho’s back room. And then there was the crow. And how I almost pitched over. On my drive home after our shift, some guy catches me spacing out at a stoplight and honks. I’m thinking about how palsied the gambler looked, like he was clawing at the needle with his last breath, and how sad it was that all the guy had to his name was a Wapati jacket, dull gold and dirty. Nothing at all in his pockets, no rings, no necklaces. Not even a shitty bead bracelet. Nothing.

  I can feel my eye swelling up where the quiet one sucker-punched me. That’ll be a fun little reminder of how I punked out when it counted, staring at me in the mirror for a few weeks. This is one of those days you should try to put behind you as soon as you clock out, but it just won’t leave me.

  The way I’ve been talking about the run-down tenements and shacks on the fringe of Chaco, you may think that where I live is a world away. You’d be wrong. My home is one half of a split duplex a quarter mile north of the police station. I live there with my father and my grandmother, which is pretty standard around here. People live with their families under one roof their entire lives. Believe it or not, with just the three of us there’s a lot of space. We each have our own room, and there’s a small kitchen and a yard out back that we share with the neighbors. Just one bathroom, but by now we all know the routine and nobody bumps into anybody else. In fact, it’s downright spacious considering that when we first moved in, back before I joined NNPD, there were five of us. Back then it was my sister Ana and me in my room, and Mom and Dad in theirs, and my grandmother content in the small storage room off of the kitchen. But then I lost my sister, and because I lost my sister I lost my mom, although in a different way. She still stops by every now and then, but for the most part she’s long gone. She lives in a studio apartment in Albuquerque now and has a job as a caretaker there. You could say that she banished herself.

  It’s late by now, and since the night quickens even earlier in the fall, it’s nearly full on dark by the time I get home. But it’s a false dark. You can’t trust the early dark of fall. You want to think the day is over, but it’s not.

  As soon as I get in, I get a beer from the icebox. I’m not even going to try to hide it. Gam would know anyway, because she always knows. Dad’s different. I could eat dinner with an icepack plastered to my face and my father wouldn’t notice until it was brought to his attention.

  I’m sitting in the kitchen eating a reheated mole stew and holding a cold beer to my puffy eye when Gam comes in. She mostly cooks and knits these days, and the kitchen is her domain. She seems to know any time anyone crosses the small threshold she’s carved out for herself there. When she sees me with the beer pressed to my face, she pauses. Her face darkens, then she sees that I’m eating lukewarm mole on rice and takes it from me, shooing me out of her space. She gestures for me to sit at the small table across from the refrigerator while she puts the stew on the stove top and takes a smoked chicken breast from the refrigerator. She shreds the breast with two forks while the sauce heats and then adds the chicken. All the while, she’s quiet, waiting for me to talk, but I don’t feel like talking, not least of all because she makes me do it in Navajo, and despite her best efforts, my Navajo has always sucked. She refuses to speak English. I have a hunch that she’s fluent, but if you don’t speak Navajo to her, she won’t answer you. She stirs the stew and stares at me with that benign, blank expression her generation has. The look that says they’ve got all the time in the world to sit right there waiting for you. She’s small—the top half of her body barely clears the counter—and her long black hair has gone entirely grey, but that look is still strong.

  I sigh and set the can down, then I crack it open and take a big swig.

  “Bad day at work,” I say, in Navajo. She nods and plates the stew and sets it in front of me.

  “Did you catch them?” she asks. I don’t know how to explain the Sancho’s situation in English, much less in Navajo, so I just grunt and give a weak nod. She watches me placidly, and I know she can see right through me, but just then Dad comes home and she stands again, ready to dish up another plate.

  “I’m going to bed,” he says in Navajo, waving her off. He slurs just a bit, and I can see Gam’s slight frown.

  “You should eat dinner,” Gam shouts.

  “I’m not hungry right now,” he says quietly, and softly closes the door behind him. Gam covers the stew and sets it back in the refrigerator. Dad will eat it later tonight when he pads around the house, usually from one in the morning to three or four. He’s up every night at the witching hours. Has been ever since Ana disappeared. Most of the time he just watches television, but every now and then I catch him out back where Ana used to play. There’s a pile of rocks in a little sandbox there that she loved to stack and arrange. Mostly he just sits and stares at that, too, like it was the television, although a couple times I’ve seen him talking to it like it’s a shrine of some sort and not a six-year- old pile of rocks. He looks hunched these days, and since he’s as short as I am it doesn’t do him any favors. He’s been drinking more, too. Gam and I know it, even though we haven’t said anything yet. He only works part time at the hardware store south of the welcome center, but he’s gone the whole work day. He’s not the type to go to Sancho’s, but he’s probably at some place just a step up. Which isn’t saying much.

  Gam looks down at the ground and says everything without speaking a word. Oren Dejooli is her son, and she is embarrassed by him. She never forgave my mother for leaving him and still refuses to be in the same room with her on the rare occasions she comes through the reservation. Gam’s generation took everything on the cheek and kept plodding, especially as it concerned their husbands. The idea of leaving everything and running away to the city like Mom did is foreign to her, but more and more I think she’s beginning to understand how strange Dad has become.

  I made a conscious decision not to dwell on Ana. Every day I tell myself to file it away. Do like Ninepoint does. You can see how well that’s worked. Like talking to Gam in English. You can say whatever you want, but you’re not gonna get any results. Over the six years since she went missing her name has become an all-encompassing thing that hangs over the house and follows us around every day. Our lives have been shattered and then rearranged into pre-Ana and post-Ana. The line that separates them is Ana, too. She’s everywhere you look around here, but nowhere to be found.

  I want to keep Gam around. The thought of her shuffling back into her room to pick up her knitting strike
s me as unbearably sad just now.

  “You know Sancho’s?” I ask her. She frowns and makes a spitting motion. She knows it all right. Gam knows just about everywhere on the rez and just about everyone. And their parents. She speaks of people in terms of “the kid of so-and-so,” or, more likely, “the no-good kid of so-and-so.”

  “A guy died there last night. An old Navajo. He was always at Wapati, or walking along the roads by Wapati in a gold jacket. He was a…” I struggle to find the words, but Gam finds them for me.

  “Alone,” she says, and a brief flash of genuine sadness bows her face. It throws me for a second. She says something in Navajo that I don’t catch completely, but I think it’s an old prayer. Something about a last visit and the end of a journey.

  “You knew him?” I ask. Already she’s composed herself again, and she waves her bony hand dismissively.

  “He was old, like me. Old people know each other in small towns. That’s all. How did he die?”

  “Drugs,” I say, in English. I don’t know the Navajo word for drugs. I’m not sure there is a Navajo word for drugs. Gam pauses in her stirring of the pot. She furrows her brow, then shakes her head.

  “No,” she says, simply.

  “No?” I ask, incredulous. Gam shakes her head once, sharply. I laugh. I can’t help it. I’d spent this whole day trying to convince myself that there was nothing wrong with an old timer overdosing in the backroom at Sancho’s, and I’d basically done it, too, by the time I walked in the house, so it annoys me that she throws open that door in my mind again. Especially when there’s nothing I can do about it. My laugh sounds harsh and hollow. Gam frowns at me.

  “I guess you’re pretty sure of that,” I say in English, not expecting a response, not wanting one.

  “Die at Sancho’s?” she says, stirring the pot again. “No. Not him.”

  “Oh yeah?” I ask, fully switched to English now. “And where was he ‘supposed’ to die, then?”

  Gam watches me calmly.

  “Where is a man supposed to die?” I ask.

  “At home.”

  “He lived out of his camper, Gam. He had no home.”

  Gam shakes her small, round head in soft rebuke. Her bun flops.

  “The gambler’s home is the Arroyo,” she says.

  The Arroyo is just like it’s advertised. It’s a wash at the far end of the floodplain, due south of where Danny and I swept through today. It’s also the prime car camping spot on the reservation. If you live out of your car in this country, there’s a good chance you’ll get robbed if you’re on your own. A sleeping man in a car is a prime target. Lock your doors and they’ll smash your windows. If the tweekers and the drunks see something valuable inside, it doesn’t matter if you’re in it or not. If you’re a camper, it’s best to stick together. ‘Course, it’s best not to sleep in your car at all, but for most of these folks that’s not a choice, so they park in a half-circle around the top of the Arroyo. It’s gotten to the point where it’s become a neighborhood in its own right.

  Danny said when he first started that Sani, the chief of police, wanted them gone. Said they were unsightly, and ramshackle neighborhoods often come with ramshackle “businesses,” most of which aren’t remotely legal. When an old camper blew up and took a pair of Navajo with it, two more casualties of the meth businesses, Sani told Danny and his partner at the time to clear them all out. The two of them blew into the Arroyo like a whirlwind and screamed and thumped cars (and a few people) with their sticks. The cars left for a day and then pulled back in the next night. That’s the thing about neighborhoods on wheels. They’re tough to catch.

  “The Arroyo is nobody’s home,” I tell Gam.

  “The Arroyo,” she says again, nodding. End of discussion. She picks up her bowl of stew, goes to her corner chair and sets it carefully down on a pull-out tray. She takes a bite, then she picks up her knitting. It’s the beginning of a blanket, and it’s gonna be a beautiful one, too. As I watch her, I see her hands shaking, and not for the first time I wonder if that blanket is ever going to get finished.

  That night I don’t sleep. I sort of fade in and out of consciousness, but I wouldn’t call it sleeping. When I’m alone in my bed I realize that the ringing in my head that started at Sancho’s never really left me. It was perched behind my forehead and murmuring to me the whole time; it just took complete quiet to notice. Every time I start to drift, the sulfur smell comes back to me and I blink myself awake, scrunching my nose. My eye feels tight and puffy, and my head throbs in time with my heartbeat. I already know I’m getting the brawler’s wink.

  I’m not sure exactly what makes me shoot out of bed, but some time near midnight I come around and find I’m already standing by the window, panting, with my heart in my throat. After my blood slows and my eyes adjust, I see my dad standing outside in the moonlight, staring at Ana’s shrine. There’s also a skittering on the roof. My first thought is it’s a squirrel my dad somehow disturbed on his nightly excursions about the house, but on second listen this thing sounds too big. There’s a sharp tap, and then I hear the explosive fluttering of wings. Big wings. Crow wings. I look up and out the window and strain my eyes to scan the sky, but the moon has thrown everything above ground into inky black relief. It’s as if the bird, or whatever it is, is absorbed into the fabric of the night as soon as it leaves the roof. I turn back to Dad. He doesn’t seem to notice anything but the rocks in front of him.

  I sit back down on the bed, take some deep breaths, and listen hard for the ringing. I think it’s gone, which is a relief, but in its place is a strange quiet. And the quiet is made worse by the fact that my dad is in the back yard sitting on the dry grass and staring at a cairn my sister made six years ago like it’s a totem pole rooted to the secrets of her vanishing. I remember when Ana built that thing. She attached no significance to it. She was messing around in the back yard, digging up weeds looking for “fossils.” She plopped some rocks on top of each other on her way to the next door of her imagination, the way nine-year-old girls do. Dad has made them far heavier than they were ever meant to be. After another fifteen minutes of listening to this silence, I give up, throw on an undershirt, and go downstairs. I move by the light of the muted television, not wanting to wake Gam, and I sit at the table again, drink an entire glass of water, and stare at my father, trying to make sense of him. The stew pot is empty and meticulously washed. Dad is a fastidious man. He doesn’t want to disturb anyone with what he’s dealing with at midnight on the back lawn. He doesn’t want to disturb us with Ana. He knows each of us has our own Ana to deal with, and he’s a hardline Navajo in that. His problems are his own.

  Gam and I know he goes outside like this. Gam thinks it’s far more normal than I do, and she thinks the fact that I find this type of ritualistic meditation strange is proof of a creeping white influence. Usually I just let him alone with his grief. But tonight I’m not getting back to sleep, I already know it, so I slide open the door and step outside. The porch light catches my motion and flicks on, and Dad is startled. He jumps up and backs away from the light. He doesn’t meet my eye.

  “The rocks saying anything to you tonight?” I ask.

  I think my dad was expecting some sort of scolding, so when he hears the soft tone of my voice, he steps forward and looks up at me.

  “Stranger things have happened,” he says. “But no. They are quiet.”

  “Rocks can’t tell you where Ana is,” I say, and then, because I think the day still has its fingers in me, and because somewhere I feel that fucking crow still watching me, I say, “Flatwood might have been able to, but he’s gone now. Is that why you’re out here? Is it because of me? Because I got rid of him? Because he was never going to help us, Dad. Whatever he knew he took with him when he was banished.”

  Dad seems to snap out of his fog, and he shakes his head, his face imploring. “Is that what you think? That I’m out here blaming you?”

  “The thought has crossed my mind, yeah. Everyone else bl
ames me for Flatwood. And I’ve had a shitty day. Another day in which people who have no idea what happened that night somehow hate me for agreeing to testify against the guy who abducted my sister. Like I’m the bad guy.”

  Dad steps forward into the full flush of the floodlight, and I can see just how pitted and hollow his eyes are. “Not me, Ben. Never me. Do you understand me?” His eyes still have a touch of liquor to them. He grabs me by the shoulders for a moment, and I’m struck by how much we look alike. He has the same sharp features that I do and the same softly sloping eyes. It’s just that he looks hollowed out, and he’s shrinking. It’s hard to watch. Some part of me thinks a son should never grow taller than his father.

  Dad turns his head back to the cairn and drops his hands from my shoulders. “I was the one who left him alone with her. I was the one who stepped out for a quick drink. I was the one who thought I needed a drink because she’d been in the hospital for nearly a month and it was draining on me. I was the one who dropped my guard.”

  “Dad—”

  “—and I was her father, Ben. You did your duty. In front of the court and the elders, you stood like a man. All you did was tell them the truth. I was the one who failed her.”

  “Nobody failed anybody, Dad. Joey was practically a member of the family. Things that bad don’t happen because you step out for a drink. Things that bad happen whether you step out or not.”

  Dad walks back to the cairn and moves out of the way so the light washes over it. He cocks his head at it like an old dog.

  “I think I see her, sometimes,” he says.

  “So do I. Every day.”

  “But only when I watch a thing until my eyes stop watching. Only when I drift. That’s why I come out here. Because I can drift.”

  I understand where he’s coming from, but I also think the whisky I can still smell on his breath might be helping with his “drifting.” It’s not that I’m not sympathetic. It’s just that if I kept hanging on to Ana the way he does, I’d have driven myself insane by now. Sometimes I wonder if that’s not the route Dad’s heading down, and sometimes I wonder if he’s not doing it on purpose.