Follow the Crow

by B. B. Griffith

  “Are you gonna come inside?” I ask.

  “No, you go in. This is my time.”

  So I leave him. But I don’t go back to bed either. I spend the next hour listening for a bird on my roof, and at one in the morning I feel more awake and restless than I did outside talking to Dad. Whenever I don’t know exactly what’s bothering me, I tackle the first thing that I think of, and the first thing I can think of is Gam saying the word Arroyo like it was the answer to everything.

  I get up, splash some water on my face, throw on another layer of deodorant, and button myself back into my uniform. I strap on my belt and holster my gun and grab my keys and my flat-brimmed hat. Danny Ninepoint would hate me going to the Arroyo alone, but Danny would also hate me waking his ass up at the birth of the morning to chase after a dead man he was over and done with the second we left the bar. So I don’t call him.

  The road to the Arroyo is winding and barren. It’s past Main Street, and past the tenements, and past the fringe, and past the stretch of desert beyond. After a good dust storm, the tracks can sometimes be hard to follow, but I’ve been here more times than I can count, and I know my way. It’s only when I get into the velvet black of the desert at night—when the headlights of my old truck get swallowed up five feet in front of me—that a small part of me wonders if this was a smart thing to do at all, much less alone. And the buzzing begins again. But it’s not so bad, and I’ve come this far already, and I don’t think I can stand turning around and finding my dad still staring at a pile of rocks, so I kick into low gear and creep my way out into the desert.

  The Arroyo appears in front of me like a shelf on the ocean floor. The drop-off beyond the campers that ring the ledge is steep, and at this hour looks a shade darker than black. In the daylight it’s a trash pit, but right now it seems like a swirling door to the worst Chaco has offer. Almost all of the cars sit silent and cold like boulders, but a handful are lit from within, and I can see shapes shifting about like genies in lamps. Danny and I have been here in the dead hours before. Usually this group knows enough to let a patrolling cop be, but then again, I thought that about the men at Sancho’s up until today too.

  Already I see blinking eyes peeking out of makeshift curtains like coyotes caught in my headlights. A van nearby starts its engine. That’s to warn those still awake that a cop is here. In the daytime they aren’t so subtle. It’s three honks. Nice that they’re considerate to the sleeping vagrants, I suppose.

  I’m looking for a memorial of some sort. If the gambler was really a part of the Arroyo, they’ll know he’s dead by now and will have set up something to mark his passing. They’re addicts and drunks here for the most part, but they are a tight community and they watch their own. It’s been that way since Gam’s time. The Navajo don’t like death. Old school Navajo, like many of the folks at the Arroyo, still think death is a thing that’s catching, so they’ll have cleaned and purified his camping spot and gathered anything he may have left about for burial. It takes me nearly a full pass before I find it.

  In the darkness it just looks like an empty spot between camps, but it stands out like a lost tooth and I slow down. When my headlights glint off the small pile in the center of the space, I know I’ve found the right place. I throw my truck into park and check the perimeter. There’s a rusted out camper to the right that’s as dark as a cellar closet. To my left is a flatbed truck with a tarp stretched over it. A one man job. But that one man is out in the night leaning against his truck and smoking a cigarette. The cherry burns like a demon’s eye in the blackness. He stares me down as I hop out. I can’t tell if he’s being surly or if he’s bored. Around here it’s most likely both.

  I close the door to my truck gently, keeping one eye on the smoker. He’s dressed in a faded Cleveland Indians baseball jersey and tear-off gym slacks, and he’s swimming in them. He’s not wearing shoes, and his head lolls a bit toward the ground, like he’s watching me out of the top of his eyes.

  “Officer,” he says. He doesn’t sound condescending, but he doesn’t sound happy to see me, either. “Funny seeing your kind at this hour.”

  Guys like this don’t worry me. What worries me is if he causes a scene and brings the whole shithole camp down on me. I’m hoping he knows the drill and doesn’t want anything more than a late night smoke.

  “A man showed up dead today,” I say. “He was an Arroyo man. In fact, unless I’m way off, I’d say he lived right here. People knew him as the gambler.”

  The smoker is silent, but that tells me as much as I need to know.

  “You’re holding vigil,” I say.

  “I am. Not that it would matter to an apple like you.”

  The Navajo who live at the Arroyo are probably the worst off of any of us, but they’re fierce nationalists. You get some of the most hardline Navajos living out of vans on the edge of the desert out here, and they stick to the old ways. They respect the purification periods and observe the holy days and practice the chant ways, and they look down on anyone who doesn’t and still calls themselves a Navajo. I try not to take it personally when he calls me an apple. I think he’d call any Indian who didn’t live hand-to- mouth right next to him an apple. It means red on the outside, white on the inside.

  “His name was Oka Chalk,” he says. “He’d been here longer than any of us. He only became the gambler because of fuckers like you and the shit you bring into our land.”

  A lot of people lump NNPD in with tribal politics and the dealings of the council and the elders. Never mind that we have nothing to do with Wapati or the finances of this rez. We’re just tasked with trying to keep it together.

  “Easy,” I say. “I’m just trying to figure out what happened to the man.”“Seems clear. He died,” says the smoker, staring blackly at me.

  “Yeah, I got that.” I stare right back at him. “Thing is, what’s a veteran Arroyo man doing dying like a common smackhead?”

  This throws him. His glower cracks just a bit. “Smack?” he asks.

  “Yeah. Smack. The gamb…Oka Chalk died in his own puke propped against the backroom of a dive bar near the fringe. So I’ma ask you something, seeing as you’re on vigil and all and that probably means you and him were friends. Does that sound like the guy you knew?”

  The smoker takes a big drag, and it washes over his head in the white of the moon.

  “Smack?” he asks again, and I know he’s speaking to himself. And I already know that’s not how the gambler died. I also know I’ll never get a straight answer from this guy. They have a code around here, and it doesn’t include working with “apple” cops like me. Instead, I take a look at Chalk’s camp site.

  It looks like the gambler lived his life out in a fifteen-foot square of dirt where he parked his car. I look out beyond the Arroyo drop-off and try to give the dead man the benefit of the doubt. I say to myself that there was probably some beauty here, in the unfiltered sunsets and the endless plains, but I can’t sell it to myself. Right now this patch of dirt reminds me a lot of the prison cells we have down at the station. And at least there you have plumbing.

  There are tokens in the center of his spot, left by the Arroyo community. Herbs and flowers mostly, and piñon and juniper branches. Things meant to purify the space. There are also other gifts with no Navajo significance at all. A carved wooden whistle and a tattered stuffed rabbit. There are folded notes, as well, and a collection of coins. The tokens form a big pile, about a foot high, in the dead center of the spot. I get the feeling that the gambler was well liked here. I turn back to the smoker with a new appreciation. I see now that the man looks bereaved. And here I was about to come out swinging. I decide to come clean to the guy.

  “Look. Something about this doesn’t sit well with me. About this whole thing. I don’t know what yet, but I’m trying to figure it out. All I know is he shouldn’t have died that way.”

  The smoker watches me for a good fifteen seconds in silence. Then he speaks.

  “He used to give me a sp
are can of beer every now and then. That’s all. But around here, that’s enough. I said I’d hold vigil because I think he was a man worth it. I don’t know nothing about him more than that.”

  I nod. Sounds about right. Sounds like the end of a poorly placed hunch.

  “But I do know this,” the smoker says, and it sounds like he was debating telling me this thing, this one thing, from the second I said I was out here trying to place the gambler on the right side of the books. “He started this token pile,” the smoker says.

  This throws me.

  “What? You mean he knew he was gonna die?”

  “Don’t know nothin’ bout that. Just know the last time I saw him, after he pulled out of his spot in that van of his, he got out, walked back over here, and set down the first token. Then he left.”

  I cross my arms and turn to the token pile. I walk over to it and kneel down. I gently move pieces of the pile, and the smoker doesn’t seem to mind, so I go digging. I set each piece in a row to the left of the pile, flowers, beaded jewelry, bits of pounded leather, coins, braided strips of hair, until I get to the very bottom, and there I find a totem.

  A totem is a powerful thing for an Indian, especially an old-timer, for whom these things generally mean more than for your average young buck. The Navajo believe that a person and an animal can be connected and that connection is unique and powerful. We don’t carve any totem poles or anything like that, but if a Navajo believes strongly enough that they are connected to an animal, sometimes they carve it out of rock or stone and make it into a totem that they keep on them, usually in a pouch by their side. Different animals mean different things, but the connection is always personal and symbolic. I feel like I used to see more totem pouches on people when I was young. I even thought of making a totem myself when I was a kid. I wanted a bear. The bear is popular because it stands for power and courage and great strength, all things a little boy wants. The problem is, you don’t choose your animal. Your animal chooses you. I’ve never seen a bear in my life, and I don’t much care to, and I’ll be the first to tell you I don’t exactly have “great strength,” so there went that.

  If a Navajo has a totem, he never parts from it, which makes it strange that the gambler would leave his behind. And the gambler’s totem is a crow. A solid turquoise crow, about the size of a walnut, and beautifully detailed. The marbling of the turquoise makes it look like it’s in mid-flight even as it sits in the dirt in front of me.

  The crow is a strange animal in Navajo lore. It’s not that the crow has negative connotations or anything, but it’s not exactly the type of animal you see carved into totems. In fact, I’d never seen a crow totem in my life. The crow stands for spiritual strength, but it’s also a symbol of change. In Navajo stories, the crow is often tricky, and sometimes he’s actually a shape-shifter. You never quite know where he’s coming from. And if we count the tapping on the roof, which I do, this is the third encounter with our tricky friend I’ve had in the past twenty-four hours. I’m not exactly a spiritual man, but I’m not blind, either. I look up at the smoker, who watches me calmly. The buzzing in my head gets louder.

  “It’s a crow,” I say, lamely. He nods.

  “Don’t touch it,” he says, but he doesn’t need to worry. You don’t touch another man’s totem. It’s wrong. Even I know that.

  I carefully bury it once more and then stand, too quickly. I stagger for a few steps until I right myself on my truck. The smoker is still watching me, and an image of him peering, cigarette limp in his mouth, spins around my head. The smell is back again, but it’s stronger, almost like plastic burning. I gag with the intensity of it.

  The smoker says something to me, but I’m holding on to my truck for dear life and I’m not listening anyway because all of a sudden I see thousands of crows and I realize that the night sky has been a patchwork of oil-black feathers all along. They seem to wave gently like heat coming up from tar on the road. The leather and bones and coins in the pile seem to dance, like the crow totem is trying to work its way out. I look up at the smoker to see what he thinks of all this, and he’s still trying to talk to me. His brow is furrowed, but his words sound like gibberish. I have an irrational urge to grab the crow and steal it for my own, an abhorrent thing for a Navajo to do to another Navajo, especially one who has just left this world, but right at this moment it doesn’t seem strange at all. It seems right. My vision is constricting, but still the crow calls to me, like light shining through the holes in a black button.

  And in a brief moment of clarity I realize I’m going to pass out, and this is about the last place in the world a guy should pass out, especially a cop. I try to get into my truck, but my body is floating away from me bit by bit. I paw at the com on my shoulder, click it on, and mutter into it.

  “Danny. Danny, I’m at the Arroyo. Danny, I need…” What do I need? Whatever is coming from my mouth is distant and muffled and certainly doesn’t sound like my voice. I drop my hand from the com. The white noise that comes back from it floods over me, and I drop to the ground. My head bounces off the runner of my truck, but I’m too far gone to care.

  Then everything is black.

  Chapter 3

  Caroline Adams

  I always get slammed with work at the end of a night shift. Like, half an hour before I’m supposed to go home. And it takes all of the Nurse-Fu I’ve accumulated over the past two years working here not to rip my hair out. It’s not even the late admission itself, or that it’s an ER overflow. We get overflow admissions all the time here on the oncology floor. Albuquerque General is constantly overflowing, and it’s usually the same people spilling in and out. No, what gets to me most is the cutesy way my nurse manager says it: Car-o-line, we got one more for ya! As if she was out looking for four leaf clovers on my behalf. I try very hard not to express disappointment. I know better than that. I feel like she watches me for it. Mary Ellen is the kind of manager who swears by the power of a positive attitude even as she pisses everyone off. Or maybe it’s just me. Although I don’t think so, because I’ve seen other nurses scowl after her, some doctors, too, although they’re doctors and they can get away with it. I tried to bring it up once in the break room, but I didn’t have the words to explain what bothers me so much, and I felt like the other girls there were waiting expectantly for some ammo to use against me. So I talked about how I felt like I’d gained ten pounds since starting night shift, which set off a round of the usual Oh my God I knows and brought us back to safe ground. Sometimes I don’t know about this floor. For nurses, a lot of my co-workers can be quite uncaring. Exhibit A is that I have no friends here. But again, maybe that’s just me.

  If our ER gets a late-night rush, it’s usually because of the Navajo. I’m not being racist here or anything—nurses don’t have time to be racist. It’s just a fact. And if we get an overflow case and it’s a Navajo, they usually give it to me. Maybe they think I’m better with Navajo patients because I spend one day a week working at the Chaco Health Center inside Chaco Rez and should therefore have some sort of connection with the Navajo. I have no such thing. I’ve tried, but the Navajo are a close people. Or maybe I’m a bad nurse. I waste a lot of time obsessing over things like this, in case you can’t tell. And since we’re being honest, I think I might as well tell you that the reason I work one day a week at CHC is because it’s a condition of the government grant that put me through nursing school. I find it rewarding, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not like I came out of school on some crusade to help the Navajo. That’s just what ended up happening.

  When Mary Ellen tells me about the new admission, I’m already taking care of one Navajo who happens to be detoxing from alcohol, and it’s not going well for either of us. Alcohol withdrawal is a mess. Detoxing from opiates or stimulants can be bad, but going cold turkey won’t kill a drug addict. Detoxing from alcohol can kill you, so we have this step-down system that tapers the patient over a long period of time in which they tend to threaten your life and spit in your
face.

  I don’t blame patients for what they say when they’re detoxing. I know they’re not in their right minds. I try not to take it personally when grizzled old men with purple noses call me a cunt or tell me I’m a waste of time and to get the fucking doctor. I’m getting better about it, but for a while I stayed up late wondering if I was a waste of time. Or, more specifically, If I’d wasted my time becoming a nurse. Those were early jitters. I hardly have those any more. Still, when you have to have the CNAs restrain the patient and strap a face-mask on the guy to keep him from spitting at you while you take his vitals, you do wonder. And this guy is taking it to such extremes I feel like I might start laughing.

  “Any tingling in the hands or feet?” I ask.

  “Cunt.”

  “How about your stomach? Do you still feel nauseous?”

  “You cunt!”

  “If you have any appetite at all it’d be really good if we could get something in your stomach.”

  “Yoouuuuuuuuuu…” he winds up, puffing his chest out like a mangy goose. “Cuuuuunnnnnnnnnntttt!” he finishes, whooshing out like a whoopee cushion. The CNA in there with me, a big Mexican woman named Inez, smiles kindly at me.

  “Well,” she says, “at least we know there’s no shortness of breath.”

  I let out a sharp laugh before I can cover my mouth, which sets him off in a string of babbling. This is the kind of laugh that threatens to go manic, so I have to excuse myself from the room and take some deep breaths. Naturally that’s when the attending doctor walks by. I have a moment of panic when I see the long white coat and here I am leaning against the wall trying to keep it together, either about to laugh or about to cry. But then I realize it’s Doctor Bennet and I relax again, but only a little. He’s a floor favorite, but he’s still a doctor.