Follow the Crow

by B. B. Griffith

  “And I have to say, Ben, after reading her admission, I agree that it’s a concern. Something is giving you trouble.”

  I never gave him an admission, but that hardly matters now.

  “So I’m gonna do a couple of things here. First, I’m going to sign this AMA. You’re free to go. We aren’t liable for anything that happens to you.” Bennet wipes his hands across the air as if to shoo the legalese away.

  “Second, I’m going to write up a referral to the CT clinic. Indian Health Services will take care of your costs.” So Bennet knows he’s Navajo too. It shouldn’t surprise me. The doctors at Albuquerque General have a program where they rotate at the Chacho Health Clinic. I’ve seen him there once or twice. He’s smiled at me.

  “What’s a CT?” Ben asks.

  “It’s a brain scan,” Bennet says, grabbing for the pen and pad in his front pocket. “We just want to rule out the worst, that’s all.”

  He rips a page from his pad and hands it to Ben, who looks at it like it’s written in a foreign language.

  “Just take that to the clinic, second floor.”

  “I really can’t today,” Ben says, and I can see he’s gone a little pallid, but it’s more than that. His general color seems to be fading. “Maybe in a couple of days,” he says, half-heartedly.

  “The referral is good for a month, but I really would encourage you to go as soon as you can. Just get it over with, and then we’ll go from there.”

  “So I can leave?” he asks.

  Bennet signs the AMA form on his clipboard and then hands it to Ben. “This certifies that you are leaving under your own power and against medical advice. Sign here.”

  Bennet’s tone is strong, but Ben doesn’t flinch. He takes the clipboard, signs his name as a little scribble and then holds out his arm with the line in it. “Can you help me out of this?”

  Bennet’s phone rings again, and he snaps it from his hip, glancing at the readout.

  “I have to move,” he says.

  “I’ll unhook him,” I say. Bennet nods. At the door, he gives one last, unreadable look to Ben and is gone.

  “He wasn’t very happy with me,” Ben says, smiling sadly as I pull the line from his arm and push the rig aside.

  “I’m not very happy with you either,” I say, not daring to meet his eyes again. “Promise me you’ll get that scan.”

  He laughs and looks at me strangely. “Promise you?”

  “Yes. Promise me.”

  “I can’t promise you, I hardly know you.”

  “Fine,” I say, curtly, before attempting to bring down my trusty curtain of separation. Well, trusty until now, anyway. “Your clothes are on the dresser there. Have a good night.” I turn to go.

  “Caroline…”

  I stop at the door and glance over my shoulder. He’s still sitting on the bed. His feet dangle above the floor. His coloring is strange. I can tell that he wants to say something, but he doesn’t know how. I don’t know how I know this, exactly, except to say that it’s almost like it’s coming off of him in waves. I feel like I can sense the exact moment when he gives up and resigns himself.

  “Look, I’ll try to get the scan, okay?” he says. I’ve heard this tone before. It’s the same tone people use when in polite company as an alternative to a flat no.

  “Well, really try,” I say, after another long moment where I feel like I’m staring at him like he’s a mirage. It’s almost like his skin is smoking. It strikes me that perhaps I need to get more sleep. Either that or maybe I have something wrong with my own head.

  Then my phone buzzes and I can hear a bed alarm going off somewhere in the back, and I’m off running. It’s almost forty minutes later when I finally clock out, and by then Ben’s room has been empty for about thirty-nine of them.

  Chapter 4

  Ben Dejooli

  I’d planned on calling a cab from outside the hospital, slinking back to the rez and never talking about this little episode again, but when I get outside I see that Dad and Gam are already in the lobby. Gam is nested in a chair, puffed up in her old down jacket, and she’s looking right at me when the elevator doors open. She hops down from her chair and shuffles my way, shaking her head at me. My father is at the help desk, and he looks white as a sheet. He might be the only person on earth who hates hospitals more than I do. That he even got this far past the front doors speaks volumes about how worried he must have been about me. I’m touched, actually.

  Gam is now nodding her head and patting me on the side of the arm and muttering in Navajo, too low for me to understand. I grasp her bony hand, its skin paper thin.

  “I’m okay, Gam,” I say. She keeps nodding and shaking her head at the same time.

  “Ben!” Dad says, striding over to me. “I came as soon as I heard. Danny told us. What happened? What happened to you?” I haven’t seen him this worked up in years. He’s borderline frantic, and I think it’s best to get all three of us out of the hospital. We have bad memories of this place.

  “Come on,” I say, shepherding Gam in front of me. Dad follows and soon we’re outside and in the car. I said I could drive, but Dad insists. He’s treating me like I’m some flower, which is exactly what I didn’t want, and exactly why I was hoping to sneak my way back home. It takes until we’re cruising down the highway, the sun cracking over the horizon ahead, before his free hand stops trembling. Gam is sitting in the back seat, nearly buried in her coat and scarf. Her eyes are closed, but I know she’s listening.

  “I’d been feeling off all day. I just blacked out for a bit, that’s all.”

  “That’s all? Ben. Danny scared us to death. Said they found you at the Arroyo. And I kept thinking if it was something I said, or what, and I was having these flashbacks of Ana—”

  “This isn’t like that, Dad. I’m not sick, I don’t feel weak, it’s totally different.”

  Gam says something in the back to the tune of Ana said the same thing, but I cut her off right there. Ana was anemic. She didn’t know what it was like to feel well. She was always tired, but she refused to sit still. She wanted to be a normal nine-year-old girl. I just had a bad day on the job. Totally different.

  “Gam, this isn’t what Ana had,” I say, and it feels weird even to equate the two. Neither of them is that reassured, but eventually I think they sense that I haven’t had much sleep and so when I lay my head back and close my eyes they leave it be for the rest of the ride back to Chaco. I wish I could say I did get some sleep, but in my mind I keep seeing the black curtain of feathers that seemed to fall over me right before I lost it at the Arroyo. Gam starts humming something. An old Navajo song I remember her singing to Ana and me when we were little and couldn’t fall asleep, our beds side by side. It was always me that worried about the dark. Ana wasn’t afraid of anything. Not even of dying. She just liked to hear Gam sing. I roll my head and open my eyes to look at Gam, but she’s not looking back at me. She’s looking out the front window, and her eyes are small slits in the shadow of her face. I follow her gaze, and I see nothing but flat road and rolling desert hills. I’m about to close my eyes again when I catch movement in the far distance, high in the sky. A whole mess of crows streaks ahead of us, like pepper strewn across a table. I try to blink them away. I’ve had enough of crows. But when I open my eyes again, they’re still there, and it’s like they’re leading our car back home. One in particular. A huge one at the head of the flock.

  When we get home, the crows wheel off and away, but I still watch the sky out of the kitchen window while I manage to eat some cereal and calm my gut. I sit with Gam while she knits. Dad is off at the hardware store. Danny calls, and I pick up, and he tells me to sit out the day to recover, everything will keep ‘til then.

  “You know what I’mma say, don’t you?” he asks.

  “That I’m an idiot.”

  “No, you’re no idiot, Ben. But sometimes you do dumb things. Can you imagine if I had to explain to your grandmother that you disappeared at the Arroyo while I w
as sleeping?”

  “I know, Danny.”

  “Did you run into trouble out there?” he asks. “Tell me true.”

  “No trouble. I think maybe that sucker punch at Sancho’s hit me harder than I thought.”

  Danny grunts in agreement.

  “Did you find anything, at least? Was it worth it?”

  Danny Ninepoint has one tone when he speaks. It’s slow and methodical, like he’s reading a speech. It’s hard to tell if he’s angry or if he’s disappointed, although if I was to guess I’d say he’s almost always just a little bit of both.

  “No,” I say, sighing. “Just a vigil and a token pile for burial.”

  Danny grunts again.

  “Don’t ever do that again, Ben. Go off without me like that.”

  “I know. I won’t.”

  And just like that I know he’s done talking about it. Just like I know he was done talking about the gambler, but I couldn’t let it go. Danny could have said that’s what I get for picking at things when they’re settled, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t have to. He knows I get it.

  “Get some sleep. Tomorrow we got some work to do.”

  “All right. And Danny. Thanks for looking out for me.”

  “Yep.”

  “And for dropping it now that it’s done.”

  “Yep.”

  And that’s that. Right now I’ve never been more grateful for the single-track mind of Danny Ninepoint. I take his advice and get to bed early. I sleep for twelve straight hours, and when I wake up again it’s just past four in the morning. I think I have maybe another hour in me, and I flip my pillow and try to sink back to sleep again. But I think I was dreaming of the hospital because I’m in mid-thought when I wake up, and I’m thinking about the way Caroline looked when she asked me to promise to get that scan. She looked afraid. There’s really no other word for it. And I wonder if I should be afraid too, but I feel better than I have in weeks. I just can’t fathom that I have anything seriously wrong with me. Still, that look of hers lingers.

  My brain is a funny thing. It’s that look of hers that’s on my mind when I wake up, but it’s the way she held my shoulder, and the feeling I got when I held on to her hand for a moment, that ends up lulling me away and back into another solid hour of dreamless sleep.

  The next morning Dad takes me to get my truck at the Arroyo. Dad drops me off but refuses to leave without me. Says he wants to follow me out. He’s still handling me with care, but I see no way around it for a little while, at least until the sour taste of the whole event washes out.

  I walk up to my truck with my tail between my legs. I don’t want to see the smoker again, or anyone, for that matter. Thankfully, it looks like the vigil is over. In fact, it looks like the campers moved away from this edge of the Arroyo entirely. There’s nobody here at all. If it weren’t for the fact that my truck was still parked where I left it (and still locked, and intact, which is a blessing), I might have thought I had the site wrong. But no, this was it. In the light of early morning, the big black pit beyond the lip looks about as ominous as a sledding hill. The vigil pile is long gone too. It takes me until I walk over to where the pile was to realize I’m looking for the crow totem. I sigh, not really knowing why I’m disappointed. It’s not my crow, after all. It feels right that it should be buried. Decommissioned. Given back to the earth, just like the gambler himself.

  Dad honks. He doesn’t like it here, and I know I’m lingering. I take one last look around the site, and it looks almost like it’s been swept. Like someone took a big, wide- framed straw broom and flattened the whole place. There aren’t even any footprints. That’s why I stop on the walk back to my truck when I see the tire tracks. They stand out like huge fingerprints, especially to someone like me, who is trained to see them. Uneven weight—the front tread is clean but the back has displaced dirt around it. Medium width but long from front to rear. I’d say a rear-wheel drive, four-door sedan. There aren’t a lot of those around here. Mostly trucks and vans and campers. If I had to guess, I’d say this tread looks a lot like an official vehicle. A town car or maybe a standard cop cruiser.

  Could Danny have come by? Maybe. He thought I might have run into trouble when we talked on the phone. Maybe he came to check out the scene before I did. But he smacked my hand for coming here alone at night. He’s a big bastard, but even he wouldn’t be keen on jumping in his car and racing down here in the dead of night. Especially once he got confirmation that the ambulance picked me up.

  I follow the tracks from where I pick them up coming out of the loose rubble, crossing over into the finer dust near the ring of the slope. They look to stop in front of the gambler’s old camp site, and then there’s a clear sprayback of dust and two divots. Whoever they were, they came here looking for something, either found it or didn’t, and then peeled out.

  I know I should file away this whole thing. Should have long ago, like Danny, but something about it won’t let me close the drawer. I have this crazy desire to look for turned earth, and a creeping suspicion that even if I could find the gambler’s burial pile, it would be missing one crow.

  But I’m late, and I’m making Dad late for his day by wasting time, and Danny said we had work to do, so I get in my truck, start her up, and pull out. I wave at Dad on the way by, and he nods. He pulls out after me, and we leave the Arroyo behind. I check the rear mirror for crows out of instinct, but there are no black specks on the horizon. Nothing but the sharp, cold blue of a fall morning.

  *

  Danny wasn’t lying when he said we had work to do. Turns out it was more work than usual, it’s just Danny didn’t want to lay it on me the day before. As soon as I get into the station I can tell that something is up. We have this rotating group of young kids that work the front desk, another cush job staffed by the council, and usually all they want to do is talk, but today they’re all business. At first I think it’s me and my episode, but Danny’s not a talker, and he wouldn’t throw me under the bus like that. When I get to my desk I can see that it’s not just me. Our district is big; we have nearly a hundred cops who work the streets and desks here, and usually the patrol guys are in the kitchen, shooting the shit, while the higher-ups gossip in their offices. The central desks generally serve more as places to sit than to work, but not today. Today everyone is glued to their seats. Today you could hear a pin drop in the kitchen. There’s still a full pot of coffee. That means things are serious.

  It doesn’t take me long to see why the station has flipped a switch. It has something to do with the two men in black off-the-rack suits who are talking to the chief behind closed doors. I can see through the window of his office, and so can everyone else.

  Danny sits down with a steaming cup of joe.

  “What’s all this?” I ask. “They don’t look Navajo.”

  “They’re not,” Danny says, keeping his voice low.

  New Mexico state patrol has come into our jurisdiction a handful of times, but never dressed like they were attending a funeral. Only one type of law dresses like that.

  “FBI,” I say. Danny nods.

  The Feds have no jurisdiction here. The US Government checks its people and its power at the welcome sign, usually, so this is strange.

  “What do they want?”

  Danny looks up at me. “Rumor is they’re asking about Flatwood.”

  Danny says this like he was reading a grocery list. Same way he says anything. But he watches me carefully because he knows what’s going through my head right now. It’s not enough that people like Sancho have to throw Flatwood in my face, as if I didn’t already think of the man every day of my life. It’s not enough for people to quiet down every now and then when I walk into the station kitchen. Now the Feds have come to remind me, and all of us, of the man I banished. I take a deep breath, and I think I smell a tinge of sulfur.

  “Ben, they’re not here for you. Not as far as I can see. They haven’t talked about anything to me.”

  “I wasn’t even a
cop when that happened,” I say. I became a cop right after that happened. Because that happened.

  Danny holds his hands out low and nods as if to say you don’t have to explain anything to me.

  “Just lay low and see what it is that they want. Hopefully just a file of some sort, then they’re gone. No reason to think they’re here to dig up old bones.”

  I appreciate the sentiment, but I know in real life things don’t work like that. There are no coincidences. That’s why I’m not surprised when the phone at our desk lights up. Danny watches me. I know it’s not for him. I pick up.

  “Dejooli,” I say.

  “Ben, its Sani. You have a minute?”

  As if I wouldn’t have a minute for the captain. I look up at Danny and then over at the closed office, behind glass. The agents are looking my way. Danny nods slowly to tell me it’s okay. One step at a time.

  “’Course, Cap,” I say. “Be right in.”

  I hang up and look down at my desk, nodding to myself. Makes sense that the guy I banished would haunt me every day since. Seems quite Navajo of him. I get up without another word and make my way to the big office.

  Sani Yokana is a veteran of the Chaco rez. I say veteran because he’s more than just an experienced cop. He worked the streets like me for ten years, then made detective, then lieutenant, now captain. He’s savvy. Nobody becomes head of the Chaco district of NNPD without knowing their way around tribal politics. Thankfully, Sani has a no-nonsense reputation and seems to have reached his position without owing too many favors, at least that I’ve heard of. I think it helps that he’s not a member of the council and has no intention of ever being a member of the council, and has, in fact, come as close as anyone I’ve ever met to telling the council to fuck off while still keeping his job. He likes to run our department his way. He’s a heavyset man, wide bodied, with long, grey hair that he never bands. When I walk in the office, all three men watch me. The suits are blank, but Sani gives me a pinched nod. He looks a bit piqued. I can tell that he’s not exactly itching to drudge up the Flatwood case again either.