Follow the Crow

by B. B. Griffith

  Later, after it’s all over and I’ve changed into my second pair of scrubs and convinced myself that the strange smoke and the soft touch of air were the result of shock, when I’m sitting back down at the table where nobody’s touched my granola bar and it lies there like a sad relic of the time when my patient was still alive, Bennet comes in and sits down across from me. He’s not wearing his coat anymore, and he’s changed his shirt. His tie is a different color too, although it’s just as skinny. It almost makes me smile.

  “That was a bad one, Caroline. They’re gonna do a debrief. I think you should go.”

  I nod. I pick up the bar, look at it, then set it down again. “Do you remember Ben Dejooli? The patient I had last week? He’s Navajo. He passed out on the reservation.”

  Bennet nods.

  “Did he ever fulfill that CT scan?”

  “Not yet,” Bennet says, and he seems confident in his answer. I wonder if Ben hasn’t crossed his mind a time or two since that early morning as well.

  I’m not surprised he hasn’t gotten the scan. Not in the least. For one, he’s a young Navajo man. And he’s in a macho line of work on top of that, one that doesn’t give him a lot of free time, from what I’ve seen of Chaco. And top it all off with that terrified look in his eyes—that look that practically begged me to get him out of the hospital—and you have a textbook recipe for negligence.

  “He’s not going to,” I say, and I know it’s true. That ball in my throat makes a grand re-entrance. I have to look away and scrunch up my face, so I’m sure it looks like I’m disgusted and not oddly heartbroken. It’s probably better that I look disgusted. It’s easier to explain away.

  Bennet picks at his tie, brushes it flat. He rests his elbows on the table and lets out a deep breath.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” he says.

  “You work at the CHC same as I do. It’s hard…with the Indians…and cancer.” It’s so much more than that, and my words come out sounding pathetic, but Bennet seems to understand.

  “I’ve found that some of the Navajo need reminding. It’s not their way to work on our schedule. They have their own schedule. It’s been theirs for thousands of years.”

  “I’ll never see him again,” I say.

  Bennet looks at me head-on, and I know that his bright-blue eyes, sharp and alive and refreshing after the horrible stillness behind the lids of the man I just saw die, can see damn near right through me.

  “You’re really worried about this guy,” he says, but it’s not accusatory. It’s soft, and it’s appreciative.

  I nod. “I see a lot of crap out there at CHC, a lot of things that can’t be helped, and I don’t want to count him in that number. Somehow I think it’s really important that I help him if I can.”

  Bennet nods again, and I notice that the sharp, aquiline blue is more than just in his eyes. It’s all over him. I rub at my own eyes. The color’s still there, rolling in soft wisps off of his skin.

  “How about this. When are you next at the CHC?” he asks, clearly unaware that he’s suddenly glowing blue. It occurs to me that I’m having a breakdown of some sort in the break room. I stare at the table and pretend to be figuring.

  “Next Tuesday,” I say.

  “Why don’t I do a little switching around and take the attending shift that day, and after we wrap up we can go find him? Nudge him along a bit.”

  I look at him head on. Smoke or no, that is an incredibly gracious thing to offer.

  “You would do that?” I ask.

  “Why not? He’s a cop, right? I’ve been to the Chaco station tons of times working with patients who come to the clinic. I’ll make an excuse to get over there at the end of the day when most of the cops are doing their own paperwork. With any luck we’ll find him.”

  “And then what?” I ask, but I feel better than I have in weeks at just the thought of being able to address this Ben thing, this nagging fear, instead of sitting and waiting for bad things to happen.

  “Well, that’s up to you, but I’m sure you’ll think of something,” he says, and he smiles. And then I smile, and I can’t help but notice that his smoke dances a bit. It makes me smile all over again, and I wonder if this is what a lunatic feels before a giggling fit.

  “Okay,” I say, perhaps a little too quickly.

  “So it’s a date?”

  “It’s a date.”

  It’s only afterwards, in that night’s three a.m. wonderings, that it occurs to me that maybe Bennet meant ‘date’ as in date. I actually blush, as if I was still talking to him and not alone in my bed. Probably he meant it just as a turn of phrase. Ninety-nine percent chance he meant it that way. Although doctors rarely mince words. Okay, maybe a ninety-five percent chance. And the other thing is that I could tell he was dancing without him ever moving his feet. He was dancing on the inside. I don’t know what is happening to me, but if I’m going blind or nuts or having a breakdown, at least I got to see Owen Bennet dance first.

  Chapter 6

  Owen Bennet

  If you asked me why I proposed the idea of finding this Ben Dejooli, I’d say ostensibly because I have a responsibility as a doctor to help my patients however I can, and then I’d probably add that I, Owen Bennet, personally have an additional responsibility to the Navajo people of Chaco Reservation. It’s in keeping with a long line of Bennet doctors who find their practice and then find their cause. My grandfather’s practice was a small pediatric clinic in Essex County; his cause was the underserved communities of upstate Massachusetts. Granddad in particular, with his black bag and his racks upon racks of black suits, would find the idea of a site visit like the one I proposed for Ben Dejooli completely normal. My father’s practice was in South Boston. He did general medicine. His cause was the Southie Irish-Americans. Working class men and women who might go twenty years at a time without a checkup were it not for him.

  I don’t have a practice, per se, since I’m an attending at ABQ General. That didn’t go over well in the family, so I doubled up on the cause. The Navajo. I work full time for the hospital and then volunteer another full day at least once a week for the Chaco Health Clinic. The sixty-hour work week is brutal, quite frankly, but it didn’t kill my grandfather (although Alzheimer’s did) and it didn’t kill my father (he just loved whisky), and it’s damn well not going to kill me.

  It’s for a good cause. That’s what I’d tell you if you were to ask why I’m going out of my way here. But the reality is that I think I’m in love with Caroline Adams. I also think I’m terrible at hiding it.

  I wish I could tell you that I’m no stranger to love. That I’ve had my heart broken a time or two then pieced myself back together again. That I’m stronger for it and all that. But if I told you that I would be lying. I feel that physicians are hobbled in love to begin with. My grandfather used to say that the only thing more powerful than the knowledge a doctor has is the illusion that he has even more. There has to be distance, he would say. He was remarkably cold for a pediatrician, but he was fabulous at what he did. Dad was a bit warmer, but even he told me that people don’t like to look behind the curtain. They don’t like to know that their physician is also a man. He is a physician first, and then a man. We may be the only profession in the world where those two are switched around. Interesting men, Dad and Granddad. You can imagine where father and husband fell on their lists.

  Distance. Curtain. Practice. Cause. Is it any wonder that I have no idea what I’m doing when these feelings for Caroline slap me in the face?

  Thankfully, I know what I’m doing when I make my rounds, even when I’m at the Chaco Health Clinic, where every new hire (or volunteer, as the case may be) walks around the cramped hallways with this look about them like they’ve stepped onto another planet. I don’t blame them. I was that way, too, when I first came here nearly seven years ago. And in a lot of ways, when you step onto the Chaco Reservation you are stepping onto another planet.

  Caroline was that way, too. But it’s been almost f
ive years for her, and she’s leveled out. Once she hits her five-year mark she’s fulfilled her grant stipulations with the US Government. She won’t have to work at the CHC anymore if she doesn’t want to. I’ve spent an embarrassing number of hours wondering if she’ll leave Chaco, and then ABQ General, too. It’s a decent enough place, but if you feel no obligation to stay in Albuquerque, it would certainly be easy enough to leave, too.

  Sometimes I have these drawn-out fantasies where she tells me she is going to leave and it forces me to make some sort of move on her. But like I said: That’s not me. It took nearly everything I had to ask her to go after Ben Dejooli with me. I felt like my heart was beating so hard it was vibrating my tie like a bass string. The trick to not looking like a lovelorn sop is to keep it professional. Thankfully, that is my zone. That is where I am king. Call me Doctor Professional. That is why I’ve been able to work with Caroline at the CHC for nearly five years without seeming untoward or awkward. But time is ticking, and I don’t want to back myself into a corner with all the rest of the kids who are too afraid to ask the girls to dance. I have to leave my zone.

  The CHC isn’t a MASH unit, but it’s no Mayo Clinic either. It’s a repurposed office building, four stories, and it has that cubicle claustrophobia about it still. We have two old conference rooms that we use for revolving-door office hours for six hours a day on the main floor. I try to get there when I can, but mostly we stock it with the resident docs. It’s good practice for them. Other than that there’s a small waiting room that is almost always at capacity, and then three other floors’ worth of patient rooms. Just over seventy-five beds. We get about two hundred thousand outpatient encounters a year. We cram ‘em in, as they say, but it’s better than nothing. I like to think we do all right.

  The day of our trip passes like a blur. I see Caroline occasionally, but most of the time I’m in and out of patient rooms one after another, like I’ve misplaced my keys and am popping in to have a look around. Here at the CHC we are strongly urged to keep patient visits to five minutes and under. That kind of thing drives me crazy, and my grandfather would most likely have spoken to every administrator there is, face-to-face, about the travesty of rushing a physician. My father knew how to work within the system better. He would have written a strongly worded letter. I simply endure. The one time I do get a free minute and Caroline is nearby, it is she who brings up our impending outing. As if it could have slipped my mind.

  “Doctor Bennet,” she says. “How are your rounds?”

  “Never-ending. But that comes with the territory,” I say, and inwardly cringe. Territory? Who am I, Meriwether Lewis?

  “We’re still on for this afternoon, right?” she asks, and she raises a hopeful eyebrow. She could have asked for just about anything right then, and I would have done it.

  We’re still getting tattoos, right?

  Sure are!

  We’re still running away to Bali, right?

  Got my bags right here!

  What actually comes out is, “If you’re able, yes.”

  “Oh good!” she says. “Yeah, I think I’ll be ready at shift change. Three p.m.? Meet you outside?”

  “I’ll be there,” I say, and she’s off. She’s one of the most senior staff we have now at this place, where the turnover is, quite frankly, pretty ridiculous. I try not to think what it would be like if she left. I throw myself headlong into the next patient, an emphysematous male, forty-seven, mild tachycardia, moderate diabetes risk. Suffering from light-headedness, like our friend Ben Dejooli was, but the culprit here is obvious, whereas Ben doesn’t smoke and he’s not overweight. I go on like this, room after room, and soon enough, work blurs my emotions, and I can pull the curtain across once more.

  Before I know it, I’m waiting out in my old SUV for Caroline, and I’m putting my palms in front of the vents to try and dry them off. It’s a balmy fifty-eight degrees according to the readout on the dash. A textbook New Mexico fall day. I see her walk out of the front doors of the Center, and when I tap the horn, she waves. I turn off the blasting air. I can see that she walks with a bit of tenderness, and I think it’s from having to single- handedly roll that stage four lung cancer patient over during that code last week. I’ve been there before. You can throw your back out in those types of situations and have no idea it happened until you’re in the shower that night and all of a sudden you can’t reach the shampoo. My heart goes out to her. It’s tough enough having to deal with a bloody code without also having it sit in the small of your back for the next two weeks.

  “All right,” she says, smiling and huffing slightly. “That’s over.”

  I wonder if I should bring up the fact that her contract is up in about a month. It doesn’t seem the thing to open with.

  “Are you ready?”

  “Ready? You act like this is some sort of war zone we’re going into.”

  I laugh, and it sounds cavernous. I clip it short. “It’s no war zone. It’s a nice community. Parts of it, anyway.”

  “Do you know your way around Chaco?”

  “I’ve been all over Chaco. I know it well enough.”

  “I’ve never been past the CHC.”

  “There’s no reason for you to, unless you like to gamble. Also there’s a great Mexican food place off the main drive, if you’re willing to look past the tracked up floors.” I scratch at my collar. I’m nervous talking now. The words keep coming. “And a bar that’s pretty friendly if you go left at the welcome center and drive for a few blocks. Dirt cheap. Called the Chaco Pourhouse.”

  She looks at me with this barely veiled expression of amazement, and it occurs to me that I’ve pushed the curtain pretty far back at this point. But that was the whole idea, wasn’t it? Time to move forward with my head up? Power through?

  “What, you don’t think doctors drink?”

  “Oh, I know doctors drink. I just wasn’t sure about you.”

  “Well,” I say, and I have no follow-up, so I shrug. She’s already looking out the window. I’m dreading the silence, so I turn on tour guide mode.

  “The rez has parts that people are supposed to see and take pictures of and experience, and then it has parts that are best left alone.”

  We’re driving on the main drag, north, skirting the welcome center and cutting through the nicer neighborhoods to get to the council buildings, where the police station is.

  “What’s best left alone?” she asks, watching a huge murder of crows that is cutting a wide circle in the sky in sync, like a flock of homing pigeons. They seem to be scanning the ground like bomber pilots and calling out landing spots.

  “You don’t want to go too far north. You hit some of the track bars and the row houses, and then beyond that is a place called the Arroyo. Sort of a gypsy camp for the poorest of the poor Navajo out by this big depression in the desert. I’ve had a handful of calls come from there, working at the CHC. It’s pretty hairy.” I puff up a bit here. She seems like she’s interested in the rez, and I want to show her that I know it better than most white boys.

  She throws me a curveball. “I’d like to go there some day,” she says.

  “The Arroyo?”

  “Yeah. The Navajo…they’re tough, but they’re also, I dunno. Kinda…wonderful.” She’s blushing now.

  “I know what you mean,” I say, and I say it sincerely. “I have this bracelet.”

  “What?”

  “I wear a bracelet. A young Navajo girl gave it to me. She was a patient of mine, back when I was a resident working at CHC. She had a goiter, very treatable but something that was literally ruining her life. It was a simple thyroid issue. That’s all. But it was big and ugly, and it ostracized her. Had for years.”

  I still remember the day that girl gave me the bracelet. She hardly smiled. She walked up to me, set it in my hand, then she turned around and walked away, and I stared at it until my eyes started to water. That’s what is running through my head, but that’s a little too much, I think, for the moment, so I say, �
��She gave me a bracelet. I wear it under my cuff.”

  I take one hand from the wheel and wiggle the cuff up a bit to show her, and I suddenly feel like a child holding up a piece of noodle art, so I tuck it back in and clear my throat. I’ve worn it for years. It probably looks like a matted piece of string to her anyway.

  “That’s incredible,” she says. “I had a woman come back with some food she’d cooked for me. I remember how good that felt. Also I had a grandmother cry once and shake both of my hands pretty vigorously after I discharged her. I’m hoping they were tears of gratitude. I’m almost a hundred percent sure that they were.”

  I look at her sidelong and can see that in her mind she’s actually revisiting those tears and reaffirming her diagnosis. I laugh. I can’t help it. She looks at me and smiles. She knows I’m laughing with her.

  “That’s pretty amazing,” I say. “Nobody ever cooked for me before.”

  “You really care about them.”

  I nod. “I don’t think I meant to. But it happened. Still, places like the Arroyo, or the strip out by the tracks, those places I don’t care for.”

  Before I know it, and before I want it to happen, the Chaco Police Station is around the corner. It’s hard to miss. A big, long barn structure built out of salmon-pink adobe composite. A big, chrome disk stands out front, like a quarter balanced on edge. A memorial to those officers who have lost their lives in the line of duty over the years. As we pull in to park I can see that she’s nervous. She’s staring blankly at the front entrance.

  “Ready? Remember, it’s no big deal. I’m just checking on some files, and you came along. We’ll see what we can see.” I shrug.

  She nods.

  Chapter 7

  Ben Dejooli

  When I agreed to write up a report on Joey Flatwood for the Feds I knew it would be like raking over a scar that still aches. I don’t do well remembering how Ana disappeared. I’ve tried very hard to remember my little sister as she was, running around the house, handing me odds and ends that she thought were little pieces of treasure, singing or humming to herself. The Division of Public Safety already has a formal report on the night in question, but it was written by another officer. I wasn’t a part of the force yet. Essentially, what those agents asked me to do was write up a report as if I was the officer who answered my own emergency call.