Follow the Crow

by B. B. Griffith

  “What do you think I have?” It almost doesn’t come out because it feels like I have a fistful of sand in my mouth.

  “I don’t know. Could be a lot of things.”

  “The doctor said you thought it was a tumor back at the hospital—”

  “I don’t know,” she says again, but I can tell that’s exactly what she’s thinking. I’m not gonna lie, the more I think about it, the more it seems possible. When you pass out and come to in an ambulance, your brain automatically leaps to the worst of the worst. You’re dying. You have something fundamentally wrong with you. But when Caroline and Doctor Bennet told me to get the scan, something in me rebelled. It’s more than just how hospitals mess with me; I refused to believe it could happen to me. Cancer is so huge, so faceless. Something that you assume attacks without mercy. A dark spot inside you that sucks you away. It’s not a headache. Not a momentary spate of dizziness. And yet, here Caroline is, trying not to look like she’s pleading with me.

  “Look, I’m right in the middle of a big case here. When it’s over, I’ll try to get to that scan. I promise this time.”

  It sounds weak, I know. To promise to try? This is exactly what she doesn’t want to hear, and I can tell that her mind is tumbling over itself. But just when she looks about to come back at me there’s a knock at the door, and it stills her. It’s Bennet. I open the door, and he looks briefly between Caroline and me.

  “I’m all set,” he says. “Did you get what you needed?”

  Caroline scowls, then frowns. Then she sort of deflates and shrugs, and that hits me. Bennet looks at me plainly and then nods.

  “Well, you did what you could,” he says.

  Caroline brushes past me, and the two of them are gone in a blink. I stand in the empty conference room for another full minute, staring at nothing, trying to probe my own brain for parts of it that might be killing me. Like I said, I know I’m not fine. But am I dying? There seems like there should be a lot of ground between those two.

  I end up staying at the station long after Danny and most everyone else on the day shift goes home. The night shift is half as strong, personnel-wise. On the rez there are basically two hotspots of activity. One is around ten in the evening, which the night shift takes on with fresh eyes and ears, and the other is at rush hour, about five in the afternoon. There’s an old tongue-in-cheek saying around here. All of your calls essentially come from the same type of Indian: he’s pissed off after work and starting shit and then drunk after dinner and starting shit.

  Nobody around Danny’s and my desk is scheduled for night shift, so I have a bit of space. Since nobody talks to me, I don’t have any distractions, either. The shift change just sort of happens around me while I’m writing up the profile part of the report for the Feds. This is the part I’ve been dreading the most. Here is where I’m supposed to talk about Joey himself. I rub at my face. The only way to get through this is to just write whatever comes to my mind.

  Joey was no saint, I write. He was the only man I ever met who gave me the guts to go places that scared me and to do things I was afraid to do. He used to say that we were clipped at the knees in life just having to live at Chaco, so we owed it to ourselves to own the place. He said we’d be the rat kings. Joey never would admit it, but outside of Danny Ninepoint, I never met a man more proud to be a Navajo.

  I met Joey when we were thirteen years old, in those first days of middle school when kids hammer out the pecking order, and we decided to stick together. He lived at the Arroyo with his grandfather on his mother’s side. His mother died when he was young. He didn’t know his father. But his grandfather was a good man. A Navajo of the old ways. He hunted and trapped for food. He had a small herb garden in the window of his camper. He would capture water from rain, which he prayed for, and he would eat rabbit and prairie dog, which he also prayed for. He butchered them in the old way, too. Giving thanks. Never taking anything for granted. When we could, my family would pass cuts of beef and cans of food to Joey, for the both of them. His grandfather was too proud to take handouts, but Joey was more practical, and he had a soft spot for Dinty Moore stew. We ran together all throughout our teenaged years.

  Looking at that last sentence, it hardly seems a fitting way to describe seven years of raising hell, chasing after cars and girls, drinking when we shouldn’t and smoking when we shouldn’t and what we shouldn’t, usually on Joey’s lead. Cigarettes that made us sick, and a couple of times peyote, that made us sicker. Swearing to watch each other’s backs. Swearing in blood, smeared on our hands, dark like mud, cut with Joey’s grandfather’s knife, which had seemed like a sword then, and, in all honesty, probably would seem like a sword now, too. It was a huge goddamn knife. I wonder if Joey took it with him. The only one I’ve ever seen like it is Danny’s scalp knife, which makes sense, since he has a lot of the old ways in him too.

  I write, Joey’s grandfather died right around the time Ana’s heart condition took a turn for the worse. Looking back on it now, it was a subtle turn, but it was a turn nonetheless. She wasn’t gaining any weight, she wasn’t growing, she seemed to be shrinking, if anything. While the rest of her classmates and her friends were pushing their way up the hill into puberty, it was like she tripped and slowly began rolling backwards. But her eyes were always bright and winking, if a little softer than usual, and she laughed and ran, if a touch slower. I worried myself sick over her, playing out terrible scenarios in my mind, trying to imagine a Ben Dejooli who had no sister. I know now that I didn’t give Joey what he needed then, as a friend, as a blood brother. I was selfish. His family was all gone. I still had mine, but it was going, and I wallowed in it. I don’t even remember his grandfather’s burial. That’s how muddled I was.

  We offered to take him in, have him live with us in our house, but he politely declined. He was seventeen, after all. His grandfather’s camper and all that came with it, sparse as it was, was his now. Knife and all. And he knew his way around the Arroyo. He was a man now.

  Still, that was the beginning of the change in him.

  Joey became obsessed with death. Our conversations, whenever we met up, eventually turned to death and dying. Which I suppose is normal for a kid who has just lost his only family. Still, this went on for an entire year. Joey was there when his grandfather died. Their camper wasn’t big enough for him to have been anywhere else. He said he went in his sleep, but I often wonder if his passing wasn’t…uglier somehow.

  I believe that this was part of the reason he offered to start watching over Ana.

  The main reason he offered was because he could see the toll the wait was taking on me and on my family. But I’ve always felt that he was unnaturally comfortable there. In the hospital, around Ana, who was dying by degrees. I don’t mean to seem like he was eager or creepy about it, not like that, but he did settle in quickly. He took one shift a week at first, just a couple of hours. He did construction day-work that started early, so he would come hang out with Ana in the mid-afternoon to give one of us a break. At night he’d go back to the Arroyo.

  And there’s another thing that’s been bothering me, although I’m not quite sure why. Before he was banished, Joey lived in the spot where the smoker had parked for his vigil. Joey and the gambler would have been neighbors. The gambler probably had that spot for decades. He would have seen Joey grow up. There’s a good chance Joey and the gambler were friends.

  Something about finding these connections where they shouldn’t be bothers me. The gambler and Joey should have nothing to do with each other, but they do. I just don’t know how yet. I feel like I’m just outside of understanding, like I’m jumping up to get a peek through a window in my mind, looking for a glimpse of Joey or Ana, and instead I find the gambler watching me. In my mind’s eye he’s not dead, though. He’s just silent. And staring at me dressed in dull gold and holding a turquoise crow tightly in his hand. And he thumps his fist to his heart…

  I jump in my seat as a gust of wind kicks up and bits of desert s
and pepper the outside of the station. The windows themselves seem to pop and settle, and the old fan that circles slowly above the main floor squeals angrily. The handful of other cops at their desks look up as well, brought out of their work, or their dozing. There is a feeling of resignation in the main room; the late night storms of autumn always signal that winter is close behind. Fall is the best season in New Mexico. It’s warm and colorful, and it stretches itself like a cat, lingering in the sunny spots as long as it can. Winter is the worst. It’s not cold, not exactly, but it’s not warm either. It’s somewhere in the damp between. The colors fall flat. The desert trees and bushes seem confused, like they don’t know if they should shed their leaves or gut it out until spring.

  Profiling Joey has put me in a bad frame of mind. I’m feeling twinges of the same sort of sick helplessness that tinges this entire series of events a drained sepia color in my memory. It’s time to wrap it up.

  The last time I saw Joseph Flatwood was the day he was banished. At the reading of his sentence.

  We were on the south edge of the reservation. He had his camper on the ‘out’ side of the Chaco line, and representatives from the tribal council and tribal court stood on the inside. I insisted that I go, too. I wanted to see him break down. I held out hope that he might finally give me something, some precious grain of information that would let me know what had happened in the room during that camera blip when Ana disappeared, but he said nothing.

  He remained silent as the court read its decision. He looked at the ground the entire time. Although I did notice that he was crying.

  I feel it’s important to note this in the report. He looked at me, too. I stood off of the road with Gam, who also insisted on coming. He looked right at me and his eyes were screaming something that I couldn’t quite understand, but his mouth was an unwavering frown, like a horseshoe. I almost called out to him. I was either going to scream at him or plead with him, but my grandmother sensed it first and gipped my shoulder like a vice, stilling me.

  And then it was over. Joey Flatwood was no longer a Navajo in the eyes of the council. The voice of the people had spoken. He was cast out. There was no great clap of thunder. No driving sheet of rain or swelling of wind, but it did feel like a cord had been cut. A musical chord in my heart, like the string of a guitar. It twanged and thumped in my mind, and then it was still. Joey never stopped watching me, even when the cops led him across the threshold, even when each man and woman turned their back upon him, one by one. I was the last. Gam had to physically turn me. I’m not sure I could have done it otherwise.

  Eventually I heard him shuffle away. Heard him get into his camper, and the engine roll over slowly, struggling to life. And then he pulled away. There was no peel out. No skittering of the desert dust underneath his wheels. It was a slow, quiet rolling away. When I turned around again, his camper was a dot on the horizon, but his eyes, silently screaming at me, brimming with tears, they stuck with me long afterwards.

  You could say that they never really left me.

  I have to wipe at my own eyes, which I do quickly and brusquely with the sleeve of my jacket. For the first time since it happened, I find words coming to me that I never turned to before, either out of fear, or out of anger, or sadness, or all three. For years I had assumed he knew something but wouldn’t tell me. Surely he knew. He was there, for God’s sake.

  But what if he knew something but couldn’t tell me?

  The thought triggers a massive wave of pressure in my head, and I’m forced to lay down on my arms on my desk. I sit like this for several minutes, breathing deeply, trying to get my eyes to focus correctly again. Watching my breath fog the desk. I’m not sure if I black out again, but if I did it was only for a short time, and, thankfully, I’m not the only cop sleeping at his desk at this hour. When I sit up I do it slowly, blinking heavily. There is a sour taste in my mouth and a whiff of matches in my nose.

  By the time I pull myself together enough to finish my statement, it’s nearly one in the morning, and by then I’m sure of two things.

  The first is that Joey Flatwood saw something terrible that day in Ana’s room.

  The second is that Caroline was right. I need to go get that goddamn brain scan.

  Chapter 8

  Caroline Adams

  Well. That was a complete disaster.

  I’ve been going over the trip to Chaco in my mind frame by frame; stopping and rewinding, slow motion, pausing here and there. It’s three in the morning now, and I’m more convinced than ever that not only did I not convince Ben to get scanned, but I also made a complete ass of myself in front of him, and later in front of Doctor Bennet, and in general in front of God and everybody. It would be good if I just ran away. I could probably get to Arizona before my car gave out. I haven’t changed the oil in a year. I haven’t done anything in a year, really. And just like that, bits of my anxiety snowball into each other until I find myself in the bathroom thinking I’m going to throw up. I don’t, of course, but I do stare at myself in the mirror until my nose bumps the glass, trying to find any trace of color like I saw on Ben and on Doctor Bennet. But whatever I can see on other people I can’t see on me, so I pee, then get some water and get back in bed. I listen to the storm blow against the wall and let my regrets wash over me like weak little lake waves.

  I think it’s time I was honest with myself. I think it’s time I call this what it is. I have a stupid little juvenile twelve-year-old girl crush on Ben Dejooli, and it’s infuriating. I want to be rid of it. I think that’s why I went to the station, to purge myself of this. This isn’t normal for me, I promise. I don’t want to give you the wrong impression. I don’t pine. I’m not a piner.

  Ben has every right to think I’m a lunatic. He should have called the cops on me. Except he is a cop. He should have called himself on me. That would have been great. But not in any sort of sexual way. Just in a sort of escort-the-crazy-cat-lady-off-the-premises type of way. And I don’t even have any cats. I’ve often thought I should get a cat. My apartment is pretty small, but I think a lazy cat would be fine. Or an indoor/outdoor cat. Although an outdoor cat on the Albuquerque outskirts would stand a one-in-five chance of getting destroyed by a coyote every time it left the apartment. If I got a cat only to have it eaten I would need therapy. I probably need therapy already.

  These are the things I think about at three in the morning.

  I really hope he gets that scan. I hope because I want him to start fighting the cancer that I somehow already know is in him. Just like I know that something was in that room after that horrible code. I just know it. I want him to get the ball rolling. He’s dying, and it’s time to get to work.

  How do I know? I can see it. I can see what is wrong with him. That’s what the colors are, some sort of visual representation of what is going on inside of people. It’s like how you can see when a patient is yellowed by jaundice; he has a color to him. Actually, it would be like if a patient turned yellow from jaundice and I was the only person in the world who could see it. That’s a bit more accurate. Just to make sure, I asked Doctor Bennet on the drive home if Ben looked darker, kind of reddish, and he looked at me like I was joking with him.

  “He looked okay to me,” he said. And then out of nowhere I started sobbing.

  I haven’t cried since my first year on the floor. I didn’t cry when my mom called and told me that my dog died. I didn’t cry when a tiny dove flew into my window and I could see it flop dead to the ground two floors below on the sidewalk. I didn’t cry when I had to work Christmas last year and couldn’t go home and I sat in my apartment and drank out of a jug of Carlos Rossi wine watching the Hallmark channel with nothing but a ficus with a droopy star for decoration, like something straight out of A Charlie Brown Christmas. That was a cryable moment if there ever was one. But I didn’t then. And I did today. God in heaven. And in front of Doctor Bennet, too.

  Of course, he played it off perfectly. He was so kind. He patted my knee and said it’s oka
y and let me wheeze it out while I stared out of the window and wished the radio was on a little louder. When I said I was sorry he said there’s no reason to be. He’s had his fair share of these days too. He didn’t even call it a breakdown, which is what I’m pretty sure it was. And the fact that he was so kind to me made it even worse, of course.

  I have to get ahold of myself. In general. I have to allow for the fact that some people just want to die. And there’s nothing I can do about it. If they want to die, they want to die. And I think Ben maybe wants to die. He was red. He was this blackish red that was just wrong.

  While we’re on the subject of my mental breakdown, I might as well come clean with you and say that I think I’ve been seeing these colors in some form for much of my life. I know this now. I’ve been seeing but not noticing. Now I’m noticing. It’s kind of like how I saw wedding bands on people’s ring fingers all of my life, but only really started noticing them once I hit my mid-twenties. The colors have always been there. In a way, this is a good thing. One of the first tests we give people who think they have an abnormal growth is the longevity test. Is this new? How long have you felt the lump? How long have you had that mole? Has it always been that size? If the answer is “for a while,” we can relax. If the answer is “I don’t know,” we nod and tell them to keep an eye on it. What we don’t want is changes. And this strange color filter I have is no change. What is a change is that the colors are stronger now. By the day. And they are trying to tell me something about the person who shows them.

  I do a lot of internet research over the next couple of days. Especially late at night when I can’t sleep. I pride myself on my internet diagnosis skills. I’m an RN by degree, but I’m a full-blown wizard-status doctor on the internet. The closest I can come to diagnosing what I have is a condition called “synesthesia” where people associate colors with things like letters. Each letter has its own unique color. Except that’s not really what I have. I see colors around people, and they don’t define the people, they help describe the person at that moment in time.