Follow the Crow

by B. B. Griffith

  Don’t worry. He’ll be dead soon anyway.

  And the sickness that washes over me immediately afterwards tells me something else: I do not want that. I desperately want this man to live. I want this man to live because keeping people alive is what I was born to do, but mostly because I know it would make Caroline happy. And we come back to the common denominator. And me, staring at my phone. I know she’s sleeping by now, but every minute that passes is another minute of wiggle room for Ben Dejooli to back out. With the Navajo, you better strike while the iron is hot. God knows when you’ll get another chance.

  I pick up the phone and dial her number. Again, and again, and again. By the time she answers I’m so far beyond embarrassed that it’s become a battle of wills between me and the ring tone. When she picks up, I let out a little hoot. “Caroline! Thank God. It’s Owen.”

  She’s groggy. For a second I think she’s hung up on me, but she hasn’t. I apologize profusely.

  “I’ve had some news…” I say, and in the excitement it comes back to me that I’m about to tell her that Ben has late stage brain cancer. I pull the curtain across, and my face slackens. I take a breath.

  “Ben got the scan. His results just came in.”

  She clears her throat. “You wouldn’t be calling me at home if it was all clear, would you,” she says, and her voice is thick.

  “No. You were right. I would diagnose it as late stage GBM. Maybe stage four.”

  She exhales slowly, and I picture her in her bed slumping over like a deflating balloon. I think she’s gearing up to shed the tears Ben wouldn’t, so I jump in again.

  “He wants to fight it,” I say, and as soon as I do, I know that isn’t entirely true. But he’s willing to give it a shot, at least.

  “Really?” she asks, echoing my doubt.

  “I’m going to order off-site chemotherapy. Given his circumstances, I’m sure it will be approved.”

  “That’s good of you,” she says, and she means it.

  “The reason I called you is that he requested you administer the regimen. You personally.”

  She makes a series of glottal sounds then says, “Are you fucking kidding me right now?”

  I’ve never heard her swear before. For some reason, it makes me smile. It is in no way emphatic, more like someone cussing in their sleep.

  “No. But he needs an answer right now, and I need to get him in the books or he could run. You know what I mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes you know or yes you’ll do it?”

  “Yes and yes. Just yes all around.”

  “Okay then. I’ll get it ordered up. We’ll start as soon as possible. I’ll get the schedule to you when you wake up.”

  “Let’s do it,” she says, and I have the strange feeling that she’s looking at herself in the mirror. Self-affirming.

  “Talk to you soon then.”

  “Doctor Bennet.”

  “Owen. Please.”

  “Owen. Thank you. All of this, it’s been a mess up and down, and I’ve totally overextended my welcome on basically every facet of it to the point where I’m even starting to annoy myself these days.”

  “Caroline. I wanted to do it. I’m with you. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” she says softly. “Thank you. So much.”

  “Let’s get him healthy, then we can thank each other. Sleep tight.”

  I hang up the phone and stare at it for a minute, wondering what just happened to me, to Ben, to Caroline, to all of us. Then I move over to my couch and collapse into a sleep that lasts until the sun starts to set again.

  Chapter 10

  Ben Dejooli

  I’m a mess after the scan. If you want to know what my darkness looks like, my own personal hell, imagine an hour-long brain scan with the specter of death hanging over you, and you’ll come pretty damn close. I thought it was bad coming to in an ambulance on its way to the hospital. I thought it was bad sitting and waiting to be discharged. None of those discomforts held a candle to this.

  I used to feel sorry for the Navajo who balked at modern medicine. I understood why they might not feel comfortable visiting a hospital, of course, but to throw the whole thing out the window was just reckless. I still have a healthy respect for modern medicine, even after everything that happened with Ana. I saw how the doctors helped her, relieved her suffering during the bad times. But the machines and the implements and the sounds; it’s not hard at all to see why a Navajo would distrust these things. They are sterile and plastic and metal. Basically anti-Navajo. And, let’s be honest, they can be terrifying.

  Take the CT scanner, for instance. It’s a big white tube, like the mouth of an enormous bloated fish. The techs slide its tongue out and strap you on it, and then the fish eats you in slow motion while its guts churn and rotate and clank and beep and motors spin around your head in the murky light inside. Faceless voices tell you to be still. Sometimes they tell you to close your eyes. It feels like you’re hiding in a closet while something terrible stalks the room outside. They give you a stick with a button on it and tell you to push it if you panic, but then caution you not to push it unless you really panic because it’ll screw up the whole scan and you’ll have to do it again.

  I think I really panicked in the parking lot. But I gritted my teeth during the scan. I was there. I would finish.

  When it was all over, I practically ran outside. I took the stairs, not the elevator. I never wanted to be boxed in in anything again. In the parking lot the sky was robin’s egg blue, and I just breathed for a full minute, staring up and blinking. I thought I’d never seen anything so beautiful in my entire life. Then I moved quickly to my car. NNPD move in and out of ABQ General all the time, and I didn’t want to be recognized.

  I think I get an inkling of what’s happening at my house before I even pull into my usual spot on the side of our street. I’d noticed a thin stream of white smoke from a little ways off that gave me goose bumps, but I was still shaken up and focusing on driving. The smoke is like a thin pole the color of a cloud. It’s streaming into the sky, and it looks to be coming from my side of the duplex. I throw my truck in park and run into the house, but inside all is quiet. I push through the living room and kitchen and out to the backyard, where I see Dad staring at Ana’s pyre while a small wood fire is crackling in our old outdoor pit. He turns when the screen door slams after me. He is wearing leather breeches and is shirtless. His eyes are red, either from the smoke or from the liquor he holds in his hand. I know that in his own way he is trying to purify himself. For what is what worries me.

  Dad says, “Your grandmother…”

  For a terrible moment I think she’s dead. It would be in line with the path that seems set out for me these days.

  But then he says, “She is at the Arroyo. She has told me to bring you there.”

  Rather than put me at ease, this whispers along my back, and I shiver. Dad walks up to me in big, uneven steps and looks at me questioningly. He smells of campfire and whisky. It is not altogether unpleasant.

  “Is she okay?” I ask.

  He takes my hand the way Mom did when I was young.

  “Yes,” he says. “But are you?”

  My spine pricks again. This is about me, not about Gam.

  “We should get to the Arroyo,” he says, and he walks, bare chested, to the passenger’s side of my truck. He opens the door and plops himself inside, waiting.

  Gam used to go to the Arroyo often when she was young. She told me she lived there for a time when she was learning the Navajo Way, which I took to mean a polite way of saying when my great-grandparents were on hard times. But she hasn’t been back there in years. In fact, a couple of times she’s gone off on the Arroyo as the dregs of Chaco. Once she even spat when I said Danny and I had the Arroyo rounds that week. I don’t know why she would be there now, but I don’t like anything about it. I hop up behind the wheel and fire up the truck.

  The entire way there, Dad never speaks. As the Arroyo c
omes into view, the sun is setting. A bowl of heavy red light spills just over the edges and into the pit, but the light is retreating and night is moving in. I pull in where my memory tells me to, where Joey Flatwood used to live, and next to where the gambler lived and was mourned. But before I can stop, my dad taps me with his hand and shakes his head. He points beyond the Arroyo, into the rolling desert left of the setting sun. I turn to him, but he doesn’t look at me. I know what’s out there. That is where the hogans are.

  “The hogans?” I ask. Dad nods.

  “Why is Gam at the hogans?” I ask, but I know why. There is only one reason you go to the hogans these days. My palms start sweating. I flip the truck in reverse and pull back out along the main path, but where it curves towards the west I cut out along a sparse, rutted trail. The truck bounces and creaks. I slow to a crawl and keep moving forward out into the desert.

  There were six hogans when I was young, evenly spaced in a long line, each separated by a good distance. Now perhaps four are usable. They are squat, rounded structures made of wood and mud, just tall enough to walk in and big enough for four or five people. Each has one door cut into it, facing the east, where blessings come from. In the center of every roof is a smoke hole where evil is expelled. Even the Arroyo kids don’t mess around with the hogans. There is something about these things; they forbid it. Years ago, the six most prominent families in Chaco each had a hogan and used them regularly for ceremonies. Blessingways and chants, or just a place to gather and sweat together. As the families fell apart or mixed with others, or just got lazy, some of the hogans went the way of the dust and mud of their build. These days, the big ceremonies, the Nightway dance with all the fire and the whooping that the tourists love and things like that, all of those are performed at the cultural center in a makeshift hogan. But these: these are the real deal. Or they were, at least, once.

  The hogans blink onto the horizon like beads on a table. The sun cuts across the tops of them and lays there like a red blanket. I can see that the one farthest along the line to the left is leaning haphazardly, slumped and drunken. Abandoned for a generation. But there are crows there. Lots of them. They stir with the noise of my truck and then settle again. All of them are facing me. I turn to Dad. I have this childish need to point them out to my father, like that will make them go away. I wonder when they began to frighten me. I steel myself. It’s easy to lose your head when you go beyond the rez, into the deep rez, and then into the desert.

  Dad points at the hogan dead center, where I see more white smoke, a single, continuous string, like the trunk of an aspen tree, pouring from the smoke hole and spreading into the sky. That’s where Gam is.

  When I pull up, Gam is waiting for me. She is staring at me, dressed in a heavy, poncho-like dressing gown, and she wears a beaded kerchief on her head that gathers her long gray hair. At her waist is a buckskin bag. It’s the bag that seals the deal for me. If it weren’t for the bag, I’d say she was out here to teach me something about my ancestors. But that’s an old buckskin bag. One of a handful of things in her room she told us never to touch. That’s a Singer’s Bag. Gam is here to do work, and I think she’s here to do work on me.

  When I walk up to her, she is quiet and watchful. She looks at me like I stumbled out of the desert behind the hogans. Like she didn’t instruct Dad to bring me here.

  “Hello, Dejooli,” she says, in Navajo. She’s not using my first name on purpose. Ben is a white man’s name.

  “What is this, Grandmother?” I ask.

  “Evil is upon you. We must treat with the Holy People to expel it. Find alignment once more.”

  “Evil? Name the evil.”

  “You are sick. In your brain.”

  I straighten at this, come up from where I was talking at her eye level. Gam knew I passed out. She knew I ended up at the hospital. But the way she says this to me makes me think she knows more. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the crows at the abandoned hogan shuffle themselves about and then settle once more. Before I can question her, she speaks again.

  “You have been marked by the white man’s medicine,” she says.

  “Grandmother, I went because I gave my word that I would go. That is no reason to call a Blessingway.”

  I see two others making their way around the hogan, blessing it with pollen. One of them is big and square. His long black hair reaches the middle of his back, and his dark arms are like cable cords. He wears leather chaps over a breechcloth, and the beaded strap of his scalp knife swings about his knees. It’s Danny Ninepoint.

  Gam waves away my words. “This is no Blessingway,” she says, and her voice chills me more than the setting sun. “There is another mark on you. A mark that runs deeper than the white man’s poison.” She reaches into her buckskin bag and pulls out a handful of black ash.

  “Come,” she says.

  In a Blessingway, the Singer essentially calls upon the Holy People to pay a visit to the hogan and bless the patient, but as far as I know it doesn’t involve black ash. Another of the Holyway ceremonies does, though: the Evilway.

  This is an exorcism.

  Gam turns away, and I follow her toward the hogan openmouthed. It’s like I can’t turn away. Dad and Gam enter the Hogan, Dad at a stoop. Gam barely needs to duck her head.

  “Wait, Gam, hold on just a second,” I say, in English. My Navajo deserts me when I panic. Gam doesn’t hold on. Gam doesn’t stop. She enters the hogan and begins preparing. I stare at the mouth of the hogan, a faint glow now visible from the small fire that will mark its center, until Danny comes around my way and stops in front of me.

  “You want to wear your shirt?” he asks, so matter of fact that at first I have no idea what he’s talking about. It’s like he’s asking me to pass the salt.

  “Danny, what is this all about?”

  “Your family says you’re sick. And that something is coming for you. I think so too.” Now that he’s up close, I see fine scratches around his eyes and bigger scabs raking down his cheeks.

  “What the hell happened to your face?”

  He waves off my question, but his hand is marked too, like it was peppered with buckshot.

  “Domestic dispute by the Boxes. The guy was hopped up on amphetamines. Fought like a bear. Bardo and I took him down.”

  Without his customary NNPD polish, I can see that he’s weary. He looks like he’s been chasing ghosts of his own. Bardo’s partner retired last year. I wonder, not for the first time, if he’s been picking up my slack and covering for me when I’ve had to make these hospital trips.

  “You should have called me, Danny. I’m your fucking partner.”

  He waves it off again.

  “If I’m sick, I need a doctor. Not a chant. This is a waste of time.”

  “You don’t believe in the power of the Chantway?” he asks. He’s not accusing, just curious.

  Of course Danny believes. Danny believes as much as Gam believes. They’re both from the same deep end of the Navajo pool.

  “No, I mean, I do, I guess…I don’t know. But this is ridiculous. How much money did this cost?” Calling a Chantway is not cheap. They require certain officiates and certain sacred objects and preparation time.

  “She brought in two Arroyo men for the sandpainting. Nobody else knows. She has prepared all day.”

  “An Evilway? I mean, really?”

  Danny nods.

  I shake my head in disbelief. “That takes what, a day and a half?”

  “Two full nights.”

  “This shit isn’t fair to you. I know you’ve been working twice as hard on my account.”

  “I took care of it. Got Bardo and Yuska to cover our beat. Said we needed to work some things out. No big deal. It happens all the time with partners. Don’t worry about me. This is about you.”

  My hands drop to my sides.

  “Now. You want to wear your shirt?” he asks again.

  I unbutton my shirt. “No, I don’t want to wear my fuckin’ shirt,” I say, but
the words have no fire behind them.

  Danny takes a pinch of pollen from the buckskin sack at his waist and holds it up to my mouth. I open, like a toddler. He tosses it in and mutters a prayer I can’t quite make out. Then he takes a second pinch, bigger this time, and plumes it on the top of my head. I hold back a sneeze. He nods, then continues around the hogan, consecrating. I go through the door and inside. I barely have to bend, either, but if Danny’s coming in, he’s coming in on hands and knees.

  The hogan is hot and already hazy. A small fire made of new wood is burning in the center. It’s not much bigger than a dinner plate, but it gives off a lot of smoke and not all of it escapes through the smokehole. Two old men I vaguely recognize are pouring thin streams of fine, colored sand into a mural that stretches in a rainbow around the far side of the fire. When I walk in, they look up briefly and nod. One is so old I can’t tell if his eyes are open or not.

  There are five figures in the mural, each drawn in a subtly different combination of simple, angled shapes and alternating patterns. Their bodies are long ovals in three colors and their arms are represented by patterned white lines and dots like Morse code. Each character stands on a thick, charcoal black line. I’ve been to a handful of Chantways in my time, both for the tourists and for the Navajo, and I can tell you that trying to decipher the sand paintings is like trying to learn another language; I can get the general sense, but the specifics are beyond me. Here, it’s a good bet that at least four of the figures are the Holy Family: the Sun, the Slayer Twins (those were always my favorite as a kid), and, of course, Changing Woman. I think she’s the biggest one. But this fifth one on the far right that stands apart from the Family, I can’t say I’ve ever seen anything like it before. It’s a figure all in black, made entirely of charcoal grains. Its eyes aren’t sand, though; they’re lumps of turquoise rock. I can’t say why, exactly, but I don’t like it.