The basic idea of a Navajo chant is that you want to call attention to yourself. You want the Holy People to notice you. To come on over and bless you or your family or business, or, with the Evilway, to set things right in you. I’d be lying if I said I hold by all of this. But all the same, I’d rather not call the attention of that last fella on the right if I can help it.
Gam throws me a breechcloth. I stare at it, then at her. She sighs and turns around. I strip down to nothing and affix the breechcloth over myself. When she turns around again, I hold out my hands.
“Now what?” I ask, in Navajo.
“Now we wait for the end of the sand painting. In the smoke.”
She flops to sitting in a heap and carefully arrays her Singer’s Bag in front of her. She pulls a plastic baggie full of twigs, herbs, and blackened wood from within it and empties it into a nearby pestle. She begins to slowly grind the concoction together. When it’s a rough powder, she takes a handful and tosses it into the fire. There is no hiss or bang or colored fire, just more smoke. She adds water from an old quart jug to what remains in the mortar and keeps grinding. The sulfur smell comes on strong, but I can’t tell if it’s because of whatever she tossed on the fire or if it’s just me. I blink rapidly, and my eyes begin to water. Neither the sand painters nor Gam take any notice of me.
I feel movement in the smoke and see Dad. He carries a crude mask made of sewn buckskin, like a leather ski mask with tiny slits for the eyes. Feathers have been sewn in at the sides and hang heavy with beads. I think I recognize it from home. As a kid I stumbled across it in the closet looking for where Mom might have hidden my slingshot from me. At the time, it scared the shit out of me. Still sort of does. Dad sits next to me and begins mixing a bucketful of ash with water and earth. Another movement of smoke, and Danny Ninepoint appears. His eyes are hard and determined. Almost manic. I can tell he’s sort of getting off on all of this. Danny always loved this stuff. In his hand he carries another mask, like Dad’s, but his is adorned with horsehair and woven brush around the neck. Neither of them look at me. Both stare heavily into the fire, unblinking.
“The fifth painting…” I say to Gam, if for no other reason than to break the heavy silence. She nods, still grinding. “Who is it? Turquoise Man?”
Turquoise Man is a strong Navajo figure. He stands with a Navajo for life. Makes him invincible. Gam sucks at her teeth. It’s her way of saying yes and no. Gam starts to remove things from her bag. Some of them I recognize. I see the miniature bow and two ornate chant arrows. I see the bull roarer and a bunch of unravelers made of string and feathers and herbs wrapped over themselves into rough balls. There’s an old bison-hoof rattle and a smooth, curved stick. But then there are other things: a wooden contraption that looks sort of like ancient brass knuckles that sprouted crow feathers. A big bone, maybe the shoulder blade of a bison, grooved and dyed dark black. A shard of obsidian the size of my hand, and then, finally, and I sense most importantly, a box made of bone, about the size of a deck of cards. This she holds with two hands and carefully sets at her feet, closest to her. Then she presses her balled fist to her chest, right at her sternum, and grimaces. I’ve been to an Evilway before, once, years ago. But I don’t recall seeing the box. In fact, I’ve never seen the box before, not at any Chantway, or at any ceremony.
“Is this an Evilway, Grandmother?” I ask.
Gam sucks at her teeth.
I try to ask more, but the smoke is making my head spin a bit, and before I can speak Gam gets up. She reaches into one of her pockets and pulls out a fistful of cornmeal. She moves to each of the four cardinal beams of the hogan and rubs the cornmeal along it with a single, deliberate stroke. She holds up an oak twig in her other hand and begins a prayer song that I partly recognize and partly don’t. It’s beautiful, rhythmic and crooning and insistent at the same time. This is the opener. The call that lets the Holy People know we are here. It could be the smoke, or it could be just my imagination, but somewhere in the back of my head I get this strange, creeping sensation, and I picture the fifth figure, the one in black, sitting on some other plane and opening one bright turquoise eye.
The smoke is heavy now, but I feel like I’m the only one affected by it. I look around, and the two old sand painters are chanting along with Gam, putting the final touches on their work. Dad and Danny are sitting on either side of Gam, who has returned to her mortar and pestle. Dad is focused on the ashes, and Danny stares into the coals with wide eyes that are shot through with red. The smoke is as white as bone, and it’s pouring through the roof like it’s the spout of a kettle. Things are wavy for me. I’ve never had a high tolerance for anything, really. Not alcohol, not weed back when Joey and I used to smoke whatever shit hash we could buy off people in the tracts, none of it. It never stopped me back then, but it was just the way it was. Joey used to give me a lot of grief for it, even as he’d carry me home.
Both of the old men stand as one and survey their work like two regulars gossiping at the bar. They point at certain parts, nodding. They both turn to the black figure and nod silently. They move behind Gam and sit next to each other and pick up her chant in soft echoes, like the walls of a canyon. Gam nods at Dad and at Danny, and they both rise, Dad with the bucket. He sets it in front of me, and both men grab globs of ash paste and begin coating me with it.
I stand with my arms out at my sides as they coat me with black. This is in keeping with the Evilway, but even my smoke-addled brain can see differences. Gam takes the obsidian and brushes it the length of her left arm before pricking her palm. A bead of blood rises, and she moves over to the black figure and presses it upon its chest. Her hand comes away grainy with charcoal, and she touches her chest again with that same grimace, like something burns there. When I am covered head to toe in ash, Gam, still chanting, comes to me with a palmful of feathery ash. She steps up to me, then away, and blows the ash over me. Then she asks me to lie down by the fire. It’s just as well. I realize that Danny Ninepoint has basically been propping me up for the past five minutes. I look at him and see that he seems addled, too. His eyes are glassy and red, but his grip is as sure as stone. He looks eagerly from me to Gam and back to me. Dad is bobbing with the chant. He is not with us, I can tell. It’s like he’s staring at Ana’s cairn again in the backyard.
When I lie down, Gam gives me her bowl. I look in and see a black, watery mixture. I’m not really sure at this point when I stopped humoring everybody and dove into this headlong, but I’m still not about to drink something that looks like pond water without knowing what’s in it. Gam lifts it up to me, and I take it and lift it back up to her and try to ask what it is, but my mouth isn’t working right. My words sound mealy and thick. Still, she gets it.
“Struck wood and struck ground.”
By which she means it’s wood from a tree hit by lightning, and the ground around it. Lightning is bad news for Navajo. Powerful, and bad news. In some corner of my brain I know that whatever that lightning hit must have some psychoactive effect, since Gam threw some of it on the fire and now I’m feeling like I’m sinking into the pine mat they set me on. The rational part of me, the cop part, tells me to knock that poison onto the ground. But the other part of me, the grandson, the son, the brother….tells me to grab it and to drink it. So I do. It tastes like mouthwash. The rest of the ceremony I experience in flashes.
It seems like I’ve only blinked, but I can feel things on me now. I look down at myself, and I can see that they are several of the items in Gam’s Singer’s Bag. The unravelers have already been partly unraveled at my feet and shins. There are black feathers at my knees. The hoof rattle sits over my groin, and the carved bone on my chest. Altogether they couldn’t weigh more than five pounds, but I could no more move them right now than fly into the night sky. The chanting is still ongoing. Always ongoing. I recognize certain words like path and sky and wing, but the rest is too much for me to make out. I fade again.
The next time I come to is horrifying. If I could
move, I would run. I see the Slayer Twins as soon as I open my eyes. They are leaning over me, like some bizarre doctors mid-operation. A quiet part of my mind whispers that these are the masks I saw earlier, that this is Danny and my father, but the rest of me refuses to believe it. The rest of me sees the twins for who they are: Naayee Neizghani, Monster Slayer, and To Bajishchini, Born for Water. It is them. I know it as surely as I know that I am truly ill. I know it as surely as I know that the white man’s scan will come back with a death sentence. These things hit me with such force and clarity that they are impossible to deny.
I watch as they shoot the chant arrows over my body. They travel slowly, but I can feel the air moving around them. Their fletching parts the smoke. The chanting gets louder. I fade again.
The third time I come around, it’s like I’ve left the hogan altogether. The singing might as well be the sound of the wind or the rain. It isn’t so much a thing being done as it is a thing that has always been, like air. I can’t see the Slayer Twins anymore, nor can I see the old sand painters. All I see is my grandmother. Her eyes are closed, and she is finishing the unraveling. I can’t see what she is removing from the unraveling, but at intervals she tosses things into the fire and each pops like a nut. The motion is one with the chant: the singing, the pop. I feel as though I have sweat and dried, and sweat again. Like I’ve broken a string of fevers.
Gam takes my hands and places a pair of painted sticks in them, presenting each to me, all while singing. Each time she looks in my eyes, I can see the concern there, the sadness. In the quiet corner of my mind I know that she knows I have cancer, even before I know. Even before the doctors know, or the scan shows it. Does she really believe she can chant cancer away? Something in her eyes tells me no. Something in her eyes tells me what this Chantway is truly about: it’s about opening a path for the fifth figure.
In the thick, roiling smoke of the hogan I sense the chant reaching a climax. It’s a slow build, but Gam’s pitch is rising and the intervals are shortening. This is when I see her pull out the small bone box that she kept close to her. There is a tightening in the air, a pressurizing, and I know that this is the reason she chanted in the first place. To present whatever is in this box to whatever Holy People have been called to this hogan, and to present me with it, to link me to it. She shows the box to me and looks me in the eye very clearly. She is making sure I am grounded for this, not floating away on whatever smoke and potion is coursing through me. I manage a nod. The sulfur smell is stronger than ever. I get this morbid thought that maybe the smell is my brain burning, or dying, or freezing, or whatever the hell a tumor does to you, but these thoughts don’t bother me like they should. They’ve been muted. It’s like they are being whispered to me.
Gam lifts the bone box up in the center of the hogan, and she flips it open. She reaches inside and pulls out a crow. A turquoise crow. It looks exactly like the turquoise crow that the gambler had at his vigil. She brings it down to my level, flying it over my body from toe to head. She presses it briefly against my dry lips and then over my eyes. The cut, the size, the style of the crow in flight, all of these are the same as the gambler’s, but there is a thick vein of white marbling in the right wing of Gam’s, and the coloring is so pure it’s almost blue. This is a different crow, and yet it is not.
I try to speak to her. Try to ask her how it can be that she has the same totem as the gambler, what it means, why crows haunt me at every turn, but nothing comes out.
Gam places the crow totem on my forehead. It rests there like it was nesting. It’s almost like it burrows down an inch into my brain. Everything on me feels so heavy. I just want to sleep. I want to let the crow carry me down and leave me buried miles below the earth. Just when I think I’m sunk, the pressure pops. The chanting, which was feverish a moment ago, is quieted. Like wind over the mouth of a cave. And that’s when I see her.
It’s Ana.
She is at the door to the hogan. The moonlight pours in from behind her. Then the sunlight. Then the moonlight again. She ducks inside, which I think is a very strange thing for a vision to do, because I know that this is a vision. A stray thought brought forth from my brain, borne from smoke and herbs and sweat, that’s all. It has to be.
But it’s still Ana. I call her name, but my voice only roars in my mind. I can see her turning from me, and it’s like she’s embarrassed. Like when I caught her drawing on the walls once with her crayons, and she turned away from me and hid them under her shirt. Ana, I said then. Ana, what did you do? And she turned away. I walked around her, and she turned back the other way. Ana, did you draw on the walls? A shrug. A small smile forming in the corner of her mouth. She turns like this now, in the hogan.
Ana? Why won’t you look at me? You’re my Ana. You’re in my head. I just want to see your face.
There’s that small smile, and then she turns to me. But it’s not Ana anymore.
It starts as Ana, but then her warm brown eyes melt. They turn to black, and their color melts downward in two long triangles. Her soft brown coloring bleaches, fades to white in front of me like it’s been baked in the sun for millennia, until what I see is a small girl with the face of eternity on her. Of Black and White. Of Absolutes.
And then whatever she is speaks to me.
Do not be afraid, my brother. All things pass.
This Ana that is not Ana, this creature, it passes from my toes to my head, and it grasps the crow totem on my forehead and yanks it out like a root.
Then all is black.
When I wake again, it is because Danny Ninepoint has poured a bucket of cold water on me. I take a huge breath, like it is my first, and then I sneeze three times. I roll and pop my neck and blink water from my eyes. Ash is running all down my face and into pools around my head.
“Welcome back,” Danny says. Then he walks out of the hogan.
I sit up, calming my heart, placing myself. Everyone is gone. The sand paintings are gone. The men are gone. Grandmother is gone. There is a stale smoke smell coming from everywhere. The early morning sun creeps through the eastern door, lighting dust motes like flakes of floating ash. I sit up, and my head feels like it’s twice the size.
“Take your time,” Danny says from outside.
I have to crawl out of the hogan. When I do, I collapse onto the desert floor and start shivering like a dog. Danny sweeps down with a blanket.
“What day is it?” I ask.
“Dawn of the third day. Monday.”
“Shit. We gotta get to work.”
“Why do you think I’m here, honcho?” Danny looks at me with a straight face, but his eyes are smiling.
“What the fuck happened in there?”
“A lot.”
“Danny, did you see Ana?”
“Your sister? No. But I saw other things.” His eyes turn glassy for a minute, manic. That and the scratches on his face combine to make him look a bit like a junkie. It looks out of place on a man like Danny.
“Did you see Ana?” he asks.
“Sort of,” I say. Danny nods. He’s the only man I know who would take this as a reasonable answer. He helps me up and into my truck. He takes my keys and drives me home, where I take a five-minute shower and slam a cup of black coffee. As I’m getting into my uniform, I get a call from Doctor Owen Bennet. He tells me I’m dying.
I can’t even act surprised.
Chapter 11
Caroline Adams
I’m ripping down the highway with a bag of chemical poison in the back seat of my car. The pump and pole rigging sits next to me in the passenger’s seat. It’s secured with the seatbelt and shifts about awkwardly as I change lanes. There’s no good way to move rigging. It only breaks down so much. It’s like trying to pack a lamp.
The chemo itself is a sack of clear liquid, like a bag of water, but the plastic is thick and heavy. It’s wrapped in a protective sheaf and secured in a bright red cooler with yellow biohazard symbols all over it. The cooler is locked in three separate places
with plastic ties. I am terrified of it. You’d think after four years of chemo certification I’d get over it. You’d be wrong. The second I start to take it for granted is the day I drop a bag on the floor and rupture it and clear out the entire wing and have to go through a flushing regimen that I’ve heard is not fun at all.
Under normal circumstances I’d be going five under the speed limit, hugging the right lane, hands at ten and two, no radio on. Mom would certainly be proud. But normal has pretty much gone out the window here in the past couple of weeks. I’ve never given a chemo regimen off-site. I don’t even like giving chemo at the hospital. But when Owen told me that Ben asked for me personally, I was all over it. I can’t stop thinking about Ben, and what scares me even more than carrying a quart of cell-destroying liquid is the thought that Ben might change his mind. So instead of my usual careful driving, I’m going fifteen over the limit on my way to Chaco and praying I don’t see a cop. Then I laugh out loud, because I am going to see a cop. And you can forget ten and two: my palms are so sweaty that I’m alternating them in front of the vents. As for the radio, I’m listening to a Top Forty station blaring pop music, because if it’s quiet I start to think too much about what I’m doing and what it means that he asked for me personally. I need to save that for three a.m. Right now I need to do my fricking job.
Once I pass the welcome center and the CHC I’m totally lost. Owen seemed to know his way around here by heart. You’d think that after five years of shifts at the CHC that I would know my way about too. Guess not. I’m in over my head, but I don’t care. I bust out my phone, but the GPS coverage isn’t so good. Doesn’t surprise me that these backstreets might be among the last to get digitized, but eventually I hone in on Ben’s place.
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