Follow the Crow

by B. B. Griffith

  Ben wanted to start treatment at his house, on his day off. He was fairly short on the phone. It took some time to figure out a schedule that worked. Where he could be alone. Apparently his grandmother is around the house most of the time, but she has a card game on Tuesday afternoons. He thought it best that nobody else was around. I said whatever he could do I would make work for me, and here I am. Before he hung up, he said thank you, and he sounded so genuine, and even a little scared, that I knew I’d make Tuesdays work.

  His place is one half of a split duplex that doesn’t look much bigger than my apartment. Still, outside of the main strip to Wapati Casino with its manicured desert foliage and squared landscaping and quaint houses of adobe and Spanish tiling, which even I know is for show, his place is one of the nicer I see within blocks. It’s clean and simple and tended.

  Ben is on the lookout for me. I can see him at the window. The curtains ruffle, and he opens the door even before I can park my car. When he walks out to me, he checks both ways down the street. I feel a bit like the ugly stepsister, and I think he knows it as soon as he comes up to me because he pauses and looks down for a second. I can see him make a conscious decision to stop being embarrassed.

  “Hi, Ben,” I say.

  “Thanks for…for coming.”

  “It sucks,” I say. He laughs, thank God. His coloring is better, less angry red and more like the red of a sunrise, but there’s still a touch of black to him, a representation of what’s frightening him. It’s not a natural color. If I was to hazard a guess, I’d say it was a visual representation of the cancer. There’s something else, too, about the way his coloring shows itself. It’s simmering, like a heavy soup about to boil. He’s putting on a good show, but he’s pretty freaked out. About the cancer, sure, but it’s more than that. Something has happened to him that has rattled him deeply.

  “You knew the whole time,” he says.

  I shake my head. “Nah, I just…I get these feelings sometimes, and I…It’s just hard to unsee them once I see them.”

  “It’s funny. You and my grandmother. Between the two of you I don’t know why I even needed to get that damn scan.” He looks up at the sky overhead and then around at the sky behind him. I follow his gaze. Nothing but blue. Not even a cloud.

  “We should get inside,” he says.

  He carries in the rig while I shoulder my tote bag and then carefully pull the chemo crate out of the back seat. He eyes it warily as we walk up the front steps. I wish I could tell him it’s not as bad as it looks, but it is.

  The front room of the house doubles as a living room and dining room, actually probably triples as a living room, dining room, and TV room. It’s neat and clean and uncluttered. He’s moved a well-used recliner, the green seat cushion worn to white, to an opening in front of the mantel. I set the crate down like it’s full of eggs, and he tries not to stare at it while I set up the rig. Meanwhile I try not to stare at everything that makes this place his home, starting with the pictures. I see the grandmother and father in one. The three of them and what looks to be his mother in another. There’s one picture in the center where he looks like a teenager and he’s with a young girl. They have the same color eyes. They practically beam out of the picture frame. I look over at him as he ponders the crate and see that his eyes are soft now, no such smile behind them anymore. He sees me looking, and I panic a little and my fingers slip on the screw that tightens the neck of the rigging. To cover it up I ask him about her.

  “Is that your sister?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Ana. But she’s been gone almost six years now.”

  My face flushes, and I’m sure I look as red as a baboon.

  “I’m so sorry,” I say, which is such a stupid thing to say, that phrase, because even if you are sorry, so very sorry, even if you’re genuine, you sound canned. Just looking at a picture of that little girl, I know I would have fallen a little in love with her if she were around and smiled at me like that.

  “Me too,” he says, and he looks from the picture to me. “It’s all right, Caroline. I’m the one that’s supposed to be nervous here.” He gently takes the pieces of the rig from my fingers, which feel like sausages. “I can set the rig up. I’ve seen a lot of them in my day. You can…do whatever needs to be done with that thing.” He nods over at the chemo crate.

  “You have any scissors?” I ask.

  “Down the hall in the kitchen. In the big drawer.”

  I walk into the kitchen. It’s spotless, but it has a well-used feel, a subtle layered smell of spices and oils that makes my stomach growl. I slide open the big drawer under the microwave and find the scissors, then turn to go. But I pause when I see a second room, off to the right. It looks like it was a small sitting room, but it’s been converted into a tiny bedroom. I crane my neck, making sure to keep behind the refrigerator enough so Ben won’t see how rude I’m being, and I see that the room is almost monastic. The floor has nothing on it. There is nothing on the walls. The bed would only accommodate two-thirds of me and is pulled hospital-tight. There’s a beautiful Navajo blanket folded lengthways across it, but that’s about all of the color there is to see, except for something on a small shelf above the bed: two painted sticks crossed over a worn leather pouch. The pouch is open, and the opening is facing me. Something is glinting there. It’s a cold, white glint. A box of some kind. I feel myself take a step towards it, and as soon as I do a shadow drops down over the window, and I have to stifle a scream. I stumble back into the open drawer, and my butt slams it shut with a loud bang.

  It’s a crow, on the windowsill. And not just any crow. It’s the biggest crow I have ever seen. It looks prehistoric. As it settles, its coloring seems to blur and change in the dull light of the fall sun. At first it’s black as night, and then it looks shot through with red, then black again. For one terrible minute I think it’s in the room, but it flaps its wings and they brush against the outside of the window with a raspy raking sound.

  A cold, whispered dread falls over me, the same type of feeling I had after that lung cancer patient bled out on us, when I was cleaning his room. There’s a subtle movement in the air where there shouldn’t be. I almost scream again, but this time it’s no jump scare. It’s because the crow is looking at me. Looking right at me with an eye the size of a golf ball and as black as marble. The fact that it doesn’t make a sound, not even a squawk, makes it somehow even worse. It’s just perched there, on the ledge, taking up the whole sill, its head turned flush right against the window. I can see a flat, sticky disk where its eye is pushing against the glass. Its beak taps once against it with the sound of a cracking knuckle.

  Then Ben is there beside me.

  “Caroline? Everything okay?”

  The spell is broken. I take my first breath in what feels like minutes. I look from him back to the window, but the crow is gone.

  “I’m sorry, I…I thought I saw something.”

  He looks through the window himself, and his coloring darkens to a deep clay. It’s not fear that he is feeling, but it’s close, something like a mixture of dread and inevitability.

  “What did you see?” he asks, but I can tell he already knows.

  “It was a bird. A big bird.”

  He nods. “I’ve been having something of a bird problem lately.”

  I cock my eyebrow at him.

  “Kinda hard to explain. C’mon, let’s get this over with.” He nods back towards the front room. When we get back there I notice he’s held my hand for the short walk. I’d like to think it’s not because he thinks I’m a snoop that he has to keep tabs on. I file it away. Prime three a.m. material, right there.

  Back in the front room, I open my tote and pull out my yellow chemo gown. It crinkles like a bag of chips as I pull it on. It has matching gloves, too. High fashion in the nursing world.

  “What the hell?” Ben says.

  “It’s standard, don’t worry.”

  “Is that to protect you?”

  “Yeah, in
case something happens when I start your line.”

  “To protect you from getting it on your skin?”

  “Exactly.”

  “To protect you from what you’re about to put in my bloodstream?”

  “That’s right.” I nod, then realize he’s incredulous. I pause before saying, “Look, this is strong stuff. But you need strong stuff. Know what I’m saying?”

  After a second he nods.

  “Plus, I think hazard yellow is a pretty good color on me. No?”

  He cracks a smile that is a shadow of the one in the picture, but even a shadow works for me.

  “All right,” I say, “let’s get this show on the road.”

  I snip the four protective ties and open the crate. The hood bag is inside another bag labeled Cytotoxic, which I pull out like a lunch pail.

  “This is Avastana. You know what it does, right?”

  “Yeah. They told me it’ll wipe me out. I’ll puke my guts out in the short term and lose my hair in the long term.” His tone is as dry as bone. I can’t tell if he’s joking. I never know what the doctors tell these guys, and although Owen is the best of them, docs by nature are dorks who often have a hard time not explaining things like they’re a textbook. I figure I should run it down for him in plain English.

  “Basically cancer is just cells that are changing way too fast. This stuff kills those cells. It also kills any cells that look like those cells. Other fast moving cells, things like hair cells that grow fast, or mucous membranes that are naturally active. That’s why your hair will most likely fall out. You’ll also probably get abrasions and sores in your mouth and lower GI.”

  “My ass?”

  “Yeah. Your ass.”

  “So this is the red button.”

  “What?”

  “The nuclear option.”

  “Yeah. You could say that.”

  He sits down in the old chair and deflates for a second before pulling himself together. He is getting quite dark. And not just in the coloring that only I can see. “That’s pretty much what the doctor said.”

  “Doctor Bennet?”

  “Yeah.”

  I nod and pull up a fold-out chair that was propped against the couch. I pop it open next to his armrest and sit down by the hanging bag next to him. It’s like a big chemical sprig of mistletoe. I grab his hand, and I’m not ashamed to admit that the spark of pure, rich clay coloring that I see float from him makes me feel good. It makes me feel like a nurse.

  “I’ll be right here, Ben. You and me. All right?”

  He squeezes my hand and looks into my eyes.

  “You and me,” he says. “Okay. Hit me.”

  I prep his vein. Every nurse judges a man by his veins. It sounds weird, but when you spend as much time fretting over hitting veins for lines as we do, and studying how best to hit veins, and reading about where we have to start lines on people when we can’t find their veins, you learn to appreciate a nice, fat, dark vein. Ben’s veins are crazy prominent on his arms. They look like earthworms. A blind nurse could start a chemo line on this guy. I hit his forearm vein on the first try and have to stop myself from whooping. He doesn’t even flinch. I flush the IV, tape it down, and turn to the pump. I program a drip level and pull the clamp. That’s that. I turn back to him and find he’s been watching me the whole time.

  “Now what?” he asks.

  “Now we wait. It’s a two-hour infusion.”

  “Two hours?”

  “Yeah. You want a book?”

  “Nah.”

  “I brought some cards, too. Or I could turn on the TV for you if you want.”

  “Nah,” he says again, but he’s tapping his foot. He looks a shade yellow. Nervous.

  “When do I start feeling like shit?” he asks.

  “With most people it’s an hour or two after the infusion.”

  He nods, and his foot tapping intensifies. He follows the line from his arm up to the bag, and he’s fixated on the pump drip like it’s an hourglass. Without even meaning to, I rest my hand on his bobbing knee. The pallid mist fades away from him like vapor in the sun. Part of me feels guilty at knowing how I affect him. A small part. The rest of me is elated.

  “Talk to me,” he says.

  “Talk to you?”

  “Yeah, I…whenever Ana or I had to do hospital things, we would talk to each other. Whenever she had tests. We’d talk nonstop.”

  “Okay,” I say, nodding. “Okay, uh. What would you like to talk about?”

  “I dunno. Anything.”

  “What’s your favorite color?”

  “Red,” he says, with a slight smirk.

  “I knew it. All right, now you.”

  “Okay. What are you doing here?” he asks.

  “Sorry?”

  “I mean on the shithole outskirts of New Mexico. You have family in Albuquerque?” He traces the line from his arm back up the bag, his eyes wide.

  “No, no family in Albuquerque, or anywhere near it. My family is from Iowa.”

  “So why here?” he asks, turning back to me.

  “I got a grant from the government. They gave me money to go to nursing school. In return I gave them five years—twelve hours a week at the Chaco Health Center.”

  “Like the army,” he says and starts to laugh. He nods to himself. “Dealing with the Navajo is kinda like a war.”

  “It’s not like that. I had a specified term in an underserved community. It could have been anywhere. HUD areas. Inner city hospitals. Rural clinics. Anything.”

  “And are you glad you were sent to Chaco?”

  I nod. I don’t even have to think. “I knew it was the right decision the day I got a tupperware full of food from this old Navajo woman. She was a patient of mine during one of my rotations. She took the bus out to ABQ General. I don’t even know where she got on.”

  “Had to have been in Grants City, just south. No bus system in Chaco.”

  “That’s what I figured. She hitched her way out of the rez and then took the bus into Albuquerque just to give me food.”

  “I bet it was awesome.”

  “Oh my God. You have no idea. Best chicken I’ve ever had in my life. And I was new then, too. I hadn’t had a home-cooked meal in months. I didn’t even have pots in my apartment yet. I literally cried while I ate it all.”

  We’re quiet for a moment, but it’s a comfortable quiet. The house settles around us in the late afternoon cool.

  “And then you came,” I say. I don’t really know why. I have this dangerous and peculiar tendency to panic around men I like, but when I do, I also have this liberating side effect of throwing caution to the wind. I think I’ve been in a low-grade panic since I got that call from Owen telling me Ben wanted off-site chemo and wanted it from me.

  “Me?” Ben says.

  “Yeah. You. You take the good with the bad when you work at the CHC. There’s plenty of both, I think, but the good is quiet while the bad is loud. The bad shows up on my patient rounds late at night half-dead or detoxing. That’s loud. That has a loud color. But you, you’re good. And you’re a quiet good. And you have a nice color, and I bet it’d be nicer if you didn’t have such a mountain on your shoulders. I can see it weighing you down. I’m rambling now. I’ll shut up.”

  For a second I think he’s going to make me explain myself and my weird Technicolor Dream Vision, and then he’ll laugh me out of his house and straight into therapy. But he says nothing. It’s wonderful. It’s wonderfully Navajo.

  “All right. Your turn,” he says.

  “What’s the deal with the crow?” I ask. I don’t even skip a beat. Neither does he.

  “I wish I knew,” he says. Then he looks up at the ceiling like he could see through it to the sky. “All I know is that recently I’ve been seeing a lot of crows. But I think they’ve been around longer than that. You know? I think it’s kind of a thing I’ve had for a long time around me but I’m only now coming to see it.”

  “Tell me about it.”

>   “What?”

  “Nothing. Keep going.”

  “I mean, it’s late fall. This is when the crows gather. It should be normal. But it’s not. “

  “Because of the big guy?”

  “Yeah. The big guy. And I sort of feel like they’re always gathering around me. Does that sound crazy?”

  I think for a second. A couple of weeks ago maybe it would have sounded crazy. Not anymore.

  “No.”

  He lets out a breath. “That’s good.”

  “But why? Why are they following you?”

  “I think it has something to do with a gambler. And this place on the desert boundary called the Arroyo. And Ana.”

  “Your sister?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know how. But it does. And…” He squints and drops his head and then blinks rapidly. I lean in closer to him.

  “Ben? You all right? What are you feeling?”

  “I just feel…I feel like I’m running out of time. I had this Evilway. It’s a Navajo chant ceremony. I saw things. I’m not sure if it was good for me. I think it’s speeding things up.”

  He’s rambling now. Pouring forth. Like I’ve lanced a blister.

  “I saw Ana. I saw her.”

  “What, like a vision?”

  “Yes. But no. It was more. It was…terrible. She came in the hogan when…” He drops his head again, straining to remember. Then he pops up, his eyes bright with recognition.

  “The crow. The totem. Or was that a vision too?” His eyes shoot back towards the kitchen, towards where the back room is. He makes a move to get up, and I have to settle him.

  “You have to wait the infusion out.”

  He sits down again and swallows hard. “I feel strange,” he says.

  “I know. So do I. Let’s keep talking.”

  So we do. Until every last drip of Avastana is coursing through his veins. We talk about our parents, his estranged but nearby, mine together but far away. We talk about paying bills and working late. We talk about night shifts and groggy mornings and old friends. He talks about a guy named Joey like a good friend, but in past tense. I don’t want to make the same mistake I did with his sister, so I don’t pursue it.