Follow the Crow

by B. B. Griffith

  “I have to keep you here,” I say, but there’s nothing behind it. There’s nothing in me anymore. Nothing but a rising sickness and the unsettling feeling of empty burning in my veins. He takes my fingers in his.

  “I’m sorry, Ben. I’m so sorry,” he says, and I have a series of flashbacks of him walking away across the rez boundary, him looking at me and weeping, but still walking away. “But time is short.”

  Then he takes the crow from his gloved hand and grips it with his bare hand, and he blinks out of sight. I look left and right for him, and I see him in flashes, like a man glimpsed through the crack of a door.

  “Goodbye,” he whispers. I feel the air part as he moves away. He’s gone, and it’s just me, sobbing against a wall. The fire alarm goes off. I turn my head towards the front, waiting for the agents, but instead I see Bennet, and he rushes to me as I slide down the wall. He saw the whole thing. Or enough of it anyway. It’s written on his face. He’s like a man who just woke up in a strange place and is looking for anything familiar to grab onto. I think I’m the same way because when he kneels down to me we grab each other, and that’s when the cavalry comes in. The two agents, sure, but another three as well, and a handful of state police for good measure, guns out, scaring the shit out of everybody.

  Bennet does what I can’t do. He stands up in the bedlam and screams like a foghorn, “He’s gone! He ran! The fire exit! Quickly!” Then he throws an arm around my back. “Come on, man,” he whispers. “With me.”

  Bennet parts the sea of agents and cops that runs around us, and he half-carries me into a darkened patient room. He helps me onto the bed, grabs a bucket, and slides it in front of me, and I lose my guts again. I puke red, and I see red. Then I see black spots, and then I’m out.

  *

  When I wake up, it’s like my life is on repeat. I’m strapped to another damn machine, with another damn baggie dripping itself into my veins. Except this time I don’t even have my comfy lounger, and the nurse in my room isn’t Caroline. She’s older, and when she hears me stir, she dials a number on her phone and bustles over to my bed.

  “How are you feeling?” she asks.

  “Like hell. What’s in the bag?”

  “You’re dehydrated. We’re just giving you some fluids, that’s all.”

  Then everything comes back to me, and I try to sit up. But this nurse is big, and she pushes a beefy hand down on my sternum.

  “Easy there.”

  My head is pounding. Watching things hurts. Blinking hurts. I close my eyes and focus on not moving them under my lids, and that helps stave off another wave of nausea.

  “What time is it?”

  “It’s just after six,” says another voice, and this one I recognize. Bennet. I open my eyes a smidge and watch him through my eyelashes. “Same day. You’ve only been out for about two hours. Thank you, Mary Ellen. I’ll take it from here.”

  Mary Ellen shuffles out, and Bennet closes the door behind her before sliding a small stool next to the bed. I shuffle a bit in a sad attempt to sit up, but he shakes his head and stills me with a single touch.

  “Rest, Ben. Your body has no idea what’s going on.”

  “Neither does the rest of me,” I mutter.

  Bennet glances at the door and nods. “He got away,” he says, his voice low. “The agents and the rest of them canvassed the place for an hour before that Parsons guy called them all off. He and Douglas left without a word. Kind of a pissy couple, those two.”

  I let out a breath that rattles my throat, but I say nothing.

  “Now why do I get the feeling that you aren’t all that torn up about the dangerous drug addict’s daring escape?”

  “He said some things to me. Some things that rang true.”

  “About that rock he held in his hand? That made him invisible?” Bennet finishes with a sad laugh and creaks back in his seat. He runs his hands up and down his face a couple of times. “I can’t believe I’m saying this. I can’t believe I just said that without tacking on ‘here’s a referral to a counselor’ or ‘that’s a side effect of the medication’.”

  “The crow is real. I don’t know what it does, exactly, but whatever it is, it’s real. It happened. But it wasn’t just that. We have a history, him and me, and now I’m starting to rethink it.”

  “Is that good, or bad?”

  “Neither. It just is. But he told me to watch out for the Feds.”

  “Sounds like something a criminal on the run would say.”

  “Nah. I get it. I get what he’s saying. I never liked those two stiffs. They always rubbed me the wrong way.”

  Bennet is quiet, but I know he won’t disagree. I know they chafe him too. The way they have blinders on. They’re too cold. Too calculating. It’s unnatural.

  “He said the Feds weren’t after him. They were after the crow.”

  “If it can do what I think I saw it do, it could be very valuable. It’s…miraculous.”

  “He told me it wasn’t the only one. That the Feds are on a tear to find all of them.”

  And then it hits me: and I know exactly where one is.

  “Where did they go?” I ask, my voice froggy. “The Feds. Where did they go?”

  “I don’t know. Like I said, they just tore off. Not a word.”

  If they knew about Joey’s crow, they could know about Gam’s crow too. Joey said they’d stop at nothing. Said they wanted all the crows, and something about Ana, but that was flushed from my mind. I had to get to Gam. I grit my teeth and push to a sitting position. I see an explosion of colors, and my head feels like a sack of sand is resting on it.

  “What are you doing? You have to rest, Ben.”

  “No. I have to go. I have to get to my grandmother. I think she’s in trouble.”

  “You aren’t going anywhere tonight, man. Even if I let you, you wouldn’t make it out that door.”

  My eyes water with pain and frustration, and fear. Magic crows, shadow-walking people, none of these things particularly scare me, but the thought of those two men knocking on our door and Gam opening it up to them terrifies me.

  “Here,” Bennet says, pulling his cell phone from his pocket. “Call her. Warn her.”

  We don’t have a landline and Gam hasn’t picked up a phone in years, but I give Dad a shot. The phone rings. And rings. And rings. His voicemail picks up and says his mailbox is full. Like it’s been for years. I hang up. The look I give Bennet must be so pathetically terrified that it’s catching. His eyes go wide, and his pale face blanches a whiter shade.

  “Isn’t there anyone? Anyone at all?” he asks.

  My mind races, and somehow, like it’s done for the past few days, it settles on Caroline. What was she doing after my chemo? She said she was going back to the CHC to log a couple more hours. If she’s still there, she’d be minutes away from my house.

  Bennet peers at me and nods slowly. He takes his phone back and flips through his contacts.

  “I’ll call her,” he says. “But you gotta explain all this.”

  Chapter 14

  Caroline Adams

  I’m basically worthless at the CHC after the chemo session with Ben. I’m making my rounds, but I’m not really there. With the Navajo you really have to work sometimes to get them to open up, and I pride myself on working hard to do that, but not today. Today I’m like the dead-weight guy in the group project. Of the five of us from ABQ General who are scheduled here, I’m by far the most worthless. One of the nurses even ends up cleaning up after me when I forget a patient on one of my rounds. A nurse’s worst nightmare. Don’t worry, they were fine. Sleeping. Thank God, but still…

  The day can’t end soon enough. I feel drained. I’m not sure what to make of what happened at Ben’s house, with him storming off like that with those weird men. To say nothing of the crows. I think it speaks to my mental state that I’m more worried about Ben getting into that Suburban than I am about the staring contest I had with a monster crow, or his thousand crow buddies that sca
red the hell out of me when I was getting into my car. The human mind is a strange thing. When something that out of whack happens, I think my mind flat refuses to let me dwell on it. Instead it pushes it to the back. I don’t forget it. It’s still there, sort of waving at me, but in its place my mind swaps in other things, stupid things. Like how Ben held my hand when the chemo was first dripping into him. How he looked at me. Monster crows from hell could be swarming all around us, ending the world, and I would still be awake at three a.m. thinking about what it meant that Ben held my hand.

  Naturally the days you want to end the fastest last the longest, and soon enough I’m regretting my decision to log a few more hours. I get a late admit: a young woman with severe cramping. She’s been in before, around this time of the month, by the looks of her chart. A targeted birth control prescription would fix all this up, even I know that. But no, she’s been prescribed a series of catch-all intrauterine devices to which she’s reacting badly. Owen would have figured this out before she sat down on the exam table. I wish he was here. I don’t feel comfortable talking to the attending on rotation here today, an older man. He means well, but he’s from the school of physicians that believes nurses should be seen, not heard.

  Anyway, the poor girl is in a lot of pain, and it’s around six in the evening when we finally get her comfortable. By then I’ve let my charting pile up, and I’m late on my final rounds. I stop in the quiet end of the hallway and take a few seconds. I do this sometimes when I know I’m being a shitty nurse. I just stop it all and stand where there are relatively few people and roll my neck for a second. With this job, it’s so easy to run and run and run, but you just can’t do that because you burn out. And when you burn out, you stop being a nurse and become just another employee. And there is a difference.

  On top of all of this I also have my grant fulfillment to think about. I’m weeks away from a clean slate. No loans. No debt. Nothing. Pretty soon the CHC administration will sign off on my contract and hand me my receipt, and if I want to I can get in my car and leave everything behind me. I can’t quite imagine the freedom I’d have. It gives me a strange sense of vertigo to think about it, like I’m standing at the edge of a cliff. I have to admit, it’s kind of intriguing. On the other hand, it would make me a tourist. I know this place doesn’t need tourists. It takes five years at Chaco just to get your foot in the door with a lot of the Navajo. I’ve put in a lot of work. I don’t want to admit it, even to myself, but my decision on whether to stay or go is going to rest on whether Ben lives or dies.

  My phone rings. I don’t like to answer my phone at work because my hands are gross, and I don’t want to touch it. It’s usually solicitors anyway, but I’m still taking my thirty seconds, and I don’t mind taking another thirty. I’m already gonna be here until seven in any case. Maybe it’s my mom calling to say hi. Or that something terrible has happened. I pull my phone out of my front pocket. It’s Owen. My pulse drops like a lead ball then bounces to racing. I get that feeling that you get when someone calls you at two in the morning: this isn’t good, but I have to answer it.

  “Hello?”

  “Caroline! Thank you. Thank you.”

  It doesn’t sound like Owen. It sounds like…but no. It can’t be.

  “Caroline, it’s Ben. I need your help.”

  “Ben? Why are you…but what…”

  “Please,” he says, and that stops me. I can hear pain in his voice. I can almost see the black wisping off of him, coming over the line, and smoking out of my end of the phone.

  “What do you need?”

  “I need you to go back to my house. I’ll explain everything along the way.”

  It takes five minutes and the promise of a double latte to one of the other nurses to get her to take care of the rest of my charting, and I’m out the door.

  *

  I pull back onto Ben’s street, but this time the crows are gone. There isn’t a bird in the sky, but somehow it feels worse for their absence. The street is deserted. No cars out front. There aren’t even any porch lights on.

  “Are you there?” asks Ben, still on the line with me. He’s told me about Joey Flatwood and what happened at the hospital. Owen is with him and chimed in occasionally, and I think that’s why I finally believed his story about the crow totem. I don’t believe in magic, never have, never will. Nor does Owen, I don’t think. But I’m not going to sit here and tell you that I think death snuffs out a person forever. Who am I to say ours is the only plane of existence? Maybe this Joey guy, maybe he exists in a different way than we do. A way with its own rules and science and medicine. It’s a stretch, I know, but I’m still secretly applauding myself for not writing both of them off as insane right off the bat. After all, I’m the one seeing colors. I’m the one that can see people’s thoughts in their mist. For better or for worse, the three of us are thick as thieves in the nut house.

  “Yeah,” I answer him. “It’s really quiet here. No sign of anybody. Wait…” I peer at the front door. It looks splintered at the lock. Uh oh. “Ben, I think the door’s been forced.”

  I get out of my car and close the car door as quietly as I can. In the past ten minutes, it’s dropped fifteen degrees. The sun has left this side of the street. I can hear both men speaking with each other on the other end. “I’m going in,” I say.

  “Wait, Caroline. Are you sure? They could still be there. Bennet is calling the cops. You should wait.” He’s a bad liar. Even over the phone. He wants somebody in there as soon as possible, and I’m the closest to hand. My mind is made up.

  “If she’s in there, she could be hurt,” I say.

  “Keep your guard up.”

  I put the phone in my pocket, still on the line, and push open the front door. It slides easily out, and then easily back when I make no move to go inside. Pieces of the jamb are strewn across the floor inside. I listen for any movement. There is nothing. I decide against announcing myself and slide inside, licking my lips and trying to work saliva back into my mouth. It’s so still inside that a passing airplane rings loudly in my ears. A dog barks somewhere far away. Dust swirls in the low light where I’d set up the chemo rig hours before.

  The place has been ransacked. A quick job. Upended drawers, flipped couch cushions. The picture of Ana and Ben sticks out from its shattered frame on the floor. I bend to pick it up, and that’s when I hear a sound from the back. It’s not much, but it’s definitely something.

  I switch tack. Time to be brave. “Hello?” I ask, and it comes out in a weak squeak. The sound stops immediately. I right the picture on the mantle again and walk slowly around the glass and debris towards the kitchen.

  “Caroline? What is it?”

  I jump, but it’s just Ben, over the phone. I reach in my pocket and end the call. There’s that shuffling again. I round the corner into the kitchen proper, and that’s when I see the blood. A trail of it in a dark red line, almost black, like smeared tar on the tiles. It goes from the little side room through a corner of the kitchen and then out the back door. I look out the back door and see a man there, face down, by a small pile of rocks in the back yard. He isn’t moving, and he has no color at all coming off of him. I know he’s dead. I move towards him, but as I’m about to push the screen open, I hear the shuffling again and snap my head right, towards where I saw the crow through the window earlier.

  And I see the crow again. Only it’s inside this time, and it’s in tatters on the ground, next to an old woman who can only be Ben’s grandmother. She isn’t moving, but the crow is. Barely. Its wings have both been broken, and its head is at an awkward angle. But it’s trying to move closer to the old woman. When I step into the doorframe, it appraises me with one cloudy black eye and pauses. It blinks once, then goes back to its sad, flopping shuffle. It’s terrifying, but it’s in pain, and all malice that it may once have possessed has fled it. It manages to bump its sleek crown against the woman’s side, and there it rests, like an old dog with its master.

  The window
in the room is shattered, and I see bits of feathers stuck to the jagged ends of the glass there. More feathers float lazily about in the breeze coming in. The bird still watches me, and then it squawks feebly. That’s when the old woman stirs.

  I step forward and pause again as the crow snaps at me and sort of gurgles. It hits me that this crow is protecting the woman. That it will die protecting the woman. And then I see the painfully slow rise and fall of both the crow’s streaked chest and Ben’s grandmother’s chest, and I know that when the one dies, the other will die too. It’s their coloring. They share it. It’s a beautiful, sparkling strand of silver, like a heartstring, but it’s weak and gossamer and looks like it could be snapped with the ease of brushing away a spider web.

  I kneel down next to the old woman, and I can hear that she’s struggling to breathe. Her neck is mottled and bruised and crumpled. Her windpipe is crushed. Blood runs from her nose. Her eyelids flutter and creep open, and she sees me. She focuses slowly, but if she is surprised to find a strange woman in her room, she doesn’t show it. She mutters something softly in Navajo that I can’t understand. My phone is buzzing like mad in my pocket. I fish it out and answer Ben’s call.

  “Ben, she’s been attacked,” I say, the panic wavering my voice. “Talk to her.” I put the phone by her head, and I can hear Ben speaking on the other line in a near wail, but she seems to take no notice of him or of the phone. She’s looking plainly at me.

  “Help is coming,” I say. “Just hold on,” and I grip her bony hand.

  “Police,” she says. Then she says a name that sounds like Dejooli.

  “Ben? Yes, he is coming. He will come soon. You can talk to him here, see?”

  “Police,” she says again. Then something that sounds like nine-pin or

  nine-point, and I am reminded of Ben’s partner. The man who called the ambulance for him at the Arroyo.

  “Yes. The police are coming. Just hold on.”