Follow the Crow

by B. B. Griffith

  As if they hear my thoughts, a group of crows hops from the fence to the ground. They bow quickly to the grass and cock their heads, listening. But they watch me.

  “What are you?” I ask.

  No answer. They bow and listen.

  “Help me,” I say.

  They start to step quickly on the grass like they’re dancing. Then they stop and bow to listen. They do this several times, and then one dashes its beak into the earth, rips half of a worm from the ground, and swallows it as it watches me. Never blinking.

  “Well, fuck you then,” I say. It snaps its beak with the final bite and burrows into the earth again, flipping a small clump of grass away.

  I turn back to the rocks. Now that I stare at them, they don’t look strewn out of anger or sorrow. They look broken down and then piled again, like they’re meant to fill a hole. I reach down and pick up a rock, and the crows freeze in their dance. One has a night crawler wriggling in its mouth, but still it doesn’t move. I toss the stone away and grab the next in the pile, and the crows go back to work with me. I toss this stone too, and then I start digging, flipping stones away to get to the heart of the pile. That’s where I find it.

  It’s a strip of beaded leather. The leather is worn almost to white and the beads are rubbed lumpy.

  I know this strip of leather. I’ve known it for years. And I know the scalp knife it hung from before my father ripped it off the weapon and stashed it as his final gift to me.

  I know who killed Dad and Gam, and it kills me too.

  Chapter 16

  Owen Bennet

  We kept Ben at ABQ General for as long as we could that night. Longer than he wanted, because he didn’t have a ride until his mother was able to make the trip from Santa Fe. That was maybe the worst part of the entire ordeal for me. Worse than the insanity with Joey Flatwood—that’s something you deal with in your own mind, and it makes it or breaks it. Worse than watching Ben hold the phone while his grandmother died—I’ve seen a lot of messy deaths. But watching him sit there in the waiting room, staring at the floor, for five hours like a forgotten child—that ripped me to pieces. Just the fact that he couldn’t catch a ride. Such a stupid thing that hit home like a sledgehammer. Caroline was at the police station making a statement. I tried to give him money for a cab, but he looked at me like his mind was breaking, so I just let him sit. Maybe it was best that he went with his mom. No man should go home alone to that hell.

  I didn’t get much sleep that night. I started drinking bourbon again. When I met the sunrise I was no more settled than I was when I tried to hand Ben cab money. And then I had to go to work again.

  It’s funny when you go through something like that. Something big and shattering and life-distorting, and then after it happens you wake up the next morning the same as always. You put your pants on and eat your breakfast and get in your car and take the same route to work and you log in to the same system, and all the while you want to just scream at everyone, How can you go on like this? The world is different now! But nobody knows. Nobody cares. People have their own problems. And who’s to say a few of these people haven’t come across some Joey Flatwoods of their own?

  I spoke with Caroline that day, the day after Ben’s life shattered to pieces, and she told me about what she’d found. About the crow and the two bodies and the robbery and the bone box. She told me that Ben’s grandmother had a crow of her own. I asked Caroline what she said to her, if she knew who attacked her, or what. She said Ben’s grandmother was too far gone. That she just sang her way out.

  She’s a terrible liar, Caroline. I think it’s part of what I love about her. Probably because until right about now she’s had nothing to lie about, but that night she saw something else there. I know it because when I asked about Ben’s grandmother’s last words she said they were “goodbye.” Nobody’s last words are “goodbye.” Least of all a Navajo elder. I almost laughed. Fair enough. If she doesn’t want to tell, she doesn’t have to. I have enough trouble keeping the rational parts of my brain from mutiny with the information I already have. I’m swimming out beyond my depth here, so that first week after everything went down, I did what any sane medical practitioner does when they don’t understand something: I researched the hell out of it.

  I started with medical explanations for visual and auditory hallucinations of the sort that might explain why Joey Flatwood seemed to phase in and out of view. I looked for literature related to degenerative eye conditions, something akin to a temporary glaucoma-like symptom that would affect frontal vision but not peripheral. I mostly did this just to make myself feel better. To do some sort of due diligence. If it was a visual phenomenon, it would have had to affect Ben and me at the same time, and in the same way. And there’s also the fact that Joey isn’t an instance of ocular flashing or a visual blind spot. He is a person. A person who appeared and then disappeared. He was no hallucination. I saw Ben grab him by the coat. So what, then? Some illusion? A sleight of hand or a smoke and mirror trick? Everyone knows your brain sees what it wants to see. And yes, maybe he could have fooled me. Or Ben. But both of us? And afterwards to elude the FBI and a platoon of policemen?

  There was no explaining it from a medical perspective, so I flipped the table around and tried it from Joey’s end, and from what I overheard when he and Ben spoke face-to-face.

  The next night I start researching crow totems and invisible men.

  I go down the internet rabbit hole into some pretty crazy conspiracy websites. Eventually I know I’m just clicking through this garbage to keep myself from calling Caroline, which I want to do more than anything. The problem is there’s really no reason for me to talk to her. I’m not sure what I’d even say aside from rehashing that we all broke down last night and then tacking on a wasn’t that crazy?

  I have this absurd idea early in the morning of calling Caroline to ask her on a date. After another hour of pacing the apartment and delving deeper into the underbelly of the web, I decide to table that, thank God. Essentially I’d be hitting on a girl just after a funeral, like some hornball. It’s not like me at all, but then again I’m not really myself these days. I’m increasingly coming to see that whatever happened that afternoon with Ben and Joey has fundamentally changed me. It is the sum measure of a path I took up when I volunteered to attend at CHC. I gained speed on that path when Caroline stepped on the scene, and then Ben. I’m usually not one for preordination, but this kind of trend is hard to ignore. The Harvard medical student Owen, the staunch atheist, would scoff at the Doctor Bennet sitting up until the dead of night thinking more and more that it’s possible that out there somewhere is a man who can disappear into space.

  I stumble across a chat room on the topic of ancient cabals. The usual tropes: old orders of men and women whose job it is to shepherd the interests of humanity, typical One World Order crap that doesn’t hold a candle to reason. Even the new Owen Bennet refuses to believe that the big banks are financed by aliens intent on keeping the masses from acquiring super-technology that a handful of privileged humans currently employ. That’s a common theme in these whack job forums. But in my glassy-eyed state I recall a point of the conversation between Joey and Ben: Joey took his crow off a dead man. He said there are other crows. He said that the agents want to get them all.

  I sleep fitfully, and I awake in cold sweats from nightmares I half remember. I start seeing things out of the corner of my eye that I know are not there. I keep a hammer underneath my pillow because it’s the only thing I have in my apartment that resembles a weapon. I don’t even own a good set of kitchen knives. By the end of the week, I’ve convinced myself I have to get off the conspiracy kick and back to the common denominator here: the Navajo connection. Ben’s grandmother had a crow. Joey has a crow. The crow is turquoise, a powerful stone in Navajo lore. The crow functions as a totem, which is a Navajo token. I get out of the chatrooms and back to the academic articles where I’ve lived most of my professional life. This time I look up the Navajo.


  I find an interesting bit about Chantways that invoke symbolism. The Blessingway and the Evilway and the Enemyway are the most famous, but there are others. Hundreds. Historians have no idea what most of them were like or what sort of function they served. The names of some of these extinct Chantways are all that survives. Names like the Hailway, the Mothway, the Dogway, the Waterway, the Big Godway, and then one that strikes me: the Ravenway. But that’s where the line ends. There’s no way to know what the Ravenway might have done, or been. It’s lost to time along with the rest of the extinct Chantways. It’s infuriating, because I have a feeling that I was getting close. Closer than aliens running JP Morgan, at least.

  I stare at crows all the next day: out of windows, from my car. Daring them to make a move. But other than the fact that there seem to be an awful lot of them, they don’t take any notice of me whatsoever. And as for the numbers, well, they flock in the winter, and it’s just about winter.

  A week goes by like this. Agonizing. Plodding. No word from Ben, and no word from Caroline. We aren’t scheduled to work together for some time. I just need an excuse to call her. You’d think I’m in love with you is a pretty good one, but that has the unfortunate effect of making things awfully uncomfortable if the sentiment’s not returned. Call me what you will. You don’t have to stare at the phone like I do. You aren’t the one with his heart on the line.

  Then, late Saturday evening, an excuse drops right onto my plate: Ben’s most recent chart, filed by Caroline on the second regimen of chemotherapy she’d delivered just the night before.

  Increased visual impairment.

  Reported diplopia.

  Noted word aphasia.

  Noted slurred speech.

  Bruising on right hip and right elbow from a fall.

  He can’t see right, he can’t speak right, and he can’t stand right. Ben is getting worse.

  I dial the phone. Caroline picks up on the first ring.

  “Owen,” she says, and as soon as she gets my name out, she starts crying. I can tell by the lack of sound, by the clipped silence that comes when you cover a receiver.

  “I saw the report.”

  “It’s worse than that. He’s…he’s giving up.”

  “We need to bring him in to the hospital, Caroline. Full time. If he’s to have any chance of surviving, he needs radical radiation therapy to shrink these tumors. I don’t think he’s responding to the chemotherapy.”

  “I know that. He won’t go.”

  “He will when he collapses.”

  “That’s what it’s going to take, I think,” she says.

  “What is he doing that is so important? More important than his own life?”

  “He wants them.”

  I almost ask who they are, but then I already know who he wants: the people he thinks killed his family.

  “He’s stubborn,” she says. “He has to right the wrong if it kills him. He has to restore the balance. You didn’t see his house, Owen. You didn’t see what I saw.”

  In the depths of all this insanity, it occurs to me that she is using my first name. It sounds wonderful coming from her. It sounds like she’s been saying it for a thousand years.

  “What did you see?” I ask.

  “I…I can’t say, really. I’m not sure.”

  So she’s in shock too. The both of us adrift at sea, the mainsail snapped.

  “Caroline, you have to listen to me. You need to convince him to come here, to ABQ General. You too. Both of you have to come.”

  “I think we will,” she says flatly. “I just think it’s gonna be when it’s too late for him.”

  I swallow, and it hitches in my throat. There’s no way I can make Ben come to the hospital myself. My entire career I’ve been fighting to get the Navajo people out of the IHS revolving door. It seems perversely fitting that this upending of my life should culminate in my trying to drag a Navajo back in.

  “I wasn’t crying until you called,” Caroline says, with quiet pride.

  “That’s always nice to hear, when a guy calls a girl.”

  “No, I mean that I haven’t just been sitting around crying the whole time.”

  “I know, Caroline.”

  “I just want to help him.”

  “Me too. I think it’s…it’s very important that we help him. However we can. Do you know what I’m saying?” I walk to the window and I stare out at where the crows massed in the tree before. It’s barren, now.

  “I do,” says Caroline.

  “You have to get him to come to ABQ. You have to try.”

  “I will.”

  “And be careful, for Christ’s sake.”

  “You too, Owen.”

  She hangs up. God, I love the way she says my name.

  Chapter 17

  Caroline Adams

  Usually I’m good with patients in shock. You know it immediately. It’s the vacant stare, the ridges on the sides of the eye. Anxious patients have ridges around the forehead. Shell-shocked patients have ridges around the eyes. I have this theory that it’s because they’re running through slides in their mind and can’t turn away, can’t even blink. They may be quiet, but they’re having a full-blown conversation with themselves in their heads. You can see it in the twitches in the bags under their eyes.

  That’s how Ben looks during chemo today. His house is still a crime scene, so I administer the regimen in a disgusting hotel outside of the reservation, past the casino. The kind of place a gambler would stay with his last forty bucks. This is where I meet his mom, Sitsi Dejooli. I arrive as he is in the middle of explaining who I am.

  As soon as I walk in, I hear her go, “You have cancer?” in a shrill, panicky voice. Ben moves back to sit on the brown comforter draped over the lumpy twin bed. He looks pleadingly at me for a moment, then drops his head in his hands and gives a weak nod. His mother is a small woman, thin, like Ben, and with his frame. She has the dark hair of the Navajo, but it’s cut short and pixie-like around her head. She wears trim, straight-legged jeans and two-toned leather boots with thick heels. She’s standing in the middle of the room clutching her purse to herself with one hand and clutching the collar of her sweater with the other. She’s quite pretty, but she has that look of an older woman trying too hard to stay in her thirties. She also looks like she doesn’t want to touch anything. Which I can understand.

  “Cancer?” she screeches again. I get the sense she’s been repeating herself. She looks at me toting my radioactive cooler like I’m here to rob them.

  “This is Caroline. She’s my nurse,” Ben says. His face twitches. He’s here, but he’s not here. His color is roiling in black. It looks like clay mixed with blood. He must have seen something at the house that sapped him completely. He’s barely there.

  “Hi, Mrs. Dejooli,” I say. She ignores me.

  “No, this isn’t right. You can’t have…did you check with other people? How many opinions did you get?”

  Ben never told his mother. Most likely never would have if his life hadn’t fallen around his feet. I can see that he’s not comfortable with her. He doesn’t trust her. He feels like she’s turned her back on him, on all of them. He thinks she doesn’t love him. It all centers on Ana. I can feel this. I’m getting better at reading the colors by the day.

  For what it’s worth, he’s wrong. Looking at this woman it’s impossible not to see it. She’s terrified of losing him. It’s coming off of her in bursts of yellow, like popping gasoline bubbles. She wants to see him grow older. She wants to die before him. She’s afraid of being alone. Which is pretty rich coming from a woman who left her entire family to carve out a new life for herself off the rez.

  Ben looks over at me with unfocused eyes. He holds out a hand weakly to me, and I come over to him.

  “Tell her, Caroline. I can’t right now.”

  I sit down and hold his arm, much thinner now even than last week. I cradle it in my lap as I swab it with an alcohol pad.

  “It’s no mistake, Mrs. Dejoo
li. He has a late stage brain cancer. It’s very real, and very serious.”

  She breaks down completely. She sits in a smoke-stained chair by the faded table in the corner and cries for basically the entire session. A couple of times she stops and looks up at me like I’ve betrayed her or something, then she goes back to holding her head in her hands and wiping her face with a Kleenex. I’d had such plans. I wanted to tell him myself what I’d whitewashed for the police report. I wanted to tell him about his grandmother’s last minutes. About what he couldn’t hear over the phone. About her calm confidence and her strange words, and, of course, about the hollow bell that hung from my neck like a ball of iced lead.

  But there is no place for that. Not with his mother here. Not with the way he’s lying on the bed and taking the drip and staring at the flaking ceiling like he wants to float up and through it and away. I might as well set it and forget it. I think he’s forgotten about me completely until I get up to use the bathroom and he grips me by the arm for a moment. I can see he’s afraid I’m leaving him. He looks lost. Like he’s floundering in the deep end of his life and is about to give up and sink under. I refuse to cry in front of his mother, who is, quite frankly, putting on a disgusting little show, heartfelt or not. Tears are not what Ben needs right now.

  That’s about all I get from Ben this time: that one look. I wrap up my stuff to leave, and he thanks me and hugs me with a creepy finality. He made some sort of decision on that bed. Some decision that is final.

  On the drive home I’m looking for any excuse to turn around, and it’s Owen who gives me one. My notes. I’d submitted them to the system in my car before hitting the road while they were still fresh in my mind, and they are blatantly indicative of a worsening condition. Ben looked so bad on the inside that the diplopia and aphasia and the bruising I noticed seemed secondary to me, but of course they were huge red flags. He is getting worse. He has to go to a hospital. He needs full-time care. I just needed someone with guts to tell me to go do it, and as usual, Owen Bennet is that man.