The Coyote Way, page 11
part #3 of Vanished Series
“And this girl. How old was she?”
“She’s our most recent,” Yokana says. “Sixteen. She comes from a family who owns a used-tire shop in a one-horse town off 57 called Animas. One of three daughters and two sons. She set fire to the building before she apparently walked five miles barefoot to the north bank of the Chaco River and laid down to die. No priors, no record of any kind. All anybody the NNPD questioned could say about her was that she was the quiet one of the family.”
“Isn’t it a bit strange that all of them seem to have been bitten?” I ask carefully, still looking at the girl. She has the gnaw marks on her face too, around the lower lip. Just like the rest of them. I look up at Bentley. “Maybe that ought to be looked into more carefully. There’s a chance we need to tell people to look out for coyotes—”
Bentley winks at me.
Half of his mouth turns up into a grin, the other half down into a snarl. It’s an awful, two-faced grimace that lasts maybe half of a second. I shake my head, take a deep breath, and when I look up again he’s watching me calmly.
“Yes?” he asks.
I turn to Yokana. He seems to have seen nothing.
“Dr. Bentley has told me that they see this quite a bit,” Yokana says, flipping through the chart in his hand as he speaks. “The coyotes get at the mouths of exposure victims pretty regularly.”
I look at Bentley again. He’s grinding his teeth softly.
“It’s just what they do,” Bentley says, staring at me, unblinking. “It’s the softest meat.” I take a step back.
“I can’t help you,” I say quickly. “I’m sorry. I wish I could. Chief Yokana, I need to go. I’ve forgotten I need to pick Grant up from school.”
I’ve forgotten no such thing. Grant won’t let me walk him to school or pick him up. But I have to get out of here. The air is suddenly thick. I’m having trouble getting a breath. I look at the assistant, and he seems strangely doped. Oddly quiet. Has he spoken since I got here?
“Chief,” I say. “We need to leave.”
Bentley smiles and waves good-bye like a kid at a bus stop. I turn and just start walking up the stairs. It takes every fiber of my being not to run as fast as I can. I hear Yokana behind me with his slow, deliberate steps. I don’t say a word until we’re both out and in the baking sun, and only then can I finally breathe. I let the sun wash over me like a shower, craning my neck toward it.
“You OK, Dr. Bennet?” Yokana asks.
I watch the door. Nobody comes after us. Not Bentley, not anybody.
“I am now. Sorry. I haven’t been around all that for a while.” I wonder what I can possibly say to convince Yokana that every policeman on the rez needs to descend on the CHC morgue right now and shoot Bentley on sight. I almost start to say it, and Yokana is watching me, concerned, but after a few more moments in the Navajo sun I’ve calmed myself. No, that wouldn’t do. The skinwalker will have thought of that, after all. It wanted to show me what it was doing, toy with me, and it said its piece. If I were to go back down those steps right now I’d probably find Tim Bentley dazed and confused, the skinwalker already gone.
“Did you see something down there?” Yokana asks, and not for the first time do I wonder if he knows more than he lets on.
“You brought me to hear what I think. Well, I think these people were attacked by something. Something that broke their minds. They wandered out into the desert because they couldn’t take it anymore.”
Yokana cocks his head. “What kind of thing would do that?”
A coyote. I almost say it. But it won’t come out. I shake my head in frustration. “And they’re getting younger. The victims. From Bill on down to the girl.”
If this was already obvious to him, Yokana doesn’t let on. He only nods, his face falling another centimeter, lower and lower. Grayer and grayer. I wonder how much longer a man like him can stay standing if every day he gets lower and grayer. But I can’t dwell on that now. Right now I’m wondering about who will come next. Who comes after the sixteen-year-old? A fifteen-year-old? Fourteen?
All I can think of is Grant.
Chapter 17
The Walker
I’m sitting inside my clan hogan watching the daylight fade. The sun seems to be pulled through the smoke hole at the top as if someone is sucking it up with a straw. Gam used to call this type of light dust light, the last, sideways beams that catch the dust and the pollen floating in the air. There’s no dust at my passing, though. I disturb nothing. I’m the only one here, and I’m not even really here, not like the fire pit is, or the swept earth, or the pollen-dusted beams. I’ve been the only one here for days. I come back in between calls, hoping to catch whoever keeps this place, but so far I’ve only seen crows. I think they can see me, or almost see me. They hop in through the eastward-facing door and cock their heads at me before turning around and hopping right out again. Maybe they don’t like what they see.
I’m probably looking a little grim. I’m definitely feeling grim. We’ve got three days until the Native Market, where our coyote may be primed to pop off. The rez is slowly falling apart under the weight of the chaos it brings, and our only weapon against it reads like a shitty garage sale.
Something about all this is going over my head, and I can almost hear the whoosh. Something fundamental about the coyote, as a skinwalker. I’m missing something, and it’s driving me nuts. If you think about it, this coyote and I have a lot in common. It’s a mean bastard, but it has a job too, just like I do. It anchors the chaos side of the river. It absorbs the souls that are drawn there. It may look like the coyote has free reign here—it can change hosts with a touch, turn them into skinwalkers too, and moves with unnatural speed and strength—but the world it inhabits now still has rules. I take a swipe at the rocks ringing the fire pit, and my hand passes through. That’s one rule. I can’t interact with this world unless it’s to take a soul to the veil. And as far as unnatural speed and strength, well, I bet if you were to ask some of the poor saps I have to chase down and drag to the veil, they’d say much the same about me. But I still have limits, so this thing must too. It’s just a matter of finding them.
I wish Gam was here. I wish I could knock on some camper doors and rattle some tents at the Arroyo and figure this out NNPD style like in the old days. I wish I was a better Navajo and knew what a Coyoteway was in the first place. I wish Joey Flatwood had any idea. I wish I was with Caroline right now, playing cards on a TV table in my house while we talked all this over. I’d even be willing to take the chemo again. See what I mean about being a bad Navajo? My people aren’t supposed to dwell. We don’t look forward much, either. We take what is and work with it. But what is sucks, and all I find myself doing these days is looking back. Sorry, Gam, I know you’d be sucking your teeth at me, shaking your head, but can you really blame me? What’s back is all I have.
I’m roused from my one-person pity party by a shuffling sound coming from outside. I walk out and take a lap around the hogan, tracing the sound back toward the Arroyo until I see two figures crest the rise, taking a well-worn path in my direction. The sunset falls right on them, and I see it’s two men. Two old men. They’re walking along the path in silence, backs bent with age, their eyes on the ground in front of them. They don’t pick up their feet so much as slide them, right foot, left foot, with a sound like the slow sweeping of a broom, one in front, the other behind.
They pass the first three derelict hogans without a glance. As they make their slow way down the path it dawns on me that I know these men. They were at my chant. They’re the sand painters. Two brothers, as old as the hills, who used to perform with Gam on the rare occasions she still sang. They’re dressed in light jackets despite the summer heat, in that universal way of all old people, but theirs are over what looks like traditional garb: woven tunics and buckskin breeches worn as thin and white as paper at the knees. They wear beaded moccasins that look patched and patched again. I know they could walk right through me, but I step aside for them anyway. They pause briefly at the open entrance to the hogan, and the first reaches into his tunic. He takes a pinch of pollen in his hands and slaps the mantel. They gently help each other with the slight bending and crouching required to get inside, and once there they silently go about sweeping the place and shoring up the four corners of the framing by dusting pollen in each direction.
One builds a fire in the pit while the other smooths the dirt beside it like he’s priming a canvas, and when the hogan is nice and hot, they take off their jackets. Then they take off their tunics. And then they take off their slippers and breeches. They’re stripped down to saggy old-man underwear. I’m starting to wonder if maybe I ought to give these fellas their privacy, but that’s where they stop. One nods at the other and then creaks his way downward until he’s lying flat on the dirt between the fire and the canvas. His brother takes up several handfuls of pinon leaves and stuffs them in a paper grocery bag. I’m thinking maybe he’s going to burn the whole thing, but instead he sets it carefully on the floor and kneels on it to save his bony knees from the hard-packed dirt of the floor. Now we’ve got one lying flat, the other kneeling over him, and the fire crackling and smoking. The kneeling man extends his right hand out over his brother, and he touches his dirt canvas with the knobby pointer finger of his left hand. Then he closes his eyes and begins to sing.
I don’t recognize his song, but that’s hardly surprising. Gam sang all the time, walking the foothills with me, cooking around the house, when she weaved and when she knitted. She sang Ana and me to sleep when I was younger, and it seemed like no two songs were exactly the same. The sand painter sings over his brother in a softy rhythmic chant that’s surprisingly high and on key, considering I bet the guy is well into his eighties. His right hand still hovers above his brother. He draws in the dirt with his finger.
I peer over his shoulder and watch as he traces symbols. I recognize the hard lines and basic shapes that make up the symbols of power and the outlines of the Holy People, but I get the sense that he’s improvising, moving his finger in time with his voice—deeper gouges when his song counts out beats, softer strokes as his words soften and his voice keens. He draws circles one way then traces them back in the opposite direction. I’m so lost in the finger painting that I don’t realize he’s opened his eyes and is staring now at his right hand. It’s a complicated one-man dance that he’s doing. Singing, painting, and now moving his right hand slowly, evenly over his brother’s body. His eyes never waver, and neither does his right hand. It cuts the air in a slow and steady slice. There aren’t even any old-man shakes. That’s when I figure out what’s going on. This is a hand-trembling ceremony. This man is a hand-trembler, a Navajo medicine-man, although not quite like what Gam was. Tremblers can tell you if you’re sick with something, then they send you to people like Gam, Singers who can perform chantways to get your spirit patched up and back in line with the Navajo Way.
After a time, the first brother abruptly stops, evidently satisfied with how still his right hand was the whole time. He gently wipes his tapestry clear, and then the two switch places. Both brothers are Tremblers, then. I can’t help but smile. These two and Gam must have made quite the team back in the day. Gam didn’t sing nearly as much near the end of her life, but I can only imagine what they must have been like in their prime. Gam was good. One of the best. I bet the brothers are too, if you believe that sort of thing. And if you were here, in the smoke and heat, and you saw the painting, the singing, and now the surgical stillness of the second brother’s hand, I don’t care how skeptical you are, some part of you might start to wonder.
The brothers now stand facing each other, which is odd. I don’t remember this sizing-up as part of any hand-trembling ceremony I ever saw or heard about from Gam. As a matter of fact, they look like they’re checking each other for blemishes, like they’re pieces of meat at the butcher. They slowly circle each other. One turns his back on the other, and he scans it from top to bottom, even stretching out the underwear band for a glance down below. They check each other’s sparse hair, like they’re looking for ticks. They lift up one leg and then the other like old donkeys and check the soles of each other’s feet. Last, they check each other’s mouths, up and down. Then they both speak the first words I’ve heard them say all evening. It’s in Navajo, but it’s clear and I understand it: “No bead, no bone.”
They nod to each other. They seem as pleased as they were to find their right hands steady over one another, and it occurs to me that this trembling ceremony wasn’t to diagnose an illness of some sort but to pronounce a clean bill of health.
At the sound of the words, memories flood into my head, one after the other. I remember walking with Gam, both Ana and me, taking care to brush our feet over any track we saw, in case it was a snake’s, and Gam laughed at us and said we just wiped out a lizard’s slow swish-and-clomp track, not a snake’s. Ana said something like, “Aren’t they bad too?” But Gam shook her head. “The Gila gave us the trembling power,” she said. “Its scales harden the Navajo warriors. It keeps us safe.” And that afternoon, outside the front door, she stopped us and ran her still-nimble fingers through our hair playfully. “See?” she said. “No bead, no bone. The Gila has kept you safe from the witches.”
No bead, no bone. The sign of a Navajo witch, of the skinwalker, is supposed to be a bead made from bone, embedded just under the skin. The sand painters wanted to make sure they were clean. They’ve been coming here time and again, judging from the pollen, to check each other for a bead.
And now other images hit me like bolts out of the blue. The first time I saw the coyote it was gnawing on its own cheek. It tackled the woman in green and lashed out at her mouth, and then she spat at her boyfriend in the red shoes. I remember the blood, the way it hit his mouth too. Then, while I was looking at her, he disappeared. I try to picture what happened next, and I go blank. I panic and take some deep breaths. The sand painters are packing up, and I watch them go in a daze, the very last of the light showing them the path that they seem to know by heart. Their slow, methodical gait calms me.
I remember now. There was a fight. A fight between Red Shoes and another man over an embrace with the waitress. Perhaps a kiss? Then the skinwalker jumped again, to the waitress, who then ran around the corner, where I lost her.
The coyote, gnawing at its mouth. The woman in green, bitten at the lip. Red Shoes, who took a full gob of blood to the face himself. The waitress he then kissed. A bone bead transferred to each. The hallmark of the skinwalker. Its source of power.
I call for Chaco. I call again and again like an annoying neighbor ringing the doorbell fifteen times. Eventually I hear the pop and feel the pressure drop, and he floats out of the sky like a piece of darker night.
“Walker, you better have a damn good reason to call me like this. Grant is in the trenches at that damn high school, and he’s chosen right now to fall into puppy love. We got darkness closing in on all sides, man. I don’t have the time to—”
“It’s a bead, Chaco. A bead made from bone. That’s what we’re looking for. Everybody that became a skinwalker had it in their mouths. The five dead people that hit me one after the next, all soulless, they had it in their mouths, but it broke their minds. Maybe they carried it for too long, or maybe they fought against it. Either way they tried to take it away, lay down and die in a place where it might be forgotten, buried by the desert in the Chaco Canyon or Escaveda Wash or wherever. But this thing has forged a connection to the coyote, and the coyote found it every time.”
Chaco stills and half floats, half flops his way to the ground in front of me. “A bead. Another object of power.” He’s talking to himself more than to me, but I nod. “Of course,” he says. “Your object of power is the bell. You’re a Walker, this thing is a Walker. Why wouldn’t this thing have one too?”
“The coyote carries it in its mouth. We find the coyote, we rip it out like a bad tooth, we destroy it.”
Chaco flutters. “Then it’s all over.”
Chapter 18
Caroline Adams
Owen is actually making Grant open up his mouth. He’s got a penlight and everything, and he’s telling him to move his tongue around. I’m torn between laughing and crying. This is what it’s come to around here. The boat is getting weird.
“OK, no beads. You’re looking good. Now you check me,” he says. He holds the penlight out to Grant, but Grant just crosses his arms and shakes his head pityingly.
“You’re not a skinwalker, Owen. I don’t need to look in your mouth to know that,” he says.
Owen shrugs. “Fine. Caroline, you can check me.”
“How about we all just stop looking in each other’s mouths, OK? None of us is the coyote. I would know,” I say.
“Oh yeah, how?”
It’s best not to get into how I have a detailed skinwalker checklist for both of them, wherein I would determine that Owen doing this type of fretting is actually normal for him. And Grant looking bored out of his mind is normal for him too. Instead I say, “I’d see it in your smoke.”
“You don’t know that. You’ve never seen it.”
“I’d know.” Although he’s right, I haven’t seen it. Still, I think there’d be some indication from the smoke that a body is possessed, being molded, being shifted by this thing into a vessel it can ride until it dies. Owen just got finished telling us his uplifting theory that the coyote needs a kid. A young person, at least. The bodies he saw were trending younger, and Owen thinks it’s because it’s harder for the coyote to take control of an old person, with set routines and embedded prejudices and experiences. Young people are malleable. Easier to warp because there’s less to change.
“The point is that we all need to see that we’re who we say we are, right now, right here, before we go to the Arroyo. It’s a baseline panel. Do you know what a baseline panel is, Grant?”
