The Coyote Way, page 13
part #3 of Vanished Series
Everyone waits. I wait too, until I realize everyone is waiting for me. They want me to say something, to kick all this off, but to be honest with you I never really thought we’d get much past the turnoff. Also, I’m not sure what these people can understand, or what they can tell me, in English. So I’m sort of in a bit of a pickle, here. With no better ideas jumping to mind, I start by taking out the black book. As soon as they see it, the brothers frown, and Tsosi makes a sucking sound with his teeth that reminds me so much of Ben’s grandmother that I have to take a breath to steady my head.
“Do you know what this is?” I ask. The brothers still frown. Maya looks back and forth between us and then shrugs, but I think it’s because she can’t understand what I’m asking. I look at Chaco, who squawks, and for one insane moment I think maybe they can understand bird squawk. I let it hang in the air for a second, but it does us no good. The sand painters don’t understand bird—nobody does but Grant and Ben. I take a deep breath and rub at my face. This is going to be harder than I thought. Then the smoker chimes in from the dark. In Navajo. The brothers respond, and he interprets for us.
“They don’t. Not exactly. But they don’t like it,” he says.
I glance at Chaco, who nods. We’re all on the straight here.
“Neither do I. Not exactly,” I say. “But it’s important, because I think it can help us catch the skinwalker.”
The word slips out before I can stop it, and it has an immediate effect. The smoke of both men, heavy and still and a rich chestnut in color, freezes. Maya’s face is drawn, and the smoker hisses at us, then spits. “We don’t talk witchcraft here. Not with the old generation. And definitely not now.” The smoker looks carefully behind him at the trash pit, where the crows sleep again. He shivers, like we just sneezed in the cave of a sleeping bear and everyone’s waiting to see if it’ll wake up.
“But how will we ask them anything? It’s what we came here for,” Grant says.
“You talk about the crows. They’ll get your meaning.”
“But the crows aren’t the problem. They’re just here because they go where things are out of balance,” Owen says, before the smoker cuts him off.
“Listen, Dr. O,” he says, making it clear he doesn’t have quite the shine for Owen’s position that Maya does. “You and your friends gotta learn how to talk around what you mean, or you’ll never get anywhere with the old-timers. It’s not their way to be direct.”
Owen sits back a little, and I can tell he’s stung. That’s something he should have known. Something I should have remembered too. But we’ve been gone too long. I hold up my hands in apology.
The brothers’ smoke stirs again, tentatively.
“There’s a list of things in this book that I was hoping you two could explain to us. Tell us what they mean. Tell us what to do.”
That came off as desperate, all right. Which was my initial plan. But now that I realize how desperate it sounds I’m wondering if I should rethink my approach. The brothers’ smoke is stilling again. Maya looks awkwardly at us from out of the corner of her eye. I can hear the smoker shaking his head, spitting again. I was too direct. That’s not the way. But what is the way? I’m starting to panic. I scratch at my neck, and I can feel it puff up with irritation. Suddenly I’m thinking about my puffy scratches and not about the book or what’s inside of it, and now my train of thought is totally derailed and I’m thinking again about that stupid chai tea latte, which is so irresponsible at a time like this—downright rude—but I have nothing else to say. I feel like I’m breathing way too fast.
“Tell us about the Coyote Way,” Grant says quietly. The tension snaps. The brothers seem to understand him, or at least those few words. Their smoke stirs then breaks and starts to flow over them again. They start talking to one another, nodding, not speaking to us, but letting us in on the conversation. The smoker interprets.
“The Coyoteway is a Way Chant. A healing ceremony. With a Singer and all that. Tsosi is saying how he went to one as a child, by Shiprock. His dad was the Singer. Tsasa was off chasing some girl, and he missed it. Their dad was pissed. They’re laughing about it, because the Coyoteway is a super-long chant. Nine days long, if it’s done right. That’s a long time to chase after tail.”
A healing ceremony doesn’t sound like what we need. What we need is a plan to catch a coyote, not heal it. I don’t think it can be healed. What it is, what it’s made of, isn’t something that can be cured. But even if a Coyoteway is the key, nine days is way too long. We have two until the market. The way Owen looks at me, I know he’s thinking the same thing. If we started right now, we’d still be too late. It’s a dead end.
I look at the book, and I’m feeling numb. The brothers’ words wash over me, talking about their own stories, talking circles around our problem, and I stop paying attention. I see the strange objects written down in the book, glittering in ink that’s impossibly black. I want to spit them all out at the feet of the brothers and see what sticks, but I know that would do us no good and only serve to still their smoke again. What would Ben do? I look desperately at Chaco, who titters at me, low and sad.
“Just talk,” Ben would say. I can almost hear him say it too, and I wonder if he’s here right now. I bet he is. He wouldn’t miss this. I try to feel his presence, walking around us. I reach out desperately in my mind for the rich earthen red of his smoke. I knew it, once. I think of one of the first times I saw it, when I was in his house and he was strapped to the chemo, and I asked him what he wanted to do, to take his mind off the poison that was coursing through him.
“Just talk,” he said. When I asked him what he wanted to talk about, he said, “Anything. You first.”
We need to take another step back, here. What if we’re not talking about a specific chant, but something bigger? Something like the way of the coyote?
“Tell us about the coyote,” I say, interrupting, then cover my mouth. “Sorry, I uh. Was that too direct?”
The smoker actually smiles. “Sometimes the only way to get these two to shut up is to interrupt them. Otherwise you’ll be here ’til you’re as old as them.”
He poses my question. The brothers take it in stride. Their conversation never misses a beat. In fact, they seem more animated, and Maya is even smiling now. I catch Owen’s eye, and he grins at me. Grant seems transfixed by the old men and the loping sound of their voices. The smoker interprets.
“Coyote is a lot of things. A shifter. A trickster. He’s good and bad. He can even be a god.”
“How do you catch Coyote?” Owen asks. “If he’s a trickster and a shifter and a god?”
The smoker speaks and then listens with us, his cigarette forgotten.
“Coyote may be a shifter and a god, but he’s also a gambler, and sometimes a fool. He falls for tricks as often as he dishes them out, and he’ll put it all on the line to get his prize.”
Tsosi points to the sky as he speaks, and all of us follow his voice as it lifts up into the night above us.
“Coyote did that,” the smoker says. “The Milky Way. Black God was putting the stars into the sky real careful like, one at a time, in all the right shapes, but Coyote was bored, impatient, so he threw the rest up to make the Milky Way. He’s powerful, but reckless. To catch Coyote you just need to take away his warning signs. Without them he will run headlong into your trap.”
“Warning signs?” I ask. I feel like we’re getting closer, still circling around what we need to know, but the circles are tightening. The wood in the pit collapses to red ash, and Maya puts another log on. A desert wind kicks up, and it scatters tiny embers into the sky, where they glow for a heartbeat before they snuff out. Tsosi confers with Tsasa then clears his throat and begins to speak, and the smoker follows a few moments later.
“One day Coyote woke up at camp and decided to walk. He set out toward the east but started growling, you know? Like how dogs growl for no reason. So he turned back. Then he started south, but his nose began to twitch, like he smelled something bad, so he turned back again. He’s wondering what all this means, right?”
The smoker’s cigarette dangles in his mouth as he talks.
“He sets off west this time, but his ears start ringing, so he turns around again. All that’s left is north, but as he starts off that way he gets all itchy. His skin twitches, and he can’t take it, so he turns around again and goes back to camp.”
The smoker pauses and lets the brothers roll on for a bit. Then he starts in, talking low so they’ll keep going.
“So Coyote does this four times, right? And the whole time he’s freaking out about all these weird feelings he’s getting. He’s trying to figure it all out when this guy emerges, right from the desert.” The smoker cocks his head and listens then reassesses. “Well, not just a guy, but a thing too. Sort of both. And he says, ‘I’m your birth bag, Coyote. I’m what you came from. And I say your home is that way.’”
Thankfully, its dark enough and Maya and the smoker are so wrapped up in the story that the fact that the three of us are suddenly sitting like we’ve got steel rods for spines goes unnoticed. This is what we’re looking for. I doubt there are a ton of stories about birth bags and coyotes in Navajo lore, and this night feels like it doesn’t have any room for coincidences.
“So Coyote walks the way he was told, until he makes camp again. In the morning he sets out, runs into the same problems. The buzzing, the growling, the itching, the smells. He’s stuck, until another thing comes up from the desert. This time it’s a burned stick, but not a burned stick, you know? Something more, to Coyote. And the burned stick tells him where to go from there.”
I imagine even Ben is still, now. If he ever was pacing around the fire, I bet he’s not anymore. The smoker seems to struggle with his translation when he gets to the birth bag that isn’t quite a birth bag, and the burned stick that isn’t quite a burned stick, but I get it. I know all about things that aren’t what they seem. All three of us carry objects that are more than they appear.
“Coyote does this four more times. Each morning he wakes up, he’s lost again. He can’t figure out what to do, where to go, but each morning he gets help from these things. On the third day it’s a broken pot. On the fourth day it’s a ratty old cane. On the fifth it’s a little broom. The sixth day it’s a broken stirring stick, like for a cook pot. They tell him where to go, and he eventually finds himself at his home, where he sacrifices again and again and again until he becomes a god himself.”
Sacrifices again, and again, and again. I think of Owen telling me about the bodies pulled from the lockers one at a time so he could examine each. Of the way the mortician twitched. Bit at his own tongue. Could that really have been something like the Navajo Coyote, showing himself for a brief time? Gambling by laying out his cards face up on the table, showing us that his hand is almost full? The brothers suddenly laugh to each other, nodding in agreement. It’s a warm kyuk kyuk kyuk that both men share. I look over at the smoker expectantly.
“They think it’s funny that Coyote was warned again and again not to go the wrong way, but he didn’t recognize it. Like most men. Without direction, we would be lost. Coyote came to see that the things he was feeling, the itching and the growling and all that, those were his warning signs. The things from the desert showed him that. Without those things, he’d be doomed.”
“These things that warn Coyote,” Owen begins then stops, obviously choosing his words carefully. I can tell this part frustrates him the most. His entire life, until he met me, he lived in a world where things were exactly what they looked like. Things worked exactly as they were supposed to. Treatments had outcomes. Things were documented, ordered, peer-reviewed. But not anymore. “Can we find these things here? Now? They seem so simple.”
The smoker speaks with the brothers for a moment. They lob these beautiful words back and forth like a slow tennis match, where everyone playing doesn’t have to move much because nobody cares too much about winning. Then he turns to us.
“They’re simple, but they’re not,” he says. “They’re things that Coyote took and made his own.”
Tsasa leans forward and with his bare hands plucks a small strip of half-burned wood from the fire pit in front of us. The brothers watch it for a moment as it fades from angry red to dull then puffs a wisp of smoke into the air, the fire gone out. Tsasa starts speaking again, and the smoker interprets.
“Yesterday this would have been just a burned stick, right? Nothing more, nothing less. Eventually it would turn to ash and be forgotten. It’s Coyote’s stick just like every stick could be Coyote’s.”
Tsasa passes it to Maya then indicates for her to give it to us. It goes around the circle until Grant hands it to me.
“But today it’s much more. Now it takes on your journey. Your strength in coming here. It has the Arroyo in it. It has all of us, this night, this sky where these stars look just like they do. Now it’s much more. Now it’s powerful. Now you have taken it back from Coyote.”
Maybe it’s just the night, or the fire, or the fact that I’ve got two ancient Navajo guys telling me an ancient story under the stars when half an hour ago I thought I was gonna lose my purse and maybe have my Chuck Taylors tossed over whatever passes for the equivalent of a telephone wire here at the Arroyo, but I feel it. The burned stick is heavier than it has any right to be. Its colors are richer. Its wood-smoke smell is stronger.
“Keep it,” the smoker says. “They think you’re gonna need it.”
Both brothers watch us carefully now, their eyes reflective pools in the firelight. It occurs to me that when we asked how to catch a coyote, they immediately started in on the Navajo figure. They didn’t go into, oh, say, how to hunt and kill an actual coyote, which might be the sane thing to discuss. Tsosi says something quietly, and the smoker speaks.
“If you find the rest of Coyote’s warning signs, they invite you to the hogan over the hill. They say it’s as good a place as any to set a trap.”
The brothers seem half asleep when we say our good-byes, but they pat our hands and nod farewell. Maya clasps Owen’s hands once more and says good-bye in a way that sounds more like good luck. On the walk back around the crescent, the Arroyo is much quieter, the lanterns fewer and farther between. There are no more laughing men or playing children. I get the sense that things should be different, maybe even had been different as recently as a few months ago, but people are circling the wagons even at the Arroyo. Afraid of what is happening outside.
“You gonna catch a coyote and get rid of my crows?” the smoker asks at the gate.
“We’ll do what we can,” I say.
He nods. “That one and his friends can stay, though,” he says, pointing at Chaco. “I like that one.” He takes a drag. “Old-timers talk in circles, but now that they’re back there and we’re up here, I’ll go ahead and say it. Coyote may be a god—sometimes he is, sometimes he ain’t. But for my money, he’s definitely a witch. And a mean one at that.”
Before any of us can answer, the smoker nods again, then he simply turns around and walks away.
Chapter 19
Grant Romer
I’m walking to school with Mick. For the past couple of days he’s been waiting for me at the edge of the Crownrock RV Park in the morning. He doesn’t say much, just leans against the rusted park sign with his hands in the baggy pockets of his shorts then walks with me when I come down the path. I’m not sure how I feel about it, since the only reason he’s doing it is ’cause I’m white. I mean, he can’t know me yet as a person. I’ve been at Crownrock High for a week. But I suppose it’s better than walking alone.
I know my mind should be on broken pots and stirring sticks and birth bags and all that crap, but instead it keeps coming back to the market and the Crownrock booth there that I gotta take apart and reattach after the dumbass morning crew drilled an unpainted crossbeam right through the middle of it on accident. And then there’s Kai. And Hosteen, her brother, who now comes to every prep session I’m at and manages to get into an argument every time with Kai over something I still can’t quite figure. Chaco thinks I’m nuts. He’s flying high above us now, making a point not to talk to me, which is fine by me because I know what he’d say: “You’re screwing around in this high-school-drama crap when the devil is at the gates.” And I’d say what I’ve been saying: If Crownrock High is good enough for the coyote to case—and it definitely is, its tracks are everywhere, worse by the day—then it’s good enough for me.
Mick isn’t happy that I stuck with market prep. He doesn’t understand why I’d want to do something for the Navajo, who never did a damn thing for him or his family and he thinks won’t do a damn thing for me. Mick’s family works in construction and got some contract on the rez that he says the Navajo are constantly messing with and rewriting and “dragging ass on.”
“You sure you don’t want to chill with me after school?” he asks. “I got some cool places to show you around here. Some cool shit.” Mick hitches up his shorts and walks with a bit of a fake limp.
“Market’s in two days, Mick. I wanna finish this thing, then you can show me whatever you want.”
“You know Hos is gonna kick your ass if you make a move on Kai. You know that, right? He’s been walking around for weeks now just looking for someone’s ass to kick.”
Of all the people in school, Hosteen is probably the one I should be trying to avoid. I’ve heard people talking at lunch about how he and his family go way back at the Arroyo and rumors of some bootlegging gambit his family runs. But of all the people in school, he’s the one that shows the most signs of being wrapped up in whatever our coyote has planned.
“I dunno, man. I don’t think it’s me he’s pissed at. It’s something else. Like you said, he’s been thugged up for weeks now. He’s got something else in mind.”
