The Coyote Way, page 15
part #3 of Vanished Series
“Look, man. The kid is fourteen. I’m sure he wasn’t exactly being a good friend to you, either. His brain just got soaked in puberty. He’ll even out eventually.”
Chaco titters on my shoulder, which is his way of laughing. Then he gets bigger. “You’d think I’d know that after a couple thousand years. But I forget every time. Every Keeper is new for me, and I…”
“You care,” I say. “It’s a good thing. But if you’re right about the dances, then we gotta bust our asses. They start in like twelve hours.”
“Can we make a move on this Hosteen kid? If he’s really a skinwalker, could the Circle jump him right now and take the bead?”
I shake my head. “The coyote is too tricky for that. If we make a move and it senses us coming, it could jump from Hosteen, maybe change up its plan totally, and then we’ve got what cops call an unknown. Unknowns are dangerous. Especially with this thing.”
We walk down Canyon Road toward St. Francis Cathedral, which is this big church made out of stone that takes on a copper color at night. The cathedral marks the west boundary of Santa Fe Plaza, which is normally a big open square where people hang out and eat or drink around the obelisk statue at the center. A circle stage has been constructed around the center statue. It’s where the dances will be performed. Beyond the viewing area, the entire square is crosshatched with rows of booths like mini city blocks on a grid. The booths spill out into adjacent streets in every direction. I see twenty or thirty people still setting up. The real procrastinators.
Then again, you could say the same about me right now. I should be hunting down artifacts of my own, I should be running around like a chicken with its head cut off, but instead I have this strange calm. Like I used to get in the car with Ninepoint when we’d quickly sketch out our approach to bringing in whomever we were after. I got some ideas that I want to run by Chaco first. I want to sketch out my approach like I used to.
“Man oh man,” Chaco says, surveying the scene. “This is gonna be a beehive.”
“The booths seem to go on forever this year. There’s a great park at the edge of all this mess. You got a second to check it out?”
Chaco nods, and we set out, walking through the honeycombed streets without turning a single head.
The walk from the plaza to Marcy Park is a pleasant one. I take the uphill approach, through the old neighborhoods, every one of them the same type of covenant-controlled adobe and wood pillared construction. You get the sense that you’ve walked back in time, especially when you come across the houses that were built well before the covenant came around. The original adobe, patched and repatched, and still strong.
“I’ve been thinking about this bone bead,” I say. “I don’t think we’re gonna be able to beat the coyote unless we destroy it. It moves too fast. It jumps from person to person. It’s made of chaos, so there’s no way we can reason with it. And if we do manage to trap it, it’s gonna be mad as hell.”
Chaco cocks his head. “I think you’re right. But we gotta tread carefully. No doubt this bone bead is a super powerful object. Think of it as a chaos bell.”
“Then you’re saying we shouldn’t destroy it?”
Chaco does this tiktiktik thing with his throat that I’ve learned is the same as when humans say, “Well, hold on just a second, now…”
“From what you said you saw in that cavern with the black pearl, I got a hunch that the pearl uses chaos souls to form the bead. The coyote has a place at the center of that pearl, and at the center of the coyote is the bead. So if I’m right, and we can fix all this by destroying the bead, the souls will just go back to making another bead for the coyote, only the coyote will be back where it’s supposed to be. No harm, no foul.”
“And if you’re wrong?”
“Hellfire and brimstone. Take your biggest pile of shit and throw it right at the biggest fan you’ve got. Then throw in a bunch of crow feathers for giggles.”
“I’m serious, bird.”
“So am I. But it’s no worse than what will happen if the coyote roams free. Either way, the river is out of whack, man. For all I know, beyond the veil is already a huge cluster. This bastard has been on a joyride from hell, not doing his job for five years.”
Chaco hates when people don’t do their jobs. That’s what happens when you diligently do yours for a couple millennia.
We crest the hill and come up on Marcy Park from on high. It looks like a concert is being set up here. Tents and merchandise booths flank a big stage at the far end of a wide grass field. A handful of technicians are turtling around, checking stage equipment and lighting.
The two of us are quiet for a moment, taking in that strange stillness that can fall over a place in the twilight hours before it gets jammed with people.
“What happens when the bead is destroyed?” I ask quietly. “I mean, I imagine that it’s more than just a little crack of breaking bone.”
“I’d imagine so, yeah.”
“You don’t know, do you?”
“I’m in new territory here, brother. Right along with you. I do know that no anchor object like that has ever been broken in living memory.”
I suspect Chaco knows more than he’s telling me. I can sense it in the way he’s looking away from me, focusing on the park below. But that’s OK, because I have some thoughts of my own about what happens when one of these things breaks, and I want to keep them to myself for a bit too.
“We’re still a ways away from breaking the thing, Walker,” Chaco says evenly. “We need to catch it first. We’ve got two of the coyote’s artifacts. We’re four short.”
“Three,” I say.
Chaco looks at me, his bird brow raised.
“We’re three short. I think I know where one of them is. The broken pot. But it’s not in any place any of the five of us can reach it.”
“So what do we do?”
“I got an idea. The four of you keep at it. It’s about time I visited my old buddy Joey.”
Chapter 21
Caroline Adams
It’s just before dawn on Saturday, the kickoff for the market. We’ve got twelve hours before the dances begin. Usually my 3:00 a.m. insomnia centers on obsessing over what passes for my love life. This time I’ve been up all night thinking about a whisk broom.
I’m not going to lie to you, I had to look online even to see what a whisk broom is. Turns out it’s a little hand-held straw broom. Something old farm women dressed in babushkas would use to dust out their cook fires. I had an absurd urge just to buy one, right then. Enter my credit card information, pay for same-day shipping. Voilà. An individually packaged whisk broom, brought to my door. But I get the feeling that’s not what the sand painters meant when they said the object is about the journey. A journey from a warehouse in Albuquerque to an RV park mail room doesn’t have an ounce of spiritual weight to it, no matter how expedited.
None of us has slept. There’s no time for sleep anymore. Not right now. Grant is already at Crownrock High with the setup crew, packing up for their trip to Santa Fe on a school bus. He was as chipper as he usually is, which is to say not at all, but at least his eyes were open. I have that gritty feeling that I used to get doing night shift at ABQ General. The one where it feels like the sandman comes by to knock you into sweet oblivion, except you have to tell him that no, in fact, you won’t be sleeping tonight because you have to do rounds on a thirty-six-bed floor, but the sandman doesn’t take that too well—he’s the jealous type—so instead of sprinkling his dust on your forehead he chucks the whole bag right at your face. It fuzzes up your teeth and gets behind your eyes, and I know it won’t be going away any time soon, so I put a pot of coffee on our little stove and get down to more thinking.
I’m halfway through my second cup when it occurs to me that Owen and I haven’t had sex in a month. Don’t ask me why this hits me out of the blue. It certainly has nothing to do with whisk brooms, but just like that I’m very disappointed in myself. I look out of the back window of the boat, where Owen is standing and watching the sunrise. He’s been walking back and forth, checking odds and ends on the hitch and around the outside of the RV without actually doing anything. That’s how he thinks. I can see it on him: he’s completely invested in this, every ounce of his smoke is wrapped up in it, and I can’t believe I haven’t noticed the change in him before now.
In a way, he looks the same as he always did on the floor. He’s driven, totally focused on the problem at hand, and you’d think that would be a good thing, but I also know that when he was that way on the floor—blind to everything else but the patients he was tasked with getting healthy again—it was a willful blindness. He told me so. He told me that work was the only thing that could take his mind off me.
I search the smoke sifting off him in the early-morning light in slow, thick waves, and I can see it. I can see that longing, but it’s tamped down. Packed under. He’s doing it again. He’s swapped one distraction for another. He’s doing everything he can not to think about me, about us, about loving me the way that he does, and it’s working. But it’s also blocking him, plugging up his soul. The colors I see on him now aren’t the true colors I know. His blue isn’t as blue. Sure, there’s a lot of it—he’s throwing himself into this search with everything he’s got—but it isn’t as strong. And it makes me feel like garbage.
I set my coffee down and walk outside. He sees me coming and musters a heartbreaking smile. His hair, normally meticulously combed and evenly parted, is tufted here and there where it looks like he’s been running his hands through it again and again. He’s frustrated and stumped.
“I know I’m missing something with that damn broken cane.” He lets his hands drop to his sides. “It’s right there, on the tip of my brain, but I can’t…”
I don’t even say anything. I just take one hand and pull him gently toward the boat. He looks confused at first, then I see him understand, and a few things cross his smoke. At first he’s incredibly hungry for me, in every way. I don’t do this type of stuff. I’m not one of those girls that does this, grabs a guy by the hand and whispers something into his ear and takes him away to the bedroom on a whim. I’m a planner. Even when it comes to sex. I think of it in terms of time frames and schedules and recommended amounts. I know it’s not romantic in the movie-star sense, but then again, I find weird things romantic. Opposite things. Things like the fact that there’s no physical way Ben and I could ever be together, but sometimes I can still feel him reach for me. Things like I’m very probably ruined emotionally by what I’ve seen and done, but Owen still stays with me, by my side, and he loves me so fiercely he’s afraid to let it show because he thinks it’ll scare me. And it does. And I sort of like it.
The second thing I see in Owen’s smoke is hesitation, and he pulls back gently.
“Caroline,” he says, “I don’t want this. I can’t keep doing this.”
He’s not lying, not exactly, but his color tells me more of what he’s thinking than his brain can right now. He does want this, and he can keep doing this, but it’s taken him a long time to get right with living with half of my heart, and when we do things like this and I lose myself and he does too, there are a few seconds of eternity where I’m his completely. It’s a beautiful lie that our bodies speak to each other.
And it’s a lie we both need right now. I just need to let him know this without hurting more of him than I already do every day.
“I don’t know why I can’t move on from him, Owen. I’m split in half, and I don’t know how to fix it. I wish I could tell you how awful I feel. I wish you could see it on me like I see it on you. You’ve been walking around with half of a companion. Half of a friend too. And I have no right to ask you to see it my way, but if you could, just think about what it’s like to be half there. To live life with part of yourself missing. You help me. You shoulder some of that loss for me. Your heart is so huge, it makes up for what I’m missing. Not all of it, but enough to make it OK for a while. So I know it may not be right, or healthy, or whatever, but I’m just gonna say it: I need this. From you.”
It works. I can see it immediately. Owen likes to know he’s needed. Just like me. Just like everybody. He lets me take his hand again and follows me inside. We lock the little door and pull down the little blinds and clear off our little bed. We undress, and he hangs his shirt in the closet to keep it off the ground and lays his socks over his shoes, right to right, left to left. He folds his slacks at the crease and lays them over the pull-out dressing table. His little routine always makes me smile. I have one too: shorts folded under shirt, folded under bra, all set on my tiny nightstand, and panties off and in the hamper. No socks or shoes for me. I haven’t worn shoes since May. Just flip flops. We do this in comfortable silence, like we have ever since that first time years ago, when it was a hilariously awkward dance around this box of a bedroom— but one that I had planned down to the minute while Grant was off getting groceries. All went according to plan, of course. I think you could actually hear the bubble of sexual tension pop that time. It was long overdue.
Owen gets in bed and makes a place for me under his arm, and I get in bed and fit there, and that’s how it starts. We know each other now. I could sketch the dimple in his shoulder from the bullet he took for me, entry and exit. I know it by heart. I’ve felt it with my hand and with my arm and with my mouth. I also know he can fit the entire back of my head in the long palm of his hand. We know where we fit with each other, and that is exactly what we both need right now, when we don’t know where we fit with everything else. We forget all that. All the to-dos, the artifacts, the ticking time bomb at the market, it’s all blown from our minds for about twenty minutes on a scorching summer morning in the Navajo desert.
Afterward, Owen’s smoke sifts peacefully down and around him, pooling in that teacup spot at the base of his neck, and it matches the blue of his eyes again. He’s staring at the ceiling but seeing through it. It’s like he’s been abraded of something, scrubbed clean, which is why he says: “It’s not the cane.”
“What is it, then?”
“It’s the exercises. Lenah, the secretary at CHC, she gave me the PT sheet I gave her with the donated walker, years ago. She didn’t need the exercises anymore. Her pain was gone.”
I sit up on one elbow. Now I’m really confused.
“It’s been staring me in the face for days now. That was my journey, right there. That program was the first walk I took with the Navajo, with the CHC. The coyote tried to take it from me. I took it back.”
Owen gets up and goes over to his nightstand, opens it up, and starts pulling things out. He shakes his head, moves over to the built-in table, lifts a stack of wiring instructions for the trailer, then lifts my magazines and rifles through all the pages. He shakes his head again. I can see him thinking for a minute before he goes over to his little closet and flips through it to find the slacks he wore that day. He frisks his pockets. Nothing. He turns around with his hands on his naked hips.
“It’s in Chief Yokana’s car,” Owen says heavily. “I left it in his damn car.”
He picks up his watch and clicks it over his wrist. He checks the time and frowns. I know what he’s thinking. We’re in the final hours now. I slide out of bed, walk over to my little pile of clothes, and get dressed. He does the same, careful to put the correct socks on the correct feet. I smile again, even with the seconds on the clock hammering home.
“Let’s go find him, then,” I say. He looks up at me and nods, and I feel like something that was coming loose between us is tied tightly again. We reach underneath our pillows for our totem pouches, and as soon as I grab mine it’s like I’m stunned. It feels heavier, richer, like it’s made of velvet and it’s carrying thousands of diamonds instead of an ancient lump of turquoise fashioned into a crow. Owen has already pocketed his and is moving to the door, but he pauses when he sees me.
“Something wrong?”
I open up the pouch and pour it out on the bed, expecting something more than the crow, expecting that stream of diamonds to come pouring out, but it’s just my totem, tumbling onto the bed. Solid as ever. I see the irregular notches in its wings, the sharp point of its searching beak. Its head, slightly turned, mid-flight, as always. And I realize it isn’t the crow totem that shocked me this time. It’s the pouch I’m still holding in my hand.
“What’s up?” Owen asks, moving over to me now. He relaxes when he sees my totem, safe and whole.
I hold the pouch out to him. “Take it and tell me I’m not crazy. Touch it.”
He takes it, and his eyes widen. He pulls his own pouch out of his pocket and squints at both, weighing them up and down in his hand.
“Is this the same one I gave you?” he asks. “It definitely feels different from mine. It’s like it’s in high def or something.”
“It’s the same old pouch.”
“But I picked up both of them in that truck stop in Alamosa. They were a pair.” He tosses mine back over to me. I catch it, and I’m struck again by how soft and full it feels. Like it’s woven silk, when I know it’s just old leather. Then I get it. It’s not just old leather. It never was. It’s more.
“You gave it to me,” I say. “It’s because you gave it to me. Only I never realized it until now.”
“That I gave it to you?”
“No, what it meant. It’s about the journey, right? That’s what the sand painters said. When we got those crows and you said you wanted to come with me, it was because you wanted me then. Just me. But when you gave me the bag, and you got the same, it was because you wanted to do all of this with me. You weren’t just there for me, you were there alongside me. Both of us were born into this new life together.”
I see it dawn on him. “The birth bag,” he says.
I blow out a breath, and a little bit of the weight that is pressing on me is lifted. “Thank God. I thought that one was gonna be really gross.”
