The Coyote Way, page 18
part #3 of Vanished Series
I hear sound coming from the back of the house. It sounds more urgent, angrier than the rest of the party noise. I hear Chaco from somewhere outside, his voice faint. “It’s the Hos kid,” he says. “Grant, be carefu—”
And then he’s there in front of me, with his whole crew. And they’re dressed to kill. Literally. They’ve painted their faces like Navajo warriors. Black smeared around the eyes, and red down the face. Some have dots of white peppering the base colors. The loud room tapers to quiet. Kai is pushing back on Hos but getting nowhere. She whispers urgent Navajo at him that he doesn’t seem to hear, pointing down at a lumpy duffel bag, one of several that his crew is carrying.
He’s trying to head out the door. He’s not expecting to see me. This isn’t like one of those moments when the new kid confronts his bully and turns him around or makes him see the light. For that to happen Hos would actually have to care about me, have me on his radar, and he doesn’t. He never has. When he grabs my shirt in a bunch in his fist, he’s looking at me, but he’s not seeing Grant. He’s seeing a white kid at a Navajo party for a Navajo school in a part of the country that was once full of Indians and is now full of white people.
“What are you doing here?” he says simply. I turn to look to Mick for help, but Mick is slinking away again. It’s just me. “Your place is up at the market, walking booth to booth.”
“I ain’t got a place,” I say then wish I could bite back the ain’t. But it’s already out there. “I figured maybe this was everyone’s place right now.”
I’m not sure what I think that’s gonna do. Change his mind? He’s painted up for war and smells like whisky, and he’s carrying what I really hope isn’t a duffel bag full of guns. He jerks me right into his face. His eye is twitching, rapid fire.
“Wrong, bilagaana. It ain’t everybody’s place. It’s our place. We’re taking it back.”
He pushes me against the wall and watches me for another span of seconds. I realize that this is my moment. This is when I try to stop him. You think about this stuff sometimes, when you’re bored and staring out the window of the boat as the miles roll by. You think about all the crazy shooting and ultra-violence that happens everywhere you go, especially nowadays, when this stuff seems to happen more than usual, and you wonder if, say, you were there that night when some asshole decided to shoot up something or raise some hell somewhere, and he came at you first. Say he’s stalking the cubicles or walking the pews or something with destruction in his eyes, and everybody just wants to live, so they shove themselves deeper down into whatever foxhole they’ve dug, but you’ve got a chance. You could smash the guy in the face, or better yet call him out before he gets violent. At least ask him to open up the duffel bags and explain himself. Face what he’s doing before he gets crazy.
Sitting safe and sound on the boat, watching the miles roll by, you think, “Of course I’d call him out. No brainer.” But then it actually happens, and you know what I do?
Nothing. And neither does anybody else.
I watch as he shoulders his duffel and gives one last look my way. I can see he’s already forgotten me. His mind is on whatever lies ahead. Then he shuffles off. His crew follows him. There are five of them, all guys painted like him, all grim looking. And then they’re gone. Kai yells something in Navajo after him, stopping at the front door. It does no good. Kai watches after them for a second, and the room watches after Kai, and then the music comes back. Maybe it was always playing, but the ringing in my ears that started when Hos grabbed me cancelled it out until I got my brains together again. I can hear Chaco, faint but freaked out.
“You all right, my man? Hos and his gang are moving in the back alleys and neighborhoods toward the plaza. The dances are almost over, but he still has time to pull something.”
“It’s up to Owen and Caroline to pull him back now.” I’m a little numb at how much of a wuss I was. How much of a wuss I am. Mick is looking at me with this gleam in his eye, and it says to me, “Your only hope for the next four years is to stick with me,” and what gets me down most is that he’s probably right. He’s a bit of a goof and a little weird, but Hos didn’t grab him on his way out. Nobody told Mick to get back to shopping the booths where he belongs. It occurs to me that I’ve given Mick a bum rap. The guy is quiet and down low, but he keeps his head above water. Nobody messes with him, even though nobody really brings him in either, but maybe that’s the best I can hope for.
Kai turns around from the doorway with a strange gleam in her eye. I wouldn’t call it the Kai shine, not the one I saw in her when she sat next to me and told me to stop slapping and start sliding. This is twice as dangerous, and when she turns it on me, I go twice as numb.
“Well that’s that,” she says. “He never listened to me anyway. Never once.” She forces a smile, and I see that her eyes glisten with damp. She walks past me and grabs my hand again. I was facing the door all ready to go out, all ready to leave with Chaco, maybe call Sani Yokana or one of the officers for help, but then Kai spins me around and I’m back in the party. I’m following her past the living room, into the kitchen, where a bunch of kids are sitting around a table with full cups, and they’re spinning a bottle.
“People actually do this?” I ask Kai, and my voice seems distant. “I thought this was just something on TV or whatever.”
Kai says nothing, just plops me down in a seat and takes the one next to me. I recognize some of the kids from class. They’re all my age, and they’re laughing and smiling. I don’t think they saw Hos leave. They’ve been out back drinking the whole time. Mick finds his way to the table soon after and shoulders in as well. He looks pretty far gone now. Chaco is trying to say something to me about getting out of here. He says he has eyes on Hos and his crew, but he’ll lose them soon.
“What are we gonna do?” I ask out loud. I mean it for Chaco. And it’s not really a question. But Kai answers.
“You spin the bottle. If it lands on a guy, he’s gotta drink. If it lands on a girl…” Her smile is dangerous. Her words trail off. “Just a little kiss. You go first.”
I spin the empty rum bottle. It has smooth edges and seems to spin forever, around and around and around, until it lands on Mick. I’m sure I look disappointed, because Mick snuffs out a breath and says, “Sorry, friend.” But his eyes are narrow and angry. I think he’s gonna chug his drink, but all he does is take one dainty sip. Then he says, “My turn,” and spins. The bottle turns and turns, and Mick stares at it without blinking until it lands on Kai. He says nothing, but I get the weirdest feeling he was expecting this.
Kai’s a good sport. Either that or she wants it over with. Either way she pops up, goes over to him, and leans down for a peck, but he grabs her and kisses her deeply. At first she tries to pull back, but then she leans in to him, almost falling on top of him, until she climbs off and away and stares at him for a second. I think maybe she’s gonna slap him. The circle is hooting, and some of the girls are calling Mick an asshole, but Kai doesn’t do anything to him. She walks quietly back to my side of the table with this strange grin on her face.
“My turn,” she whispers. She’s standing behind me, but she reaches over me, pressing her chest to my back, and spins the bottle right in front of me. I look at Mick, and he seems lost. He’s staring at his hands, at the table, at the spinning bottle. He looks at the circle of people as if seeing them for the first time. Then he looks at me.
“Grant?” he says, as if surprised to see me sitting across the table from him. “My head…” He sags in his chair and presses his palms to his forehead. His gaze runs a thousand yards.
Chaco slams against the back window. The whole party jumps in fright, and Chaco slams again. The glass splinters, and kids scream and run from the kitchen, everyone but Mick and me and Kai. The bell starts to push at me, to push me away from here, from this place, but it seems to realize things at the same time I do. Which is too late.
The bottle stops dead to rights on me. Kai grabs my head and wrenches it around and pries my mouth open with her tongue. Her lips seal against mine.
Everything hits me. A million flashes of a million jagged edges of a million shattered memories where everything is falling apart. People, things, emotions, all of it splintered and scattered at random. The bell is burning like a white coal pressed to my chest. My heart feels stuck in an endless loop of the terrible space between beats, flopping out of rhythm inside of me like it’s lost and will never get right again, and still I’m hammered with these memories that aren’t mine, over and over and over and ov—
Chapter 26
Caroline Adams
The line of hogans is mostly falling apart, and their cracked mud tops go: bleached white, bleached white, bleached white, then black as night. We take a well-worn path that snakes down and around the bumps and rolls of the desert, and as we approach I see that the black we mistook for the roof of the last one is actually about a hundred silent crows. A hundred black beaks pointing, and two hundred black eyes following our movements. When they shuffle a bit to keep us in view, it makes a sound like flipping through a huge phone book. It gives me goose bumps.
“Here for the show, huh?” Owen asks them, stopping before the low entrance. No answer. Just blinking. As creepy as they are, I’m not entirely against them being here. We’ve been in more than a few scrapes where a curtain of black crows has come in handy. Although if it comes to that, somebody is usually dead or dying, so I hope they stay right where they are in the peanut gallery.
Inside, the sand painters are waiting. They sit together in one corner, shirtless, their scrawny brown chests hairless. They wear leather breeches and sit cross-legged on a bed of pinion leaves. They watch us in silence until we both eventually sit too. We have no Chaco/Grant combo to translate this time, and no smoker to be our voice. I expected the smoker, but when we walked through the Arroyo to get here, it was quiet and closed, like a town battened down for an incoming storm. We didn’t see anybody, and nobody approached us.
One of the brothers—I don’t know if it’s Tsosi or Tsasa now that they’re out of their recliners—points at the fire pit in the center, where berries, wood, leaves, and pine needles are clumped in two neat piles, one large and one small. He takes a pack of wooden matches from a pouch at his waist and tosses them to Owen, who bobbles the catch but snatches them up from the ground.
“Me?”
The sand painter nods.
“Small,” he says, pointing at the little pile. Owen crawls over on his hands and knees and strikes a few matches until he gets the needles to burn. The rest takes care of itself. The pile is already burning fast and putting out a great deal of smoke. The brothers watch the smoke waft until it envelops all four corners of the hogan, then they close their eyes and breathe deeply. Owen and I do the same and immediately start coughing. The smell isn’t bad, necessarily, it’s just strong. Like a gin martini. But as the fire fades, the smoke eases. We sit still until the hogan is almost completely clear again. I get the feeling that was a prep round, maybe a burst of purification to ready the place for the big pile.
“Broken pot,” says the other brother. Owen and I look at each other. That was Joey’s task, and Joey isn’t here.
“Looks like we didn’t get very far,” Owen whispers to me, his face grave.
I rub my smoke-irritated eyes and think about how I’m gonna explain that it looks like we’re missing step one in this business, when I hear the telltale whoosh, pop of a Circle member arriving. When I blink my eyes I see a shadow outside of the entrance. A leather vest falls to the desert floor outside, followed by a shower of pollen, and then in comes Joey. His eyes are wide as he looks at Owen and me, but it’s really the sand painters that he seeks. When he finds them he bows his head, as if awaiting sentencing from them.
The two men watch him coldly for a moment, and in the silence Joey chances a sad little glance at them. When he does, they can’t hold their scowls any longer and both burst out laughing, their smiles genuine. Joey looks up again and after a moment starts to grin. The brothers gesture him over to them, and they scooch apart then slap the space between them with their hands. Joey sidles in between and smiles at us sheepishly, which is something I’ve never seen him do before. It gives me a quick glance at the type of guy he might have been when he was young and it was just him and Ben here, running around the Arroyo like it was their personal playground.
Joey Flatwood has been welcomed home.
“Broken pot,” the sand painter says again, and this time Joey reaches in his own pouch and pulls from it a small box that looks like it’s been carved from bone and hardened with glaze. I recognize it immediately from the night I said good-bye to Ben’s grandmother. It was on the ground next to her. It’s cracked at the back, where its two leather hinges have been snapped, and Joey takes the top entirely off.
The sand painters nod. Crisis one is averted. I think about confessing that we don’t have the broom, but it looks like things are on a roll here, and basically I don’t want to have to see the looks on everyone’s faces when I tell them our recipe is missing something and our cake isn’t gonna rise. So I don’t. Besides, the guy sitting right next to me once told me to hold on if you can, because you never know what one more second might bring.
“Burned stick,” says one brother. Owen reaches in his satchel and pulls out the first artifact we found, given to us, actually, by the sand painters themselves. One brother mimics putting things in the bone box. Joey holds it out to us, and Owen drops the stick in. The burned part juts out over the side.
“Broken stirring stick,” says the other brother, struggling with the words. Owen places the second stick in the box, and the brother readjusts it so that they cross each other and stick out evenly.
“Old cane” is next. Owen plucks the tattered page from his bag and looks at it for a moment, smiling. The brothers mime sliding it under the sticks in the box, and he does.
“Birth bag.” I pull out my totem pouch and frown. And here I pause. I know it’s crazy, but I don’t want to part from the old thing. I know it’s to save the rez, and maybe the world, but it still sort of sucks. This thing has been under my pillow for years. It’s rubbed silky smooth on one side where it sits against my skin when I wear it. I look over at Owen, and I’m surprised to realize that I have tears in my eyes again, and not from the smoke.
Owen gives me a soft smile and leans over to me. “I’ll find you a new pouch.”
“You too. We do this together. Same pouches.”
“Same pouches.”
I sniff and nod. Then I open it and let my crow totem tumble to the floor of the hogan. The brothers pass me a strip of cloth, and I wrap my crow then tuck it in my pocket. I place the pouch on top of the sticks in the box.
I know what’s coming next.
“Whisk broom.”
And here we’ve hit our wall. I take a deep breath, look the brothers in the eye, and shake my head. They don’t frown or tsk tsk. They don’t do anything, really. Their faces are impassive as they speak to Joey between them. After a minute Joey gets up and lights the big pile, and I think we may have dodged a bullet. Maybe the artifacts were more like guidelines after all.
“Are we good?” I ask. But Joey shakes his head.
“We wait,” he says.
“For what?” Owen asks.
“For the whisk broom.”
What’s that supposed to mean? Wait for the whisk broom? What’s it gonna do—come waltzing into the hogan like one of those talking candy bars in the movie theater ads?
“What’s the fire for, then?” Owen asks. I can tell he’s as disappointed as I am. In the fact that we can’t move forward without the broom, but mostly in himself. We’ve let everybody down.
“That’s how much time we have to wait,” Joey says. “When the fire dies, the window closes.”
Owen looks like he wants to say more, but suddenly he twitches and paws at his own totem pouch. I feel it too, at the same time. The crows are deadly cold. So cold that I can feel it through the cloth wrapping of mine. We pull them out of our pockets at the same time and set them down on the dirt. The cloth around mine is already frosting, despite the heat.
“Something is wrong,” Joey says. I look up to find him holding his bead-wrapped crow before he, too, sets it down, working the chill from his fingers. “The bell is calling for help.”
The three of us—Joey, Owen, and I—stare mutely at each other until the sand painters break the silence.
“They say I am needed here, and Caroline is needed here,” Joey says. He looks at Owen and shrugs. “I don’t know why, Owen. But that leaves you to go to the bell.”
Owen looks down, nodding to himself. Grant is foremost in his mind. He’s more than willing, but his smoke still takes a hit at the fact that he’s not “needed.” When I touch the small of his back, he perks up a little. Not much, but a little.
“All right,” he says. “I’ll go.”
“The market,” Joey says as Owen flutters his fingers over his crow on the dirt floor.
“Be careful,” I say.
He turns to me. Kisses me on the forehead. “You too,” he says. Then he grabs his totem and pops out of sight.
The sand painters take all this in as evenly as if they were watching the sun setting behind their camper. Joey takes a deep breath of smoke from the new fire, and I watch as it streams out of the top of the hogan. The pile is bigger, but it’s burning fast.
We wait.
Chapter 27
Owen Bennet
I step from the tense quiet of the hogan into a madhouse of people at the Santa Fe Plaza. I hold my phase for now, reasoning that it’ll be easier to spot the bell in the crush of people if I’m in the thin place. And it truly is a crush. The blurred effect of the thin place seems to double the mayhem. All around me people are shoving and yelling. Walking over each other to get away from the main stage for some reason. There, someone holds the microphone. A young man with a painted face. A security guard appears to be unconscious on the ground next to him, and two others are being held back by a group of other young men painted similarly. So this is Hos. This is our coyote. I’m not sure what he’s saying—sounds are muted by the whipping wind of the thin place—but judging by how badly everyone wants to get away from him, I know it’s not good.
