The Coyote Way, page 19
part #3 of Vanished Series
He lifts up a duffel bag and drops the mic. A sea of panicked people passes right through me, but none of them is Grant. I chance a quick scan of the plaza, looking for the glow of the bell, but I don’t see it anywhere. Back on stage, the coyote and his pack are fishing through the duffel and each pulling out what look like duct-taped aerosol cans. They fan out around the stage. Policemen on the perimeter are struggling to get to them, but they look like fish fighting a waterfall. Every step forward is two steps back.
Hos holds up his bomb and screams, “My people are not entertainment!” so loudly that even I can hear it. Then he chucks his bomb at the obelisk statue in the center of the stage. His gang follows his lead. There’s a split second when I see six floating packages sailing toward the center, and I realize we blew it. We missed our chance. We couldn’t bait the trap in time. I wonder what fire feels like in the thin place. Will I live through this? Does it matter?
I can’t hear the bombs explode, but I can see them. They send out great gouts of color, all of it tinged a glittering black to my eyes. Then I tense for the blast, but it never comes. The crowd has pushed their way through me, and my way is clear now, save a few people injured in the stampede. I blink into reality.
“This symbolizes the blood of our people, shed for the benefit of yours, year after year after year!” yells Hos, just before he’s tackled by police along with the rest of his gang. Behind him, the plaza statue is glistening, absolutely soaked in red paint.
Paint? That’s it? That’s what the coyote had planned? It almost makes me want to laugh. They’ve got Hos rolled over, they’re cuffing him, and all the while he’s still screaming about Native American rights. I let out a deep breath. Maybe we misjudged this whole affair after all. Then a piercing scream rings through the crowd. Everyone hears it, even the cops. Even Hos stops his tirade. All of us look west. There, high in the sky, I see Chaco. Immediately I know something isn’t right. He’s diving down fifty or so feet then pulling up. Diving down again then pulling up. He looks harried, like when a bunch of smaller birds chase away one large bird, but this is worse. Panicked. He calls again, and it sounds like he’s in pain.
I look at the square. Hos is back to his tirade. The crowd is calming down at the edges. This isn’t the right place. The coyote tricked us.
I position Chaco in my mind, do some quick thin-place calculations, then snatch my totem and blink out.
Chapter 28
The Walker
I sit at Caroline’s side, and both of us watch as the fire burns down. I want to hold her, reassure her that everything will be all right, but the fact is, I don’t think it will. The simple cloth that covers her totem is frosted completely over. Soon the fire will be down to embers. But neither of us needs those things to know how south all this has gone. She can feel it as well as I can. Grant is in serious trouble, and now Owen is too.
One brother says, “Sweep,” but Caroline shakes her head. “Sweep,” he says again, pointing to the little ash pile from the first fire and then to the box. He wants the whisk broom to sweep the ash into the box, but Caroline can’t, and she starts to cry.
“We don’t have the broom, old man!” I yell, and maybe I see a flicker from Joey’s eyes, but otherwise it falls on deaf ears, as always.
“Sweep,” the brother says again, gently this time. Caroline reaches for the ash with her hands, but the second brother is up on his knees quickly and stills her arm. He’s firm but not unkind. He has sad eyes. His grip tells us that each artifact is integral.
“Please,” he says, his voice breaking. “Sweep.”
That’s when Caroline gets it. But it doesn’t lift her spirits any.
She takes the black book from her breast pocket and looks at it. She bends it this way and that, fluttering the pages. They flop heavily. For Caroline the book was always weighty. To her, it represents a link. A chance. A possibility to reach me. Her heart is tangled up with memories of me in the blank pages of that thing.
She holds it by the spine and carefully sweeps the small pile of ashes into the box that Joey still holds. Then Joey caps it. The brothers mime that the book goes on top, to hold the box top in place and press down on the package. And then the whole thing goes into the fire.
Joey holds out the box, but Caroline still holds the book.
“I’m sorry, Ben,” she whispers. I know she can’t see me, but I also think she knows I’m here. She’s really speaking to me.
“You have nothing to be sorry about,” I say, even though my words will not reach her.
“I was hoping I might be able to finish our story some day,” she says. “All these blank pages. Why couldn’t one be for us?”
Tears are rolling down her face now, dripping off her cheeks and onto the book. I reach out to try and wipe them again, but this time I stop myself before I pass through her. If I passed through her right now, it might break me apart.
“You’ve had half of my heart ever since I first met you,” she says. “If we’d had time, I think I’d have given you the whole thing, but we didn’t, and over the years what I had left has gone to Owen, piece by piece. Even I didn’t realize it until it happened. But it happened, and I can’t live like this anymore. Half measures don’t work when it comes to hearts.”
Her head droops low, she speaks into her lap, but her words are for me.
“Ever since you died, all I’ve wanted is closure. I didn’t even have to have you back, if I could just figure out how to say good-bye to you properly. But I know now, I don’t need closure. If it means that I have to forget you, forget who I was when I was with you and forget the person you helped me to become, I don’t want it. And that piece of my heart you have, it’s always going to have a bit of you in it, but I want to give it to Owen. I need to give it to Owen.”
“I know,” I say. “I know you do.”
I didn’t think I had any tears left. I thought they all dried up when I rang the bell. Boy was I was wrong.
Caroline takes a shuddering breath. “I can’t ask you to give back to me what I gave to you. It’s up to me to reach out and take hold of it again myself, so that’s what I’m doing.”
She gently sets the book on the box and nods to Joey, who moves over to the fire and places the whole package in the searing coals. It’s alight in moments. Now both Caroline and I are slumped over ourselves, as if the strings that bonded us, that moved us together and mixed us up and were hopelessly tangled when I died, have finally been cut.
As the coyote’s warning signs catch fire, I feel a sea change. The hole at the top of the hogan seems to be pulling more than just smoke up and out. It’s subtle but definite: the wind from outside is pulled in, then a bit of desert sand. The hogan darkens as if a stream of the rising night itself is being pulled in from the eastern door.
One of the brothers says, “Now we wait.”
I feel like a wrung-out towel, but I know that this is my time to get to work. I’m the one that has to catch this thing in between planes. Keep it from jumping from person to person and away from us again. I don’t know how I can do anything but collapse with Caroline’s words still bouncing around my head, but I have to do my part too.
I stand, but as I do, I feel the tug. I’m getting a call.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I say. “Now? Really?”
It’s insistent, much more insistent than it usually is, and it makes my stomach flip. I swirl open the map looking for the fray, for the guttering soul string that calls to me, and I find it almost immediately. It’s very close. Someone is dying, and they’re dying in Marcy Park.
Chapter 29
Owen Bennet
My half step in the thin place takes me to a park, where I’m thrown into mayhem of a different sort. A band plays on a stand in the distance with a large crowd all pressed together, but the wind makes their music sound whiny and off key. The stage lights are rattling in the gusts, and one falls from the overhead rigging, spinning wildly and throwing a chaotic beam across the darkening green before it shatters behind the band in an electric flare that shorts out all the music. Now all I can hear is the wind and a screaming crow.
Chaco is behind the stage, off to the right, above a bunch of houses. I sprint toward where he dips and hovers, still struggling. The wind seems to be pushing back at me, and the sound is as loud as if I was back in the thin place, but this wind is real. It throws dirt and grass and grit in my eyes and mouth, but I carve through.
I break free of the park and into a small neighborhood, and now I can hear Chaco’s wings beating just under the cut of the wind. He’s in the sky over a house at the end of the block, but he’s moving my way, because Grant is moving my way. I almost collapse with relief.
“Grant! Are you OK? Where’s the bell?”
Grant stops dead in his tracks and looks at me. Chaco lets loose another painful cry, twice as loud.
“Grant?”
He runs toward me with this insane smile on his face, but there’s nothing happy about it. It’s the type of smile I used to see back on my psych rotations in medical school. It’s the smile of the mentally broken. The unhinged.
He’s in front of me in the blink of an eye, and then he’s grabbing my throat with one hand. My air shuts off full stop. His grip feels like a knot in my windpipe.
Chaco dives again and pulls up, and now I see why. This is not Grant. This is the coyote. He’s turned Grant into a skinwalker, and Chaco doesn’t know whether to attack him or help him. I try to speak but can’t. My words feel like they back up from my mouth all the way to my brain. My head is about to burst, but then he drops me.
I suck in a crackling breath on my hands and knees. But the air isn’t coming fast enough. My vision dims, tunneling to a pinpoint, but then I feel the soft head of Chaco brushing against my arm. I’ve never actually touched Chaco before, not in five years, but here he is, standing beside me, and I focus on that touch until my vision clears. When I look up again, I see that the whole party is outside on the front porch watching. But then Grant’s insane smile is right in my face again.
“Let him go,” I say. It comes out in a growl. The coyote wears Grant’s grin, stretches it wider than it should be, and he shakes his head like an ornery child. I push myself standing, and the coyote follows me, inches away. The crowd of kids behind him is half cheering, half terrified, and totally unaware of what is happening. He backs up their way, and I stagger after him. He sticks out his tongue, and I see it. The bone bead. It’s the size of a pea. How could such a small thing cause so much destruction?
“Spit it out!” I say. I lurch after him, but he dodges me at the last second, lurching this way and that like we’re playing tag. He zips his tongue back in and clamps the bead behind a mad grin that bears his full set of teeth. I lunge for him and grab him by the shoulders.
“Give me my son back, you bastard!”
The coyote backhands me across the face so hard that I end up spitting out a molar. Now the crowd silences. One girl starts to scream. I see Kai, the girl Grant is so fond of, sitting down outside on the grass, her head between her knees. She’s moaning, “No, no, no, no, get out of my head!”
The coyote pulls me straight again. “Your son is mine,” he says. “Until he dies.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I say, my words bubbling with blood. “Take me! Take me, but leave him!”
The coyote shakes his head very slowly, his eyes wide. It’s hard to imagine that Grant ever had those eyes.
“No,” the coyote whispers. “I want the Keeper.”
“Then you’re gonna have to kill me first.”
The coyote looks behind me, and his eyes light up. He takes in a big, overjoyed breath.
“I don’t have to kill you,” he says, pointing behind me with all five trembling fingers. “Because he will.”
I spin around to find a small figure standing alone in the middle of the block. He’s talking to himself. Hitting his head, muttering loudly then quietly. It’s Grant’s friend Mick. And Mick has a gun in his hand.
“I told you,” Mick says. “I told you they’d never like you. I told you I told you I told you to come see what I had. To come check it out.” He raises his gun. He’s pointing it at Grant, but he’s aiming through me. With his other hand he’s hitting and scratching at his head, just like Tim Bentley was. He’s trying to shake free the cobwebs that chaos left there. “Nobody wants to see what I got. Nobody. Well, fine. If you don’t want to come see, I’ll just show it to you anyway!”
Mick shoots three times, and all of the bullets punch into me. The first thing I think is how different it feels from when I was hit in the shoulder years ago, back at the hospital. That time the shot passed clean through. This is so much worse. These hit the meat of me. They scramble all the beautiful things that are packed inside of me, the things I studied all my life to learn. I picture them now. My stomach, miles and miles of delicate instrumentation for converting food to energy, pulverized to mush. My liver, that miracle machine, which I’ve mistreated from time to time. I’m sorry you had to go like this, punctured and riddled with filthy lead, your delicate connections to my bloodstream destroyed. My lungs, with their millions of tiny balloons keeping me afloat, popped forever. It hurts terribly. It hurts worse than I’d ever imagined anything could hurt. It hurts for the blink of an eye.
And then I die.
Chapter 30
The Walker
When I step out of the soul map, I don’t understand what I’m seeing.
First, I see Grant. He’s standing tall with his arms out like he’s taking in the adulation of a crowd, but all I hear is screaming. He’s smiling, so at first I think he’s happy, that maybe we got the coyote, maybe it’s finally all over, but then the true nature of his smile creeps over me. When he turns to look right at me, I know it’s true. I’m face to face with the creature of chaos that has fashioned himself after Coyote, and he’s taken over Grant.
“Welcome, Walker,” he hisses. It’s Grant’s boyish voice, but it’s off somehow. Like it’s slightly out of tune for a human range. It makes me sick to hear it.
Then I see Owen on the ground, and a lot of blood. I feel like my mind is lagging way behind my eyes, because I can’t put together that the holes in Owen’s body made all that blood. I feel like I’m looking at a tricky math problem, letters as numbers, numbers as letters, none of it making any sense.
“What did you do?” I ask.
“He killed me,” Owen says. Then his soul sits up from his body and looks down around him. “What a waste.”
Owen’s soul stands and walks over to me. “Hello, Ben. Long time no see.”
I back up. “No, no. What the fuck are you doing? Get back in there, Owen.”
“I can’t.”
“Get back in your body. Now.”
“Ben,” he says, reaching out to me. And he touches me. He touches my shoulder. That can only happen when people die. That’s my window to interact. But I never wanted this from Owen. Ever. I throw it off.
“Don’t you fucking touch me, Owen. You get back in your body right now!”
“Ben, it’s over.”
But I’m not having that. I don’t care if the coyote is in Grant’s body or not. I’m taking that thing down. Grant’s bones can heal. I launch myself at the coyote. But once again, I fly right through. And the coyote laughs like a maniac.
“You’ll never cross over, Walker. Ever. But I will. Again and again. Now that I have the bell, this world is mine to remake.”
He rips the bell from Grant’s neck and holds it high. “Do it, Mick!” he yells.
That’s when I see the boy. He’s been warped by the coyote, and he has a gun. Owen tries to stand in front of Grant’s body again, the poor bastard. As if he had any physical body left to take the bullets. And finally it dawns on me what the coyote wanted all along: the bell, just like everybody else. With the bead and the bell he’d be unstoppable. His chaos would smother the rez and then the world. And we brought it right to him.
Mick raises the gun again, but then my world lurches, just a touch. It feels like an invisible train just blew by, and my clothes and hair are sucked back a bit. The coyote doesn’t seem to notice anything.
“Owen, get over here,” I whisper.
The coyote closes his eyes, waiting to die. Waiting to ring the bell. Double his power. And Owen still won’t move, so I run over and grab him.
“Hold on.”
“What?”
I felt a warning sign. And the coyote missed it. The crew at the hogan did their job. When you wear the robes of Coyote, you play by the history of Coyote. I see the veil in the distance. Closing fast. It’s here to take Owen away from me. From Caroline. Forever. But not yet. It’s gotta catch us first.
“Just hold on tight.”
If what I felt before was a breath of the train’s passing, what I feel now is the full damn train. The coyote opens his eyes at the last second, but he still doesn’t understand. He’s confused. Mick fires his gun, but the coyote is yanked backward by another lurch, this time across both of our worlds. The bullet misses, careening off the pavement. The coyote growls, slaps his hands over his mouth, but he can’t keep the bone bead from the pull of the hogan now. It leaps from Grant’s mouth, a little white dot, like a floating snowflake, and Grant collapses next to Owen’s body. That’s all I see before I’m pulled away along with the bead like a fish yanked out of water.
