The Coyote Way, page 21
part #3 of Vanished Series
“Gam said, well, if monsters come back, then somebody will have to stand up in their own way. Fight them back again. I used to think that was me. The problem is, I can’t fight in the land of the living anymore. My time there is over. But you can. You and Grant and Caroline and the rest of the Circle.”
“Ben, don’t do this,” I croak. “She won’t be able to take it if I tell her you had a chance to go to her and you didn’t take it.”
“She’s already made her choice. I was there. And she’s right.”
Ben lowers his head to me, loosens his grip, and presses his forehead to mine.
“It’s not your time to die, Owen. Watch your son grow tall and strong. Be there to wipe away her tears. And whatever you do, don’t ever let go of her.”
Ben tosses me forward just like he tossed the coyote. The veil is all around me, like an ocean of red, and then it’s behind me, and all worlds go black.
Chapter 33
Grant Romer
I come to face down on the hot concrete street, and my cheek is lying in a pool of cooling blood. I have no idea what happened to me, only that it was very, very bad. I do the first thing that I do every morning when I get up. I feel for the bell around my neck. But it’s not there.
I sit up, and a string of blood comes up with me, drips down my face. My hands are painted in it, my clothes are saturated. And my head is killing me. It feels foggy and scratched up. I have shadows of strange memories, and I don’t think all of them are mine. I feel like I needed to do something terrible, but I forgot what it was.
I see the bell and let out what I feel must be my first breath in hours. It’s lying by my shoes, like it was dropped there. The necklace is broken, and both bell and necklace are smeared in blood. Then I see Owen. He’s facing away from me, his nice shirt soaked.
“Hey, Owen? Get up, man. Something bad happened here.”
Owen doesn’t move, but that’s OK, because I know he will. He’s just pulling it together, like me. I shake him a little bit.
“Get up, Owen. We gotta find the coyote. C’mon.”
Owen still isn’t moving, and at the very back of my brain I know why, but I’m keeping it there, in the back. I refuse to let it come to the front. I shake my head hard, and it’s jarring. The shadows of the terrible thoughts threaten to make noise until I sit very still again.
“Owen?”
The truth of what I see is creeping to the front of my brain an inch at a time. I’m remembering Pap. He was lying on the ground like this, and there wasn’t even any of the blood then that there is now. And I know how that ended.
“Owen. Please.” I pull him over, and he flops on his back. His front is a mess. His nice shirt. It’s a mess. It’s way too big of a mess for anything to ever be right in my life ever again. That’s when it hits me that all this blood is his blood. I don’t know whose blood I thought it was before, but it’s his now.
“No, no, no.” I scoop a little bit of it up and hold it in my hand. I don’t know what I’m doing with it, so I set it on Owen, like I could maybe put it back in him or something, even though I know that’s not how these things work, but this just can’t be. Owen being dead is also not how things work. There is not a scenario in which the world can exist without Owen in it.
I sort of choke then, with the weight of it all. I don’t cry, I just start coughing, and I close my eyes because I don’t want to see any of this anymore, and I lay my head down on Owen’s ruined stomach, and I just want to go to sleep.
With my eyes closed, the sounds of everything wash over me. Kids are screaming. I hear sirens in the distance, and over everything is the roar of the wind. The only completely silent thing is Owen. Then I hear footsteps. I look up and see Mick standing above me. He’s looking down at me, and he has a gun hanging limply in his hand, but he looks completely lost. There’s a big gust of wind and the light brush of black feathers over my face as Chaco lands between us. He snaps at Mick, but Mick doesn’t even seem to notice him.
“My dad is dead,” I say. I don’t know what else to say. I don’t even know who I’m talking to. Chaco lowers his head and folds his wings in and turns around to tuck himself between Owen and me. Mick shakes his head, and I hear a big clunk as he drops the gun before he shuffles over to the curb and collapses there.
I don’t know how long Chaco and I lay like this, resting on Owen. Certainly until I fall asleep, because I know I must be dreaming when I start to hear a small beat in Owen’s chest. It’s like his heart is telling me a secret, it’s so quiet, and then I think it goes away again, and it was nothing after all. But the bell heard the secret too, because it gets a little bit warmer in my hand. I try to listen, and even Chaco presses himself closer. He hears it too.
Another beat. Another whisper. Louder now. I can hear it. And I know what it’s saying. It’s saying not yet.
Not yet. Not yet. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Stronger and stronger and stronger. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet.
Chaco rises, then I sit up, and when we look at Owen, we find he’s looking back at us. He rolls on his side to grab my hand, and there are three soft tink, tink, tink sounds as the bullets that were inside of him fall to the ground.
“Not yet,” he says, smiling at me. “Not just yet.”
Chapter 34
The Walker
The Serenity Room at Green Mesa is back to normal. Well, normal for a psychiatric hospital, anyway. I guess I was giving myself too much credit when I said it was me that was spooking all these people. It was the combo of the coyote running loose everywhere and then me walking in on top of that. This time, with the coyote back where he belongs, I only get a few mutters when I pass. That’s it.
Mom is in her usual spot, by the big bay window, and she’s watching the Jemez Mountains again. Only this time, when I sit down next to her, I see that she’s actually seeing them. The sunset is an explosion of soft pink, and the clouds look like strings of cotton candy. She’s watching the crows fly under them, away from here. They’re scattering again. That, as much as anything, tells me our job is done for now.
“You look good, Mom,” I say. She says nothing, but she does smile. I know it has nothing to do with me talking to her. That’s the rub with a job like mine. When you do it right, nobody notices you. If things are going the way they should, you’re invisible.
“She’s moving on,” I say. “Caroline is. Which is good, because until she told me, I didn’t realize how tightly I was holding on to her. To the past. To my life. I’ve been dead for six years. You’d think I would have realized it by now. But it took her showing me. It took her letting go to get me to ease my grip too.”
Mom reaches back and brushes her fingers through her silky hair, still watching the sky. Her eyes are moving from cloud to cloud.
“She’s good at helping people realize things that are staring them in the face. Like the rez. How it needed help. It still needs help, but at least its problems are normal problems now. They’re gonna stick around, all three of them. She told Owen that if he was gonna keep screwing around with that trailer hitch, he ought to at least put it to work. He’s turning it into a mobile doc’s office. He and Caroline are gonna work the rez.”
It makes me absurdly happy to know that they’re staying on Chaco rez. That when I need to find them, I won’t have to search the map. No more uprooting. Grant’s staying at Crownrock High. Even after all that happened. He said he was done running. Caroline is helping with that too. The coyote messed with a lot of people’s minds, and she’s got a knack for fixing them. Grant’s and Kai’s. Even Mick’s. Although that kid was troubled for a long time, maybe even before the coyote came through. The cops found an arsenal in the back of his car and journals with all sorts of terrible plans. He was ripe for the coyote to begin with. Still, Caroline got permission to visit him at UNM’s acute care psych ward, where he’s under lock and key. She says she at least wants to undo whatever the coyote did, and I know she can. The rest is up to the docs.
Things at Chaco are settling down again. Life is moving forward.
“I think I was afraid that for me, there was no such thing as forward. All I had was what lay behind me. Like when Ben died and I became the Walker, that was it for Ben. I thought the two were totally separate things. So I held on to Caroline for dear life, thinking that if I let go, not only would I lose her, but I’d lose Ben too, forever. I looked high and low for a way to get back to her, for a chance to be Ben again. But that’s the thing. Ben’s still here. Ben never left. And the Walker is still here too. It’s all one thing. It’s all me.”
Mom’s gaze is broken when another patient sits down in the chair next to her. A woman her age. One that used to sit with her all the time, until Mom started to go downhill.
“Evening, Sitsi,” she says. “It’s almost dinnertime. Any interest?”
“I think so,” Mom says, and hearing her voice brings tears to my eyes. “I think that would be nice.”
The two women help each other up, and together they walk right through me, on their way out.
I don’t mind. Not anymore. It makes me smile, actually. It makes me feel good. This is my job. This is my journey, and it’s moving forward now. Caroline, Owen, Grant, they all walk it with me. We’re all still in it together. For now. And even though they can’t see me, I know they can feel that I’m there, walking next to them.
It’s what I do. I am the Walker, after all.
Author’s Note
Coyote is one of the most fascinating and contradictory beings in Navajo lore. Karl W. Luckert, a mythology scholar on the subject, calls him, among other things, a “fool-gambler-imitator-trickster-witch-hero-savior-god.” Signs of Warning, the tale told in Chapter 18 of this novel, was taken from the Curly To Aheedlinii version of Navajo Coyote Tales, translated from the original Navajo by Father Berard Haile, OFM (and interpreted by the smoker in the narrative). The six objects that present themselves to Coyote (birth bag, burned stick, broken pot, cane, whisk broom, and broken stirring stick) are all accurate at their origin.
Signs of Warning is but one of many tales about Coyote, and anyone looking to learn more will benefit from both Haile’s compilation and Karl W. Luckert’s essay on the theoretical and historical framework of Coyote that is presented as the introduction.
About the Author
B. B. Griffith writes best selling fantasy and thriller books. He is the author of the Tournament series, the Vanished series, and the Gordon Pope thrillers. He lives in Denver, where he is often seen sitting on his porch staring off into the distance or wandering to and from local watering holes with his family.
If you’d like to know when he has another book out, you can join his mailing list here: http://eepurl.com/SObZj. It is an entirely spam-free experience.
You can also visit him online via his facebook page, or check out his digital HQ at bbgriffith.com.
Thanks for reading!
Publication Information
The Coyote Way
ISBN: 978-0-9963726-3-3
Written by B. B. Griffith
Published by Griffith Publishing, LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means without the prior written permission and consent of the copyright owner.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
B. B. Griffith, The Coyote Way
