The Wind Thief (Vanished, #4), page 1
THE WIND THIEF
VANISHED, BOOK FOUR
B. B. GRIFFITH
Publication Information
The Wind Thief (Vanished, #4)
Copyright © 2023 by Griffith Publishing LLC
Paperback ISBN: 979-8-9874270-1-9
Ebook ISBN: 979-8-9874270-0-2
Written by B. B. Griffith
Cover design by Damonza
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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.
Created with Vellum
CONTENTS
1. Grant Romer
2. Owen Bennet
3. Caroline Adams
4. Grant Romer
5. Owen Bennet
6. Caroline Adams
7. Owen Bennet
8. Grant Romer
9. The Walker
10. Manaba Morning Rock
11. The Walker
12. Grant Romer
13. Caroline Adams
14. Owen Bennet
15. Caroline Adams
16. The Walker
17. Grant Romer
18. Caroline Adams
19. Owen Bennet
20. Caroline Adams
21. The Walker
22. Owen Bennet
23. The Walker
24. Manaba Morning Rock
25. The Walker
26. Caroline Adams
27. Grant Romer
Author’s Note
About the Author
Also by B. B. Griffith
To Chris McGrady.
A true family man.
“There is nothing as eloquent as a rattlesnake’s tail.”
- Navajo Proverb
1
GRANT ROMER
When the sun dips behind the Chuska Mountains to the west, the valley is drenched in amber and just dark enough that I ease off the gas. The roads in this part of the Rez are twisty. It’s easy to end up in a ditch, especially at night. My truck can handle pretty much anything. Dad’s RV? Not so much. We call it the Old Boat for a reason.
Dad uses the Old Boat as a mobile doc’s office. It’s been lots of places I never thought it’d make it back from, but still, this is a hell of a place to blow a tire. I keep telling Dad to stick to driving east of the Arroyo, where the New Mexico desert is flat as a pancake. If he’s gotta go into the foothills and mountains, he should use his crow totem. But sometimes he don’t like to listen.
West of the Arroyo, most of the BIA roads stop and the local roads begin. If you know what you’re doing, you can wind your way on the local roads through the bucks and folds of the Jemez Mountains all the way over the Arizona border. That way is dark, with no streetlights to speak of. People drive by sun or by moon, and if they pop a tire on washout scree, they’d better be ready to walk fifty miles to civilization. I had to do it once, when I was sixteen. I was just lucky I had my crow to tell me which way to walk. Out here, if you’re on foot too long, you’re coyote meat.
Since then I’ve probably put ten thousand miles of local dirt under my tires, most of them on the west side on account of Kai living out here. I know there’s really no good place to pop a tire, especially on Chaco Navajo Reservation, but this here is Crooked Snake Road, and Crooked Snake Road is particularly bad. Not just cause of the snakes it’s named after neither. Cell service is nonexistent. No mile markers. People gotta be real heads-up about landmarks and know how far ’till the next outpost. Keeping a spare in the truck is smart as well.
What ain’t smart is taking Crooked Snake in a ten-year-old camper with more miles on it than any three beat-up F-150s on the Rez combined. What ain’t smart is leaving that camper’s twelve-ton bottle jack in the garage back home right next to a crow totem, one that can give you a stride a mile long and get you out of trouble. Those things ought to occur to a man like Owen Bennet, but then again, sometimes Dad ain’t all that smart.
Don’t get me wrong—he’s a brilliant doctor, and he’s my dad, and I love him. But when it comes to things like towing capacity, ground clearance, tire wear and the like—basically, anything with an engine—he’s kinda lost. I eventually had to revoke his electrical privileges with the wiring on the Old Boat. He already died once. No need for him to push his luck.
My truck is eighteen years old, same as me, but I looked under the hood of a dozen or so before I settled on her, and I’ve replaced most of the things that get people in trouble out here: belts, breaks, plugs. Shocks too—that’s why she glides over the washboarding like she was born for it. Sure, it ain’t much to look at, but I’m not trying to draw attention to myself. Most of the Navajo guys—first thing they buy when they get their eighteen money is a truck. I see more brand-spanking new trucks on Chaco Rez than in Albuquerque, even. But with me, it’s different. If I was driving around in a new truck, I’d get looks, and when you carry the bell around your neck, you don’t really want looks.
My bird is a floating slice of midnight in the distance, the last full rays of the sun reflecting off his feathers.
“He’s up ahead,” Chaco says.
“Is he alright?” I ask—not out loud but in my head. Chaco and I have an interior dialogue, the way you might talk to yourself, but he answers.
“Seems fine. He’s sitting on a rock by the side of the road just up ahead. Looks like he’s working some kinks out of his back.”
I shake my head. Owen Bennet, always trying to do too much too soon. Whatever he has, he gives. He took off for Kai’s place as soon as I even suggested something might be wrong with her. Never mind he had only about a seventy-percent grasp on where she lives.
In the back of my mind, I hear Joey Flatwood say, You knew he would do this. That’s why you told him.
And maybe I did. The bell sometimes shows me things others can’t see. And what I see is that Kai Bodrey is sick—with what, I don’t really know. But Owen is the single best person on the planet for helping sick people. I know this is true no matter what her brother Hosteen says. I could say the sky is blue, and Hos would spit on the ground and say, “Prove it, bilagaana.”
I crest a hill and slow to a roll on the downslope. In the distance, Owen is standing against a scoop carved out of the pink sandstone, looking embarrassed and blinking in the headlights. The shirt-and-tie combo he always wears on house calls is particularly out of place—like he’s on a job interview. He has the kind of smooth face that could get mistaken for midtwenties at first glance, but his hair—or lack of it—gives away that he’s on the far side of forty. His widow’s peak is as sharp as a knife, the golden red starting to fade to more of a dust color. His eyes betray him too. They’re a dusty turquoise that remind me of what my grandpa’s used to look like
He flags me over with big flapping arm motions, as if I might somehow miss the enormous RV flashing hazards as bright as campfires.
I park my truck and step out. The fine rocks of the road crunch under my boots as I walk around to the bed and pull out the jack.
“An RV jack doesn’t do a whole lot of good sittin’ in a garage,” I say. I dig around in the pocket of my jeans and pull out his worn-leather totem pouch and hand it to him. “Neither does this.”
He takes the pouch and tucks it carefully into a pocket then places his hands on his hips. “Alright, okay. I deserved that. Thank you for your help.”
I look up at the purpling sky and find my bird wheeling above. “You should thank Chaco. He’s the one that saw you laid up.”
Owen leans back and cups his mouth then yells, “Thank you, Chaco!” loud enough to echo off the canyon and cause me to cringe. Joey once told me not to yell into the desert at night unless I wanted a response. Chaco lets out three bemused caws anyway.
The flat is on the right rear, which is a double set. Lucky. If he’d blown one of the front tires, the Old Boat would probably be on its side. I sit down in the dirt and unpack the jack.
“Need help?” Owen asks.
I look at him sidelong, ponder it, and shake my head.
“Nah, you’re probably right,” he says quickly. “Faster if you just do it.”
He resumes his old-man workout on the side of the road, rotating his hips like he’s hula hooping, watching me carefully as I feel under the frame to get set up.
I can tell he’s embarrassed at having to be dependent on me like this. Sometimes, I think Mom and Dad still think of me like they did when they found me at age eight.
“Found the spare in the back,” he says, rolling it over to me. “Careful with your fingers. I don’t want you to get crushed.”
“I don’t aim to get crushed, Dad,” I say, sighing.
The pipe-mounted stabilizers come in sets of two. I get the rig lifted on both sides, and I’m spinning off lug nuts when Chaco says someone is coming. On instinct, I turn my head to find him, a streak of black like war paint on a stone mesa glowing in the near distance.
Owen keys in on my reaction immediately. “What’s up?”
“Chaco says a truck is coming. Maybe three miles back.”
Owen smooths his tie. “Maybe it’s the tribal cops. Somebody s
But the way he says it tells me he doesn’t quite believe that. I don’t believe it either. Crooked Snake Road isn’t exactly on the circuit. The only people that come out here are the Bodreys, people that buy bootleg liquor from the Bodreys, and occasionally, idiots like me trying to get closer to a girl that the Bodreys don’t want me anywhere near—one Bodrey in particular, who I’d bet my lucky Stetson is driving that truck.
I swap the tires and tighten the nuts, mind racing. I ain’t afraid of Hos Bodrey—not exactly. It’s just that I’ve needed to be not afraid of him for years, and it’s tiring. The only break I had from Hos was when he had to do a year of juvie in Albuquerque as some sort of deal Sani Yokana, the chief of police, brokered with his people and the Santa Fe cops after Hos paint bombed a five-hundred-year-old statue and generally raised hell at the Native Market.
I know Sani, and I know part of him wanted to let the state cops haul Hos away for good. The Bodreys have a long history of starting shit. They’re hard-line Arroyo folks that split their time between the car camp there and their trading post up Crooked Snake. The bootlegging operation is somewhere way out back too. I ain’t ever seen it with my own eyes—Kai won’t let me past the trading post when she lets me up there at all—but everybody knows it, Sani too. I asked him why he didn’t just let the state take custody of Hos for good, but all he said was he’s not in the business of banishing people if he can help it. Too few Navajo in this world as it is, he said.
So Hos came back. And he was not happy about how I’d been spending that year inching my way closer to his sister. Maybe he would leave me alone if I stopped seeing Kai, but I doubt it. And that ain’t gonna happen anyway.
I let the jacks down easy, and the RV settles like an elephant in the sand. She’ll drive, but she’s still too thick for the pass by a good sight. “Take my truck,” I say. “Follow Crooked Snake all the way up to the fork with a big tree growing out of a rock. Take a right and follow the road all along the bluff, past where you think it stops. You’ll see the Bodrey outpost. If you hurry, you can catch the last light.”
Dad looks back and forth between me and where Chaco is cutting his silent way through the air toward us. “What are you going to do?”
I stand up and dust my hands off on my old jeans, more gray now than black. “I’m gonna talk to Hosteen Bodrey.”
“You sure that’s a good idea, out here and all?” Dad rerolls his sleeves in that precise way of his—three flips of the cuff, like he’s prepping for surgery or squaring for an old-timey boxing match—and it makes me smile despite the day getting long.
I know from experience that anyone who pushes Owen Bennet too far usually ends up wishing they hadn’t. The man wrestled with Death, after all. True, we’re friends with Death. And yes, Dad lost and got tossed back to the land of the living—thank God—but he still wrestled the guy and walked away. Not many can say that.
Chaco swoops in low and flares out to land on the side of the road. I toss Dad the keys. “Figure we can buy you ten, maybe twenty minutes. If you leave now.”
I can tell he doesn’t feel good about it, but I know he’s concerned for Kai, too, after what I told him. I ain’t ever seen a seizure before I saw that one with Kai, and it scared the shit out of me. One minute, her legs were draped over mine, fingers threaded loosely while we watched TV, and the next, she was hard as a rubber ball against my side, teeth grinding, eyes rolled, hands turned to claws. She didn’t answer, no matter how loud I called for her.
Then, she just came out of it, looked around lost and started crying. Nothing but a thin drop of blood coming from her nose was evidence it ever happened.
Maybe he reads some of that on my face because he opens the passenger door and grabs his faded black doctor’s bag.
“Try for twenty,” he says.
My truck skitters dirt out the back as he pulls away. I watch until the switchback hides the taillights, and Chaco and I are alone.
“You ready up there?” I ask.
Chaco flaps his huge wings as he resettles himself on a dinner-plate-sized outjut off the mesa. “I’m not a huge fan of you throwing yourself into this type of thing again and again. Remember what you have around your neck, buddy. It’s bigger than you or me.”
“It’s for Kai,” I say. “I wanna make sure she’s okay.”
“Yeah, yeah, you do it for love,” Chaco says. “I’ve heard that one before.”
Kai and I haven’t dropped the L word yet. But we’re getting close, and Chaco knows it. The sunlight has almost totally retreated out of the sliver of valley we’re in, but he’s got crow sight, and I know he can see me smiling.
2
OWEN BENNET
Grant’s truck handles like a dream compared to the Old Boat. Most everything on four wheels does. I’m at the fork in front of the mesa in no time, but here I slow down, way down. The drop-off to the right of Crooked Snake may be a bluff, but if the tires slip, I’m in for an ugly trip back to the base of the foothills. I’m incredibly grateful that Grant invested in the light bar. The way this desert turns to darkness at the flick of a switch still astonishes me. I stick to the established ruts in the narrow road and cross my fingers that my lights are bright enough to give anyone coming the other way some pause.
I’m not sure why I ever thought I could make it up here in the Old Boat—or if by some miracle I did, how I expected to get back down. I would likely get ten points into my twenty-point U-turn by the Bodrey outpost then go tumbling over the side like a log—either that or just keep going and hope to come out on the other side of the Colorado Plateau sometime next week. And forgetting my crow totem was sloppy. I need to be more prepared than that. Caroline thinks I take too much on myself, but this doctors-on-wheels gig was my idea, and I have to make it work. Sometimes, I feel like it’s the only real way I can pull my weight in the family.
My father always said practicing medicine meant nothing if it didn’t help the community, if I didn’t have a cause. Caroline and I left ABQ General years ago, but the mobile clinic is my cause. I’m following in a long line of Bennet physicians that way. Every time I pick up that black bag, I feel my grandfather nodding in approval across time. My father nods, too, although he does sniff at the Old Boat and cock an eye at the hard-packed desert, at a bit of a loss. It’s about as far from Boston as you can get. That’s exactly why I came here, of course.
But existential pressure isn’t the only thing driving me onward. It’s real pressure too. For one, if I don’t start charging for visits soon, I’m likely to be the first Bennet doctor to go broke. The Native Americans are among the most underserved communities in the country when it comes to basic medical care. I had an idea of that when I decided to take up the mobile clinic, but the reality was—and still is—shocking. The lack of education, the fear of modern medicine, the sheer distance that has to be covered—and then, just when you think you’re starting to make some inroads, you blow a tire. My life in a microcosm.
RV tires are expensive too. At least once a day, I think of all the worthless junk I used to waste money on back in the day because I was bored—the air fryer and nonstick pans off the infomercials, the rare-release bourbon, the massage chair. That damn thing alone would’ve been two full tanks of gas for the Old Boat.
But charging someone for a house call is hard when I see the tape holding their sandals together is starting to fray.
The light bar catches something, throwing a sharp shadow out in front of me, and I hit the brakes. The tires slide a bit on the dirt, skittering tiny rocks down the shelf of the bluff. The fork with the tree growing out of the rock—I almost missed it.
