The Coyote Way, page 10
part #3 of Vanished Series
And yet here I am. I pat my breast pocket, where the words of the book are transcribed. Each of us has a copy, in case the book gets fickle again and sucks up all the ink we only recently got it to bleed out. I’ve already memorized it, and I’ll spare you the anticipation: the directions make no sense. The three of us and Chaco brainstormed all night over them without getting far. Maybe if I recite them out loud in the hollow of the trailer, the acoustics will make sense of them. Sort of like singing in the shower. Which is what Caroline does. I used to go over some of my trickier biopsy procedures in the shower. Same difference. Here goes. Number one:
“A birth bag,” I say. Not sure what that is. Medically, it could be a lot of things, none of them appealing outside of a hospital setting. Don’t blame me, I’m just telling you what the book says.
“A burned stick.” Which shouldn’t be too hard. In a sane world, you just go out, find a stick, and burn it. There you go. Or how about a match? That’s a burned stick. Can it possibly be that easy?
“A broken pot.” Same deal. Do I just break a pot? Caroline said that we have a Crock- Pot we sometimes use. She likes to cook enough for several days at a time when she can. It has her most recent concoction in it right now, a peccadillo that didn’t go over very well. I can toss it. It’ll be a shame to lose the ceramic piece, but if it means saving the world, I can part with it.
“A cane.” There are plenty of those around here. We used to give them out for free at the CHC. We took up a donation in Albuquerque for them. Most of them were used walkers, though. Would that work?
“A whisk broom.” We use a Hoover to keep the RV clean. Caroline said that’s like a modern whisk broom. Maybe we toss the Hoover in?
“A broken stirring stick.” We’re at a loss here. I’m not quite sure what a stirring stick is. Grant suggested using our soup ladle.
I laugh out loud. If you think we can catch our coyote with a match, a crock pot, a walker, our vacuum, and a soup ladle, all wrapped up in whatever the hell a birth bag is, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you. Once again that damn book provides us more questions than answers. I dribble more bourbon into my mouth. Maybe I’ll just sit in here until all the chaos blows over. Or until the world blows over into chaos. The latter is looking more likely these days…
A sharp series of knocks makes me literally jump up from my back in complete darkness. I forget where I am. All I know is that I’m sweating profusely. It must be a hundred degrees. I feel out wildly for anything, and my hands slap against the sides of what I slowly come to realize is the trailer. I stumble around in the darkness, slam my head against the back hatch, and knock over my bottle of bourbon. I scramble to pick it up then feel around the trailer handle for the lever that pops it open. The door snaps up into the ceiling in a jarring rattle, and I’m left peering out into the afternoon sun. My shirt is drenched in bourbon and sweat, and my hair sticks straight up like the tuft of some sort of tropical bird. What’s left of the booze swirls around the bottle hanging from my left hand. I shade my eyes from the blinding sun. I can’t even tell who’s standing on the dirt in front of me.
“Can I help you?” I ask, trying to make it sound polite but challenging at the same time. The first thing that comes to mind is that another Itch found us.
“Everything all right, Dr. Bennet? It’s three o’clock. We’re supposed to be at the CHC in half an hour.”
My eyes adjust, and I see the bulky outline of a big Navajo. A few single strands of his long hair hover about over his shoulders in the rising heat. He’s dressed in a worn linen button-up and well-washed jeans. He wears creased leather cowboy boots and sports a shiny silver police badge on his hip, offset of a shinier silver belt buckle.
“Oh God. Chief Yokana. I’m sorry. I lost track of time.” Truth be told, I lost track of the fact that we were supposed to meet to go to the CHC morgue in the first place. He knows it too. I can tell by the way he looks at me sidelong then peers behind me into the empty trailer where there’s a wet outline of my head on the floor. He glances at the bottle of bourbon I have absolutely nowhere to hide. He sees me deflate. There are a million things he could say right now. Any number of accusations.
What he says is: “All right, then. Let’s get goin’.”
God bless the Navajo.
“Great,” I say, a little too eagerly. “Let me just change my shirt.”
We drive over in Yokana’s SUV, a well-traveled Ford Explorer with NNPD plates but no other markings. It has a dusty clean to it—no trash, not even a stray coffee cup—but everywhere bits of the desert, even down to the cracked-earth smell of the AC. I get the feeling he could have a nicer car. He’s the chief of police, after all, but I think he doesn’t have one for the same reason he’s travelling the rez to try and calm people down, and for the same reason he knocked on my trailer and picked me up today. Because he’s more interested in actually doing the job than just looking like he’s doing the job.
As we roll down the double-lane road out of Crownrock and onto the Navajo Service Route he just starts to talk. Not a lot, not consistently, but a few words here and there. Observations about what he’s seen in the towns and outposts, none of them good. The one thing I can say I definitively learned working with the Navajo over the years is to shut up and listen if they’re talking, so that’s what I do.
“There’s a backwater trading post ten or so miles north of Crownrock. It’s where I was before I came to you. A man named Burner Forbath runs it with his wife. Has for decades. It works on the barter system still. If you want to set up a house account, you leave what you got as collateral, take what you need. All sorts of things get left and taken. He’s had no trouble. Ever. Until his own son robbed him then ended up dead several miles west near White Rock. No visible cause of death. Nothing but coyote tracks around him. That was two days ago. Yesterday I got another call. I’ll tell you about that when we get there. Just know that now we’re up to five.”
Yokana is quiet then. He shakes his head once then shifts his hardened gaze to the road. He doesn’t need to embellish. That is implication enough. A two-fold betrayal: Navajo stealing from Navajo, and son stealing from father.
“Burner’s boy was a good kid. I didn’t believe him until I saw the boy’s body myself, surrounded by the house bank he stole. You’ll see for yourself, but our team found no cause of death, no markings. It’s like the gods struck him down for what he did.”
Sani turns north on 191 toward Chaco City. He seems to be working words around in his mouth, behind his closed lips. I know what he wants to say, that this makes no sense. That Burner’s boy was struck mad. That the whole rez has been struck mad. That maybe this goes beyond the police work he’s accustomed to, into another realm. If he said that, maybe I could shift this load I’ve been carrying, tell him he’s right. That the bodies I’m about to see all were most likely struck by madness. That we’ve got a coyote skinwalker in our midst. That Burner Forbath’s son didn’t betray his own family and clan. The coyote did, using him.
But Sani Yokana didn’t get to be where he is by swiping at shadows and ghosts. He charged real people with real crimes and put them behind real bars. Just like I used to practice real medicine on real people with real ailments.
“Maybe he didn’t steal the house bank,” I say. It’s as close as I can come to saying what I feel without chancing Yokana pulling a U-turn and taking me right back to Crownrock with a good day to you, sir. He looks over at me.
“Burner has one key to the store safe. He gave it to the boy before he left for business in Crownrock that day. It was him.”
“What I mean is, maybe Burner’s son was ill. Mentally unwell.” I look pointedly out the window at all the crows weaving above me, casting shadows like running clouds on the flats and across the heat-beaten road. Yokana follows my eyes, and together we watch a line of four crows flank the car then cut high and right. One tracks us with eerie calm before all are lost to view.
“If I remember correctly, the crows started to show up last time too,” he says. “You know I sometimes wonder if they follow me? You believe that?” He smiles sadly and shakes his head.
The rest of the drive, Yokana outlines what he knows about the rest of the bodies. One of them is Bilagaana Bill. I already know his story, but I listen to Yokana tell me about him again. The one they found in the Escavada Wash is a woman from a little town called Los Cristos. An older loner, like Bill. It took three days for someone in her family to get to the CHC to identify her. The third they found the same day: a farm hand who worked seasonally in Nageezi for years. The ranch foreman identified him but couldn’t say much other than that he always did his work well then left after harvest.
We pull into the CHC parking lot as the sun turns from the light brightness of high noon to the heavy, cutting rays of a New Mexico afternoon. I reflexively straighten the tie I put on when I changed my shirt, the first I’ve worn in months, and I’m struck by a nearly overwhelming nostalgia. I remember the heady, antiseptic smell of the place with such force that I can nearly taste it in my mouth. The sunlight reflects off the uniform windows of the squat, four-story building like each has a raging bonfire behind it, and most likely, many do. Not physical fires, but mental ones. Most of my time here was spent putting out fires with Caroline and nurses not nearly as good as Caroline.
We walk through the doors, and I see the front-desk receptionist, a Navajo woman named Lelah who was fairly old before I came around a decade ago. She looks up, mid-phone call, and smiles. Then she ends the call and stands up. She laughs when she sees my surprise. For the first five years I knew Lelah, she couldn’t walk right. She was on the receiving end of the walker donations we started in Albuquerque. She walks evenly over to me and gives me a big hug and says, “All it took was every day.” I don’t know what she’s talking about at first, until I see that she’s holding out a tattered single sheet of paper with a series of physical therapy exercises on it. “Just like you said, Dr. Bennet,” she adds as she hands me the sheet. I sense it’s important to her that I take it. Like it signals the end of a long struggle.
I return her smile, and I laugh along with her, but inside I find I’m disappointed in myself. I’ve let her down by not walking in these doors a few times a week over the past five years. I cheated by handing her the instructions and leaving for half a decade and then walking in when her battle is done. I should have been here. I don’t deserve her smile, but she pats me on the back and mutters over me in broken English and Navajo anyway until I have to excuse myself to follow Yokana.
He leads me past the elevator bay, where I’d usually wait to ride to the top floor then make my way down methodically from there, getting as far as I could, one patient at a time. Instead we walk to the stairs at the back of the main floor. They lead down to the morgue.
The formaldehyde tang washes over us slowly along with the increasing cold, all of it gradual, until we find ourselves standing under buzzing blue lights between cold lockers and stainless-steel tables. A medical examiner and his assistant work quietly on a naked body on a cold slab in the far back of the room. I recognize Tim Bentley, a mortician who comes up from Gallup twice a week on behalf of IHS. He’s a good guy, if a little weird. But what mortician isn’t?
Bentley looks up at us as we approach. “Dr. Bennet,” he says, “thanks for coming down.” I wonder if he knows I’ve been gone for five years. Bentley never got out much. He ushers the assistant aside and makes way for us to approach the table. “We’ve been trying to make heads or tails of this one for almost a week now. He was the first. Take a look.”
On the table is Bilagaana Bill. He’s looked better, but I’ve definitely seen corpses look worse. I think whatever kept the grubs away is still lingering on him. The chaos. If it’s anything like what we felt with the book, I’d want to stay away too. Yokana clears his throat.
“Got a tip from a group of hikers that said they saw something in the middle of the canyon near the west mesa. This is Bidzill Halkini, the one I told you about. Who went by Bill.”
I hope it doesn’t show that I’ve seen him before. That we were the ones that found him. That I was the one who called in the tip from a pay phone at the Chaco Canyon Visitor’s Center, muffling the receiver a bit with my hand when I spoke.
“What’s your cause of death?” I ask Bentley.
“On paper, organ failure. Same as the other four.”
“On paper?”
The assistant glances at Bentley. He looks uncomfortable. So does Bentley, in his own way. He takes off his magnifying glasses and picks at some sleep in the corner of his eye. “There’s some indication here of a… I’d almost call it a type of encephalopathy, although it doesn’t follow modern examples of the disease. The blood flow in the brain was not normal.”
“Do you have any postmortem scans?” I ask, slipping on latex gloves. It comes back remarkably easily. Like I’ve fallen back into the routine of flicking on the coffee pot and stepping outside to get the morning paper. Yokana steps back and rests against the wall, watching.
“Mr. Yokana petitioned for two—one on Halkini, because he came in first, and then on Burner, because he was significantly younger than the first three victims.” He moves over to Bill’s file and rifles through it until he finds a photo printout of the man’s brain. He hands it to me.
“Burner’s looks much the same as Halkini’s, in terms of blood flow.”
As soon as I touch the glossy printout, I’m taken back to that moment in my apartment when Radiology patched through a brain scan of Ben Dejooli, effectively hammering the last nail in his coffin. I remember the way the crows exploded from the big tree outside of my apartment window after I read the scan. I’d been drinking bourbon then too. I half expect more crows now, their claws clacking against the flooring as they come hopping down the stairs. I get no such thing, only the low-grade buzz of fluorescent lights and Tim Bentley looking at me strangely.
Brains are not my specialty, outside of when they’re anomalous with cancerous growth. This man’s brain is not. I recognize no outstanding masses of any sort, nothing that would indicate a tumor or clot. But I’ve seen enough postmortem CT scans of brains to recognize what a normal one looks like.
Bilagaana Bill’s scan does not look normal. Some areas of his brain look devoid of blood flow entirely. As if they’ve been cut off. Others are suffused with blood, bright white on the scan, like they’ve been overexposed. I bend over him and pull up his right eyelid. The tiny capillaries that web the eye are burst in places. Their red is softened to a muted purple by the milky film of death.
“When was this taken?”
“As soon as we got him in, five days ago.”
I take a big breath. “On its face it looks like some sort of massive stroke.”
“Except that—”
“Except that there are no clots or blockages of any sort,” I say.
Bentley nods. “I thought the error might have been mechanical until I took his front plate off. The tissue samples corroborate.”
I stare at the scans for another minute in silence, until Bentley says, “Thoughts, Dr. Bennet?”
“I’m not sure you want to know what I think, Dr. Bentley.”
“Try me.”
I weigh my thoughts. Test my words in my mind first. “I think his brain looks like it was changing, and his body couldn’t take it. Let me guess, no indications of why his major organs gave out?”
Bentley shakes his head.
“He shut down,” I say.
“Why?” Bentley’s tone is academic. Distant.
“Maybe he didn’t want the alternative.” By which I mean whatever chaos was poisoning his brain. I wish I could just tell them, without Yokana taking me out in handcuffs.
“He does look like something got at his mouth,” I offer, since it’s all I can do.
“All of them do,” Yokana says. “Paw prints around them too. Probably just a coyote worrying at the mouths. They do that sometimes.”
“The rest of the decomposition process is occurring remarkably slowly,” Bentley says.
More overhead buzzing. I look at Bentley only to find he’s already looking at me. I tuck the scan back in the folder. “Can I see the other bodies?”
Bentley moves down the cold locker, snapping open clasps and sliding out corpses like a tailor pulling an assortment of fabrics. Soon the other four are stretched out before me. I’m looking for anything that might link them, besides the coyote bite. Something that might give me a clue as to the type of person the coyote wants. I feel like more of a cop than a doctor. But then again, maybe that’s why Yokana brought me along. Because the best cop he knew for this type of stuff is dead.
After Bilagaana Bill is the woman they found in Escaveda Wash. She’s squat, fatter than Bill. There are no marks on her that might indicate how she died, but her face has the same creases from age and sun. The farmer they found near Nageezi looks similarly worn. Deep crow’s feet around the eyes. Chapped lips and chapped hands. There’s a slight crease around his forehead, and when Yokana sees me looking at it, he chimes in.
“That’s from an ancient Stetson he always wore.”
“These people are all old,” I say.
“That was our first connection too. Until Burner’s son came in.”
I move down the line to Burner. He’s darkened by the sun, but otherwise he looks like a normal young man. He’s filled out at the shoulders, but his face still has a hint of that pudgy, teenaged veneer.
“How old was Burner’s son?”
“Nineteen,” Bentley says.
I walk as calmly as I’m able to the last slab down the line. A thin girl with waist-length black hair lies here. She has muddy feet. She’s quite pretty.
