The Coyote Way, page 20
part #3 of Vanished Series
We blow though the soul map, and I see a coyote form itself around the bead, muzzle first. Both of us are dragged by the nape toward the hogan, helpless to fight the pull. The coyote growls, but I grit my teeth in silence, my arms straining, because I’m carrying Owen’s soul right along with me.
Chapter 31
The Walker
All three of us hit the dirt of the hogan with enough force to kill us, if any of us were alive in the first place. We bounce and stagger, and my vision spins. All three of us seem confined here by the ceremony, but the only thing that makes an actual impression on the living world is the bead that the coyote still holds in its mouth. It’s real on every plane, just like the bell. It rips into the dirt when the coyote’s chin hits, digging a little trench on the ground, but the coyote holds on. The brothers notice it, Joey notices it, and so does Caroline. They watch it with strange calm.
When I find my focus again, one of the sand painters is saying something quickly, and I hear Joey’s voice quietly translating.
“Nobody move.”
Apparently I’m the last to wake up at the party, because when I sit up I see Owen’s soul quietly getting to his feet. The coyote is already prowling the edge of the hogan, testing the walls, bead in mouth, his oil-dipped eyes furious. The fire is still burning bright. The bone box is in the middle of it, glowing red, the warning signs vaporized. The sand painters start singing in tandem, their voices rising and falling easily. I recognize the song too. It has nothing to do with Coyote. It’s not even a Chant. It’s what Gam sang to Ana and me at night. The song about the coming sunrise.
“You’ve been duped,” Owen says.
The coyote growls.
“You should have stayed on your side of the veil,” I say. “And done your job.”
Owen moves around behind him, and the coyote lunges at him, but it’s just a feint. I take the opposite tack, coming at him from the front. I stop when I’m standing right behind Caroline.
“I told you to spit it out,” Owen says. “I told you.”
The coyote laughs. It’s a grating, high-pitched yipping, and it makes me cringe, then he jumps at Owen. Owen falls back, but the coyote changes direction at the last second, bounces over Owen’s head, and heads straight for Caroline.
Time seems to slow without me having a thing to do with it. The coyote leaps, his mouth open, the bead bared, aiming to jam it into Caroline and take her as well, and he looks like he’s grinning. He sees his way out. But I know something the coyote doesn’t know. I know Caroline. And I know that no matter how crazy this may be, somewhere, somehow, through all those sleepless nights, Caroline thought of this. Thought of how it might come down to this, and how the coyote might come for her, and she’s been watching the bead carefully.
At the last second, Caroline shifts her head to the right. The coyote’s bead misses her mouth by a centimeter. His spirit body passes right through her, but not through me. I catch him by the neck and hold on for dear life. The coyote bucks and twists in my arms, yipping and growling. Owen jumps on the coyote’s hind legs to keep them from raking at me, and together we wrestle him still, but it’s a tense, primal type of stillness that won’t last if we give it an inch.
“Now you have a choice, Walker,” the coyote says. I shove its face against my chest to keep it from talking. I shove it hard, because I know what it’s talking about. I think I knew the choice I’d be faced with back when I danced around the subject with Chaco while we walked the streets of Santa Fe.
I can feel the veil coming. I look at Owen and know that he feels it too. The curtain call is here. Throughout everything, agents of chaos, runaway souls, skinwalkers, and coyotes, one thing has always remained constant: the veil comes for everyone eventually.
Even Owen.
A moment of strained silence, then the veil’s shadow falls over the hogan.
“It’s here,” Owen says, looking out of the eastern door, still holding tight to the coyote with me.
You’d think I’d be the one with the stone jaw here. I’ve seen the veil millions of times. I’ve had long-winded, one-sided conversations with the damn thing over the years. But suddenly I’m the one blubbering.
“Wait. Owen. We can think of something here.” I ease my grip, and the coyote bucks and twists, and I almost lose him. Owen and I slam together to still it. “Just hold on a second, man.”
Owen shakes his head. “I’ve got to go out there, Ben. I’ve got to meet it like a man.”
He looks me in the eye until I nod.
“Together, then. This thing crosses back over too. Carefully.”
Owen takes a deep breath, and then he looks at Caroline. She’s watching the bead. The only thing she can see, but I sense that she understands. Her face is falling. Her whole being is falling. She’s like a sandcastle being slowly picked apart by waves. But it’s Owen’s look that hits me hardest. He’s saying good-bye to her in the only way that he knows how. With his entire heart wrapped up in one last, longing gaze.
We walk out of the hogan together, with the coyote between us, and there’s the veil. It’s as tall and as still and as red as I’ve ever seen it. And it’s creeping toward Owen.
“Jesus,” Owen says numbly. “It’s a lot bigger than I thought it would be.”
Owen might be intimidated, but I sure as hell ain’t.
“Listen, you old rag. I know you don’t like me crossing over, but we got something here that shouldn’t be here, and you know it. See?”
The coyote bucks again, and we have to wrestle him still. It’s like hauling in a hundred- pound catfish. The veil pauses its relentless approach.
“Yeah, you see it. Now, the only way we can get this thing back where it belongs is if Owen and I take it together. So are you gonna let me cross over or not?”
The veil hesitates. It’s always been a stickler for the rules. But it knows better than any of us that since the coyote has been gone, things have gone to seed on the other side. It flutters slightly. That’s a yes in my book.
“C’mon, Owen,” I say.
“You’re coming with me?”
“Let’s get a move on. Before Big Red here changes its mind.”
So it is that Owen Bennet and I cross over into the land of the dead, wrestling the coyote the whole way, together.
Chapter 32
Owen Bennet
It’s not bad, if that’s what you’re wondering. Death doesn’t feel bad. Except for the solid weight of the coyote between Ben and I, like a python trapped in a bag, I don’t feel anything, really. I just feel dead. But then I see the river.
The river of souls is beautiful. It reminds me of flying over LA at night, but instead of a million different roads and a million different people going a million different directions, it’s one road. Billions of people. Two directions. Left, or right.
“Man oh man, has this place gone to shit,” Ben says.
I lose my focus. I feel this crazy pull toward the water. To float to the right. That’s all I want to do. I want to do it as badly as I’ve wanted anything, as badly as I wanted Caroline, even. And I drop the coyote.
Immediately the coyote starts bucking, throwing itself left and right, and Ben can’t hang on. He throws him down on the sand and sets up in front of the veil like a goalkeeper. The coyote rights himself and shakes his fur free of sand. He slowly raises his head and snaps his teeth a few times, showing us a few flashes of the bead, then he starts to prowl the perimeter of the veil, looking for a chance to jump back through.
“Owen, a little help,” Ben says.
“It’s just that this river…”
“I know, man. I know. But not yet. We gotta deal with this thing first.”
I shake my head. The pull of the river lessens if I look away, turn back toward the veil, toward whatever was beyond it. I try to focus on Caroline. Not on how she looks but on how she feels. The color of her. It’s the color of the skin of a bubble, and I want to be with it again. I finally understand what she sees on people all the time. What she calls “smoke.”
I step up next to Ben, both of us eyeing the coyote as it walks back and forth in front of us, its eye on the veil.
“The bead and the bell,” Ben says. “That would have been a pretty sweet deal for you. Eh?”
The coyote snuffs and kicks up a divot of sand.
“You’d have the soul map, so you could go anywhere. You’d have your pick of the dead, the ordered and the chaotic both, it wouldn’t matter. All of them would have been yours. And you could take any of them at any time.” Ben whistles. “That would have been one powerful setup.”
The coyote growls. I’m not sure what Ben’s going for here, but he taps my leg gently in a way that says get ready.
“Turns out you blew it, though. We took your warning signs from you. Took back the world you were trying to steal from us. And then you never saw us coming.”
The coyote snaps at us, and I see a flash of white bone in his mouth.
“As a matter of fact, I doubt you can even make a run at the veil anymore. You got nothing left in the tank, old man,” Ben says.
The coyote stops prowling. Ben taps on my leg again, down low, by my knee. Then the coyote jumps.
We take him down together. I hit low, Ben hits high. Together we stun him, throw him to the sand, his tongue lolling. I see the bead.
“Grab it!” Ben screams. “Grab the bead!”
I jam my hand in the coyote’s mouth. He bites down, but I feel nothing. No pain, no pressure, nothing. That, more than anything, drives home that I’m gone. I’ve left the living world behind me. But I snag the bone bead.
“You should have spit it out when I told you to,” I say, then I rip it from the coyote’s mouth. The coyote howls, leaps at me as he sees the bead leave him. Then he starts changing. He goes from coyote to person in a blink. It’s Bilagaana Bill, then its Burner’s boy, then it’s the young girl. All the while it’s screaming, its voice changing as its body changes. It flickers faster, through hundreds, then thousands of people. For a split second I see myself there, and Ben, and Caroline. I try to remember that Coyote is a trickster, so this creature of chaos might be showing me things to try and throw off my nerve, but it doesn’t help much. Not when you see yourself screaming.
Ben isn’t fooled. Ben holds on when I scramble back. Ben picks up this chaotic blur of a thing and wrestles it to the river.
“Time to go home,” he says. “Your souls are calling for you.”
He tosses the coyote up and kicks it out, like he was busting down a door. The coyote flies out and over the river, and the river reaches for it. The river is overflowing with souls that strain toward it, souls stacked upon souls stacked upon souls, and no matter how much the coyote kicks, there is no escaping them. They grasp and coil and stick to the coyote like tar, then they start to pull it down.
The coyote stops fighting. Its flickering muzzle forms a translucent grin. “Now for your choice, Walker,” it says. Then it’s swept under the river. I see its form like a shark under water, jetting down the left side of the river, toward its home in the pearl.
That isn’t my way. My way is to the right, and as I face my way, the pull of the river is twice as strong. It’s like a glass of cold water in the desert. You never realize how much you want water until water is gone from you forever.
I stagger forward, but Ben comes around and presses a gentle hand against my chest. “Owen, we need to talk.”
It hurts quite a lot now, turning from the river. It’s like fighting sleep after staying awake for days, but I figure after all we’ve been through, I at least owe Ben a chat. He turns me around so I’m facing the veil again. The pull is less, but not by much.
“You have the bead?” he asks.
The bead. I’d forgotten about the bead. I suppose I do still have it. I hold out my hand and open my palm. “Take it,” I say, but Ben recoils. He steps back and then shudders, and in the way that this place strips emotions bare, I realize that he wants to take it more than anything he’s ever wanted in his life. It takes every ounce of him to do what he’s doing right now, to keep from touching it.
“What?” I ask. “What is it? Take the bead, Ben. We’ve won.”
“It’s not worth it,” Ben says.
“Of course it is. Just take it.”
“No! It’s not worth it if we lose you. If they lose you. If she loses you.”
“What are you talking about?” My head turns toward the river. The pull is insistent now. Ben slaps me in the face, and when I look back at him I see he’s trembling with the effort it takes to stay away from the bead.
“We need to break that thing,” Ben says.
“So break it.” My voice sounds clouded. Dreamy.
“Here’s the thing. When we do, a big hole is going to be ripped between worlds. Look at me, Owen. A big one. One that someone could walk through without anything stopping them.”
I feel as though I come around again for a minute. “Anyone could walk through?”
“Anyone,” Ben says. “No matter what. Free pass. But it’s one for one. That’s the way things work here. Balance rules.”
I get it now. I’m happy for him, really. I thought I’d be angry, but it makes so much sense now.
“You did it, Ben,” I say. “This is your chance. Cross over, man. For God’s sake, do it. You have no idea how much she loves you.”
“Don’t say that,” Ben says.
Enough of this. I didn’t get killed to sit here and bandy the obvious with Ben. I set the bone bead on a rock at the edge of the river and a grab a bigger rock. I’ll make his choice for him. Before he can say anything I slam one rock into the other, and the veil is blown open with a staggering crack, like all the thunder in the world saved up for one massive explosion. It sloshes the river like a child would a bucket of water and kicks the sand into a dust-devil frenzy until we’re thrown to the ground.
When both of us can stand again, and the sand of the riverbank is settled enough to see, we find the veil is parted. Not in the way that it parted to take me across, either. It’s as if a hole has been blown completely through it. No rules need apply for this one time, in order to right the balance of years and years of the coyote prowling and taking what wasn’t his to take. As if in emphasis, the five souls he stole seem to crawl from the rock where we shattered the bead. Bill, Burner, and all the rest. They pay us no mind but go directly to the river, which is where I should be.
“Go, Ben,” I say.
“Don’t say that!” Ben screams.
“Then just cross!”
“I can’t,” Ben says, sobbing. He drops to the sand. “I can’t.”
“Why?”
“Because I belong here, and you belong there.”
“Are you kidding me? Belong there? They don’t need me. I spent a year of my life wiring a goddamn trailer hitch. I’ve got a fourteen-year-old boy who doesn’t care if I’m alive or dead. And as for Caroline, she’s spent five straight years just trying to talk to you. She’d kill to have just one moment of what I’m doing right now. So cross over. Take the bell from Grant. Take the burden from both of them. You could be everything to them, the Walker and a father and a husband.”
“That’s not how it works. I know that now.” Ben’s hands are limply brushing the sand, his knees digging divots. “I don’t know what else to say except that when you thought you were spinning your wheels, you were winning her heart. Both of them. You were building a family, and you didn’t even realize it.”
Ben comes to some sort of decision, and he stands up. He looks at me in a way not entirely different from the way he looked before, when he grappled with the coyote.
“What are you doing, Ben? Think for a second.”
“Oh, I’ve thought,” he says. “I get a lot of time to think. Sometimes I feel like it’s all I ever do. And I’ve made my decision.”
I back up, look toward the river. I can feel its warmth calling to me, but Ben’s voice pulls me back.
“I think a lot about my grandmother these days, about the stories she told me.” He swings slowly to the right, pacing in the still-fresh tracks of the coyote. I realize he’s herding me. “My favorite, always, is about the Slayer Twins. Have you heard of them?”
“Ben, this thing isn’t going to stay open forever.”
He ignores me. “All the young Navajo kids love the Slayer Twins. Monster Slayer and Born For Water are their names. We used to pretend we were fighting with them, running around with sticks, slapping at yucca and dirt like they were the monsters the twins were sent to fight.”
I start to walk toward the river without realizing it. I’m almost at the bank when Ben steps in front of me and shoves me back. He’s not gentle either.
“They’re the twin sons of Changing Woman. She’s the Big Deal for us. Basically the Earth itself. And the twins, they had this huge job to do. They had to rid the earth of monsters like the thing we just dragged to the river. So that people could live their lives.”
He’s backing me up now, so I just rush at him. He grabs me, and we grapple for a minute while the souls behind us swirl and hop. Ben gets me in a headlock pretty quickly. I never claimed to be a good fighter. I’m facing the river again, and its pull is enough to start me writhing and kicking, but Ben flips me around so that I face the veil again. He presses my face to his chest.
“The Slayer Twins cleared the earth so we people could live there, but I always wondered what then? I asked Gam, when I was a kid, what happens if the monsters come back.”
Ben’s dragging me toward the break in the veil. I hit him in the arm, in the shoulder, in the face. He doesn’t flinch.
“You wanna know what she said?”
I spin Ben around again so his back is at the veil. He’s right there. He could go through. I get this wild idea to just push with my legs and fling him backward, but as soon as I tense he reads me and flips me facing forward. Facing the veil myself. The scene just beyond the veil is the hospital for half a heartbeat. The room where Ben died. That’s where he would step back to. He’d walk out of ABQ General whole again. But now that I face it fully the scene shifts. Now I see my body lying in the street, and Grant’s body stirring slightly next to me, both of us resting in my blood. Ben sees what I see.
