The Wind Thief (Vanished, #4), page 4
As big as our jobs are, I know his is infinitely bigger. I can’t expect him to be around us much, especially with our history, but the last time I felt even a whisper from Ben was four years and eight months ago. I could feel him lingering after a young Navajo boy bled out here from injuries when his idiot friend rolled a truck racing on IRR9. I felt him then, like a breeze on the back of my neck, but not since. And people have died in the time between. Maybe he’s doing the touch-and-go version of things now. Who knows?
For a minute, I think Owen might somehow be hurt. He used to have a bit of an inferiority complex when it came to Ben. But Owen doesn’t seem to care. Eventually, he nods in agreement.
“Except for Ben,” he echoes.
Sometimes, I forget Owen could miss Ben as much as I do, in his own way.
“I had twenty patients today,” I say. “Nine of them had lost time, fainting, or passing out.”
Owen nods. “Same with me, more or less.”
He somehow saw nearly as many patients as I in a little over half the time and all with maybe a twentieth of the visible sweat under his armpits.
“I took a blood sample from Kai before I got chased out of the Bodrey place. Ran it down with the lab tech upstairs. She’s got all the markers of a diabetic.”
Of course. That would explain a lot of what Grant described about Kai’s listlessness and the fainting spells, even seizures if her blood sugar got too low. But Owen says this without any sense of victory in diagnosis. I set aside for a moment the way he just dropped in “chased out of the Bodrey place” because it’s looking more and more like he and I need to have a sit-down about the things we’ve both seen over the past twenty-four hours.
“Makes sense,” I say. “Give her some fast-acting insulin, get her a glucose monitor. If you teach her how to take care of herself, she’ll be right as rain.”
Owen makes an exceptionally noncommittal noise even as he nods. “Maybe.”
That’s all he has to say. He may not see smoke, but he understands that something more is going on here. People seem drained, tired on the inside. There’s no quick fix for the harsh side of Rez life.
He leans against me, and I lean against him.
“We’ll figure this out,” I say.
He allows himself one minute. I know only because I’m watching the old wall clock tick, its white face gone yellow, the second hand as red as blood.
After that minute, Owen straightens his tie, sits up into a slouch, and sips his coffee with a grimace. “Let’s finish this day out, shall we?”
He holds out a hand and helps me up.
4
GRANT ROMER
I don’t get looked at much, walkin’ around the Arroyo these days, and I take that as a good thing. My acceptance here, such as it is, sort of went like this: first time I came through those battered and rusted horse gates set out in the middle of nowhere, separating the dirt of the Arroyo from the dirt of the rest of the Rez, I was fourteen years old. Mom, Dad, and I came up on this place in the dead of night, and I was too young to be afraid even when the Smoker told us to turn around. For one, we were desperate for help only the Arroyo elders could give—on the hunt for a skinwalker, our lives turned upside down—for another, I had my bird.
Since that first visit, the place sort of got a hold of me: the way the rutted road magics itself together at the gate, the dirt packed basically to concrete over the decades. How the people who live here—the poorest of the poor Diné for miles around—still manage to add personal touches to their car camp or tent or lean-to. An herb box here. A wind chime there. Bright-red rain boots in a neat row outside an Airstream that looks older than the hills around it. Crow feathers tied to strips of dried sinew, fluttering in the wind like leashed pieces of the night sky.
Mom and Dad sometimes have a hard time getting past the shady side of this place. It’s not huge, but it is there—mostly boosted catalytic converters, stripped wiring, and the like, plus the drugs and booze. If you don’t go lookin’ for it, it won’t go lookin’ for you, but they still wouldn’t let me near the place alone for years, no matter how many times I asked, not until Joey Flatwood came back.
After his banishment was revoked, he moved back in with a vengeance, right next to the elder brothers Tsosi and Tsasa. He drove his thirty-year-old Suburban to a spot that had been cleared for him, threw it in park, and never started it again. That’s probably a good thing because I remember how it hacked its way through those gates that first day. I think it knew it had one last big trip in it, from his exile to his return, then it sat down like an old wolf and gave up its ghost. He anchored it with cinder blocks, swapped the tires for old wooden barrels, and gutted the interior to make himself what you might call an Arroyo studio apartment.
Mom and Dad were okay with me visiting the Arroyo as long as Joey was there. And Joey made a point of always being there whenever I asked if I could come by and grill up some backstrap or roast some good ol’ Hebrew National hot dogs over the fire while the elder brothers told stories. At first, I had to have Joey translate every word. Then some time passed, and soon I was only asking for every other then maybe one or two here or there.
Now, I go lots of places Mom and Dad don’t know about. I’ve been fixing up cars across half the Rez and hunting for parts across the other half, but they’re still squirrelly about me coming here without Joey, even ten years later.
They might be happy to hear that I’m still a little uncomfortable too, even with my bird perched on my shoulder the way he was that first day.
Joey’s place is easy to spot. For the past year, he’s been working on painting what I humbly believe is the most badass custom design in the Four Corners region, on the side of his Suburban. A crow spans the entire length of the car, dripping in the colors of a New Mexico desert sunset, eyes a black so deep they look lacquered.
When I walk up, he’s going over a wing tip carefully with an old brush. Two flags flutter on a pine-wood pole over his head: a threadbare and faded flag of the state of New Mexico, the sunburst emblem tagged with some graffiti he won’t translate for me no matter how much I ask, and above that, an equally faded flag of the Navajo Nation homeland—the Diné Bikeyah—framed between the four sacred peaks.
Makes sense that no one flag would really capture this place. The people who live here are certainly a part of all these places, but they’re also a little world unto themselves.
Joey never stops his slow, careful painting even as he says, “She’s out back with the twins.”
I pause at the border of his camp, where four rocks mark the four cardinal directions, flat things the size of dinner plates dusted with corn pollen. “How is she?”
Joey carefully sets his brush back on the chipped plate at his knees. He stands and wipes his hands off on his oil-stained canvas workpants. Joey is tall for a Navajo, almost as tall as me. But where I have what might be generously called ropey strength, he’s thick. Chaco tells me Joey was smaller not all that long ago. The word he used was “diminished.” That was back when he was trying to make sense of the bell I wear around my neck and the crow he wears in a leather totem pouch around his. Back when he was trying to make sense of how a little girl he loved like a sister could just disappear. The tribe blamed him. So did Ben. But he fought through. He knew otherwise.
“Hard to say,” he says and nods at Chaco in a silent greeting that I feel the bird return with a bob of his head. “One minute, she’s fine, chatting like family, working the kettle grill like she was born to it. The next, she’s… not there. Distant. She says she just needed a place to rest, but that was hours ago. She just woke up even though the sun is high in the sky.”
Chaco chirrups low but says nothing, sort of like a bird grumble.
Tsosi and Tsasa live in the double-wide next door to Joey. They’re the kind of old that rumors are made of, but they can still move about and love to hold court at their firepit out back, at the lip of a drop-off where, at night, the stars seem to touch the ground. A woman named Maya takes care of them. She’s not related, but here, you don’t have to be related to be family.
Joey nods toward their camp, but his eyes are distant, caught somewhere on the thin horizon line. He’s been as quiet as my bird recently. I shake my shoulder to give Chaco some life, like he’s a clip-on toy, but he just moves and settles again with me, watching along the same line of sight as Joey.
Across the Arroyo, about one good football throw away, an old camper van is packing up. A woman is cranking away at a tattered overhang, bringing it down with a rusty squeal. The man she’s with kicks out tire stops that look dug into the fine Arroyo dust like ticks. Their old truck is running but has a bad belt rattle.
“The White River folk are packing up?” I ask.
Joey nods slowly.
“How long they been here?”
“Long time.”
Chaco chirps at my shoulder. “Those two, twenty years. But there’s been at least one White River at the Arroyo for over a hundred. Until now.”
Joey can’t hear Chaco, but he exhales slowly through his nose as if he gets it all the same, his jaw tense. “A strange wind blows through the Arroyo these days, Grant Romer.” He steps in closer, smelling of paint and sage smoke and clean sweat. “Has the bell spoken to you?”
I thumb it over my shirt and lift it up and off me a bit, out of habit. Usually, if things are acting up between the lands of the living and the dead, the bell reacts in some way. It gets either hot or cold. Sometimes, it feels more real. Nothing like that has happened recently, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t noticing it more and more. It’s not heavier, really—just somehow tighter around my neck even though it’s on the same woven leather it’s hung from for years.
“Hard to say.”
Joey nods as if he expected as much. The slamming of a car door echoes across the pit between, and at almost the same time, a chunk of dirt at the lip of the White River camp crumbles down the steep side of the Arroyo there.
Now that I see it, the Arroyo is crumbling at lots of places around the lip, mostly by empty campsites. I can’t remember if this many plots were empty before.
“Come,” Joey says. “They are expecting you.” He opens the little swinging back gate and holds it for me. “I will return shortly.”
“Where you goin’?”
Joey pulls his long hair back and ties it with a beaded strip of leather that glitters black in the sun. “I need to consult with the Circle.”
With one last look at Chaco, he ducks into the back of his camper, reaches into his totem pouch, and snaps out of sight.
I look at Chaco. “What was that all about?”
Chaco walks across my back to the other shoulder then turns around again, the bird version of pacing. “This place has a permanence, the Arroyo most of all. When things change here, it’s like a canary in a coal mine—which, by the way, is a phrase birdkind do not like. Joey thinks all things are connected. And he’s got a pretty good track record when it comes to being right about this stuff.”
“Permanence? It’s a car camp. People are always coming and going. Half of this crowd are junkies.”
Chaco pauses and looks at me from an inch away. “And the other half? I have a bird’s-eye view, a very old one. There used to be a pattern to the coming and going. But lately, the balance is all out of whack…” He looks into forever away, the way only a crow can. “Remember when we dealt with thin places, way back? The Arroyo is the opposite of that. It has roots that go deeper than you can see. Roots that prop up a lot. Get it?”
“The longer I wear this thing around my neck, the less I get.”
Chaco’s laugh is a hollow clicking sound that should be as scary as hell but is actually kinda catching. “Talk to Kai. Whatever’s happening, I feel like it’s happening around her.”
I wait for more, but that’s all Chaco says. Instead, he just bobs a little, strangely impatient for a thing that’s been around since the dawn of time.
Kai sits in a rusted lawn chair underneath a canvas tarp by the firepit out back. A smoldering bundle of sage floats thin wisps of smoke that twist and turn before being snatched away by the cross-canyon breeze. The Smoker is leaning against the fence, wrapping a second sage bundle carefully, unlit cigarette dangling from his lips. The elder twins sit to either side of Kai, dressed in layers of flannel in that way the really old do, no matter what the temperature. She glances up as Maya announces me to the brothers. She looks spacey, like she’s half asleep and still trying to place herself. Eventually, she allows a smile. When I first saw her that day back when we were in high school, I wanted nothing more than to have that smile hit me every day. We’ve been together for years now, on the low, and it still feels brand new every time, even if the rest of her looks dog tired.
“I been tryin’ to get a hold of you,” I say.
“Hos has too,” she says, “which is why I left my phone at home.”
The way we’re talking through sage smoke lends the whole conversation a strange, dreamy quality. Whatever rest she aimed to get here, it wasn’t enough.
“Plus,” she adds, “you can always find me if you really want to. You got Chaco.” She gives my bird a wink that flutters his plumage a bit.
Kai knows about Chaco and me and the bell. She doesn’t quite get it, but she believes it. Course, it’s kinda hard not to believe when the same bird’s been flying in the skies above us for years now.
I take a seat in an ancient folding chair that looks like it saw its last tailgate before I was born. I pull out an insulin pump and what Dad called a continuous glucose monitor from my dusty road bag. “I brought you something. Dad says it’ll help.”
Kai looks at all the gear in a daze. “Okay…” she says, drawing it out.
I expected her to be wary. She’s old school in a lot of ways, but it’s a big thing to drop on someone, that they have a condition they’ll need to work on their whole life, one that could kill them otherwise.
“So that’s one opinion,” she says, allowing it.
“He thinks it’s Type 1. Diabetes hits indigenous people pretty hard, in their twenties, usually. He said you could have it without even knowing it. Nothing you’ve done. He’ll come by and teach you how to use it. Set it and forget it. Sorta.”
I’m rambling, and I know I’ve said too much too fast, but I don’t know how else to do it. I want to add that I’ll be there every step of the way, helping her, that we can do this together—forever, if she wants. But I think that might be way too much.
She rubs at her brow. “I’m still getting a second opinion.”
“Dad’s usually right about this stuff—”
She shakes her head. “Not from a doctor. From a healer. From the brothers.”
Tsosi and Tsasa look up at me, their faces inscrutable, pinched with age. So that’s why she’s here. She’s getting the second opinion right now.
I clear my throat, feeling a bit stupid. “You want me to leave?”
Kai focuses hard on her hand, looking at it like it’s a stranger’s. She seems to be strugglin’ to keep it still. When she lets out a breath, relaxing even a little bit, her hand starts to tremble. It’s nothing crazy, but it’s there, almost like she’s shivering, but only in her left hand.
“Not unless you want to,” she says quietly.
I manage to stammer out, “Never. I never want to. Leave, I mean.”
I would probably say more, but thankfully, Tsosi nods assent in a way that settles me back in my chair.
Tsosi turns to Tsasa and says something in low, slow Navajo that I don’t catch. Tsasa grunts in response and pumps at the inner coals of the fire with a tattered bellows, using his stocking feet. The sage puffs white and strong, watering my eyes. If this is what I think it is, they’re going to try to diagnose if she’s a hand trembler. If she is, then it opens up a whole can of worms. That’s an affliction but also a power. Tremblers diagnose tremblers, but they also cure them. If they don’t catch it in time, it becomes a dangerous power—an illness, not a gift. She might need a healing ceremony, maybe a Mothway or something, which takes time and means lining up the hogan and the singers and getting together some cash—cash none of us really have.
I take a breath to stop the downward spiral. One step at a time. Slow ain’t necessarily bad, if it works. Like fixing a flooded engine.
The smoke is thick as Tsasa gestures for Kai to move her chair closer and holds out a hand. That’s when Chaco moves on my shoulder, ticking his head at a tiny angle as if catching a sound too high for the rest of us.
“What is it?” I ask, mind to mind.
Chaco puffs up and settles again, teetering his head back and forth. “Hosteen is coming,” he says.
“You kiddin’ me?” Talk about terrible timing.
Chaco turns toward the gate then stills. “I can hear that truck of his a mile away.”
I dodged running into Hos out on Crooked Snake, and I could probably do it again. But that’s not what Joey would do. That’s not what my gut tells me to do neither.
“Well, hell. Guess this is happening.”
“What’s happening?” Kai asks, watching her hand as Tsosi takes it gently in both of his.
“Looks like your brother is stopping by. And my guess is he ain’t here out of love.”
Kai takes her hand back. “I thought I had more time,” she says softly.
In the quiet waft of smoke, I can hear the truck approaching. The Smoker is looking everywhere but at us and puffing on his cig like there’s no tomorrow.
Kai stares daggers at him. “You called him, didn’t you.”
“He told me to,” the Smoker says around his cigarette, tying and retying a sage bundle that doesn’t need it, still refusing to meet her eye. “I mean, you know how Hos is. Plus…”
“Plus what?” she asks, with a bit of that old fight in her.
“Plus, he said if I helped him, Jacob Dark Sky would help me.”
He crushes some of the sage and sprinkles it at his feet then clears his throat with a cough, which might be a bit more than just a cough, the way I’m seein’ things now.
