The Coyote Way, page 8
part #3 of Vanished Series
“This one is still used,” Chaco says.
“This is my clan’s hogan. Gam brought me here once, when I first found out I had cancer all those years ago. She sang over me. Performed a Way chant that I thought was for healing. But now I’m not so sure. I think she knew I was going to die.”
I point at the swept floor beyond the fire. “Two old men sandpainted the Holy People right there, but there was a fifth figure in addition to the four. A dark figure with turquoise eyes. I saw Ana during the chant. Up until about a week ago I still thought she was a vision. Now I think maybe I really saw her. I think the chant called her and opened my eyes for a short time. Maybe Gam wanted me to see what was in store for me so it’d be easier for me to take it when the time came.”
“A Way chant,” Chaco said softly.
“That’s right. We have a bunch of them. The Blessingway and the Evilway are the most famous, but there are a ton more. Enemyway, Nightway, Shootingway. There was even a Ravenway and a Dogway a long time ago, and more that are lost to time. Each calls the Holy Family’s attention in a different way, for a different reason. Brings them to the song.”
“The Coyote Way,” Chaco says, amazed. “It’s a song. A Navajo chant.”
“Why not? And think about this: the coyote is untouchable right now. It’s a skinwalker. It can be anyone and anywhere. But what if we could bring it right here? Right to this hogan. What if we could call it?”
“We could trap it,” Chaco says excitedly.
“Why not?” I say again.
Chaco and I stare at the cold fire pit in silence. It’s the logistics of the thing that are tricky. If there ever was a Coyoteway chant, it’s an ancient memory now. The instructions might be in the black book, but is it worth risking Caroline’s life for them? And even if we did know what to do, what to say, it takes talent and preparation to sing. Gam brought Ana to me, but she was an accomplished Singer with decades of experience under her belt and a full Singer’s pouch. And what if we actually catch the damn thing? What then? We got a lot on our plate, and time is running out.
Still, I can’t help but smile a little. Maybe we caught a break. And what’s more, maybe we can catch another. Somebody is keeping this hogan clean. If we can find them, maybe they can help us before this becomes coyote country once and for all.
Chapter 13
Grant Romer
I’m talking to Chaco on the way to school. That’s right. I’m going to school. And not school where Owen is the math teacher and the science teacher and the history teacher and whatever other teacher, either, with Caroline showing up every now and then to tell me I should read more literature and do some art. Like she reads much more than her magazines anyway. No, this is a real school, with real kids, and real lockers, and real desks, and a real football team.
Chaco ain’t so keen on the idea. Sorry. He isn’t so happy with the idea. Texans get keen. Other people get happy. He sort of slow-floats above me, riding thermals, but we still talk. Every now and then he passes behind a slew of other crows floating the thermals too as they careen to get out of his way.
“Something is wrong with this place,” he says. “I can feel it.”
“Something is wrong with every place,” I say, muttering some of the words, thinking the rest. I’ve been doing a lot of talking out loud to Chaco when I don’t need to. Now that I’m around other kids, I need to keep him on the downlow.
“You know what I mean, bro.” And he’s right. I do. I can see paw prints all around Crownpoint High if I look close enough. The town itself is pretty bad, but this place is bad in particular. It’s a good thing nobody else notices what I see. They might not leave their houses. Which would suck because I want to meet them. That girl in particular. I didn’t catch her last name, but I sure remember her first name. Kai. It sounds good. It sounds like how she looks. I don’t speak any Navajo yet, but if I was to guess, I’d say a Kai is that little tiny smile she has on the corner of her mouth. Or maybe a Kai is when you wink your eye without winking your eye, like she can.
“Well, you watch my back, right? I mean, if something is going on here, one of us needs to figure out what.”
“I can’t always be there for you. I do my best, but you’re growing up, man. You’re in all sorts of different situations now, and it’s all I can do just to keep up.”
“Maybe I don’t always need you lookin’ after me,” I say, and the way Chaco suddenly gets distant, in the sky and in my mind, makes me immediately regret it. After an awkward silence Chaco chimes in again.
“The things that are coming after you aren’t always as easy to spot as the agents. Snakes don’t always look like snakes, Grant.”
“I’ll be careful, man. Why can’t you be happy for me? I’m finally off the boat.”
And with those words hanging in the air, I walk under the eagle painted above the doors of Crownrock High for my first day of school.
They pair me with a white kid to show me around the place, which I’m sure they think will make me more comfortable or something, but it isn’t exactly what I was looking for. His name is Mick, and he’s as pale and scrawny as I am. He wears these baggy gangster clothes, big printed T-shirts that go down past his butt, and baggy b-ball shorts with huge work boots, and they sort of swallow him up. We talked for a minute or two at the town meeting in the gym. I meet him in the hall outside of the front office after I hand in my enrollment papers.
“It’s you,” he says. “I wondered if I’d see you again. Thought maybe you’d be scared off the place.”
“Scared off?” I ask, trying not to sound nervous. “Why?”
“Well, you saw. At the meeting. There aren’t a lot of white kids here. Matter of fact, I think you’re number ten or so in the whole school now.”
“I don’t mind.”
“Not yet you don’t. But you just walked through the doors.”
I don’t know what to say to that, so I just shrug.
“C’mon,” he says. “Your locker is over here.”
We walk down the halls and everything is quiet. Mick is quiet. I can feel Chaco nearby, but if I can’t see him I have trouble talking to him, so even he’s quiet. I can see everyone already in class as I pass the doors.
“It’s first period right now. Which I hate, so thanks for getting me out of it.”
I can’t tell if Mick is being friendly or not. I think maybe he is. He looks at the ground a lot, almost like he’s following some invisible tracks of his own. I think he’s just one of those people who doesn’t like looking straight at you. “You’ll start at second period.” He snatches my schedule from my hand. “Which looks like Geometry for you. Good luck with that shit. Room 108, right over there, after the bell rings.”
We walk past a row of small lockers, some of them hanging open. A few have little hearts and hand-drawn signs on them with things like Go 18! Beat Sargaso!
“What’s Sargaso?” I ask.
“High school in Santa Fe. We always play them in football the Thursday before the market. It’s a big stupid deal. Why do you wear all black?”
He asks this like it’s right in line with football and big stupid deals.
“Just like it is all. Doesn’t stain.”
Mick doesn’t laugh. He does nod, though, like it was good advice or something. I think my sense of humor is getting a little dusty. More Navajo, hopefully.
“Here’s yours,” he says, popping his fist on the farthest locker in the line. “Upperclassmen get all the good ones,” he says, reading my mind. “Your code is in your folder. Put your shit in there, we still got a few minutes to walk.”
Mick shows me the cafeteria. “There’s where you get the food, there’s where you eat it. Can you eat lunch?”
“You mean like do I have lunch?”
“Can you pay for it. You got money?”
“A little,” I say. Owen gave me twenty for lunch, even after I told him I wanted to walk solo.
“A’ight, well, if you got money trouble, they help you out. There’s programs and stuff.” He shoves his hands in his pockets. “But if you do got money, keep that shit to yourself.”
We walk again without talking much. Just the sounds of Mick’s boots squeaking against the tracked floor. He points out the art-and-music hall, where I see the wooden framing of a booth.
“It’s the Crownpoint booth for the market.” He sneers. “I gotta help paint it ’cause I got busted skipping first period last week. If you wanna check it out after class, I could use the company.”
He vaguely gestures out a big window in the rear toward the sports fields. I see one half of a dusty baseball diamond and take his word on a football field just out of sight. All in all the place is old, pretty small, and well worn. Discolored paths snake along the concrete floor where kids have walked for years. But I don’t mind. I’m used to old places. Pap’s house was old before he bought it. I’m used to small places too. I live in a car—a big car, but still a car. As for well worn, well, I got no problem with that. The bell I wear around my neck might be the most well-worn thing on this planet.
Mick looks at his watch. A big, plastic, cheap-looking thing. “Shit,” he says. “Time’s up.”
The bell rings. The period switches over, and a couple hundred kids go from in the classrooms to in the halls in a blink. I try to keep my eye out for anything weird, or for anyone eyeing me funny, sensing the bell, but all I see is kids. Tons of them. More than I’ve seen in my life. And all of them look at me as they pass: I’m the new kid. One of a handful of white kids in the whole place. Of course they’re gonna look at me. But still I feel as hot as I’ve ever felt in my life. And that’s before I spot Kai.
She’s walking out of a classroom, talking with two other girls at her side, and putting a notebook away into a woven bag at her hip. She’s wearing a Lobos Football T-shirt and very short pink shorts. The way the shirt falls, it almost looks like she’s not wearing shorts at all. She laughs at something one of her friends says, then she looks up, and then she sees me staring like a cow. I know I should look away, pretend I was just scanning the hall, but I can’t. She recognizes me. She looks surprised, but not in a bad way. She opens her mouth a little, then she’s surrounded by a group of older guys who come laughing down the hallway, and soon all of them go off in the same direction.
When I turn back to Mick, he’s already looking at me with a smirk on his face. His mouth twitches a little, like he wants to say something, but he just shakes his head. The hallway is already clearing out. The passing period is winding down.
“Remember, you’re in Room 108. Good luck, lover boy.”
Chapter 14
Caroline Adams
I’m freezing. I mean, I know I get cold. I always have. I’m the type of girl to blow dry my feet for ten minutes after I do my hair, just because I can. In the winter, if it were socially acceptable for me to walk around in one of those huge Carhartt monkey suits the rig workers have, I would do it. I’d sleep in it too. But it’s August, in the desert, and I’m way too cold for August in the desert.
The book almost killed me. The thought of how close I came to having my life sucked out of me in the thin place makes me a bit dizzy. So now I’m cold and dizzy. It’s been a few days since that night, and I’m still not right. I came close to slipping away forever. Really, really close. I try not to tip Owen and Grant off about just how close, but I think they know. It might have something to do with the fact that I reheat my steaming-hot tea in the microwave every thirty seconds. Or that I’m drinking cup after cup of steaming-hot tea in the first place, in the co-captain’s chair, under the blazing windshield.
Anybody else wouldn’t have made it back. I don’t want to toot my own horn here, but it’s the truth. I had to coax my own smoke back to life, which is tough, because I can’t exactly see it on myself. All I know is I felt it guttering, like a little spark at the bottom of a pile of straw, only the pile is on the desert plains and a big wind is trying to scatter it far and wide. I had to put my hands around it, breathe on it, whisper to it, just like I did with the agents when they first tumbled out of the break in the river, when they were half dead too.
I focused on thoughts that would warm me. Not things like tropical islands and Carhartt monkey suits, which would warm my body, but things that would warm my soul. Things like remembering Grant when he stood like a little superhero, holding the bell out in front of us to protect us in the Texas desert. Things like Ben. Everything I can remember about Ben, actually. But the problem is, I’m remembering less and less about Ben. I have a bunch of core memories that I go back to all the time. Playing cards with him when he was getting chemo, holding him in the dry grass of his backyard when he got sick, kissing him for the first and last time before he left me. These are all important to me, but I’ve been bringing them out of their special memory box and shining them up too much, and I think I’ve forgotten other stuff. I had a lot more Ben material once. I know I did. Every moment I spent with him was special in some way, but all I have now are the superstars, and the more I bring them out, the less shiny and the more bronzed they get. The rest seem to have faded altogether. That, more than anything, reminds me of all the years that have gone by.
The Ben memories helped, but they didn’t bring me back. They’re more the type of thing I talk to James and Allen about over a cup of French press up at Friday Harbor. They’re great “last thoughts,” the kind of things you run up the flagpole right as you’re checking out, and I thought I was checking out, until a stupid memory popped into my head. It was of Owen, frazzled and red faced and damp about the ironed neck of his button-down, trying to make a twenty-point U-turn in the boat when we were lost on some Navajo road west of Chaco Canyon, and even though I couldn’t laugh with my frozen mouth I ended up laughing with my soul. And just like that, the icy-iron grip of the thin place and the creeping insanity of the book were snapped. I’d live. What can I say? I guess I have a soft spot for frazzled men.
Speaking of frazzled, Owen has been in a constant state of mild frazzlement for days now, ever since he slapped that book away and pulled me back. He grasps my fingers like straws whenever he sees me, as if they were thermometers that could measure my core temperature. He does this without talking sometimes, just reaches over and grasps my fingers, and, yes, they’re cold. I tell him that they’re always cold, which is true, but I can tell he doesn’t buy it. His smoke is so gentle. It’s this softly resting blue, like a cloud plunked over a mountain, afraid to leave. Which is why he’s really not happy about what we’re about to do.
“Are you sure they’re all gonna show up? I mean, if it’s just you and me, we’re really underprepared for this. Criminally underprepared,” Owen says. He’s pacing the main room of the boat, his head cocked at forty-five degrees so it doesn’t bump the ceiling.
“Chaco got word out. Everyone will be there,” I say, trying to grab him as he passes, but he’s lost in his analytical world again. The one that measures outcomes and risk and determines best practice. The oncologist’s world.
“You just stopped shivering in your sleep, Caroline.”
“We don’t have any more time. You’ve seen this place. It’s falling apart. And Grant is in the middle of it. Ben thinks this could be the key to trapping this thing. If there’s a chance we can get any more info out of the book, we have to take it.” I check the dash clock on the boat. It’s almost time.
Owen mutters to himself, still pacing. I hear the words Grant wouldn’t even let me walk him halfway and goddamn book, but I know he’s in with me. He’s pulling his totem pouch from inside his shirt. He chose to wear it there because his neckties used to cover up the bulge. He doesn’t wear ties anymore, but he still keeps it there. He has racks and racks of ties in the closet that he hasn’t touched in years, but he still keeps them too.
“Are you ready?” I ask gently.
“No.”
“Owen.”
“Fine.”
I count down from ten. I have the book in one hand, flipped open to the Coyote Way page. At one, I grab my totem. Owen phases right along with me, his hand grasped around my fingers.
The bite is immediate and twice as painful as I’ve ever felt it, so soon.
“Don’t look at it!” Owen screams. He brushes my cheek with the hand that holds his totem and nudges my line of sight toward him. “Not yet!”
We’re alone. Each second that ticks by makes us more alone. I think maybe I was wrong and Owen was right. Maybe this was another stupid decision in a long line of stupid decisions with this stupid book. And if you peg this book as stupid, and me as stupid for getting it, then the whole house of my life starts to look like a stupid deck of cards.
I shake my head. That’s just the melancholy of this place talking. I can’t let it win. But there’s no denying that we’re here alone and I’m holding on to a mental time bomb with the hand that doesn’t hold my totem. I stare into Owen’s eyes, as muted and sepia-blown as they are, and he stares into mine, both of us willing each other not even to glance at the book. Another interminable number of seconds ticks by. I want to leave. I want to blink back. I dip my gaze, but Owen squeezes my fingers. I look up at him again.
Then there’s a weird sucking sensation, like when you’re bobbing in the ocean and caught in the retreat of a wave that pulls your legs out from under you. Another hand falls on my shoulder, bracing me. I turn to find Joey Flatwood watching me with calm eyes, his long black hair spread out behind him like a ribbon, splintering into fragmented strands of gray that blend into the thin place. He says nothing, only clamps his hand onto my shoulder and nods.
