Child of the sky vanishe.., p.1
Child of the Sky (Vanished, #5), page 1
CHILD OF THE SKY
VANISHED, BOOK 5
B. B. GRIFFITH
Publication Information
Child of the Sky (Vanished, #5)
Copyright © 2023 by Griffith Publishing LLC
Ebook ISBN: 979-8-9874270-2-6
Paperback ISBN: 979-8-9874270-3-3
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. The Walker
3. Caroline Adams
4. Owen Bennet
5. Kai Bodrey
6. Caroline Adams
7. Owen Bennet
8. The Walker
9. Caroline Adams
10. Kai Bodrey
11. Grant Romer
12. The Walker
13. Caroline Adams
14. Kai Bodrey
15. Grant Romer
16. Owen Bennet
17. Kai Bodrey
18. The Walker
19. Caroline Adams
20. Kai Bodrey
21. The Walker
22. Owen Bennet
23. Grant Romer
24. Owen Bennet
25. The Walker
26. Kai Bodrey
27. Owen Bennet
28. The Walker
29. Kai Bodrey
30. The Walker
31. Owen Bennet
32. Grant Romer
33. Kai Bodrey
34. The Walker
Author’s Note
About the Author
Also by B. B. Griffith
For Murphy.
A spirit warrior from day one.
“In pursuit of old age and happiness I follow the scent of rainfall and approach the place where the lines of rain are darkest.”
- Diné Bahaneʼ
The Navajo Creation Story
(Paul G. Zolbrod, trans.)
1
GRANT ROMER
I nudge open the gate to the Arroyo with the grille of my truck. The rusty chain that used to keep the swinging doors hooked to the pine poles on either side drags a thin line through dirt made soft by early spring rain.
Somebody always manned the gate, back in the before time, when we had something to man. Usually, it was the Smoker, who would eye you up and down for the length of a cigarette before decidin’ to let you through or not. Now, they swing whichever way the wind tells them.
Beyond is the Arroyo—or what’s left of it. The half-moon lip of the canyon used to glow like a river in the moonlight. Campfires would burn here and there. Gennies powered soft lights inside thirty or so trailers all spread out the same way they’d been for decades.
Eight months ago, a hundred or more people called this place home. It was alive. Now, it’s more like the kind of ghost town you come up on way off the map: a few structures here and there are falling apart by degrees, leaning relics. Blowing trash is bleached by the sun and wind.
Echoes of what was.
The ground shifts underneath my tires, and I spin out more dirt than I’d like. It’s not the tires. It’s the ground—more sand than old hardpack these days. The weird damp is chipping away at this place, and there ain’t no foot traffic left to hold the ground together right.
Finding Joey isn’t hard. His car camp and the elder twins’ double-wide next door are all that’s left, beacons of soft light in the dyin’ afternoon. I try to come out here at least once a week. Maria still takes care of the twins, God bless her, and Joey takes care of all three of ’em, but nobody checks in on Joey. And sometimes, Joey needs checkin’ in on.
He took it hard—the loss of the Arroyo. Because that’s what it is, gone. The people that lived here were stolen, but they walked out themselves, followin’ a medicine man from another world called Jacob Dark Sky.
The roots of the Arroyo are its people. When most all of them left, the land started to slide away bit by bit, back into the desert. And then these rains came, which made things worse.
So I’m checkin’ in on Joey, yeah. But I’m checkin’ in on the Arroyo too. Every time I nudge these gates open, I half expect to find nothin’ but flat desert, and if that ever happens, I really don’t know what I’m gonna do with myself.
In the passenger’s seat to my right, Chaco shivers. He’s not a fuzzy little blob anymore. But he’s not what you or I would call a full-grown crow either. He’s that awkward in-between: a bit patchy, a bit glossy—big feet, small wings.
“Damp cold in the desert. Makes no sense,” he says.
He’s talking to me, mind to mind, but he’s also talking to himself, tellin’ himself what some old part of his endless soul remembers about this place. He’s a new bird, but he comes from a long line of old, old birds, and they’re all in there somewhere, even if they can sometimes be hard to find.
I gotta agree with him. “Can’t say I ever seen it this wet before.”
He inches up closer to the vents, closing his eyes and letting them blow hot air over the fine feathers of his head. He’s only about the size of my hand, so he’s gotta reach to feel the air, and he almost topples to the floormat.
“Can’t say I’ve seen the Rez like this before either,” I say. “Dark. Quiet. Like we’re just tryin’ to get it over with. But what, I got no idea.”
“The rain and the quiet are connected,” Chaco says, trying to sound deep, like thirteen-year-old me lookin’ to impress Kai with my zen brush strokes on the float committee back in high school. He’s tryin’.
I can’t help but smile. “No shit?”
“Not even a bit of shit,” Chaco says, fluffing up everything he’s got for that heater vent.
He’s not like he was. But he’s not different, either. He’s new. And he’ll get there—back to the weird desert wizard he was—just like he’ll be able to zip across planes again, to be a guide for us when we’re lost.
But not yet. Right now, it feels like he needs us as much as we need him. Like how I gotta put my hand out to keep him from donking his little bird head on the dash when I brake. But all said and done, I’m just happy to have him here with me in the car, trying to steady himself in that weird bird way as the tires slide and grip. Him and me work. And in this place, people gotta hold on to things that work, things we’re grateful for. They’re what gets us by.
A trail-worn Bronco with mud splashed up to the windows is parked next to Joey’s van on blocks. I recognize that Bronco. Everybody in the Rez does.
I shut off the engine and sit there in the whispering silence the rain makes on my windshield. I wasn’t expecting company.
“What’s the problem?” Chaco asks. “Sani Yokana is just doing his job. I know this.”
“I know, I know.”
Chaco’s longtime chief of police is one of the few remaining threads that hold strong ’round here. He’s been at it since Ben’s time.
“Problem is he’s looking for answers we can’t give,” I say.
I hop out and walk around to get my bird. He steps onto my palm and hops off at my shoulder. He can fly for short distances, but he doesn’t really like to. He prefers the crook of my neck, which is alright by me.
The kerosene lantern underneath Joey’s flagpole is lit up, as usual, but his car camp is dark, and his Navajo Nation flag hangs limp in the rain. Looks like everyone is next door at the twins’.
Joey and I replaced the old wooden front staircase to the elder twins’ double-wide with a ramp around midwinter because they’re way past the age of walkin’ up and down cinderblock stairs to get in and out of their home. The ramp helps, especially since Maria still sweeps it and keeps the fake yellow daisies in the window box clean and bright. She’s the one that opens the door for me and gives me a big hug. I feel it full on, and for a second, it fills that space in the middle of me where the bell was.
That hollow spot is a strange place.
Sometimes, I forget the bell is gone. If I’m with Kai or working on the trucks or walking the Rez with Chaco, sometimes I can go a whole hour without thinkin’ about it. But then I always remember. The feeling is a strange ache, like I slept on my neck wrong, but deeper inside, near my heart.
The worst thing is that the longer I go without it, the more I realize I’m glad it ain’t there.
The bell and me, we got what you might call a complicated relationship.
“Come, come,” Maria says. “They’re all out back.”
“In this shit?” I ask, holding my palm out in the never-ending spit of rain, and when Maria gives me that look on account of the language, I follow with a quick “Sorry.”
Maria sniffs and puts her hands on her hips. “They won’t come in. Maybe you can talk sense into them,” she says.
I pass through the twins’ double-wide, which takes about four steps, and walk out the back to what you might call their backyard although, truth be told, the whole Arroyo is their backyard now. There ain’t nobody else here to say otherwise.
Th
A fire burns in the pit between the twins, as always. The pine smoke is sweet and beats back the grim damp, which makes me feel like I’m not getting rained on for the first time since I can’t really remember.
They’re talking in Diné, but when I come in, the Diné drops off.
“Grant, welcome in,” Chief Yokana says, offering me a seat on the painted stump next to him. “Maybe you can help shed some light on things.” He’s got a beat-up old notebook in one hand and a chewed-up pen in the other. His hair is long and full, the silver strong and bright in the gloom. His black hat sits on his knee, marked at the brim where he’s been taking it on and off for at least a decade but clean as a whistle otherwise. He’s still broad, if a bit thinner these days. Overall, he don’t look his age, which has to be near seventy by now. But his hands don’t lie. They’re spotted even underneath the desert tan, gettin’ knobby, and they shake a bit.
“Shed a light? On what?” I ask even though I know damn well what.
Chief Yokana licks a finger and flips through his old notebook to an earmarked page. He holds it up. “One hundred and eighteen missing.”
Each name is written out, given its own line. He has to flip the page three times to get through them all.
Joey chimes in, “Chief, we told you—”
“A hundred and eighteen,” Yokana says again, cutting him off. “Forty-one cars and trucks and trailers in an impound lot over in Grant. Most of them loaded up with every earthly possession these folks had—but not a one of them claimed. Going on seven months now.”
Tsosi picks up another piece of pinewood and lays it carefully on the fire. The pop and hiss sounds flat in the soggy air.
“I called in a favor with the bureau over in Gallup. Usually, the feds don’t give two shits about missing Indians, but they owed us big for that mess with the impersonated agents all those years ago. I got them to sweep the whole mountain with one of their choppers, look for heat signatures. Even if they’re all dead, a hundred and eighteen bodies oughta be hard to miss from the air.”
He’s waiting for us to chime in, but we ain’t got nothin’ to say that won’t make us look like we’re wrapped up in how the Arroyo folks went missing. Which, of course, we are.
After a minute, Yokana closes his notebook and stares into the fire. “Nothing, then?” he asks.
Chaco chirrups at my side. I repeat what he says before I can stop myself. “They ain’t dead, Chief. They’re just lost.”
Joey looks at me warily. Yokana eyes me much the same. I clear my throat and look elsewhere. I shoulda kept my mouth shut.
Joey bails me out. Again. “We’ve told you the truth, Chief,” Joey says. “Jacob Dark Sky took them. They followed him to the Turquoise Mountain, and he took them away.”
Yokana stands. “Where? Where did he take them?”
“We don’t know,” I say.
I’m being honest. We’ve been looking on our side. Ben’s been looking on his. We got nothin’.
“But we’re going to find out,” Joey adds.
Tsasa speaks up, gesturing across the fire like it was the whole of the night sky, shrouded above. “Of a time long, long ago these things are said.”
With Chaco’s help, I get most of his story.
“In those days, the people were apart from one another. Men and women, apart. On two sides of a deep river. And being apart pained them. When the pain became too much, three women jumped in and tried to swim across. A mother and two maidens.”
The fire flares here and there where raindrops hiss into the coals. Yokana rubs at his face like he ain’t got time for this, but he’s old school and won’t interrupt the twins.
“The mother made it across. But the maidens disappeared. For three days, the people searched and found nothing. But on the fourth day, they listened to the gods, who told them to look deep in the water. There, they found Big Water Creature. He had stolen the maidens and put them next to his own two children. Hidden them all in his house of four rooms deep below.”
Tsasa settles back, watching the fire, coughing a dry cough. Eventually, Maria moves a metal cover with a smoke hole over the fire, to protect it, and the rain starts to ping off it.
“I don’t get it,” I tell Chaco, mind to mind.
Chaco flares the tiny feathers on the hood of his head and huddles deeper under the brim of my hat, close to my neck and out of the storm. “Me neither,” he says. I can tell he’s disappointed with himself. “I should get it, but I don’t.”
I surprise myself by speaking up in broken Diné. “Did they take them home? The two maidens?”
Tsosi and Tsasa and everyone else looks up at me. I can’t think of a time I’ve really addressed the twins directly. Joey looks impressed, which I’ll take to the bank.
“Yes, they took them home,” Tsosi says. “But while they did, Coyote snuck in and stole the children of Big Water Creature.”
“Dumb move,” I say, switching back to English.
Chief Yokana cuts in. “Grandfathers, with all due respect, I’m looking for real people who have gone real missing. If you know anything—”
Joey cuts in. “What happened then?” he asks in that way he has that says he knows exactly what happened then.
“A flood,” says Tsosi. “A terrible flood.”
Chief Yokana stands, his joints popping. “I got a hundred and eighteen bodies to find,” he says. The word bodies seems to hurt him physically. “If anything comes to you that might help the cause, please give me a call.”
He pulls his collar up against the rain and looks up at the sky like it’s a stranger. Then he heads out to his car without another word. Joey watches after him, his face heavy. The twins stir the ashes through the smoke hole until the flames lick at the new log and the hood steams in the rain.
Tsasa looks out at the Arroyo, which is fading to black in the way rain can bring on an early night. Maria helps him to stand then does the same for Tsosi.
Together, the twins walk to the edge of their yard, where a wooden fence stands. There they lean, with Joey and Maria and me right behind. All five of us stare out at the vacant sky, hollow like a footlocker and empty except for the strange way the rain moves the air about in shades of gray.
After a minute, I notice what the twins are eyeing. A thin stream of water is running outside the fence, and the way they’re lookin’ at it—like it was some sort of rattlesnake sliding past—makes me think it’s water where there ain’t really been water before.
With my eyes, I follow it as far as I can into the dusk. It’s streaming slow and steady into the canyon itself.
Joey sees what I see. His face is grim. “This isn’t the work of Coyote,” he says in Diné.
“It’s the work of Dark Sky,” I say. “And Black Bear.”
The twins grumble to each other and shake their heads. “The people who were stolen are what matters,” says Tsasa. “More than the people who did the stealing.”
Tsosi nods. “Return the people, and the balance is restored.”
Joey leans hard against the fence, making the wet wood creak. “What if we can’t find them?”
The twins watch the water. Maria fusses over them with raincoats, but they seem not to feel the rain—at least not yet. Tsosi covers Joey’s hand with his. It reminds me of the way Chaco leans against me when he can tell my mind is in a dark spot.
