Nakai was shouting now, emphasizing each word with a downward sweep of his fist. 'I can't pray to the mountain no more,' he shouted. 'Not after the white man built all over the top of it. Remember what the stories tell us. Changing Woman left us. She's gone awayâŚ'
Leaphorn watched the thin man with the guitar, trying to find a place for him in his memory. He studied the audience, looking for familiar faces, finding a few. Even though he'd rarely worked this eastern Checkerboard side of the Big Reservation, this didn't surprise him. The reservation occupied more space than all of New England but it had a population of no more than 150,000. In a lifetime of policing it, Leaphorn had met, in one way or another, a lot of its inhabitants. And these fifty or sixty assembled under Nakai's old canvas to try the Jesus Road seemed approximately typical. Fewer children than would have been brought to a ceremonial of the traditional Navajo religion, none of the teenagers who would have been hanging around the fringes of a Night Chant playing the mating game, none of the drunks, and certainly no one who looked even moderately affluent. Leaphorn found himself wondering how Nakai paid his expenses. He'd collect whatever donations these people would make, but that wouldn't be much. Perhaps the church he represented paid him out of some missionary fund. Leaphorn considered the pots. What he'd seen in the Nelson's catalog made it clear that some of them brought far, far more than fifty-five dollars. But most of them would have little value and Leaphorn couldn't imagine Nakai getting many of them. Even if they were totally converted, still these were born Navajo. The pots came from burials, and Navajos were conditioned almost from infancy to avoid the dead and to have a special dread of death.
It was exactly what Nakai was talking about. Or, more accurately, shouting. He gripped the microphone stand with both of his small, neat hands, and thundered into it.
'The way I was taught, the way you were taught, when my mother died my uncles came there to the place where we lived out there near Rough Rock and they took the body away and put it somewhere where the coyotes and the ravens couldn't get to it.' Nakai paused, gripped the microphone stand, looked down. 'You remember that?' he asked, in a voice that was suddenly smaller. 'Everybody here remembers somebody dying.' Nakai looked up, recovering both composure and voice. 'And then there's the four days when you don't do nothing but remember. And nobody speaks the name of the dead⌠Because there's nothing left of them but the chindi, that ghost that is everything that was bad about them and nothing that was good. And I don't say my mother's name anymore-- not ever again--because that chindi may hear me calling it and come back and make me sick. And what about what was good about my mother? What about what was good about your dead people? What about that? Our Holy People didn't tell us much about that. Not that I know about, they didn't. Some of the Dineh, they have a story about a young man who followed Death, and looked down into the underworld, and saw the dead people sitting around down there. But my clan, we didn't have that story. And I think it got borrowed from the Hopi People. It is one of their beliefs.'
Early in this discourse, Leaphorn had been interested in Nakai's strategy. Methods of persuasion intrigued him. But there seemed to be nothing particularly unique in it, and he'd let his attention wander. He had reviewed what little he'd learned from Nakai, and what he might do next, if anything, and then simply watched the audience reaction. Now Leaphorn found himself attentive again. His own Red Forehead Clan had no such story either--at least he hadn't been told it in his own boyhood introduction into the Navajo Way. He had heard it often in his days as an anthropology student at Arizona State. And he'd heard it since from Navajos around Window Rock. But Nakai was probably right. Probably it was another of the many stories the Dineh borrowed from the cultures that surrounded them--borrowed and then refined into abstract philosophical points. The Navajo Way was devoted to the harmony of life. It left death simply terrifying black oblivion.
'We learn this story about how Monster Slayer corners Death in his pit house. But he lets Death live. Because without death there wouldn't be enough room for the babies, for young people. But I can tell you something truer than that.' Nakai's voice had risen again to a shout.
'Jesus didn't let Death live. Hallelujah! Praise the Lord!' Nakai danced across the platform, shouting, drawing from the audience answering shouts. 'When we walk through the Valley of Death, he is with us, that's what Jesus teaches. We don't just drift away into the dark night, a ghost of sickness. We go beyond death. We go into a happy world. We go where there ain't no hunger. There ain't no sorrow. Ain't no drunks. No fighting. No seeing relatives run over out here on the highway. We go into a world where last are first, and the poor are the rich, and the sick are well, and the blind, they see againâŚ'
Leaphorn didn't hear the last of it. He was hurrying out through the tent flap into the darkness. He stood for a while, allowing his eyes to adjust, breathing the cool, clean high-altitude air. Smelling dust, and sagebrush, shaken, remembering the day they brought Emma's body home from the hospital.
It had still been unreal to him, what had happened at Gallup, what the doctor had told him. It had left him stunned. Emma's brothers had come to talk to him about it. He'd simply told them that he knew Emma would want a traditional burial, and they'd left.
They'd taken the body to her mother's place over near Blue Gap Chapter House, on the edge of Black Mesa. Under the brush arbor her old aunt had washed her, and combed out her hair, and dressed her in her best blue velvet skirt, and her old squash-blossom necklace, put on her rings, and wrapped her in a blanket. He had sat in the hogan, watching. Her brothers had picked her up then, and put the body in the back of their truck, and driven down the track toward the cliffs. In about an hour they came back without her and took their cleansing sweat bath. He didn't know--would never know-- where they'd left her. In a crevice somewhere, probably. High. Protected by deadwood from the predators. Hidden away. He had stayed for two days of the silent days of mourning. Tradition demanded four days, to give the dead time to complete their journey into the oblivion of death. Two days was all he could stand. He'd left them.
And her. But no more of this.
Chee's pickup was still there. Leaphorn walked to it.
'Ya te'eh,' Chee said, acknowledging him.
'Ya te,' Leaphorn said. He leaned on the truck door. 'What brings you out to the Reverend Slick Nakai's revival?'
Chee explained about the backhoe loader, and the abortive chase, and what Tso had told him about where the Backhoe Bandit might be found.
'But I don't think he is going to show up tonight,' Chee said. 'Getting too late.'
'You going to go in and ask Nakai who this fellow is?' Leaphorn asked.
'I'm going to do that,' Chee said. 'When he's through preaching and when I get a look at the people coming out of the tent.'
'You think Nakai would tell you he didn't know this guy, and then tip him off you're looking for him?'
Long silence. 'He might,' Chee said. 'But I think I'll risk it.'
Leaphorn didn't comment. It was the decision he would have made. Handle it on Navajo time. No reason to rush in there.
There was no hurry for him either, but he went back into the tent. He'd hear the rest of Nakai's sermon, and see how much money he took in at his collection. And how many, if any, pots. Leaphorn was thinking that maybe he'd learned a little more than he'd first realized. Something had jogged his memory. The thin Navajo with the guitar was the same man he'd seen helping Maxie Davis at the excavation at Chaco Canyon. That answered one small question. A Christian Navajo wouldn't be worrying about stirring up the chindi of long-dead Anasazi. But it also made an interesting connection--a man who dug up scientific pots at Chaco worked for a man who sold theoretically legal pots. And a man who sold theoretically legal pots linked to a man who stole a backhoe. Backhoes were machines notoriously useful in uprooting Anasazi ruins and despoiling their graves.