A Thief of Time

When he threw back the tarp and emerged, rosy with body heat and streaming sweat, he felt light of head, light of foot, generally wonderful. He rubbed himself down with the sand he'd collected, climbed back to the trailer, and took his shower. Chee added to the desert dweller's habitual frugality with water the special caution that those who live in trailers re-learn each time they cover themselves with suds and find there's nothing left in the reservoir. He soaped a small area, rinsed it, then soaped another, hurried by the smell of his coffee perking. His Navajo, genes spared him the need to shave again for probably a week, but he shaved anyway. It was a way to delay the inevitable.

That was delayed a bit more by the lack of a telephone in Chee's trailer. He used the pay phone beside the convenience store on the highway. Janet Pete wasn't at her office. Maybe, the receptionist said, she had gone down to the Justice building, to the police station. She had been worried about her new car. Chee dialed the station. Three call-back messages for him, two from Janet Pete of DNA, the tribal legal service, one from Lieutenant Leaphorn. Leaphorn had just called and talked to Captain Largo. The captain then had left the message for Chee to call Leaphorn at his home number in Window Rock after 6:00 P.M. Had Pete left any messages? Yes, with the last call she had said to tell him she wanted to pick up her car.

Chee called Pete's home number. He tapped his fingers nervously as the telephone rang. There was a click.

'Sorry I can't come to the phone now,' Pete's voice said. 'If you will leave a message after the tone sounds, I will call you.'

Chee listened to the tone, and the silence following it. He could think of nothing sensible to say, and hung up. Then he drove over to Tso's garage. Surely the damage hadn't been as bad as he remembered.

The damage was exactly as he'd remembered. The car squatted on Tso's towing dolly, discolored with dust, the front wheel grotesquely misaligned, paint scraped from the fender, the little clips that once held Janet Pete's favorite chrome strip holding nothing. A small dent in the door. A large dent marring the robin's-egg blue of the rear fender. Looking crippled and dirty.

'Not so terrible,' Tso said. 'Nine fifty to eleven hundred dollars and it's good as it was. But she really ought to fix all those problems it had when you first drove it in.' Tso was wiping the grease from his hands in a gesture that reminded Chee of greedy anticipation. 'Crabby brakes, slack steering, all that.'

'I'm going to need some credit,' Chee said.

Tso thought about that, his face full of remembered debts, of friendships violated. Chee's thoughts of Tso, always warm, began turning cool. While they did, Janet Pete's motor pool sedan pulled up beside the building. The front door opened. Janet Pete emerged. She looked at the Buick, at two other cars awaiting Tso's ministrations, and gave Chee a dazzling smile.

'Where's my Buick?' she asked. 'How did it run? Did you…'

The question trailed off. Janet Pete looked again at the Buick.

'My God,' she said. 'Was anybody killed?'

'Well,' Chee said. He cleared his throat. 'You see, I was driving down…'

'Bad shocks,' Tso said. 'Slack steering. But Chee here took it out anyway. Sort of a safety check.' Tso shrugged, made a wry face. 'Could have been killed,' he said.

Which, if you thought about it right, was perhaps true, Chee thought. His displeasure with Tso was swept away by a wave of gratitude.

He made a depreciating gesture. 'I should have been more careful,' he said. `Tso warned me.'

Janet was staring at the Buick, reconciling what she saw with what she had left. 'They told me everything was fine,' she said.

'Odometer set back,' Tso said. 'Brake lining unevenly worn. U-joint loose. Steering loose. Needed lots of work.'

Janet Pete bit her lip. Thought. 'Can I use your telephone?'

Chee overheard only part of it. Getting past the salesman to the sales manager to the general manager. It seemed to Chee that the general manager mostly listened.

'Officer Chee doesn't seem to be too badly hurt, but I haven't heard from his lawyer… mechanic's list of defects shows… that's a third-degree misdemeanor in New Mexico, odometer tampering is. Yes, well, a jury can decide that for us. I think the fine is five thousand dollars. You can pick it up at Tso's garage in Shiprock. He tells me he won't release it until you pay his costs. Towing, inspection, I guess. My lawyer told me to make sure that none of your mechanics worked on it until he decides…'

On the way to get a cup of coffee in Janet Pete's motor pool sedan, Chee said, 'He'll have his mechanics fix everything.'

'Probably,' Janet said. 'Wouldn't be much of a lawsuit anyway. Not worth it.'

'Just letting him sweat a little?'

'You know, they wouldn't try that on you. You're a man. They pull that crap on women. They figure they can sell a woman on the baby blue paint and the chrome stripe. Sell us a lemon.'

'Um,' Chee said, which provoked a period of silence.

'What really happened?' Janet asked.

'Steering failed,' Chee said, feeling uneasy.

'Come on,' Janet said.

'Tried to make a turn,' Chee said. 'Missed it.'

'How fast? Come on. What was going on?'

So Jim Chee explained it, all about the missing trailer, and the missing backhoe, and Captain Largo, and that led to what he had found last night.

Janet had heard about it on the radio. Over coffee she was full of questions, not all of them about the crime.

'I heard you were a hatathali,' she said. `That you sing the Blessing Way.'

'I'm still learning,' Chee said. 'The only one I performed was in the family. A relative. But I know it now. If anybody wants one done.'

'How do you get time off? Isn't that a problem? Eight days, isn't it? Or do you sing the shorter version?'

'No problem yet. No customers.'

'Another thing I hear about you--you have a belagana girlfriend. A teacher over at Crownpoint.'

'She's gone away,' Chee said, and felt that odd sensation of hearing, from some external point, his voice saying the words. 'Gone away to be a graduate student in Wisconsin.'

'Oh,' Janet said.

'We write,' Chee said. 'I sent her a pregnant cat once.'

Janet looked surprised. 'Testing her patience?'

Chee tried to think how to explain it. A stupid thing to send to Mary Landon, stupid to mention it now.

'At the time I thought it had some symbolism,' he said.

Janet let the silence live, Navajo fashion. If he had more he wanted to say about Mary Landon and the cat, he would say it. He liked her for that. But he had nothing more to say.

'It was that cat you told me about? Last summer when you'd arrested that old man I was representing. The cat the coyote was after?'

Chee was stirring his coffee, head down but conscious that Janet Pete was studying him. He nodded, remembering. Janet Pete had suggested he provide his stray cat with a coyote-proof home and they had gone to a Farmington pet store and bought one of those plastic and wire cages used to ship pets on airliners. He had used it, eventually, to ship the abandoned white man's cat back to the white man's world.

'Symbolism,' Janet Pete said. Now she was stirring her coffee, looking down at the swirl the spoon made.

To the top of her head, Chee said: 'Belagana cat can't adapt to the Navajo ways. Starves. Eaten by coyote. My stray cat experiment fails. I accept the failure. Cat goes back to the world of the belaganas, where there's more to eat and the coyote doesn't get you.' It was more than Chee had intended to say. He was torn. He wanted to talk about Mary Landon, about the going away of Mary Landon. But he wasn't comfortable talking about it to Janet Pete.