'She didn't want to stay on the reservation. You didn't want to leave,' Janet Pete said. 'You are saying you understand her problem.'
'Our problem,' Chee said. 'My problem.'
Janet Pete sipped her coffee. 'Mine was a law professor. Assistant professor, to be technical.' She put the cup down and considered. 'You know,' she said, 'maybe it was the same symbolic cat problem. Let me see if I can make it fit.'
Chee waited. Like Mary Landon, Janet Pete had large, expressive eyes. Dark brown instead of blue. Now they were surrounded by frown lines as Janet Pete thought.
'Doesn't fit so well,' she said. 'He wanted a helpmate.' She laughed. 'Adam's rib. Something to hold back the loneliness of the young man pursuing his brilliant career at law. The Indian maiden.' The words sounded bitter, but she smiled at Chee. 'You remember. Few years ago, Indian maidens were in with the Yuppies. Like squash-blossom necklaces and declaring yourself to be part Cherokee or Sioux if you wanted to write romantic poetry.'
'Not so much now,' Chee said. 'I gather you agreed to disagree.'
'Not really,' she said. 'The offer remains open. Or so he tells me.'
'Fits in a way,' Chee said. 'I wanted her to be my Navajo.'
'She was a schoolteacher? At Crownpoint?'
'For three years,' Chee said.
'But didn't want to make a career out of it. I can see her point.'
'That wasn't exactly the problem. It was raising kids out here. More than that, too. I could leave. Had an offer from the FBI. Better money. Sort of a choice involved, as she saw it. Did I want her enough to quit being a Navajo?'
Outside the dusty front window of the Navajo Nation Cafe the dazzling late-day sunlight turned dark with cloud shadow. A Ford 250 pickup rolled past slowly, its front seat crowded with four Navajos, its rear bumper crowded by the van of an impatient tourist. Chee caught the eye of the waitress and got their coffees refilled. What would he say if Janet Pete pressed the question. If she said: 'Well, do you?' what would he say?
Instead, she stirred her coffee.
'How has the professor's brilliant career developed?' Chee asked.
'Brilliantly. He's now chief legal counsel of Davidson-Bart, which I understand is what is called a multinational conglomerate. But mostly involved with the commercial credit end of export-import business. Makes money. Lives in Arlington.'
Through the dusty window came the faint sound of thunder, a rumble that faded away.
'Wish it would rain,' Janet Pete said.
Chee had been thinking exactly the same thing. Sharing a Navajo thought with another Navajo. 'Too late to rain,' he said. 'It's October thirty-first.'
Janet Pete dropped him at the garage. He stopped at the station to call Lieutenant Leaphorn on his way back to the trailer.
'Largo told me you found the bodies of those pot hunters,' Leaphorn said. 'He was a little vague about what you were doing out there.'
He left the question implied and Chee thought a moment before answering. He knew Leaphorn's wife had died. He'd heard the man was having trouble coping with that. He'd heard-- everybody in the Navajo Tribal Police had heard--that Leaphorn had quit the force. Retired. So what was he doing in this affair? How official was this? Chee exhaled, taking another second for thought. He thought, quit or not, this is still Joe Leaphorn. Our legendary Leaphorn.
'I was looking for that fellow who stole that backhoe here at Shiprock,' Chee said. 'I found out he was a pot hunter now and then, and I was trying to catch him out digging. With the stolen property.'
'And you knew where to look?' Leaphorn, Chee remembered, never believed in coincidence.
'Some guessing,' Chee said. 'But I knew what gas company he worked for, and where his job would have taken him, and where there might be some sites in the places he would have been.'
The word that spread among the four hundred employees of the Navajo Tribal Police was that Joe Leaphorn had lost it. Joe Leaphorn had a nervous breakdown. Joe Leaphorn was out of it. To Jim Chee, Leaphorn's voice sounded no different. Neither did the tone of his questions. A kind of skepticism. As if he knew he wasn't being told all he needed to know. What would Leaphorn ask him now? How he knew the man would be digging last night?
'You have anything else to go on?'
'Oh,' Chee said. 'Sure. We knew he rented a truck with new tires on double back wheels.'
'Okay,' Leaphorn said. 'Good. So there were tracks to look for.' Now his voice sounded more relaxed. 'Makes a lot of difference. Otherwise you spend the rest of your life out there running down the roads.'
'And I figured he might be out digging last night because of something he said to Slick Nakai. The preacher bought pots from him, now and then. And he sort of told the preacher he'd have some for him quick,' Chee said.
Silence.
'Did you know I'm on leave? Terminal leave?'
'I heard it,' Chee said.
'Ten more days and I'm a civilian. Right now, matter of fact, I guess I'm unofficial.'
'Yes sir,' Chee said.
'If you can make it tomorrow, would you drive out there to the site with me? Look it over with me in daylight. Tell me how it was before the sheriffs people and the ambulance and the FBI screwed everything up.'
'If it's okay with the captain,' Chee said, 'I'd be happy to go.'
Chapter Eight
Ť ^ ť
LEAPHORN HAD BEEN AWARE of the wind most of the night, listening to it blow steadily from the southeast as he waited for sleep, awakening again and again to notice it shifting, and gusting, making chindi sounds around the empty house. It was still blowing when Thatcher arrived to pick him up, buffeting Thatcher's motor pool sedan.
'Cold front coming through,' Thatcher said. 'It'll die down.'
And as they drove northward from Window Rock it moderated. At Many Farms they stopped for breakfast, Thatcher reminiscing about Harrison Houk, cattleman, pillar of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, potent Republican, subject of assorted gossip, county commissioner, holder of Bureau of Land Management grazing permits sprawling across the southern Utah canyon country, legendary shrewd operator. Leaphorn mostly listened, remembering Houk from long ago, remembering a man stricken. When they paid their check, the western sky over Black Mesa was bleak with suspended dust but the wind was down. Fifty miles later as they crossed the Utah border north of Mexican Water, it was no more than a breeze, still from the southeast but almost too faint to stir the sparse gray sage and the silver cheat grass of the Nokaito Bench. The sedan rolled across the San Juan River bridge below Sand Island in a dead calm. Only the smell of dust recalled the wind.
'Land of Little Rain,' Thatcher said. 'Who called it that?'
It wasn't the sort of friendship that needed answers. Leaphorn looked upstream, watching a small flotilla of rubber kayaks, rafts, and wooden dories pushing into the stream from the Sand Island launching site. A float expedition down into the deep canyons. He and Emma had talked of doing that. She would have loved it, getting him away from any possibility of telephone calls. Getting him off the end of the earth. And he would have loved it, too. Always intended to do it but there was never enough time. And now, of course, the time was all used up.
'One of your jobs?' Leaphorn asked, nodding toward the flotilla below.
'We license them as tour boatmen. Sell `em trip permits, make sure they meet the safety rules. So forth.' He nodded toward the stream. 'That must be the last one of the season. They close the river down just about now.'
'Big headache?'
'Not this bunch,' Thatcher said. 'This is Wild Rivers Expeditions out of Bluff. Pros. More into selling education. Take you down with a geologist to study the formations and the fossils, or with an anthropologist to look at the Anasazi ruins up the canyons, or maybe with a biologist to get you into the lizards and lichens and the bats. That sort of stuff. Older people go. More money. Not a bunch of overaged adolescents hoping to get scared shitless going down the rapids.'