“That was all he said? Just for me to hurry and come?”
She nodded again. “I went back to the nursing station and asked. The nurse said they had put him in Intensive Care. She said it was lung cancer.”
“Yes,” Chee said. “Did she say how he got there?”
“She said an ambulance had brought him in. I guess his wife checked him in.“ She paused, looked at Chee, down at her hands and at him again. “The nurse said it was terminal. He had a tube in his arm and an oxygen thing.”
“It’s been terminal a long time,” Chee said. “Cancer. Another victim of the demon cigarette. Last time I saw him they thought he had just a few weeks to live and that was -" He stopped, thinking it had been months. Far too long. He felt shame for that—for violating the bedrock rule of the Navajo culture and putting his own interests ahead of family needs. Bernie was watching him, awaiting the end of his sentence. Looking slightly untidy as usual, and worried, and a little shy, wearing jeans stiff with newness and a bit too large for her and a shirt which fit the same description. A pretty girl, and nice, Chee thought, and found himself comparing her with Janet. Comparing pretty with beautiful, cute with classy, a sheep-camp woman with high society. He sighed. “That was far too long ago,” he concluded, and looked at his watch.
“They have evening visiting hours,” he said, and got up. “Maybe I can make it by then.”
“I wanted to tell you I talked to Cowboy Dashee,” Bernie said. “He told me what you did.”
“Did? You mean the airplane?”
“Yes,” she said, looking embarrassed. “That was a lot of work for you. You were sweet to do all that.”
“Oh,” Chee said. “Well. It was mostly luck.”
“I guess that was the big reason they were holding Teddy. Because he could fly. And he knew the man who had the plane. I owe you a big favor now. I didn’t really mean to ask you to do all that work. I just wanted you to tell me what to do.”
“I was going to ask why you were at the hospital. Seeing about Teddy Bai, I guess.”
“He’s better now,” she said. “They moved him out of Intensive Care.”
“I didn’t know Bai knew Eldon Timms,” Chee said. “Did you know that?”
“Janet Pete told me,” Bernie said. “She was at the hospital. She was appointed to represent Teddy.”
“Oh,” Chee said. Of course. Janet was a lawyer in the federal court public defender’s office. Bai was a Navajo. So was Janet, by her father’s name and her father’s blood if not by conditioning. Naturally, they’d give her Bai’s case.
Bernie was studying him. “She asked about you.”
“Oh?”
“I told her you were on vacation. Just back from going fishing up in Alaska.”
“Uh, what did she say to that?”
“She just sort of laughed. And she said she’d heard you had a hand in finding that airplane. Said she guessed you must have been doing that on your own time. I hadn’t talked to Cowboy yet, and I didn’t know about that, so I just said, well anyway you hadn’t gone back to work yet. And she laughed again, and said she thought getting egg on the FBI’s face had become sort of a hobby with you.”
Chee picked up his hat. “It’s not,” he said. “Lot of good people in the Bureau. It’s just they let the FBI get way too big. And the politicians get the promotions, and so they’re the ones making the policies and calling the shots instead of the bright ones. And so a lot of stupid things happen.”
“Like evacuating Bluff in that big manhunt of ninety-eight,” Bernie said.
Chee held the door open for her.
Bernie stood there looking at him, in no hurry to leave.
“Would you like to go along?” Chee asked. “Go see Hosteen Nakai with me?”
Bernie’s expression said she would.
“Could I help?”
“Maybe. Be good company anyway. And you could bring me up to date on what I’ve been missing here.”
But Bernie wasn’t very good company. As soon as she climbed into his pickup and shut the door behind her, he said, “You mentioned Janet asked about me at the hospital. What else did she say?”
Bernie looked at him a moment. “About you?”
“Yeah,” Chee said, wishing he hadn’t asked that question.
She thought for a moment, either about what Janet Pete had said about him, or about what she was willing to tell him.
“Just what I told you already, about you liking to embarrass the FBI,” she said.
After that there wasn’t much talking during the thirty-mile drive to the hospital.
Visiting hours were almost over when they pulled into the parking lot, and the traffic was mostly outgoing.
“I was noticing faces,” Bernie said. “The ones who had good news and the ones who didn’t. Not many of them looked happy.”
“Yeah,” Chee said, thinking of how he could apologize to Hosteen Nakai for neglecting him, trying to come up with the right words.
“Hospitals are always so sad,” Bernie said. “Except for the maternity ward.”
It took only a glance at the nurse manning the desk on the floor housing the Intensive Care ward to support Bernie’s observation. She was talking on a desk telephone, a graying, middle-aged woman whose face and voice reflected sorrow.
“Did he say when? OK." She glanced up at Chee and Bernie, gave the 'just a moment' signal, and said, "When he checks in tell him the Morris boy died." She hung up, made a wry face, and replaced it with a question.
“We’ve come to see Mr Frank Sam Nakai,” Chee said.
“He may not be awake,” she said, and glanced at the clock. “Visiting hours end at eight. You’ll have to make it brief.”
“He sent a message,” Chee said. “He asked me to come right away.”
“Let’s see then,” she said, and led them down the hall.
It was hard to tell whether Nakai was awake, or even alive. Much of his face was covered with a breathing mask, and he lay absolutely still.
“I think he’s sleeping,” Bernie said, and as she said it, Nakai’s eyes opened. He turned his face toward them and removed the mask.
“Long Thinker has come,” he said, in Navajo and in a voice almost too weak to be audible.
“Yes, Little Father,” Chee said. “I am here. I should have come long ago.”
A slender translucent tube connected Hosteen Nakai to a plastic container hung on a bedside stand. Nakai’s fingers followed the tube along the sheet to his arm. Not the burly arm Chee remembered. Not much more than a bone covered with dry skin.
“I will go away soon,” Nakai said. He spoke with his eyes closed, in slow, careful Navajo. “The in-standing wind will be leaving me, and I will follow it to another place." He tapped his forearm with a finger. “Nothing will be left here but these old bones then. Before that, I must tell something. There is something I left unfinished. I must give you the last of your lessons.”
“Lesson?” Chee asked, but instantly he knew what Nakai meant. Years ago, when Chee had still believed he could be both a Navajo Policeman and a hataalii, Nakai had been teaching him how to do the Night Way ceremony. Chee had memorized the actions of the Holy People involved in myth and how to reproduce this story in the sand paintings. He’d sung the chants that told the story. He’d learned the formula for the emetic required, how to handle the patient, everything required to produce the magic that would compel the Holy People to end the sickness and restore the harmony of natural life. Everything except the last lesson.
The tradition of Navajo shamanism required that. The teacher withheld the ultimate secret until he was certain the student was ready for it. For Chee, that moment had never come. Once he had gone away to Virginia to study at the FBI Academy, once he had flown to Los Angeles to work on a case, once he’d gone to Nakai’s winter hogan to be tutored and Nakai had said the season and the weather were wrong for it. Finally, Chee had concluded that Nakai had seen that he would never be ready to sing the Night Way. He had been hurt by that. He had suspected that Nakai disapproved of assimilation of the white man’s ways, of his plan to marry Janet Pete, had understood that having a Navajo father would never prepare her for the sacrifices required of a shaman’s wife. Whatever the reason, Chee had respected Nakai’s wisdom. He would have to forget that boyhood dream. He was not to be entrusted the power to cure. He had come to accept that.