But now—? Had Nakai changed his mind? What could he say?
“Here?” he said. He gestured at the white, sterile walls. “Could you do that here?”
“A bad place,” Nakai said. “Many people have died here, and many are sick and unhappy. I hear them crying in the hallway. And the chindi of the dead are trapped within its walls. I hear them, too. Even when they give me the medicine that makes me sleep, I hear them. What I must teach you should be done in a holy place, far away from evil. But we have no choice.”
He replaced the mask over his face, inhaled oxygen, and removed it again.
“The bilagaana do not understand death,” he said. “It is the other end of the circle, not something that should be fought and struggled against. Have you noticed that people die just at the end of night, when the stars are still shining in the west and you can sense the brightness of Dawn Boy on the eastern mountains? That’s so Holy Wind within them can go to bless the new day. I always thought I would die like that. In the summer. At our camp in the Chuskas. With the stars above me. With my instanding wind blowing free. Not dying trapped in-"
Nakai’s voice had become so faint that Chee couldn’t understand the last words. Then it faded into silence.
Chee felt Bernie’s touch at his elbow.
“Jim. If this is something ceremonial, shouldn’t I leave?”
“I guess so,” Chee said. “I really don’t know.”
They stood, watching Nakai, his eyes closed now.
Chee replaced the oxygen mask over his face, felt Bernie’s touch on his elbow.
“He hates this place,” Bernie said. “Let’s get him out of here.”
“What do you mean?” Chee said. “How?”
“We tell the nurse we’re taking him home. And then we take him home.”
“What about all that?” Chee asked, pointing at the oxygen mask, the tubes that tied Nakai to life, and the wires that linked him to the computers which measured the Holy Wind within him and reduced it to electronic blips racing across television screens. “He’ll die.”
“Of course he’ll die,” Bernie said, her tone impatient. “That’s what the nurse told us. He’s dying right now. That’s what he was telling you. But he doesn’t want to die here.”
“You’re right,” Chee said. “But how do -"
But Bernie was walking out. “First, I call the ambulance service,” she said. “While they’re coming I’ll start trying to check him out.”
It was not quite as simple as Bernie made it sound. The nurse was sympathetic but had questions to be answered. For example, where was Nakai’s wife, whose name, but not her signature, was on the admissions form? By what authority were they taking Mr Nakai off the life-support systems and out of the hospital? The doctor who had admitted Mr Nakai had left for Albuquerque. That shifted responsibility to another doctor—now busy in the emergency room downstairs patching up a knifing victim. He arrived on the floor thirty minutes and two paging calls later, looking young and tired.
“What’s this about?” he asked, and the nurse provided a fill-in that caused him to look doubtful. Meanwhile, the ambulance attendant emerged from the elevator, recognized Chee from working traffic accidents and asked him for instructions.
“I can’t do it,” the doctor said. “The patient’s on life support. We need authorization from the next of kin. Lacking that, the admitting physician needs to sign him out.”
“That’s not really the question,” Chee said. “We are taking Hosteen Nakai home tonight to be with his wife. Our question is how you can help us do this to minimize the trouble it might cause.”
That produced a chilly but brief silence followed by the signing by Chee of a Released Against Advice of Physician form and a financial responsibility statement. Then Hosteen Frank Sam Nakai was free again.
Chee rode in the back of the ambulance with Nakai and the emergency medical technician.
“I guess you heard they got one of those casino bandits,” the tech said. “It was on the six o’clock news.”
“No,” Chee said. “What happened?”
“The guy shot himself,” the tech said. “It was that fella that used to have a radio talk show. Sort of a right’winger. News said he ran cattle up there south of Aneth. Married a Navajo woman and was using her grazing allotment up there.”
“Shot himself? What’d they say about that?”
“Not much. It was at his house. I guess they were closing in on him, and he didn’t want to get arrested. Fella named Everett Jorie. And now they know who the other two were. Said they’re both from up there in Utah. Part of one of those militia bunches.”
“Jorie,” Chee said. “Never heard of him.”
“He used to have a talk show on the radio. You know, all the nuts calling in and complaining about the government.”
“OK. I remember him now.”
“And they have the other two identified now. Man named George Ironhand and one named Buddy Baker. I think Ironhand’s a Ute. Anyway, they said he used to work at the Ute Casino.”
“I wonder how they got them identified.”
“The TV said the FBI did it, but it didn’t say how.”
“Well, hell,” Chee said. “I was hoping they’d catch them in Los Angeles, or Tulsa, or Miami, or anyplace a long ways from this place.”
The ambulance tech chuckled. “You’re not anxious to go prowling around in those canyons again. I wouldn’t be, either.”
Chee let that pass into silence.
Then Hosteen Nakai sighed, and said, “Ironhand.” And sighed again.
Chee leaned over him, and said, “Little Father. Are you all right?”
“Ironhand,” Nakai said. “Be careful of him. He was a witch.”
“A witch? What did he do?”
But Hosteen Nakai seemed to be sleeping again.
Chapter Eleven
The half-moon was dipping behind the mountains to the west when the ambulance, with Bernie trailing it in Chee’s truck, rolled down the track and stopped outside Hosteen Nakai’s sheep-camp place in the Chuskas. Blue Woman was standing in the doorway waiting. She ran out to greet them, crying. At first the tears were for grief, thinking they were bringing home her husband’s body. Then she cried for joy.
They put him on his bed beside a pinion tree, rearranged his oxygen supply and listened to Blue Woman’s tearful explanation of how Hosteen Nakai had come to be abandoned, as she saw it, in the Farmington hospital. Her niece had come to take her to have an infected tooth removed, and to replenish the supply of the medicine which kept away the pain and let her husband sleep. Nakai had been much better, had wanted to come along and there had been no one to look after him at the sheep camp. But at the dentist’s office he had fainted, someone called 911, and an ambulance took him to the hospital. She had waited there, and waited, not knowing what to do for him, and finally her niece had to go to care for her children, and she had to go with her. There were stories that the rich young people from the cities were putting wolves back in the mountains, and there was no one at their place to protect their young lambs.