Listening Woman frowned. You mean moved off the Big Reservation? Ask Old Man McGinnis. Hell send it for you.
I asked. McGinnis didn’t know how, Tso said. He said you had to write down on it the place it goes to.
Listening Woman laughed. Sure, she said. The address. Like Gallup, or Flagstaff, or wherever they live, and the name of the street they live on. Things like that. Who do you want to write to?
My grandson, Tso said. I have to get him to come. But all I know is he went with the Jesus People.
I don’t know how you’re going to find him, Listening Woman said. She found her cane.
Don’t worry about it. Somebody else can take care of getting a singer for you and all that.
But there’s something I have to tell him, Hosteen Tso said. I have to tell him something before I die. I have to.
I don’t know, Listening Woman said. She turned away from Tso and tapped the brush arbor pole with her cane, getting her direction. Come on, Anna. Take me up to that place where I can listen.
Listening Woman felt the coolness of the cliff before its shadow touched her face. She had Anna lead her to a place where erosion had formed a sand-floored cul-de-sac. Then she sent the girl away to await her call. Anna was a good student in some ways, and a bad one in others. But when she got over being crazy about boys, she would be an effective Listener. This niece of Listening Woman’s had the rare gift of hearing the voices in the wind and getting the visions that came out of the earth. It was something that ran in the family a gift of divining the cause of illness. Her mothers uncle had been a Hand-Trembler famous throughout the Short Mountain territory for diagnosing lightning sickness.
Listening Woman herself she knew was widely known up and down this corner of the Big Reservation. And someday Anna would be famous, too.
Listening Woman settled herself on the sand, arranged her skirts around her and leaned her forehead against the stone. It was cool, and rough. At first she found herself thinking about what Old Man Tso had told her, trying to diagnose his illness from that. There was something about Tso that troubled her and made her very sad. Then she cleared her mind of all this and thought only of the early-evening sky and the light of a single star. She made the star grow larger in her mind, remembering how it had looked before her blindness came.
An eddy of wind whistled through the piñons at the mouth of this pocket-in-the-cliff. It stirred the skirt of Listening Woman, uncovering a blue tennis shoe. But now her breathing was deep and regular. The shadow of the cliff moved inch by inch across the sandy space. Listening Woman moaned, moaned again, muttered some-thing unintelligible and lapsed into silence.
From somewhere out of sight down the slope, a half-dozen ravens squawked into startled flight. The wind rose again, and fell. A lizard emerged from a crevice in the cliff, turned its cold, unblinking eyes on the woman, and then scurried to its late-afternoon hunting stand under a pile of tumbleweeds. A sound partly obscured by wind and distance reached the sandy place. A woman screaming. It rose and fell, sobbing. Then it stopped. The lizard caught a horsefly. Listening Woman breathed on.
The shadow of the cliff had moved fifty yards down the slope when Listening Woman pushed herself stiffly from the sand and got to her feet. She stood a moment with her head down and both hands pressed to her face still half immersed in the strangeness of the trance. It was as if she had gone into the rock, and through it into the Black World at the very beginning when there were only Holy People and the things that would become the Navajos were only mist. Finally she had heard the voice, and found herself in the Fourth World. She had looked down through the emergence hole, peering at Hosteen Tso in what must have been Tsos painted cave. An old man had rocked on a rocking chair on its floor, braiding his hair with string. At first it was Tso, but when the man looked up at her she had seen the face was dead. Blackness was swelling up around the rocking chair.
Listening Woman rubbed her knuckles against her eyes, and shook her head, and called for Anna. She knew what the diagnosis would have to be. Hosteen Tso would need a Mountain Way Chant and a Black Rain Chant. There had been a witch in the painted cave, and Tso had been there, and had been infected with some sort of ghost sickness.
That meant he should find a singer who knew how to do the Mountain Way and one to sing the Black Rain. She knew that. But she also thought that it would be too late. She shook her head again.
Girl, she called. I’m ready now.
What would she tell Tso? With the sensitized hearing of the blind, she listened for Anna Atcitty's footsteps. And heard nothing but the breeze.
Girl, she shouted. Girl! Still hearing nothing, she fumbled against the cliff, and found her cane. She felt her way carefully back to the pathway toward the hogan. Should she tell Tso of the darkness she had seen all around as the voice spoke to her? Should she tell him of the crying of ghosts she had heard in the stone? Should she tell him he was dying?
Listening Woman’s feet found the pathway. She called again for Anna, then shouted for Old Man Tso to come and lead her. Waiting, she heard nothing but the moving air. She tapped her way cautiously down the sheep trail, muttering angrily. The tip of her cane warned her away from a cactus, guided her around a depression and past an outcrop of sandstone. It tapped against a hummock of dead grass and contacted the little finger of the outstretched left hand of Anna Atcitty. The hand lay palm up, and the wind had drifted a little sand against it, and even to Listening Woman’s sensitive touch, it felt like nothing more than another stick. And so she tapped her way, still calling and muttering, down the path toward the place where the body of Hosteen Tso lay sprawled beside his overturned rocking chair the Rainbow Man still arched across his chest.
» 2 «
T
he speaker on the radio crackled and growled and said, Tuba City.
Unit Nine, Joe Leaphorn said. You got anything for me?
Just a minute, Joe. The radios voice was pleasantly feminine.
The young man sitting on the passenger side of the Navajo police carryall was staring out the window toward the sunset. The afterglow outlined the rough shape of the San Francisco Peaks on the horizon, and turned a lacy brushwork of high clouds luminescent rose, and reflected down on the desert below and onto the face of the man. It was a flat Mongolian face, with tiny lines around the eyes giving it a sardonic cast. He was wearing a black felt Stetson, a denim jacket and a rodeo-style shirt. On his left wrist was a $12.95
Timex watch held by a heavy sand-cast silver watchband, and his left wrist was fastened to his right one with a pair of standard-issue police handcuffs. He glanced at Leaphorn, caught his eye, and nodded toward the sunset.
Yeah, Leaphorn said. I noticed it.
The radio crackled again. Two or three things, it said. The captain asked if you got the Begay boy. He said if you got him, don’t let him get away again.
Yes, Maam, the young man said. Tell the captain the Begay boy is in custody.
I got him, Leaphorn said.
Tell her I want the cell with the window this time, the young man said.
Begay says he wants the cell with the window, Leaphorn said.
And the waterbed, Begay said.
And the captain wants to talk to you when you get in, the radio said.
What about?
He didn’t say.
But Ill bet you know.
The radio speaker rattled with laughter. Well, it said. Window Rock called and asked the captain why you weren’t over there helping out with the Boy Scouts. When will you be in?
Were coming down on Navajo Route 1 west of Tsegi, Leaphorn said. Be in Tuba City in maybe an hour. He flicked off the transmit button.
Whats this Boy Scout business? Begay asked.
Leaphorn groaned. Window Rock got the bright idea of inviting the Boy Scouts of America to have some sort of regional encampment at Canyon de Chelly. Kids swarming in from all over the West. And of course they tell Law and Order Division to make sure nobody gets lost or falls off a cliff or anything.