“There is a first step which must be taken,” Hosteen Nakai had said. “Nothing important can happen before that.” As a first step, Jimmy Chee must study the white man and the way of the white man. When he came to understand this white man’s world which surrounded the People, he must make a decision. Would he follow the white man’s way or would he be a Navajo?
His uncle had driven his truck into Gallup and parked it on Railroad Avenue, where they could see the bars and watch the Navajos and the Zunis going in and out of them. Jimmy Chee remembered it very well. He remembered the woman who came out of the Turquoise Tavern and the man in the black reservation hat who followed her. They had walked unsteadily, both drunk. The woman had lost her balance and sat heavily on the dirty sidewalk, and the man had bent to help her. His hat had fallen and rolled into the gutter. Hosteen Nakai’s fierce eyes had watched all this.
“They cannot decide,” he said. “The way Changing Woman taught us is too hard for them, and they have lost its beauty. But they do not know the white man’s way. You have to decide. It is easy, now, to be a white man. You have gone to school and there are scholarships to go more, and jobs if you learn what the white man puts his value in.”
Jimmy Chee had said that he had already decided. He wanted to walk in beauty as a Navajo.
“You can’t decide until you understand the white man. They have much that we don’t have. To be a Navajo is to have no money,” Hosteen Nakai had said. “When you are older we will talk again. If you still wish it, I will begin teaching you something. But you must study the white man’s way.”
Chee had studied. After Shiprock High School, he had enrolled at the University of New Mexico. He’d studied anthropology, sociology, and American literature in class. Every waking moment he studied the way white men behaved. All four subjects fascinated him. When he came home during semester breaks to his mother’s place in the Chuska Mountains, Hosteen Nakai taught him the wisdom of the Dinee. Finally his uncle began teaching him the ritual songs that brought the People back from their sicknesses to walk in beauty. And Chee’s memory always served him well.
On the road that leads from Grants into the back side of Ambrosia Lakes uranium fields, Chee returned the recorder to its case and concentrated on finding the home of Tomas Charley. He found it some thirty feet west of the narrow asphalt pavement. It was a two-room adobe to which someone had connected a wooden frame lean-to with a roof of red composition shingles. A 1962 Chevrolet Impala squatted on cinderblock supports in the front yard, all four of its wheels missing. Chee pulled his patrol car to a stop beside it and sat waiting. If someone was home, willing to receive a visitor, he would appear at the door. If he didn’t after a polite interval of waiting, Chee would knock.
The front door opened and Chee could see someone looking at him through the screen. A child. Chee waited. No one else appeared. Chee climbed out of the carryall.
“Ya-tah, “he said. “Hello.”
“Hello,” the child said. It was a boy, about ten or twelve.
“I’m looking for Tomas Charley,” Chee said.
“He went to get my mother,” the boy said.
“Where’s that?”
“They won’t be there,” the boy said. “She’s a weaver. My uncle was taking her to the rug auction.”
“At Crownpoint?” Chee asked.
“Yeah,” the boy said. “She’s going to sell a bunch of rugs.”
Chee laughed. “I’m not very lucky today,” he said. “That’s where I came from and now I’ll have to drive right back.”
“You going to see my uncle there?”
“If I can find him,” Chee said. “What’s he driving?”
“A 1975 Ford pickup,” the boy said. “An F-150. Blue. If you see him, tell him maybe somebody wants to buy our old Chevy. Tell him a man came by right after he left, looking for him,” the boy said.
“Sure,” Chee said. “Anything else?”
“Maybe the man will see him there at the rug auction,” the boy said. “He’s a blond guy, wearing a yellow jacket. He was going to look for him there.”
“Okay,” Chee said. He looked at the car with more interest now. The exposed brake drums were brown with rust and the upholstery in the back seat hung down in dusty festoons Tomas Charley’s nephew was overly optimistic. No one was going to drive all the way to Crownpoint to arrange to buy that junker.
12
IT WAS AFTER SUNDOWN when Chee drove past the Tribal Police office. It was dark. On the other side of the village, perhaps two hundred assorted vehicles were parked at the Crownpoint elementary school, suggesting a good turnout for the November rug auction. Chee found a blue Ford 150 pickup. Parked next to it was a green-and-white Plymouth, like the one Charley’s nephew had said the would-be car buyer was driving. Chee checked it quickly. It was new, with less than three thousand miles on the odometer. A folder on the dashboard suggested it had been rented from the Albuquerque airport office of Hertz.
Inside the school, the air was rich with a mélange of aromas. Chee identified the smells of cooking fry bread, floor wax, blackboard chalk, stewing mutton and red chili, of raw wool, of horses, and of humans. In the auditorium, perhaps a hundred potential buyers were wandering among the stacks of rugs on the display tables, inspecting the offerings and noting item numbers. At this hour, most of the crowd would be in the cafeteria, eating the traditional auction dinner of Navajo tacos – tortillas topped with a lethal combination of stewed mutton and chili. Chee stood just inside the auditorium entrance, methodically examining its inhabitants. He had little idea what Charley would look like-just Becenti’s sketchy description. His inspection was simply a matter of habit.
“Looking for someone?”
The voice came from beside him, from a young woman in a blue turtleneck sweater. The woman was small, the sweater large, and the face atop the folds of bulky cloth was unsmiling.
“Trying to find a man named Tomas Charley,” Chee said. “But I don’t know what he looks like.”
The woman’s face was oval, framed by soft blond hair. Her eyes were large, and blue, and intent on Chee. A pretty lady, and Chee recognized the look. He had seen it often at the University of New Mexico – and most often among Anglo coeds enrolled in Native American Studies courses. The courses attracted Anglo students, largely female, enjoying racial/ethnic guilt trips. Chee had concluded early that their interest was more in Indian males than in Indian mythology. Their eyes asked if you were really any different from the blond boys they had grown up with. Chee looked now into the eyes of the woman in the bulky blue turtleneck and detected the same question. Or thought he did. There was also something else. He smiled at her. “Not knowing what he looks like makes it tougher to find him.”
“Why not just go away and leave him alone?” she asked. “What are you hunting him for?”
Chee’s smile evaporated. “I have a message from his nephew,” he said. “Somebody wants to buy his old car and…”
“Oh,” the young woman said. She looked embarrassed. “I guess I shouldn’t jump to conclusions. I’m sorry. I don’t know him.”
“I’ll just ask around,” Chee said. Her distaste for police was another standard reaction Chee had learned to expect from the young Anglos the reservation seemed to attract. He suspected there was a federal agency somewhere assigned to teach social workers that all police were Cossacks and that Navajo police were the worst of all. “Are you with the Bureau of Indian Affairs?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “I’m helping the weavers’ cooperative.” She gestured vaguely toward the check-in table, where two Navajo women were sorting through papers. “But I teach school here. Fifth grade. English and social studies.” The hostility was gone from her eyes now. The curiosity remained.