“It must have been a long message,” Mary said. “I think you found something to talk about besides someone wanting to buy a car.” The words were skeptical, but after she said them she smiled.
Chee found himself trying to think of something to ask her, of a reason to be in this kitchen talking to her. His mind was blank. “How about having a cup of coffee?’ he heard himself saying. “The coffee shop will be open late.”
The first time she had looked at him she had been inspecting a Tribal Police sergeant. Now she was looking at a man asking her out for coffee. It was a different sort of inspection. “I have to finish with these pots,” she said.
“I’ll do it for you,” Chee said.
Chee washed dishes each evening in his mobile home – a plate, cup, knife, and fork left over from breakfast, a second plate, a cup, and cutlery from dinner, and the frying pan used to cook both meals. But never since his university days had he washed dishes socially.
“You look like you enjoy that,” Mary said. “Maybe you missed your calling.”
Chee tried to think of something witty. He couldn’t.
In the booth at the Crownpoint Café, Chee learned a little about Mary Landon, and she learned a little about him. She had come to Laguna the previous year to replace a teacher hurt in an automobile accident. Then she had landed the Crownpoint job. She was from a little place not far from Milwaukee. She had attended the University of Wisconsin. She liked canoeing and hiking, and the outdoors in general. She didn’t like pretentious people. She liked teaching Navajo children, but wasn’t sure what to do about their conditioning against competitiveness. She hoped to learn Navajo, but it was hard to pronounce and so far she could speak only a few phrases. She spoke them, and Chee pretended to understand, and Mary Landon was not fooled by the pretense but appreciated it and rewarded him with a genuinely friendly look. Chee asked her about her parents, and learned her father ran a sporting goods store. He decided not to ask her about her hostility to police. This wasn’t the time for that, and the attitude was common enough.
Mary Landon learned Chee was one of the Slow Talking Dinee, the clan of his mother, and was “born to” the Bitten Water Dinee, the clan of his father. She learned that Chee’s father was dead, that his maternal uncle was a noted yataalii, and she had been around Navajo country long enough to know about the role of these shamans in the ceremonial life of the People. She learned a good deal more about his family, ranging from his two older sisters through a galaxy of cousins, uncles, and aunts, one of whom represented the Greasy Water district on the Tribal Council.
“She’s my mother’s sister, which makes her my ‘little mother,’ ” Chee said. “A real tiger.”
“You’re not playing the game,” Mary Landon said. “I told you about me. You’re just telling me about your family.”
The statement surprised Chee. One defined himself by his family. How else? And then it occurred to him that white people didn’t. They identified themselves by what they had done as individuals. He added sugar to his coffee, thinking about it.
“That’s the way we play the game. If I was introducing you to Navajos, I wouldn’t say, ‘This is Mary Landon, who teaches at Crownpoint,’ and so forth. I’d say, “This woman is a member of…’ – your mother’s family, and your father’s family – and I’d tell about your uncles and aunts, so everyone would know just exactly where you fit in with the people around you.”
“This woman’?” Mary Landon asked. “You wouldn’t tell them my name?”
“That would be rude. Now more people have English names, but among traditional Navajos it’s very impolite to say someone’s name in their presence. Names are just reference words, when the person’s not there.”
Mary Landon looked incredulous. “I think that’s…” She stopped.
“Silly?” Chee asked. “You have to understand the system. Our real names are secret. We call them war names. Somebody very close to you in the family names you when you’re little. Something that fits your personality, if possible. Not more than a half-dozen people are even going to know it. It’s used for ceremonial purposes: if a girl is having her kinaalda – her puberty ceremony – or if you’re having a sing done for you. Then, as you grow, people give you nicknames to refer to you. Like ‘Cry Baby,’ and ‘Hard Runner,’ or maybe ‘Long Hands’ or ‘Ugly.’ ” Chee laughed. “I’ve got an uncle on my father’s side everybody calls ‘Liar.’ ”
“How about Jim Chee? Isn’t that your real name?”
“Along came the trading posts,” Chee said. “Along came the white man. He had to have a name to write down when one of us pawned our jewelry to him, or got credit for groceries. The traders started formalizing the nicknames, and before long we had to have names on birth certificates, so you got family names, like mine. I’ve had nicknames, too. Two or three. And I’m sure you do, too.”
“Me?” Mary Landon looked surprised.
“How long you been at Crownpoint? Three months? Sure. The people have a name for you by now.”
“Like what?”
“Something that fits. Maybe ‘Pretty Teacher.’ Or ‘Stubborn Girl.’ ” Chee shrugged. “’Blue Eyes.’ ‘Blond Woman.’ ‘Fast Talker.’ Do you want me to find out for you?”
“Sure,” she said. Then, “No, wait. Maybe just forget it. How about you? What do they call you?”
“Here? I don’t know. When I was at Rough Rock they used to call me…” He paused, and then said the word carefully in Navajo. “It means ‘One Who Studies to Be a Singer.’ ”
“Oh,” Mary Landon said. “Are you?”
“I was,” Chee said. “I guess I still am, in a way. It depends.”
“On what?”
“I applied for admission to the FBI. More or less to see how I’d do. Took the tests. Got interviewed by the screening panel at Albuquerque. Last week I got a letter telling me I’d been accepted. I’m supposed to report to the academy in Virginia. December tenth.”
She looked at him curiously. “So you’re going to be an FBI agent.”
“I don’t know,” Chee said.
“You haven’t decided?”
“What’s the rush? We work on Navajo time.” Even as he said it, the flippancy sounded false. December 10 wasn’t Navajo time. It was four weeks away. A specific, ironclad, unbendable deadline.
“But you can’t be both a Navajo medicine man and an FBI agent?”
“Not really,” Chee said. He wanted to change the subject, wanted not to talk about it. As a matter of fact, you couldn’t be both a Navajo and an FBI agent. You couldn’t be a Navajo away from the People. “By the way,” he said, “thanks for helping with Tomas Charley. I learned what I needed to know. If he told me the truth, that is.”
Mary Landon studied him. Chee remembered, belatedly, what he had told her about why he wanted to find Charley.
“Do people lie a lot in your business?”
The question sounded innocent. And if it was, the answer was yes, a lot of people lie to a policeman. But Chee sensed the barb. And the answer was different.
“I’m sorry about that,” he said. “I did tell his nephew I’d pass on the message about the car. But I also wanted to see him about police business.”
“And you couldn’t tell me that.” It was more a statement than a question, and the proper answer, of course, was “No, I couldn’t.” But Chee sensed the hostility again (or perhaps it could now better be described as a mixture of caution and suspicion), and he was not in the mood to give the proper answer.
“I could tell you, but only if you don’t mind complicated accounts of things that don’t amount to much,” Chee said. “Do you want to hear about it?”
She did. Chee told her about Vines, and Mrs. Vines, and the stolen keepsake box, and Sheriff Gordo Sena, and about the People of Dankness and the disappearing body, and finally about where Tomas Charley had left the box.