Then he picked up the leather pouch.
“What’s that?” Mary asked. “What are you looking for?”
“It’s where you carry your ceremonial stuff,” Chee said. “Supposed to be made of the hide of a deer killed in the ritual fashion. It holds your gall medicine. What you use against witchcraft. A little pollen. Maybe a little ceremonial corn meal…” He pulled open the draw cord and fished into the pouch with his fingers. “And it’s where you carry your amulet, if you carry one.”
The amulet he extracted was black, and dull, and shaped into the eyeless, sharp-nosed form of a mole. He held it up for Mary’s inspection. It was heavy, formed from a soft stone. Some sort of shale, Chee guessed. “Here we have Dine’etse-tle,” Chee said. “The predator of the nadir. The hunting spirit of the underworld. One of the People of Darkness.”
He stared at it, heavy on his palm, hoping for some information. It was well formed – better than most amulets. Chee remembered the amateur sculpture in B. J. Vines’ huge office. Had Vines made this? Was this formed from one of those fragments of black rock Emerson Charley had found in Vines’ keepsake box? Perhaps. But what did that mean? He slipped the mole back into the pouch.
“Did it tell you anything?”
Chee recited two lines of Navajo. “That’s from one of the blessing chants,” he said.
The mole, his hunting place is darkness.
The mole, his hunting song is silence.
27
THE SECRETARY from Dr. Huff’s office met them as they left the storage room. The message was from Chee’s Crownpoint office. It told him to call Martin at Albuquerque FBI headquarters.
“I thought nobody knew where we are,” Mary said. She was frowning. “Wasn’t that how we were going to stay safe?”
“Nobody but my office,” Chee said.
“But if your office knows, can’t somebody else…?”
“How?” Chee asked.
Mary thought about it, still frowning. She shrugged. “I guess you’re right,” she said. “But you know how people are.”
Martin wanted to remind Chee that he was supposed to come in and look at photographs.
“Maybe in a day or two,” Chee said. “To tell the truth, I’m going to stay away from places where this guy might be waiting around for me.”
“I think you can relax a little now. He’s gone.”
“How do you know?”
“We made a clean sweep,” Martin said. “Checked every motel, every hotel, every place he could be staying. We even checked new apartment rentals.”
“Lot of work,” Chee said.
“He’s no place around here,” Martin said. “And we found the green-and-white Plymouth. It was in a little garage in Gallup. The son of a bitch drove it in and told the mechanic it needed a valve job and he was in no hurry for it. That’s why we didn’t find it abandoned anywhere.”
“That was smart,” Chee said. “You know how he got out of Albuquerque this time?”
“We’re pretty sure he stole a car. Just drove it somewhere. Maybe El Paso or Denver. Somewhere far enough to miss our stakeouts. And then he took a plane for wherever he goes.”
“So he’s not in Albuquerque?”
“Not unless he’s staying with relatives,” Martin said.
28
AT THE COST OF HOURS of driving from here to there in search of older members of the Mud Clan, Jimmy Chee learned a little about Windy Tsossie. He learned that not long after the oil well explosion, Tsossie had married a daughter of Grace Yazzie of the Standing Rock Clan. He had moved northwestward to the Bisti country to join his new family. He had been seen around Ambrosia Lakes no more. Chee learned that Tsossie’s wife was dead. He learned other things as well. Among the important ones was that Tsossie’s sister-in-law, a woman named Romana Musket, was alive and well and living between Thoreau and Crownpoint in the log house with the tin roof and the sheep pens behind it that was visible on the slope above the highway. Mrs. Musket seemed likely to know where Tsossie could be found, alive or dead. Chee had also learned that no one seemed to know for sure which one it would be. No one had heard Tsossie had died. On the other hand, Chee had found no one who had actually seen him for years. And finally Chee had accumulated a general impression of Windy Tsossie. It was a negative impression. His kinsmen and his clansmen, when they admitted remembering him at all, remembered him without fondness or respect. They talked of him reluctantly, vaguely, uneasily. No one put it in words. Since Chee was Navajo, no one needed to. Windy Tsossie did not “go in beauty.” Windy Tsossie was not a good man. He did not follow those rules which Changing Woman had given the People. In a word, Windy Tsossie was believed by his kinsmen to be a witch.
“I don’t see how you can say that,” Mary said. “You told me what they said. Nobody even hinted at anything like that.”
“They wouldn’t,” Chee said, “not to a stranger. I might be a witch myself. Or you might be. And witches don’t like people talking about witches.”
Mary yawned. “You’re stretching things,” she said.
“Did you notice that talking about Tsossie made them nervous? That’s the tip-off.”
“The thing that interests me is I think we’re finally going to find one of them alive,” she said. “What’s he going to tell us? I really think now he’s going to remember something.”
“If he’s alive.”
“He will be.”
“I have the same sort of hunch,” Chee said.
They were driving the subagency’s pickup truck, having traded the relative comfort of the patrol car for the ability to follow wagon tracks. They drove northeastward, mostly in second gear, over a rutted road which now tilted downward. Chee flicked his lights to bright. The beams lit the broad, sandy bottom of an arroyo below. When they reached it, he stopped.
“Chaco Wash,” he said. He switched on the dome light, unfolded his map, and examined it. The map was one entitled “Indian Country,” produced by the Auto Club of Southern California; Chee had found it both accurate and detailed. It rated routes of travel in nine categories, ranging from Divided Limited Access Highways, down through Gravel, Graded Dirt, and Ungraded Dirt to Doubtful Dirt. For the last fifteen miles, they had been driving on Doubtful Dirt. According to the map, the Doubtful Dirt ended at Chaco Wash.
Chee folded the Indian Country map and extracted from his shirt pocket a lined sheet of notebook paper. It had come from a red-covered Big Chief notebook at the home of Mrs. Musket. On it, a grandson of Romana Musket had drawn another map to show how to reach the hogan where Rudolph Charley was conducting a Peyote Way. His grandmother was attending the services. The grandson was about twelve. He wore a T-shirt with the S symbol of Superman decorating its front, and he drew the map carefully with a ballpoint pen, and while he drew he explained that Rudolph Charley was the new peyote chief because somebody had shot the old peyote chief, who was Rudolph Charley’s older brother.
“Right at Chaco Wash the regular road got washed out,” Supergrandson said. “You turn right there, and you drive up the sand if you want to, because it’s smoother. You got to pay attention or you’ll miss the turns. I’ll put down some landmarks to look for.” He glanced up and grinned at Mary, and switched politely to English. “If you’re not careful out there you can get lost,” he assured her.
On the Big Chief map, Supergrandson had penned in “salt cedars” at the point where the Doubtful Dirt road petered out at the wash bottom. Now, in the beam of his headlights, Chee could see a cluster of winter-bare salt cedar below. Chee let the truck roll forward again, past the trees and onto the smoothness of the arroyo floor.