“Here’s where we get to the place where if we’re not careful we can get lost,” Mary said. “Is that right?”
“Right,” Chee said.
“Let’s not,” Mary said. “I’m too tired. I’m flat out exhausted. It seems like we’ve been in this truck about seventeen days.”
“Just since about sunrise,” Chee said.
Mary turned suddenly and stared back out the rear window. “I get a feeling I’ll look back there and see somebody following us,” she said. “Not somebody. That blond man.”
“How could he?” Chee asked. “There’s no way he could know where we’re going.”
She shivered, and hugged herself. “Let’s say he’s smart,” she said. “Or let’s say he has some reason himself to go to this peyote ceremony.”
“I can’t think why he would.”
“It’s a memorial service for Tomas Charley, isn’t it? Or something like that. Maybe he’s looking for people, just as we are. Maybe we’ll just run into him there.”
“I doubt it,” Chee said.
“I think you’re like me. Too tired to care. You’re so tired you’re going to tell me your war name.”
“It won’t be much longer now,” Chee said. “We want to be at Charley’s place at midnight, and then Mrs. Musket will tell us that Windy is living in Grants and give us his address and telephone number. Then we go get some sleep and tomorrow we’ll call Tsossie, and he’ll tell us who blew up the oil well and why, and where to find the evidence to give to the grand jury, and who to arrest and why Emerson Charley’s body was taken out of the hospital, and who hired the blond man to shoot Tomas Charley, and…”
“Oh, stop,” Mary said. She yawned hugely behind her hand. “With the luck you and I have,” she said through the end of the yawn, “that kid gave us the wrong address or the wrong night, or Mrs. Musket won’t be there, or she never heard of Windy Tsossie, or she won’t like your looks and won’t talk to you, or she’ll tell you Tsossie moved to Tanzania and didn’t leave an address, or it’s the wrong Tsossie, or the blond will be there and he’ll shoot you. Or even worse, he’ll shoot me.”
Chee smiled. “Well,” he said, “we’ll soon know.”
At seven minutes to midnight the track they were following skirted a rocky outcrop covered with stunted juniper. The truck’s headlights reflected from a windshield, and then from the corrugated metal roof of a shack and the glass of the window below the roof. Chee slowed the truck to a crawl and examined what the headlights showed him. Three pickup trucks, an old white Chevy, and a wagon on which bales of hay served as seats. Twenty yards behind the shack was the round stone shape of a hogan, with a thin wisp of blue smoke emerging from the smoke hole in the center of its conical dirt-insulated roof. No one was in sight.
Chee parked the truck beside the newest of the pickups, flicked off the headlights, and stepped out into the darkness. The moon was down and the black sky was brilliant with a billion stars. He stood with face raised, drinking it in – the great fluorescent sweep of the Milky Way, the pattern of the winter constellations, the incredible silent brightness of the universe.
Mary was standing beside him now. “My God,” she said in a hushed voice. “I never saw the sky like that.”
“Altitude,” Chee said. “We’re almost at the Continental Divide here. Mile and a half above sea level; air’s thin. And partly it’s because there’s no ground lights. Look,” he said, pointing to the southeast. “See that little glow on the horizon? That’s Albuquerque. Hundred miles away, but you can see what it does.”
“It makes you forget for a minute how cold you are,” Mary said. She shuddered. “The minute’s up. I’m cold.”
From the hogan came the sound of song and the tapping of a pot drum. Distance and the hogan walls muted it, and the singing was not much more than a rising and falling rhythm, part of the background of the windless night. Chee glanced at his watch. The followers of Lord Peyote wouldn’t recess their ceremonial until midnight. They began at sunset after a prayer to inform the setting sun that their intentions were holy, and the ritual would not end until sunrise. But at midnight there was a break. And that meant another five minutes to wait.
“When I was a boy,” Chee said, “sometimes my mother would wake me up in the darkest part of the night, and we’d go out away from the hogan, and she’d teach me star lore. How the constellations move and how you can tell the direction and the time of night if you know the time of year. And how it all began.”
“How did it all begin?” Mary asked.
“There weren’t any Navajos yet. Just Holy People. First Man, First Woman, Talking God, Gila Monster, Corn Beetle, all the various yei figures. At night, the sky was black and blank except for the moon. So First Man decided to hang out the stars. And he put up the Blue Flint Boys” – Chee pointed to Cepheus – “and the Bear, and the Stalking God, and all the rest. And along came Coyote, and he grabbed the blanket where First Man had the stars waiting to be hung, and he gave it a toss and threw all that were left out in one great swinging motion. That’s what made the Milky Way.”
“Quite a coyote,” Mary said. She shivered again and hugged herself.
The hogan was silent now, and suddenly there was light at the doorway as the blankets hung across the opening were pulled back.
Chee reached into the cab of the truck and turned on the dome light. It was polite to let people know who was calling on them.
Contrary to Mary’s pessimism, Mrs. Musket was there. She was a gray-haired, sturdy woman with a red-and-green mackinaw over the voluminous velveteen blouse and skirt of traditional Navajo womanhood. She wasn’t sure she wanted to talk about Windy Tsossie.
Rudolph Charley invited them into the hogan out of the cold, and stood beside them listening. Rudolph Charley looked a lot like Tomas Charley. Just a little younger and even thinner.
“It all happened a long time ago,” Chee was saying. “Before he married your sister. There was an explosion at an oil well where he worked. We want to see if he remembers what happened.”
Mrs. Musket stared at Chee, glanced nervously at Mary, at Charley, and then back at Chee.
“He won’t remember anything,” Mrs. Musket said.
“It seems like just about everybody else who was working with Tsossie is dead,” Chee said. “We can’t talk to them. We want to talk to him.”
“I think Windy is dead, too,” Rudolph Charley said. “I think the witch got them all.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Musket said. “He’s dead.”
“When did he die?” Chee asked. He suspected Mrs. Musket was lying. Experience taught one to watch the face of a person being questioned. Lying made almost everyone nervous. Mrs. Musket was nervous. But then she would be nervous anyway, at being questioned by strangers who appeared out of the darkness to talk of death. And there was more to it than nervousness. Something vague and hard to define. And he thought that he knew what was causing it. Mrs. Musket had eaten peyote and drunk of the “black drink” of the ceremonial – peyote tea. She was in that dreamy world of the psychedelic. He glanced at Rudolph Charley. The road chief of his ceremonial, too, looked at Chee as if he wasn’t sure that Chee existed.
“When did he die, then?” Chee repeated. “And where did they put the body?”
“Long time ago,” Mrs. Musket said. She stood looking at Chee and through Chee. The seconds ticked away. “They lived out behind Bisti in the badlands. I wasn’t with them. But my sister’s husband was a witch, and somebody turned the witching around against him. He got corpse sickness and he died.”