Colton drove steadily westward, past Grants, past the uranium-processing mills of Ambrosia Lakes, into the rougher country which climbed toward the Continental Divide. Crownpoint was trying to reach Chee at ten-minute intervals. At the Thoreau interchange, Colton pulled off the highway and parked. It was here he had decided to wait. He had never thought there was a serious chance that Chee would run far after the fiasco in the hospital. There was no need to run. Where better to hide an Indian than on an Indian reservation?
He sat with his knees propped against the dash and put together a sandwich of the materials he had brought from the trailer. As always, he ate slowly. The mountain was miles to the east now, but it still dominated the landscape, cold and ominous. When this was over, when he had caught Jim Chee and killed him, and killed the woman; when his tracks were erased and he was once again secure, then he would find a better way to trace his mother. Perhaps a hypnotist could help him remember something he had forgotten. Something useful. There was that old woman in one of his earliest memories. She had put him on her lap and her breath had smelled of tobacco. He had always guessed she might be a grandmother. If he could remember that – or even the place where they had lived when he was very small – it might be helpful. He could remember so little of that. Only a sense of days of cold fog, days of rain, days in an upstairs apartment with his meals left in a refrigerator, his mother coming home in the mornings, his mother’s hair damp against his face, his mother’s hands cold against his skin. There were men then, too, but no particular man he could remember.
He was staring outward at the blank blue sky, but his thoughts were on that room. He could remember the cracks in the gray linoleum. He’d had two marbles then and the marbles would chase one another down the cracks. He could remember playing that game endlessly, day after day, and the grimy windows, but not the name of the town. Surely he had heard it. Surely, even at four or five, it had meant something to him. His mother had not talked to him often. She wouldn’t have been likely to tell a child they were living in Seattle, or Portland, or wherever it was. But he must have heard it. He would find himself a hypnotist and maybe then he could remember something. Colton was aware that things were wrong with his memory. Gaps in it. He ran his thumb down his sweater, feeling the bump under the skin where the rib had healed crookedly. He could remember when he didn’t have the bump – when they lived in San Diego. He could remember having it, already healed, in Bakersfield. But he couldn’t remember the beating that produced it. It was the same with the ridge of thick white scar tissue under the hair above his left ear. That also had grown from some blank spot in his childhood. The last time he had tried to remember about that was in Taylorville, but trying had made him sick and he had stopped.
His radio spoke again, the voice of the Crown-point dispatcher called for Jim Chee.
This time, Chee answered. Colton put down his sandwich and picked up his notebook. Crownpoint relayed the message he had left.
“Well, hell,” Chee’s voice said. “We’re way over here by the old Bisti trading post.”
Colton jotted “We’re by Bisti” on his pad. He underlined “We’re.”
“If you’re away from the telephone, he wanted me to call him and let him know where he could meet you. He said he’d be coming to the reservation,” the dispatcher said.
There was a pause. “Well,” the voice of Chee said. “I guess he’s going to have to wait, then. We’re trying to find a hogan northwest of the old trading post. It’s about nine miles back in there, and it’ll take me a while to find it. Tell him I’ll meet him at our office in Crownpoint tonight. Tell him I’ll try to be there by nine, but I might be a little late.”
“Ten-four,” the dispatcher said. “You paying attention to the weather? It’s supposed to snow.”
“Right,” Chee said. “We’ll watch it.”
Colton jotted “We” on his note pad. He also wrote “nine miles back in there.” He didn’t make a note of the nine o’clock meeting time at Crownpoint. By nine o’clock Jimmy Chee would be dead.
30
THE BISTI TRADING POST had burned years ago, with the thoroughness with which buildings burn when there is no fire department to interfere. The fire had left only the blackened stone foundation and odds and ends of melted glass and twisted metal. Years of casual Navajo scavengers had sorted through the ashes, and years of weather had piled tumbleweeds and dust against the ruins. The great cypresses imported to protect the post from the sun had long since starved for water, like town dogs abandoned in the desert. The row of bare dead trunks now served as an incongruous landmark for a ruin that had otherwise almost returned to nature.
Chee turned the pickup truck left beyond the dead trees, leaving a road marked “Graded Dirt” for a track his map did not show. It ran, fairly straight and fairly smooth, across an expanse of creosote brush.
“You sure this is the right way?” Mary asked.
“No,” Chee said, “but I’m sure it’s the right direction.”
“And you still think we can find the hogan? After all these years?”
“Probably,” Chee said. “She said nine miles northwest by north of the trading post, at the south side of an isolated butte. And she described the butte.” He pointed ahead. “That must be it. And out here they’d have had to build the hogan of stone, so it’s still there. It’s just a matter of hunting it. And I’m pretty good at hunting.” Chee paused, thinking about that statement. “Or I used to think I was.”
The land sloped downward now, into an immensity of erosion. What once had been a sandstone plain had been carved into a grotesquerie of shapes – tables, heads, layer cakes, twisted spires, exposed ribs, serrations, and weird forms that suggested things to which Chee’s imagination could not attach names. Wind and water had cut through the overlay into the blackness of coal deposits, into crimson clay, into the streaky blue of shale. Every color showed except green. This was the Bisti badlands. It stretched away for fifty miles under a sky in which clouds had been steadily building.
“I have a hunch he’s not dead,” Mary said. “I sort of sensed she was hiding something.”
“She was nervous,” Chee said. “Maybe she was lying and maybe there was another reason. But if the bones are there, we’ll find them. And if they’re not, we’ll find Tsossie.”
As he said it, his confidence surprised him. But he was confident. Finding Tsossie, skeletal or breathing, involved things purely Navajo – a pattern of thinking and behavior with which Chee was in intimate harmony. He felt no such harmony with the thinking of the whites who must be involved in this affair. For all enterprises, such harmony was essential. Especially for the hunter. And this was from the very start a hunt.
One of the prayers from the Stalking Way ran through his mind, and the voice of his uncle chanting it:
Perfect understanding, Chee thought. Harmony between deer and man. Harmony between Jim Chee and Tsossie, or the bones of Tsossie, and the thinking of those who had placed Tsossie’s corpse among the rocks. But Jim Chee didn’t understand the thinking of whites. Neither Changing Woman nor Talking God had given him a song to produce that understanding. What would his uncle say to that? Chee knew exactly what the old man would say. He could almost hear him, because he had heard him so often: