“I hope someone’s here,” Officer Manuelito said.
“They are,” Chee said. He nodded toward the boot.
Officer Manuelito frowned, not understanding.
“The boot’s turned up,” Chee said. “When you’re leaving, and nobody’s going to be home, you turn the boot upside down. Empty.
Nobody home. That saves your visitor from driving all the way up to the hogan.”
“Oh,” Manuelito said. “I didn’t know that. We lived over near Keams Canyon before Mom moved to Red Rock.” She sounded impressed. Chee became aware that he was showing off. And enjoying it. He nodded, said: “Yep. You probably had a different signal over there.” And thought it would be embarrassing now if nobody was home. The trouble with cattle guard signaling was that people forgot to stop and change the boot.
But Lucy Sam’s pickup was resting in front of her double-wide mobile home and Lucy Sam was peering out of the screen door at them. Chee let the patrol car roll to a stop amid a flock of startled chickens. They waited, giving Ms. Sam the time required to prepare herself for receiving visitors. It also gave Chee time to inspect the place.
The mobile home was one of the flimsier models but it had been placed solidly on a base of concrete blocks to keep the wind from blowing under it. A small satellite dish sat on its roof, helping a row of old tires hold down the aluminum panels as well as bringing in a television signal. Beside this insubstantial residence stood the Sam hogan, solidly built of sandstone slabs with its door facing properly eastward. Chee’s practiced eyes could tell that it had been built to the specifications prescribed for the People by Changing Woman, their giver of laws. Beyond the hogan was a hay shed with a plank holding pen for cattle, a windmill with attendant water tank, and, on top of the shed, a small wind generator, its fan blades spinning in the morning breeze. Down the slope a rusty and long-deceased Ford F100 pickup rested on blocks with its wheels missing. Farther down stood an outhouse. Beyond this untidy clutter of rural living, the view stretched away forever.
It reminded Chee of a professor he’d had once at the University of New Mexico who had done a research project on how Navajos place their hogans. The answer seemed to Chee glaringly obvious. A Navajo, like a rancher anywhere, would need access to water, to grazing, to a road, and above all a soul-healing view of—in the words of one of the curing chants—“beauty all around you.” The Sam family had put beauty first. They had picked the very crest of the high grassy ridge between Red Wash and Little Ship Rock Wash. To the west the morning sun lit the pink and orange wilderness of erosion that gave the Red Rock community its name.
Beyond that the blue-green mass of the Carrizo Mountains rose. Far to the north in Colorado, the Roman nose shape of Sleeping Ute Mountain dominated, and west of that was the always-changing pattern of lights and shadows that marked the edge of Utah’s canyon country. But look eastward, and all of this was overpowered by the dark monolith of the Rock with Wings towering over the rolling grassland. Only five or six million years old, the geologists said, but in Chee’s mythology it had been there since God created time or, depending on the version one preferred, had flown in fairly recently carrying the first Navajo clans down from the north.
Lucy Sam reappeared at her doorway, the signal that she was ready to receive her visitors. She had started a coffeepot brewing on her propane stove, put on a blouse of dark blue velveteen, and donned her silver and turquoise jewelry in their honor. Now they went through the polite formalities of traditional Navajo greetings, seated themselves beside the Sam table, and waited while Ms.
Sam extracted what she called her “rustler book” from a cabinet stacked with magazines and papers.
Chee considered himself fairly adept at guessing the ages of males and fairly poor with females. Ms. Sam he thought must be in her late sixties—give or take five or ten years. She did her hair bound up in the traditional style, wore the voluminous long skirt demanded by traditional modesty, and had a television set on a corner table tuned to a morning talk show. It was one of the sleazier ones—a handsome young woman named Ricki something or other probing into the sexual misconduct, misfortune, hatreds, and misery of a row of retarded-looking guests, to the amusement of the studio audience. But Chee was distracted from this spectacle by what was sharing table space with the television set.
It was a telescope mounted on a short tripod and aimed through the window at the world outside. Chee recognized it as a spotting scope—the sort the marksmanship instructor had peered through on the police recruit firing range to tell him how far he’d missed the bull’s-eye. This one looked like an older, bulkier model, probably an artillery observer’s range-finding scope and probably bought in an army surplus store.
Ms. Sam had placed her book, a black ledger that looked even older than the scope, on the table. She settled a pair of bifocals on her nose and opened it.
“I haven’t seen much since you asked me to be watching,” she said to Officer Manuelito. “I mean I haven’t seen much that you’d want to arrest somebody for.” She looked over the bifocals at Chee, grinning. “Not unless you want to arrest that lady that used to work at the Red Rock trading post for fooling with somebody else’s husband.” 33 of 102
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Officer Manuelito was grinning, too. Chee apparently looked blank, because Ms. Sam pointed past the telescope and out the window.
“Way over there toward Rock with Wings,” she explained. “There’s a nice little place down there. Live spring there and cottonwood trees. I was sort of looking around through the telescope to see if any trucks were parked anywhere and I see the lady’s little red car just driving up toward the trees. And then in a minute, here comes Bennie Smiley’s pickup truck. Then, quite a little bit later, the truck comes out over the hill again, and then four or five minutes, here comes the little red car.” She nodded to Chee, decided he was hopeless, and looked at Manuelito. “It was about an hour,” she added, which caused Officer Manuelito’s smile to widen.
“Bennie,” she said. “I’ll be darned.”
“Yes,” Ms. Sam said.
“I know Bennie,” Officer Manuelito said. “He used to be my oldest sister’s boyfriend. She liked him but then she found out he was born to the Streams Come Together clan. That’s too close to our ‘born to’ clan for us.” Ms. Sam shook her head, made a disapproving sound. But she was still smiling.
“That lady with the red car,” Manuelito said. “I wonder if I know her, too. Is that Mrs.—” Chee cleared his throat.
“I wonder if you noticed any pickups, anything you could haul a load of hay in, stopped over there on the road past the Rattlesnake pumping station. Probably a day or so before the snow.” He glanced at Officer Manuelito, tried to read her expression, decided she was either slightly abashed for gossiping instead of tending to police business, or irritated because he’d interrupted her. Probably the latter.
Ms. Sam was thumbing through the ledger, saying, “Let’s see now. Wasn’t it Monday night it started snowing?” She thumbed past another page, tapped the paper with a finger. “Big fifth-wheel truck parked there beside Route 33. Dark blue, and the trailer he was pulling was partly red and partly white, like somebody was painting it and didn’t get it finished. Had Arizona plates. But that was eight days before it snowed.”
“That sounds like my uncle’s truck,” Manuelito said. “He lives over there at Sanostee.” Ms. Sam said she thought it had looked familiar. And, no, she hadn’t noticed any strange trucks the days just before the storm, but then she’d gone into Farmington to buy groceries and was gone one day. She read off the four other entries she’d made since getting Manuelito’s request. One sounded like Dick Finch’s truck with its bulky camper. None of the others would mean anything unless and until some sort of pattern developed. Pattern! That made him think of the days he’d worked for Leaphorn. Leaphorn was always looking for patterns.