Chee walked away from the trailer and stood beside the cottonwood's trunk, thinking. Below, on a path leading down to the riverbank and along it, a man was walking. He was whistling, coming up the path toward Chee. He wore neatly fitted denims, a long-sleeved shirt of blue flannel, a denim vest, and a black felt hat with a feather jutting from its band. When the path tilted upward so that Chee could see his face, he recorded a man on the young side of middle age, clean-shaven, slender, distinctly Navajo in bone, with a narrow, intelligent face. He walked with an easy grace, swinging the heavy stalk of a horseweed like a cane. He walked now through a tunnel of sunlit yellow where the willows and alders arching over the path had not yet lost all their foliage, still not seeing Chee. But suddenly, he heard the persistent summons of the telephone bell.
He dropped the stick and sprinted for the trailer, hesitating when he noticed Chee, then regaining stride.
"Got to catch the phone," he said as he ran past. He had his key out when he reached the door, unlocked it deftly, scrambled inside. Chee stood at the steps by the open door, waiting.
"Hello," the man said, and waited. "Hello.
"Hello." He waited again, then whistled into the speaker. "Anybody home?" He waited, then whistled again, waited again, watching Chee. Whoever had dialed his number had apparently put down the phone and left it to ring. "Hello," the man repeated. "Anybody there?" This time he seemed to receive an answer.
"Yes, this is Grayson… Well, I wasn't far. Just went for a walk down the river." Then he listened. Nodded. Glanced at Chee, his expression curious. "Yes," he said. "I will." He leaned his hip against the trailer's cooking stove and reached into a drawer to extract a note pad and pen. "Give it to me again." He wrote something. "All right. I will."
He hung up and turned to face Chee.
Chee spoke in Navajo, introducing himself as born to the Slow Talking Clan, born for the Bitter Water People, naming his mother and his deceased father. "I am looking for a man they call Leroy Gorman," he concluded.
"I don't understand Navajo," the man said.
Chee repeated it, clan memberships and all, in English. "Gorman," the man said. "I don't know him."
"I heard he lived here. In this trailer."
The man frowned. "Just me here," he said.
Chee was conscious that the man hadn't identified himself. He smiled. "You're not Leroy Gorman then," Chee said. "Is that a safe bet?"
"Name's Grayson," the man said. He stuck out his hand and Chee shook it. A hard, warm grip.
"Wonder how I got the wrong information," Chee said. "This is the place." He gestured at road, tree, river, and trailer. "Supposed to be an aluminum airflow trailer like this. Strange."
Grayson was studying Chee. Behind his smile his face was stiff with tension, the eyes watchful.
"Who is he, this Gorman? Who told you he lived here?"
"I don't really know him," Chee said. "I was just supposed to deliver a message."
"A message?" The man stared at Chee, waiting.
"Yeah. To Leroy Gorman."
The man waited, leaning in the doorway. Past him Chee could see dishes beside the sink, but except for that the interior of the trailer was utterly neat. The man was a Navajo, Chee was sure of that from his appearance. Since he didn't speak the language, or pretended not to, and since he didn't follow Navajo courtesy, he might be a Los Angeles Navajo. But he said he wasn't Leroy Gorman.
"You're the second person to show up today looking for this Gorman guy," he said. He laughed, nervously. "Maybe Gorman himself will show up next. You want to leave that message with me so I can pass it along if he does?"
"Who was the first one?"
"A girl," Grayson said. "Cute little skinny girl. Late teens."
"She tell you her name?"
"She did. I can't think of it."
"How about Margaret? Margaret Sosi."
"Yeah," Grayson said. "I think so."
"How little? How was she dressed?"
"About so," Grayson said, indicating shoulder height with a gesture of his hand. "Thin. Wearing a blue coat like in the navy."
"What did she want?"
"Seemed to think I was this Gorman. And when she understood I wasn't, she wanted to ask me about her grandfather. Had he been here. Things like that. Don't remember his name. She wanted to find this Gorman because he was supposed to know something about where her grandfather was." Grayson shrugged. "Something like that. Didn't make much sense." Chee put his foot on the step, shifted his weight. He wanted the man to invite him inside, to extend the conversation. Who was Grayson? What was he doing here?
"Maybe I could leave that message," he said. "You got a place I could write it down?"
Grayson hesitated a heartbeat. "Come on in," he said.
He provided a sheet from his note pad and a ballpoint pen. Chee sat on the built-in couch beside the table and printed, in a large, slow hand:
leroy gorman—albert got killed. get in touch with chee at
He hesitated. The tribal police switchboard operator responded to calls with "Navajo Tribal Police." Chee imagined Grayson hearing that and hanging up, his curiosity satisfied. He wrote in the number of the Shiprock Economy Wash-O-Mat and added:
leave message.
Chee didn't look up while he printed. He wanted Grayson to be reading the message—and he was sure that he had. He folded the paper, and refolded it, and wrote on the final fold:
for leroy gorman, private.
He handed it to Grayson.
"Appreciate it," Chee said. "If he does show up."
Grayson didn't look at the note. His face was tense. "Sure," he said. "But it ain't likely. Never heard of him until that girl showed up."
"Did she say where she was going when she left?"
Grayson shook his head. "Just said something about going off to find some old woman somewhere. Didn't mean much to me."
It didn't mean much to Jim Chee either, except that finding Margaret Sosi probably wouldn't be easy.
Chapter 11
Finding margaret sosi, Chee thought, would take a lot more time and hard work than finding an aluminum trailer under a cottonwood tree. Maybe she'd gone to Los Angeles. Maybe she hadn't. Chee remembered himself at seventeen. Easy enough to talk about Los Angeles, and to dream about it, but for a child of the reservation it represented a journey into a fearful unknown—a visit to a strange planet. He could never have managed it by himself. He doubted if Margaret Sosi would have taken that long and lonely leap into God-knew-what. More likely she was hunting Old Man Begay on the Big Reservation. Maybe she was tracking down members of their clan who'd moved to the Cañoncito. That was exactly what Chee would begin doing. Unfortunately, members of the Turkey Clan seemed to be scarce. But Chee's route back to his office led past the intersection of U.S. 666 and Navajo Route 1. The 7-Eleven store there served as depot for both Greyhound and Continental Trailways. It would only take a minute to check, and Chee took it. A middle-aged Navajo named Ozzie Pete managed both the store and bus ticket sales. No. No tickets had been sold to Los Angeles for weeks. Maybe months. For the past several days he was dead sure he had sold no tickets at all to a skinny teenage girl in a navy pea coat.
From his office, Chee called south to the trading posts at Newcomb and Sheep Springs. Same questions. Same answers. He called Two Gray Hills. The mare was back in the corral, neither better nor worse for its abduction, but no one had seen anyone who looked like Margaret Sosi. So much for that.
Chee tilted his chair back against the wall and crossed his boots on his wastebasket. What now? He had no idea how to start looking for Turkey Clan people. It could only be purely random. Driving around, stopping at trading posts, chapter houses, watering points, every place where people collected, to ask questions and leave word. Sooner or later someone would either be Turkey Clan or know someone who was. And since the Turkey Clan was virtually extinct it would more likely be later rather than sooner before he made connections. Chee did not feel lucky. He dreaded the job. But the only alternative to starting it was to see if he could think of an alternative.