"Just like the stereotype," she'd said, smiling at him. "Noble Savage Understands the Elements."
"Just like common sense," Chee had told her. "Farmers and ranchers and people who work outside, like surveying crews and tribal cops, pay attention to the weather news. We watch Bill Eisenhood on Channel Four, and he tells us what the jet stream is doing and shows us the hundred-and-fifty-millibar map."
But he didn't want to think about Mary Landon. He opened the blinds and looked out into the gray dawn light. Still air. Street empty except for a black man in blue coveralls standing at a bus stop. The world of Mary Landon. A row of signs proclaiming what could be had for money stretching up the decrepit infinity of the West Hollywood street. Chee remembered what he'd seen on Sunset Boulevard last night on his Navajo hunt with Shaw. The whores waiting on the corners, huddling against the wind. Chee had seen whores before. Gallup had them, and Albuquerque's Central Avenue swarmed with them in State Fair season. But many of these were simply children. He commented on that to Shaw, surprised. Shaw had merely grunted. "Started a few years ago," he said. "Maybe as early as the late sixties. We don't try to buck it any more." This, too, was part of Mary Landon's world. Not that the Dinee had no prostitution. It went all the way back to the story of their origins in the underworld. The woman's sexuality was recognized as having monetary value in their marriage traditions. A man who had intercourse with a woman outside of wedlock was expected to pay the woman's family, and to fail to do so was akin to theft. But not children. Never children. And never anything as dismal as he'd seen last night on Sunset.
The black man at the bus stop put his hand in his rear pocket and scratched his rump. Watching, Chee became aware that his own rump was itching. He scratched, and made himself aware of his hypocrisy.
All alike under the skin, he thought, in every important way, despite my Navajo superiority. We want to eat, to sleep, to copulate and reproduce our genes, to be warm and dry and safe against tomorrow. Those are the important things, so what's my hang-up?
"What's your hang-up, Jim Chee?" Mary Landon had asked him. She had been sitting against the passenger door of his pickup, as far from him as the horizon. "What gives you the right to be so superior?" All of her was in darkness except for the little moonlight falling on her knees through the windshield.
And he had said something about not being superior, but merely making a comparison. Having a telephone is good. So is having space to move around in, and relatives around you. "But schools," she'd said. "We want our children to get good educations." And he'd said, "What's so wrong with the one where you're teaching?" and she'd said, "You know what's wrong," and he'd said…
Chee went for breakfast to a Denny's down the street, putting Mary Landon out of his mind by escaping into the problem presented by Margaret Sosi. This puzzle, while it defied solution, improved his appetite. He ordered beef stew.
The waitress looked tired. "You just getting off work?" she asked, jotting the order on her pad.
"Just going to work," Chee said.
She looked at him. "Beef stew for breakfast?"
Mexican, Chee thought, but from what Shaw had said she probably wasn't. Not in this part of Los Angeles. She must be a Filipino. "It's what you get used to," Chee said. "I didn't grow up on bacon and eggs. Or pancakes."
The woman's indifference vanished. "Burritos," she said. "Refritos folded in a blue corn tortilla." Smiling.
"Fried bread and mutton," Chee said, returning the grin. "Down with the Anglos and their Egg McMuffin." And so much for Shaw's generalizations about his home territory. The only people Chee had ever known who would willingly eat refried beans wrapped in a tortilla were Mexicans. Chee doubted if Filipinos would share any such culinary aberration.
He ate his stew, which had very little meat in it. Maybe this woman was the only Spanish speaker in West Hollywood who wasn't from the Philippines, but Chee doubted it. Even if she was, she represented the flaw in generalizing about people. On the Big Reservation, where people were scarce and scattered, one tended to know people as individuals and there was no reason to lump them into categories. Shaw had a different problem with the swarming masses in his jurisdiction. People in West Hollywood were Koreans or Filipinos, or some other category that could be labeled.
Just like people in old folks' homes were senile. Policemen wouldn't bother questioning senile people. Chee hurried through his stew.
The legend on the door of the Silver Threads Rest Home declared that visiting hours were from 2 to 4 p.m. Chee glanced at his watch. It was not yet 8 a.m. He didn't bother to ring the bell. He walked back to the sidewalk and began strolling along the chain-link fence. On his third circuit, four old people had appeared on the east-facing porch, sitting in their mute and motionless row in their immobile wheelchairs. While Chee strolled, a red-faced boy wearing a white smock backed through the doorway with a fifth wheelchair in tow. It held a frail woman wearing thick-lensed glasses. Mr. Berger and his aluminum walking frame had not appeared. Chee continued his circumnavigation, turning up the alley and confirming that residents of the nursing home had a fine view of the apartments where the late Albert Gorman had lived—from the porch or from the lawn. On the next circuit, Berger appeared.
As Chee rounded the corner that brought him past the east porch, the old man was shuffling his way toward the fence, moving the walker, leaning on it, then bringing his legs along. Chee stopped at the fence at the point for which Berger was aiming. He waited, turning his back to the fence and to the old man's struggle. Be hind him he could hear Berger's panting breath.
"Sons a bitches," the man was saying. Describing, Chee guessed, either the nursing home staff or his own recalcitrant legs. Chee heard Berger place the walker beside the fence and sigh and grunt as he dragged his legs under him. Only then did he turn.
"Good to see you, Mr. Berger," Chee said. "I was hoping I wouldn't have to wait for visiting hours."
"Coming to see…" The surprise was in the tone before Berger's tongue balked at the rest of it. His face twisted with the struggle, turning slightly red.
"I wanted to talk to you some more about Gorman," Chee said. "I remember you asked me if he was in trouble, and as a matter of fact he was in very deep trouble, so I thought maybe you had some idea of what was going on." Chee was careful not to phrase it as more than an implied question.
Mr. Berger opened his mouth slightly. Made a wry expression.
"He might have been in worse trouble than he knew. Somebody followed him from here to Shiprock. In New Mexico. On the Navajo Reservation. They shot each other, Gorman and this guy. Gorman killed the man. And then Gorman died himself."
Berger looked down at his hands, gripping the metal frame of the walker. He shook his head.
"We don't know why anyone would have wanted to kill Gorman," Chee said. "Doesn't seem to be any reason for it. Did Gorman tell you anything that would help?"
Berger's white head rose. He looked at Chee, drew a deep and careful breath, closed his eyes, concentrated.
"Man came," he said.
Chee waited.
Berger struggled, gave up. "Shit," Berger said.
"Would it help if I fill in the gaps? I'm going to guess at some of it. And if I'm wrong you shake your head and I'll stop. Or I'll try another guess."