Chee groaned, punched the pillow into better shape, rolled over. Nothing fit. Tomorrow morning he'd call Captain Largo, and tell him he'd be back in Shiprock by midafternoon, and see if Largo had learned anything while Chee was wasting his time in California. And he would complain about his headache and ask for a week of sick leave. He had some work he wanted to do.
Chapter 22
From flagstaff, near the western edge of the Navajo Big Reservation, to Shiprock, near its northern border, is about 230 miles if you take the most direct route through Tuba City. Chee took that route, checking out of his motel before sunrise and stopping briefly at Gray Mountain to call Largo.
First he dealt with official business. He was going to apply for a week of sick leave to let his head heal. Would it be approved? All right, Largo said, sounding neutral.
He'd told Largo in a call from the hospital the basics about what had happened to him and what he'd learned. Now he told him a little more, including what Shaw had learned, or failed to learn, in his visit to the u.s.d.a.'s office. "Shaw doesn't have any doubt that this Grayson is really Leroy Gorman," Chee said. "Neither do I. But it would be a good thing to confirm it. Is there a way you could do that? Find out for sure he's a protected witness?"
"He is," Largo said.
"You checked?"
"I checked," Largo said. "Grayson is Leroy Gorman. Or I should say Leroy Gorman is Grayson and will be until they haul him back to Los Angeles and have him testify. Then he'll be Leroy Gorman again."
Chee wanted to ask Largo how he'd found out. Obviously the fbi would not tell Largo or anyone else anything about this supersecret witness business. It was a long-time sore point with the local law that the Federals moved all sorts of known felons into their jurisdiction under false identities with no warning to anybody. The Justice Department said it was essential to the safety of witnesses. Local law saw the insult built into it—another statement from the Federals that locals couldn't be trusted. So how had Largo checked? The first possibility that occurred to Chee was a visit to the local telephone office to find out who ordered the telephone line connected to the trailer.
"Is Sharkey paying Grayson's telephone bill?" Chee asked.
Largo chuckled. "He is. And the bill for hauling that trailer in there from Farmington—the hauling company sent that right to the fbi. But when I told Sharkey what we know about all this, you'd have thought he couldn't imagine why I thought he'd be interested."
"Well," Chee said. "I'll see you next week."
"When you come back to work," Largo said, "I want you to make one more try to find that Sosi girl. And this time handcuff her to your steering wheel or something to get her to hold still long enough to find out about that postcard. You think you can do that?"
Chee said he could try, and he asked the captain to switch him to the dispatcher.
"Dispatcher?" Largo said.
"Yeah," Chee said. "If I haven't had any mail, I'll skip coming in."
Largo switched the call.
Chee didn't have any mail. He hadn't expected to. Then he arranged to have a horse saddled and a horse trailer ready for him for the afternoon. Captain Largo could have arranged that, but Captain Largo would have wanted to know why he wanted the horse.
Outside the Gray Mountain store, Chee stretched, yawned, and sucked in a huge lungful of air. It was cold here, frost still riming the roadside weeds, and the snowcapped shape of the San Francisco Peaks twenty miles to the south looked close enough to touch in the clear, high-altitude air. The winter storm being held at bay by the Utah high in last night's weathercast was still hung up somewhere over the horizon. The only clouds this morning were high-altitude cirrus so thin that the blue showed through them. Beautiful to Chee. He was back in Dine' Bike'yah, back Between the Sacred Mountains, and he felt easy again—at home in a remembered landscape. He stood beside his pickup, postponing for a moment the four or five hours he still had to spend driving, and studied the mountain. It was something Frank Sam Nakai had instructed him to do. "Memorize places," his uncle had told him. "Settle your eyes on a place and learn it. See it under the snow, and when first grass is growing, and as the rain falls on it. Feel it and smell it, walk on it, touch the stones, and it will be with you forever. When you are far away, you can call it back. When you need it, it is there, in your mind."
This was one of those places for Chee—this desert sloping away to the hills that rose to become Dook'o'oosli'id, Evening Twilight Mountain, the Mountain of the West, the mountain built by First Man as the place where the holy Abalone Shell Boy would live, guarded by the Black Wind yei. He had memorized this place when he worked out of the Tuba City agency. He leaned his elbows against the roof of his pickup and memorized it again, with rags of fog drifting away from the snowy peaks and the morning sun making slanting shadows across the foothills. "Touch it with your mind," Frank Sam Nakai had told him. "Inhale the air that moves across it. Listen to the sounds it makes." The sounds this place was making this morning were the sounds of crows, hundreds of them, moving out of the trees around the trading post back toward wherever this flock spent its winter days.
Chee climbed back into the truck and rolled it onto U.S. 89 North. He wanted to get where he had to go a long time before dark.
He got there about midafternoon, driving steadily and fast despite a quickening north wind, which told him the storm was finally bulging down out of Utah. He made a quick stop at his trailer in Shiprock to strap on his pistol, get his heavy coat, and collect a loaf of bread and what was left of a package of bologna. He picked up the horse and trailer at the tribal barns and ate on the long bumpy drive back into the Chuskas, trailed now by a cold north wind. He parked where Albert Gorman had abandoned his ruined Plymouth, unloaded the horse, and rode the rest of the way to the Begay hogan. The sky was clouding now, a high gray overcast moving down from the northwest. Chee tied the horse in the shelter of Begay's empty corral and quickly scouted the hogan yard. If anyone had been here since he'd left the place, they'd left no sign. Then he walked around the hogan to its broken north wall.
The wind was gusty now, whipping dust around his feet and making sibilant noises in the corpse hole. Chee squatted and peered inside. In the gray light of the stormy afternoon, he could see just what he'd seen by the light of his flash when he'd been here before: the rusty iron stove, the stove pipe connecting it to the smoke hole, odds and ends of trash. The wind hooted through the hole and sent a scrap of paper scuttling across the hard-packed earthen floor. The wind eddied around the collar of his padded coat, touching his neck with cold. Chee shivered and pulled the collar tight. By Navajo tradition, Albert Gorman now would have completed his journey to the underworld, would have vanished into the dark unknown which the metaphysics of the People had never tried to explain or explore. But his chindi would be here, an unhappy, discordant, malevolent evil—whatever in Gorman had been out of harmony—trapped forever inside the hogan when Gorman had died.
Chee took a deep breath and stepped through the hole.
He was instantly aware that it was warmer inside, and of the smell of dust and of something sharper. He paused a moment, trying to identify the aroma. Old grease, old ashes, old sweat—the smell of human occupation. Chee opened the stove door. Nothing in the oven. He opened the fire box. The ashes had already been stirred, probably by Sharkey. He picked up the scrap of paper the wind had moved. A torn bit of old envelope with nothing written on it. He found the place at the west side of the hogan where Begay had habitually laid his sheepskins for sleeping. He took out his knife and dug into the packed earth, looking for he knew not what. He found nothing at all, and paused, squatting on his heels, thinking.