Chee hadn't known it existed. He should have known, he thought. It would be useful to any policeman. And even while he was thinking that, another part of his consciousness was shocked and dismayed. So few names. And so many of them listed as knowing only the Blessing Way, or the Enemy Way, or the Yeibichi, the Night Chant, or the more common and popular curing rituals. He glanced at Frank Sam Nakai, who was running his finger slowly down the page. His uncle had told him that the Holy People had taught the Dinee at least sixty such rituals, and that many of them were lost in those grim years when the People had been herded into captivity at Fort Sumner. And he could see by this that more were being lost. He looked down the list to see how many singers knew the Stalking Way, which he had been trying to learn. He saw only the name of his uncle and one other man.
"Just two know the Ghostway," his uncle said. "That fellow I told you about and his old uncle, way over there west of Hopi country. Just two."
"It would probably be the younger man," Chee said. "The Turkey Clan seems to be eastern Navajos—mostly on this side of the Chuskas."
"You can see why we need you," Frank Sam Nakai said. "Everybody is forgetting everything. There won't be anybody left to cure anybody. Nobody to keep us being Navajos."
"Yeah," Chee said. "That's the way it looks." He'd have to tell Frank Sam Nakai soon. Very soon. But today he just couldn't do it.
The fellow who knew the Ghostway (and the Blessing Way and Mountaintop Way) was on the book as Leo Littleben, Junior. And he lived not way the hell a thousand miles down a dirt track on the other side of the reservation but at Two Story, just twenty-five miles down the highway toward Window Rock. And—rarity of rarities on the reservation—he was listed in the Navajo-Hopi telephone book.
"I think my luck's changing," Chee said.
Somebody answered the telephone at the Littleben residence. A woman.
"He's not here," she said.
"When do you expect him back?" Chee asked.
"I don't know. Three-four more days, I think."
"Anyplace I can reach him?"
"He's doing a sing."
"Do you know where?"
"Way over there on the Cañoncito Reservation."
His luck hadn't changed much, Chee thought. Cañoncito was as far as you could get from Ganado and still be in Navajo country. It was a fragment of reservation separated from the Big Reservation by miles of private land and by the Acoma and Laguna Indian reservations. It was practically in Albuquerque. In fact, it was outside Dine' Bike'yah, on the wrong side of the Turquoise Mountain. Some strictly orthodox medicine men would refuse to hold a sing there.
"Do you know who it's for?" Chee said. "Who hired him?"
"For some woman named Sosi, I think it is."
"A Ghostway?"
"A Ghostway," the woman agreed. "He's doing the five-day sing. Be back in another three-four days."
So Chee's luck had changed, after all.
Chapter 25
It was almost dark when Chee turned off Exit 131 from Interstate 40 and took the worn asphalt that led northward. For the first miles the road ran between fences bearing the No Trespassing signs of the Laguna Indian Pueblo—grass country grazed by Herefords. But the land rose, became rockier. More cactus now, and more juniper and chamiza and saltbush, and then a fading sign:
welcome to the cañoncito reservation
Home of the Cañoncito Band of Navajos
Population 1600
Leroy Gorman would have no trouble getting this far, Chee thought, not if he could read road signs well enough to navigate the Los Angeles freeways. Chee had called him from the college, using his Tribal Police identification number to wring Grayson's unlisted number from the information operator's supervisor.
"You said you wanted to meet some kinfolks," Chee said. "You want to enough to drive a couple of hundred miles?"
"What else have I got to do?" Gorman said. "Where do I go?"
"South to Gallup. Then take Interstate forty east through Grants, and after you pass Laguna start looking for the Cañoncito Reservation interchange. Get off there and head into the reservation and look for the police station. I'll leave a map or something for you there to tell you where to go."
"You found the girl? They're having a curing thing for her?"
"Exactly," Chee said. "And the more of her relatives are there, the better it works."
Five miles beyond the entrance sign, a green steel prefabricated building, a shed, a mobile home, a parked semi-trailer, and a Phillips 66 gasoline sign marked the site of a trading post. Chee stopped. Anyone know the Sosi family? No Sosi family at Cañoncito. Anyone know where a sing was being held? Everybody did. It was way back on Mesa Gigante, at the place of Hosteen Jimmie Yellow. Easy to find it. How about the police station, where was that? Just down the road, three-four miles, before you get to the chapter house. Can't miss it.
It would, in fact, have been hard to miss—a small frame building not fifty feet from the road wearing a sign that read simply police station. It was manned, as Chee recalled the situation, not by the Navajo Tribal Police but by the Law and Order Division of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a parttime patrolman who also worked the east side of Laguna territory. On this particular afternoon it was manned by a young woman wearing bifocals.
Chee showed her his identification. "I'm trying to find a sing they're having at Jimmie Yellow's place," Chee said. "You know how to get there?"
"Sure," the woman said. "Up on Mesa Gigante." She extracted a piece of typing paper from the desk, wrote North at the top of it and East on the right-hand side, and drew a tiny square near the bottom and labeled it Cops. Then she drew a line past the square northward. "This is Route Fifty-seven. Stay on it past"—she drew a cluster of tiny squares west of the line—"the chapter house and the Baptist Church off here, and then you angle westward on Road Seventy forty-five. There's a sign." The map took precise shape under her pen, with unwanted turns identified and blocked off with X's, and landmarks such as windmills, watertanks, and an abandoned coal mine properly indicated.
"Finally it winds around up here, under this cliff, and then you're on top of the mesa. Only road up there so you don't have any choice. There's an old burned-out truck there right at the rim, and about a mile before you get to Yellow's place, you pass the ruins of an old hogan on the left. And you can see Yellow's place from the road."
"And I can't miss it," Chee said, grinning.
"I don't think so. It's the second turnoff, and the first one is to the old torn-down hogan." She looked up at him over her glasses, somberly. "Somebody died there, so nobody uses that track anymore. And after the turnoff to Yellow's place, that's all of them for miles because Jimmie Yellow's people are about the only ones up there any more."
Chee told her about Gorman driving down from Shiprock, instructed to stop here for directions. Would that be any problem? It wouldn't be. But as Chee drove away, he was nagged by a feeling that something would be a problem, that he was forgetting something, or overlooking something, or making some sort of mistake.
Jimmie Yellow's place, even more than Ashie Begay's, seemed to have been selected more for the view than for convenience. It was perched near the rim of the mesa, looking down into the great empty breaks that fell away to the Rio Puerco. To the west, across the Laguna Reservation, the snowy ridges of Turquoise Mountain reflected the light of the rising moon. To the east, the humped ridge of the Sandia Mountains rose against the horizon, their base lit by the glowing lights of Albuquerque. To the north, another line of white marked the snowcap on the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and the bright smudge of yellow light below them was Santa Fe, one hundred miles away. A spectacular view, but no water, and only a scattered stand of juniper to provide firewood, and the snake-weed around Chee's boots indicated what too many sheep a long time ago had done to the grazing on the mesa top.