Walking back to the carryall, Chee decided he had a second puzzle to add to the question of why Hosteen Begay had not saved his hogan from the ghost. Another piece of carelessness. Begay had in some ways prepared his relative well. Albert A. Gorman had gone through the dark hole that leads into the underworld with plenty of money he could no longer spend. No ghost could follow his confusing footprints. He had been left with the symbolic food and water for the journey. But he would arrive unpurified. His dirty hair should have been washed clean in yucca suds, combed, and braided. Boiling yucca roots takes time. Had something hurried Hosteen Begay?
Chapter 5
The beginning of winter bulged down out of Canada, dusted the Colorado Plateau with snow, and retreated. Sun burned away the snow. The last late Canada geese appeared along the Sun Juan, lingered a day, and fled south. Winter appeared again, dry cold now. It hung over the Utah mountains and sent outriders of wind fanning across the canyon country. At the Shiprock subagency office of the Navajo Tribal Police the wind shrieked and howled, buffeting the walls and rattling the windows, distracting Jim Chee from what Captain Largo was saying and from his own thoughts about Mary Landon. The Monday morning meeting had lasted longer than usual, but now it was ending. The patrolmen, shift commanders, dispatchers, and jailers had filed out. Chee and Taylor Natonabah had been signaled to stay behind. Chee lounged in his folding chair in the corner of the room. His eyes were on Largo, explaining something to Natonabah, but his mind was remembering the evening he had met Mary Landon: Mary watching him in the crowd at the Crownpoint rug auction, Mary sitting across from him at the Crownpoint Cafe, her blue eyes on his as he told her about his family—his sisters, his mother, his uncle who was teaching him the Mountain Way and the Shooting Way and other curing rituals of the Navajo Way, preparing him to be a yataalii, one of the shaman medicine men who kept the People in harmony with their universe. The genuine interest on Mary's face. And Mary, finally, when he had given her a chance to talk, telling him of her fifth-graders at Crownpoint elementary, of the difference between the Pueblo Indian children she'd taught the year before at the Laguna-Acoma school and these Navajo youngsters, and of her family in Wisconsin. He'd known, he thought now, even on that first meeting, that this white woman was the woman he wanted to share his life with.
A fresh blast of wind rattled sand against the windows and seeped through some crack somewhere to move icy air around Chee's ankles. His memory skipped ahead to the weekend he'd taken Mary back on the plateau to his mother's summer hogan south of Kayenta. When he'd asked his mother later what she'd thought of Mary, his mother had said, "Will she be a Navajo?" And he had said, "Yes, she will be." Now he knew he had been wrong. Or probably wrong. Mary Landon would not be a Navajo. How could he change that? Or, if he couldn't change it, could Jim Chee stop being a Navajo?
Now Natonabah was leaving, zipping up his fur-lined jacket, his face flushed, his mouth grim. Clearly the captain had, in his low-key way, expressed disapproval. Chee quit thinking about Mary Landon and reexamined his conscience. He'd already done that automatically when Largo had signaled him to stay behind and had thought of no violations of Largo's rules and regulations. But now Captain Largo's large round face considered him, even blander and milder than usual. Often that meant trouble. What had he done?
"You all caught up on your work?"
Chee sat up straight. "No, sir," he said.
"You catch that Yazzie who's bootlegging all that wine?"
"No, sir."
"Found that kid did the cutting on the Ute Reservation?"
"Not yet." It was going to be worse than he'd expected. He'd only had the Ute stabbing added to his case list Friday.
Largo was peering down into the file folder in which he kept Chee's reports. It was a bulky file, but Largo apparently decided to shorten the ordeal a little. He flipped rapidly through it, then closed it and turned it face down on his desk. "All this still-unfinished business then?" he asked. "You got plenty to keep your mind occupied?"
"Yes, sir," Chee said. "Plenty of work to do."
"I got the impression that you had time on your hands," Largo said. "Looking for something to keep you occupied."
Chee waited. Largo waited. Ah, well, Chee thought, might as well get it over with. "How's that, sir?" he asked.
"You pulled the file on the Gorman business," Largo said. His expression asked why.
"Just curious," Chee said. Now he would get a lecture on respecting jurisdictions, on minding his own business.
"You find anything interesting in there?"
The question surprised him. "Not much in there at all," he said.
"No reason for there to be," Largo said. "It's not our case. What were you looking for?"
"Nothing specific. I wondered who Gorman was. And who was the man who came after him. The one Gorman shot at the laundry. What Gorman was doing in Shiprock. How Begay fit in. Things like that."
Largo made a tent of his fingers above the desk top and spent a moment examining it. "Why were you curious?" he asked, without taking his eyes off his fingers. "Fight in a parking lot. The survivor runs to his kinsman to hide out and heal. Everything looks normal. What's bothering you?"
Chee shrugged.
Largo studied him. "You know," he said, "or anyway you heard from me, that an fbi agent got killed back in California in this one. The Agency is always touchy. This time they're going to be extra touchy."
"I was just curious," Chee said. "No harm done."
"I want you to tell me what made you curious."
"It wasn't much," Chee said. He told Largo about the way Gorman's corpse had been prepared, with its hair unwashed, and of wondering why Begay had not moved Gorman outside before the moment of death.
Largo listened. "You tell Sharkey about this?"
"He wasn't interested," Chee said.
Largo grinned.
"Maybe no reason to be," Chee admitted. "I don't know much about Begay. Lots of Navajos don't know enough about the Navajo way of getting a corpse ready. Lots of 'em wouldn't care."
"Younger ones, maybe," Largo said. "Or city ones. Begay isn't young. Or city. What do you know about him?"
"They call him Hosteen, so I guess the people up there respect him. That's about it."
"I know a little more than that," Largo said. "Begay is Tazhii Dinee. In fact, I'm told his aunt is the ahnii of that clan. He's lived up there above Two Gray Hills longer than anybody can remember. Has a grazing permit. Runs sheep. Keeps to himself. Some talk that he's a witch."
Largo recited it all in a flat, uninflected voice, putting no more emphasis on the last sentence than the first.
"There's some talk that just about everybody is a witch," Chee said. "I've heard you were. And me."
"He seems to have a good reputation," Largo said. "People up there seem to like him. Say he's honest. Takes care of his relatives." That was the ultimate compliment for a Navajo. The worse insult was to say he acted like he didn't have any relatives. In Navajo country, families come first.
Chee wanted to ask Largo why he had learned so much about an old man who kept to himself high in the Chuska Mountains. As Largo had said, the Gorman shooting was an fbi case—white-man business completely outside the jurisdiction of the Navajo Tribal Police. Instead of asking, he waited. He'd worked for Largo two years, first at the Tuba City subagency and now here at Shiprock. Largo would tell him exactly what Largo wanted him to know and all at Largo's own pace. Chee knew very little about the Tazhii Dinee—only that the Turkey People were one of the smallest of the sixty or so Navajo clans. If Begay's aunt was the clan's ahnii, its matriarch/judge/fountain-of -wisdom, then his was a most respected family and he would certainly know enough of the Navajo Way to properly prepare a kinsman for burial.
"Gorman was the son of Begay's youngest sister," Largo said. "The Bureau of Indian Affairs relocated a bunch of that clan in Los Angeles in the nineteen forties and fifties. In fact, Begay seems to have been among the few of that outfit that didn't go. I think one of his daughters also stayed. Lived over around Borrego Pass. Dead now. And a few Tazhii Dinee are supposed to have moved over to the Cañoncito Reservation. But the clan doesn't amount to much any more." Largo walked to the window and stood, back to Chee, inspecting the weather in the parking lot.