Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 07] (8 page)

"What harm is he doing?" Leaphorn asked. "The way I understand it, he recommends they go to a
yataalii
if they need a ceremonial sing. And he points them at the white man's hospital only if they have a white man's problem. Diabetes, for example."

Chee had made no response to that. If Leaphorn couldn't see the problem, the sacrilege involved, then Leaphorn was blind. But that wasn't the trouble. Leaphorn was as cynical as Yellowhorse.

"You, yourself, have declared yourself to be a
yataalii
, I hear," Leaphorn said. "I heard you performed a Blessing Way."

Chee had nodded. He said nothing.

Leaphorn had looked at him a moment, and sighed. "I'll talk to Largo about it," he said.

And that meant that one of these days Chee would have an argument with the captain about it and if he wasn't lucky, Largo would give him a flat, unequivocal order to say nothing more about Yellowhorse as shaman. When that happened, he would cope as best he could. Now the road to Badwater had changed from bad to worse. Chee concentrated on driving.

It was the policy of the Navajo Tribal Police, as a matter of convenience, to consider Badwater to be in the Arizona portion of the Big Reservation. Local wisdom held that the store itself was actually in Utah, about thirty feet north of the imaginary line that marked the boundary. One of the local jokes was that Old Man Isaac Ginsberg, who built the place, used to move out of his room behind the trading post and into a stone hogan across the road one hundred yards to the south because he couldn't stand the cold Utah winters. Nobody seemed to know exactly where the place was, mapwise. Its location, in a narrow slot surrounded by the fantastic, thousand-foot, red-black-blue-tan cliffs, made pinpointing it on surveys mostly guesswork. And nobody cared enough to do more than guess.

Historically, it had been a watering place for herdsmen. In the immense dry badlands of Casa del Eco Mesa, it was a rare place where a reliable spring produced pools of drinkable water. Good water is a magnet anywhere in desert country. In a landscape like Caso del Eco, where gypsum and an arsenal of other soluble minerals tainted rainwater almost as fast as it fell, the stuff that seeped under the sandy arroyo bottoms was such a compound of chemicals that it would kill even tumbleweeds and salt cedar. Thus, the springs in Badwater Wash were a magnet for all living things. They attracted those tough little mammals and reptiles which endure in such hostile places. Eventually it attracted goats that strayed from the herds the Navajos had stolen from the Pueblo Indians. Then came the goatherders. Next came sheepherders. Finally, geologists discovered the shallow but persistent Aneth oil deposit, which brought a brief, dusty boom to the plateau. The drilling boom left behind a little refinery at Montezuma Creek, a scattering of robot pumps, and a worn-out spiderweb of truck trails connecting them with the world. Sometime in this period between boom and dust, it had attracted Isaac Ginsberg, who built the trading post of slabs of red sandstone, earned the Navajo name Afraid of His Wife, and died. The wife to whom Ginsberg owed his title was a Mud Clan Navajo called Lizzie Tonale, who had married Ginsberg in Flagstaff, had converted to Judaism, and, it was locally believed, had persuaded Ginsberg to establish his business in such an incredibly isolated locale because it was the hardest possible place for her relatives to reach. It would have been a sensible motive. Otherwise, the trading post would have been bankrupt in a month, since Lizzie Tonale could refuse no kin who needed canned goods, gasoline, or a loan, and maintain her status as a respectable woman. Whatever her motives, the widow Tonale-Ginsberg had run the post for twenty years before her own death, steadfastly closing on the Sabbath. She had left it to their daughter, the only product of their union. Chee had met this daughter only twice. That was enough to understand how she had earned her local name, which was Iron Woman.

Now, as he rolled his patrol car down the final slope and into the rutted yard of Badwater Wash Trading Post, he saw the bulky form of Iron Woman standing on the porch. Chee parked as much of the car as he could in the scanty shade of a tamarisk and waited. It was a courtesy learned from boyhood in a society where modesty is prized, privacy is treasured, and visitors, even at a trading post, are all too rare. "You don't just go run up to somebody's hogan," his mother had taught him. "You might see something you don't want to see."

So Chee sat, without giving it a thought, to allow the residents of Badwater Wash to get in harmony with the idea of a visit from a tribal policeman, to button up and tidy up, or to do whatever was required by Navajo good manners. While he sat, perspiring freely, he looked in his rearview mirror at the people on the porch. Iron Woman had been joined by another woman, as thin and bent as Iron Woman was stout and ramrod rigid. Then two young men appeared in the front door, seeming, in the dusty rearview glass, to be dressed exactly alike. Each wore a red sweatband around the forehead, a faded red plaid shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots. Iron Woman was saying something to the bent woman, who nodded and looked amused. The two young men, standing side by side, stared with implacable rudeness at Chee's car. An old Ford sedan was parked at the corner of the building, a cinder block supporting the right rear axle. Beside it, perched high on its backcountry suspension, was a new GMC four-by-four. It was black with yellow pinstripes. Chee had priced a similar model in Farmington and couldn't come close to affording it. He admired it now. A vehicle that would go anywhere. But richer than anything you expected to see parked at Badwater Wash.

Through his windshield, beyond the thin screen of Russian olive leaves, the red mass of the cliff rose to the sky, reflecting the sun. The patrol car was filled with dry heat. Chee felt uneasiness stirring. He was getting used to it, finding the anxiety familiar but not learning to like it. He got out of the car and walked toward the porch, keeping his eyes on the men, who kept their eyes on him.

"
Ya-tah-hey
," he said to Iron Woman.

"
Ya-tah
," she said. "I remember you. You're the new policeman from Shiprock."

Chee nodded.

"Out here the other day with the government officer seeing about the Endocheeney business."

"Right," Chee said.

"This man is born to the Slow Talking People and born for the Salts," Iron Woman told the bent woman. She named Chee's mother, and his maternal aunt, and his maternal grandmother, and then recited his father's side of the family.

Bent Woman looked pleased. She faced Chee with her head back and her eyes almost closed, looking at him under her lids, a technique the descending blindness of glaucoma and cataracts taught its victims. "He is my nephew," Bent Woman said. "I am born to the Bitter Water People, born for the Deer Spring Clan. My mother was Gray Woman Nez."

Chee smiled, acknowledging the relationship. It was vague—the Bitter Waters being linked to the Salt Clan and thereby to his father's family. The system meant that Chee, and all other Navajos, had wholesale numbers of relatives.

"On business?" Iron Woman asked.

"Just out poking around," Chee said. "Seeing what I can see."

Iron Woman looked skeptical. "You don't get out here much," she said. "Nobody gets out here except on purpose."

Chee was aware of the two men watching him. Barely men. Late teens, he guessed. Obviously brothers, but not twins. The one nearest him had a thinner face, and a half-moon of white scar tissue beside his left eye socket. Under the old rules of Navajo courtesy, they would have identified themselves first, since he was the stranger in their territory. They didn't seem to care about the old rules.

"My clan is Slow Talking People," Chee said to them. "Born for the Salt Dinee."

"Leaf People," the thinner one said. "Born for Mud." His face was sullen.

Chee's efficient nose picked up a whiff of alcohol. Beer. The Leaf Clan man let his eyes drift from Chee to study the police car. He gestured vaguely toward the other man. "My brother," he said.

"What's happening over your way?" Iron Woman asked. "I heard on the radio they had a knifing at a wedding over at Teec Nos Pos. One of the Gorman outfit got cut. Anything to that?"

Chee knew very little about that one—just what he'd overheard before the morning patrol meeting. Normally he worked east and south out of Shiprock—not this mostly empty northwestern area. He put the beer (possession illegal on the reservation) out of his mind and tried to remember what he had heard.

"Didn't amount to much," Chee said. "Fella was fooling with a girl and she had a knife. Stuck him in the arm. I think she was a Standing Rock girl. Not much to it."

Iron Woman looked disappointed. "It got on the radio, though," she said. "Lot of people around here related to the Gorman outfit."

Chee had gone to the battered red pop cooler just inside the front door, inserted two quarters, and tried to open the lid.

"Takes three," Iron Woman said. "Costs too much to get that stuff hauled way out here. And icing it down. Now everybody wants it cold."

"No more change," Chee said. He fished out a dollar and handed it to Iron Woman. It was dark inside the store and much cooler. At the cash register, Iron Woman handed him four quarters.

"Last time you were with that FBI man—asking about the one that got killed," she said, respecting the Navajo taboo of not speaking the name of the dead. "You find out who killed that man?"

Chee shook his head.

"That fellow that came through here looking for him the day he was killed. Sounded to me like he did it."

"That's a crazy thing," Chee said. "We found that man at his hogan over in the Chuskas. A man they call Roosevelt Bistie. Bistie told us he came over here to kill that man who got killed. And the man Bistie was after was up on his roof fixing something, and Bistie shot at him and he fell off. But whoever killed the man did it with a butcher knife."

"That's right," Iron Woman said. "Sure as hell, it was a knife. I remember his daughter telling me that." She shook her head, peered at Chee again. "Why would that fellow tell you he shot him?"

"We can't figure that out, either," Chee said. "Bistie said he wanted to kill the man, but he won't say why."

Iron Woman frowned. "Roosevelt Bistie," she said. "Never heard of him. I remember when he stopped in here asking directions, I never had seen him before. The man's kinfolks, do they know this Bistie?"

"None of them we've talked to," Chee said. He was thinking of how disapproving Kennedy would be if he could hear Chee discussing this case with a layman. Captain Largo too, for that matter, Largo having been a cop long enough to start acting secretive. But Kennedy was FBI to the bone, and the first law of the Agency was, Say nothing to nobody. If Kennedy were here, listening to this Navajo talk, he'd be waiting impatiently for a translation—knowing that Chee must be telling this woman more than she needed to know. However, Kennedy wasn't here, and Chee had his own operating theory. The more you tell people, the more people tell you. Nobody, certainly no Navajo, wants to be second in the business of telling things.

Chee dropped in quarters and selected a Nehi Orange. Cold and wonderful. Iron Woman talked. Chee sipped. Outside, noonday heat radiated from the packed earth of the yard, causing the light to shimmer. Chee finished his soda pop. The four-by-four drove away with a roar, dust spurting from its wheels. Beer in the four-by-four, Chee guessed. Unless the boys had bought it here. But if Iron Woman was a bootlegger, he hadn't heard it, and he hadn't remembered seeing this place on the map Largo kept of liquor sources in his subagency territory. Beer in the morning, and an expensive rig to drive. Iron Woman had said the two were part of the Kayonnie outfit, which ran goats down along the San Juan to the north and sometimes worked in the oil fields. But Iron Woman obviously did not want to discuss the Kayonnie boys, her neighbors, with a stranger. The local murder victim was another matter. She couldn't understand who would do it. He was a harmless old man. He stayed at home. Since his wife had died, he rarely came even as far as the trading post. Maybe two or three times a year, sometimes riding in on a horse, sometimes coming with a relative when a relative came to see him. No Endocheeney daughters to bring home their husbands, so the old man had lived alone. Only thing important she could remember happening involving him was a Red Ant Way sing done for him six or seven years ago to cure him of something or other after his woman died. In all the years she'd been at Badwater, which was all her life, she couldn't remember him getting into any kind of trouble, or being involved in bad problems. "Like getting your wood on somebody else's wood-gathering place, or getting into some other family's water, or running his sheep where they shouldn't be, or not helping out somebody that needed it. Never heard anything bad about him. Never been in any trouble. Always helping out at sheep dippings, always tried to take care of his kinfolks, always there when somebody was having a sing."

"I don't know if I ever told you that I have studied to be a
yataalii
myself," Chee said. "I do the Blessing Way and some others." He got out his billfold, extracted a card, and handed it to Iron Woman. The card said:

The next lines provided his address and telephone number at the Shiprock Police Station. He had mentioned this to the dispatcher, thinking he would square it with Captain Largo if the captain ever learned about it. So far, the risk seemed small. There had been no calls, and no letters.

Iron Woman seemed to share the general lack of enthusiasm. She glanced at the card and laid it on the counter.

"Everybody liked him," Iron Woman said, getting back on the subject. "But now he's dead, some people are saying he was a skinwalker." Her face reflected distaste. "Sons-a-bitches," she added, clarifying that the distaste was not for skinwalkers but for the gossips. "When you live by yourself, people say things like that."