The Dark Wind jlajc-5

by Tony Hillerman

  Cowboy's white patrol car drove by, stopped, backed up, stopped again beside Chee's truck.

  "Hey, man," Cowboy said. "I thought you were on vacation."

  "That was yesterday," Chee said. "Today I'm wondering if you've caught your windmill vandal yet."

  "One of the Gishis," Cowboy said. "I know it. You know it. Everybody knows it. Trouble is, all Navajos look alike, so we don't know who to arrest."

  "In other words, no luck. No progress," Chee said.

  Cowboy turned off his ignition, lit a cigaret, relaxed. "Tell you the truth," he said, "I been sort of laying back on that one. Wanted to see how you could do with not much help."

  "Or maybe not any help?"

  Cowboy laughed. He shook his head. "Nobody's ever going to catch that son of a bitch," he said. "How you going to catch him? No way."

  "How about your big drug business?" Chee said. "Doing any good?"

  "Nothing," Cowboy said. "Not that I know of, anyway. But that's a biggy. The sheriff and the undersheriff, they're handling that one themselves. Too big a deal for just a deputy."

  "They take you off of it?"

  "Oh, no," Cowboy said. "Sheriff had me in yesterday, wanting me to tell him where they had the stuff hid. He figured I'm Hopi, and it happened on the Hopi Reservation, so I gotta know."

  "If it happened in Alaska, he'd ask an Eskimo," Chee said.

  "Yeah," Cowboy said. "I just told him you probably got off with it. Reminded him you were out there when it happened, had your truck and all. They ought to look in the back of your truck."

  The conversation was going approximately in the direction Chee wanted to take it. He adjusted it slightly.

  "I think they already have," he said. "I didn't tell you about the dea people talking to me. They had about the same idea."

  Cowboy looked startled. "Hell they did," he said. "Seriously?"

  "Sounded serious," Chee said. "Serious enough so Largo reminded me about Navajo Police not having jurisdiction. Warned me to stay completely away from it."

  "He don't want you distracted from our windmill," Cowboy said. "The crime of the century."

  "Trouble is, I think I can guess where they put that car the feds are looking for."

  Cowboy looked at him. "Oh, yeah?"

  "It's up one of those arroyos. If it's out there at all, that's where it is."

  "No it ain't," Cowboy said. "The sheriff was talking about that. The dea and the fbi had that idea, too. They checked them all."

  Chee laughed.

  "I know what you mean," Cowboy said. "But I think they did a pretty good job this time. Looked on the ground, and flew up and down 'em in an airplane."

  "If you were hiding a car, you'd hide it where an airplane couldn't see it. Under an overhang. Under a tree. Cover it up with brush."

  "Sure," Cowboy said. He was looking at Chee thoughtfully, his elbow propped on the sill of the car window, chin resting on the heel of his hand. "What makes you think you could find it?"

  "Look here," he said, motioning to Cowboy. He dug his Geological Survey map book out from beneath the seat.

  Cowboy climbed out of his patrol car and climbed into Chee's truck. "I need me a book of those," he said. "But the sheriff would be too tight to pay for 'em."

  "You're hiding a car," Chee said. "Okay. God knows why, but you're hiding it. And you know the law's going to be looking for it. The law has airplanes, helicopters, all that. So you've got to get it someplace where it can't be seen from the air."

  Cowboy nodded.

  "So what do you have?" Chee ran his finger down the crooked blue line which marked Wepo Wash on the map. "He drove down the wash. No tracks going up. Personally, I'd bet he drove right down here to where it goes under the highway bridge, and then drove off to Los Angeles. But the feds don't think so, and the feds have got some way of knowing things they aren't telling us Indians about. So maybe he did hide his car. So where did he hide it? It's not in the wash. I'd have seen it. Maybe you'd have seen it." Chee made a doubtful face. "Maybe even the feds would have seen it. So it's not in the wash. And it's somewhere between where the plane crashed and the highway. Gives you twenty-five miles or so. And it gives you three arroyos which are cut back into country where you've got enough brush and trees and overhang so you could hide a car." He pointed out the three, and glanced at Cowboy.

  Cowboy was interested. He leaned over the map, studying it.

  "You agree?"

  "Yeah," Cowboy said slowly. "Those other ones don't go anywhere."

  "These two lead back into the Big Mountain Mesa," Chee said. "This one leads into Black Mesa. In fact, it leads back up toward Kisigi Spring. Back up toward where we found John Doe's body dumped."

  Cowboy was studying the map. "Yeah," he said.

  "So if Largo hadn't promised to break my arm and fire me if I didn't stay away from this, that's where I'd be looking."

  "Trouble is, they already looked," Cowboy said. But he didn't sound convinced.

  "I can see it. They drive along the wash and when they get to an arroyo, somebody gets out and looks around for tire tracks. They don't find any, so he climbs back in and drives along to the next one. Right?"

  "Yeah," Cowboy said.

  "So if you're going to hide the car, what do you do? You think that if you leave tracks they're going to just follow them and find you. So you turn up the arroyo, and you get out, and you take your shirttail or something, and you brush out your tracks for a little ways."

  Cowboy was looking at Chee.

  "I don't know how hard the feds looked," Cowboy said. "Sometimes they're not the smartest bastards in the world."

  "Look," Chee said. "If by chance that car does happen to be hidden out in one of those arroyos, you damn sure better keep quiet about this. Largo'd fire my ass. He was sore. He said I wasn't going to get a second warning."

  "Hell," Cowboy said. "He wouldn't fire you."

  "I mean it," Chee said. "Leave me out of it."

  "Hell," Cowboy said. "I'm like you. That car's long gone by now."

  It was time to change the subject. "You got any windmill ideas for me?" Chee asked.

  "Nothing new," Cowboy said. "What you've got to do is convince Largo that there's no way to protect that windmill short of putting three shifts of guards on it." He laughed. "That, or getting a transfer back to Crownpoint."

  Chee turned on the ignition. "Well, I better get moving."

  Cowboy opened the door, started to get out, stopped. "Jim," he said. "You already found that car?"

  Chee produced a chuckle. "You heard what I said. Largo said keep away from that case."

  Cowboy climbed out and closed the door behind him. He leaned on the sill, looking in at Chee. "And you wouldn't do nothing that the captain told you not to?"

  "I'm serious, Cowboy. The dea climbed all over Largo. They think I was out there that night to meet the plane. They think I know where that dope shipment is. I'm not kidding you. It's absolutely goddamn none of my business. I'm staying away from it."

  Cowboy climbed into his patrol car, started the engine. He looked back at Chee. "What size boots you wear?"

  Chee frowned. "Tens."

  "Tell you what I'll do," Cowboy said. "If I see any size ten footprints up that arroyo, I'll just brush 'em out!"

  Chapter Seventee

  Black mesa is neither black nor a mesa. It is far too large for that definition—a vast, broken plateau about the size and shape of Connecticut. It is virtually roadless, almost waterless, and uninhabited except for an isolated scattering of summer herding camps. It rises out of the Painted Desert more than seven thousand feet. A dozen major dry washes and a thousand nameless arroyos drain away runoff from its bitter winters and the brief but torrential "male rains" of the summer thunderstorm season. It takes its name from the seams of coal exposed in its towering cliffs, but its colors are the grays and greens of sage, rabbit brush, juniper, cactus, grama and bunch grass, and the dark green of creosote brush, mesquite, piñon, and (in the few place
s where springs flow) pine and spruce. It is a lonely place even in grazing season and has always been territory favored by the Holy People of the Navajo and the kachinas and guarding spirits of the Hopis. Masaw, the bloody-faced custodian of the Fourth World of the Hopis, specifically instructed various clans of the Peaceful People to return there when they completed their epic migrations and to live on the three mesas which extend like great gnarled fingers from Black Mesa's southern ramparts. Its craggy cliffs are the eagle-collection grounds of the Hopi Flute, Side Corn, Drift Sand, Snake, and Water clans. It is dotted with shrines and holy places. For Chee's people it was an integral part of Dinetah, where Changing Woman taught the Dinee they must live in the beauty of the Way she and the Holy People taught them.

  Chee was familiar with only a little of the eastern rim of this sprawling highland. As a boy, he had been taken westward by Hosteen Nakai from Many Farms into the Blue Gap country to collect herbs and minerals at the sacred places for the Mountain Way ceremony. Once they had gone all the way into Dzilidushzhinih Peaks, the home of Talking God himself, to collect materials for Hosteen Nakai's jish, the bundle of holy things a shaman must have to perfect his curing rituals. But Dzilidushzhinih was far to the east. The camp of Fannie Musket, the mother of Joseph Musket, was near the southern edge of the plateau, somewhere beyond the end of the trail that wandered southward from the Cottonwood day school toward Balakai Point. It was new country to Chee, without landmarks that meant anything to him, and he'd stopped at the trading post at Cottonwood to make sure the directions he'd gotten earlier made sense. The skinny white woman running the place had penciled him a map on the page of a Big Chief writing tablet. "If you stay on that track that leads past Balakai arroyo you can't miss it," the woman said. "And you can't get off the track or you'll tear the bottom outa your truck." She laughed. "Matter of fact, if you're not careful you tear it out even if you stay on the track." On his way out Chee noticed "Fannie Musket" scrawled in chalk on the red paint of a new fifty-gallon oil drum which sat on the porch beside the front door. He went back in.

  "This barrel belong to the Muskets?"

  "Hey," the woman said. "That's a good idea. You want to haul that out for them? They're dried up out there and they're hauling water and they had me get 'em another drum."

  "Sure," Chee said. He loaded it into the back of his pickup, rolled the truck to the overhead tank that held the post's water supply, rinsed out the drum, and filled it.

  "Tell Fannie I put the barrel on her pawn ticket," the woman said. "I'll put the water on there, too."

  "I'll get the water," Chee said.

  "Two dollars," the woman said. She shook her head. "If it don't rain we ain't going to have any to sell."

  Fannie Musket was glad to get the water. She helped Chee rig the block and tackle to lift the barrel onto a plank platform where two other such barrels sat. One was empty and when Chee tapped his knuckles against the other, the sound suggested no more than ten gallons left.

  "Getting hard to live out here," Mrs. Musket said. "Seems like it don't rain anymore." She glanced up at the sky, which was a dark, clear blue with late summer's usual scattering of puffy clouds building up here and there. By midafternoon they would have built up to a vain hope of a thundershower. By dark, both clouds and hope would have dissipated.

  Chee and Mrs. Musket had introduced themselves, by family, by kinship, and by clan. (She was Standing Rock, born for the Mud Clan.) He had told Mrs. Musket that he hoped she would talk to him about her son.

  "You are hunting for him," she said. Navajo is a language which loads its meanings into its verbs. She used the word which means "to stalk," as a hunted animal, and not the form which means "to search for," as for someone lost. The tone was as accusing as the word.

  Chee changed the verb. "I search for him," Chee said. "But I know I will not find him here. I am told he is a smart man. He would not come here while we search for him, and even if he had, I would not ask his mother to tell me where to find him. I just want to learn what kind of a man he is."

  "He is my son," Mrs. Musket said.

  "Did he come home after they let him out of the prison? Before he went to work at Burnt Water?"

  "He came home. He wanted to have an Enemy Way done for him. He went to see Tallman Begay and hired Hosteen Begay to be the singer for it. And then after the sing, he went to Burnt Water."

  "It was the right thing to do," Chee said. It was exactly what he would have done himself. Purified himself from prison, and all the hostile, alien ways the prison represented. The character of Joseph Musket took on a new dimension.

  "Why do you come to ask me questions this time? Before, another policeman came."

  "That's because the police station at Chinle is closer," Chee explained. "A policeman came from there to save money and time."

  "Then why do you come now?"

  "Because there are many odd things about that burglary," Chee said. "Many questions I can't answer. I am curious."

  "Do you know my son did not steal that pawn?"

  "I don't know who stole it," Chee said.

  "I know he didn't. Do you know why? Because he had money!" Mrs. Musket said it triumphantly. The ultimate proof.

  "There are people among the belacani who steal even when they don't need to steal," Chee said.

  Mrs. Musket's expression was skeptical. The concept was totally foreign to her.

  "He had hundred-dollar bills," she said. "Many of them." She held up six fingers. "And other money in his purse. Twenty-dollar bills." She looked at Chee quizzically, waiting for him to concede that no one with hundred-dollar bills could be suspected of stealing. Certainly no Navajo would be likely to.

  "He had this money when he first got here?"

  Mrs. Musket nodded. "He wrote us that he was coming and my husband took the pickup truck on the day and drove out to Window Rock to meet the bus. He had all that money then."

  Chee was trying to remember what prisoners were given when they left the penitentiary. Twenty dollars, he thought. That and whatever they might have in the canteen fund. A maximum of another fifty dollars, he suspected.

  "It doesn't sound like he would steal the jewelry if he had all that money," Chee said. "But where did he go? Why doesn't he talk to us and tell us he didn't steal it?"

  Mrs. Musket wasn't going to answer that question. Not directly at least. Finally she said, "They put him in prison once."

  "Why was that?"

  "He made bad friends," Mrs. Musket said.

  Chee asked for a drink of water, got it, drank it, changed the subject. They talked of desperate difficulties of sheepherding in a drought. All her sons-in-law were out with their herds, as was her husband, and now they had to drive them so far for grass and water that they could not return to their hogans at night. The women took them food. And already they had lost eleven lambs and even some of the ewes were dying. With Chee guiding it, the conversation gradually edged back to Joseph Musket. He had always been good with sheep. A careful hand with the shears, adept at castration. Reliable. A good boy. Even when he had been thrown from his horse and smashed his fingers and had to wear metal splints for so long, he could still shear faster than most young men. And he had told her that when he finished working at Burnt Water—by the end of summer—he would have plenty of money to buy his own herd. A big herd. He planned to buy two hundred ewes. But first he would go to all the squaw dances, find himself a young woman to marry. Someone whose family had plenty of grazing rights.

  "He said that after he worked for the trading post a little while he didn't want to have anything else to do with the white men after that," Mrs. Musket said. "He said he only had one white man who had ever been a friend, and that all the others just got you in trouble."

  "Did he say who the friend was?"

  "It was a boy he knew when he went to the Cottonwood school," Mrs. Musket said. "I can't remember what he called him."

  "Was it West?" Chee asked.

  "West," Mrs. Musket said. "I think
so."

  "Does he have any other friends? Navajo friends?"

  Mrs. Musket examined Chee thoughtfully. "Just some young men around here," she said vaguely. "Maybe some friends he made when he was away with the white people. I don't think so."

  Chee could think of nothing more to ask. Not with any hope of getting an answer. He gave Mrs. Musket the message about the cost of the water barrel being added to her pawn ticket and climbed back in the truck.

  Mrs. Musket stood in the yard of the hogan, watching him. Her hands clasped together at her waist, twisting nervously.

  "If you find him," she said, "tell him to come home."

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chee spent the next day as Largo had arranged, a long way from Tuba City and Wepo Wash. He drove fifty miles north toward the Utah border to see a woman named Mary Joe Natonabah about her complaint that her grazing right on Twenty-nine Mile Wash was being trespassed by somebody else's sheep. She identified the trespasser as an old man called Largewhiskers Begay, who had his camp in the Yondots Mountains. That took Chee to Cedar Ridge Trading Post and down the horrible dirt road which leads westward toward the Colorado River gorge. He found the Begay camp, but not Largewhiskers, who had gone to Cameron to see about something or other. The only person at the camp was a surly young man with his arm in a cast, who identified himself as the son-in-law of Large-whiskers Begay. Chee told this young man of the Natonabah complaint, warned him of the consequences of violating another person's grazing right, and told him to tell Largewhiskers he'd be back one day to check it all out. By then it was noon. Chee's next job took him to Nipple Butte, where a man named Ashie McDonald had reportedly beaten up his cousin. Chee found the camp but not Ashie McDonald. McDonald's mother-in-law reported that he'd got a ride down to Interstate 40 and was hitchhiking into Gallup to visit some relatives. The mother-in-law claimed to know nothing of any beating, any fight, any cousin. By then it was a little after 4:40 p.m. Chee was now sixty miles as the raven flew, ninety miles by unpaved back roads, or 130 miles via the paved highway from his trailer at Tuba City. He took the more direct dirt route. It wandered northeast across the Painted Desert, past New-berry Mesa, and Garces Mesa, and Blue Point, and Padilla Mesa. The country was dead with drought, no sign of sheep, no trace of green. He was off duty now, and he drove slowly, thinking what he would do. This route would take him through the Hopi villages of Oraibi, Hotevilla, and Bacobi, and near the Hopi Cultural Center. He would stop at the café there for his supper. He would learn if Ben Gaines was still in the motel, or the Pauling woman. If Gaines was there, Chee would see what he could learn from him. Maybe he would tell Gaines where to find the car. Most likely he wouldn't. Cowboy had two days to get there and find it, but maybe something had interfered. Most likely he wouldn't risk telling Gaines yet. He'd tell him only enough to determine if he could learn anything from the lawyer.