The Dark Wind jlajc-5

by Tony Hillerman

  "I didn't think bachelors went to bed so early," Chee said. "Sorry about that. But I need to know something. Did they find the dope?"

  "Hell," Dashee said. "We didn't find nothing. That's why I'm trying to get some sleep. The sheriff wanted us out there at daylight. Everybody figured they'd hauled that stuff up the arroyo in that carryall and then hid it someplace around there. If they did, we sure as hell couldn't find it."

  "Does anybody really know what you're looking for?" Chee asked. "Any idea how big it is, or what it weighs, or how big a hole it would take to bury it?"

  "Seem to," Cowboy said. "They were talking about a hundred pounds or so and something as bulky as maybe three forty-pound sacks of flour. Or maybe a bunch of smaller packages."

  "So they do know what they're after," Chee said. "The dea was there?"

  "Johnson was. And a couple of fbi agents from Flagstaff."

  "And you didn't find anything interesting? No dope, no machine guns, no tape-recorded messages on how to ransom the cargo, no dead bodies, no maps. Absolutely nothing?"

  "Found a few tracks," Cowboy said. "Nothing useful. There just flat wasn't any big cache of dope hidden up there. If they hauled it up there in that gmc in the first place, then they just hauled it off again, and we didn't see any sign of that. Wouldn't make sense anyway. Think about it. No sense to it."

  Chee did think about it. He thought about it intermittently all the way north to Chama and then on the long westward drive across the sprawling Jicarilla Apache reservation. As Cowboy said, there was no sense to it. Another apparently irrational knot to be unraveled. Chee could think of only one possible place to find an end to the string. Whoever was vandalizing Windmill Sub-unit 6 had been a hidden witness at the crash. He must have seen something. It was merely a matter of finding him.

  It was afternoon when Chee returned to the windmill. He stood looking at it, realizing that any sensible, sensitive human could come to detest it. It was an awkward discordant shape. It clashed with the gentle slope on which it stood.

  The sun reflected painfully bright from the zinc coating which armored it against softening rust. It made ugly clanking, groaning noises in the breeze. The last time he'd been here his mood had been cheerful as the morning, and then the mill had seemed merely neutral—a harmless object. But today heat shimmered off the drought-stricken landscape and dust moved in the arid wind, and his mood was as negative as the weather. This ugly object represented injustice to thousands of Navajos. Any one of them might be vandalizing it, or all of them, or any member of their multitudinous families. Or maybe they were taking turns vandalizing it. Whatever, he didn't blame them and he'd never solve the mystery. Maybe it wasn't a Navajo at all. Maybe it was some artistic Hopi whose sense of aesthetics was offended.

  Chee walked past the steel storage tank and peered into it. Bone dry. A reservoir for dust. Leaning against the hot metal, Chee took inventory of what he knew. It was all negative. The vandal always used some simple means—no dynamite, cutting torches, or machinery. In other words, nothing to trace down. He apparently arrived on foot or by horse, since Chee had never found any wheel tracks which he couldn't account for. And Jake West had guessed it wasn't a local Navajo, for what that was worth. West could be misleading him deliberately to protect a friend, or West could be wrong. West had not, however, been wrong about bia efficiency. The bia crew had apparently brought the wrong parts, or done something wrong. The gearbox was still not operating and the mill's creaks and groans were as impotent as they'd been for most of the summer.

  Chee repeated his methodical examination of the grounds, working in widening circles. He found no off-brand cigarets smeared with odd-colored lipstick, no discarded screwdrivers with handles which still might retain fingerprints, no lost billfolds containing driver's licenses with color photographs of the windmill vandal, no footprints, no tire tracks, nothing. He hadn't expected to. He sat down on the slope, cupped his hand against the dusty wind, and managed to get a cigaret lit. He stared down toward the mill, frowning. He hadn't found anything specific, but something in his subconscious was teasing him. Had he found something without realizing it? Exactly what had he found? Almost nothing. Even the rabbit droppings and the trails of the kangaroo rats were old. The little desert rodents which congregate wherever there is water had moved away. Last year the inevitable leakage around the windmill had provided for them. But now the thick growth of sunflowers, tumbleweeds, and desert asters which had flourished around the storage tank were just dead stalks. The plants were dead and the rodents were gone because the vandal had dried up their chance of living here. Desert ecology had clicked back into balance on this hillside. The rodents would have returned to the arroyo with its seeping spring, with its pahos and its guardian spirit, Chee guessed, but the spring, too, was virtually dry. The victim of drought. Or was it?

  Chee jumped to his feet, snubbed out his cigaret, and hurried down the slope toward the arroyo. He trotted along the sandy bottom, following the path the moccasins of the shrine's guardian had made. The shrine looked just as he had left it. He crouched under the shale overhang, careful not to disturb the pahos. When he had been here before, there had been a film of water on the granite under the shale, so shallow that it was not much more than a pattern of wetness. Chee studied the rock surface. The dampness had spread. Not much, but it had spread. The spring had been barely alive when he had seen it before. It was still barely alive. But the spring was no longer dying.

  Chee walked back to his pickup truck, climbed in, and drove away without a backward glance. He was finished with the windmill. It offered no more mysteries. He'd stop at the Burnt Water store and call Cowboy Dashee. He'd tell Cowboy he had to talk to the keeper of the shrine. Cowboy wouldn't like it. But Cowboy would find him.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Cowboy had arranged to meet him at the junction of Arizona Highway 87 and Navajo Route 3. "We're going to have to go to Piutki," Cowboy had told him. "That's where he lives. But I don't want to have you floundering around up there by yourself, getting lost. So meet me, and I'll take you up."

  "About when?"

  "About seven," Cowboy said.

  So Chee had arrived about seven. Five minutes before, to be exact. He stood beside his pickup truck, stretching his muscles. The early evening sun lit the slopes of Second Mesa behind him, making a glittering reflection off the hot asphalt of Navajo 3 where it zigzagged upward. Just to the north, the cliff of First Mesa was dappled with shadow. Chee himself stood in the shadow. A cloud which had been building slowly all afternoon over the San Francisco Peaks had broken free of the mountain's updrafts and was drifting eastward. It was still at least twenty miles to the west, but its crest had built high enough now to block out the slanting light of the sun. The heat of the day had produced other such thunderheads. Three, in an irregular row, were sailing across the Painted Desert between Chee and Winslow. One, Chee noticed with pleasure, was actually dragging a small tail of rain across Tovar Mesa. But none of the smaller clouds promised much. With sundown they would quickly evaporate in the arid sky. The cloud spawned by the San Francisco Peaks was another matter. It was huge, its top pushed up into the stratospheric cold by its internal winds, and its lower levels blue-black with the promise of rain. As Chee appraised it, he heard the mutter of thunder. The clouds would be visible for a hundred miles in every direction, from Navajo Mountain across the Utah border, as far east as the Chuska Range in New Mexico. One cloud wouldn't break a drought, but it takes one cloud to start the process. For a thousand Navajo sheepmen across this immense dry tableland the cloud meant hope that rain, running arroyos, and new grass would again be part of the hozro of their lives. To the Hopis, rain would mean more than that. It would mean the endorsement of the supernatural. The Hopis had called for the clouds, and the clouds had come. It would mean that after a year of blighted dust, things were right again between the Peaceful People of the Hopi Mesas and their kachina spirits.

  Chee leaned against the truck, enjoying the c
ool, damp breeze which the cloud was now producing, enjoying the contrast between the dappled browns and tans of the First Mesa cliffs and the dark-blue sky over them. Above him the rim of the cliff was not cliff at all, but the stone walls of the houses of Walpi. From here it was hard to believe that. The tiny windows seemed to be holes in the living rock of the mesa.

  Chee glanced at his watch. Cowboy was late. He retrieved his notebook from the front seat, and turned to a clean page. Across the top he wrote: "Questions and Answers." Then he wrote: "Where is J. Musket? Did Musket kill John Doe? Witch? Crazy? Tied up with the narcotics heist?" He drew a line down the center of the page, separating the Answers section. Here he wrote: "Evidence he was away from work day Doe killed. Musket connected with narcotics. Likely came to Burnt Water to set up delivery. How else? Would have known the country well enough to hide the gmc." Chee studied the entries. He tapped a front tooth with the butt of the ballpoint pen. He wrote under Questions: "Why the burglary? To provide a logical reason for disappearing from the trading post?" Chee frowned at that, and wrote: "What happened to the stolen jewelry?"

  He drew a line under that all the way across the page. Under it he wrote:

  "Who is John Doe? Somebody from the narcotics business? Working with Musket? Did Musket kill him because Doe smelled the double cross? Did Musket make it look like a witch killing to confuse things?" No answers here. Just questions. He drew another horizontal line and wrote under it:

  "Where's Palanzer's body? Why hide it in the gmc? To confuse those looking for dope? Why take it out of the gmc? Because someone knew I'd found it? Who knew? The man who walked up the arroyo in the dark? Musket? Dashee?" He stared at the name, feeling disloyal. But Dashee knew. He'd told Dashee where to find the truck. And Dashee could have been at the windmill site when the crash happened. He wondered if he could learn where Dashee had been the night John Doe's body had been hidden. And then he shook his head and drew a line through "Dashee," and then another line. Under that he wrote a single word: "Witch."

  Under that he wrote: "Any reason to connect witch killing with dope?" He stared at the question, worrying his lower lip between his teeth. Then he wrote: "Coincidence of time and place." He paused a moment, then jotted beside it: "Doe died July 10, West died July 6." He was still thinking about that when Dashee drove up.

  "Right on the money," Cowboy said.

  "You're late," Chee said.

  "Operating on Navajo time," Cowboy said. "Seven means sometime tonight. Let's take my car."

  Chee got in.

  "You ever been to Piutki?"

  "I don't think so," Chee said. "Where is it?"

  "Up on First Mesa," Cowboy said. "Back behind Hano on the ridge." Cowboy was driving more sedately than usual. He rolled the patrol car down Navajo Route 3 and did a left turn onto the narrower asphalt which made the steep, winding climb up the face of the mesa. His face was still, thoughtful.

  Worried, Chee thought. We're getting involved in something religious.

  "There's not much left of Piutki," Cowboy said. "It's pretty well abandoned. Used to be the village of the Fog Clan with some Bow Clan, and the Fog Clan is just about extinct. Not many Bow left either."

  Fog Clan touched a memory. Chee tried to recall what he'd learned about Hopi ethnology in his anthro classes at the University of New Mexico, and what he'd read since, and what he'd picked up from gossip. The Fog Clan had brought to the Hopis the gift of sorcery. That had been its ceremonial contribution to Hopi society. And of course, the sorcerers were the powaqas, the "two-hearts," the Hopi culture's peculiar version of what witches were like. There was something about the Bow Clan, too. What? Chee's reliable memory served up the answer. He'd read it in some treatise on Hopi clan history. When the Bow Clan had completed its great migrations and arrived at the Hopi Mesas, it had accumulated such a reputation for creating trouble that the Bear Clan elders had repeatedly refused its request for lands and a village home. And after it had finally been allowed to join the other clans, the Bows had been involved in the single bloody incident in the history of the Peaceful People. When the Arrowshaft Clan at Awatovi had allowed Spanish priests to move into the village, the Bows had suggested a punitive attack. The Arrowshaft males had been slaughtered in their kivas, and the women and children had been scattered among the other villages. The Arrowshaft clan had not survived.

  "This man we're going to see," Chee said. "What's his clan?"

  Cowboy eyed him. "Why you ask that?"

  "You said it was the Fog Clan village. I heard somewhere that the Fog Clan had died out."

  "More or less," Cowboy said. "But the Hopis use a sort of linked clan system, and the Fog is linked to the Cloud Clan and the Water Clan and…" Cowboy let it trail away. He shifted into second gear for the steep climb along the mesa cliff.

  The road reached the saddle of the narrow ridge. It climbed straight ahead to Walpi. Cow boy jerked the patrol car into the narrow turn up the other side of the saddle toward Sichomovi and Hano. The rear wheels skidded. Cowboy muttered something under his breath.

  Chee had been watching him. "Had a bad day?"

  Cowboy said nothing. Clearly Cowboy had had a bad day.

  "What's bothering you?" Chee asked.

  Cowboy laughed. But he didn't sound amused. "Nothing," he said.

  "You'd just as soon not be doing this?"

  Cowboy shrugged.

  The patrol car edged past the ancient stone walls of Sichomovi… or was it Hano now? Chee wasn't sure yet where one of the villages ended and the other began. It seemed inconceivable to Chee that the Hopis had chosen to live like this—collecting right on top of each other in these tight little towns without privacy or breathing room. His own people had done exactly the opposite. Laws of nature, he thought. Hopis collect, Navajos scatter. But what was bothering Cowboy? He thought about it.

  "Who is this guy we're going to see?"

  "His name is Taylor Sawkatewa," Cowboy said. "And I think we're wasting our time."

  "Don't think he'll tell us anything?"

  "Why should he?" Cowboy said. The tone was curt, and Cowboy seemed to realize it. When he continued, there was a hint of apology in his tone. "He's about a million years old. More traditional than the worst traditional. On top of that, I hear he's sort of crazy."

  And, Chee thought, you hear he's a powaqa. And that's what's making you a little edgy. Chee thought about what he'd heard about powaqas. It made him a little edgy, too.

  "Not much use appealing to his duty as a law-abiding citizen, I guess," Chee said.

  Cowboy laughed. "I don't think so. Be like trying to explain to a Brahma bull why he should hold still while you're putting a surcingle around him."

  They were clear of Hano now, jolting down a stony track which followed the mesa rim. The cloud loomed in the southwest. The sun on the horizon lit the underface of its great anvil top a glittering white, but at its lower level its color varied. A thousand gradations of gray from almost white to almost black, and—from the dying sun—shades of rose and pink and red. To Cowboy Dashee's people such a cloud would have sacred symbolism. To Chee's people, it was simply beautiful, and thus valuable just for itself.

  "Another thing," Cowboy said. "Old Sawkatewa don't speak English. That's what they tell me anyway. So I'll have to interpret."

  "Anything else I need to know about him?"

  Cowboy shrugged.

  "You didn't tell me what his clan is."

  Cowboy slowed the patrol car, eased it past a jagged rock and over a rut. "He's Fog," he said.

  "So the Fog Clan isn't extinct?"

  "Really, it is," Cowboy said. "Hardly any left. All their ceremonial duties—what's left—they're owned by the Water Clan now, or Cloud Clan. It was that way even when I was a boy. Long before that, I guess. My daddy said the last time the Ya Ya Society did anything was when he was a little boy—and I don't think that was a full ceremony. Walpi kicked them out a long time ago."

  "Kicked them out?"

  "The Ya Ya S
ociety," Cowboy said. He didn't offer to expand. From what Chee could remember hearing about the society, it controlled initiation into the various levels of sorcery. In other words, it was a sensitive subject and Cowboy didn't want to talk about it to a non-Hopi.

  "Why did they kick 'em out?" Chee asked.

  "Caused trouble," Cowboy said.

  "Isn't that the society that used to initiate people who wanted to become two-hearts?"

  "Yeah," Cowboy said.

  "I remember somebody telling me something about it," Chee said. "Somebody told me the deal where they saw a pine tree trunk on the ground and the sorcerer caused it to move up and down in the air."

  Cowboy said nothing.

  "That's right?" Chee asked. "A lot of magic at a Ya Ya ceremony."

  "But if you have power, and you use it for the wrong reasons, then you lose the power," Cowboy said. "That's what we're told."

  "This man we're going to see," Chee said. "He was a member of the Ya Ya Society. That right?"

  Cowboy eased the patrol car over another rough spot. The sun was down now, the horizon a streak of fire. The cloud was closer and beginning to drop a screen of rain. It evaporated at least a thousand feet above ground level, but it provided a translucent screen which filtered the reddish light.

  "I heard he was a member of the Ya Ya," Cowboy said. "You can hear just about anything."

  The village of Piutki had never had the size or importance of such places as Oraibi, or Walpi, or even Shongopovi. At its peak it had housed only part of the small Bow Clan, and the even smaller Fog Clan. That peak had passed long ago, probably in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. Now many of its houses had been abandoned. Their roofs had fallen in and their walls had been quarried for stone to maintain houses still occupied. The great cloud now dominated the sky, and illuminated the old place with a red twilight. The breeze followed the patrol car with outriders of dust. Cowboy flicked on the headlights.