"Wait a minute," Largo said. "When was this visit? It was after I ordered you to stay away from that drug case."
"I was working on the windmill," Chee said. "Sometimes you get more than you go after."
"I notice you do," Largo said grimly. "I've got to have the paperwork done on all this."
"Is tomorrow soon enough?"
"Just barely," Largo said. "What's wrong with coming in to work and doing it now?"
"I'm way down at Cameron," Chee said. "And I thought I'd spend the day seeing if I can catch us that Burnt Water burglar."
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The first step toward what Chee called catching the Burnt Water burglar was ceremonial. In effect, Chee was going hunting. From their very beginnings, the Navajos had been a society of hunters. Like all hunting cultures, they approached the bloody, dangerous, and psychologically wounding business of killing one's fellow beings with elaborate care. Everything was done to minimize damage. The system had been devised in the dim, cold past, when the Dinees preyed with the wolves on the moose and caribou of the Arctic. And the first step of this system was the purification of the hunter.
There was no place anywhere near his trailer lot where Chee could build a sweat house. So he had found a place on the ridge behind Tuba City. He'd built it in a little arroyo, using one of the banks for a wall and erecting a sort of lean-to of rocks and juniper limbs. There was plenty of dead wood all around to fuel its fire pit. The necessary water Chee carried in from his truck in two collapsible plastic containers. By midmorning, the rocks were hot enough. Chee stripped to his Jockey shorts. He stood, facing east, and sang the first of the four sweat lodge songs:
"I am come from Graystreak Mountain;
I am standing nearby.
I am the Talking God,
A son of Female Wind. I stand near you
With a black bow in my right hand,
With a yellow-feathered arrow in my left hand.
I am the Talking God, standing ready…"
He sang all the verses, dropped to his hands and knees, and ducked through the sweat house entrance into the hot darkness inside. He poured water from one of the plastic containers onto the sizzling boulders and pulled the heavy canvas cover down over the entrance. In the steamy blackness he sang three other songs, recounting how Talking God and the other yei figures of this legend had caught Black God in his guise as a crow, and how Black God had removed his suit of black feathers, and how Black God had been tricked, finally, into releasing all the game animals which he had held captive.
With that ritual finished, Chee was not certain how he should proceed. It was not the sort of question he would have ever thought to ask Frank Sam Nakai. "How, Uncle, does one prepare himself for a hunt which will take him into a Hopi village on a Holy Night when the kachina spirits are out? How does one prepare himself to trap another man?" Had he ever asked, he knew Frank Sam Nakai would have had an answer. He would have lit a cigaret, and smoked it, and finally he would have had an answer. Chee, his sweat bath songs finished, sat in the choking wet heat and thought about it in the Navajo Way—from east through north. The purpose of the hunting ceremony—the Stalking Way—was to put hunter and prey in harmony. If one was to hunt deer, the Stalking Way repeated the ancient formula by which man regained his ability to be one with the deer. One changed the formula only slightly to fit the animal. The animal, now, was man. An Anglo-American, ex-husband of a Hopi woman, trader with the Navajos, magician, wise, shrewd, dangerous. Chee felt the sweat pouring out of him, dripping from his chin and eyebrows and arms, and thought how to change the song to fit it to West. He sang:
"I am the Talking God. The Talking God.
I am going after him.
Below the east, I am going after him.
To that place in Wepo Wash, I am going after him.
I, being the Talking God, go in pursuit of him.
To Black Mesa, to the Hopi villages,
The chase will take me.
I am the Talking God. His luck will be with me.
His thoughts will be my thoughts as I go after him."
Verse after verse he sang, adopting the ancient ceremonial songs to meet this new need. The songs invoked Talking God, and Begochidi, and Calling God, and Black God himself, and the Predator People: First Wolf, First Puma, First Badger; recounting the role of Game Maker, and all the other Holy People of the Great Navajo myth of how hunting began and how man became himself a predator. Through it all, verse by verse, the purpose was the same as it had been since his ancestors hunted along the glaciers: to cross the prehuman flux and once again be as one with the hunted animal, sharing his spirit, his ways, thoughts, his very being.
Chee simply substituted "the man West" for "the fine buck" and sang on.
"In the evening twilight, the man West is calling to me.
Out of the darkness, the man West comes toward me.
Our minds are one mind, the man West and I, the Talking God.
Our Spirits are one spirit, the man West and I, the Talking God.
Toward my feathered arrow, the man West walks directly.
Toward my feathered arrow, the man West turns his side.
That my black bow will bless him with its beauty.
That my feathered arrow will make him like the Talking God.
That he may walk, and I may walk, forever in Beauty.
That we may walk with beauty all around us.
That my feathered arrow may end it all in Beauty."
There should be a final ceremony, and a final verse. In the old, traditional days, the bow of the hunter would have been blessed. These days, sometimes it was done to the rifle before a deer hunt. Chee unsnapped his holster and extracted his pistol. It was a medium-barrel Ruger .38. He was not particularly good with it, making his qualifying score each year with very little to spare. He had never shot at any living thing with it, and had never really decided what he would do if the situation demanded that some fellow human be fired upon. Given proper need, or proper provocation, Chee presumed he would shoot, but it wasn't the sort of decision to be made in the abstract. Now Chee stared at the pistol, trying to imagine himself shooting West. It didn't work. He put the pistol back in the holster. As he did, it occurred to him that the final verse of the usual sweat bath ceremonial could not be done now. The prescribed verse was the Blessing Song from the Blessing Way. But Jim Chee, a shaman of the Slow Talking People, could sing no blessing songs now. Not until this hunt was finished and he had returned to this sweat bath to purify himself again. Until then, Jim Chee had turned himself into a predator, dedicated by the Stalking Way songs to the hunt. The Blessing Song would have to wait. It put one in harmony with beauty. The Stalking Way put one in harmony with death.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Jim chee waited for West, or for Ironfingers, or for whoever would come, just as a mountain lion waits for game at a watering place. He picked a place which gave him a good view of the burial place of the suitcases and from which he could move quickly to make an arrest. He had checked the area and found no sign that West's jeep, or any other vehicle, had been here since Johnson's futile search. He poked his jack handle into the sand until he felt the steel tapping against aluminum. The bait was still in place. Then he sat behind a screen of junipers on the bank of the wash and waited. He didn't expect West to come. But if West did come, Chee would be waiting.
It was midafternoon now, a little less than six hours before the 9:00 p.m. deadline the caller had announced for the transfer of drugs for money. It was humid—a rare circumstance for the Colorado plateau—and the thunderheads were boiling up northward toward Utah and over the Mogollón Rim to the West. Chee still felt the effects of the heat and dehydration of the sweat bath. He'd taken two huge drinks of water to replace the lost fluids and was, in fact, sweating again now. Still, he felt a kind of clear, clean sharpness in his vision and in his mind. Hosteen Nakai had taught him of the time when all intelligent things were still in flux, when what-would-be-
animal and that-which-would-be-human could still talk together, and change forms. In a ceremonial way, the Stalking Way was intended to restore that ancient power on some much-limited intellectual level. Chee wondered about it as he waited. Was he seeing and thinking a little more like a wolf or a puma?
There was no way to answer that. So he reviewed all he knew of this affair, from the very beginning, concentrating on West. West the magician, causing him to think of mental telepathy instead of the mathematics of how a deck of cards can be divided. West misdirecting the attention of the Navajo buying the rope, misdirecting Chee's attention away from the easy solution of the three of diamonds, misdirecting attention away from why Joseph Musket's hands were flayed. Always distorting reality with illusion. And now, why was West asking only five hundred thousand dollars for a cocaine shipment that the dea said was worth many millions of dollars? Why so little? Because he wanted it fast? Because he wanted to minimize any risk that the owners wouldn't be willing to buy it back? Because West was not a greedy man? That was his reputation. And it seemed to be justified. He had no expensive tastes. No drinking. No women. As trading posts went, Burnt Water seemed to be moderately profitable, and West's prices, and his interest rate on pawn, showed no tendency to gouge. He was, in fact, known to be generous on occasion. Cowboy had told him once of West giving a drunk twenty dollars for bus fare to Flagstaff. Not the act of a man who valued money for money's sake.
So what would he do with five hundred thousand dollars? How would he use it, a lonely man with no one to spend it on, no one to spend it with? There must be a reason for demanding it, for setting up the steal, for the killing and the danger. A West reason. A white man's reason.
Chee stared out across the sandy bottom of Wepo Wash. Slowly, the white man's reason emerged. Chee checked it against everything he knew, everything that had happened. Everywhere it fit. Now he was sure West wouldn't come for the suitcases.
Chee left his hiding place, and walked back to the arroyo where he had left his patrol car. He drove it, with no effort at all at concealment, up the wash to the crash location. He parked it beside the basalt upthrust. His shovel was in his pickup truck but he didn't really need it. He dug with his hands, exposing the two suitcases, and pulled them out. They were surprisingly heavy—each sixty to seventy pounds, he guessed. He loaded them into the trunk of his patrol car, slammed the trunk shut, then reached in through the window and got his clipboard.
If he was right, this work was wasted. But if he was wrong, someone would come today—or someday—to dig up the cache and vanish with it. Questions would be left unanswered then, and Chee would no longer have a way to find the answers. Chee hated unanswered questions.
On the notepad on the clipboard, he wrote in block print: i have the suitcases. hang around burnt water and remember the number of letters in this message. Then he counted the letters. Seventy-nine.
He fished through the glove box, found an empty aspirin bottle he used to keep matches in, removed the matches, and folded in the note. He wiped off his fingerprints and dropped the bottle in the hole where the suitcases had been.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The village of sityatki, like many of the Southwest's pueblo villages, had been split by the human lust for running water. The original village still perched atop the east cliff of Third Mesa, from which it stared four hundred feet straight down into the sandy bottom of Polacca Wash. But along the wash itself, the Bureau of Indian Affairs had built a scattering of those brown frame-and-plaster bungalows which are standard government housing, equipped them with refrigerators and a pressure-tank water system, and thereby lured perhaps three-fourths of the younger residents of Sityatki down from the cliffs. The deserters, for the most part, remained loyal to village traditions, to their duties to the Fox, Coyote, and Fire clans which had founded it in the fourteenth century, and to the religious society into which they had been initiated. But they were usually present in the village only in spirit, and when ceremonial occasions required. Tonight, the presence of most of them was not required—was in fact discouraged—and the little stone houses which were theirs by right through the wombs of their mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers for twenty or so generations now stood empty. Tonight was the night of the Washing of the Hair, when the four great religious fraternities of the village—the Wuchim, the Flute, the One Horn, the Two Horn—initiate young people. For more than a week, the na 'chi of the Wuchim Society had been planted atop the Wuchim kiva at the east edge of the Sityatki plaza, its sparrow-hawk feathers ruffled by the August breezes—a sort of flag notifying the Hopis that the priests of Wuchim were preparing for the ritual. The kivas of the three other societies were also marked by their distinctive standards. And this afternoon the few families who still lived on the east side of the village had moved from their houses and hung blankets over windows and doorways. When darkness came, no profane eyes would be looking out to witness the kachinas coming from the spirit world to visit the kivas and bless their new brothers.
Jim Chee knew this—or thought he knew it—because he had taken a course in Southwestern ethnology at UNM, which had taught him enough to pry a little more out of a reluctant and uneasy Cowboy Dashee.
Chee had never been to Sityatki, but he'd had Cowboy describe it in wearisome (for Cowboy) detail—from the layout of its streets to the ins and outs of its single dead-ended access road. Now he reached one of the few "outs" the road offered, a side track which zigzagged downward to provide risky access to the bottom of Polacca Wash. His plan was to leave the car here, out of sight from the access road. If what Dashee had told him was accurate, a little after dark a priest of the One Horn Society would emerge from the society's kiva and "close" the road by sprinkling a line of corn meal and pollen across it. He would then draw similar sacred lines across the footpaths leading into the village from the other directions, barring entry except by the "spirit path" used by the kachinas. Chee's intentions were to reach the village when it was dark enough to avoid being seen by West, or anyone else who might know him, but before Sityatki was ceremonially closed against intruders. Chee parked the car behind a growth of junipers near the wash, transferred the flashlight from the glove box to the hip pocket of his jeans, and locked the door. About a mile to walk, he guessed, including the steep climb back up to the mesa rim. But he'd left himself at least an hour of daylight. Plenty of time.
He hadn't covered a hundred yards when he saw West's jeep. Like Chee's patrol car, it had been driven behind a screen of brush. Chee checked it quickly, saw nothing interesting, and hurried up the hill. He felt a sense of urgency. Why had West come so early? Probably for the same reason that had motivated Chee. He had probably called in the location of the meeting place at the last possible moment and then rushed to make sure he'd be here first and that no trap could be set for him. On the mesa top, Chee kept away from the road but near enough to watch it. An old pickup passed, driving a little faster than the bumpy road made wise or comfortable. Hopis, Chee guessed, hurrying to some ceremonial duty, or perhaps just anxious to get to their homes before the village was sealed. Then came a car, dark blue and new, a Lincoln edging cautiously over the stony surface. Chee stopped and watched it, feeling excitement rising. It wouldn't be a local car. It might be a sightseer, but the usually hospitable Hopis did not advertise this event, nor encourage tourists to come to it. More likely, the blue Lincoln confirmed his guess about where West had arranged the buy-back. This was The Boss coming to ransom his cocaine shipment. The car eased into a depression, moving at no more than walking speed. At the bottom of the dip, the rear door opened, and a crouching man stepped out, clicked the door shut behind him, and was out of sight behind the junipers along the cliff. Too much distance, too little light, too short a moment for Chee to register whether the man looked familiar. He could see only that he was blond, and wore a blue-and-gray shirt. The Boss apparently had not followed orders to come alone; he'd brought along a bodyguard. Like Chee, the bodyguard intended to slip into the vil
lage unnoticed.
Chee waited; he wanted to give this man time to get well ahead. But when he thought of it, it didn't matter whether this fellow saw him or not. Out of uniform, in his off-day jeans and work shirt, Chee conceded that he would be seen by this white man as just another Hopi walking home from wherever he'd been. Chee conceded this reluctantly. To Chee, Navajos and Hopis, or Navajos and anyone else for that matter, looked no more alike than apples and oranges. It wasn't until Hosteen Nakai pointed out to him that after three years at the University of New Mexico, Chee still couldn't sort out Swedes from Englishmen, or Jews from Lebanese, that Chee was willing to admit that this "all Indians look alike" business with white men was genuine, something to be added to his growing store of data about the Anglo-American culture.
Chee hurried again, not worrying about being seen. Like himself, the man who had slipped out of the car was keeping away from the road. And like Chee, he was skirting along the rim of the mesa. Chee kept him periodically in sight for a while, and then lost him as the twilight deepened. He didn't think it would matter. Sityatki was a small place—a cluster of no more than fifty residences crowded around two small plazas, each with two small kivas. It shouldn't be hard to find the blue Lincoln.
He reached the edge of the village a little earlier than he'd planned. The sun was well below the horizon now, but the clouds which had been building up all afternoon gave the dying light a sort of glum grayness. Far to the west, back over the Mogollon Rim and Grand Canyon country, the sky was black with storm. Chee stopped beside a plank outhouse, glanced at his watch, and decided to wait for a little more darkness. No breeze moved the air. It was motionless and, rarity of rarities in this climate, damp with a warm, smothering humidity. Maybe it would rain. Really rain—a soaking, drought-breaking deluge. Chee hoped it would, but he didn't expect it. Even when the storm is breaking, the desert dweller maintains his inbred skepticism about clouds. He finds it hard to believe in rain even when it's falling on him. He's seen too many showers evaporate between thunderclap and the parched earth.
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