Coyote Waits jlajc-10

by Tony Hillerman

  “Odd though,” Leaphorn said. “When he feels better I might ask him.”

  “Maybe the colonel did take them,” Largo said. “But so what. People are always taking pictures of rocks. They think they see a shape like a duck, or Ronald Reagan, or God knows what.”

  “You think the boy did it?”

  “The killing? I don’t. How about you?”

  Leaphorn shook his head. The sort of a shake that avoids an answer.

  “I’ve got another question,” Leaphorn said. “While Chee is a common name among us Dinee, unfortunately, it is not all that damn common. How the hell did your Jim Chee get himself mixed up with this?”

  Largo’s expression was grim. “I intend to find out.”

  “So do I,” Leaphorn said. Chapter 14

  JANET PETE HAD not liked the idea. Basically, no matter what she said, Jim Chee understood that she hadn’t liked it because she hadn’t trusted him. At worst, she thought he might betray her. Chee doubted that she really believed that, although the possibility that she did lingered in his memory. And rankled. At best, she wasn’t certain she could depend on his discretion. On his good judgment. That rankled, too. In a way, that was even worse.

  Chee had finally let his temper show. That was a weakness new to him, and he realized it. He explained it to himself as a product of raw nerves; of a hand which, with every twinge, reminded him it might never be fully useful again; of traumatic memories which recalled his failure to perform his duty. However he explained it, he didn’t like the way it felt.

  “Janet,” he said. “Spare me all that lawyer talk. I’ve told you I won’t ask the old man for a confession. I won’t ask him what he was doing out there that night. Or how he got there. Or what the hell caused him to shoot Nez. I just want to ask him about the story he told to the professor. Just why he thinks the Enemy Way sing was done for all those horse thieves, and the Ghostway Chant added for one of them. I won’t ask him anything that would make any sense to the FBI. Or to you either, for that matter.”

  That had touched a nerve. Janet’s voice turned chilly.

  “I’ll spare you the lawyer talk. You spare me the ‘I’m more Indian than you are’ crap. Okay?”

  Chee hesitated. “Right,” he said. “Sorry about that.”

  “Okay, then,” she said. “But you play by the rules. I’m going to be there every minute. Ashie Pinto only answers what I want him to answer. You two speak better Navajo than I do, so if I want you to explain a question, you by God explain it until I understand what you’re getting at or it doesn’t get answered. Understood?”

  Chee had understood perfectly.

  Janet Pete set it up for three that afternoon and Chee took a cab down to the County Detention Center where federal prisoners were being held. It was a sunny, windless autumn afternoon with a fringe of high clouds drifting in from the northwest, reminding him that the TV weatherman had reported snow in Flagstaff last night and the front—as always—was drifting eastward. He showed his credentials to the desk clerk and a deputy jailer escorted him to the visitors’ room.

  Janet Pete was waiting. She sat behind a long wooden table in a straight wooden chair looking small and tired and beautiful.

  “Yaa’ eh t’eeh,” Chee began, and swallowed it and said, “Hello, Janet,” instead.

  She smiled at him. “Yaa’ eh t’eeh,” she said. “I do know a little Navajo.”

  “As much as I do,” Chee said, which was a blatant lie, but a guard ushered in Hosteen Ashie Pinto before she could say so.

  Here, in this still, sterile room lit by a battery of fluorescent tubes, Ashie Pinto was not the man Chee remembered. He remembered a stumbling drunk illuminated in the yellow glare of his headlights, wet with rain, blurred by Chee’s own shock and Chee’s own pain. Now he was smaller, desiccated, frail, dignified, and terribly old. He sat in the chair next to Janet Pete, acknowledged her with a nod. He looked at Chee, and then at the heavy bandages wrapped on Chee’s left hand. Then Ashie Pinto repeated the only thing Chee had ever heard him say.

  “I am ashamed,” he said, and looked down.

  Chee looked down, too. And when he looked up, Janet was watching him. He wondered if she had understood the Navajo phrase.

  “I think I told you Mr. Pinto speaks hardly any English at all,” she said. “I told him you were coming, of course, so he remembers who you are. He still does not want to say anything at all about the crime and I told him not to answer any questions until I tell him to.”

  “Okay,” Chee said. “The question I want to ask him takes some explaining. Stop me if you get lost.”

  And so Chee began.

  “My uncle,” he said, “I think you may have heard of Frank Sam Nakai, who is a singer of the Blessing Way and the Mountain Top Chant and many of the other curing songs. This man is the brother of my mother, and he has tried to teach me to follow him and become a hataalii. But I am still an ignorant man. I have much yet to learn. I have learned a little of the Ways of the Holy People. And what I have learned has brought me here to ask you a question. It is a question about something you told to a professor named Tagert.”

  Chee stopped, eyes on Pinto. The man sat as still as death, waiting. His skin was drawn tight over the skull bones, seeming almost transparent in its thinness. The desiccation made his eyes seem protuberant, larger than they were. They were black eyes, but the cornea of one was clouded by a film of cataract.

  Sure now that Chee had finished his statement, Pinto nodded. Chee was to continue.

  “You were telling the professor about a time, perhaps before you were born, when some young men of the Yucca Fruit People rode over to Sleeping Ute Mountain to get back some horses the Utes had stolen from them. Do you remember that?”

  Pinto remembered.

  Chee summarized the rest of the adventure, taking time to tell it carefully. He wanted to draw Pinto’s consciousness out of this room, out of his role as prisoner and into his past. Finally he had reached the place which had puzzled him.

  “The way the biligaana professor wrote down what you told him may not be exactly what you told him. But what he wrote down is like this. That you said the hataalii the Yucca Fruit People called decided that an Enemy Way sing should be held for all of those young men. Is that true?”

  Pinto considered. He smiled slightly, nodded.

  “Then the biligaana professor wrote down that you told him that this singer decided he should also hold a Ghostway Chant for the man they called Delbito Willie. Is that true?”

  There was no hesitation now. Hosteen Pinto nodded.

  “That is the first of my questions,” Chee said. “Do you know why this Ghostway was needed?”

  Pinto studied Chee’s face, thinking. He smiled slightly, nodded again.

  “My uncle,” Chee said, “will you tell me why?”

  “Not yet,” Janet Pete said. “I didn’t understand a lot of that. What are you driving at?”

  “Basically, why a certain cure was prescribed for one of those men and not for the others. That suggests he broke a specific taboo. I wonder what it was?”

  Janet Pete was obviously lost. “But how

  ? Oh, go ahead and answer it.”

  Hosteen Pinto glanced at Janet Pete, then back at Chee, then at something out the window beside Chee’s shoulder. Chee waited. Through the glass came the sound of an ambulance siren, the sound of brakes applied. Somewhere in the building a door slammed, the clang of steel on steel. Chee could smell dust, an astringent floor cleaner, the aroma peculiar to old, old men. Pinto released his breath, a sighing exhalation. He looked at Janet Pete again, smiling. This man, Chee thought, this kindly old man is the man who murdered Delbert Nez. The man who burned my friend in his car. The man whose actions caused this terrible burn across my hand. Why did he do it? Whiskey. Todilhil. The Water of Darkness. Twice it had turned this old man into a coyote.

  Hosteen Pinto shifted in his chair, seeking some comfort for old bones. “This young woman has become like a granddaughter
to me,” he said. “She tells me that she knows you. She says that you are an honorable man. She says you follow the Navajo Way.”

  He paused to give Chee a chance to respond to that. Then drew a deep breath.

  “These things I told Hosteen Professor. I think they wrote these things all down on paper. And you read that paper? Is that right?”

  “Yes. I read it all.”

  Pinto looked puzzled.

  “And you know the Navajo Way?”

  “I have studied it some,” Chee said.

  Pinto’s expression was slightly skeptical, as if he wondered how much Chee had studied.

  “They say there were many skinwalkers then,” Hosteen Pinto began. “Even more than now. Do you understand skinwalkers?”

  “I know something about them,” Chee said. He settled himself in his chair. This was going to take a long time. Pinto would begin in the beginning and talk his way through it. And the longer he talked the better the chance that he’d cast some light on this murky business. If, that is, anything connected with anything.

  “They teach us that everything has two forms,” Hosteen Pinto said, starting even further back than Chee had expected. “There is the mountain we see there beside Grants, the mountain the biligaana call Mount Taylor. That is the outer form. And then they say there is the inner form, the sacred Turquoise Mountain that was there with the Holy People in the First World, the Dark World at the very beginning. And First Man brought it up from the Third World and built it on his magic robe, and decorated it with turquoise. And then there is the yucca. We see the outer form all around us, but it is the inner form of yucca that we offer the prayer plume for when we dig its roots to make the soap to clean ourselves.”

  He paused, studying Chee. “You understand?”

  Chee nodded. This was basic Navajo metaphysics. But he wondered if Janet had ever heard it.

  “Bluebird has two forms, and the deer and the beetle. Two forms. They have the form of the yei and they have the outer form that we see. All living things. You too. And I. Two forms.”

  Hosteen Ashie Pinto leaned forward, tiny in the yellow coveralls of the county prisoner, intent on Chee’s understanding.

  “And then there is Coyote,” he said. “Do you know about Coyote?”

  “I know something about Coyote,” Chee said. He glanced at Janet Pete. She was focused on Pinto, concentrating on what he was saying. Wondering, Chee imagined, where all this was leading. “I know about his tricks. I have heard the stories. How he snatched the blanket and scattered the stars into the Milky Way. How he stole the baby of the Water Monster. How he tricked the sister of the bears into marrying him. How—”

  The amusement on Pinto’s face stopped him.

  “The children are told the funny stories about Coyote so they will not be afraid,” Pinto said. The amusement went away. Pinto smiled a tight, grim smile and launched into the explanation—as old as the culture of the People—of why Coyote was not funny. Chee listened, wishing, as he had come to wish many times in such sessions with old taletellers, that Navajos did not have to start everything at the very beginning. He glanced at Janet again. She looked bemused, probably wondering what the devil he was hoping to learn from all this—a wonder Chee was beginning to share. But at least she couldn’t accuse him of trying to learn anything incriminating. Unless, of course, the old man talked long enough to tell him what Chee had come here to learn.

  Now Hosteen Pinto was talking about how the name for Coyote in the Fourth World was not atse’ma’ii, or First Coyote, but atse hashkke, or First Angry, and what that implied symbolically in an emerging culture in which peace and harmony were essential to survival. He talked of Coyote as the metaphor for chaos among a hungry people who would die without order. He talked of Coyote as the enemy of all law, and rules, and harmony. He talked of Coyote’s mythic power. He reminded Chee how Coyote always sat in the doorway of the hogan when the Holy People met in Council, neither quite part of these representatives of cosmic power, nor totally allied with the wilderness of evil outside. And finally he reminded Chee that other wise people, like the old men in the Hopi kiva societies, knew that there was a time when humans had two hearts. Thus they were able to move back and forth from one form to the other—from natural to supernatural.

  “I think your uncle must have taught you about the power of skin,” Pinto said. He looked up for confirmation in Chee’s face and, seeing it, went on:

  “They say that’s how Changing Woman created the first Navajos. From the skin rubbed from her breast, she formed the Salt People, and the Mud Clan, and the Bitter Waters and the Bead People. I have heard of your uncle, of Frank Sam Nakai. They say he is a great hataalii. He must have taught you how Coyote transformed First Man into a skinwalker by blowing his hide over him. You know about that? About how First Woman wouldn’t sleep with him because now he had all the evil ways of Coyote, smelled like coyote urine, licked himself and tried to lick her, and did all those dirty things that coyotes do. And how the Holy People cured First Man by passing him through the magic hoops to strip away his coyote skin. Your uncle taught you that?”

  “Some of it,” Chee said. He remembered a little of it. It was something reenacted in part of the Ghostway ceremony—a cure for the most virulent form of witch sickness.

  “So then you know why this fellow had to have the Ghostway sing,” Pinto said. “He had to have it because he had been with the yenaldolooshi.”

  “No,” Chee said. “I don’t understand that.”

  Janet Pete raised a hand. “Wait a minute. I don’t understand this either. Yenaldolooshi? That is the word for animals that trot, isn’t it?”

  Chee nodded. “Animals that trot on four legs. But it is also used for skinwalkers. Witches.”

  “Where is this conversation going?” she asked. “Are you leading Mr. Pinto into something? Do you remember what you promised?”

  Pinto was watching, puzzled.

  Janet Pete switched to Navajo. “I wanted to make sure that Mr. Chee was not trying to get you to’say something that would hurt your chance in the trial,” she explained. “I want you to be careful about that.”

  Hosteen Pinto nodded. “We are talking about something that happened a long time ago,” he said.

  “I don’t understand, my uncle,” Chee said. “Why did they do the Ghostway sing for the one they called Delbito Willie when they did the Enemy Way for the others?”

  “Because he went in there,” Hosteen Pinto said. His tone was patient. “He went in there—into Tse A’Digash. He went in there where the witches gather. He went in there among the corpses and the skinwalkers. He went in to the place where the yenaldolooshi do their ceremonies, where they do incest, where they kill their relatives.”

  Silence, Chee thought about this. He frowned, glanced at Janet Pete. She was watching him. Well, he would ask it anyway.

  “My uncle, would you tell me just where this Tse A’Digash is located?”

  Pinto’s expression changed. “I cannot tell you that.”

  “Could you tell me if Professor Tagert hired you to show him where it was?”

  Hosteen Pinto stared at Chee. “When you arrested me that night, I could smell the fire in your clothing. I could smell where your flesh had burned. I said I was ashamed. I am still ashamed of that. But these things you ask me now, I cannot tell you.”

  “What’s going on?” Janet asked.

  Hosteen Pinto stood, limped toward the doorway, his old bones stiff from the sitting.

  “Could you just tell me who gave you that whiskey?”

  Hosteen Pinto tapped on the glass. The jailer was coming.

  “Don’t say anything,” Janet said. Then to Chee, angrily, “So much for your promises.”

  “I just want some of the truth,” Chee said. “Maybe the truth will make him free.” Chapter 15

  JIM CHEE HAD not flown enough to learn to think creatively on an airplane. He spent the time on this Mesa Airlines turboprop flight looking down from his seat by the window a
t the early snow on the Jemez Mountain ridges below, and the great broken expanse of tan and gray of the Chaco Mesa country and finally, at the ribbon of fading yellow and black that marked the San Juan River Valley. His mind was on Janet Pete, who had been irritated with him—but not nearly as irritated as he had expected her to be. He decided, tentatively, that this was because Hosteen Pinto had told him nothing incriminating.

  Still, she should have been furious because he’d tried to take advantage of her. That could be explained if Janet didn’t give a damn how he behaved. Chee didn’t like that explanation. It was true, perhaps, but he rejected it. More and more, he was giving a damn about Janet.

  He retrieved his pickup from the airport parking lot and drove down off the mesa into the heavy after-work traffic on 550. He’d stop at the police station in Ship Rock and see if the captain was in. Largo had been around a lot longer than Chee and knew a lot more people in this part of the Reservation. He might have heard of the Tse A’Digash that Ashie Pinto had mentioned. It would be somewhere south of Ship Rock, Chee guessed. Somewhere in the volcanic outcrop country. Probably not too far from where he’d arrested the man. And if Largo didn’t know, he’d be likely to know some old-timer who would.

  But Largo wasn’t at the station.

  Angie was at the desk.

  “Hey, man, how’s the hand?” she asked, grinning at him. And without waiting for an answer: “The captain’s been looking for you. Like he has something heavy on his mind.”

  “What?” Chee asked, starting the automatic examination of conscience that such statements provoke. “I’m on sick leave.”

  “I don’t know what. He didn’t say. But Lieutenant Leaphorn was with him. Up from Window Rock. And he looked pissed off.”

  “Leaphorn?”

  “Captain Largo,” Angie said. “Come to think of it, the lieutenant, too, I guess.”

  “Was that today?”

  Angie nodded. “They left here just a little bit ago.”

  To hell with it, Chee thought. He’d see Largo when he saw him. The Leaphorn news disturbed him more. Leaphorn had been trying to reach Tagert. There could be just one explanation for that. The lieutenant, the supercop, had invited himself into the Pinto investigation. Not at the invitation of the FBI, Chee guessed. That wasn’t likely. More likely he’d guessed Officer Jim Chee had screwed it up. Well, to hell with Leaphorn.