He walked into the parking lot, savoring the cold fresh air after the stuffy heat inside. Tomas Charley was standing beside his truck, talking to a white man in a yellow windbreaker. The white man was blond. The buyer of worthless rusty Chevrolets had found his man. Chee stared at him, curious. The white man seemed to feel the eyes on him. He stared back. The same man, Chee realized, had been watching him and Charley in their long conversation against the wall. Mary Landon was still invisible.
He found her, finally, in the cafeteria kitchen helping a half-dozen other women with cleanup operations.
“The message is delivered,” Chee said. “Thanks.”
It was the third time he had spoken to her, and Chee had a theory about third meetings between people. The third time you were no longer strangers.
“It must have been a long message,” Mary said. “I think you found something to talk about besides someone wanting to buy a car.” The words were skeptical, but after she said them she smiled.
Chee found himself trying to think of something to ask her, of a reason to be in this kitchen talking to her. His mind was blank. “How about having a cup of coffee?” he heard himself saying. “The coffee shop will be open late.”
The first time she had looked at him she had been inspecting a Tribal Police sergeant. Now she was looking at a man asking her out for coffee. It was a different sort of inspection. “I have to finish with these pots,” she said.
“I’ll do it for you,” Chee said.
Chee washed dishes each evening in his mobile home—a plate, cup, knife, and fork left over from breakfast, a second plate, a cup, and cutlery from dinner, and the frying pan used to cook both meals. But never since his university days had he washed dishes socially.
“You look like you enjoy that,” Mary said. “Maybe you missed your calling.”
Chee tried to think of something witty. He couldn’t.
In the booth at the Crownpoint Café, Chee learned a little about Mary Landon, and she learned a little about him. She had come to Laguna the previous year to replace a teacher hurt in an automobile accident. Then she had landed the Crownpoint job. She was from a little place not far from Milwaukee. She had attended the University of Wisconsin. She liked canoeing and hiking, and the outdoors in general. She didn’t like pretentious people. She liked teaching Navajo children, but wasn’t sure what to do about their conditioning against competitiveness. She hoped to learn Navajo, but it was hard to pronounce and so far she could speak only a few phrases. She spoke them, and Chee pretended to understand, and Mary Landon was not fooled by the pretense but appreciated it and rewarded him with a genuinely friendly look. Chee asked her about her parents, and learned her father ran a sporting goods store. He decided not to ask her about her hostility to police. This wasn’t the time for that, and the attitude was common enough.
Mary Landon learned Chee was one of the Slow Talking Dinee, the clan of his mother, and was “born to” the Bitter Water Dinee, the clan of his father. She learned that Chee’s father was dead, that his maternal uncle was a noted yataalii, and she had been around Navajo country long enough to know about the role of these shamans in the ceremonial life of the People. She learned a good deal more about his family, ranging from his two older sisters through a galaxy of cousins, uncles, and aunts, one of whom represented the Greasy Water district on the Tribal Council.
“She’s my mother’s sister, which makes her my ‘little mother,’” Chee said. “A real tiger.”
“You’re not playing the game,” Mary Landon said. “I told you about me. You’re just telling me about your family.”
The statement surprised Chee. One defined himself by his family. How else? And then it occurred to him that white people didn’t. They identified themselves by what they had done as individuals. He added sugar to his coffee, thinking about it.
“That’s the way we play the game. If I was introducing you to Navajos, I wouldn’t say, ‘This is Mary Landon, who teaches at Crownpoint,’ and so forth. I’d say, ‘This woman is a member of…’—your mother’s family, and your father’s family—and I’d tell about your uncles and aunts, so everyone would know just exactly where you fit in with the people around you.”
“‘This woman’?” Mary Landon asked. “You wouldn’t tell them my name?”
“That would be rude. Now more people have English names, but among traditional Navajos it’s very impolite to say someone’s name in their presence. Names are just reference words, when the person’s not there.”
Mary Landon looked incredulous. “I think that’s…” She stopped.
“Silly?” Chee asked. “You have to understand the system. Our real names are secret. We call them war names. Somebody very close to you in the family names you when you’re little. Something that fits your personality, if possible. Not more than a half-dozen people are ever going to know it. It’s used for ceremonial purposes: if a girl is having her kinaalda—her puberty ceremony—or if you’re having a sing done for you. Then, as you grow, people give you nicknames to refer to you. Like ‘Cry Baby,’ and ‘Hard Runner,’ or maybe ‘Long Hands’ or ‘Ugly.’” Chee laughed. “I’ve got an uncle on my father’s side everybody calls ‘Liar.’”
“How about Jim Chee? Isn’t that your real name?”
“Along came the trading posts,” Chee said. “Along came the white man. He had to have a name to write down when one of us pawned our jewelry to him, or got credit for groceries. The traders started formalizing the nicknames, and before long we had to have names on birth certificates, so you got family names, like mine. I’ve had nicknames, too. Two or three. And I’m sure you do, too.”
“Me?” Mary Landon looked surprised.
“How long you been at Crownpoint? Three months? Sure. The people have a name for you by now.”
“Like what?”
“Something that fits. Maybe ‘Pretty Teacher.’ Or ‘Stubborn Girl.’” Chee shrugged. “‘Blue Eyes.’ ‘Blond Woman.’ ‘Fast Talker.’ Do you want me to find out for you?”
“Sure,” she said. Then, “No, wait. Maybe just forget it. How about you? What do they call you?”
“Here? I don’t know. When I was at Rough Rock they used to call me…” He paused, and then said the word carefully in Navajo. “It means ‘One Who Studies to Be a Singer.’”
“Oh,” Mary Landon said. “Are you?”
“I was,” Chee said. “I guess I still am, in a way. It depends.”
“On what?”
“I applied for admission to the FBI. More or less to see how I’d do. Took the tests. Got interviewed by the screening panel at Albuquerque. Last week I got a letter telling me I’d been accepted. I’m supposed to report to the academy in Virginia. December tenth.”
She looked at him curiously. “So you’re going to be an FBI agent.”
“I don’t know,” Chee said.
“You haven’t decided?”
“What’s the rush? We work on Navajo time.” Even as he said it, the flippancy sounded false. December 10 wasn’t Navajo time. It was four weeks away. A specific, ironclad, unbendable deadline.
“But you can’t be both a Navajo medicine man and an FBI agent?”
“Not really,” Chee said. He wanted to change the subject, wanted not to talk about it. As a matter of fact, you couldn’t be both a Navajo and an FBI agent. You couldn’t be a Navajo away from the People. “By the way,” he said, “thanks for helping with Tomas Charley. I learned what I needed to know. If he told me the truth, that is.”
Mary Landon studied him. Chee remembered, belatedly, what he had told her about why he wanted to find Charley.
“Do people lie a lot in your business?”
The question sounded innocent. And if it was, the answer was yes, a lot of people lie to a policeman. But Chee sensed the barb. And the answer was different.
“I’m sorry about that,” he said. “I did tell his nephew I’d pass on the message about the car. But I also wanted to see him about police business.”
/> “And you couldn’t tell me that.” It was more a statement than a question, and the proper answer, of course, was “No, I couldn’t.” But Chee sensed the hostility again (or perhaps it could now better be described as a mixture of caution and suspicion), and he was not in the mood to give the proper answer.
“I could tell you, but only if you don’t mind complicated accounts of things that don’t amount to much,” Chee said. “Do you want to hear about it?”
She did. Chee told her about Vines, and Mrs. Vines, and the stolen keepsake box, and Sheriff Gordo Sena, and about the People of Darkness and the disappearing body, and finally about where Tomas Charley had left the box.
“And when you look at it all with a detached view,” Chee said, “you see a Navajo cop simply exercising his curiosity. A crime of no particular importance. A total lack of jurisdiction.”
“But it is curious,” she said. “What do you think happened to Mr. Charley’s father? And what are you going to do next?”
“I don’t know about the body. Probably lost by the bureaucracy somehow and nobody cared enough to find it. As for me, next I’ll go out in the malpais when I have some time and get the box and take a look at those rocks, and then I’ll get the box back to Vines. He says he doesn’t want his box back. But he must want those medals.”
“What will you tell Vines?”
“I won’t. I’ll call the sheriff’s office at Grants and tell them I got an anonymous tip on where the box had been left, and went out and found it, and for them to tell the Vineses to come and get it if they want it back.”
Mary Landon raised her eyebrows and sipped her coffee.
“Okay,” Chee said. “It’s a lie. But how else does Vines get his box back without Charley getting in jail?”
“I can’t think of a way,” she said. “Something else puzzles me. How did Charley know he could trust you?”
Chee shrugged. “Because I look trustworthy?” he asked.
She laughed. “As a matter of fact, you don’t,” she said. “Could I go along when you go hunting the box?”
“Sure,” Chee said. “We’ll go tomorrow.”
The apartments the Crownpoint school district provided for its teachers were a quarter mile beyond the school. The school was dark now, and the parking lot empty except for a single pickup truck. The pickup was a blue Ford 150. Charley’s. Chee slowed his carryall, staring at it.
“Not here,” Mary Landon said. “It’s those apartments up ahead.”
“I know,” Chee said. “I’ll get you home in just a minute.”
He pulled into the parking lot, beside the pickup. “This is Charley’s truck,” he said. “Why would he leave it?”
The truck was locked. Frost was turning the windshield opaque. Chee walked around it, shone his flashlight into the cab, looking for anything that would answer that question. He didn’t find it.
13
Malpais, translated literally from the Spanish, means “bad country.” In New Mexico, it signifies specifically those great expanses of lava flow which make black patches on the map of the state. The malpais of the Checkerboard country lies just below Mount Taylor, having been produced by the same volcanic fault that, a millennium earlier, had thrust the mountain fifteen thousand feet into the sky. Now the mountain has worn down to a less spectacular eleven thousand feet and relatively modern eruptions from cracks at its base have sent successive floods of melted basalt flowing southward for forty miles to fill the long valley between Cebolleta Mesa and the Zuni Mountains. Some of this malpais was ancient, long since softened by algae, moss, rain, wind, and durable desert grasses. Elsewhere it was only a few thousand years old, still raw, black, and relatively lifeless. The track Chee was following zigzagged its way across a smoother, more ancient flow. Nonetheless, it was rough going.
“I’ve never been out here before,” Mary Landon said. “Not out in it. It’s like someone was boiling a whole oceanful of black ink, and all of a sudden it froze solid.”
“Even the rodents out here tend to be black,” Chee said. “Protective coloration, I guess.”
“It doesn’t look like there’d be anything alive.”
“Lots of reptiles,” Chee said. “All kinds of snakes and lizards. And quite a few mammals. Rabbits, mice, kangaroo rats, so forth.”
“What do they drink?” Mary asked.
“Some of them don’t. They get their water from the plants they eat. But rain and snow melt and collect in potholes,” Chee said. “And now and then there’s a spring. That’s where we’re going. Charley has a spring out here. He collects herbs, datura, stuff like that. For his ceremonials. That’s where he left the box.”
“How do you find it?”
“Either by the powers of deduction,” Chee said, “or by asking Charley. I asked Charley and he told me to follow this track until I came to the place where the new lava flow crosses the old.” Chee pointed ahead. “Like right there. And then I’d see a place where the track forks. See? Right there ahead. And the spring was maybe a hundred yards down the right fork of the track. He said there was a bunch of tamarisk sticking up out of the lava flow to mark it. See? Over there.”
“So why aren’t you taking the right turn?” Mary asked.
“I want to show you that new lava up close,” Chee said. “We’ll park there and we can walk over.”
The new lava was at least a thousand years old. It looked as if it had hardened yesterday. It was as black as coal, raw and rough, still marked with the froth of its white-hot bubbling as it boiled across the landscape. They climbed from the ancient lava onto the final wave of the new and stood looking across ten miles of tumbled, ragged blackness at the blue shape of Cebolleta Mesa.
“I’m impressed,” Mary said finally. “It’s like looking backward a hundred million years.”
“Do you know any of our legends?” Chee asked.
“I know a few,” Mary said. “A Laguna girl I know told me one about the Laguna migrations. And the Corn Maidens.”
“Those are Pueblo,” Chee said. “If you were Navajo you’d know that you are looking at the blood of the Horned Monster.”
“Oh. Black blood.” Mary grinned at Chee. “You Navajos have black-hearted monsters.”
“Yes, indeed. A historic spot. Right around here is where the Hero Twins started making Dinetah safe for the Dinee to live in. The Horned Monster was the first one they bagged. Born of Water distracted him, and Monster Slayer shot him with an arrow.”
“He certainly bled a lot,” Mary said.
“And then they cleaned the rest of them out,” Chee said. He helped her down from the lava crest. “The Winged Monster, and the Water Monster. We even had one they called One Who Kicks People Over the Cliff.”
“How’d they do him in?”
“His hair grew out of the cliff, keeping him from falling,” Chee said. “Monster Slayer gave him a hair-cut.”
The ancient lava flow made fairly easy walking. Eons of time had rubbed away its roughness and turned its blackness gray. It was coated with lichens, and grass grew wherever dust had accumulated in its cracks. Chee talked of Navajo mythology. Mary Landon listened. He was carrying a grocery sack which contained a thermos of coffee, two apples, and two king-sized Lottaburgers picked up in Grants. Chee hadn’t been on a picnic since school days. He was happy. To their right, the morning sun reflected off the snow on the high slopes of Mount Taylor, making it glitter against the dark-blue sky.
“We call it Turquoise Mountain,” Chee said. “First Man built it out of earth he brought up from the Third World, and he pinned it to the world with a magic knife to keep it from flying away. He put Turquoise Girl on top of it, to keep the Navajos safe from monsters, and he assigned Big Snake to live on the mountain for eternity, to keep Turquoise Girl safe from whatever bothers Turquoise Girls.”
“Speaking of big snakes,” Mary Landon said. “Am I right in remembering that they hibernate in the winter, and I therefore have absolutely nothing to worry about? Or is that hiber
nation business just another of your myths?”
She was climbing a great hump of lava. Just beyond it were the tamarisks and the spring. “When are you going to tell me your war name?”
“It’s a good rule to stay off those humps when you’re walking on lava,” Chee said. “They’re the tops of old bubbles, and about one in twenty thousand is thin enough so that you can fall through and…”
Chee’s voice trailed away. Mary had stopped atop the hump and stood frozen, looking down.
“Jim,” she said. “There’s someone…”
Chee scrambled up beside her.
Just beyond the hump was a sinkhole, a circle of clear, dark water rimmed by cattails and a species of green reed. This was surrounded, in turn, by a small expanse of buffalo grass. The man wore a red-and-black mackinaw and his black hat lay beside his head. His hands were together behind his back, secured by what seemed to be an electric cord.
“I think he’s dead,” Mary Landon said in a very small voice.
“I’ll see,” Chee said. The left hand looked distorted, and coated with something dark. “I think you should wait in the truck.”
“All right,” Mary said.
The kneeling man was Tomas Charley. The black on his hand was blood, long dried. But when Chee placed his fingers on Charley’s neck to confirm the certainty that he was dead, he found the flesh resilient and warm. He stepped quickly back from the body and studied the area around him. Tomas Charley had been dead only a matter of minutes. Chee became intensely aware that his pistol, inappropriate for a picnic with a girl, was locked in the glove box of the patrol car. Perhaps Tomas Charley had been left here hours ago and had been a long time dying. And perhaps he had been killed only moments ago, which would mean his killer must be nearby. Chee glanced at the body again. There was no sign of what had killed him. The only blood visible was from the hand. Chee grimaced. The hand had been methodically mutilated. He examined the mackinaw, looking in vain for a bullet hole. Then he noticed a place where the black hair on the back of Charley’s head had been scorched. He knelt beside the body and gently parted the hair. Beneath it, the skin over the skull had been punctured, leaving a small round hole. A bullet hole, probably no larger than a .22. Turquoise Girl had not kept this half-Navajo safe from the monsters.
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