Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 06 - The Ghostway

by The Ghostway(lit)

  He really did. More important, he sometimes thought, he liked her, too. Admired her. Enjoyed her company, her voice, her laugh, the way she touched him, the way she understood him. He was right, this decision he was making. And he'd made it without even being conscious of it. He would be wrong to lose her. Having made his decision, he set about confirming it-thinking of all the things that were wrong with his job, with the reservation, with the Navajo culture. Making comparisons: This hospital room and the cold discomfort of his grandmother's hogan; the security of life with a regular paycheck and the sheep rancher's endless nerve-wracking dependence on rain that wouldn't fall, comparing the comforts of white society with the unemployment and poverty of the People. Perversely, these thoughts led him to the Silver Threads, and Mr. Berger, and the woman whose son was coming to see her, and to the old women who lived on Jacaranda Street, Bentwoman Tsossie and Bentwoman's Daughter.

  In fact, it was three days before he could get out of the hospital. The next day the headache returned, fierce and persistent. That provoked another round of X-rays and a renewed verdict that he was suffering from concussion. Mary called in the afternoon and had to be persuaded again not to drop everything and visit him. The following day he felt fine, but the doctors weren't finished with some test or other. Shaw dropped in and reported he had nothing to report. Vaggan had proved surprisingly invisible. He was suspected of being involved in a bizarre assault case involving one of Southern California's television personalities; the description fit and it seemed to involve a welshed bet, which was the sort of work Vaggan did. But there was no hard proof. A witness hadn't gotten a look at him, and the victim and his girlfriend reported he was wearing a stocking mask. He dropped a copy of the Los Angeles Times on Chee's bed so he could read about it. Shaw looked tired and defeated.

  Driving home the next day, Chee felt the same way. He also felt depressed, nervous, frustrated, irritated, and generally miles from that condition for which the Navajo word is hozro. It means a sort of blend of being in harmony with one's environment, at peace with one's circumstances, content with the day, devoid of anger, and free from anxieties. Chee thought of his neglected studies to become a yataalii, a shaman whose work it would be to restore his fellow Navajos to hozro. Physician, heal thyself, he thought. He drove eastward on Interstate 40 faster than he should, glum and disgruntled. Mary Landon hung in his mind-a problem he had solved but which refused to stay solved. And when he turned away from that, it was to the frustration of the postcard, which seemed to have come from no one to Albert Gorman, and on to Ashie Begay, and then to disappear-unless Margaret Sosi had it.

  Chee stopped at a Flagstaff motel. The weathercast at the close of the ten o'clock news was on, the map showing a high-pressure area centered over northern Utah that promised to hold winter at bay for at least another day. Chee fell into bed, tired but not sleepy, and found himself reviewing it again.

  Simple enough on the Los Angeles end. A car-theft operation broken, some indicted, some persuaded to be witnesses. One was Leroy Gorman. That much seemed sure. Leroy Gorman tucked away under the Witness Protection Program under the name of Grayson, and denying he was Gorman because the Federals had told him to deny it. If Shaw's information was correct, Albert Gorman had refused to cooperate. Upchurch had nothing to scare him with. But something-apparently that photograph/postcard of the trailer-had caused Albert to decide to come to Shiprock to find his brother. He'd been pursued. Why? Presumably because his employers wanted him to lead them to Leroy so that Leroy could be eliminated as a witness. Albert Gorman had resisted. Albert Gorman had been shot.

  Chee lay listening to the truck traffic rumble on the Interstate, thinking of that. One odd hole in the Los Angeles end. Albert Gorman hadn't been followed to Shiprock. They'd known he was going there. Lerner had flown directly to Farmington and driven directly to Shiprock. And if what Berger had told him was true, Vaggan had come to Gorman's apartment to keep him from going to Shiprock. So much for that. So much for the reasonable, logical explanation. But at least he knew now why Lerner had gone to do the dirty work instead of Vaggan. Vaggan was having a splint put on a finger broken when Albert slammed the car door on it. Fat lot that helped.

  Chee groaned, punched the pillow into better shape, rolled over. Nothing fit. Tomorrow morning he'd call Captain Largo, and tell him he'd be back in Shiprock by midafternoon, and see if Largo had learned anything while Chee was wasting his time in California. And he would complain about his headache and ask for a week of sick leave. He had some work he wanted to do.

  Chapter 22

  From flagstaff, near the western edge of the Navajo Big Reservation, to Shiprock, near its northern border, is about 230 miles if you take the most direct route through Tuba City. Chee took that route, checking out of his motel before sunrise and stopping briefly at Gray Mountain to call Largo.

  First he dealt with official business. He was going to apply for a week of sick leave to let his head heal. Would it be approved? All right, Largo said, sounding neutral.

  He'd told Largo in a call from the hospital the basics about what had happened to him and what he'd learned. Now he told him a little more, including what Shaw had learned, or failed to learn, in his visit to the u.s.d.a.'s office. "Shaw doesn't have any doubt that this Grayson is really Leroy Gorman," Chee said. "Neither do I. But it would be a good thing to confirm it. Is there a way you could do that? Find out for sure he's a protected witness?"

  "He is," Largo said.

  "You checked?"

  "I checked," Largo said. "Grayson is Leroy Gorman. Or I should say Leroy Gorman is Grayson and will be until they haul him back to Los Angeles and have him testify. Then he'll be Leroy Gorman again."

  Chee wanted to ask Largo how he'd found out. Obviously the fbi would not tell Largo or anyone else anything about this supersecret witness business. It was a long-time sore point with the local law that the Federals moved all sorts of known felons into their jurisdiction under false identities with no warning to anybody. The Justice Department said it was essential to the safety of witnesses. Local law saw the insult built into it-another statement from the Federals that locals couldn't be trusted. So how had Largo checked? The first possibility that occurred to Chee was a visit to the local telephone office to find out who ordered the telephone line connected to the trailer.

  "Is Sharkey paying Grayson's telephone bill?" Chee asked.

  Largo chuckled. "He is. And the bill for hauling that trailer in there from Farmington-the hauling company sent that right to the fbi. But when I told Sharkey what we know about all this, you'd have thought he couldn't imagine why I thought he'd be interested."

  "Well," Chee said. "I'll see you next week."

  "When you come back to work," Largo said, "I want you to make one more try to find that Sosi girl. And this time handcuff her to your steering wheel or something to get her to hold still long enough to find out about that postcard. You think you can do that?"

  Chee said he could try, and he asked the captain to switch him to the dispatcher.

  "Dispatcher?" Largo said.

  "Yeah," Chee said. "If I haven't had any mail, I'll skip coming in."

  Largo switched the call.

  Chee didn't have any mail. He hadn't expected to. Then he arranged to have a horse saddled and a horse trailer ready for him for the afternoon. Captain Largo could have arranged that, but Captain Largo would have wanted to know why he wanted the horse.

  Outside the Gray Mountain store, Chee stretched, yawned, and sucked in a huge lungful of air. It was cold here, frost still riming the roadside weeds, and the snowcapped shape of the San Francisco Peaks twenty miles to the south looked close enough to touch in the clear, high-altitude air. The winter storm being held at bay by the Utah high in last night's weathercast was still hung up somewhere over the horizon. The only clouds this morning were high-altitude cirrus so thin that the blue showed through them. Beautiful to Chee. He was back in Dine' Bike'yah, back Between the Sacred Mountains, and he felt easy ag
ain-at home in a remembered landscape. He stood beside his pickup, postponing for a moment the four or five hours he still had to spend driving, and studied the mountain. It was something Frank Sam Nakai had instructed him to do. "Memorize places," his uncle had told him. "Settle your eyes on a place and learn it. See it under the snow, and when first grass is growing, and as the rain falls on it. Feel it and smell it, walk on it, touch the stones, and it will be with you forever. When you are far away, you can call it back. When you need it, it is there, in your mind."

  This was one of those places for Chee-this desert sloping away to the hills that rose to become Dook'o'oosli'id, Evening Twilight Mountain, the Mountain of the West, the mountain built by First Man as the place where the holy Abalone Shell Boy would live, guarded by the Black Wind yei. He had memorized this place when he worked out of the Tuba City agency. He leaned his elbows against the roof of his pickup and memorized it again, with rags of fog drifting away from the snowy peaks and the morning sun making slanting shadows across the foothills. "Touch it with your mind," Frank Sam Nakai had told him. "Inhale the air that moves across it. Listen to the sounds it makes." The sounds this place was making this morning were the sounds of crows, hundreds of them, moving out of the trees around the trading post back toward wherever this flock spent its winter days.

  Chee climbed back into the truck and rolled it onto U.S. 89 North. He wanted to get where he had to go a long time before dark.

  He got there about midafternoon, driving steadily and fast despite a quickening north wind, which told him the storm was finally bulging down out of Utah. He made a quick stop at his trailer in Shiprock to strap on his pistol, get his heavy coat, and collect a loaf of bread and what was left of a package of bologna. He picked up the horse and trailer at the tribal barns and ate on the long bumpy drive back into the Chuskas, trailed now by a cold north wind. He parked where Albert Gorman had abandoned his ruined Plymouth, unloaded the horse, and rode the rest of the way to the Begay hogan. The sky was clouding now, a high gray overcast moving down from the northwest. Chee tied the horse in the shelter of Begay's empty corral and quickly scouted the hogan yard. If anyone had been here since he'd left the place, they'd left no sign. Then he walked around the hogan to its broken north wall.

  The wind was gusty now, whipping dust around his feet and making sibilant noises in the corpse hole. Chee squatted and peered inside. In the gray light of the stormy afternoon, he could see just what he'd seen by the light of his flash when he'd been here before: the rusty iron stove, the stove pipe connecting it to the smoke hole, odds and ends of trash. The wind hooted through the hole and sent a scrap of paper scuttling across the hard-packed earthen floor. The wind eddied around the collar of his padded coat, touching his neck with cold. Chee shivered and pulled the collar tight. By Navajo tradition, Albert Gorman now would have completed his journey to the underworld, would have vanished into the dark unknown which the metaphysics of the People had never tried to explain or explore. But his chindi would be here, an unhappy, discordant, malevolent evil-whatever in Gorman had been out of harmony-trapped forever inside the hogan when Gorman had died.

  Chee took a deep breath and stepped through the hole.

  He was instantly aware that it was warmer inside, and of the smell of dust and of something sharper. He paused a moment, trying to identify the aroma. Old grease, old ashes, old sweat-the smell of human occupation. Chee opened the stove door. Nothing in the oven. He opened the fire box. The ashes had already been stirred, probably by Sharkey. He picked up the scrap of paper the wind had moved. A torn bit of old envelope with nothing written on it. He found the place at the west side of the hogan where Begay had habitually laid his sheepskins for sleeping. He took out his knife and dug into the packed earth, looking for he knew not what. He found nothing at all, and paused, squatting on his heels, thinking.

  Jim Chee was aware of the sound of the wind outside, whispering around the corpse hole and at the blocked smoke hole over his head. He was very much aware of the ghost of Albert Gorman in the air around him, and suddenly he was aware, clearly and surely, of the nature of the Gorman chindi. Like Gorman-of course like Gorman since it was Gorman-it was Los Angeles, and the little girl whores he'd seen along Sunset Boulevard, and the impersonal precision of the herds on the freeways, and the chemical gray air, and Albert Gorman's landlady, and the pink-faced aide at the Silver Threads. And now it was Jim Chee's ghost because Jim Chee had chosen it-stepped through the corpse hole into the darkness freely and willingly, having decided to do so rationally. Having chosen Los Angeles over Shiprock, and Mary Landon over the loneliness and poverty and beauty of hozro. Chee squatted on his heels, and looked around him, and tried to think of what he should be looking for. Instead, he remembered the song from the hogan blessing ceremonial.

  This hogan will be a blessed hogan.

  It will become a hogan of dawn,

  Dawn Boy will live in beauty in it,

  It will be a hogan of white corn,

  It will be a hogan of soft goods,

  It will be a hogan of crystal water,

  It will be a hogan dusted with pollen,

  It will be a hogan of long-life happiness,

  It will be a hogan with beauty above it,

  It will be a hogan with beauty all around it.

  The words of Talking God came back to Chee. They would have been sung here, when Begay's family had gathered to help him bless this hogan a long time ago. Chee got to his feet, took out his knife again, and walked to the east wall. Here, under the end of the base log just atop the foundation stones, the singer hired by Ashie Begay to conduct his hogan ceremonial would have placed a choice piece of Begay's turquoise. Chee chipped away with the knife tip at the dried adobe plaster, dislodged a chunk of it, and crumbled it in his fingers. The turquoise was there, a polished oval of clear blue gemstone. Chee wiped it on his shirt, inspected it, and put it back under the log. He walked to the west wall, dug under the end of the foundation log, and extracted a white seashell. The abalone shell symbolized the great yei Abalone Boy, just as the turquoise represented the Turquoise Boy spirit. But what had finding them told him? Nothing, Chee thought, that he hadn't believed he knew-that Begay was orthodox, that this hogan had been properly blessed, that Begay, in abandoning his home, had left these ritual jewels behind. Would that be orthodox? Probably, Chee thought. Unless Begay had thought to remove them before Albert Gorman died they wouldn't be removed at all-just as no wood from this hogan would ever be used again, not even for a fire. But removing them before Gorman died would have been prudent, and Begay must have seen the death coming, and Bentwoman had described her grandson as a prudent man. What would a prudent man salvage from his hogan if he saw death approaching it?

  What had Bentwoman expected him to find in here?

  Of course! Chee walked around the stove to the east-facing entrance. He felt along the log lintel above the door, running his fingers through the accumulated dust. Nothing. He tried to the right of the door. There, his fingers probing into the space over the log encountered something.

  Chee held it in his left hand, a small brown pouch of dusty doeskin tied at the top with a leather thong. His fingers squeezed it, feeling exactly what he expected to feel. The pouch contained four soft objects. Chee untied the thong and dumped into his palm four smaller pouches, also of doeskin. He held Ashie Begay's Four Mountains Bundle.

  The instant he saw it, he knew that Ashie Begay was dead.

  Chee stepped through the corpse hole into snow. The wind now was carrying small, light flakes, which blew across the yard of Ashie Begay's hogan as dry as dust. He climbed down to the corral, the Four Mountains Bundle tucked in his coat pocket, to where he had tied his horse-thinking about what he'd found. The bundle represented weeks of work, a pilgrimage to each of the four sacred mountains to collect from each the herbs and minerals prescribed by the Holy People. Chee had collected his own the summer of his junior year at the University of New Mexico. Mount Taylor and the San Francisc
o Peaks had been easy enough, thanks to access roads to Forest Service fire lookouts on both of their summits. But Blanca Peak in the Sangre de Cristos and Hesperus Peak in the Las Platas had been a different matter. Begay would have gone through that ordeal in harder times, before roads led into the high country. Or he might have inherited it from his family. Either way, he would never have left it behind in a death hogan. It would have been his most treasured belonging, an heirloom beyond price.

  So what had happened at Ashie Begay's hogan?

  Chee had brought the horse because he intended, no matter what he might find in the hogan, to make a general search of Ashie Begay's home territory. Now that search took on new purpose. The horse stomped and whinnied as he approached, cold and ready to move. Chee untied it, dusted the snow off its haunches, and swung into the saddle. What had happened at this hogan? Could Begay have gone away, returned to find Gorman dead, and forgot the sacred pouch when he abandoned the hogan?