Colton’s last stop was at the municipal library, where he checked through the file of telephone books and noted the numbers he might need. And then he drove westward from Albuquerque, climbing out of the Rio Grande valley, crossing the Rio Puerco breaks, and rolling at a steady fifty-five miles an hour across the empty mesa-butte landscape of west central New Mexico. As he drove, he tested his radio reception on the federal and law-enforcement channels. Reception was excellent. The technique and terminology of the radio dispatchers was no different from what he’d heard in other states. Then he tested the telephone connection by calling the U.S. Weather Service for the forecast. For the west central plateau of New Mexico, the forecast was for increasing afternoon cloudiness, periodic gusty winds, and colder temperatures through the afternoon, with a 60 percent chance of snow before midnight. The green interstate information sign told Colton that the Grants interchange was ahead. To his right, Mount Taylor rose against an unnaturally blue sky, its highest slopes white with snowbanks. He let the camper roll to a stop on the shoulder of the highway, picked up the phone, checked his notebook for the names he wanted, and placed a call to the Navajo Tribal Police subagency office at Crownpoint.
The voice that answered was a woman’s.
“This is the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Colton said, “Albuquerque. Agent Martin. Is Captain Largo there?”
“He works out of Tuba City,” the voice said. “That number…”
“I know that,” Colton said, “but Largo told me he might stop in there today. How about Jim Chee, then?”
“Chee’s not here, either,” the voice said. “He’s taking some time off.”
“How’s he feeling? Hope those ribs are healing up.”
“Okay, I guess.”
“I was calling about Chee,” Colton said. “We got some things we want him to look at. About that shooting. How can I get hold of him?”
“Just a minute,” the voice said. There was a pause.
Colton waited. This was the crucial moment. He would allow the delay to stretch four minutes. More than that would risk a successful trace. He couldn’t chance the police learning that this was a radiotelephone call. The second hand on his watch dial swept into the second minute.
“We’ll have to get him on the radio.” It was a man’s voice now. “What’s the message?”
“Tell him Martin has some information for him, and I need to show him some pictures. Tell him I’m coming out to the reservation and have him call me on my car telephone.” He provided a wrong number that sounded reasonable. “Is he near a telephone?”
“I doubt it,” the voice said.
“Look,” Colton said. “This is urgent. See if you can find him, and if he’s a long ways from a telephone, can I get you to call me back and let me know how long it will be?”
“Sure,” the voice said.
“Okay. Thanks,” Colton said. He hung up, switched on the radio receiver, and pulled the truck back onto Interstate 25. He hadn’t gone a mile before he monitored the first call from the Crown-point dispatcher trying to reach Jimmy Chee.
Colton drove steadily westward, past Grants, past the uranium-processing mills of Ambrosia Lakes, into the rougher country which climbed toward the Continental Divide. Crownpoint was trying to reach Chee at ten-minute intervals. At the Thoreau interchange, Colton pulled off the highway and parked. It was here he had decided to wait. He had never thought there was a serious chance that Chee would run far after the fiasco in the hospital. There was no need to run. Where better to hide an Indian than on an Indian reservation?
He sat with his knees propped against the dash and put together a sandwich of the materials he had brought from the trailer. As always, he ate slowly. The mountain was miles to the east now, but it still dominated the landscape, cold and ominous. When this was over, when he had caught Jim Chee and killed him, and killed the woman; when his tracks were erased and he was once again secure, then he would find a better way to trace his mother. Perhaps a hypnotist could help him remember something he had forgotten. Something useful. There was that old woman in one of his earliest memories. She had put him on her lap and her breath had smelled of tobacco. He had always guessed she might be a grandmother. If he could remember that—or even the place where they had lived when he was very small—it might be helpful. He could remember so little of that. Only a sense of days of cold fog, days of rain, days in an upstairs apartment with his meals left in a refrigerator, his mother coming home in the mornings, his mother’s hair damp against his face, his mother’s hands cold against his skin. There were men then, too, but no particular man he could remember.
He was staring outward at the blank blue sky, but his thoughts were on that room. He could remember the cracks in the gray linoleum. He’d had two marbles then and the marbles would chase one another down the cracks. He could remember playing that game endlessly, day after day, and the grimy windows, but not the name of the town. Surely he had heard it. Surely, even at four or five, it had meant something to him. His mother had not talked to him often. She wouldn’t have been likely to tell a child they were living in Seattle, or Portland, or wherever it was. But he must have heard it. He would find himself a hypnotist and maybe then he could remember something. Colton was aware that things were wrong with his memory. Gaps in it. He ran his thumb down his sweater, feeling the bump under the skin where the rib had healed crookedly. He could remember when he didn’t have the bump—when they lived in San Diego. He could remember having it, already healed, in Bakersfield. But he couldn’t remember the beating that produced it. It was the same with the ridge of thick white scar tissue under the hair above his left ear. That also had grown from some blank spot in his childhood. The last time he had tried to remember about that was in Taylorville, but trying had made him sick and he had stopped.
His radio spoke again, the voice of the Crown-point dispatcher called for Jim Chee.
This time, Chee answered. Colton put down his sandwich and picked up his notebook. Crownpoint relayed the message he had left.
“Well, hell,” Chee’s voice said. “We’re way over here by the old Bisti trading post.”
Colton jotted “We’re by Bisti” on his pad. He underlined “We’re.”
“If you’re away from the telephone, he wanted me to call him and let him know where he could meet you. He said he’d be coming to the reservation,” the dispatcher said.
There was a pause. “Well,” the voice of Chee said. “I guess he’s going to have to wait, then. We’re trying to find a hogan northwest of the old trading post. It’s about nine miles back in there, and it’ll take me a while to find it. Tell him I’ll meet him at our office in Crownpoint tonight. Tell him I’ll try to be there by nine, but I might be a little late.”
“Ten-four,” the dispatcher said. “You paying attention to the weather? It’s supposed to snow.”
“Right,” Chee said. “We’ll watch it.”
Colton jotted “We” on his note pad. He also wrote “nine miles back in there.” He didn’t make a note of the nine o’clock meeting time at Crownpoint. By nine o’clock Jimmy Chee would be dead.
30
The Bisti trading post had burned years ago, with the thoroughness with which buildings burn when there is no fire department to interfere. The fire had left only the blackened stone foundation and odds and ends of melted glass and twisted metal. Years of casual Navajo scavengers had sorted through the ashes, and years of weather had piled tumbleweeds and dust against the ruins. The great cypresses imported to protect the post from the sun had long since starved for water, like town dogs abandoned in the desert. The row of bare dead trunks now served as an incongruous landmark for a ruin that had otherwise almost returned to nature.
Chee turned the pickup truck left beyond the dead trees, leaving a road marked “Graded Dirt” for a track his map did not show. It ran, fairly straight and fairly smooth, across an expanse of creosote brush.
“You sure this is the right way?” Mary asked.
“No,” Chee said, “but I’m sure it’s the right direction.”
“And you still think we can find the hogan? After all these years?”
“Probably,” Chee said. “She said nine miles north-west by north of the trading post, at the south side of an isolated butte. And she described the butte.” He pointed ahead. “That must be it. And out here they’d have had to build the hogan of stone, so it’s still there. It’s just a matter of hunting it. And I’m pretty good at hunting.” Chee paused, thinking about that statement. “Or I used to think I was.”
The land sloped downward now, into an immensity of erosion. What once had been a sandstone plain had been carved into a grotesquerie of shapes—tables, heads, layer cakes, twisted spires, exposed ribs, serrations, and weird forms that suggested things to which Chee’s imagination could not attach names. Wind and water had cut through the overlay into the blackness of coal deposits, into crimson clay, into the streaky blue of shale. Every color showed except green. This was the Bisti bad-lands. It stretched away for fifty miles under a sky in which clouds had been steadily building.
“I have a hunch he’s not dead,” Mary said. “I sort of sensed she was hiding something.”
“She was nervous,” Chee said. “Maybe she was lying and maybe there was another reason. But if the bones are there, we’ll find them. And if they’re not, we’ll find Tsossie.”
As he said it, his confidence surprised him. But he was confident. Finding Tsossie, skeletal or breathing, involved things purely Navajo—a pattern of thinking and behavior with which Chee was in intimate harmony. He felt no such harmony with the thinking of the whites who must be involved in this affair. For all enterprises, such harmony was essential. Especially for the hunter. And this was from the very start a hunt.
One of the prayers from the Stalking Way ran through his mind, and the voice of his uncle chanting:
I am the Black God as I sing this,
Black God I am. I come and I stand
beneath the East, beneath the Turquoise Mountain.
The crystal doe walks toward me,
as I call it, as I pray to it,
toward me it comes walking, understanding me
it walks this day into my right hand.
Pleasant, it comes to join me,
in its death it obeys the voice of my singing.
In its beauty I obey the crystal doe.
Perfect understanding, Chee thought. Harmony between deer and man. Harmony between Jim Chee and Tsossie, or the bones of Tsossie, and the thinking of those who had placed Tsossie’s corpse among the rocks. But Jim Chee didn’t understand the thinking of whites. Neither Changing Woman nor Talking God had given him a song to produce that understanding. What would his uncle say to that? Chee knew exactly what the old man would say. He could almost hear him, because he had heard him so often:
“Boy, when you understand the big, you understand the little. First understand the big.”
And that would mean, in this case, that if Chee learned to understand all men (the big), he could understand white men (the little). His uncle would add that if a Navajo could find harmony with a deer, he could find equal harmony with a white man. Chee grimaced at the windshield. And then his uncle, who never failed to belabor a point, would add some wisdom about deer and men. He would say that the deer is much like the Navajo in fundamental ways. It loves its offspring and its mate, food, water, and its rest. And it hates cold, hunger, pain, and death. But the deer is also different. Its life is short. It builds no hogans. The Navajo is more like a white man than like a deer.
That’s about what his uncle would say, Chee thought sourly. But his uncle had no dealings with the whites when he could avoid them. And how would his uncle explain the thinking of a white man who filled his home with mementos of his achievements but kept his greatest honors hidden away in a keepsake box? The medals Tomas Charley had described were a Bronze Star and a Silver Star, which—as the military encyclopedia in the university library had informed him—are awarded for deeds of courage in combat; and the Purple Heart, awarded to those wounded in action. You would expect to find them framed in places of prominence on Vines’ wall, along with his other trophies. Why did he hide them away with a package of old boy-hood photographs and a double handful of rock fragments? A Navajo might either advertise his exploits or modestly conceal them. Why would anyone hide some and advertise others?
The sky was darker now and the wind blew from the northwest. It gusted around the pickup, kicking up a flurry of sand and tumbleweeds.
“That has to be our butte,” Chee said. He pointed through the right side of the windshield. “It’s the only one within nine miles of the trading post. And it’s in the right direction.”
The track emerged on a great sheet of barren granite and skirted an island of overlaid sandstone. The island was capped by a slab of white limestone, which left a wide overhang where the softer rock had worn away. It suggested to Chee a table where giants dined. Suddenly, just beyond this landmark, he took his foot from the gas pedal and let the truck roll to a stop.
“What?” Mary asked.
Chee looked at her. “Boy,” he said. “Am I stupid.” He slammed his fist against the steering wheel. Two sets of keepsakes, he was thinking. One on the walls. One hidden in the safe. What was the difference between them? The difference was in time.
Mary was staring at him. “Come on,” she said. “Cut it out. Let me in on it.”
“I’m still getting it sorted out,” Chee said. “But what it boils down to is why a man who’s very much into keeping mementos and showing them off would hide the best of them in his wall safe.”
“Like those medals,” Mary said.
“Like those and his high school football team picture, and a couple of athletic awards.”
“And black rocks,” Mary said.
“Let’s get to those later. Stick to the easy stuff now.”
“Easy if you’ve thought of the answer,” Mary said. “Quit showing off, damn it. What have you thought of?”
“The only difference I can see is the ones in the safe were all from Vines’ early life. Boyhood and young man in the military. The stuff on the wall is after he struck it rich.”
Mary had her lower lip caught between her teeth. Her expression said she was looking for significance in this. “Before the oil well explosion and after the explosion. Is that it? And how about the rocks?”
“We better get moving,” Chee said. “It’s going to get dark.” He put the pickup in gear.
“In other words, you don’t know about the rocks.”
“Somehow they had to be important. A memento of something important,” Chee said. “And from his early life.”
“I’ll buy that,” Mary said. Moments ticked away as the pickup jolted over the rocky surface. “Hey,” Mary said. “I know what. The rocks are from when he found the uranium deposit. They’re his first ore samples. Don’t you think?”
“That would fit,” Chee said. “Sure. Why didn’t you think of that earlier?”
“You didn’t ask me,” Mary said. “All you had to do was ask.”
“Okay, then. Explain why he keeps those medals in the safe.”
“Maybe he’s keeping them for somebody else,” Mary said.
The wind rocked the pickup again, buffeting it with a barrage of driven sand. Chee down-shifted to pull the truck up a steep incline.
“Mary,” he said, “you’re a genius.” He switched on the transmitter and raised the dispatcher at Crownpoint. His instructions were specific. Call Martin at the FBI. Tell him to have the Veterans Administration make a high-priority emergency check on the military record of Benjamin J. Vines. Was he a first lieutenant in the 101st Airborne Division? Had he won the Silver Star, Bronze Star, and Purple Heart? What kind of discharge? Any criminal record in the service?
The dispatcher read the instructions back. “Anything else?”
“Tell Martin I’ll explain it to him when I see him tonight. Tell him
I’ll be late. And…wait a minute.” Chee fished out his notebook. “Give him these names, too.” He read off the names of those killed in the oil well explosion. At the name of Carl Lebeck, he paused. Lebeck the geologist. Lebeck the well-logger. For a geologist, black rocks might be a memento. “Put the name of Lebeck first,” Chee said. “Tell Martin that if Vines didn’t win those decorations, to have the VA go down that list of names and see if Lebeck or any of the others won them.”
“Got it,” the dispatcher said. “You still at Bisti?”
“Northwest of the burned-out trading post,” Chee said. “We’ll be out here until after dark, the way it looks.”
“Better watch the weather,” the dispatcher said. “It’s snowing some over on the west side. Inch on the ground at Ganado. Not supposed to amount to much, but you know how that is.”
People of Darkness Page 16
