Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 06 - The Ghostway

by The Ghostway(lit)

  The walking part turned out to be a little less than ten miles-a hard four hours in the soft snow. It gave Chee time to think, to sort it all out again. It resolved itself into a single central puzzle. Why had someone gone to so much trouble to conceal the murder of Ashie Begay? Chee could understand why Gorman might have been followed to the Begay hogan. That simply continued the effort to find Leroy Gorman. McNair, somehow, seemed to have learned that Leroy was in Shiprock, learned that Albert was going there, decided that Albert's arrival would scare the fbi into moving Leroy before his exact location could be pinned down, and sent someone to catch Albert and learn from Albert where Leroy could be found. Albert had resisted, been wounded, fled. Albert had been tracked down at Begay's place by someone (probably Vaggan) seeking an answer to the same question. Vaggan had either found Albert dead, or dying, or had killed him, and had killed Ashie Begay to eliminate a witness to the crime. That was all plausible enough. It left questions, true. How had Vaggan found Albert Gorman so quickly at the Begay hogan? Probably because the McNair people knew enough about Albert's connections on the reservation to make an educated guess. After all, one of those involved was a Navajo: Beno. Robert Beno, Upchurch had said. High enough in the organization to warrant grand jury action, and the only one who managed to run. Another relative, perhaps. Another member of the Turkey Clan. Someone who could guess the only place Albert Gorman could find refuge. Or maybe it was simpler than that. Albert surely had intended to visit his uncle when he came to the reservation-to Chee's Navajo mind such a visit by a nephew was certain and inevitable-and he had told Mrs. Day, who had passed the information along. Anyway, that didn't seem to matter. What mattered was why all the trouble to make the crime at Begay's hogan invisible.

  Chee plodded along through ankle-deep snow, examining possibilities. Because Vaggan didn't want the law to know he was looking for Leroy and was within a hundred miles of finding him? That looked good for a moment, but the shooting in the parking lot had already alerted the fbi. What other motive could there be? Chee could think of none and skipped over to another question. If the McNair people knew, or even suspected, that Leroy was hidden away in Shiprock, why weren't they looking for him? Largo had said there was no sign at all of that. No strangers asking around. Largo had put the word out, at the gas stations, and trading posts, and convenience stores, the post office, the laundry, everywhere. It was an old and simple and absolutely efficient system, and Chee had no doubt that if anyone-anyone at all-had shown up in Shiprock, or anywhere near Shiprock, asking questions, Largo would have known it within fifteen minutes. And unless McNair knew about the aluminum trailer and had some idea of where it was parked, Leroy Gorman couldn't be found without questions-hundreds of them. Chee had hunted enough people on the reservation to know how many weary hours of questions. And if McNair did know about the aluminum trailer and the cottonwood tree, Leroy would have been found with no questions at all. And Leroy would be just as dead as Albert.

  And so the thinking went, leading around in the same circle back to the picture of the aluminum trailer mailed as a postcard with something, apparently, written on its back that had brought Albert running and started all this. Something, even though Leroy didn't remember writing such a stirring message-or claimed he didn't remember it. What would Leroy have written that he'd refuse to admit? Chee would know, he hoped, when he found Margaret Billy Sosi again-for the third time-and pinned her down long enough to extract from her either the card itself or her exact and detailed memory of what was written on it, and what her grandfather had told her about why Gorman (which Gorman?) was dangerous to be around. And just about when Chee was thinking this, he smelled smoke.

  It was the smell of burning pi¤on, the sweet, perfumed smell of hot resin. Then a blue wisp of the smoke against the junipers on the next hillside, and the place of Frank Sam Nakai was in view. It was an octagonal log hogan, a rectangular frame house covered with black tarpaper, a flatbed truck, a green pickup, a corral with a sheep pen built beyond it, the tin building where Nakai kept his cattle feed, and, off against the hillside, the square plank building where the mother of Frank Sam Nakai's late wife lived with Frank Sam Nakai's daughter. The smoke was coming from stovepipes in both houses, making wisps of blue as separate as the suppers the occupants were cooking. Chee's uncle and his uncle's mother-in-law were following the instructions of Changing Woman, who had taught that when men look upon the mothers of the women they marry it may cause blindness and other more serious problems. To Jim Chee it seemed perfectly natural.

  It also seemed natural to Chee that Frank Sam Nakai was absolutely delighted to see him. Nakai had been shoveling snow into barrels, where the sun would convert it into drinking water, when he saw Chee approaching. His shout of welcome brought Chee's aunt out of the house. His aunt by white man's reckoning was Mrs. Frank Sam Nakai. Her Navajo friends, neighbors, and clansmen called her Blue Woman in honor of her spectacular turquoise jewelry. But to Chee she was and always had been and would be Little Mother, and in honor of his visit she opened cans of peaches and candied yams to augment the spicy mutton tacos she served him for his supper. Only when all that was finished, and the utensils cleared from the table, and news of all the family covered, did Chee bring up what had brought him here.

  "My father," he said to Frank Sam Nakai, "how many yataalii are left who know how to cure someone of the ghost sickness?"

  Behind him, where she was sitting beside the stove, Chee heard Little Mother draw in her breath. His uncle digested the question.

  "There are two ways it can be done," he said finally. "There is the nine-day sing and the five-day. I think not many know the nine-day any more. Maybe only an old man who lives up by Navajo Mountain. Up in Utah. You could find somebody to do the five-day cure a little easier. There was a man who knew it, I remember, when we were teaching young people to be yataalii at the Navajo Community College. I remember he said he learned it from his uncle, and his uncle lived over on the Moenkopi Plateau, over there by Dinnebito Wash. So that would be two. But the uncle was old even then. Maybe he is dead by now."

  "How could I find this man? The younger one?"

  "Tomorrow we will go to Ganado. To the college. They kept a list there of everybody who knew the sings, and where they lived." His uncle's face was asking the question that his courtesy would never allow him to put in words. Who suffered from ghost sickness? Was the victim Jim Chee?

  "I'm trying to find a girl of the Turkey Clan who people call Margaret Billy Sosi," Chee said. "She was in a chindi hogan, and I think she will be having a sing." He heard a sigh from Little Mother, a sound of relief. He didn't want to tell these two that he, too, was infected. He didn't want to tell his uncle what he had done. He didn't want to tell him that he was going to get a job with the fbi, and leave the People, and give up his idea of being a yataalii like his uncle. He didn't want to see the sadness in that good man's face.

  They'd had coffee and bread and had three horses saddled before it was time for his uncle to take a pinch of pollen and a pinch of meal and go out to bless the rising sun with the prayer to Dawn Boy. Little Mother rode with them to lead their horses back, and everything went very rapidly. The drive back over the now-frigid snow was like driving over ground glass, squeaking and crunching under Chee's tires. They were on the good road past Blue Gap in thirty minutes. Before noon, they were in the library at Navajo Community College, working their way through the roster of men and women who are shamans of the Navajos.

  Chee hadn't known it existed. He should have known, he thought. It would be useful to any policeman. And even while he was thinking that, another part of his consciousness was shocked and dismayed. So few names. And so many of them listed as knowing only the Blessing Way, or the Enemy Way, or the Yeibichi, the Night Chant, or the more common and popular curing rituals. He glanced at Frank Sam Nakai, who was running his finger slowly down the page. His uncle had told him that the Holy People had taught the Dinee at least sixty such rituals, and that many of them were
lost in those grim years when the People had been herded into captivity at Fort Sumner. And he could see by this that more were being lost. He looked down the list to see how many singers knew the Stalking Way, which he had been trying to learn. He saw only the name of his uncle and one other man.

  "Just two know the Ghostway," his uncle said. "That fellow I told you about and his old uncle, way over there west of Hopi country. Just two."

  "It would probably be the younger man," Chee said. "The Turkey Clan seems to be eastern Navajos-mostly on this side of the Chuskas."

  "You can see why we need you," Frank Sam Nakai said. "Everybody is forgetting everything. There won't be anybody left to cure anybody. Nobody to keep us being Navajos."

  "Yeah," Chee said. "That's the way it looks." He'd have to tell Frank Sam Nakai soon. Very soon. But today he just couldn't do it.

  The fellow who knew the Ghostway (and the Blessing Way and Mountaintop Way) was on the book as Leo Littleben, Junior. And he lived not way the hell a thousand miles down a dirt track on the other side of the reservation but at Two Story, just twenty-five miles down the highway toward Window Rock. And-rarity of rarities on the reservation-he was listed in the Navajo-Hopi telephone book.

  "I think my luck's changing," Chee said.

  Somebody answered the telephone at the Littleben residence. A woman.

  "He's not here," she said.

  "When do you expect him back?" Chee asked.

  "I don't know. Three-four more days, I think."

  "Anyplace I can reach him?"

  "He's doing a sing."

  "Do you know where?"

  "Way over there on the Ca¤oncito Reservation."

  His luck hadn't changed much, Chee thought. Ca¤oncito was as far as you could get from Ganado and still be in Navajo country. It was a fragment of reservation separated from the Big Reservation by miles of private land and by the Acoma and Laguna Indian reservations. It was practically in Albuquerque. In fact, it was outside Dine' Bike'yah, on the wrong side of the Turquoise Mountain. Some strictly orthodox medicine men would refuse to hold a sing there.

  "Do you know who it's for?" Chee said. "Who hired him?"

  "For some woman named Sosi, I think it is."

  "A Ghostway?"

  "A Ghostway," the woman agreed. "He's doing the five-day sing. Be back in another three-four days."

  So Chee's luck had changed, after all.

  Chapter 25

  It was almost dark when Chee turned off Exit 131 from Interstate 40 and took the worn asphalt that led northward. For the first miles the road ran between fences bearing the No Trespassing signs of the Laguna Indian Pueblo-grass country grazed by Herefords. But the land rose, became rockier. More cactus now, and more juniper and chamiza and saltbush, and then a fading sign:

  welcome to the ca¤oncito reservation

  Home of the Ca¤oncito Band of Navajos

  Population 1600

  Leroy Gorman would have no trouble getting this far, Chee thought, not if he could read road signs well enough to navigate the Los Angeles freeways. Chee had called him from the college, using his Tribal Police identification number to wring Grayson's unlisted number from the information operator's supervisor.

  "You said you wanted to meet some kinfolks," Chee said. "You want to enough to drive a couple of hundred miles?"

  "What else have I got to do?" Gorman said. "Where do I go?"

  "South to Gallup. Then take Interstate forty east through Grants, and after you pass Laguna start looking for the Ca¤oncito Reservation interchange. Get off there and head into the reservation and look for the police station. I'll leave a map or something for you there to tell you where to go."

  "You found the girl? They're having a curing thing for her?"

  "Exactly," Chee said. "And the more of her relatives are there, the better it works."

  Five miles beyond the entrance sign, a green steel prefabricated building, a shed, a mobile home, a parked semi-trailer, and a Phillips 66 gasoline sign marked the site of a trading post. Chee stopped. Anyone know the Sosi family? No Sosi family at Ca¤oncito. Anyone know where a sing was being held? Everybody did. It was way back on Mesa Gigante, at the place of Hosteen Jimmie Yellow. Easy to find it. How about the police station, where was that? Just down the road, three-four miles, before you get to the chapter house. Can't miss it.

  It would, in fact, have been hard to miss-a small frame building not fifty feet from the road wearing a sign that read simply police station. It was manned, as Chee recalled the situation, not by the Navajo Tribal Police but by the Law and Order Division of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a parttime patrolman who also worked the east side of Laguna territory. On this particular afternoon it was manned by a young woman wearing bifocals.

  Chee showed her his identification. "I'm trying to find a sing they're having at Jimmie Yellow's place," Chee said. "You know how to get there?"

  "Sure," the woman said. "Up on Mesa Gigante." She extracted a piece of typing paper from the desk, wrote North at the top of it and East on the right-hand side, and drew a tiny square near the bottom and labeled it Cops. Then she drew a line past the square northward. "This is Route Fifty-seven. Stay on it past"-she drew a cluster of tiny squares west of the line-"the chapter house and the Baptist Church off here, and then you angle westward on Road Seventy forty-five. There's a sign." The map took precise shape under her pen, with unwanted turns identified and blocked off with X's, and landmarks such as windmills, watertanks, and an abandoned coal mine properly indicated.

  "Finally it winds around up here, under this cliff, and then you're on top of the mesa. Only road up there so you don't have any choice. There's an old burned-out truck there right at the rim, and about a mile before you get to Yellow's place, you pass the ruins of an old hogan on the left. And you can see Yellow's place from the road."

  "And I can't miss it," Chee said, grinning.

  "I don't think so. It's the second turnoff, and the first one is to the old torn-down hogan." She looked up at him over her glasses, somberly. "Somebody died there, so nobody uses that track anymore. And after the turnoff to Yellow's place, that's all of them for miles because Jimmie Yellow's people are about the only ones up there any more."

  Chee told her about Gorman driving down from Shiprock, instructed to stop here for directions. Would that be any problem? It wouldn't be. But as Chee drove away, he was nagged by a feeling that something would be a problem, that he was forgetting something, or overlooking something, or making some sort of mistake.

  Jimmie Yellow's place, even more than Ashie Begay's, seemed to have been selected more for the view than for convenience. It was perched near the rim of the mesa, looking down into the great empty breaks that fell away to the Rio Puerco. To the west, across the Laguna Reservation, the snowy ridges of Turquoise Mountain reflected the light of the rising moon. To the east, the humped ridge of the Sandia Mountains rose against the horizon, their base lit by the glowing lights of Albuquerque. To the north, another line of white marked the snowcap on the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and the bright smudge of yellow light below them was Santa Fe, one hundred miles away. A spectacular view, but no water, and only a scattered stand of juniper to provide firewood, and the snake-weed around Chee's boots indicated what too many sheep a long time ago had done to the grazing on the mesa top.

  Still, the view was impressive, and normally Jim Chee would have enjoyed it and added it to his internal file of beautiful places memorized. Not tonight. Tonight, when Chee allowed himself to think of it, he looked at the mountains with a sense of loss. He had no illusions about where his career in the fbi would take him. They would identify him as an Indian, he was sure enough of that. And that would mean he'd be used in some apparently appropriate way. But they wouldn't send him home to work among people who were family, his kinsmen and clansmen. Too much risk of conflict of interest in that. He'd work in Washington, probably, at a desk coordinating the Agency's work with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Or he'd be sent north to be a cop
among the Cheyennes, or south to deal with federal crime on Seminole land in Florida. Aside from that dismal thought, Chee was not enjoying the view because he was not in the mood to enjoy anything. He had found Margaret Billy Sosi for the third time, and extracted from her the last missing piece of the puzzle, and it told him absolutely nothing. He took Ashie Begay's Four Mountains Bundle from his coat pocket and tossed it in his hand. From behind him, the sound of a pot drum drifted on the cold, still air, and with it the sound of Littleben's voice, rising and falling in the chant which told how the Hero Twins had decided that Old Man Death must be spared and not eliminated in their campaign to cleanse Dinetah of its monsters. The same faint breeze which carried the sound brought the perfume of woodsmoke from the fire in the hogan, reminding Chee that it was warm in there, and that the cold out here at this slab of sandstone on which he was sitting was seeping into his bones. But he didn't want to be inside, sitting with his back to the hogan wall, watching Littleben build the last of the great sand paintings of this ceremonial, sharing the music and the poetry and the goodwill of these people. He wanted to be out here in the cold, trying to think, going over it all again.