A Thief of Time jlajc-8

by Tony Hillerman

  'Like what?'

  She made herself comfortable. 'Oh,' she said. 'He said, did you hear what happened to so-and-so? Then he listened. Then he said something like, it made him nervous. And to be careful. And then he said somebody-else-or-other was who he worried about and the only way to warn him was to go out to his hogan and find him. He said he was going to cancel his revival here and go up there. And then he listened a long time, and then he said he didn't know how far. It was over into Utah.' She shrugged. 'That's about it.'

  'About it isn't good enough.'

  'Well, that's all I remember.'

  Apparently it was. She was blank on both so-and-so and somebody-else-or-other. Chee left, thinking 'over into Utah' was over into the country Leaphorn wanted Nakai cross-examined about--the source of Friedman-Bernal's pot obsession. He was also thinking that heading into the Four Corners would take him past Shiprock. Maybe he would take the night off, if he was tired when he got there. Maybe he would run Slick Nakai to earth tomorrow. But why had Nakai changed his plans and headed for the Utah border? Who knows? 'So-and-so' was probably Etcitty. 'Somebody-else-or-other' probably another of Nakai's converts who stole pots on the side. To Chee, Nakai was seeming increasingly odd.

  He was driving through the Bisti Badlands, headed north toward Farmington, when the five o'clock news began. A woman reporting from the Durango, Colorado, station on the letting of a contract for range improvement on the Ute Mountain Reservation, and a controversy over the environmental impact of an additional ski run at Purgatory, and a recall petition being circulated to unseat a councilman at Aztec, New Mexico. Chee reached up to change the channel. He'd get more New Mexico news from a Farmington station. 'In other news of the Four Corners country,' the woman said, 'a prominent and sometimes controversial Southeast Utah rancher and political figure has been shot to death at his ranch near Bluff.'

  Chee stopped, hand on the dial.

  'A spokesman for the Garfield County Sheriffs Office at Blanding said the victim has been identified as Harrison Houk, a former Utah state senator and one of southern Utah's biggest ranch operators. The body of Houk was found in his barn last night. The sheriffs office said he had been shot twice.

  'Some twenty years ago, Houk's family was the victim of one of the Four Corners' worst tragedies. Houk's wife and a son and daughter were shot to death, apparently by a mentally disturbed younger son who then drowned himself in the San Juan.

  'Across the line in Arizona, a suit has been filed in federal district court at…'

  Chee clicked off the radio. He wanted to think. Houk was the man to whom Nakai had sold pots. Houk lived at Bluff, on the San Juan. Maybe Etcitty was Nakai's 'so-and-so.' More likely it would be Houk. Could Nakai have heard of Houk's murder en route to Tsaya? Probably, on an earlier newscast. That would explain the abrupt change in plans. Or maybe Houk was 'somebody-else-or-other' -- the man Nakai wanted to warn. Too late for that now. Either way, it seemed clear that Nakai would be headed to somewhere very close to Bluff, to where Houk, his customer for pots, had been killed.

  Chee decided he would work overtime. If he could find the elusive Nakai tonight, he would.

  It proved to be surprisingly easy. On the road north toward Bluff, far enough north of Mexican Water so he was sure he'd crossed the Arizona border into Utah, Chee saw Nakai's tent trailer. It was parked maybe a quarter-mile up an old oil field road that wanders off U.S. 191 into the rocky barrens south of Caso del Eco Mesa.

  Chee made an abrupt left turn, parked by the trailer, and inspected it. The tie-down ropes were in place, all four tires were aired, everything in perfect order. It had simply been unhooked and abandoned.

  Chee jolted down the old road, past a silent oil pump, down into the bare stoniness of Gothic Creek, and out of that into a flatland of scattered sage and dwarf juniper. The road divided into two trails--access routes, Chee guessed, to the only two Navajo families who survived in these barrens. It was almost dark now, the western horizon a glowing, luminous copper. Which route to take? Far down the one that led straight ahead he saw Nakai's car.

  He drove the five hundred yards toward it cautiously, feeling uneasy. He'd been joking with the girl at Tsaya when he cast Nakai in the role of gangster. But how did he know? He knew almost nothing. That Nakai had been preaching on the reservation for years. That he encouraged his converts to collect pots for him to sell to help finance his operation. Did he have a pistol? A criminal record? Leaphorn probably knew such things, but he hadn't confided in Chee. He slowed even more, nervous.

  Nakai was sitting on the trunk of the massive old Cadillac, legs straight out, leaning against the rear window, watching him, looking utterly harmless. Chee parked behind the car, climbed out, stretched.

  'Ya te'eh,' Nakai said. And then he recognized Chee, and looked surprised. 'We meet again--but a long way from Nageezi.'

  'Ya te,' Chee said. 'You are hard to find. I heard you were supposed to be'--he gestured southward--'first at Tsaya and then way down beyond the Hopi Country. Down at Lower Greasewood.'

  'Ran outta gas,' Nakai said, ignoring the implied question. 'This thing burns gas like a tank.' He jumped down from the trunk, with the small man's natural agility. 'Were you looking for me?'

  'More or less,' Chee said. 'What brings you up here into Utah? So far from Lower Greasewood?'

  'The Lord's business takes me many places,' Nakai said.

  'You planning a revival out here?'

  'Sure,' Nakai said. 'When I can arrange it.'

  'But you left your tent,' Chee said. And you're lying, he thought. Not enough people out here.

  'I was on empty,' Nakai said. 'Thought I could save enough gas to get where I was going. Then come back and get it.' He laughed. 'Waited too long to unhook. Burned too much gasoline.'

  'You forget to look at your gauge?'

  'It was already broke when I bought this thing.' Nakai laughed again. 'Blessed are the poor,' he said. 'Didn't do no good to look at it. Before I got outta gas, I was outta money.'

  Chee didn't comment on that. He thought about how he could learn what Nakai was doing out here. Who he came to warn.

  'Have a brother lives down there,' Nakai explained. 'Christian, so he's my brother in the Lord. And he's Paiute. My 'born to' clan. So he's a brother that way, too. I was going to walk. And then I saw you coming.'

  'So you just got here?'

  'Five minutes, maybe. Look, could you give me a ride? Maybe eight miles or so. I could walk it, but I'm in a hurry.'

  Nakai was looking down the trail, westward. Chee studied his face. The copper light gave it the look of sculpture. Metal. But Nakai wasn't metal. He was worried. Chee could think of no clever way to get him to talk about what he was doing here.

  'You found out Harrison Houk was killed,' Chee said. 'And you headed out here. Why?'

  Nakai turned, his face shadowed now. 'Who's Houk?'

  'The man you sold pots to,' Chee said. 'Remember? You told Lieutenant Leaphorn about it.'

  'Okay,' Nakai said. 'I know about him.'

  'Etcitty dealt with you, and with Houk, and with these pots, and he's dead. And now Houk. Both shot. And Nails, too, for that matter. Did you know him?'

  'Just met him,' Nakai said. 'Twice, I think.'

  'Look,' Chee said. 'Leaphorn sent me to find you because of something else. He wants to locate this Eleanor Friedman-Bernal woman -- find out what happened to her. He talked to you about her already. But now he wants more information. He wants to know what she said to you about looking for pots right out here in this part of the country. Along the San Juan. Up around Bluff. Around Mexican Hat.'

  'Just what I told him. She wanted those smooth polychrome pots. Those pinkish ones with the patterns and the wavy lines and the serration, or whatever you call it. Pots or the broken pieces. Didn't matter. And she told me she was particularly interested in anything that turned up around this part of the reservation.' Nakai shrugged. 'That was it.'

  Chee put his hands on hips and bent backward,
eliminating a kink in his back. He'd spent ten hours in that pickup today. Maybe more. Too many. 'If Joe Leaphorn were here,' he said, 'he'd say no, that wasn't quite it. She said more than that. You are trying to save time. Summarizing. Tell me everything she said. Let me do the summarizing.'

  Nakai looked thoughtful. An ugly little man, Chee decided, but smart.

  'You're thinking that I am a cop, and that these pots came off the Navajo Reservation where they are mucho, mucho illegal. Felony stuff. You're thinking you are going to be careful about what you say.' Chee slouched against the pickup door. 'Forget it. We are doing one thing at a time and the one thing is finding this woman. Not figuring out who shot Etcitty. Not catching somebody for looting ruins on Navajo land. Just one single, simple thing. Just find Eleanor Friedman. Leaphorn seems to think she went looking for these pots. At least that's what I think he thinks. He thinks she told you where to find them. Therefore, I'd appreciate it, you'd win my gratitude and a ride to wherever you want to go, if you'll just tell me all of it. Whether or not you think it matters.'

  Nakai waited awhile, making sure Chee's outburst was finished.

  'What matters isn't much,' he said. 'Let me remember a minute or two.'

  Behind Nakai the sunset had darkened from glowing pale copper to dark copper. Against that gaudy backdrop, two streaks of clouds were painted, blue-black and ragged. To the left, a three-quarter moon hung in the sky like a carved white rock.

  'You want her words,' Nakai said. 'What she said, what he said, what she said. I don't remember that well. But I remember some impressions. One. She was thinking about very specific ruins. She'd been there. She knew what it looked like. Two. It was illegal. Better than that, it was on the Navajo Reservation. She good as said that. I remember I said something about it being illegal, and she said maybe it shouldn't be. I was a Navajo and it was Navajo land.'

  Nakai stopped. 'How about the ride?'

  'What else?'

  'That's all I know, really. Did I say it was in a canyon? I'm sure it was. She said she'd been told about it. Didn't say who told her. Somebody she'd bought a pot from, I guess. Anyway, the way she described the place it had to be a canyon. Three ruins, she said. One down by the streambed in the talus, one on the shelf above it, and a third one out of sight in the cliff above the shelf. So that would have to be in a canyon. And that's all I know.'

  'Not the name of the canyon.'

  'She didn't know it. Said she didn't think it had one. Canyon sin nombre.' Nakai laughed. 'She didn't tell me much, really. Just that she was very, very interested in pots, or potsherds, even little fragments, but only if they had this pinkish glaze with the wavy light lines and the serration. Said she'd triple her price for them. That she wanted to know exactly where they came from. I wondered why she didn't go try to find the place herself. I guess she didn't want to risk getting caught at it.'

  'Leaphorn thinks she went. Or, I think he does.'

  'Now,' Nakai said, 'I earned my ride.'

  Chee took him to a hogan built on the slope of a wash that drained into Gothic Creek--using three-quarters of an hour to cover less than eight jarring miles. It was almost full dark when they pulled onto the slick rock surface that formed the hogan yard, but the moon was bright enough to show why the site had been picked. A growth of cottonwoods, tamarisks, and rabbitbrush at the lip of the wash showed where a spring flowed. It was probably the only live water within thirty miles, Chee guessed, and it wasn't lively enough to support a family in the dry season. A row of rusty water barrels on a wooden rack told him that. Chee parked, raced the pickup engine to make sure the hogan's occupants had noticed their arrival, and turned off the engine. A dim light, probably from a kerosene lamp, showed through the side window. The smell of sheep, a smell that always provoked nostalgia in Chee, drifted down from a brush compound behind the house.

  'You have another little problem now,' Chee said.

  'What?'

  'This brother of yours who lives here. He steals pots for you. You want to tell him about Etcitty, and Nails, and Houk. You want to tell him to be careful--that somebody's shooting pot hunters. But I'm a cop so you don't want me to hear it.'

  Nakai said nothing.

  'No car. No truck. At least I don't see one. Or see any place to put one on this flat rock where I couldn't see it. So somebody who lives here has gone off with the truck.'

  Nakai said nothing. He drew in a breath and exhaled it.

  'So if I just leave you here, as you'd intended, then you're stuck. No gas and no ride to where you can get some.'

  'One of his sons probably has the truck,' Nakai said. 'He probably keeps some gasoline here somewhere. At least a five-gallon can.'

  'In which case you walk that eight miles back to the Caddy with it,' Chee said. 'Or maybe he doesn't have any gas.'

  A blanket hanging over the hogan doorway swung aside. The shape of a man appeared, looking out at them.

  'What do you have in mind?' Nakai said.

  'You quit playing the game. I'm not going to arrest anyone for stealing pots. But I gotta find out where they came from. That's all I care about. If you don't know where that is, this Paiute Clan man here does. Let him tell me. No more games.'

  The Paiute Clan man was called Amos Whistler. A skinny man with four of his lower front teeth missing. He knew where the pots had come from. 'Way over there, toward the west. Toward Navajo Mountain,' he said, indicating the direction. 'Maybe thirty miles across the Nokaito Bench.' But there were no roads, just broken country, sandstone cut by one wash after another. Whistler said he had heard about the ruins years ago from an uncle, who told him to stay out of the place because the ghosts were bad in there. But he had learned about Jesus, and he didn't believe in ghosts, so he packed in with a couple of horses, but it was tough going. An ordeal. He'd lost a horse. A good one.

  Chee owned an excellent U.S. Geological Survey map of the Big Reservation, a book in which each page showed everything in a thirty-two-mile square. 'What's the name of the canyon?'

  'I don't know if it has a name,' Amos Whistler said. 'Around here they say its name is Canyon Where Watersprinkler Plays His Flute.' It was a long name in Navajo, and Whistler looked embarrassed when he said it.

  'Would you take me in there? Rent the horses and lead me in?'

  'No,' Amos Whistler said. 'I don't go there no more.'

  'I'd hire you,' Chee said. 'Pay you for using your horses. Good money.'

  'No,' Whistler said. 'I'm a Christian now. I know about Jesus. I don't worry about Anasazi ghosts like I did when I was a pagan. Before I walked on the Jesus Road. But I won't go into that place.'

  'Good money,' Chee said. 'No problems with the law.'

  'I heard him in there,' Whistler said. He took two steps away from Chee, toward the hogan door. 'I heard the Watersprinkler playing his flute.'

  Chapter Fourteen

  Ť ^ ť

  LEAPHORN MANAGED a forward seat by the window when he changed planes in Chicago. There was nothing to see -- just the topside of solid cloud cover over the great flat, fertile American heartland. Leaphorn looked down at this gray mass and thought of the river of wet air flowing up from the Gulf of Mexico, and of cold rain, and bleak, featureless landscapes closed in by a sky no more than six feet above one's forehead. At least Emma had saved them from that by holding him on the reservation.

  He was depressed. He had done what he had gone to do and achieved nothing useful. All he knew that he hadn't known before was that Et-citty had been too smart to sign a pot documentation admitting a violation of federal law. Leaphorn was fairly sure that the physical description of the site must be accurate. He could think of no reason for Etcitty to have made up such a complicated description. It seemed to flow from memory. An unsophisticated man following the form's instructions, describing reality with the single lie to avoid incrimination. That helped very little. The Utah-Arizona-New Mexico border country was a maze of washes, gulches, draws, and canyons. Thousands of them, and in their sheltered, sun-facing
alcoves, literally scores of thousands of Anasazi sites. He'd seen an estimate of more than a hundred thousand such sites on the Colorado Plateau, built over a period of almost a thousand years. What Etcitty had given him was like a description of a house in a big city with no idea of its street address. He could narrow it down some. Probably in southern Utah or extreme northern Arizona. Probably north of Monument Valley. Probably east of Nokaito Mesa. Probably west of Montezuma Creek. That narrowed it to an area bigger than Connecticut, occupied by maybe five thousand humans. And all he had was a site description that might be as false as its location obviously was.

  Perhaps Chee had done better. An odd young man, Chee. Smart, apparently. Alert. But slightly… slightly what? Bent? Not exactly. It wasn't just the business of trying to be a medicine man--a following utterly incongruous with police work. He was a romantic, Leaphorn decided. That was it. A man who followed dreams. The sort who would have joined that Paiute shaman who invented the ghost dance and the vision of white men withering away and the buffalo coming back to the plains. Maybe that wasn't fair. It was more that Chee seemed to think an island of 180,000 Navajos could live the old way in a white ocean. Perhaps 20,000 of them could, if they were happy on mutton, cactus, and pinon nuts. Not practical. Navajos had to compete in the real world. The Navajo Way didn't teach competition. Far from it.

  But Chee, odd as he was, would find Slick Nakai. Another dreamer, Nakai. Leaphorn shifted in the narrow seat, trying vainly for comfort. Chee would find Nakai and Chee would get from Nakai about as much information as Leaphorn would have been able to extract.

  Leaphorn found himself thinking of what he would say to Emma about Chee. He shook his head, picked up a New Yorker, and read. Dinner came. His seatmate examined it scornfully. To Leaphorn, who had been eating his own cooking, it tasted great. They were crossing the Texas panhandle now. Below, the clouds were thinning, breaking into patches. Ahead, the earth rose like a rocky island out of the ocean of humid air that blanketed the midlands. Leaphorn could see the broken mesas of eastern New Mexico. Beyond, on the western horizon, great cloud-castle thunderheads, unusual in autumn, rose into the stratosphere. Leaphorn felt something he hadn't felt since Emma's death. He felt a kind of joy.