Chee. “See you later, Janet.” And he was gone.
“Me too,” Janet said. “I’ve got to go.”
“Where?” Chee said.
“First to Crownpoint. The federals are releasing Ahkeah and I have to do the paperwork.”
“I’m going that direction,” Chee said. “Could I give you a ride?”
“I have to go on from there up to Aztec. I have some business at the San Juan County courthouse.”
“That’s right on my way,” Chee said.
“I’d better take my own car,” she said. “You’d have to wait for me.” She got up, dropped a dollar on the table. “My share of the tip.”
“Janet,” Chee said. “I want to talk to you.”
“I’m not sure I’d care for that.”
Chee sat looking up at her. He could think of nothing to say. But his expression must have said something to her.
“What could we talk about?” she asked. “Do you think we can go back to being friends?”
Chee shook his head. “I doubt it. I don’t think I could.”
He put his hand out. She looked at it. Then took it. Her fingertips felt soft and warm against his skin.
“Just a few hours,” he said.
“What do we talk about?”
“The weather. The landscape. Old times, maybe, if we’re careful how we handle it. And I think maybe I want you to help me make up my mind about something.”
She extracted her hand.
“Not about Navajo clans,” he said. “About something you must have studied in law school. Justice. Retribution. Social revenge. Ethics. All that.”
She managed a smile. “I’m good at that kind of talk.”
In fact, they talked very little on their way to Crownpoint. East of Gallup, Chee pointed to the places along the red sandstone cliffs of Mesa de los Lobos where various movies had been shot. He explained that Thoreau was pronounced “threw” because the village had been named after a railroad engineer and not the poet-essayist. He pointed southward to Little Haystack Mountain and told her how a Navajo prospector named Paddy Martinez had found a vein of radioactive pitchblende near there and opened the great Ambrosia Lake uranium mining district. He told her, finally, about the chain of events that had gotten Leaphorn suspended, and had caused the lieutenant to miss his trip to China.
“It was a stupid thing to do,” he said. “Leaving that tape in there, I mean. Leaphorn didn’t make much out of it, but I feel terrible about it.”
“I didn’t think I would like that man at first,” Janet said. “But I really do. I think he’s a kind person. I used to just think he was smart.”
“He’s smart, all right.”
“That’s what he thinks about you, too.”
“Why do you say that?”
“The way he talked about you.”
“What do you mean? When did you talk to him?”
“I went to see him about Ahkeah. Exactly like you told me to do.”
Chee took his eyes off the road to stare at her. She was looking amused. “I told you to go see Leaphorn? When did that happen?”
“Don’t you remember? I told you Eugene Ahkeah was not guilty. You said go tell Lieutenant Leaphorn that and he’d turn him loose. So I did. And he did.”
“Did you really,” Chee said. “Wow.”
“I think it was just good timing. He’d figured out someone else had done it.”
“But what makes you think he has this high opinion of me?” Chee said. “I don’t often get that impression.”
“The hit-and-run case. He thinks you can solve it.”
“No he doesn’t. Or he didn’t. He doesn’t think anyone can solve it.”
“He told me that, too,” Janet said. “No clues. But really, he thinks you can do it.”
Chee took his eyes off the road again. She was looking straight ahead so all he could see was her profile. Hard to understand, but a beautiful profile.
She spent only a few minutes in the Crownpoint station and emerged with Eugene Ahkeah in tow. Ahkeah looked tired and disheveled. “I told Mr. Ahkeah we’d give him a ride home,” she said. They did, dropping him off at his mobile home.
“Blizzard was kidding me about Navajos being talkative,” Chee said. “He should meet your client.”
“He’s resentful,” Janet said. “He thinks he was arrested just because he was handy.”
“Well, now,” Chee said, feeling a touch resentful himself, “there was the matter of finding all that stolen stuff under his house.”
“Yes, but-” Janet said, and stopped. “Let’s not argue.”
They drove in silence through the rolling, autumn grassland. It is a hundred and five miles from Thoreau to Farmington and there were days when Chee had made the drive without seeing another vehicle. Today they had met a car and two pickups before they were ten miles north of Crownpoint.
“Heavy traffic day,” Chee said, hoping to restart a conversation.
“You wanted to ask me about something. Remember?”
“I do,” Chee said. He fished the tape out of his glove box and put it into the tape player and pushed the play button. “But first I want you to listen to this.”
Janet listened.
“That doesn’t happen very often,” she said. “I heard about this but it didn’t seem real. Did he send any money?”
“Six twenties, two tens, and a five,” Chee said. “In the U.S. mail.”
She thought about that. Shrugged. “And nobody recognized him of course, or he’d be in jail by now. How about the description?”
“The usual. Middle-aged, middle-sized, average-looking Navajo male, wearing average-looking Navajo clothing. He was wearing one of those long-billed baseball caps with the bill bent, and he smelled like onions, and he drove a middle-aged, middle-sized, middle-green pickup truck with a bumper sticker which said ‘Ernie is the greatest.’”
“Smelled like onions?” She looked at him, eyebrows raised with the question.
“Middle of the morning,” Chee said. “Too early for your Lottaburger onion fix.”
“Now you see why I think Lieutenant Leaphorn thinks you’re going to nail this guy?” She was smiling at him.
Which Chee enjoyed. But this was not the time for basking. He said, “This stopped being a tough one as soon as he walked into that radio station. It’s not tough now. Now we catch him because of that bumper sticker.”
“Surely he’d have gotten rid of that. He’d have soaked it off as soon as he got home.”
“I don’t think so,” Chee said. “Neither do the Farmington police, or the New Mexico state cops. He’ll keep driving that pickup out on the highway and sooner or later a cop drives up behind him and sees it.”
Janet looked unpersuaded. She shrugged. “I defer to your experience in such matters. As for me, I’d have painted over it, or something.”
Chee thought about that. “No,” he said, looking at her. “I have a feeling you’d turn yourself in.”
They were driving almost due north through a landscape devoid of humans and the signs that humans leave. Jim Chee loved it for its emptiness. Its beauty had always stirred him and it now stirred him out of his pessimism. Things will work out, he thought. Somehow they’ll work out. They passed the junction that offered thirty miles of dirt road and the White Rock Chapter House to the left, and the much shorter dirt road to the Lake Valley Chapter House to the right. Behind the grassy hills to the right, Kenbeto Wash, and Bettonie Tsossie Wash, and Escalvada Wash, and Fajada Wash all got together after draining thousands of square miles of mountain slopes and mesas, and moved enough water to be called the Chaco River. On this afternoon of a dry autumn, the Chaco bridge crossed a broad expanse of sand on which dust devils were being produced by the autumn breeze (or, as his
