showed him. Three pickup trucks, an old white Chevy, and a wagon on which bales of hay served as seats. Twenty yards behind the shack was the round stone shape of a hogan, with a thin wisp of blue smoke emerging from the smoke hole in the center of its conical dirt-insulated roof. No one was in sight.
Chee parked the truck beside the newest of the pickups, flicked off the headlights, and stepped out into the darkness. The moon was down and the black sky was brilliant with a billion stars. He stood with face raised, drinking it in – the great fluorescent sweep of the Milky Way, the pattern of the winter constellations, the incredible silent brightness of the universe.
Mary was standing beside him now. “My God,” she said in a hushed voice. “I never saw the sky like that.”
“Altitude,” Chee said. “We’re almost at the Continental Divide here. Mile and a half above sea level; air’s thin. And partly it’s because there’s no ground lights. Look,” he said, pointing to the southeast. “See that little glow on the horizon? That’s Albuquerque. Hundred miles away, but you can see what it does.”
“It makes you forget for a minute how cold you are,” Mary said. She shuddered. “The minute’s up. I’m cold.”
From the hogan came the sound of song and the tapping of a pot drum. Distance and the hogan walls muted it, and the singing was not much more than a rising and falling rhythm, part of the background of the windless night. Chee glanced at his watch. The followers of Lord Peyote wouldn’t recess their ceremonial until midnight. They began at sunset after a prayer to inform the setting sun that their intentions were holy, and the ritual would not end until sunrise. But at midnight there was a break. And that meant another five minutes to wait.
“When I was a boy,” Chee said, “sometimes my mother would wake me up in the darkest part of the night, and we’d go out away from the hogan, and she’d teach me star lore. How the constellations move and how you can tell the direction and the time of night if you know the time of year. And how it all began.”
“How did it all begin?” Mary asked.
“There weren’t any Navajos yet. Just Holy People. First Man, First Woman, Talking God, Gila Monster, Corn Beetle, all the various
“Quite a coyote,” Mary said. She shivered again and hugged herself.
The hogan was silent now, and suddenly there was light at the doorway as the blankets hung across the opening were pulled back.
Chee reached into the cab of the truck and turned on the dome light. It was polite to let people know who was calling on them.
Contrary to Mary’s pessimism, Mrs. Musket was there. She was a gray-haired, sturdy woman with a red- and-green mackinaw over the voluminous velveteen blouse and skirt of traditional Navajo womanhood. She wasn’t sure she wanted to talk about Windy Tsossie.
Rudolph Charley invited them into the hogan out of the cold, and stood beside them listening. Rudolph Charley looked a lot like Tomas Charley. Just a little younger and even thinner.
“It all happened a long time ago,” Chee was saying. “Before he married your sister. There was an explosion at an oil well where he worked. We want to see if he remembers what happened.”
Mrs. Musket stared at Chee, glanced nervously at Mary, at Charley, and then back at Chee.
“He won’t remember anything,” Mrs. Musket said.
“It seems like just about everybody else who was working with Tsossie is dead,” Chee said. “We can’t talk to them. We want to talk to him.”
“I think Windy is dead, too,” Rudolph Charley said. “I think the witch got them all.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Musket said. “He’s dead.”
“When did he die?” Chee asked. He suspected Mrs. Musket was lying. Experience taught one to watch the face of a person being questioned. Lying made almost everyone nervous. Mrs. Musket was nervous. But then she would be nervous anyway, at being questioned by strangers who appeared out of the darkness to talk of death. And there was more to it than nervousness. Something vague and hard to define. And he thought that he knew what was causing it. Mrs. Musket had eaten peyote and drunk of the “black drink” of the ceremonial – peyote tea. She was in that dreamy world of the psychedelic. He glanced at Rudolph Charley. The road chief of his ceremonial, too, looked at Chee as if he wasn’t sure that Chee existed.
“When did he die, then?” Chee repeated. “And where did they put the body?”
“Long time ago,” Mrs. Musket said. She stood looking at Chee and through Chee. The seconds ticked away. “They lived out behind Bisti in the badlands. I wasn’t with them. But my sister’s husband was a witch, and somebody turned the witching around against him. He got corpse sickness and he died.”
“You weren’t there, but you heard about it? Is that right? From your sister?” Chee asked.
“From my sister,” Mrs. Musket agreed.
“He died of a sickness?”
“Corpse sickness,” Mrs. Musket said.
“Where?”
“In my sister’s hogan.”
“And they buried him there?”
“They got a white man who worked there at Bisti to come and put the body out in the rocks. They told me that he put it in a little blowhole in the side of a cliff and covered it over with rocks.”
“It’s all starting up again,” Rudolph Charley said suddenly. “More witching.”
Chee looked at him. Charley’s eyes were focused somewhere a long way off.
“The first time it killed my grandfather, and all the people who the Lord Peyote let see through the doorway. The witching killed all six of them. And now it has started up again. First it killed my grandfather. Now it has killed my father, and it killed my brother. Tonight we are asking the Lord Peyote to let us see what will happen next…” His voice trailed off.
Mary began a word and bit it off. The four of them stood there, silently, waiting for the road chief to continue. Beyond Charley, Chee could see the room. The packed earthen floor had been cleared of furnishings. The peyote altar had been built across the back of it – a low crescent shape of hard-packed sand. The peyote moon, they called it. At its center, where the sand was perhaps six inches high, a cup-sized bed of cedar twigs had been built. In this nest the gnarled, hairy shape of a peyote button rested. On the sand beside it was a small silver box, lid open. Behind the peyote moon two zigzag lines were inscribed in the earth, representing the footprints of Christ. The Native American Church as it came to the Checkerboard was more or less Christian. Christ taught the white man only through the Bible, because the white man had crucified him. But the Navajo, who had not harmed Christ, God instructed directly through visions. And Lord Peyote was the instrument, the key to the door which led to reality.
Rudolph Charley still stood motionless, caught in some odd drug-induced expansion of time.
“Did he let you see?” Chee asked.
“I saw the mole,” Rudolph Charley said. “The amulet that was my father’s and my grandfather’s.”
“Nothing else?” Chee asked.
The door opened and two men ducked through – both young. They glanced at Chee and at Mary. One added sticks to the pinon fire which had burned to a bed of coals in the hogan fire pit. The other went to the back wall and squatted by the pot drum, watching and waiting. Rudolph Charley’s mood changed.
“Nothing you would understand,” he said. “We have to start again now. We have to finish the service.”
“The man you want to talk to is dead,” Mrs. Musket said.
“All right,” Chee said. “Then tell me where to find the blowhole where they put his body.”
29
FINALLY COLTON WOLF was ready. He’d had both a CB radio and a radiotelephone installed in the cab of the pickup. He had driven up an arroyo east of the Sandia Mountains and refreshed his marksmanship with both his
