'Nothing new,' Cowboy said. 'What you've got to do is convince Largo that there's no way to protect that windmill short of putting three shifts of guards on it.' He laughed. 'That, or getting a transfer back to Crownpoint.'
Chee turned on the ignition. 'Well, I better get moving.'
Cowboy opened the door, started to get out, stopped. 'Jim,' he said. 'You already found that car?'
Chee produced a chuckle. 'You heard what I said. Largo said keep away from that case.'
Cowboy climbed out and closed the door behind him. He leaned on the sill, looking in at Chee. 'And you wouldn't do nothing that the captain told you not to?'
'I'm serious, Cowboy. The dea climbed all over Largo. They think I was out there that night to meet the plane. They think I know where that dope shipment is. I'm not kidding you. It's absolutely goddamn none of my business. I'm staying away from it.'
Cowboy climbed into his patrol car, started the engine. He looked back at Chee. 'What size boots you wear?'
Chee frowned. 'Tens.'
'Tell you what I'll do,' Cowboy said. 'If I see any size ten footprints up that arroyo, I'll just brush 'em out!'
Chapter Seventee
Black mesa is neither black nor a mesa. It is far too large for that definition—a vast, broken plateau about the size and shape of Connecticut. It is virtually roadless, almost waterless, and uninhabited except for an isolated scattering of summer herding camps. It rises out of the Painted Desert more than seven thousand feet. A dozen major dry washes and a thousand nameless arroyos drain away runoff from its bitter winters and the brief but torrential 'male rains' of the summer thunderstorm season. It takes its name from the seams of coal exposed in its towering cliffs, but its colors are the grays and greens of sage, rabbit brush, juniper, cactus, grama and bunch grass, and the dark green of creosote brush, mesquite, pinon, and (in the few places where springs flow) pine and spruce. It is a lonely place even in grazing season and has always been territory favored by the Holy People of the Navajo and the kachinas and guarding spirits of the Hopis. Masaw, the bloody-faced custodian of the Fourth World of the Hopis, specifically instructed various clans of the Peaceful People to return there when they completed their epic migrations and to live on the three mesas which extend like great gnarled fingers from Black Mesa's southern ramparts. Its craggy cliffs are the eagle-collection grounds of the Hopi Flute, Side Corn, Drift Sand, Snake, and Water clans. It is dotted with shrines and holy places. For Chee's people it was an integral part of Dinetah, where Changing Woman taught the Dinee they must live in the beauty of the Way she and the Holy People taught them.
Chee was familiar with only a little of the eastern rim of this sprawling highland. As a boy, he had been taken westward by Hosteen Nakai from Many Farms into the Blue Gap country to collect herbs and minerals at the sacred places for the Mountain Way ceremony. Once they had gone all the way into Dzilidushzhinih Peaks, the home of Talking God himself, to collect materials for Hosteen Nakai's
'This barrel belong to the Muskets?'
'Hey,' the woman said. 'That's a good idea. You want to haul that out for them? They're dried up out there and they're hauling water and they had me get 'em another drum.'
'Sure,' Chee said. He loaded it into the back of his pickup, rolled the truck to the overhead tank that held the post's water supply, rinsed out the drum, and filled it.
'Tell Fannie I put the barrel on her pawn ticket,' the woman said. 'I'll put the water on there, too.'
'I'll get the water,' Chee said.
'Two dollars,' the woman said. She shook her head. 'If it don't rain we ain't going to have any to sell.'
Fannie Musket was glad to get the water. She helped Chee rig the block and tackle to lift the barrel onto a plank platform where two other such barrels sat. One was empty and when Chee tapped his knuckles against the other, the sound suggested no more than ten gallons left.
'Getting hard to live out here,' Mrs. Musket said. 'Seems like it don't rain anymore.' She glanced up at the sky, which was a dark, clear blue with late summer's usual scattering of puffy clouds building up here and there. By midafternoon they would have built up to a vain hope of a thundershower. By dark, both clouds and hope would have dissipated.
Chee and Mrs. Musket had introduced themselves, by family, by kinship, and by clan. (She was Standing Rock, born for the Mud Clan.) He had told Mrs. Musket that he hoped she would talk to him about her son.
'You are hunting for him,' she said. Navajo is a language which loads its meanings into its verbs. She used the word which means 'to stalk,' as a hunted animal, and not the form which means 'to search for,' as for someone lost. The tone was as accusing as the word.
Chee changed the verb. 'I search for him,' Chee said. 'But I know I will not find him here. I am told he is a smart man. He would not come here while we search for him, and even if he had, I would not ask his mother to tell me where to find him. I just want to learn what kind of a man he is.'
'He is my son,' Mrs. Musket said.
'Did he come home after they let him out of the prison? Before he went to work at Burnt Water?'
'He came home. He wanted to have an Enemy Way done for him. He went to see Tallman Begay and hired Hosteen Begay to be the singer for it. And then after the sing, he went to Burnt Water.'
