'I remember somebody telling me something about it,' Chee said. 'Somebody told me the deal where they saw a pine tree trunk on the ground and the sorcerer caused it to move up and down in the air.'
Cowboy said nothing.
'That's right?' Chee asked. 'A lot of magic at a Ya Ya ceremony.'
'But if you have power, and you use it for the wrong reasons, then you lose the power,' Cowboy said. 'That's what we're told.'
'This man we're going to see,' Chee said. 'He was a member of the Ya Ya Society. That right?'
Cowboy eased the patrol car over another rough spot. The sun was down now, the horizon a streak of fire. The cloud was closer and beginning to drop a screen of rain. It evaporated at least a thousand feet above ground level, but it provided a translucent screen which filtered the reddish light.
'I heard he was a member of the Ya Ya,' Cowboy said. 'You can hear just about anything.'
The village of Piutki had never had the size or importance of such places as Oraibi, or Walpi, or even Shongopovi. At its peak it had housed only part of the small Bow Clan, and the even smaller Fog Clan. That peak had passed long ago, probably in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. Now many of its houses had been abandoned. Their roofs had fallen in and their walls had been quarried for stone to maintain houses still occupied. The great cloud now dominated the sky, and illuminated the old place with a red twilight. The breeze followed the patrol car with outriders of dust. Cowboy flicked on the headlights.
'Place looks empty,' Chee said.
'It almost is,' Cowboy agreed.
The plaza was small, houses on two sides of it in ruins. Chee noticed that the kiva, too, was in disrepair. The steps that led to its roof were rotted and broken, and the ladder that should have protruded from its rooftop entrance was missing. It was a small kiva, and low, its walls rising only some five feet above the dusty plaza earth. It seemed as dead as the men who had built it so long ago.
'Well,' Cowboy said. 'Here we are.' He stopped the car beside the kiva. Beyond it, one of the houses that still walled two sides of the plaza was occupied. The breeze blew smoke from its chimney toward them, and a small pile of coal stood beside its doorway. The door opened. A boy—perhaps ten or twelve—looked out at them. The boy was an albino.
Cowboy left the car unlocked and walked through the blowing dust without waiting for Chee. He spoke to the boy at the door in Hopi, listened to his answer, thought about it, and spoke again. The boy disappeared inside.
'He said Sawkatewa is working. He'd tell him he had visitors,' Cowboy said.
Chee nodded. He heard a thumping of thunder and glanced up at the cloud. Only its upper levels were red with sunset now. Below that, its color shaded from blue to almost black. While he looked at it, the black flashed with yellow, and flashed again. Internal lightning was illuminating it. They waited. Dust eddied in the plaza. The air was much cooler now. It smelled of rain. The sound of thunder reached them. This time it boomed, and boomed again.
The boy reappeared. He looked at Chee through thick-lensed glasses and then at Cowboy, and spoke in Hopi.
'In we go,' Cowboy said.
Taylor Sawkatewa was sitting on a small metal chair, winding yarn onto a spindle. He was looking at them, his bright black eyes curious. But his hands never stopped their quick, agile work. He spoke to Cowboy, and motioned toward a green plastic sofa which stood against the entrance wall, and then he examined Chee. He smiled and nodded.
'He says sit down,' Cowboy said.
They sat on the green plastic. It was a small room, a little off square, the walls flaking whitewash. A kerosene lamp, its glass chimney sooty, cast a wavering yellow light.
Sawkatewa spoke to both of them, smiling at Chee again. Chee smiled back.
Then Cowboy spoke at length. The old man listened. His hands worked steadily, moving the gray-white wool from a skein in a cardboard beer carton beside his chair onto the long wooden spindle. His eyes left Cowboy and settled on Chee's face. He was a very old man, far beyond the point where curiosity can be interpreted as rudeness. Navajos, too, sometimes live to be very old and Chee's Slow Talking Dinee had its share of them.
Cowboy completed his statement, paused, added a brief postscript, then turned to Chee.
'I told him I would now tell you what I'd told him,' Cowboy said. 'And what I told him was who you are and that we are here because we are trying to find out something about the plane crash out in Wepo Wash.'
'I think you should tell him what happened in a lot of detail,' Chee said. 'Tell him that two men were killed in the airplane, and that two other men have been killed because of what the airplane carried. And tell him that it would help us a lot if someone had been there and had seen what happened and could tell us what he saw.' Chee kept his eyes on Sawkatewa as he said this. The old man was listening intently, smiling slightly. He understands a little English, Chee decided. Maybe he understands more than a little.
Cowboy spoke in Hopi. Sawkatewa listened. He had the round head and the broad fine nose of many Hopis, and a long jaw, made longer by his toothlessness. His cheeks and his chin wrinkled around his sunken mouth, but his skin, like his eyes, looked ageless and his hair, cut in the bangs of the traditional Hopi male, was still mostly black. While he listened, his fingers worked the yarn, limber as eels.
Cowboy finished his translation. The old man waited a polite moment, and then he spoke to Cowboy in rapid Hopi, finished speaking, and laughed.
Cowboy made a gesture of denial. Sawkatewa spoke again, laughed again. Cowboy responded at length in Hopi. Then he looked at Chee.
'He says you must think that he is old and foolish. He says that he has heard that somebody is breaking the windmill out there and that we are looking for the one who broke it to put him in jail. He says that you wish to trick him into saying that he was by the windmill on that night.'
