Gorman almost certainly knew all about this address.
Chapter 17
Chee found 13271 jacaranda street just as the setting sun was converting the yellow-gray smog along the western horizon into oddly beautiful layers, pink-gray alternated with pale rose, making a milder, more pastel display than the garish sunsets of the high desert country. He had enjoyed the hunt. The scenery was different: desert, but low-altitude desert, and without the bitter winters of the Big Reservation it produced a different kind of vegetation. He had decided fairly early that he wouldn't find the Jacaranda address, that it was simply a number Gorman had pulled from the air to satisfy Mrs. Day's requirement. Tomorrow morning he would get up early, drive back to Shiprock, and put out feelers at St. Catherine and Two Gray Hills and here and there, to make sure he'd know if and when Margaret Sosi returned to home country. And he'd drive over to Crownpoint and talk to Mary Landon. And, having time to think about it, Mary Landon would have decided that raising their children Dinee and among the Dinee was, after all, what she really wanted to do. Or maybe not. Probably not. Almost certainly not. And what then? What would he do?
Meanwhile Chee drove. The junction of Jacaranda Drive was marked by a huge billboard that rose from a fieldstone base and was topped by the legend j c R ND EST TES in raised wooden letters, once red. Even expecting it, it took Chee a moment to recognize jacaranda estates with the A'S stolen. And to wonder who had such a specialized need for letters. Below the defaced name the billboard featured a map. A great green blob in the middle was labeled Golf Course, and a dim blue oblong near the center of the green was marked Trout Lake. Other landmarks included Shopping Center, Post Office, School, and Country Club. Nothing on the map seemed to bear any relationship to the reality of lonely desert foothills around him, but Chee studied the network of streets it displayed. Jacaranda meandered east-southeast, a main artery. He felt encouraged.
The encouragement was brief. Jacaranda's asphalt surface, already cracked and weedy, gave way to gravel within a quarter mile, and the gravel that replaced it was soon replaced in turn by graded dirt, replaced by a rutted track from which streets led, streets which were nothing more than a few passes made by a bulldozer years ago. Chee passed street signs (Jelso, Jane, Jenkins, Jardin, Jellico), warped plywood boards mounted on two-by-fours with their paint weathered almost beyond the point of legibility. Jane Street had offered a half dozen dilapidated mobile homes clustered near a rusty water tank. On Jenkins he passed a concrete foundation, on Jellico an abandoned frame house from which doors and window frames had been looted. But mostly there was only emptiness. Judy, July, Jerri, and Jennifer streets offered nothing but creosote brush, sandstone, and cacti. Beyond Jennifer, the erosion of an arroyo had erased Jacaranda.
Chee detoured, and detoured again, and rediscovered Jacaranda—worse than ever. And finally, over a ridge, there were homes again—a dented aluminum mobile home on a foundation of cinder blocks and, beyond it, a frame shanty partly covered with roofing shingles, and beyond that a charred jumble of partly burned boards. In front of the mobile home, three old cars and a school bus were parked. A middle-aged man, shirtless, a blue bandanna tied around his head, had the front wheel off the bus and seemed to be replacing a brake lining. Chee stopped, rolled down his window.
'Thirteen two seventy-one Jaracanda,' he shouted. 'You know where it is?'
The man looked up from his work, squinted, wiped sweat from his eyebrow.
'That them Indians?' he asked. 'That old woman and all?' He had a high-pitched, whining voice.
'Sounds right,' Chee said. 'Name's Tsossie, or something like that.'
'I don't know about that,' the man said. 'But their place is over that ridge yonder.' He gestured down the track.
Over the ridge was a house. It was a patchwork affair, apparently built by a series of owners with diminishing ambitions, money, and hope. The front section was made of neat red bricks. A subsequent builder had tried to finish it with cinder-block walls and an addition to the pitched roof, using asphalt shingles that didn't quite match the original. To this a lean-to of planks had been added, with a roof of corrugated sheet metal. The lean-to jutted from the side, and behind it was the framework skeleton of another room, roofless, floorless, and open to the wind. Judging from the collection of dead weeds the framework had accumulated, this project must have been abandoned years ago.
Beyond this house, the rusted corpses of three vehicles stood in a neat row—a delivery van, a pickup truck too cannibalized for easy identification, and a red Dodge sedan with its hood and engine missing. Beside the house, an old Chevy sedan was parked, the window of its driver's-side door held together with tape.
Chee parked on the side of the track in front of the house, tapped twice on the horn, and waited.
Almost five minutes passed. The front door opened just a little and a face peered out. A woman. Chee got out and walked slowly toward the house.
The woman at the door was old, with a round, plump face framed with graying hair. She was obviously a Navajo, and Chee introduced himself in their language—telling her his mother's clan and his father's clan and naming various aunts and uncles—both maternal and paternal—old enough or prominent enough in affairs ceremonial or political that this old woman might have heard of them.
She listened, nodded when he was finished, and motioned him inside.
'I am born to the Turkey Clan,' she said. 'My mother is Bentwoman Tsossie of the Turkey Clan and my father was Jefferson Tom of the Salt Dinee.' She spoke in a rusty old-person's voice, giving Chee the rest of her clan genealogy, mentioning relatives and clan connections, a litany of names of her extended family and its ancestors. Chee recognized a few of them: a woman who had served long before he was born on the Tribal Council, a singer of the Mountain Way Chant whom his own father had sometimes mentioned, and a man who had been, long, long ago, a tribal judge. When she had finished all the formalities and offered him a bottle of cold Pepsi-Cola, Chee accepted it, and sipped from it, and allowed the proper amount of time to pass, and then put the bottle on the floor beside his chair.
'My grandmother,' he said, 'I come here from Shiprock in the hope that I can find a woman of your clan. She calls herself Margaret Billy Sosi.' Chee paused. 'I hope you can help me find her.'
'The girl isn't here,' Bentwoman's Daughter said. 'Why do you wish to see her?'
'I work for the Dinee,' Chee said. 'I am a member of the Navajo Tribal Police. We hope to find a man of the Turkey Clan who is called Hosteen Ashie Begay. He is the grandfather of Margaret Billy Sosi. She is hunting for him too.' Chee paused, noticing the expression on the old woman's face. It was skeptical. He would not look to her like a Navajo Tribal Policeman—out of uniform, in a travel-rumpled plaid shirt and blue jeans. Chee had the usual Navajo's propensity for personal cleanliness, plus a little more. But his only packing for this journey had been to stick his toothbrush holder in his shirt pocket and a spare pair of socks and shorts in the glove box of his pickup. Now he looked like he'd spent two nights in jail. He extracted from his hip pocket and displayed his police credentials.
