1. Now, with the icy wind beginning to blow, they would drink themselves to death in frozen ditches.
That wind buffeted his truck, stirring a cold draft around his face. Chee turned on the ignition and started his engine. Where was Mary Landon at this moment? Teaching her fifth-graders at Crownpoint. Chee remembered the afternoon he had stood on the walk outside the windows of her classroom and watched her—a silent pantomime through the glass. Mary Landon talking. Mary Landon laughing. Mary Landon coaxing, approving, explaining. Until one of her students had seen him standing there and looked at him, and he had fled in embarrassment.
He turned his mind away from that and rolled the pickup out of the lot. He would see Eddie about the Blue Door later. The stolen pinto mare and the angry brother-in-law and the rest of it could wait. Now the job was to find Margaret Billy Sosi, aged seventeen, granddaughter of Ashie Begay, clanswoman of a dead man whom people called Albert Gorman, who seemed to have been running, but not running fast enough or far enough. And thus the first step to finding Margaret Billy Sosi was finding Hosteen Joseph Joe and asking him the question Sharkey hadn't asked, which was what Albert Gorman had said to him at the Shiprock Economy Wash-O-Mat.
Chapter 7
Finding joseph joe proved simple enough. In cultures where cleanliness is valued and water is scarce, laundries are magnets—social as well as service centers. Chee took for granted that the people at the Shiprock Economy Wash-O-Mat would know their customers. He was correct. The middle-aged woman who managed the place provided Joseph Joe's full family genealogy and directions to his winter place. Chee rolled his patrol car southward across the San Juan bridge with the north wind chasing him, then west toward Arizona, and then south again across the dry slopes of snakeweed and buffalo grass toward the towering black spire of basalt that gave the town of Shiprock its name. It was the landmark of Chee's childhood—jutting on the eastern horizon from his mother's place south of Kayenta, and a great black thumb stuck into the northern sky during the endless lonely winters he spent at the Two Gray Hills Boarding School. It was there he'd learned that the Rock with Wings of his uncle's legends had, eons ago, boiled and bubbled as molten lava in the throat of an immense cinder cone. The volcano had died, millions of years had passed, abrasive weather—like today's bitter wind—had worn away cinders and ash and left only tough black filling. In today's bleak autumn light, it thrust into the sky like a surreal gothic cathedral, soaring a thousand feet above the blowing grass and providing—even at five miles' distance—a ludicrously oversized backdrop for Joseph Joe's plank and tarpaper house. 'I already told the white policeman about it,' Hosteen Joe told Chee. Joe poured coffee into a plastic Thermos bottle cap and into a white cup with re-elect mcdonald for tribal progress printed around it, handed Chee the political cup, took a sip from the other, and began telling it all again.
Chee listened. The wind seeped through cracks, rustling the Farmington
Chee took a courtesy sip. He drank a lot of coffee. ('Too much coffee, Joe,' Mary would say. 'Someday I will reform you into a sipper of tea. When I get you, I'm going to make sure you last a long time.') He enjoyed coffee, respected its aroma, its flavor. This was awful coffee: old, stale, bitter. But Chee sipped it. Partly courtesy, partly to cover his surprise at what Joseph Joe had told him.
'I want to make sure I have everything right,' Chee said. 'The man in the car, the man who drove up first, said he wanted to find somebody he called Leroy Gorman?'
'Leroy Gorman,' Joe said. 'I remember that because I thought about whether I had ever known anybody by that name. Lots of Navajos call themselves Gorman, but I never knew one they called Leroy Gorman.'
'The man you were talking to, his name was Gorman too. Did the white policeman tell you that?'
'No,' Joe said. He smiled. 'White men never tell me much. They ask questions. Maybe they were brothers.'
'Probably the same family, anyway,' Chee said. 'But it sounds like this white policeman didn't ask you enough questions. I wonder why he didn't ask you about what Gorman said to you.'
'He asked,' Joseph Joe said. 'I told him.'
'You told him about Gorman asking you where to find Leroy Gorman.'
'Sure,' Joseph Joe said. 'Told him the same thing I told you.'
'Did you tell the policeman about the picture Gorman showed you?'
'Sure. He asked me a bunch of questions about it. Wrote it down in his tablet.'
'That picture,' Chee said. 'A house trailer? Not a mobile home? Not one of those things that has a motor and a steering wheel itself, but something you pull behind a car?'
'Sure,' Joseph Joe said. He laughed, his wrinkled face multiplying its creases with amusement. 'Used to have a son-in-law lived in one. No room for nothing.'
'Two things,' Chee said. 'I want you to remember everything you told the white policeman about the picture —everything in it. And then I want you to see if you can remember anything you didn't tell him. Was it just a picture of a trailer? Was it with a bunch of other trailers? Hitched behind a car? One man in the picture, standing there?'
Joseph Joe thought. 'It was a color picture,' he said. 'A Polaroid.' He walked to a tin trunk against the wall, opened the lid, extracted a photo album with a black cardboard cover. 'Like this one,' he said, showing Chee a Polaroid photo of Joseph Joe standing beside his front door with a middle-aged woman. 'Same size as this,' he said. 'Had the trailer in the middle, and a tree sort of over it, and just dirt in front.'
'Just one man in it?'
'Standing by the door. Looking at you.'
'What kind of tree?'
Joe thought. 'Cottonwood. I think cottonwood.'
'What color leaves?'
'Yellow.'
'What color trailer?'
