The Ghostway

'It was aluminum,' Joe said. 'You've seen 'em. Round on both ends. Round shape. Big things.' Joe indicated the bigness with his hands and laughed again. 'Maybe if my son-in-law had one that big, he'd still be my son-in- law.'

'And the picture,' Chee said. 'You said he took it out of his wallet. Did he put it back in again?'

'Sure,' Joe said. 'Not in those little pockets where you keep your license and things. Too big for that. He put it in with the money. In the money place.'

'You tell the white policeman that?'

'Sure,' Joe said. 'He was like you. He asked a lot of questions about the picture.'

'Now,' Chee said. 'Did you think of anything you didn't tell him?'

'No,' Joseph Joe said. 'But I can think of some things I haven't told you.'

'Tell me,' Chee said.

'About the writing,' Joe said. 'On the back side it had an address written, and something else, but I couldn't see what it was. I don't read. But I could see it was something short. Just two or three words.'

Chee thought about it on the way back. Why had Sharkey said nothing of the picture in his report, or of Albert Gorman trying to find Leroy Gorman? Had that part been deleted before the Navajo Tribal Police received their version? What kind of a game was the Agency playing? Or was it Sharkey's game, and not the fbi's?

'The fbi wants you,' Mary said. 'You impressed them at the Academy. They accepted you when you applied. They'd accept you again if you applied again. And they'd keep you close to the reservation. You'd be more valuable to them here. Why would they move you someplace else?' And he'd said something about not to count on it. Something about in Washington an Indian was an Indian, and they'd be as likely to have him working with the Seminoles in Florida, just like they have a Seminole over in Flagstaff working with the Navajos. And Mary had said nothing at all, just changed the subject. As Chee changed it now, forcing his memory away from the soreness.

He remembered Sharkey standing beside Gorman's body, Gorman's wallet in his hand, piling its contents on the boulder. No photograph of a trailer. Had Sharkey palmed it? Hidden it away? Chee's memory was excellent, the recall of a People without a written memory, who keep their culture alive in their minds, who train their children to memorize details of sand paintings and curing ceremonials. He used it now, re-creating the scene, what Sharkey had said and done, Sharkey looking into the money compartment of the wallet, removing the money, looking again, inspecting flaps and compartments: Sharkey seeking a Polaroid photograph that wasn't there.

Chapter 8

The light was turning red. The sun had dipped beneath the western horizon, and the clouds in the west— dazzling yellow a few moments earlier—were now reflecting scarlet. Soon it would be too dark to see. Then Chee would confront his decision. He would either walk back to his pickup truck, go home, and write off this idea as a waste of time or he would search the one place he hadn't searched. That meant taking out his flashlight and stepping through the hole into darkness. At one level of his intellect it seemed a trivial thing. He would crouch, step over the broken siding, and find himself standing erect inside the abandoned death hogan of Hosteen Begay. To the Jim Chee who was an alumnus of the University of New Mexico, a subscriber to Esquire and Newsweek, an officer of the Navajo Tribal Police, lover of Mary Landon, holder of a Farmington Public Library card, student of anthropology and sociology, 'with distinction' graduate of the fbi Academy, holder of Social Security card 441-28-7272, it was a logical step to take. He had repeated the long, bumpy drive into the Chuskas, made the final two-mile trudge from his pick-up to this place, to see what he could find at this hogan. How could his logical mind justify not searching it?

But 'Jim Chee' was only what his uncle would call his 'white man name.' His real name, his secret name, his war name, was Long Thinker, given him by Hosteen Frank Sam Nakai, the elder brother of his mother and one of the most respected singers among Four Corners Navajos. Since he had gone to Albuquerque to study at the University of New Mexico, he did not often think of himself as Long Thinker. But he did now. He stood on the talus slope above where he had found the Gorman corpse looking down at the Begay hogan as a Navajo would look at it. The east- facing door was boarded shut. (He had resealed it before he'd left, repairing the damage done by Sharkey.) The smoke hole was plugged. The chindi, which had left the body of Gorman at the moment of Gorman's death, was trapped inside—a summation of all in the dead man's life that was evil and out of harmony with the Navajo Way.

Everything in Long Thinker's training conditioned him to avoid chindis. 'If you have to be out at night, go quietly,' his mother had taught him. 'The chindis wander in the darkness.' And his uncle: 'Never speak the name of the dead. Their chindi thinks you are calling it.' He had come to terms with these ghosts in high school and reduced them to rational terms at the university, converting them into something like the dietary taboos of Jews and Moslems, the demons of Christians. But from this talus slope, in the dying light, in the dead stillness of this autumn evening, the rationality of the university was canceled.

And there was another side to all this. 'You did it,' Mary Landon would say. 'When you stepped through that corpse hole, you proved that you can be a Navajo on an emotional plane but an assimilated man intellectually.' And he would say, 'No, Mary, you simply don't understand,' and she would say…

He turned away from that and considered what he'd learned. Almost nothing. He'd driven straight from the place of Joseph Joe and started his work here with a meticulous examination of the hogan yard. He'd learned that Hosteen Begay used his sweat bath more than most, that he kept goats as well as sheep, and that he owned two horses (one newly shod).

Recent additions to Begay's garbage dump included an empty lard can, an empty Shurfine flour sack, and tin cans that had held peaches, creamed corn, and pork and beans. The garbage told him that Begay dipped snuff (an addiction unusual among Navajos), that he did not use beer, wine, or whiskey, and (judging from the discarded Dr. Scholl's footpads) that he suffered from bunions. None of that was helpful.

Nor had he found anything helpful in the second stage of his hunt, an equally careful sweep up and down the arroyo behind the hogan and around the wooded slopes above and below Begay's little meadow. He simply confirmed what he'd learned on his original inspection. Begay had, as would be expected of any prudent shepherd, taken his flocks to downhill pastures weeks ago, before early winter storms could trap them. And when he'd abandoned this place, he'd ridden the newly shod horse and led the other, heavily loaded. He'd headed downhill, probably for some shortcut he knew to reach the road to Two Gray Hills. Maybe, Chee thought, he could follow those tracks far enough to get some hint of his destination. But that seemed wildly unlikely. Time, wind, and the dry season made tracking doubtful, and even if he could track, his work would also certainly simply lead him to the road to the trading post.

Today's wind had been the sort any tracker hates—dry and abrasive, blasting sand against the face and erasing signs. But it had died away in late afternoon, and now the total calm of an autumn high-pressure area had settled