Skinwalkers

'I've heard about it,' Leaphorn said. He was remembering what else he'd heard. He'd heard that Yellowhorse liked to tell how his mother had died out there in that empty country of a little cut on her foot. It had led to an infection, and gangrene, because she never got any medical help. That, so the story went, was how Yellowhorse was orphaned, and got stuck in a Mormon orphanage, and got adopted into a large amount of Midwestern farm machinery money, and inherited a way to build himself a clinic—sort of a perfect circle.

'Sounds like a good idea to me,' Leaphorn said. 'We damn sure wouldn't have any policy against it.'

'One of your cops does,' Yellowhorse said. 'He's telling people I'm a fake and to stay away from me. I hear the little bastard is trying to be a yataalii himself. Maybe he thinks I'm unfair competition. Anyway, I want you to tell me how what he's doing squares with the law. If it doesn't square, I want it stopped.'

'I'll check into it,' Leaphorn said. He reached for his notepad. 'What's his name?'

'His name's Jim Chee,' Yellowhorse said.

Chapter 3

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roosevelt bistie wasn't at home, his daughter informed them. He had gone into Farmington to get some medicine yesterday, and was going to spend the night with his other daughter, at Ship-rock, and then drive back this morning.

'When do you expect him?' Jay Kennedy asked. The relentless high desert sun of the reservation had burned the yellow out of Kennedy's short blond hair and left it almost white, and his skin was peeling. He looked at Chee, waiting for the translation. Bistie's Daughter probably understood English as well as Kennedy, and spoke it as well as Chee, but the way she had chosen to play the game today, she knew only Navajo. Chee guessed she was a little uneasy—that she hadn't seen many sunburned blond white men up close before.

'That's the kind of questions belagana ask,' Chee told her in Navajo. 'I'm going to tell him you expect your father when you see him. How sick is he?'

'Bad, I think,' Bistie's Daughter said. 'He went to a crystal gazer down there at Two Story and the crystal gazer told him he needed a Mountaintop sing. I think he's got something wrong with his liver.' She paused. 'What do you policemen want him for?'

'She says she expects him when he gets here,' Chee told Kennedy. 'We could start back and maybe meet him on the road. Or we could just wait here. I'll ask her if she knows where the old man went—what was it—two weeks ago?'

'Just a minute.' Kennedy motioned Chee over toward the Agency's carryall. 'I think she can understand some English,' he said in just above a whisper. 'We have to be careful of what we say.'

'I wouldn't be surprised,' Chee said. He turned back to Bistie's Daughter.

'Two weeks ago?' she asked. 'Let's see. He went to see the crystal gazer the second Monday in July. That's when I go in and get all my laundry done down at Red Rock Trading Post. He took me down there. And then it was…' She thought, a sturdy young woman in an 'I Love Hawaii' T-shirt, jeans, and squaw boots. Pigeon-toed, Chee noticed. He remembered his sociology professor at the University of New Mexico saying that modern dentistry had made crooked teeth an identifying mark of those who were born into the bottommost fringe of the American socioeconomic classes. Unstraightened teeth for the white trash, uncorrected birth defects for the Navajo. Or, to be fair, for those Navajos who lived out of reach of the Indian Health Service. Bistie's Daughter shifted her weight on those bent ankles. 'Well,' she said, 'it would have been about a week later. About two weeks ago. He took the truck. I didn't want him to go because he had been feeling worse. Throwing up his food. But he said he had to go find a man somewhere way over there around Mexican Hat or Montezuma Creek.' She jerked her chin in the general direction of north. 'Over by Utah.'

'Did he say why?'

'What you want to see him about?' Bistie's Daughter asked.

'She says Bistie went to see a man over by the Utah border two weeks ago,' Chee told Kennedy.

'Ah,' Kennedy said. 'Right time. Right place.'

'I don't think I will talk to you anymore,' Bistie's Daughter said. 'Not unless you tell me what you want to talk to my father. What's wrong with that belagana's face?'

'That's what sunshine does to white people's skin,' Chee said. 'Somebody got killed over there around Mexican Hat two weeks ago. Maybe your father saw something. Maybe he could tell us something.'

Bistie's Daughter looked shocked. 'Killed?'

'Yes,' Chee said.

'I'm not going to talk to you anymore,' Bistie's Daughter said. 'I'm going into the house now.' And she did.

Chee and Kennedy talked it over. Chee recommended waiting awhile. Kennedy decided they would wait one hour. They sat in the carryall, feet hanging out opposite doors, and sipped the cans of Pepsi-Cola that Bistie's Daughter had given them when they arrived. 'Warm Pepsi-Cola,' Kennedy said, his voice full of wonder. This remark caught Chee thinking of the way the buckshot had torn through the foam rubber of his mattress, fraying it, ripping away chunks just about over the place where his kidneys would have been. Thinking of who wanted to kill him. Of why. He had thought about the same subjects all day, interrupting his gloomy ruminations only with an occasional yearning thought of Mary Landon's impending return to Crown-point. Neither produced any positive results. Better to think of warm Pepsi-Cola. For him, it was a familiar taste, full of nostalgia. Why did the white culture either cool things or heat them before consumption? The first time he had experienced a cold bottle of pop had been at the Teec Nos Pos Trading Post. He'd been about twelve. The school bus driver had bought a bottle for everyone on the baseball team. Chee remembered drinking it, standing in the shade of the porch. The remembered pleasure faded into the thought that anyone with a shotgun in any passing car could have mowed him down. Someone now, on the ridgeline behind Bistie's hogan, could be looking over a rifle sight at the center of his back. Chee moved his shoulders uneasily. Took a sip of the Pepsi. Turned his thoughts back to why whites always iced it. Less heat. Less energy. Less motion in the molecules. He poked at that for a cultural conclusion, found himself drawn back to the sound of the shotgun, the flash of light. What had he, Jim Chee, done to warrant that violent reaction?

Suddenly, he badly wanted to talk to someone about it. 'Kennedy,' he said. 'What do you think about last night? About…'

'You getting shot at?' Kennedy said. They had covered that question two or three times while driving out from