the hogan, but a pickup truck parked there, and guessing that the Mud Clan man would be around somewhere. And hearing the sound of someone hammering, and seeing the Mud Clan man working on a shed back in an arroyo behind the hogan—nailing on loose boards. And then Bistie described standing there looking over the sights at the Mud Clan man, and seeing the man looking back at him just as he pulled the trigger. And he told them how, when the smoke had cleared, the man was no longer on the roof. He told them absolutely everything about the chronology and the mechanics of it all. But he told them absolutely nothing about why he had done it. When Chee asked again, Bistie simply sat, grimly silent. And Chee didn't ask why he was claiming to have shot a man who had been knifed to death.
While Roosevelt Bistie talked, describing this insanity in a calm, matter-of-fact, old man's voice, Chee found other questions forming in his mind.
'You were in Shiprock last night? At your daughter's house? Tell me her name. Where she lives.'
Chee wrote the name and place in his notebook. It would have taken Old Man Bistie ten minutes to drive from that Shiprock address to Chee's trailer.
'What are you writing?' Kennedy asked.
Chee grunted.
'Do you have a shotgun?' he asked Bistie.
There is no Navajo word for shotgun and Kennedy caught the noun.
'Hey,' he said. 'What are you getting into?'
'Just the rifle,' Bistie said.
'I'm getting into who tried to shoot Jim Chee,' Jim Chee said.
Chapter 4
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awakening was abrupt. An oblong of semi-blackness against the total darkness. The door of the summer hogan left open. Through it, against the eastern horizon, the faint glow of false dawn. Had the boy cried out? There was nothing but silence now. No air moved. No night insect stirred. Anxiety alone seemed to have overcome sleep. There was the smell of dust, of the endless, sheep-killing drought. And the smell, very faint, of something chemical. Oil, maybe. More and more, the truck engine leaked oil. Where it stood in the yard beside the brush arbor, the earth was hard and black with the drippings. A quart, at least, every time they drove it. More than a dollar a quart. And not enough money, not now, to get it fixed. All the money had gone with the birth of the boy, with the time they had had to spend at the hospital while the doctors looked at him. Anencephaly, the doctor had called it. The woman had written the word on a piece of paper for them, standing beside the bed in a room that seemed too cold, too full of the smell of white-man medicines. 'Unusual,' the woman had said. 'But I know of two other cases on the reservation in the past twenty years. It happens to everybody. So it happens to Navajos too.'
What did anencephaly mean? It meant Boy Child, the son, would live only a little while. 'See,' the woman had said, and she had brushed back the thin hair on the top of Boy Child's head. But it had already been apparent. The top of the head was almost flat. 'The brain has not formed,' the woman had said, 'and the child cannot live long without that. Just a few weeks. We don't know what causes it. And we don't know anything to do about it.'
Well, there were things that the
The shotgun had seemed a good idea—fired through the thin skin of the trailer into the bed where the witch was sleeping. But skinwalkers were hard to kill. Somehow the skinwalker had known. It had flown from the bed and the bone had missed.
Boy Child stirred now. Sleep for him was always momentary, a fading out of consciousness that rarely lasted an hour. And then the whimpering would start again. A calling out to those who loved him, were bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. The whimpering began, the only sound in the darkness. Just a sound, like that the newborn young of animals make. It seemed to say: Help me. Help me. Help me.
There would be no more sleep now. Not for a while. No time to sleep. Boy Child seemed weaker every day. He had already lived longer than the
The rectangle of the door frame grew lighter. Possibilities appeared and were considered, and modified, and rejected. Some were rejected because they might not work. Most were rejected because they were suicidal: The witch would die, but there would be no one left to keep Boy Child from starving. There must be a way to escape undetected. Nothing else was a useful solution.
In the cardboard box where he was kept, Boy Child whimpered endlessly—a pattern of sound as regular and mindless as an insect might make. A faint breeze moved the air, stirring the cloth that hung beside the hogan doorway—Dawn Girl awakening to prepare the day. About then the thought came: how it could be done. It was simple. It would work. And the witch they called Jim Chee would surely die.
Chapter 5
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lieutenant joe leaphorn nosed his patrol car into the shade of the Russian olive tree at the edge of the parking lot. He turned off the ignition. He eased himself into a more comfortable position and considered again how he would deal with Officer Chee. Chee's vehicle was parked in a row of five patrol cars lined along the sidewalk outside the entrance of the Navajo Tribal Police Station, Shiprock subagency. Unit 4. Leaphorn knew Chee was driving Unit 4 because he knew everything officially knowable about Chee. He had called the records clerk at 9:10 this morning and had Chee's personnel file sent upstairs. He'd read every word in it. Just a short time earlier, he had received a call from Dilly Streib. Streib had bad news.
'Weird one,' Streib had said. 'Kennedy picked up Roosevelt Bistie, and Roosevelt Bistie said he shot Endocheeney.' It took only a millisecond for the incongruity to register. 'Shot,' Leaphorn said. 'Not stabbed?'
'Shot,' Streib said. 'Said he'd gone over to Endocheeney's hogan, and Endocheeney was fixing the roof of a shed, and Bistie shot him, and Endocheeney disappeared—fell off, I guess—and Bistie drove on home.'
