Mexican Water.'
Suddenly Reverend Tafoya was shouting 'Hallelujah,' his voice loud and hoarse, and the crowd was joining him, and the thin man with the hat was doing something with the guitar.
'Anything else? I can talk to you later,' Nakai said. 'I need to help out now.'
'Was that the last time you saw her? The last contact?'
'Yeah,' Nakai said. He started toward the speaker's platform, then turned back. 'One other contact,' he said. 'More or less. A man who works with her came by when I was preaching over at the Hogback there by Shiprock. Fella nameda?S' Nakai couldn't come up with the name. 'Anyway he was a belagana. An Anglo. He said he wanted to pick up a pot I had for her. I didn't have any. He said he understood I had one, or maybe it was some, from over on the San Juan, around Bluff. I said no.' Nakai turned again.
'Was it a tall man? Blond. Youngish. Named Elliot?'
'That's him,' Nakai said.
Leaphorn watched the rest of it. He unfolded a chair at the back of the tent and sat, studied Nakai's techniques, and sorted out what he had learned, which wasn't much.
Nakai's congregation here on the fringe of the Checkerboard Reservation included perhaps sixty people--all Navajos apparently, but Leaphorn wouldn't swear that a few of them weren't from the Jicarilla Reservation, which bordered on Navajo territory here. They were about sixty percent women, and most middle-aged or older. That surprised Leaphorn a little. Without really thinking about it, because this aspect of his culture interested Leaphorn relatively little, he had presumed that those attracted to fundamentalist Christianity would be the young who'd been surrounded by the white man's religion off the reservation. That wasn't true here.
At the microphone, Nakai was gesturing toward the north. 'Right up the highway here-- you could see it from right here if it wasn't dark--right up here you have Huerfano Mesa. We been taught, us Navajos, that that's where First Woman lived, and First Man, and some of the other Holy People, they lived there. Anso when I was a boy, I would go with my uncle and we'd carry a bundle of aghaal up there, and we'd stick those prayer sticks up in a shrine we made up there and we'd chant this prayer. And then sometimes we'd go over to Gobernador Knoba?S' Nakai gestured toward the east. 'Over there across Blanco Canyon where First Woman and First Man found the Asdza'a' Nad-leehe, and we would leave some of those aghaal over there. And my uncle would explain to me how this was a holy place. But I want you to remember something about Huerfano Mesa. Just close your eyes now and remember how that holy place looked the last time you saw it. Truck road runs up there. It's got radio towers built all over the top of it. Oil companies built `em. Whole forest of those antennae all along the top of our holy place.'
Nakai was shouting now, emphasizing each word with a downward sweep of his fist. 'I can't pray to the mountain no more,' he shouted. 'Not after the white man built all over the top of it. Remember what the stories tell us. Changing Woman left us. She's gone awaya?S'
Leaphorn watched the thin man with the guitar, trying to find a place for him in his memory. He studied the audience, looking for familiar faces, finding a few. Even though he'd rarely worked this eastern Checkerboard side of the Big Reservation, this didn't surprise him. The reservation occupied more space than all of New England but it had a population of no more than 150,000. In a lifetime of policing it, Leaphorn had met, in one way or another, a lot of its inhabitants. And these fifty or sixty assembled under Nakai's old canvas to try the Jesus Road seemed approximately typical. Fewer children than would have been brought to a ceremonial of the traditional Navajo religion, none of the teenagers who would have been hanging around the fringes of a Night Chant playing the mating game, none of the drunks, and certainly no one who looked even moderately affluent. Leaphorn found himself wondering how Nakai paid his expenses. He'd collect whatever donations these people would make, but that wouldn't be much. Perhaps the church he represented paid him out of some missionary fund. Leaphorn considered the pots. What he'd seen in the Nelson's catalog made it clear that some of them brought far, far more than fifty-five dollars. But most of them would have little value and Leaphorn couldn't imagine Nakai getting many of them. Even if they were totally converted, still these were born Navajo. The pots came from burials, and Navajos were conditioned almost from infancy to avoid the dead and to have a special dread of death.
It was exactly what Nakai was talking about. Or, more accurately, shouting. He gripped the microphone stand with both of his small, neat hands, and thundered into it.
'The way I was taught, the way you were taught, when my mother died my uncles came there to the place where we lived out there near Rough Rock and they took the body away and put it somewhere where the coyotes and the ravens couldn't get to it.' Nakai paused, gripped the microphone stand, looked down. 'You remember that?' he asked, in a voice that was suddenly smaller. 'Everybody here remembers somebody dying.' Nakai looked up, recovering both composure and voice. 'And then there's the four days when you don't do nothing but remember. And nobody speaks the name of the deada?S Because there's nothing left of them but the chindi, that ghost that is everything that was bad about them and nothing that was good. And I don't say my mother's name anymore-- not ever again--because that chindi may hear me calling it and come back and make me sick. And what about what was good about my mother? What about what was good about your dead people? What about that? Our Holy People didn't tell us much about that. Not that I know about, they didn't. Some of the Dineh, they have a story about a young man who followed Death, and looked down into the underworld, and saw the dead people sitting around down there. But my clan, we didn't have that story. And I think it got borrowed from the Hopi People. It is one of their beliefs.'
Early in this discourse, Leaphorn had been interested in Nakai's strategy. Methods of persuasion intrigued him. But there seemed to be nothing particularly unique in it, and he'd let his attention wander. He had reviewed what little he'd learned from Nakai, and what he might do next, if anything, and then simply watched the audience reaction. Now Leaphorn found himself attentive again. His own Red Forehead Clan had no such story either--at least he hadn't been told it in his own boyhood introduction into the Navajo Way. He had heard it often in his days as an anthropology student at Arizona State. And he'd heard it since from Navajos around Window Rock. But Nakai was probably right. Probably it was another of the many stories the Dineh borrowed from the cultures that surrounded them--borrowed and then refined into abstract philosophical points. The Navajo Way was devoted to the harmony of life. It left death simply terrifying black oblivion.
'We learn this story about how Monster Slayer corners Death in his pit house. But he lets Death live. Because without death there wouldn't be enough room for the babies, for young people. But I can tell you something truer than that.' Nakai's voice had risen again to a shout.
'Jesus didn't let Death live. Hallelujah! Praise the Lord!' Nakai danced across the platform, shouting, drawing from the audience answering shouts. 'When we walk through the Valley of Death, he is with us, that's what Jesus teaches. We don't just drift away into the dark night, a ghost of sickness. We go beyond death. We go into a happy world. We go where there ain't no hunger. There ain't no sorrow. Ain't no drunks. No fighting. No seeing relatives run over out here on the highway. We go into a world where last are first, and the poor are the rich, and the sick are well, and the blind, they see againa?S'
Leaphorn didn't hear the last of it. He was hurrying out through the tent flap into the darkness. He stood for a
