of Ship Rock every clump of sagebrush, every juniper, every snakeweed, every hummock of bunch grass cast its long blue shadow?an infinity of lines of darkness undulating across the glowing landscape. Beautiful. Chee’s spirit lifted. No time to think of justice. Or of the duty he had left undone.
Janet’s Toyota topped the long climb out of the San Juan Basin and earth sloped away to the south?empty, rolling gray-tan grassland with the black line of the highway receding toward the horizon like the mark of a ruling pen. Miles to the south, the sun reflected from the windshield of a northbound vehicle, a blink of brightness. Ship Rock rose like an oversized, free-form Gothic cathedral just to their right, miles away but looking close. Ten miles ahead Table Mesa sailed through its sea of buffalo grass, reminding Chee of the ultimate aircraft carrier. Across the highway from it, slanting sunlight illuminated the ragged black form of Barber Peak, a volcanic throat to geologists, a meeting place for witches in local lore.
They did the right turn off 666 onto Navajo 33, driving into the setting sun.
“Here’s probably about where he was when we first made radio contact,” Chee said. “Just about here.” His voice sounded stiff in his own ears.
Janet nodded.
He slowed, pointing. “I was way over there, twenty-five, thirty miles behind Ship Rock, driving south on the road from Biklabito. I was back there behind the rock. Something like that screws up radio communication. It keeps fading in and out.”
Chee cleared his throat. He pulled down the sunshade. Janet flipped down the one on the driver’s side, found she was too short to be helped by it, and fished out her sunglasses. She was thinking that Chee wasn’t as ready to talk about this as he’d thought he was.
“Going to be quite a sunset,” she said. “Look north.”
North, over Sleeping Ute Mountain in Colorado, over Utah’s Abajo Mountains, great thunder,heads were reaching toward their evening climax. Their tops, reflecting in the direct sun, were snowy white and the long streamers of ice crystals blown from them seemed to glitter. But at lower levels the light that struck them had been filtered through the clouds over the Chuskas and turned into shades of rose, pink, and red.
Lower still, the failing light mottled them from pale blue-gray to the deepest blue. Overhead, the streaks of high-level cirrus clouds were being ignited by the sunset. They drove through a fiery twilight.
“There’s where it happened,” Chee said, nodding to the left. “He pulled off the pavement right up there, and the car was burning over by that cluster of junipers, way off there.”
Janet nodded. Chee noticed her forehead, her cheeks rosy in the reflected light. Skin as smooth as silk. Her eyes were intense, staring at something. An intelligent face. A classy face. She frowned.
“What’s that over on those rocks?” She gestured. “Those white marks up in that formation over there?”
“That’s what was bothering Delbert,” Chee said, and made a chuckling sound. “That’s the artwork of our phantom vandal. Delbert noticed somebody had been painting those formations maybe six weeks ago. He wanted to catch the guy.”
“It bothered him? I don’t guess there’s a law against it. Nothing specific anyway,” she said. “But it bothers me too. Why ugly up something natural?”
“With Nez, I think it was a mixture of being bothered and thinking it was sort of weird. Who would climb up in there and waste all that time and paint turning black basalt into white? Anyway, Delbert was always talking about it. And that night, it sounded like he thought he’d seen the guy. He was laughing about it.”
“Maybe he did see him,” Janet said. She was staring out at the formation. “What caused all that? I know it must be volcanic but it doesn’t look like the normal ones. Frankly, they don’t teach you anything about geology in law school.”
“In anthropology departments either,” Chee said. “But from what I’ve been told, the volcanic action that formed Ship Rock lasted for tens of thousands of years. The pressure formed a lot of cracking in the earth’s surface, and every thousand years or so?or maybe it’s millions of years?there would be another bubbling up of melted rock and new ridges would form. Sometimes right beside the old ones.”
“Oh,” Janet said.
“These run for miles and miles,” Chee said. “Sort of parallel the Chuska Mountains.”
“Is there a name for them?”
Chee told her.
She made a wry face. “My parents wanted me to speak perfect English. They didn’t talk Navajo much around me.”
“It means something like ‘Long Black Ridges.’ Something like that.” He glanced at Janet, not knowing where she stood on the issue of Navajo witchcraft. “Lot of traditional Navajos wouldn’t want to go around those lava formations?especially at night. According to Navajo mythology, at least on the east side of the Reservation, those lava flows are the dried blood of the monsters killed by the Hero Twins. I think that’s one of the things that got Nez so interested. You know. Who was breaking that taboo?”
“Maybe Nez caught whoever it was, and the guy killed him,” Janet said.
“And gave the pistol to Hosteen Pinto,” Chee said. “You’re going to have trouble selling that one.”
Janet shrugged. “It’s as good as anything else I’ve thought of,” she said. “Let’s take a look at it.” She glanced at Chee, looking suddenly doubtful. “Or would there be a lot of snakes this time of year?”
“Always some snakes in places like that,” Chee said. “But they’re no problem if you use your head.”
“Just thinking about snakes is a problem.”
Janet said. But she turned the Toyota off the asphalt.
Getting to part of the formation where the painter worked involved maneuvering the little Toyota across about a mile of trackless stone, cactus, Russian thistle, buffalo grass, sage, and snakeweed. After dropping a wheel with a rattling jolt into a little wash, Janet switched off the ignition.
