books. She recognized Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth, Buchanan’s A Shining Season, Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain, and Zolbrod’s Dine Bahane, which had seemed to her to be the best translation of the Navajos’ origin story. Odd that Chee would be reading a white man’s version of the Navajo Bible.
“You still planning to be a medicine man?” she asked.
“Someday,” Chee said. “If I live long enough.”
She put down her cup. “It’s been a long day,” she said. “I don’t think I learned much useful. I don’t think I answered any questions about Ashie Pinto. Like how he got there. Or why. Or who killed Officer Nez.”
“That’s the only one I can answer,” Chee said. “Your client did it. I don’t know why. Neither does he, exactly. But the reason was rooted in whiskey. The Dark Water. That’s what the Navajo word for it means in English.”
Janet let all that pass. “How about you?” she asked. “You think we solved any mysteries?”
Chee was leaning against the stove, holding his cup clumsily in his left hand. He sipped. “I think we added a new one. Why Mr. Ji lied to us.”
“How?”
“He said he didn’t meet anyone on the way home. He must have seen me coming toward him, just as he was turning off Route 33 onto the gravel.”
“Maybe he forgot,” Janet said. “It’s been weeks.”
“I had my siren going and my cop lights blinking.”
Janet considered that. “Oh,” she said. “You’d think he’d remember that.”
“He would have just driven past a fire. A big one not far off the road. Then here comes a cop car, siren going. This isn’t Chicago. Nothing much happens out here. He would have remembered.”
She frowned. “So what does it mean?that he was pretending he was there when he actually wasn’t? Or pretending he didn’t see your patrol car? That wouldn’t make sense.
Or, maybe somebody else was driving his car and he was covering for them. Or
what?” She rubbed the back of her hand across her forehead, picked up the cup again and drained it. “I’m too damn tired to think about it,” she said. “And I’ve got to go. Got to drive down to Window Rock tonight.”
“That’s too far,” Chee said. “Two hard hours. Just stay here.” He paused, gestured. “I’ll roll my sleeping bag out on the floor.”
They looked at each other. Janet sighed.
“Thanks,” she said. “But Emily’s expecting me.”
Emily. Chee vaguely remembered the name. Someone Janet had shared an apartment with when she worked in Window Rock.
He stood in the doorway watching the Toyota on its climb back up to the road, then sat on the bunk and removed his shoes. He was tired, but the coffee would keep him awake. He unbuttoned his shirt and slipped it off over the bandage, yawning.
Three new questions added today, he thought. Not just why Mr. Ji had lied. There was also the methodical insanity of the painter to puzzle over. And most important of all, there was Janet Pete. Chapter 7
THE VOICE OF Ashie Pinto had an odd sort of singsong quality through the earphones Jim Chee was wearing. It rose and fell, recounting the time in myth when Changing Woman had her second menstrual period. “They say that much time had passed but I don’t know how much in days as we count them now. The old men would tell about this very carefully. Careful not to make any mistakes, they would tell it, but if they told the number of the days I do not remember that now. They told how First Man had instructed Changing Woman, and First Woman had watched after her, and I think they must have told Changing Woman to tell them when her second period began. And when it did, Talking God came to the place there where the Holy People were staying near Huerfano Mesa. He came to the hogan First Man had built east of the mesa. They say that Calling God came with him but they say Talking God was in charge of it.”
Pinto’s voice shifted from singsong into a creaky-voiced chant. Chee recognized one of the Talking God songs from the Blessing Way. He had memorized that ceremonial himself, and given it twice when his ambition to be a medicine man had been alive and thriving.
“‘e ne ya! Now I am the child of Changing Woman. My moccasins are of white shell
“
The earpiece of the tape player was hurting Chee’s earlobe. He listened to another couple of minutes of the tape, noticing that Pinto’s version was just a little different in phrasing from the chant Frank Sam Nakai had taught him. His maternal uncle was Hosteen Nakai, and he was a medicine man of good reputation. Chee tended to consider Nakai’s versions correct and to disapprove of variations. He pushed the fast-forward button and looked around him.
The reading room of the Reserve Section of the University of New Mexico Library was almost empty. The row of tables was vacant except for him and a skinny, middle-aged man working his way methodically through boxes that seemed to be filled with old postcards and letters. In the silence, the sound of the tape racing over the reel seemed loud. Chee stopped it sooner than he had intended and listened again.
“
way out there north of Ladron Butte. Trial’s what my grandfather told me. He said that the Utes used to cross the San Juan River upstream from where Montezuma Creek is now, and they’d come down Tsitah Wash. That’s the route they liked to take in those days. They’d ride up the wash and come out there where Red Mesa school is now, and then go east of Tohatin Mesa and try to catch the people who lived around Sweetwater. He said a lot of the Mud Clan People used to grow corn and beans and peaches there in those days, and the Utes would try to kill the men and steal the horses and the women and children. He said in those days when his father was a boy the Mexicans used to pay sometimes a hundred dollars for a Navajo child there in Santa Fe where they sold them. And then when the biligaana came in the price got higher and
“
