Mountain and not try to drive the goats because the Utes would chase them. Flipped again, read about the two of the men splitting off from the party to head west to Teec Nos Pos, taking eleven of the Ute horses. One of the Piaute Clan men had been shot in the leg somewhere back in one of the pages Chee had skipped. But a fight with the Utes wasn’t what he was looking for. He flipped again, scanning rapidly. Then he stopped.
They say there were Hosteen Joseph and Delbito Willie and the young men from the Yucca Fruit People still on their way home then, and they were camped out for the night somewhere between Rol Hai Rock and Littlewater Wash. They say Delbito Willie had gone out to get some firewood because they were cooking two rabbits they had shot. He saw dust over to the northeast. They put out their fire and watched. These two men were riding toward Beautiful Mountain, leading a mule. It is said that these were white men. They saw where Delbito Willie had left the Ute ponies, on their hobbles down below the cliffs of that place. These two white men, they scouted all around, looking for the people who owned those ponies, but they never did see Delbito Willie or the Yucca Fruit People with him. So they started to steal the horses. They were cutting the hobbles when Hosteen Joseph shot one of them, and the two men got back on their horses and rode away. Delbito Willie and the Yucca Fruit men were chasing them. They were shooting at them and the two men were shooting and one of them, the white man with the yellow mustaches they say it was, he shot Hosteen Joseph. The bullet hit Old Man Joseph in the chest, right below the nipple they say, and it killed him.
After that they chased the two white men. They almost got away once, but the one Hosteen Joseph had shot fell off his horse and the other one had to stop and help him back on. After that they say Delbito Willie shot the other man, but didn’t kill him. And then the two white men rode their horses out into a place where there is lava flow. Where it’s dangerous to ride a horse even in the daylight. The Yucca Fruit men followed slowly, keeping way back where they wouldn’t get shot because that man with the yellow mustaches, they said he was a good shot even riding on a horse. Finally they found where the white men had left their horses and went up into the rocks.
Chee skipped rapidly through the rest of it. The next morning, one of the white men had tried to come out and one of the Yucca Fruit boys shot him again?they thought in the arm this time?and he went back up into the rocks. The Navajos had waited all that day, and the next. They drank up their own water, and the water canteens the white men had left on their horses, and finally?on the morning of the fourth day?Delbito Willie had climbed up into the rocks. He followed the bloody spots back into the formation until he could see the bodies of the two men. Then the group had taken the horses and returned to their place on the other side of the Carrizo Mountains. An Enemy Way was held for all of them because of their contamination with the Utes and the white men.
Chee lingered over the section in which Ashie Pinto had described the ceremonial curing?an Enemy Way and a section of the Ghostway done, apparently, for Delbito Willie alone. It stirred his memory of an Enemy Way he’d attended as a child. The cure had been conducted by a hataalii who had been very tall and had seemed to him then to be incredibly ancient. The patient had been Chee’s paternal grandmother, a woman he had loved with the intensity of a lonely child, and the event had formed one of his earliest really vivid memories. The cold wind, the starlight, the perfume of the pinon and juniper burning in the great fires that illuminated the dance ground. Even now, he could see it all and the remembered aroma overpowered the mustiness of this office. Most of all, he remembered the hataalii standing gray and thin and tall over his grandmother, holding a tortoiseshell rattle and a prayer plume of eagle feathers, chanting the poetry from the emergence story, making Old Lady Many Mules one with White Shell Girl, restoring her to beauty and harmony.
And restore her it had. Chee remembered staying at the old woman’s place, playing with his cousins and their sheepdogs, seeing his grandmother happy again, hearing her laughter. She had died, of course. The disease was lung cancer, or perhaps tuberculosis, and people with such diseases died?as all people do. But it had been that cure that had caused him to think that he would learn the great curing ways, the songs and the sand paintings, and become a hataalii for his people. Unfortunately, his people showed no sign of wanting him as one of their shamans. He must have laughed because Jacobs asked, “Something funny? You find something interesting?”
“Just thinking,” Chee said.
“About what?” Jacobs said. “You’re not supposed to be holding out on me.”
“I was reading what Ashie Pinto told Tagert about these Navajo horse thieves,” Chee said. “They had a curing ceremonial for them when they got home and I was remembering my own boyish dreams about becoming a medicine man.”
Jacobs was looking at him, eyes curious. Or perhaps sympathetic. Perhaps both. Their eyes held. Chee made a wry mouth. Jacobs looked down.
“Anything in there that helps get Tagert home so I can quit doing all his work?” she asked.
Chee shrugged. “No,” he said. “Or if there is, I don’t understand it.”
But he was thinking about the Ghostway. He didn’t know it. Frank Sam Nakai, who was a respected hataalii and Chee’s maternal uncle and mentor in all things metaphysical, didn’t know it either. Why would part of it have been done for Delbito Willie and for no one else on the raiding party? And why had Ashie Pinto, with his Navajo storyteller’s predilection for telling everything in exhaustive detail, skipped so quickly over this?
Maybe Pinto would tell him that, even if he would tell him nothing else. Chapter 12
AS WAS HIS fashion (except when it violated his sense of order), Leaphorn went through channels. The former Vietnamese colonel named Huan Ji lived in Ship Rock, which was in the jurisdiction of the Ship Rock subagency of the Navajo Tribal Police. Leaphorn dialed the Ship Rock Tribal Police office and asked for Captain Largo.
“I’ve heard of him,” Largo said. “He teaches at the Ship Rock High School. Math, I think it is, or maybe one of the sciences. But we never had any business with him. What’s he up to?”
Leaphorn told him about the conversation with Kennedy.
“I remember now,” Largo said. “It was his car Jim Chee met when he was going to the Nez killing. The Bureau had us run it down for them. What’d he tell them?”
“They didn’t talk to him,” Leaphorn said.
“They didn’t?” Largo said, surprised. Then, “Oh, yeah.” He laughed?which with Largo was a deep, rumbling sound. “From what I hear he’s sort of an untouchable. Supposed to have worked for the CIA in Nam.”
“I think somebody ought to talk to the man,” Leaphorn said. “I think I’ll come and do it.”
“You want me to save you the drive?”
“No use you pissing off the Bureau,” Leaphorn said. “I’ll do it.”
“That sounds like you’re still thinking of retiring,” Largo said, and laughed again.
