She smiled at him. “Yaa’ eh t’eeh,” she said. “I do know a little Navajo.”
“As much as I do,” Chee said, which was a blatant lie, but a guard ushered in Hosteen Ashie Pinto before she could say so.
Here, in this still, sterile room lit by a battery of fluorescent tubes, Ashie Pinto was not the man Chee remembered. He remembered a stumbling drunk illuminated in the yellow glare of his headlights, wet with rain, blurred by Chee’s own shock and Chee’s own pain. Now he was smaller, desiccated, frail, dignified, and terribly old. He sat in the chair next to Janet Pete, acknowledged her with a nod. He looked at Chee, and then at the heavy bandages wrapped on Chee’s left hand. Then Ashie Pinto repeated the only thing Chee had ever heard him say.
“I am ashamed,” he said, and looked down.
Chee looked down, too. And when he looked up, Janet was watching him. He wondered if she had understood the Navajo phrase.
“I think I told you Mr. Pinto speaks hardly any English at all,” she said. “I told him you were coming, of course, so he remembers who you are. He still does not want to say anything at all about the crime and I told him not to answer any questions until I tell him to.”
“Okay,” Chee said. “The question I want to ask him takes some explaining. Stop me if you get lost.”
And so Chee began.
“My uncle,” he said, “I think you may have heard of Frank Sam Nakai, who is a singer of the Blessing Way and the Mountain Top Chant and many of the other curing songs. This man is the brother of my mother, and he has tried to teach me to follow him and become a hataalii. But I am still an ignorant man. I have much yet to learn. I have learned a little of the Ways of the Holy People. And what I have learned has brought me here to ask you a question. It is a question about something you told to a professor named Tagert.”
Chee stopped, eyes on Pinto. The man sat as still as death, waiting. His skin was drawn tight over the skull bones, seeming almost transparent in its thinness. The desiccation made his eyes seem protuberant, larger than they were. They were black eyes, but the cornea of one was clouded by a film of cataract.
Sure now that Chee had finished his statement, Pinto nodded. Chee was to continue.
“You were telling the professor about a time, perhaps before you were born, when some young men of the Yucca Fruit People rode over to Sleeping Ute Mountain to get back some horses the Utes had stolen from them. Do you remember that?”
Pinto remembered.
Chee summarized the rest of the adventure, taking time to tell it carefully. He wanted to draw Pinto’s consciousness out of this room, out of his role as prisoner and into his past. Finally he had reached the place which had puzzled him.
“The way the biligaana professor wrote down what you told him may not be exactly what you told him. But what he wrote down is like this. That you said the hataalii the Yucca Fruit People called decided that an Enemy Way sing should be held for all of those young men. Is that true?”
Pinto considered. He smiled slightly, nodded.
“Then the biligaana professor wrote down that you told him that this singer decided he should also hold a Ghostway Chant for the man they called Delbito Willie. Is that true?”
There was no hesitation now. Hosteen Pinto nodded.
“That is the first of my questions,” Chee said. “Do you know why this Ghostway was needed?”
Pinto studied Chee’s face, thinking. He smiled slightly, nodded again.
“My uncle,” Chee said, “will you tell me why?”
“Not yet,” Janet Pete said. “I didn’t understand a lot of that. What are you driving at?”
“Basically, why a certain cure was prescribed for one of those men and not for the others. That suggests he broke a specific taboo. I wonder what it was?”
Janet Pete was obviously lost. “But how
? Oh, go ahead and answer it.”
Hosteen Pinto glanced at Janet Pete, then back at Chee, then at something out the window beside Chee’s shoulder. Chee waited. Through the glass came the sound of an ambulance siren, the sound of brakes applied. Somewhere in the building a door slammed, the clang of steel on steel. Chee could smell dust, an astringent floor cleaner, the aroma peculiar to old, old men. Pinto released his breath, a sighing exhalation. He looked at Janet Pete again, smiling. This man, Chee thought, this kindly old man is the man who murdered Delbert Nez. The man who burned my friend in his car. The man whose actions caused this terrible burn across my hand. Why did he do it? Whiskey. Todilhil. The Water of Darkness. Twice it had turned this old man into a coyote.
Hosteen Pinto shifted in his chair, seeking some comfort for old bones. “This young woman has become like a granddaughter to me,” he said. “She tells me that she knows you. She says that you are an honorable man. She says you follow the Navajo Way.”
He paused to give Chee a chance to respond to that. Then drew a deep breath.
“These things I told Hosteen Professor. I think they wrote these things all down on paper. And you read that paper? Is that right?”
“Yes. I read it all.”
Pinto looked puzzled.
“And you know the Navajo Way?”
“I have studied it some,” Chee said.
