Pinto’s expression was slightly skeptical, as if he wondered how much Chee had studied.
“They say there were many skinwalkers then,” Hosteen Pinto began. “Even more than now. Do you understand skinwalkers?”
“I know something about them,” Chee said. He settled himself in his chair. This was going to take a long time. Pinto would begin in the beginning and talk his way through it. And the longer he talked the better the chance that he’d cast some light on this murky business. If, that is, anything connected with anything.
“They teach us that everything has two forms,” Hosteen Pinto said, starting even further back than Chee had expected. “There is the mountain we see there beside Grants, the mountain the biligaana call Mount Taylor. That is the outer form. And then they say there is the inner form, the sacred Turquoise Mountain that was there with the Holy People in the First World, the Dark World at the very beginning. And First Man brought it up from the Third World and built it on his magic robe, and decorated it with turquoise. And then there is the yucca. We see the outer form all around us, but it is the inner form of yucca that we offer the prayer plume for when we dig its roots to make the soap to clean ourselves.”
He paused, studying Chee. “You understand?”
Chee nodded. This was basic Navajo metaphysics. But he wondered if Janet had ever heard it.
“Bluebird has two forms, and the deer and the beetle. Two forms. They have the form of the yei and they have the outer form that we see. All living things. You too. And I. Two forms.”
Hosteen Ashie Pinto leaned forward, tiny in the yellow coveralls of the county prisoner, intent on Chee’s understanding.
“And then there is Coyote,” he said. “Do you know about Coyote?”
“I know something about Coyote,” Chee said. He glanced at Janet Pete. She was focused on Pinto, concentrating on what he was saying. Wondering, Chee imagined, where all this was leading. “I know about his tricks. I have heard the stories. How he snatched the blanket and scattered the stars into the Milky Way. How he stole the baby of the Water Monster. How he tricked the sister of the bears into marrying him. How?”
The amusement on Pinto’s face stopped him.
“The children are told the funny stories about Coyote so they will not be afraid,” Pinto said. The amusement went away. Pinto smiled a tight, grim smile and launched into the explanation?as old as the culture of the People?of why Coyote was not funny. Chee listened, wishing, as he had come to wish many times in such sessions with old taletellers, that Navajos did not have to start everything at the very beginning. He glanced at Janet again. She looked bemused, probably wondering what the devil he was hoping to learn from all this?a wonder Chee was beginning to share. But at least she couldn’t accuse him of trying to learn anything incriminating. Unless, of course, the old man talked long enough to tell him what Chee had come here to learn.
Now Hosteen Pinto was talking about how the name for Coyote in the Fourth World was not atse’ma’ii, or First Coyote, but atse hashkke, or First Angry, and what that implied symbolically in an emerging culture in which peace and harmony were essential to survival. He talked of Coyote as the metaphor for chaos among a hungry people who would die without order. He talked of Coyote as the enemy of all law, and rules, and harmony. He talked of Coyote’s mythic power. He reminded Chee how Coyote always sat in the doorway of the hogan when the Holy People met in Council, neither quite part of these representatives of cosmic power, nor totally allied with the wilderness of evil outside. And finally he reminded Chee that other wise people, like the old men in the Hopi kiva societies, knew that there was a time when humans had two hearts. Thus they were able to move back and forth from one form to the other?from natural to supernatural.
“I think your uncle must have taught you about the power of skin,” Pinto said. He looked up for confirmation in Chee’s face and, seeing it, went on:
“They say that’s how Changing Woman created the first Navajos. From the skin rubbed from her breast, she formed the Salt People, and the Mud Clan, and the Bitter Waters and the Bead People. I have heard of your uncle, of Frank Sam Nakai. They say he is a great hataalii. He must have taught you how Coyote transformed First Man into a skinwalker by blowing his hide over him. You know about that? About how First Woman wouldn’t sleep with him because now he had all the evil ways of Coyote, smelled like coyote urine, licked himself and tried to lick her, and did all those dirty things that coyotes do. And how the Holy People cured First Man by passing him through the magic hoops to strip away his coyote skin. Your uncle taught you that?”
“Some of it,” Chee said. He remembered a little of it. It was something reenacted in part of the Ghostway ceremony?a cure for the most virulent form of witch sickness.
“So then you know why this fellow had to have the Ghostway sing,” Pinto said. “He had to have it because he had been with the yenaldolooshi.”
“No,” Chee said. “I don’t understand that.”
Janet Pete raised a hand. “Wait a minute. I don’t understand this either. Yenaldolooshi? That is the word for animals that trot, isn’t it?”
Chee nodded. “Animals that trot on four legs. But it is also used for skinwalkers. Witches.”
“Where is this conversation going?” she asked. “Are you leading Mr. Pinto into something? Do you remember what you promised?”
Pinto was watching, puzzled.
Janet Pete switched to Navajo. “I wanted to make sure that Mr. Chee was not trying to get you to’say something that would hurt your chance in the trial,” she explained. “I want you to be careful about that.”
Hosteen Pinto nodded. “We are talking about something that happened a long time ago,” he said.
“I don’t understand, my uncle,” Chee said. “Why did they do the Ghostway sing for the one they called Delbito Willie when they did the Enemy Way for the others?”
“Because he went in there,” Hosteen Pinto said. His tone was patient. “He went in there?into Tse A’Digash. He went in there where the witches gather. He went in there among the corpses and the skinwalkers. He went in to the place where the yenaldolooshi do their ceremonies, where they do incest, where they kill their relatives.”
Silence, Chee thought about this. He frowned, glanced at Janet Pete. She was watching him. Well, he would ask it anyway.
“My uncle, would you tell me just where this Tse A’Digash is located?”
