Lucy Sam reappeared at her doorway, the signal that she was ready to receive her visitors. She had started a coffeepot brewing on her propane stove, put on a blouse of dark blue velveteen, and donned her silver and turquoise jewelry in their honor. Now they went through the polite formalities of traditional Navajo greetings, seated themselves beside the Sam table, and waited while Ms.
Sam extracted what she called her “rustler book” from a cabinet stacked with magazines and papers.
Chee considered himself fairly adept at guessing the ages of males and fairly poor with females. Ms. Sam he thought must be in her late sixties—give or take five or ten years. She did her hair bound up in the traditional style, wore the voluminous long skirt demanded by traditional modesty, and had a television set on a corner table tuned to a morning talk show. It was one of the sleazier ones—a handsome young woman named Ricki something or other probing into the sexual misconduct, misfortune, hatreds, and misery of a row of retarded-looking guests, to the amusement of the studio audience. But Chee was distracted from this spectacle by what was sharing table space with the television set.
It was a telescope mounted on a short tripod and aimed through the window at the world outside. Chee recognized it as a spotting scope—the sort the marksmanship instructor had peered through on the police recruit firing range to tell him how far he’d missed the bull’s-eye. This one looked like an older, bulkier model, probably an artillery observer’s range-finding scope and probably bought in an army surplus store.
Ms. Sam had placed her book, a black ledger that looked even older than the scope, on the table. She settled a pair of bifocals on her nose and opened it.
“I haven’t seen much since you asked me to be watching,” she said to Officer Manuelito. “I mean I haven’t seen much that you’d want to arrest somebody for.” She looked over the bifocals at Chee, grinning. “Not unless you want to arrest that lady that used to work at the Red Rock trading post for fooling with somebody else’s husband.” 33 of 102
15/03/2008 19:57
TheFallenMan
file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Floop/Local%20Settings/Te...
Officer Manuelito was grinning, too. Chee apparently looked blank, because Ms. Sam pointed past the telescope and out the window.
“Way over there toward Rock with Wings,” she explained. “There’s a nice little place down there. Live spring there and cottonwood trees. I was sort of looking around through the telescope to see if any trucks were parked anywhere and I see the lady’s little red car just driving up toward the trees. And then in a minute, here comes Bennie Smiley’s pickup truck. Then, quite a little bit later, the truck comes out over the hill again, and then four or five minutes, here comes the little red car.” She nodded to Chee, decided he was hopeless, and looked at Manuelito. “It was about an hour,” she added, which caused Officer Manuelito’s smile to widen.
“Bennie,” she said. “I’ll be darned.”
“Yes,” Ms. Sam said.
“I know Bennie,” Officer Manuelito said. “He used to be my oldest sister’s boyfriend. She liked him but then she found out he was born to the Streams Come Together clan. That’s too close to our ‘born to’ clan for us.” Ms. Sam shook her head, made a disapproving sound. But she was still smiling.
“That lady with the red car,” Manuelito said. “I wonder if I know her, too. Is that Mrs.—” Chee cleared his throat.
“I wonder if you noticed any pickups, anything you could haul a load of hay in, stopped over there on the road past the Rattlesnake pumping station. Probably a day or so before the snow.” He glanced at Officer Manuelito, tried to read her expression, decided she was either slightly abashed for gossiping instead of tending to police business, or irritated because he’d interrupted her. Probably the latter.
Ms. Sam was thumbing through the ledger, saying, “Let’s see now. Wasn’t it Monday night it started snowing?” She thumbed past another page, tapped the paper with a finger. “Big fifth-wheel truck parked there beside Route 33. Dark blue, and the trailer he was pulling was partly red and partly white, like somebody was painting it and didn’t get it finished. Had Arizona plates. But that was eight days before it snowed.”
“That sounds like my uncle’s truck,” Manuelito said. “He lives over there at Sanostee.” Ms. Sam said she thought it had looked familiar. And, no, she hadn’t noticed any strange trucks the days just before the storm, but then she’d gone into Farmington to buy groceries and was gone one day. She read off the four other entries she’d made since getting Manuelito’s request. One sounded like Dick Finch’s truck with its bulky camper. None of the others would mean anything unless and until some sort of pattern developed. Pattern! That made him think of the days he’d worked for Leaphorn. Leaphorn was always looking for patterns.
“How did you know it was an Arizona license?” Chee asked. “The telescope?”
“Take a look,” Ms. Sam said, and waved at the scope.
Chee did, twiddling the adjustment dial. The mountain jumped at him. Huge. He focused on a slab of basalt fringed with mountain oak. “Wow,” Chee said. “Quite a scope.”
He turned it, brought in the point where Navajo Route 33 cuts through the Chinese Wall of stone that wanders southward from the volcano. A school bus was rolling down the asphalt, heading for Red Rock after taking kids on their fifty-mile ride into high school at Shiprock.
“We bought it for him, long time ago when he started getting sick,” Ms. Sam said—using the Navajo words that avoided alluding directly to the name of the dead. “I saw it in that big pawnshop on Railroad Avenue in Gallup. Then he could sit there and watch the world and keep track of his mountain.”
She produced a deprecatory chuckle, as if Chee might think this odd. “Every day he’d write down what he saw. You know. Like which pairs of kestrels were coming back to the same nests. And where the red-tailed hawks were hunting. Which kids were spray-painting stuff on that old water tank down there, or climbing the windmill. That sort of thing.” She sighed, gestured at the talk show. “Better than this stuff. He loved his mountain. Watching it kept him happy.”
“I heard he used to come down to Shiprock, to the police station, and report people trespassing and climbing Tse? Bitai?,” Chee said. “Is that right?”
“He wanted them arrested,” she said. “He said it was wrong, those white people climbing a mountain that was sacred. He said if he was younger and had some money he would go back East and climb up the front of that big cathedral in New York.” Ms. Sam laughed. “See how they liked that.”
“What sort of things did he write in the book?” Chee asked, thinking of Lieutenant Leaphorn and feeling a
