The Fallen Man

keep track of strange trucks and trailers.

He said I was a little late, but he took the notebook and said he’d help.”

“Did he say how late?” Maryboy hadn’t reported a cattle theft. Chee was sure of that. He checked on everything involving rustling every day. “Did he say why he hadn’t reported the loss?”

“He said he missed ’em sometime last spring. He was selling off steers and came up short. And he said he didn’t report it because he didn’t think it would do any good. He said when it happened before, a couple of times, he went in and told us about it but he never did get his animals back.”

That was one of the frustrations Chee had been learning to live with in dealing with rustling. People didn’t keep track of their cattle.

They turned them out to graze, and if they had a big grazing lease and reliable water maybe they’d only see them three or four times a year. Maybe only at calving time and branding time. And if you did see them, maybe you wouldn’t notice if you were short a couple. Chee had spent his boyhood with sheep. He could tell an Angus from a Hereford but beyond that one cow looked a lot like every other cow. He could understand how you wouldn’t miss a couple, and if you did, what could you do about it? Maybe the coyotes had got ’em, or maybe it was the little green men coming down in flying saucers. Whatever, you weren’t going to get ’em back.

“So we put an X on our map and mark it ‘unreported,’” Chee said, “which doesn’t help much.”

“It might,” Officer Manuelito said. “Later on.”

Chee was extracting their map from his desk drawer. He kept it out of sight on the theory that everyone in the office except Manuelito would think this project was silly. Or, worse, they would think he was trying to copy Joe Leaphorn’s famous map.

Everybody in the Tribal Police seemed to know about that and the Legendary Lieutenant’s use of it to exercise his theory that everything fell into a pattern, every effect had its cause, and so forth.

The map was a U.S. Geological Survey quadrangle chart large enough in scale to show every arroyo, hogan, windmill, and culvert.

Chee pushed his in basket aside, rolled it out and penned a tiny blue ? on the Maryboy grazing lease with a tiny 3 beside it. Beside that he marked in the date the loss had been discovered.

Officer Manuelito looked at it and said: “A blue three?”

“Signifies unreported possible thefts,” Chee said. “Three of them.” He waved his hand around the map, indicating a scattering of such designations. “I’ve been adding them as we learn about them.”

“Good idea,” Manuelito said. “And add an X

there, too. Maryboy is going to be a lookout for us.” She pulled up a chair, sat, leaned her elbows on the desk, and studied the chart.

Chee added the X. The map now had maybe a score of those, each marking the home of a volunteer equipped with a notebook and ballpoint pen. Chee had bought the supplies with his own money, preferring that to trying to explain this system to Largo. If it worked, which today didn’t seem likely to Chee, he would decide whether to ask for a reimbursement of his twenty-seven-dollar outlay.

“Funny how this is already working out,” Manuelito said. “I thought it would take months.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the patterns you talked about,” she said. “How those single-animal thefts tend to fall around the middle of the month.” Chee looked. Indeed, most of the 1 s that marked single-theft sites were followed by mid-month dates. And a high percentage of those midmonth dates were clustered along the reservation border. But what did that signify? He said: “Yeah.” 49 of 102

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“I don’t think we should concentrate on those,” she said, still staring thoughtfully at the map. “But if you want me to, I could check with the bars and liquor stores around Farmington and try to work up a list of guys who come in about the middle of the month with a fresh supply of money.” She shook her head. “It wouldn’t prove anything, but it would give us a list of people to look out for.” About halfway through this monologue, Chee’s brain caught up with Manuelito’s thinking. The Navajo Nation relief checks arrived about the first of the month. Every reservation cop knew that the heavy workload produced by the need to arrest drunks tended to ease off in the second week when the liquor addicts had used up their cash. He visualized a dried-out drunk driving past a pasture and seeing a five-hundred-dollar cow staring through the fence at him. How could the man resist? And why hadn’t he thought of that?

He thought of it now. Weeks compiling the list, weeks spent cross-checking, sorting, coming up finally with four or five cases, getting maybe two convictions resulting in hundred-dollar fines, which would be suspended, and thirty-day sentences, which would be converted to probation. Meanwhile, serious crime would continue to flourish.

“I think instead we’ll sort those out and set them aside. Let’s concentrate on solving the multiple thefts,” Chee said.

“There’s a pattern there, too, I think,” Officer Manuelito said. “Am I right?” Chee had noticed this one himself. The multiple thefts tended to show up in empty country—from grazing leases like Maryboy’s where the owner might not see his herd for a month or so. They talked about that, which led them back to their growing list of rustler- watchers, which led them back to Lucy Sam.

“You looked through her telescope,” Manuelito said. “Did you notice she could see that place where the fence posts were loose?” Chee shook his head. He had been looking at the mountain. Thinking of the Fallen Man stranded on the cliff up there, calling for help.

“You could,” Manuelito said. “I looked.”

“I think I should go talk to her,” Chee said. But he wasn’t thinking of rustling when he said it. He was wondering what Lucy Sam’s father might have seen all those years ago when Hal Breedlove had huddled on that