'Like what?'
'Like making a move on her.'
Chee didn't want to hear about it. Not now. 'Tell her to report it to me,' he said, and went into his office to confront his paperwork. With a couple of hours of peace and quiet he could finish it by lunchtime. He got in about thirty minutes before the dispatcher buzzed him.
'Kinsman wants a backup,' she said.
'For what?' Chee asked. 'Where is he?'
'Out there past Goldtooth,' the dispatcher said. 'Over near the west side of Black Mesa. The signal was breaking up.'
'It always does out there,' Chee said. In fact, these chronic radio communication problems were one thing he was complaining about in his report. 'We have anyone close?'
'Afraid not.'
'I'll take it myself,' Chee said.
A few minutes after noon, Chee was bumping down the gravel trailing a cloud of dust looking for Kinsman. 'Come in, Benny,' Chee said into his mike. 'I'm eight miles south of Goldtooth. Where are you?'
'Under the south cliff of Yells Back Butte,' Kinsman said. 'Take the old Tijinney hogan road. Park where the arroyo cuts it. Half mile up the arroyo. Be very quiet.'
'Well, hell,' Chee said. He said it to himself, not into the mike. Kinsman had gotten himself excited stalking his Hopi poacher, or whatever he was after, and had been transmitting in a half-intelligible whisper. Even more irritating, he was switching off his receiver lest a too-loud response alert his prey. While this was proper procedure in some emergency situations, Chee doubted this was anything serious enough to warrant that sort of foolishness.
'Come on, Kinsman,' he said. 'Grow up.'
If he was going to be backup man on whatever Benny was doing, it would help to understand the problem. It would also help to know how to find the road to the Tijinney hogan. Chee knew just about every track on the east side of the Big Rez, the Checkerboard Rez even better, and the territory around Navajo Mountain fairly well. But he'd worked out of Tuba City very briefly as a rookie and had been reassigned there only six weeks ago. This rugged landscape beside the Hopi Reservation was relatively strange to him.
He remembered Yells Back Butte was an outcrop of Black Mesa. Therefore it shouldn't be too difficult to find the Tijinney road, and the arroyo, and Kinsman. When he did, Chee intended to give him some very explicit instructions about how to use his radio and to behave himself when dealing with women. And, come to think of it, to curb his anti-Hopi attitude.
This was the product of having his family's home site added to the Hopi Reservation when Congress split the Joint Use lands. Kinsman's grandmother, who spoke only Navajo, had been relocated to Flagstaff, where almost nobody speaks Navajo. Whenever Kinsman visited her, he came back full of anger.
One of those scattered little showers that serve as forerunners to the desert country rainy season had swept across the Moenkopi Plateau a few minutes before and was still producing rumbles of thunder far to the east. Now he was driving through the track the shower had left and the gusty breeze was no longer engulfing the patrol car in dust. The air pouring through the window was rich with the perfume of wet sage and dampened earth.
Don't let this Kinsman problem spoil the whole day, Chee told himself. Be happy. And he was. Janet Pete was coming. Which meant what? That she thought she could be content outside the culture of Washington's high society? Apparently. Or would she try again to pull him into it? If so, would she succeed? That made him uneasy.
Before yesterday's letter, he had hardly thought about Janet for days. A little before drifting off to sleep, a little at dawn while he fried his breakfast Spam. But he had resisted the temptation to dig out her previous letter and reread it. He knew the facts by heart. One of her mother's many well-placed friends reported that her job application was 'favorably considered' in the Justice Department. Being half-Navajo made her prospects for an assignment in Indian country look good. Then came the last paragraph.
'Maybe I'll be assigned to Oklahoma—lots of legal work there with that internal fight the Cherokees are having. And then there's the rumble inside the Bureau of Indian Affairs over law enforcement that might keep me in Washington.'
Nothing in that one that suggested the old pre-quarrel affection. It had caused Chee to waste a dozen sheets of paper with abortive attempts to frame the proper answer. In some of them he'd urged her to use the experience she'd gained working for the Navajo tribe's legal aid program to land an assignment on the Big Rez. He'd said hurry home, that he'd been wrong in distrusting her. He had misunderstood the situation. He had acted out of unreasonable jealousy. In others he'd said, Stay away. You'll never be content here. It can never be the same for us. Don't come unless you can be happy without your Kennedy Center culture, your Ivy League friends, art shows, and high-fashion and cocktail parties with the celebrity set, without the snobbish intellectual elite. Don't come unless you can be happy living with a fellow whose goals include neither luxury nor climbing the ladder of social caste, with a man who has found the good life in a rusty trailer house.
Found the good life? Or thought he had. Either way, he knew he was finally having some luck forgetting her. And the note he'd eventually sent had been carefully unrevealing. Then came yesterday's letter, with the last line saying she was 'coming home!!'
Home. Home with two exclamation points. He was thinking of that when Kinsman's silly whispering had •jarred him back to reality. And now Kinsman was whispering again. Unintelligible muttering at first, then: 'Lieutenant! Hurry!'
Chee hurried. He'd planned to pause at Goldtooth to ask directions, but nothing remained there except two roofless stone buildings, their doorways and windows open to the world, and an old-fashioned round hogan that looked equally deserted. Tracks branched off here, disappearing through the dunes to the right and left. He hadn't seen a vehicle since he'd left the pavement, but the center track bore tire marks. He stayed with it. Speeding. He was out of the shower's path now and leaving a rooster tail of dust. Forty miles to the right the San Franciscos dominated the horizon, with a thunderstorm building over Humphrey's Peak. To the left rose the ragged shape of the Hopi mesas, partly obscured at the moment by the rain another cloud was dragging. All around him was the empty wind-shaped plateau, its dunes held by great growths of Mormon tea, snake weed, yucca, and durable sage. Abruptly Chee again smelled the perfume that showers leave behind them. No more dust now. The track was damp. It veered eastward, toward mesa cliffs and, jutting from them, the massive shape of a butte. The tracks leading
