The Wailing Wind

Peshlakai would avoid violence. But if circumstances had driven him to it, if he had killed anyone, he would be beset by guilt, by knowledge that he had violated the rules laid down by various Holy People. Thus, he would seek a cure for the sickness brought on by these broken taboos. Shamans cannot cure themselves.

The first step, Chee decided, would be to ask Peshlakai himself about it. He called the fbi office in Gallup, asked for Osborne, and asked Osborne if he'd noticed that Peshlakai had a cellphone in his hogan. Osborne had noticed. Had he gotten the number, checked calls Peshlakai had been making? That was being done. Chee asked for the number.

'You want to call him?' Osborne asked. 'About what?'

'It's a medical question,' Chee said. 'I want to ask him which curing ceremonial he'd recommend for me. You know, for being involved in this murder case.'

A moment of silence followed as Osborne digested this. 'I'm still new here,' he said. 'Do you have a special treatment for things like that? As if it was a heart attack or something?'

'I think you could relate it better to psychiatric treatment. The point is that stressful happenings get a person out of harmony with his environment,' Chee said, wishing he hadn't gotten into this. He cleared his throat. 'For example, if you have—'

'Okay, okay,' Osborne said. 'I'll ask you about it later.' And he gave Chee the telephone number.

Chee called it, got no answer, decided asking Peshlakai was not such a good idea anyway. He'd take a less direct approach. He called two well-regarded singers—one with the Navajo Traditional Medicine Association and the other a traditionalist who considered the ntma too liberal/modern. Both had listed a version of the Red Ant Way, the Big Star Way, and the Upward Reaching Way as their top choices if the exposure was to violent death or to the corpse of a homicide victim. That matched what Chee had learned in his own efforts to become a singer. The next step was to find a hataali who still performed these sings—ceremonies that involved dealings with those yei who had left the Earth Surface World and returned to the existence before humanity had been fully formed.

A sequence of telephone calls to old-timers produced the names of four shamans who performed one or more of these rarely used cures. One was Peshlakai himself, who sometimes conducted the Big Star Way. Another was Frank Sam Nakai, who had been Chee's maternal uncle, who had tutored Chee as a would-be hataali and had recently died of cancer. One of the remaining two, Ashton Hoski, seemed to Chee the man Peshlakai would have chosen. Like Peshlakai, this hataali was too traditional to remain in the Medicine Man Association. He knew both the Upward Reaching Way and the Big Star Way, and he lived near Nakaibito, not fifty miles west of Peshlakai's place. The remaining prospect lived far, far to the west near Rose Well on the wrong side of the Coconino Plateau. Unlikely Peshlakai would know him.

So Chee set forth for Nakaibito to find Hostiin Ashton Hoski and confirm the innocence of Hostiin James Peshlakai. He'd used up the morning on the telephone phase and skipped lunch. In the Nakaibito Trading Post he got a ham-and-cheese sandwich from the cooler, took it to the cash register, and paid.

'I'm trying to find Ashton Hoski,' Chee said. 'They say he is a hataali.'

The man at the register handed Chee his change. Old Man Hoski, he explained, probably wouldn't be home today. He guessed he'd be looking after some of his sheep grazing up near the Forest Service Tho-Ni-Tsa fire lookout tower.

A good guess. The old Dodge pickup described for Chee at the trading post was pulled into the shade of a cluster of pines beside the track. No one was in it, but a thermos and what might be a lunch sack were on the seat. Chee found a comfortable and well-shaded rock and sat down to wait and to do some thinking.

On the climb up the Chuska Mountains slope into the spruce and aspen altitude, he found himself feeling twinges of self-doubt mixed with a small measure of guilt. That had produced a sneaky hope that Hostiin Hoski wouldn't be findable and that he therefore would be spared the sort of disreputable role of testing his faith in one shaman by more or less lying to another one. He worried those notions a few minutes, found no relief in that, and turned his thoughts to more pleasant territory. Namely Bernadette Manuelito. Bernie had touched his arm yesterday as they were leaving Leaphorn's place.

'Sergeant Chee,' she'd said, and stopped, and he'd stood there, hand on the handle of the car door, looking at her face and wondering what her expression meant and what she was preparing to say to him. She looked down, drew in a breath, looked up at him again.

'I want to thank you for what you did,' Bernie said. 'I mean about the tobacco can. You didn't need to do that for me, and I could have gotten you into real trouble.'

Chee remembered feeling embarrassed, even blushing, and he'd shrugged, and said, 'Well, I didn't want you to be suspended. And, anyway Lieutenant Leaphorn was the one who got the can back to the crime scene. Not me.'

'I guess I should apologize, too,' Bernie had said. 'I took for granted that you'd just taken the can back to Agent Osborne and explained it to him. Which was exactly what it was your duty to do, but duty or not, I was sort of hurt by it. I just didn't give you enough credit. It was sweet of you to do that for me.'

And while she was saying that, she was rewarding Jim Chee with just about the warmest, most affectionate smile he could ever remember receiving. He'd said something dumb, probably, 'Oh, well,' and opened the car door for her, and that ended that.

Except it didn't end it. Not at all. As they were driving over to the fbi offices on Gallup's Coal Avenue, he had been remembering the first time a woman had called him 'sweet.' It had been Mary Landon, pale, blue-eyed, with hair like golden silk. He had been pretty sure Mary loved him while she had her adventure as a just-out-of-college schoolteacher at Crownpoint Middle School. But not as long as he remained a Navajo, not as the father of her Wisconsin children. Mary had been the first, and Janet Pete the last. And that had been way back when they were talking wedding plans and before he had finally, finally, reluctantly faced the fact that Janet saw him as he would be when she had remade him into a match of herself—another of the beautiful people Maryland/Virginia beltway elite. Janet had seen him as a rough diamond she'd found in the West who would become a gem in her urbane, Ivy League East after a little polishing.

And now Bernadette Manuelito had said what seemed to have become for Chee the magic word. He thought about her. The landscape spread below the Tho-Ni-Tsa fire lookout on this cool late summer day almost extended forever. The vivid greens of high-country aspen, fir, and spruce turned into the darker shades of lower elevations where juniper and pinon dominated. That quickly faded into the pale-tan immensity of the grazing country. Shadows formed along the serrated cliffs of Chaco Mesa, and to the south the blue shape of the San Mateo rose, capped by the spire of Tsoodzil, the sacred Turquoise Mountain guarding the south boundary of Dine' Bike'yah.

'Our heartland,' Bernie had called it. 'Our Holy Land. Our Dine'tah.' He'd always remembered that.