A Thief of Time (5 page)

That was Friday evening. Saturday morning he drove the Buick down to Bernie Tso's garage and put it on the rack. Bernie was not impressed.

“Fourteen thousand miles, my ass,” Bernie said. “Look at the tread on those tires. And here.” Bernie rattled the universal joint. “Arizona don't have a law about running back the odometer, but New Mexico does,” he said. “And she got this junker over in New Mexico. I'd say they fudged the first number a little. Turned her back from forty-four thousand, or maybe seventy-four.”

He finished his inspection of the running gear and lowered the hoist. “Steering's slack, too,” he said. “Want me to pull the head and take a look there?”

“Maybe later,” Chee said. “I'll take it out and see what I can find and then I'll let her decide if she wants to spend any money on it.”

And so he had driven Janet Pete's blue Buick out Highway 550 toward Farmington, glumly noting its deficiencies. Slow response to the gas pedal. Probably easy to fix with an adjustment. Tendency to choke on acceleration. Also fixable. Tendency to steer to the right on braking. Suspension far too soft for Chee, who was conditioned to the cast-iron springing of police cars and pickup trucks. Maybe she liked soft suspension, but this one was also uneven—suggesting a bad shock absorber. And, as Bernie had mentioned, slack steering.

He was measuring this slack, swaying down the Farmington-bound lanes of 550, when he saw the Backhoe Bandit. And it was the slack steering, eventually, that did him in.

He noticed the off-color fender first. He noticed that the car approaching him, Shiprock-bound, was a blue Plymouth sedan of about 1970 vintage. As it passed, he registered the patches of gray-white primer paint on its door. He got only a glimpse of the profile of the driver—youngish, long blond hair emerging from under a dark billed cap.

Chee didn't give it a thought. He did a U-turn across the bumpy divider and followed the Plymouth.

He was wearing his off-duty work clothes—greasy jeans and a Coors T-shirt with a torn armpit. His pistol was locked securely in the table beside the cot in his trailer at Shiprock. No radio in the Buick, of course. And it was no chase car. He would simply tag along, determine where the Backhoe Bandit was going, take whatever opportunity presented itself. The Plymouth was in no particular hurry. It did a left turn off 550 on the access road to the village of Kirtland. It crossed the San Juan bridge, did another turn onto a dirt road, and made the long climb up the mesa toward the Navajo Mine and the Four Corners Power Plant. Chee had fallen a quarter-mile back, partly to avoid eating the Plymouth's dust and partly to avoid arousing suspicion. But by the time he reached the escarpment the Backhoe Bandit seemed to have sensed he was being followed. He did another turn onto a poorly graded dirt road across the sagebrush, driving much faster now and producing a rooster tail of dust. Chee followed, pushing the Buick, sending it bouncing and lurching over the humps, fighting the steering where the road was rutted. Through the dust he became belatedly aware the Plymouth had made another turn—a hard right. Chee braked, skidded, corrected the skid, collected the slack in the steering, and made the turn. He was a little late.

Oops! Right wheel onto the rocky track. Left wheel in the sagebrush. Chee bounced painfully against the Buick's blue plush roof, bounced again, saw through the dust the rocks he should have been avoiding, frantically spun the slack steering wheel, felt the impact, felt something go in the front end, and then simply slid along—his hat jammed low onto his forehead by its kiss with the ceiling.

Janet Pete's beautiful blue Buick slid sideways, plowing a sedan-sized gash through the sage. It stopped in a cloud of dirt. Chee climbed out.

It looked bad, but not as bad as it might have been. The left front wheel was horizontal, the tie-rod that held it broken. Not as bad as a broken axle. The rest of the damage was, to Chee's thinking, superficial. Just scrapes, dents, and scratches. Chee found the chrome strip that Janet Pete had so admired about fifteen yards back in the brush, peeled off by a limb. He laid it carefully on the backseat. The plume of dust produced by the Plymouth was receding over the rim of the mesa. Chee watched it, thinking about his immediate problem—getting a tow truck out here to haul in the Buick. Thinking about the five or six miles he would have to walk to get to a telephone, thinking about the seven or eight hundred dollars it was going to cost to patch up the damaged Buick. Thinking about such things was far more pleasant than considering his secondary problem, which was how to break the news to Janet Pete.

“Absolutely beautiful,” Janet Pete had said. “I fell in love with it,” she'd said. “Just what I'd always wanted.” But he would think about that later. He was staring into the diminishing haze of dust, but his vision was turned inward—imprinting the Backhoe Bandit in his memory. The profile, the suggestion of pockmarks on the jaw, the hair, the cap. This had become a matter of pride. He would find the man again, sooner or later.

By midafternoon, with the Buick back at Bernie Tso's garage, it seemed it would be sooner. Tso knew the Plymouth. Had, in fact, once towed it in. And he knew a little about the Backhoe Bandit.

“Everything that goes around comes around,” Chee said, happily. “Everything balances out.”

“I wouldn't say that,” Tso said. “What's it going to cost you to balance out this Buick?”

“I mean catching the son of a bitch,” Chee said. “At least I'm going to be able to do that. Lay that on the captain's desk.”

“Maybe your girlfriend can take it back to the dealer,” Tso said. “Tell 'em she doesn't like the way that front wheel looks.”

“She's not my girlfriend,” Chee said. “She's a lawyer with DNA. Tribal legal services. I ran into her last summer.” Chee described how he had picked up a man who came to be Janet Pete's client, and had tried to have him kept in the Farmington jail until he had a chance to talk to him, and how sore Pete had been about it.

“Tough as nails,” Chee said. “Not my type. Not unless I kill somebody and need a lawyer.”

“I don't see how you're going to catch him with what little I know about him,” Tso said. “Not even his name. All I remember is he works out in the Blanco gas field the other side of Farmington. Or said he did.”

“And that you pulled him in when he had transmission troubles. And he paid you with two hundred-dollar bills. And he told you when you got it fixed to leave it at Slick Nakai's revival tent.”

“Well, yeah,” Tso said.

“And he said you could leave the change with Slick 'cause he saw Slick pretty often.”

And now it was Saturday night. Slick Nakai's True Gospel had long since left the place near the Hogback where Tso had gone to tow in the Plymouth. But it was easy enough to locate by asking around. Nakai had loaded his tent, and his portable electric organ, and his sound system into his four-wheel trailer and headed southeast. He had left behind fliers tacked to telephone poles and Scotch-taped to store windows announcing that all hungering for the Word of the Lord could find him between Nageezi and the Dzilith-Na-O-Dith-Hie School.

F
ULL DARKNESS CAME LATE
on this dry autumn Saturday. The sun was far below the western horizon but a layer of high, thin cirrus clouds still received the slanting light and reflected it, red now, down upon the ocean of sagebrush north of Nageezi Trading Post. It tinted the patched canvas of Slick Nakai's revival tent from faded tan to a doubtful rose and the complexion of Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn from dark brown to dark red.

From a lifetime of habit, Leaphorn had parked his pickup a little away from the cluster of vehicles at the tent and with its nose pointing outward, ready for whatever circumstances and duty might require of it. But Leaphorn was not on duty. He would never be on duty again. He was in the last two weeks of a thirty-day “terminal leave.” When it ended, his application to retire from the Navajo Tribal Police would be automatically accepted. In fact he was already retired. He felt retired. He felt as if it were all far, far behind him. Faded in the distance. Another life in another world, nothing to do with the man now standing under this red October sunset, waiting for the sounds coming from the True Gospel revival tent to signal a break in the preaching.

He had come to Slick Nakai's revival to begin his hunt. Where had that hyphenated woman gone? Why had she abandoned a meal so carefully prepared, an evening so obviously anticipated? It didn't matter, and yet it did. In a way he couldn't really understand, it would say good-by to Emma. She would have prepared such a meal in anticipation of a treasured guest. Often had done so. Leaphorn couldn't explain it, but his mind made a sort of nebulous connection between Emma's character and that of a woman who probably was quite different. And so he would use the final days of his final leave to find that woman. That had brought him here. That, and boredom, and his old problem of curiosity, and the need for a reason to get away from their house in Window Rock and all its memories.

Whatever had moved him, he was here, on the very eastern fringe of the Navajo Reservation—more than a hundred miles from home. When circumstances allowed, he would talk to a man whose very existence annoyed him. He would ask questions the man might not answer and which might mean nothing if he did. The alternative was sitting in their living room, the television on for background noise, trying to read. But Emma's absence always intruded. When he raised his eyes, he saw the R. C. Gorman print she'd hung over the fireplace. They'd argued about it. She liked it, he didn't. The words would sound in his ears again. And Emma's laughter. It was the same everywhere he looked. He should sell that house, or burn it. It was in the tradition of the Dineh. Abandon the house contaminated by the dead, lest the ghost sickness infect you, and you died. Wise were the elders of his people, and the Holy People who taught them the Navajo Way. But instead, he would play this pointless game. He would find a woman. If alive, she wouldn't want to be found. If dead, it wouldn't matter.

Abruptly, it became slightly more interesting. He had been leaning on the door of his pickup, studying the tent, listening to the sounds coming from it, examining the grounds (another matter of habit). He recognized a pickup, parked like his own behind the cluster of vehicles. It was the truck of another tribal policeman. Jim Chee's truck. Chee's private truck, which meant Chee was also here unofficially. Becoming a born-again Christian? That hardly seemed likely. As Leaphorn remembered it, Chee was the antithesis of Slick Nakai. Chee was a
hatathali.
A singer. Or would be one as soon as people started hiring him to conduct their curing ceremonials. Leaphorn looked at the pickup, curious. Was someone sitting in it? Hard to tell in the failing light. What would Chee be doing here?

The sound of music came from the tent. A surprising amount of music, as if a band were playing. Over that an amplified male voice leading a hymn. Time to go in.

The band proved to be two men. Slick Nakai, standing behind what seemed to be a black plastic keyboard, and a thin guitarist in a blue checked shirt and a gray felt hat. Nakai was singing, his mouth a quarter-inch from a stand-mounted microphone, his hands maintaining a heavy rhythm on the keyboard. The audience sang with him, with much swaying and clapping of hands.

“Jesus loves us,” Nakai sang. “That we know. Jesus loves us. Everywhere.”

Nakai's eyes were on him, examining him, sorting him out. The guitarist was looking at him, too. The hat looked familiar. So did the man. Leaphorn had a good memory for faces, and for just about everything else.

“We didn't earn it,” Nakai sang. “But He don't care. His love is with us. Everywhere.”

Nakai emphasized this with a flourish at the keyboard, shifting his attention now from Leaphorn to an elderly woman wearing wire-rimmed glasses who was sway-dancing, eyes closed, too caught up with emotion to be aware she had danced into the tangle of electrical cables linking Nakai's sound system to a generator outside the tent. A tall man with a thin mustache standing by the speaker's podium noticed Nakai's concern. He moved quickly, steering the woman clear of the cables. Third member of the team, Leaphorn guessed.

When the music stopped, Nakai introduced him as “Reverend Tafoya.”

“He's Apache. I tell you that right out,” Nakai said. “Jicarilla. But that's all right. God made the Apaches, and the
belagana,
and the blacks, and the Hopis, and us Dineh and everybody else just the same. And he inspired this Apache here to learn about Jesus. And he's going to tell you about that.”

Nakai surrendered the microphone to Tafoya. Then he poured water from a thermos into a Styrofoam cup and carried it back toward where Leaphorn was standing. He was a short man, sturdily built, neat and tidy, with small, round hands, small feet in neat cowboy boots, a round, intelligent face. He walked with the easy grace of a man who walks a lot.

“I haven't seen you here before,” Nakai said. “If you came to hear about Jesus you're welcome. If you didn't come for that you're welcome anyway.” He laughed, showing teeth that conflicted with the symphony of neatness. Two were missing, one was broken, one was black and twisted. Poor people's teeth, Leaphorn thought. Navajo teeth.

“Because that's about all you hear around me anyway…Jesus talk,” Nakai said.

“I came to see if you can help me with something,” Leaphorn said. They exchanged the soft, barely touching handshake of the Navajo—the compromise of the Dineh between modern convention and the need to be careful with strangers who might, after all, be witches. “But it can wait until you're through with your revival. I'd like to talk to you then.”

At the podium, Reverend Tafoya was talking about the Mountain Spirits of the Apaches. “Something like your
yei
, like your Holy People. But some different, too. That's who my daddy worshiped, and my mother, and my grandparents. And I did too, until I got this cancer. I don't have to tell you people here about cancer….”

“The Reverend will take care of it for a while,” Nakai said. “What do you need to know? What can I tell you?”

“We have a woman missing,” Leaphorn said. He showed Nakai his identification and told him about Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal. “You know her?”

“Sure,” Nakai said. “For maybe three years, or four.” He laughed again. “But not very well. Never made a Christian out of her. It was just business.” The laugh went away. “You mean seriously missing? Like foul play?”

“She went to Farmington for the weekend a couple of weeks ago and nobody's heard from her since,” Leaphorn said. “What was the business you had with her?”

“She studied pots. That was her business. So once in a while she would buy one from me.” Nakai's small, round face was registering concern. “You think something went wrong with her?”

“You never know about that with missing people,” Leaphorn said. “Usually they come back after a while and sometimes they don't. So we try to look into it. You a pot dealer?”

Leaphorn noticed how the question sounded, but before he could change it to “dealer in pots,” Nakai said, “Just a preacher. But I found out you can sell pots. Pretty big money sometimes. Had a man I baptized over near Chinle give me one. Didn't have any money and he told me I could sell it in Gallup for thirty dollars. Told me where.” Nakai laughed again, enjoying the memory. “Sure enough. Went to a place there on Railroad Avenue and the man gave me forty-six dollars for it.” He made a bowl of his hands, grinning at Leaphorn. “The Lord provides,” he said. “Not too well sometimes, but he provides.”

“So now you go out and dig 'em up?”

“That's against the law,” Nakai said, grinning. “You're a policeman. I bet you knew that. With me, it's once in a long while people bring 'em in. Several times at revivals I mentioned that fella who gave me the pot, and how it bought gasoline for a week, and the word got around among the born-again people that pots would give me some gasoline money. So now and then when they got no money and want to offer something, they bring me one.”

“And the Friedman-Bernal woman buys them?”

“Mostly no. Just a time or two. She told me she wanted to see anything I got when I was preaching over around Chinle, or Many Farms—any of that country over around Chinle Wash. And out around here in the Checkerboard, and if I get up into Utah—Bluff, Montezuma Creek, Mexican Hat. Up in there.”

“So you save them for her?”

“She pays me a little fee to take a look at them, but mostly she doesn't buy any. Just looks. Studies them for a couple of hours. Magnifying glass and all. Makes notes. The deal is, I have to know exactly where they came from.”

“How do you manage that?”

“I tell the people, ‘You going to bring in a pot to offer to the Lord, then you be sure you tell me where you found it.'” Nakai grinned his small, neat grin at Leaphorn. “That way, too, I know it's a legal pot. Not dug up off of government land.”

Leaphorn didn't comment on that.

“When's the last time you saw her?” The answer should be late September, or something like that. Leaphorn knew the date he'd seen on Friedman's calendar, but it wasn't something Nakai would be likely to remember.

Nakai extracted a well-worn pocket notebook from his shirt and fingered his way through its pages. “Be last September twenty-third.”

“More than a month ago,” Leaphorn said. “What did she want?”

Nakai's round face filled with thought. Behind him, the Reverend Tafoya's voice rose into the high tenor of excitement. It described an old preacher at a revival tent in Dulce calling Tafoya to the front, laying on his hands, “right there on the place where that skin cancer was eating into my face. And I could feel the healing power flowing….”

“Well,” Nakai said, speaking very slowly. “She brought back a pot she'd gotten from me back in the spring. A piece of a pot, really. Wasn't all there. And she wanted to know everything I knew about it. Some of it stuff I had already told her. And she'd written it down in her notebook. But she asked it all again. Who I'd got it from. Everything he'd said about where he'd found it. That sort of stuff.”

“Where was it? I mean where you met. And what did this notebook look like?”

“At Ganado,” Nakai said. “I got a place there. I got home from a revival over by Cameron and I had a note from her asking me to call, saying it was important. I called her there at Chaco Canyon. She wasn't home so I left a message when I'd be back at Ganado again. And when I got back, there she was, waiting for me.”

He paused. “And the notebook. Let's see now. Little leather-covered thing. Small enough to go in your shirt pocket. In fact that's where she carried it.”

“And she just wanted to talk to you about the pot?”

“Mostly where it came from.”

“Where was that?”

“Fella's ranch between Bluff and Mexican Hat.”

“Private land,” Leaphorn said, his voice neutral.

“Legal,” Nakai agreed.

“Very short visit then,” Leaphorn said. “Just repeating what you had already told her.”

“Not really. She had a lot of questions. Did I know where she could find the person who had brought it? Could he have gotten it from the south side of the San Juan instead of the north side? And she had me look at the design on it. Wanted to know if I'd seen any like it.”

Leaphorn had discovered that he was liking Nakai a little, which surprised him. “And you told her he couldn't have found it south of the San Juan because that would be on the Navajo Reservation, and digging up a pot there would be illegal?” He was smiling when he said it and Nakai was smiling when he answered.

“Didn't have to tell Friedman something like that,” Nakai said. “That sort of thing, she knew.”

“What was special about this pot?”

“It was the kind she was working on, I guess. Anasazi pot, I understand. They look pretty much alike to me, but I remember this one had a pattern. You know, sort of abstract shapes painted onto its surface. That seemed to be what she was interested in. And it had a sort of mixed color. That's what she always had me watching out for. That pattern. It was sort of an impression of Kokopelli, tiny, repeated and repeated and repeated.”

Nakai looked at Leaphorn quizzically. Leaphorn nodded. Yes, he knew about Kokopelli, the Humpbacked Flute Player, the Watersprinkler, the fertility symbol. Whatever you called him, he was a frequent figure in strange pictographs the Anasazi had painted on cliffs across the Colorado Plateau.

“Anytime anyone brought one in like that—even a little piece of the pot with that pattern on it—then I was to save it for her and she'd pay a minimum of fifty dollars.”

“Who found that pot?”

Nakai hesitated, studied Leaphorn.

“I'm not out hunting pot hunters,” Leaphorn said. “I'm trying to find this woman.”

“It was a Paiute Clan man they call Amos Whistler,” Nakai said. “Lives out there near south of Bluff. North of Mexican Water.”