Coyote Waits (9 page)

“It’s easier to walk,” she said. “Especially easier on my poor car.”

It wasn’t quite as easy as it looked. As with all large objects seen through the thin, dry, high desert air, the outcrop was bigger and more distant than it seemed. The sun had dipped well below the horizon when they climbed the steep final slope toward its base. Overhead the high clouds had faded from rose to dark red. Far to the west across Arizona, clouds over the Kaibito Plateau were blue-black, outlined by fiery yellow.

Janet stopped to stare.

“Did you miss these sunsets in Washington?” Chee asked.

“I’m looking at that car,” she said, pointing.

Pulled behind a clump of junipers was a dark green Ford Bronco II, dirty, dented, and several years old. They detoured to walk behind it. It wore a New Mexico vanity license plate.

“REDDNEK,” Janet read. “You think the irony was intended?”

Chee shrugged. He didn’t catch the irony. The vehicle was empty. What was it doing here? Where was the driver?

“A redneck who can’t spell it,” she explained.

“Oh.”

On the ridge beyond the vehicle, Janet stopped again. She stood, head tilted back, staring up at the massive, unbroken slab of basalt which confronted them here.

“I don’t see any sign of paint,” Janet said. The red light changed the color of her shirt, and her faded jeans, and her face. Her hair was disheveled, her expression intent, and, taken all together, she looked absolutely beautiful to Jim Chee. It would be a lot better, he thought, if friends didn’t look like that.

“Let’s see if we can find where he climbed up,” he said.

That wasn’t easy. The first upward possibility dead-ended on a shelf that led absolutely nowhere except up a vertical face of stone. The second, a pathway that opened inside a split in a basaltic slab, took them perhaps seventy-five yards upward and in before it finally dwindled away into an impossibly narrow crack. They found the third atop a sloping hump of debris by ducking under a tilted roof of fallen stone.

“I haven’t brought up the subject of snakes,” Janet said. She was brushing the dirt from her hands on her pant legs. “If I do, I hope you’ll try to say something positive.”

“Okay,” Chee said. He thought for a minute, catching his breath. “If you like snakes, this is a fine example of the places you come to find them.”

“I don’t like snakes,” Janet said. “I know all that BS about Navajos and snakes being friends, but I don’t like them. They scare me.”

“We’re not supposed to be friends,” Chee said. “The way it goes in the legend, First Man and Big Snake learned to respect one another. The way you do that is by not putting your hand, or your foot, or any other part of you where you can’t see. That way you don’t step on your little brother, or sit on him, or poke him in the eye. And in return, he buzzes his rattlers to tell you if you’re getting in dangerous territory. Very efficient.”

“I still don’t like them,” Janet said, but she was staring up into the formation. “Look. I think that’s paint.”

It was. Above them and to their left, Chee could see a face of the basalt cliff reflecting white. Reaching it involved climbing up a deep crack into a long, narrow pocket. But eons of erosion had filled it with enough fallen rocks and blown dust to form a floor. There Chee leaned against the stone, breathing hard, the bottom level of the paint just above his head.

“Look here,” Janet said. She was kneeling on the dirt. “Can you believe this? I think somebody carried a ladder in here.”

If Janet was breathing hard it didn’t show. But Chee was, and was embarrassed by it. It was being out of shape, he thought. Too long in the hospital bed. Too many weeks without exercise. Climbing with one hand in a bandage hadn’t been easy. He would have to get back into doing some exercises.

He took a long, deep breath and squatted beside her. Two narrow, rectangular shapes had been pressed into the earth, the proper distance apart to have been made by the feet of a ladder.

“A determined painter,” Janet said. “With a plan, obviously. Why else haul a ladder way up in here? He had to know he was going to be reaching up somewhere where he’d need it.”

Chee was examining the holes the ladder had left. He was wishing they’d climbed in here when the light was better.

“I think that’s interesting,” Janet said.

He stood and brushed off his jeans with his good hand, wondering if Nez actually caught the son-of-a-bitch. Did Nez chase him? Did he even know Nez was after him?

“Did this crazy rock painter kill Nez?” Janet asked.

“Ashie Pinto shot Nez in the chest,” Chee said. “But did this nutty rock painter have anything to do with it? Did he see it happen?”

“He seems nutty all right,” Janet said. She had climbed halfway out of the pocket and was staring up into the broken, slanted wilderness of slabs, crags, boulders, and cliffs of the upthrust. “You can see several painted places back in there. One big squarish place, and a narrow vertical strip and some other small places.”

Chee climbed up beside her.

“If he saw it happen, and I can find him, then you could just plead Pinto guilty,” Chee said. “No use letting it go to trial. Just make a deal for him.”

Janet let it pass, staring up into the formation. “Odd,” she said.

“It doesn’t seem to form any pattern,” Chee agreed. “Or communicate anything or make any sense.” With his knife, he scraped at the painted stone where they were standing, collecting a sample from the lower edge of the brush mark. Then he bent close, examining it in the dimming red glow of the twilight.

“He’s sending some sort of signal to flying saucers,” Janet said. “Or when the Mesa airliner comes over here flying down to Gallup, this says ‘you’re lost’ to the pilot. Or the guy who is doing it, they lost his luggage and when you look down from the airplane this is some sort of awful obscene insult.”

“Look at this,” Chee said.

Janet bent closer. “What?”

“It washed down a little,” Chee said, indicating the flow with his finger.

“So?”

“So I think the paint was fresh when it started raining. He was still painting when the rain began.”

“Ah,” Janet Pete said. “So maybe there was a witness. Maybe . . .” Her voice trailed off, turning squeaky. She shrank away from the slab where she had been leaning, away from a buzzing sound.

“Jim,” she whispered. “Don’t tell me that’s what I think it is.”

“Only if you don’t think it’s a rattlesnake,” Chee said. “Move back toward me. It’s under the edge of that slab. See it?”

Janet made no effort to see it. “Let’s go,” she said. And went, and it was still light enough to see that the old green Bronco II was no longer parked behind the junipers.

She rolled the Toyota to a halt under the cottonwood tree that shaded Jim Chee’s home — a well-scuffed and dented aluminum trailer parked on the low north bluff of the San Juan River. Chee made no move to get out. He was waiting for her to turn off the ignition. She left the motor running and the headlights on.

“The only other time I was here you had a pregnant cat,” she said. “Remember that? It seems like a long time ago.”

“I didn’t have a cat,” Chee said. “It was just hanging out here.”

“You were looking out after it.” She grinned at him. “Remember? You were afraid a coyote was going to get it. And I thought about getting one of those cases they ship animals in on airplanes to use as a cat house. Coyote-proof. And you bought one in Farmington. What happened?”

“You moved away,” Chee said. “You followed your boyfriend to Washington and joined his law firm and got rich and came home again.”

“I meant what happened to the cat,” Janet said.

“I couldn’t deal with the cat,” Chee said. “It was a
biligaana
cat. Ran away from some tourists I guess. And I thought maybe it could become a natural Navajo Reservation-type cat and live on its own. But it wasn’t working.”

“But what happened?”

“I put it in the shipping case and sent it to Mary Landon,” Chee said.

“Your white schoolteacher,” Janet said.

“White schoolteacher, but not mine,” Chee said. “She moved back to Wisconsin. Going to graduate school.”

“Not yours anymore?”

“I guess maybe she never was.”

They sat in the Toyota considering this, listening to the engine run.

Janet looked at him. “You all right now?”

“More or less,” Chee said. “I guess so.”

They considered that.

“How about you?” Chee said. “How about your ambitious lawyer? I don’t remember his name. How about your own ambitions?”

“He’s back in Washington. Getting rich, I guess. And here I am, trying to defend a destitute drunk who won’t even tell me he didn’t do it.”

Chee, who had been listening very, very carefully, heard nothing much in her voice. Just a flat statement.

“You’re all right now? Is that the message you’re sending me?”

“We don’t write,” she said, voice still flat. “I guess so. Except it leaves you feeling stupid. And used. And confused.”

“I’ll make some coffee,” Chee said.

No response. Janet Pete merely looked out the windshield, as if she was seeing something in the darkness under the cottonwoods.

“Maybe somebody told you about my coffee,” Chee said. “But I don’t boil it anymore. Now I’ve got some of these things where you put a little container on top of the cup, and coffee grounds in the container, and pour boiling water through. It’s much better.”

Janet Pete laughed and turned off the ignition.

The coffee was, in fact, excellent. Hot and fresh. She was tired and she sipped it gratefully, surveying Jim Chee’s narrow quarters. Neat, she noticed. That surprised her. Everything in place. She glanced at his bed — a blanket-covered cot suspended from the wall. Monastic was the word for it. And above it, a shelf overflowing with books. She recognized Joseph Campbell’s
The Power of Myth
, Buchanan’s
A Shining Season
, Momaday’s
The Way to Rainy Mountain
, and Zolbrod’s
Dine Bahane
, which had seemed to her to be the best translation of the Navajos’ origin story. Odd that Chee would be reading a white man’s version of the Navajo Bible.

“You still planning to be a medicine man?” she asked.

“Someday,” Chee said. “If I live long enough.”

She put down her cup. “It’s been a long day,” she said. “I don’t think I learned much useful. I don’t think I answered any questions about Ashie Pinto. Like how he got there. Or why. Or who killed Officer Nez.”

“That’s the only one I can answer,” Chee said. “Your client did it. I don’t know why. Neither does he, exactly. But the reason was rooted in whiskey. The Dark Water. That’s what the Navajo word for it means in English.”

Janet let all that pass. “How about you?” she asked. “You think we solved any mysteries?”

Chee was leaning against the stove, holding his cup clumsily in his left hand. He sipped. “I think we added a new one. Why Mr. Ji lied to us.”

“How?”

“He said he didn’t meet anyone on the way home. He must have seen me coming toward him, just as he was turning off Route 33 onto the gravel.”

“Maybe he forgot,” Janet said. “It’s been weeks.”

“I had my siren going and my cop lights blinking.”

Janet considered that. “Oh,” she said. “You’d think he’d remember that.”

“He would have just driven past a fire. A big one not far off the road. Then here comes a cop car, siren going. This isn’t Chicago. Nothing much happens out here. He would have remembered.”

She frowned. “So what does it mean — that he was pretending he was there when he actually wasn’t? Or pretending he didn’t see your patrol car? That wouldn’t make sense. Or, maybe somebody else was driving his car and he was covering for them. Or . . . what?” She rubbed the back of her hand across her forehead, picked up the cup again and drained it. “I’m too damn tired to think about it,” she said. “And I’ve got to go. Got to drive down to Window Rock tonight.”

“That’s too far,” Chee said. “Two hard hours. Just stay here.” He paused, gestured. “I’ll roll my sleeping bag out on the floor.”

They looked at each other. Janet sighed.

“Thanks,” she said. “But Emily’s expecting me.”

Emily. Chee vaguely remembered the name. Someone Janet had shared an apartment with when she worked in Window Rock.

He stood in the doorway watching the Toyota on its climb back up to the road, then sat on the bunk and removed his shoes. He was tired, but the coffee would keep him awake. He unbuttoned his shirt and slipped it off over the bandage, yawning.

Three new questions added today, he thought. Not just why Mr. Ji had lied. There was also the methodical insanity of the painter to puzzle over. And most important of all, there was Janet Pete.

THE VOICE OF Ashie Pinto had an odd sort of singsong quality through the earphones Jim Chee was wearing. It rose and fell, recounting the time in myth when Changing Woman had her second menstrual period.

“They say that much time had passed but I don’t know how much in days as we count them now. The old men would tell about this very carefully. Careful not to make any mistakes, they would tell it, but if they told the number of the days I do not remember that now. They told how First Man had instructed Changing Woman, and First Woman had watched after her, and I think they must have told Changing Woman to tell them when her second period began. And when it did, Talking God came to the place there where the Holy People were staying near Huerfano Mesa. He came to the hogan First Man had built east of the mesa. They say that Calling God came with him but they say Talking God was in charge of it.”

Pinto’s voice shifted from singsong into a creaky-voiced chant. Chee recognized one of the Talking God songs from the Blessing Way. He had memorized that ceremonial himself, and given it twice when his ambition to be a medicine man had been alive and thriving.

“
’e ne ya
! Now I am the child of Changing Woman. My moccasins are of white shell . . .”

The earpiece of the tape player was hurting Chee’s earlobe. He listened to another couple of minutes of the tape, noticing that Pinto’s version was just a little different in phrasing from the chant Frank Sam Nakai had taught him. His maternal uncle was Hosteen Nakai, and he was a medicine man of good reputation. Chee tended to consider Nakai’s versions correct and to disapprove of variations. He pushed the fast-forward button and looked around him.