Through all this Asher Davis had been looking up at the roof ledge, uneasily. Asher’s sunburned neck bulged from the eighteen-inch neck of his sport shirt and his back strained its triple-X width. “Reckon it’ll hold me?” Asher asked, his voice filled with doubt.
“Sure,” Dashee said. He motioned around the plaza. “Look at all the people up there. Those roofs are built to hold full-sized people. Like us. Or,” he paused and inspected Chee and Janet Pete, “twice as many skinny ones.”
“Not me, they’re not,” Asher said. “But I need to be seeing some folks anyway. I’ve got to be going about my business. Helping the Tano economy. Buying up some goodies.”
Janet Pete had settled it. “Let’s sit on the roof,” she said. “Come on, Asher. Don’t be lazy. You can do your business later.”
“Hey,” Davis said. “I see another excuse. There’s ol’ Roger.” He looked at Janet. “I’ll bet you know him. He’s a fellow lawyer. Works the Indian territory out of Santa Fe, and for years he’s been big in saving the planet.”
“Roger who?” Janet asked, scanning the crowd.
“Applebee,” Davis said. “The big gun in Nature First.”
“Oh, yeah,” Janet said. “I see him now. He talked to me about that Continental toxic-waste dump proposal last year.”
Davis laughed. “And he probably got you into some sort of trouble. He’s been doing that to me for years. Rog and I go all the way back to Santa Fe High School. Santa Fe Demons. He was quarterback, I was fullback. He got me suspended when we were sophomores. He’s the kind of friend everybody needs to keep life from being boring.”
Chee had been just standing there, looking at the housetop, trying to think of an argument against climbing up there. But this aroused his interest.
“How’d that happen? The suspension?”
“Well, we were having an algebra test, as I remember it, and Roger had custody of his uncle’s car. I think he was supposed to get it greased or something. We’d been driving around instead of studying. So Rog says not to worry. We’ll postpone the test. We call the principal, tell him we’re the gas company and there’s a leak in the line to the temporary building where the math class met.” Davis was grinning at the memory. “It worked.”
“It worked, but you got suspended?” Chee asked.
“Well, that’s the way it is with the Davis-Applebee projects. Roger dreams ’em up and they sound fine and then it turns out there’s something he didn’t think of. This one just worked for a day or so. I made the call, because I had the deep voice. And when it turned out no gas leak, the secretary had had enough dealings with me to remember what I sounded like.”
“I’d like to meet Applebee,” Chee said. “I wonder if I could help him stop that waste dump project.”
But then Davis had shouted, “Hey, Rog,” and waved and was plowing through the crowd.
So, reduced to a party of three, they climbed the ladder behind the house of a plump middle-aged woman whom Cowboy Dashee seemed to know. They sat on the packed earth of the roof with their feet dangling over the parapet – looking directly down on the pueblo’s central plaza with Chee feeling disgruntled.
In typical Chee fashion, he analyzed why. It was partly because Lieutenant Leaphorn had sent him here on this trivial assignment. True, he had only been second man in the two-man Special Investigations Office for three days, but there were already signs it wasn’t going to work out. The lieutenant wasn’t taking him seriously. It wasn’t just not being shifted over to the homicide, it was Leaphorn’s attitude. They should be investigating Continental Collectors, and Tribal Councilman Jimmy Chester, and those people in the Bureau of Land Management, and the whole conspiracy to make the Checkerboard Reservation a national garbage pit. That’s what he should be doing – not chasing after a runaway schoolboy who wasn’t even a Navajo. Or was just barely a Navajo. And hunting him just because his grandmother was a big shot on the Navajo Tribal Council.
So he was in a down mood today partly because of the sense of having his time wasted. But, to be honest with himself, it was mostly because of the way this expedition had all worked out.
When Leaphorn had given him his orders, Chee had decided to make the best of it. Janet Pete’s legal aid office was closed. He’d called her at home and invited her to come and watch the ceremonial. She’d said fine. She’d meet him in front of the Navajo Nation Inn. And she was standing there when he drove up. But, alas, she was talking to Cowboy and Asher Davis, and a lot of the glitter quickly vanished from what had been a very good idea.
“Do you know this fellow, here?” Cowboy had asked Chee. “He’s Asher Davis and he is what you college-educated people would call an oxymoron. He’s an Honest Indian Trader.” While they shook hands, Dashee was looking at Davis, reconsidering the compliment.
“Well, let’s make that read ‘Fairly Honest Indian Trader.’ We’ve been out to Hopi Mesas and I’ve got to admit that Asher did try to cheat some of my kinfolks.”
Davis was obviously used to this. “As a matter of fact,” he told Chee, his expression somber, “cheating Cowboy’s kinfolks is something I haven’t been able to pull off. His uncle there at Mishongnovi sold me a nineteenth-century Owl Kachina, and when I got it home and looked under the feathers I found one of those ‘Made in Taiwan’ labels.”
Dashee was grinning. “Actually, it said ‘Made in Taiwan in 1889 by Hopis.’ So at least it was ancient.”
“Good to meet you, Mr. Davis,” Chee said. “We’ve got to be shoving off.”
And Cowboy had said where you going and, alas, Chee had admitted they were going to Tano to see the ceremonial, and Cowboy had said he hadn’t seen that one and had heard it was interesting and Davis had said it was, indeed, and Tano had an unusually good market and he sometimes picked up some old pots there, and the Jicarillas brought in their baskets for sale, and alas again, Janet had then said, “We have plenty of room. Why don’t you come along?”
Thus, what Chee had planned as a quiet duet, with plenty of time to talk and explore their relationship, had deteriorated into a noisy quartet. And then there was Janet’s grinning when Cowboy needled him, and siding with Cowboy on whether they should sit on the roof. Worse, now that they were up here on the roof, it was obvious that Cowboy was right. To hell with it.
Chee extracted the photograph of Delmar Kanitewa from his jacket pocket and rememorized it. The grainy copy had come from the boy’s portrait in last year’s Crownpoint High School yearbook. It showed a wide grin, white but slightly crooked teeth, high cheekbones, a slightly cleft chin, and a bad haircut. Clearly, the genes of Delmar’s Tano mother had overridden those of his Navajo father. He would look like scores of other Tano Pueblo teenagers, and a lot like hundreds of other teenagers from the other Pueblo tribes, and a lot like a Hopi, for that matter. But Chee would recognize him. He was good at faces when he tried to be.
When Leaphorn had given him this job, the lieutenant’s instructions had been explicit. “His mother’s house is one street south of the plaza,” Leaphorn had told him. “But don’t go there. We got the BIA who covers Tano to check with Kanitewa’s mama and she said she hadn’t seen him. She’s probably hiding him, or something. So don’t tip your hand.”
“It’s funny, though,” Chee had said. “Didn’t she send him to the school in the first place? You’d think she’d want him back in his classes.”
Lieutenant Leaphorn had not thought that worthy of comment, or even of looking up from his notepad.
“When you find him, here’s what you do. Ask him why he ran away from school and where he’s staying. Make sure he knows you’re not after him so he won’t take off again. Then call me and tell me where he is. Nothing else.”
“I don’t pick him up? Take him back to school?”