“Then why…” Colton let the question trail off.

“Maybe it doesn’t work fast enough,” Boxholder said. “Do you care?”

“No,” Colton said. “I guess not.”

But it seemed curious then, and it seemed curious now, this business of getting rid of the body. Curious, but well done. The grave filled. The rotting mattress pulled across it and the trash scattered over the mattress. No one would ever find the body of Emerson Charley. Reporting time was noon tomorrow. Colton anticipated it happily. Boxholder would be pleased.

11

JIM CHEE HAD ROLLED the two-hundred-dollar check from Ben Vines and the five one-hundred-dollar bills from the envelope Mrs. Vines had handed him into a tight cylinder. It was not much larger than a cigaret. Each night he dropped the tube into one of the boots beside his bed. Each morning, after he’d said his brief prayer of greeting to the dawning day, he shook the tube out of the boot and considered what to do with it. And each morning he finally stuck the tube back into his shirt pocket, thereby signaling that the matter remained undecided. On the fourth morning, Chee noticed that the edge of the check was frayed. He unrolled the tube, put check and cash side by side on his table, and stared at them.

Two hundred dollars was too much to be offered for the little trouble he’d been involved in. Worse, why would Mrs. Vines offer him three thousand dollars to recover a box she had stolen herself? For those as inconceivably rich as the Vineses the money would be relatively meaningless. But his uncle had warned him against that kind of thinking.

“Don’t think a man don’t care about one goat because he’s got a thousand of ’em,” Hosteen Nakai would say. “He’s got a thousand because he cares more about goats than he cares about his relatives.” In other words, don’t expect the rich to be generous.

And what would his uncle advise him to do about this particular money? Chee grinned, thinking about it. There’d be no advice – not directly. There’d be a hundred questions: Which one was lying? What motivated the large payments? Why did the Checkerboard Navajos think Vines was a witch? Or did they? How was the Charley outfit mixed into this affair? And when Chee could offer no answers, Hosteen Nakai would smile at him and remind him of what he had told Chee a long time ago. He’d told Chee he had to understand white people.

Chee used his two forefingers to tap the stack of currency into a neat pile. Mrs. Vines had lied to him, at least a little. He picked up the check and looked at B. J. Vines’ bold signature. Vines’ story had been almost purely lies. Chee folded the check and slid it into the credit card pocket of his billfold. He put the currency in the cash compartment. He would talk to Tomas Charley and see what he could learn.

Talking to Tomas Charley meant finding him. Becenti had remembered only that he lived somewhere beyond the eastern limits of the Checkerboard – somewhere near Mount Taylor. Chee made telephone calls. Shortly before noon he learned that Charley was employed by Kerrmac Nuclear Fuels. A quick call to the Kerrmac personnel office at Grants revealed that Charley was the driver of an ore loader, that he had the day off, that he had no telephone, the rural route address from the Grants’ post office matched the one the hospital had provided – a mailbox on the road between Grants and San Mateo village.

It was probably no more than thirty miles from Crownpoint as the raven flew, but for something with wheels it was around ninety. Chee told Officer Benny Yazzie, who was holding down the office, that he wouldn’t be back until evening.

While he drove, Chee worked at memorizing the Night Chant. He switched on the tape recorder and ran the cassette forward to the place where the singer awakens the spirit of Talking God in the sacred mask. On Interstate 40, he drove in the slow lane, listening carefully. Truckers, wise to the ways of this stretch of highway, roared past him, safe in the knowledge that tribal police had no jurisdiction here. Passenger cars slowed to the legal fifty-five, eyeing him nervously. Chee ignored them all. He concentrated on the voice of his uncle, strong and sure, singing the words that Changing Woman had taught at the very creation of his people.

Above the hills of evening, he stirs, he stirs.

Covered with the pollen of evening, he stirs, he stirs.

The Talking God stirs, he stirs amid the sunset.

Along the trail of beauty, he stirs, he stirs.

With beauty all around him, he stirs, he stirs.

The recorder was on the seat beside him. Chee silenced Hosteen Nakai’s voice with a touch of the off button, concentrated a moment, then repeated the five statements, trying to reproduce cadence and notes as well as meaning. By the time he reached the Grants interchange, he was confident he had the entire sequence of mask songs fixed in his mind.

Even among a people who placed high value on memory and who honed it in their children almost from birth, Chee’s talent was unusually strong. It had caused his family to think of him from a very early age as one who might become a singer. The Slow Talking Dinee had produced more famous singers than any of the other more than sixty Navajo clans. And the family of his mother had produced far more than its share. His uncle, the brother of his mother, was among the most prominent of these. He was Hosteen Frank Sam Nakai, who performed the Night Chant and the Enemy Way and key parts of several other curing ceremonials, and who sometimes taught ceremonialism at the Navajo Community College at Rough Rock. It was Hosteen Nakai who had chosen Jimmy Chee’s “war name,” which was Long Thinker. Thus his uncle was one of the very few who knew his real and secret identity. His uncle had named him, but when he had asked his uncle to teach him to be a singer, his uncle had at first refused.

“There is a first step which must be taken,” Hosteen Nakai had said. “Nothing important can happen before that.” As a first step, Jimmy Chee must study the white man and the way of the white man. When he came to understand this white man’s world which surrounded the People, he must make a decision. Would he follow the white man’s way or would he be a Navajo?

His uncle had driven his truck into Gallup and parked it on Railroad Avenue, where they could see the bars and watch the Navajos and the Zunis going in and out of them. Jimmy Chee remembered it very well. He remembered the woman who came out of the Turquoise Tavern and the man in the black reservation hat who followed her. They had walked unsteadily, both drunk. The woman had lost her balance and sat heavily on the dirty sidewalk, and the man had bent to help her. His hat had fallen and rolled into the gutter. Hosteen Nakai’s fierce eyes had watched all this.

“They cannot decide,” he said. “The way Changing Woman taught us is too hard for them, and they have lost its beauty. But they do not know the white man’s way. You have to decide. It is easy, now, to be a white man. You have gone to school and there are scholarships to go more, and jobs if you learn what the white man puts his value in.”

Jimmy Chee had said that he had already decided. He wanted to walk in beauty as a Navajo.

“You can’t decide until you understand the white man. They have much that we don’t have. To be a Navajo is to have no money,” Hosteen Nakai had said. “When you are older we will talk again. If you still wish it, I will begin teaching you something. But you must study the white man’s way.”

Chee had studied. After Shiprock High School, he had enrolled at the University of New Mexico. He’d studied anthropology, sociology, and American literature in class. Every waking moment he studied the way white men behaved. All four subjects fascinated him. When he came home during semester breaks to his mother’s place in the Chuska Mountains, Hosteen Nakai taught him the wisdom of the Dinee. Finally his uncle began teaching him the ritual songs that brought the People back from their sicknesses to walk in beauty. And Chee’s memory always served him well.