“We’re pretty sure he stole a car. Just drove it somewhere. Maybe El Paso or Denver. Somewhere far enough to miss our stakeouts. And then he took a plane for wherever he goes.”

“So he’s not in Albuquerque?”

“Not unless he’s staying with relatives,” Martin said.

28

AT THE COST OF HOURS of driving from here to there in search of older members of the Mud Clan, Jimmy Chee learned a little about Windy Tsossie. He learned that not long after the oil well explosion, Tsossie had married a daughter of Grace Yazzie of the Standing Rock Clan. He had moved northwestward to the Bisti country to join his new family. He had been seen around Ambrosia Lakes no more. Chee learned that Tsossie’s wife was dead. He learned other things as well. Among the important ones was that Tsossie’s sister-in-law, a woman named Romana Musket, was alive and well and living between Thoreau and Crownpoint in the log house with the tin roof and the sheep pens behind it that was visible on the slope above the highway. Mrs. Musket seemed likely to know where Tsossie could be found, alive or dead. Chee had also learned that no one seemed to know for sure which one it would be. No one had heard Tsossie had died. On the other hand, Chee had found no one who had actually seen him for years. And finally Chee had accumulated a general impression of Windy Tsossie. It was a negative impression. His kinsmen and his clansmen, when they admitted remembering him at all, remembered him without fondness or respect. They talked of him reluctantly, vaguely, uneasily. No one put it in words. Since Chee was Navajo, no one needed to. Windy Tsossie did not “go in beauty.” Windy Tsossie was not a good man. He did not follow those rules which Changing Woman had given the People. In a word, Windy Tsossie was believed by his kinsmen to be a witch.

“I don’t see how you can say that,” Mary said. “You told me what they said. Nobody even hinted at anything like that.”

“They wouldn’t,” Chee said, “not to a stranger. I might be a witch myself. Or you might be. And witches don’t like people talking about witches.”

Mary yawned. “You’re stretching things,” she said.

“Did you notice that talking about Tsossie made them nervous? That’s the tip-off.”

“The thing that interests me is I think we’re finally going to find one of them alive,” she said. “What’s he going to tell us? I really think now he’s going to remember something.”

“If he’s alive.”

“He will be.”

“I have the same sort of hunch,” Chee said.

They were driving the subagency’s pickup truck, having traded the relative comfort of the patrol car for the ability to follow wagon tracks. They drove northeastward, mostly in second gear, over a rutted road which now tilted downward. Chee flicked his lights to bright. The beams lit the broad, sandy bottom of an arroyo below. When they reached it, he stopped.

“Chaco Wash,” he said. He switched on the dome light, unfolded his map, and examined it. The map was one entitled “Indian Country,” produced by the Auto Club of Southern California; Chee had found it both accurate and detailed. It rated routes of travel in nine categories, ranging from Divided Limited Access Highways, down through Gravel, Graded Dirt, and Ungraded Dirt to Doubtful Dirt. For the last fifteen miles, they had been driving on Doubtful Dirt. According to the map, the Doubtful Dirt ended at Chaco Wash.

Chee folded the Indian Country map and extracted from his shirt pocket a lined sheet of notebook paper. It had come from a red-covered Big Chief notebook at the home of Mrs. Musket. On it, a grandson of Romana Musket had drawn another map to show how to reach the hogan where Rudolph Charley was conducting a Peyote Way. His grandmother was attending the services. The grandson was about twelve. He wore a T-shirt with the S symbol of Superman decorating its front, and he drew the map carefully with a ballpoint pen, and while he drew he explained that Rudolph Charley was the new peyote chief because somebody had shot the old peyote chief, who was Rudolph Charley’s older brother.

“Right at Chaco Wash the regular road got washed out,” Supergrandson said. “You turn right there, and you drive up the sand if you want to, because it’s smoother. You got to pay attention or you’ll miss the turns. I’ll put down some landmarks to look for.” He glanced up and grinned at Mary, and switched politely to English. “If you’re not careful out there you can get lost,” he assured her.

On the Big Chief map, Supergrandson had penned in “salt cedars” at the point where the Doubtful Dirt road petered out at the wash bottom. Now, in the beam of his headlights, Chee could see a cluster of winter-bare salt cedar below. Chee let the truck roll forward again, past the trees and onto the smoothness of the arroyo floor.

“Here’s where we get to the place where if we’re not careful we can get lost,” Mary said. “Is that right?”

“Right,” Chee said.

“Let’s not,” Mary said. “I’m too tired. I’m flat out exhausted. It seems like we’ve been in this truck about seventeen days.”

“Just since about sunrise,” Chee said.

Mary turned suddenly and stared back out the rear window. “I get a feeling I’ll look back there and see somebody following us,” she said. “Not somebody. That blond man.”

“How could he?” Chee asked. “There’s no way he could know where we’re going.”

She shivered, and hugged herself. “Let’s say he’s smart,” she said. “Or let’s say he has some reason himself to go to this peyote ceremony.”

“I can’t think why he would.”

“It’s a memorial service for Tomas Charley, isn’t it? Or something like that. Maybe he’s looking for people, just as we are. Maybe we’ll just run into him there.”

“I doubt it,” Chee said.

“I think you’re like me. Too tired to care. You’re so tired you’re going to tell me your war name.”

“It won’t be much longer now,” Chee said. “We want to be at Charley’s place at midnight, and then Mrs. Musket will tell us that Windy is living in Grants and give us his address and telephone number. Then we go get some sleep and tomorrow we’ll call Tsossie, and he’ll tell us who blew up the oil well and why, and where to find the evidence to give to the grand jury, and who to arrest and why Emerson Charley’s body was taken out of the hospital, and who hired the blond man to shoot Tomas Charley, and…”

“Oh, stop,” Mary said. She yawned hugely behind her hand. “With the luck you and I have,” she said through the end of the yawn, “that kid gave us the wrong address or the wrong night, or Mrs. Musket won’t be there, or she never heard of Windy Tsossie, or she won’t like your looks and won’t talk to you, or she’ll tell you Tsossie moved to Tanzania and didn’t leave an address, or it’s the wrong Tsossie, or the blond will be there and he’ll shoot you. Or even worse, he’ll shoot me.”

Chee smiled. “Well,” he said, “we’ll soon know.”

At seven minutes to midnight the track they were following skirted a rocky outcrop covered with stunted juniper. The truck’s headlights reflected from a windshield, and then from the corrugated metal roof of a shack and the glass of the window below the roof. Chee slowed the truck to a crawl and examined what the headlights showed him. Three pickup trucks, an old white Chevy, and a wagon on which bales of hay served as seats. Twenty yards behind the shack was the round stone shape of a hogan, with a thin wisp of blue smoke emerging from the smoke hole in the center of its conical dirt-insulated roof. No one was in sight.

Chee parked the truck beside the newest of the pickups, flicked off the headlights, and stepped out into the darkness. The moon was down and the black sky was brilliant with a billion stars. He stood with face raised, drinking it in – the great fluorescent sweep of the Milky Way, the pattern of the winter constellations, the incredible silent brightness of the universe.