The Ghostway jlajc-6 Read online

  For several hundred yards the dim parking lights had been picking up the black gloss of spilled crankcase oil. Now they reflected from a green Plymouth sedan, blocking the trail. Chee parked his truck behind it, cut the lights and the engine, and climbed out.

  Sharkey had the window of his pickup down. He was leaning out, looking at Chee.

  "About three quarters of a mile up the track here," Chee said, pointing.

  It was then he noticed for the first time that fog was forming. A trace of it drifted like gray smoke through the beam of Sharkey's lights just as he turned them off, and then the smell of fog was in Chee's nostrils and the dampness on his face.

  Chapter 3

  In the high, dry mountains of the Colorado Plateau, fog is out of its element. It forms as part of a climatic accident, produced when a cold front crosses a mountain range and collides with warmer air on the opposite slope. And it survives no longer than a fish out of water. By dawn, when the four of them reached the place of Hosteen Begay, the fog had already lost its character as a solid blinding cloud. Now it survived only in pockets, as patches and fragments. Chee stood at the edge of one such fragment, exactly where Sharkey had told him to stand—on the slope west of the meadow where Begay had built his hogan. His role was to make sure that if Gorman tried to escape he would not escape in that direction. Chee rested a hip against a boulder. He waited and watched. At the moment, he watched Deputy Bales, who stood beside a ponderosa pine, right hand against the tree trunk and his left holding a long-barreled revolver, its muzzle pointing at the ground. The bottom of the tree trunk and Bales's lower legs were obscured by the mist, making—in the dim light—man and tree seem somehow detached from solid earth. Over the meadow, the fog was almost solid, frayed only here and there by the very beginning of a cold dawn breeze. Chee glanced at his watch. In eleven minutes it would be sunrise.

  The hogan was a little below where Chee and the deputy waited. Through the ebbing mist, Chee could make out its conical roof, which seemed to be formed of slabs sliced from ponderosa logs in their first trip past the blade at the sawmill. The mist eddied and obscured this and eddied again. The short tin smoke pipe jutting from the center of the roof cone seemed to be blocked, closed by something pressed up into it from inside the hogan. Chee stared, straining his vision. He could think of just one reason to block a hogan's smoke hole.

  Chee clicked his tongue, producing a nondescript sound just loud enough to catch the deputy's attention. Then he motioned his intention to move. Bales looked surprised. He tapped the face of his wristwatch, reminding Chee of the few minutes left. Just at sunrise, Sharkey and his man would be at the hogan's east-facing door. If Hosteen Begay emerged to bless the new day in the traditional fashion, they would pull him out of harm's way, rush into the hogan, and overpower Gorman. If he didn't appear, they'd rush in anyway. That was the plan. Chee had a feeling now that it would be an exercise in futility.

  He moved along the slope away from Bales toward the north side of the hogan. From what Chee had learned of Hosteen Begay at Two Gray Hills he was an old-fashioned man, a traditional man, a man who knew the Navajo Way and followed it. He would have built this hogan as Changing Woman taught—with a single doorway facing the direction of dawn, the direction of all beginnings. North was the direction of darkness, the direction of evil. It was through the north wall of a hogan that a corpse must be removed in the sad event of death striking someone inside. Then the smoke hole would be plugged, the entrance boarded, and the place abandoned—with the corpse hole left open to warn the People that this had become a death hogan. The body could be removed, but never the malicious chindi of the dead person. The ghost infection was permanent.

  Chee had circled about a hundred yards, keeping out of sight. Now he was almost due north of the place. Through the thinning mist he could see the dark hole where the logs of the wall had been chopped away. Someone had indeed died inside the hogan of Hosteen Begay and left his ghost behind.

  Chapter 4

  The thing to do is find the body—if there is one," Sharkey said. "You take care of that, Chee. We'll see what we can find around here."

  Sharkey was standing at the hogan doorway, a small, hard-looking man of maybe forty-five with blond hair, short-cropped and curly.

  "Here's some more old bandage." Bales's voice came from behind Sharkey, inside the hogan. "Dried blood on this one, too."

  "What else are you finding?" Chee asked. "Any bedroll?"

  "See if you can find where they put the body," Sharkey said, his voice impatient.

  "Sure," Chee said. He already had an idea where the body might be. From the description they had of Gorman he wouldn't be particularly heavy. But Begay was an old man, and carrying a full-sized corpse wouldn't be easy. Probably he'd have dragged it on the blankets that had been its bed. And the best convenient burial site was obvious. A line of cliffs towered over Begay's little meadow to the northwest, their base littered with giant sandstone boulders tumbled out of their walls. It was the ideal place to put a body where it would be safe from predators. Chee headed for the talus slope.

  Sharkey's agent was climbing out of the arroyo that ran behind the hogan. He nodded at Chee. "Nothing in the corral or the sheep pens," he said. "And the manure looks old."

  Chee nodded back, wishing he could remember the man's name and wondering what "old" meant when he defined animal droppings. Yesterday or last year? But he wasn't particularly interested in any of this. It was Sharkey's business, and none of his own. Gorman might be a Navajo by blood but he was a white man by conditioning, by behavior. Let the whites bury the whites, or however that quotation went. He needed to get back to Shiprock, back to his own work and his own problems. What was he going to do about Mary Landon?

  Chee followed the only relatively easy pathway into the boulders, noticing very quickly that he'd guessed right. Something heavy had been dragged here, leaving a trail of broken weeds and disturbed dust. Then Chee noticed, just up the talus slope ahead of him, the raw scar where rocks had been dislodged—pried and pushed to cause gravity to produce a rock-slide. The easy way to cover a body. Then he saw blue denim.

  The body had been placed atop a slab of stone that had tumbled out of the cliff eons earlier. The corpse was out of reach of coyotes there, and the stones pushed down atop it had made it safe from birds. The denim that had caught Chee's eye was the bottom of a trouser leg. He walked around the burial, inspecting it. He could see nothing of the head and little of the body, just the sole of the right shoe and, through a gap between stones, a bit of the shoulder of a blue shirt.

  Something was bothering Chee, something a touch out of harmony with things as they should be. What? He climbed the slope and inspected the burial site from above. Just an unnatural-looking slide of rocks. He looked beyond it, inspecting the place of Hosteen Begay. The sun was up now, high enough above the horizon to be warm on his face. Below, the hogan was still in shadow. A neat place, well made, with a well-made brush arbor beside it, and a fairly new Montgomery Ward storage shed, and a welded pipe rack for the oil drums in which Hosteen Begay kept his water for cooking and drinking, and a shed in which he kept feed for his livestock. A good place. Beyond it, through a fringe of ponderosas, the morning sun had lit the rolling gray velvet of the San Juan basin. Sheep country—buffalo grass, grama, sage, chamiza, and snakeweed— punctuated by the soaring black gothic spires of Shiprock and, beyond Shiprock, 50 miles away, the smudge that marked the smokestacks of the Four Corners power plant.

  Chee drank in the view, letting the grandeur of immense space lift his spirits. But something still nudged at his consciousness. Something didn't fit. In this great harmony, something was discordant.

  Chee looked down at the hogan again, studying it. Bales was beside the brush arbor. The two fbi agents were out of sight—perhaps inside the death hogan, where their ignorance protected them from the malice of Gorman's chindi. A perfect site. It had everything. Firewood. Summer grass. Spring water for livestock in the arroyo behind
the hogan. Beauty in the site and in the view. And the isolation, the sense of space, which the Pueblo Indians and whites called loneliness but the Navajos treasured. True, winters would be snowed in here, and bitter cold. The place must be well over 8,000 feet. But the hogan had been built for winter. It must have been terribly hard for the old man to abandon it. And why had he?

  It was this question, Chee realized, that had been bothering him. Why hadn't the old man done what the Dinee had done for a hundred generations when they saw death approaching? Why hadn't he moved the dying Gorman out of the hogan, out under the eye of Father Sun, into the pure open air? Why hadn't he made this kinsman a death bed under the arbor, where no walls would have penned in his chindi when death released it, where the ghost could have lost itself in the vastness of the sky? Gorman must have died a slow, gradual death brought on by lost blood, internal damage, and infection. Death would have been nothing strange to the old man. The Navajos were not a culture that hides its people away in hospitals at their dying time. One grew up with the death of one's old people, attending death, respecting it. Begay must have seen this death coming for hours, heard it in Gorman's lungs, seen it in his eyes. Why hadn't he moved the man outside in the fashion of the People? Why had he allowed this valued homeplace to be eternally infected with ghost sickness?

  Sharkey appeared in the hogan doorway and stood staring up toward Chee. Chee stared back, unseen among the boulders. Bales and the other agent were invisible now. What was the man's name? It came to him suddenly: Witry. Another thought suddenly occurred to Chee. Could the body under the rocks be Begay's? Could it be that Gorman had killed the old man? It didn't seem likely. But Chee found that his bleak mood had changed. Suddenly he was interested in this affair.

  He stepped out where Sharkey could see him. "Up here!" he shouted.

  Removing the rocks was quick work.

  "I left the photographs in the truck," Sharkey said. "But he fits Gorman's description."

  The body obviously couldn't be Hosteen Begay. Far too young. Mid-thirties, Chee guessed. It lay on the stone, face up, legs extended, arms by the sides. A plastic bread sack, its top twisted shut, was beside the right hand.

  "Here's what killed him," Bales said. "Hit him right in the side. Probably tore him all up, and the bleeding wouldn't stop."

  Sharkey was looking at Chee. "I guess there's no way to get a vehicle in here," he said. "I guess we'll have to carry him out to the pickup."

  "We could bring a horse in," Chee said. "Haul him out that way."

  Sharkey picked up the sack and opened it.

  "Looks like a jar of water. And cornmeal," he said. "That make sense?"

  "Yes," Chee said. "That's customary."

  Sharkey poured the contents of the sack carefully out on the rock, leaving Gorman's persona to make its four-day journey into the underground world of the dead with neither food nor water. "And here's his billfold. Cigaret lighter. Car keys. Comb. Guess it was the stuff he had in his pockets." Sharkey fished through the various compartments of the wallet, laying the odds and ends he extracted on the boulder beside Gorman's knee and then sorting through them. The driver's license was first. Sharkey held it in his left hand, tilted Gorman's face toward him with the right, and made the comparison of face to photograph.

  "Albert A. Gorman," Sharkey read. "The late Albert A. Gorman. Eleven thousand seven hundred thirteen La Monica Street, Hollywood, Cal." He counted quickly through the money, which seemed to be mostly hundred-dollar bills, and whistled through his teeth. "Twenty-seven hundred and forty-odd," he said. "So crime paid fairly well."

  "Hey," Witry said. "His shoes are on the wrong feet."

  Sharkey stopped sorting and looked at Gorman's feet. He was wearing brown low-cut jogging shoes—canvas tops, rubber soles. The shoes had been reversed, right shoe on left foot.

  "No," Chee said. "That's right."

  Sharkey stared at him quizzically.

  "I mean," said Chee, "that's the way it's done. In the traditional way, when you prepare a corpse for burial you reverse the moccasins. Switch 'em." Chee felt his face flushing under Sharkey's gaze. "So the ghost can't follow the man after death."

  Silence. Sharkey resumed his examination of the artifacts from Gorman's billfold.

  Chee looked at Gorman's head. There was dirt on his forehead, and his hair was dusty from the rockfall that had buried it. But it was more than dusty. It was tangled and greasy—the hair of a man who had lain for days dying.

  "Lots of money," Sharkey said. "visa, Mastercard, California driver's license. California hunting license. Membership card in Olympic Health Club. Mug shots of two women. Coupon to get two Burger Chefs for the price of one. Social Security card. That's it."

  Sharkey felt in the pockets of Gorman's jacket, unbuttoned it and checked his shirt pockets, turned the pockets of his trousers inside out. There was absolutely nothing in Gorman's pockets.

  Walking back to the carryall, Chee decided he had a second puzzle to add to the question of why Hosteen Begay had not saved his hogan from the ghost. Another piece of carelessness. Begay had in some ways prepared his relative well. Albert A. Gorman had gone through the dark hole that leads into the underworld with plenty of money he could no longer spend. No ghost could follow his confusing footprints. He had been left with the symbolic food and water for the journey. But he would arrive unpurified. His dirty hair should have been washed clean in yucca suds, combed, and braided. Boiling yucca roots takes time. Had something hurried Hosteen Begay?

  Chapter 5

  The beginning of winter bulged down out of Canada, dusted the Colorado Plateau with snow, and retreated. Sun burned away the snow. The last late Canada geese appeared along the Sun Juan, lingered a day, and fled south. Winter appeared again, dry cold now. It hung over the Utah mountains and sent outriders of wind fanning across the canyon country. At the Shiprock subagency office of the Navajo Tribal Police the wind shrieked and howled, buffeting the walls and rattling the windows, distracting Jim Chee from what Captain Largo was saying and from his own thoughts about Mary Landon. The Monday morning meeting had lasted longer than usual, but now it was ending. The patrolmen, shift commanders, dispatchers, and jailers had filed out. Chee and Taylor Natonabah had been signaled to stay behind. Chee lounged in his folding chair in the corner of the room. His eyes were on Largo, explaining something to Natonabah, but his mind was remembering the evening he had met Mary Landon: Mary watching him in the crowd at the Crownpoint rug auction, Mary sitting across from him at the Crownpoint Cafe, her blue eyes on his as he told her about his family—his sisters, his mother, his uncle who was teaching him the Mountain Way and the Shooting Way and other curing rituals of the Navajo Way, preparing him to be a yataalii, one of the shaman medicine men who kept the People in harmony with their universe. The genuine interest on Mary's face. And Mary, finally, when he had given her a chance to talk, telling him of her fifth-graders at Crownpoint elementary, of the difference between the Pueblo Indian children she'd taught the year before at the Laguna-Acoma school and these Navajo youngsters, and of her family in Wisconsin. He'd known, he thought now, even on that first meeting, that this white woman was the woman he wanted to share his life with.

  A fresh blast of wind rattled sand against the windows and seeped through some crack somewhere to move icy air around Chee's ankles. His memory skipped ahead to the weekend he'd taken Mary back on the plateau to his mother's summer hogan south of Kayenta. When he'd asked his mother later what she'd thought of Mary, his mother had said, "Will she be a Navajo?" And he had said, "Yes, she will be." Now he knew he had been wrong. Or probably wrong. Mary Landon would not be a Navajo. How could he change that? Or, if he couldn't change it, could Jim Chee stop being a Navajo?

  Now Natonabah was leaving, zipping up his fur-lined jacket, his face flushed, his mouth grim. Clearly the captain had, in his low-key way, expressed disapproval. Chee quit thinking about Mary Landon and reexamined his conscience. He'd already done that automatically when Largo had signaled
him to stay behind and had thought of no violations of Largo's rules and regulations. But now Captain Largo's large round face considered him, even blander and milder than usual. Often that meant trouble. What had he done?

  "You all caught up on your work?"

  Chee sat up straight. "No, sir," he said.

  "You catch that Yazzie who's bootlegging all that wine?"

  "No, sir."

  "Found that kid did the cutting on the Ute Reservation?"

  "Not yet." It was going to be worse than he'd expected. He'd only had the Ute stabbing added to his case list Friday.

  Largo was peering down into the file folder in which he kept Chee's reports. It was a bulky file, but Largo apparently decided to shorten the ordeal a little. He flipped rapidly through it, then closed it and turned it face down on his desk. "All this still-unfinished business then?" he asked. "You got plenty to keep your mind occupied?"

  "Yes, sir," Chee said. "Plenty of work to do."

  "I got the impression that you had time on your hands," Largo said. "Looking for something to keep you occupied."

  Chee waited. Largo waited. Ah, well, Chee thought, might as well get it over with. "How's that, sir?" he asked.

  "You pulled the file on the Gorman business," Largo said. His expression asked why.

  "Just curious," Chee said. Now he would get a lecture on respecting jurisdictions, on minding his own business.

  "You find anything interesting in there?"

  The question surprised him. "Not much in there at all," he said.

  "No reason for there to be," Largo said. "It's not our case. What were you looking for?"

  "Nothing specific. I wondered who Gorman was. And who was the man who came after him. The one Gorman shot at the laundry. What Gorman was doing in Shiprock. How Begay fit in. Things like that."

  Largo made a tent of his fingers above the desk top and spent a moment examining it. "Why were you curious?" he asked, without taking his eyes off his fingers. "Fight in a parking lot. The survivor runs to his kinsman to hide out and heal. Everything looks normal. What's bothering you?"