Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 14] (9 page)

But now—? Had Nakai changed his mind? What could he say?

“Here?” he said. He gestured at the white, sterile walls. “Could you
do that here?”

“A bad place,” Nakai said. “Many people have died here, and many are
sick and unhappy. I hear them crying in the hallway. And the
chindi
of the dead are trapped within its walls. I hear them, too. Even
when
they give me the medicine that makes me sleep, I hear them. What I must
teach you should be done in a holy place, far away from evil. But we
have no choice.”

He replaced the mask over his face, inhaled oxygen, and removed it
again.

“The
bilagaana
do not
understand death,” he said. “It is
the other end of the circle, not something that should be fought and
struggled against. Have you noticed that people die just at the end of
night, when the stars are still shining in the west and you can sense
the brightness of Dawn Boy on the eastern mountains? That’s so Holy
Wind within them can go to bless the new day. I always thought I would
die like that. In the summer. At our camp in the Chuskas. With the
stars above me. With my instanding wind blowing free. Not dying trapped
in-"

Nakai’s voice had become so faint that Chee couldn’t understand the
last words. Then it faded into silence.

Chee felt Bernie’s touch at his elbow.

“Jim. If this is something ceremonial, shouldn’t I leave?”

“I guess so,” Chee said. “I really don’t know.”

They stood, watching Nakai, his eyes closed now.

Chee replaced the oxygen mask over his face, felt Bernie’s touch on
his elbow.

“He hates this place,” Bernie said. “Let’s get him out of here.”

“What do you mean?” Chee said. “How?”

“We tell the nurse we’re taking him home. And then we take him home.”

“What about all that?” Chee asked, pointing at the oxygen mask, the
tubes that tied Nakai to life, and the wires that linked him to the
computers which measured the Holy Wind within him and reduced it to
electronic blips racing across television screens. “He’ll die.”

“Of course he’ll die,” Bernie said, her tone impatient. “That’s what
the nurse told us. He’s dying right now. That’s what he was telling
you. But he doesn’t want to die here.”

“You’re right,” Chee said. “But how do -"

But Bernie was walking out. “First, I call the ambulance service,”
she said. “While they’re coming I’ll start trying to check him out.”

It was not quite as simple as Bernie made it sound. The nurse was
sympathetic but had questions to be answered. For example, where was
Nakai’s wife, whose name, but not her signature, was on the admissions
form? By what authority were they taking Mr Nakai off the life-support
systems and out of the hospital? The doctor who had admitted Mr Nakai
had left for Albuquerque. That shifted responsibility to another
doctor—now busy in the emergency room downstairs patching up a knifing
victim. He arrived on the floor thirty minutes and two paging calls
later, looking young and tired.

“What’s this about?” he asked, and the nurse provided a fill-in that
caused him to look doubtful. Meanwhile, the ambulance attendant emerged
from the elevator, recognized Chee from working traffic accidents and
asked him for instructions.

“I can’t do it,” the doctor said. “The patient’s on life support. We
need authorization from the next of kin. Lacking that, the admitting
physician needs to sign him out.”

“That’s not really the question,” Chee said. “We are taking Hosteen
Nakai home tonight to be with his wife. Our question is how you can
help us do this to minimize the trouble it might cause.”

That produced a chilly but brief silence followed by the signing by
Chee of a Released Against Advice of Physician form and a financial
responsibility statement. Then Hosteen Frank Sam Nakai was free again.

Chee rode in the back of the ambulance with Nakai and the emergency
medical technician.

“I guess you heard they got one of those casino bandits,” the tech
said. “It was on the six o’clock news.”

“No,” Chee said. “What happened?”

“The guy shot himself,” the tech said. “It was that fella that used
to have a radio talk show. Sort of a right’winger. News said he ran
cattle up there south of Aneth. Married a Navajo woman and was using
her grazing allotment up there.”

“Shot himself? What’d they say about that?”

“Not much. It was at his house. I guess they were closing in on him,
and he didn’t want to get arrested. Fella named Everett Jorie. And now
they know who the other two were. Said they’re both from up there in
Utah. Part of one of those militia bunches.”

“Jorie,” Chee said. “Never heard of him.”

“He used to have a talk show on the radio. You know, all the nuts
calling in and complaining about the government.”

“OK. I remember him now.”

“And they have the other two identified now. Man named George
Ironhand and one named Buddy Baker. I think Ironhand’s a Ute. Anyway,
they said he used to work at the Ute Casino.”

“I wonder how they got them identified.”

“The TV said the FBI did it, but it didn’t say how.”

“Well, hell,” Chee said. “I was hoping they’d catch them in Los
Angeles, or Tulsa, or Miami, or anyplace a long ways from this place.”

The ambulance tech chuckled. “You’re not anxious to go prowling
around in those canyons again. I wouldn’t be, either.”

Chee let that pass into silence.

Then Hosteen Nakai sighed, and said, “Ironhand.” And sighed again.

Chee leaned over him, and said, “Little Father. Are you all right?”

“Ironhand,” Nakai said. “Be careful of him. He was a witch.”

“A witch? What did he do?”

But Hosteen Nakai seemed to be sleeping again.

The half-moon was dipping behind the mountains to the west when the
ambulance, with Bernie trailing it in Chee’s truck, rolled down the
track and stopped outside Hosteen Nakai’s sheep-camp place in the
Chuskas. Blue Woman was standing in the doorway waiting. She ran out to
greet them, crying. At first the tears were for grief, thinking they
were bringing home her husband’s body. Then she cried for joy.

They put him on his bed beside a pinion tree, rearranged his oxygen
supply and listened to Blue Woman’s tearful explanation of how Hosteen
Nakai had come to be abandoned, as she saw it, in the Farmington
hospital. Her niece had come to take her to have an infected tooth
removed, and to replenish the supply of the medicine which kept away
the pain and let her husband sleep. Nakai had been much better, had
wanted to come along and there had been no one to look after him at the
sheep camp. But at the dentist’s office he had fainted, someone called
911, and an ambulance took him to the hospital. She had waited there,
and waited, not knowing what to do for him, and finally her niece had
to go to care for her children, and she had to go with her. There were
stories that the rich young people from the cities were putting wolves
back in the mountains, and there was no one at their place to protect
their young lambs.

Nakai was awake now, listening to all this. When Blue Woman was
finished, he motioned to Chee.

“I have something to tell you,” he said. “A story.”

“We will make some coffee,” Blue Woman said. She led Bernie away to
the hogan, and as they left Nakai began his tale.

It would be long, Chee thought, involving the intricacies of Navajo
theology, the relationship of the universal creator who set all nature
in its harmonious motion to the spirit world of the Holy People, and to
humanity, and when it was finished he would know the final secret that
would qualify him as a shaman.

“I think you will be going into the canyon soon to hunt the men who
killed the policemen,” Nakai said. “I must tell you a story about
Ironhand. I think you must be very, very careful.”

Chee exhaled a long breath.
Wrong
again
, he thought.

“A long time ago when I was a boy, and the winter stories were being
told in the hogan, and people were talking about the great dam that was
going to make Lake Powell, and how the water of the Colorado and the
San Juan were backing up and drowning the canyons, the old men would
talk about how the Utes and the Paiutes would come through the canyons
in their secret ways, and steal the sheep and horses of our people, and
kill them, too. And the worst of these was a Paiute they called Dobby,
and the band that followed him. And the worst of the Utes was a man
they called Ironhand.”

Nakai replaced his oxygen mask and spent a few moments inhaling.

“Ironhand,” Chee said, probably too softly for Nakai to hear him.

Nakai removed the mask again.

“They say Dobby and his people came out of the canyons at night and
stole the sheep and horses at the place of woman of the
tl’igu
dinee
, and they killed her and her daughter and two children. And
the son-in-law of this old woman was a man they called Littleman, who
married into the Salt Clan but was born to the Near the Water
Dine’
.
And they say he forgot the Navajo Way and went crazy with his grief.”

Nakai’s voice grew weaker, and slower, as he related how Littleman,
after years spent hunting and watching, had finally found the narrow
trail the raiders had used and finally killed Dobby and his men.

“It took summer after summer for many years for the Salt Clan to
catch Dobby,” Nakai said. “But no one ever caught the Ute they called
Ironhand.”

The moon was down, the dark sky overhead adazzle with stars, and
Chee was feeling the high-altitude chill. He leaned forward in his
chair and tucked the blankets around Nakai’s shoulders.

“Little Father,” he said, "I think you should sleep now. Do you need
more of the medicine for that?”

“I need you to listen,” Nakai said. “Because while our people never
caught Ironhand, we know now why we didn’t. And we know he had a son
and a daughter, and I think he must have a son or a grandson. And I
think that is who you will be hunting, and what I will tell you will
help.”

Chee had to lean forward now, his ear close to Nakai’s lips, to hear
the rest of it. After two of his raids, the Navajos had managed to
trace Ironhand and his men into the Gothic Creek Canyon, and then down
Gothic toward the San Juan under the rim of Casa Del Eco Mesa. There
tracks turned into a steep, narrow side canyon where the Utes and
Mormon settlers from Bluff dug coal. They found a corpse in one of the
coal mines. But the canyon was a dead end with no way out. It was as if
Ironhand and his men were witches who could fly over the cliffs.

Nakai’s voice died away. He replaced the mask, inhaled, and removed
it again.

“I think if there is a young man named Ironhand, he robs and kills
people, he would know where his grandfather hid in that canyon, and how
he escaped from it.

“And now,” Hosteen Nakai said, "before I sleep, I must teach you the
last lesson so you can be a
hataalii
."
He took a labored
breath. “Or not be one.”

To Chee, the old man seemed utterly exhausted. “First, Father, I
think you should rest and restore yourself. You should -"

“I must do it now,” Nakai said. “And you must listen. The last
lesson is the one that matters. Will you hear me?”

Chee took the old man’s hand.

“Know that it is hard for the people to trust outside their own
family. Even harder when they are sick. They have pain. They are out of
harmony. They see no beauty anywhere. All their connections are broken.
That is who you are talking to. You tell them the Power that made us
made all this above us and around us and we are part of the Power and
if we do as we are taught we can bring ourselves back into
hozho
.
Back into harmony. Then they will again know beauty all around them.”

Nakai closed his eyes, gripped Chee’s hand.

“That is hard to believe,” he said. “Do you understand that?”

“Yes.”

“To be restored, they must believe you.”

Nakai opened his eyes, stared at Chee.

“Yes,” Chee said.

“You know the chants. You sing them without a mistake. And your sand
paintings are exactly right. You know the herbs, how to make the
emetics, all that.”

“I hope so,” Chee said, understanding now what Hosteen Frank Sam
Nakai was telling him.

“But you have to decide if you have gone too far beyond the four
Sacred Mountains. Sometimes you can never come all the way back into
Dinetah
again.”

Chee nodded. He remembered a Saturday night after he’d graduated
from high school. Nakai had driven him to Gallup. They had parked on
Railroad Avenue and sat for two hours watching the drunks wandering in
and out of the bars.

He’d asked Nakai why he’d parked there, who they were looking for.
Nakai hadn’t answered at first, but what he said when he finally spoke
Chee had never forgotten.

“We are looking for the
dine’
who have left
Dinetah
.
Their bodies are here, but their spirits are far beyond the Sacred
Mountains. You can go east of Mount Taylor to find them, or west of the
San Francisco Peaks, or you can find them here.”

Chee had pointed to a man who had been leaning clumsily against the
wall up the avenue from them, and who now was sitting, head down on the
sidewalk. “Like him?” he asked.

Nakai had waved his hand in a motion that included the bar’s neon
Coors sign and the drunk now trying to push himself up from the
pavement. But went beyond them to follow a polished white Lincoln Town
Car rolling up the avenue toward them.

“Which one acts like he has no relatives?” Nakai had asked him. “The
drunk who leaves his children hungry, or the man who buys that car that
boasts of his riches instead of helping his brother?”

Nakai’s eyes were closed now, and his efforts to breathe produced a
faint groaning sound. Then he said, “To cure them you must make them
believe. You must believe so strongly that they feel it. Do you
understand?”