Still, Leaphorn had kept the bone bead.
"I'll see about it," he'd said. "Send it to the lab. Find out if it is bone, and what kind of bone." He'd torn a page from his notebook, wrapped the bead in it, and placed it in the coin compartment of his billfold. Then he'd looked at Chee for a moment in silence. "Any idea how it got in here?"
"Sounds strange," Chee had said. "But you know you could pry out the end of a shotgun shell and pull out the wadding and stick a bead like this in with the pellets."
Leaphorn's expression became almost a smile. Was it contempt? "Like a witch shooting in the bone?" he asked. "They're supposed to do that through a little tube." He made a puffing shape with his lips.
Chee had nodded, flushing just a little.
Now, remembering it, he was angry again. Well, to hell with Leaphorn. Let him believe whatever he wanted to believe. The origin story of the Navajos explained witchcraft clearly enough, and it was a logical part of the philosophy on which the Dinee had founded their culture. If there was good, and harmony, and beauty on the east side of reality, then there must be evil, chaos, and ugliness to the west. Like a nonfundamentalist Christian, Chee believed in the poetic metaphor of the Navajo story of human genesis. Without believing in the specific Adam's rib, or the size of the reed through which the Holy People emerged to the Earth Surface World, he believed in the lessons such imagery was intended to teach. To hell with Leaphorn and what he didn't believe. Chee started the engine and jolted back down the slope to the road. He wanted to get to Badwater Wash before noon.
But he couldn't quite get Leaphorn out of his mind. Leaphorn posed a problem. "One more thing," the lieutenant had said. "We've got a complaint about you." And he'd told Chee what the doctor at the Badwater Clinic had said about him. "Yellowhorse claims you've been interfering with his practice of his religion," Leaphorn said. And while the lieutenant's expression said he didn't take the complaint as anything critically important, the very fact that he'd mentioned it implied that Chee should desist.
"I have been telling people that Yellowhorse is a fake," Chee said stiffly. "I have told people every chance I get that the doctor pretends to be a crystal gazer just to get them into his clinic."
"I hope you're not doing that on company time," Leaphorn said. "Not while you're on duty."
"I probably have," Chee said. "Why not?"
"Because it violates regulations," Leaphorn said, his expression no longer even mildly amused.
"How?"
"I think you can see how," Leaphorn had said. "We don't have any way to license our shamans, no more than the federal government can license preachers. If Yellowhorse says he's a medicine man, or a hand trembler, or a road chief of the Native American Church, or the Pope, it is no business of the Navajo Tribal Police. No rule against it. No law."
"I'm a Navajo," Chee said. "I see somebody cynically using our religion… somebody who doesn't believe in our religion using it in that cynical way…"
"What harm is he doing?" Leaphorn asked. "The way I understand it, he recommends they go to a yataalii if they need a ceremonial sing. And he points them at the white man's hospital only if they have a white man's problem. Diabetes, for example."
Chee had made no response to that. If Leaphorn couldn't see the problem, the sacrilege involved, then Leaphorn was blind. But that wasn't the trouble. Leaphorn was as cynical as Yellowhorse.
"You, yourself, have declared yourself to be a yataalii, I hear," Leaphorn said. "I heard you performed a Blessing Way."
Chee had nodded. He said nothing.
Leaphorn had looked at him a moment, and sighed. "I'll talk to Largo about it," he said.
And that meant that one of these days Chee would have an argument with the captain about it and if he wasn't lucky, Largo would give him a flat, unequivocal order to say nothing more about Yellowhorse as shaman. When that happened, he would cope as best he could. Now the road to Badwater had changed from bad to worse. Chee concentrated on driving.
It was the policy of the Navajo Tribal Police, as a matter of convenience, to consider Badwater to be in the Arizona portion of the Big Reservation. Local wisdom held that the store itself was actually in Utah, about thirty feet north of the imaginary line that marked the boundary. One of the local jokes was that Old Man Isaac Ginsberg, who built the place, used to move out of his room behind the trading post and into a stone hogan across the road one hundred yards to the south because he couldn't stand the cold Utah winters. Nobody seemed to know exactly where the place was, mapwise. Its location, in a narrow slot surrounded by the fantastic, thousand-foot, red-black-blue-tan cliffs, made pinpointing it on surveys mostly guesswork. And nobody cared enough to do more than guess.
Historically, it had been a watering place for herdsmen. In the immense dry badlands of Casa del Eco Mesa, it was a rare place where a reliable spring produced pools of drinkable water. Good water is a magnet anywhere in desert country. In a landscape like Caso del Eco, where gypsum and an arsenal of other soluble minerals tainted rainwater almost as fast as it fell, the stuff that seeped under the sandy arroyo bottoms was such a compound of chemicals that it would kill even tumbleweeds and salt cedar. Thus, the springs in Badwater Wash were a magnet for all living things. They attracted those tough little mammals and reptiles which endure in such hostile places. Eventually it attracted goats that strayed from the herds the Navajos had stolen from the Pueblo Indians. Then came the goatherders. Next came sheepherders. Finally, geologists discovered the shallow but persistent Aneth oil deposit, which brought a brief, dusty boom to the plateau. The drilling boom left behind a little refinery at Montezuma Creek, a scattering of robot pumps, and a worn-out spiderweb of truck trails connecting them with the world. Sometime in this period between boom and dust, it had attracted Isaac Ginsberg, who built the trading post of slabs of red sandstone, earned the Navajo name Afraid of His Wife, and died. The wife to whom Ginsberg owed his title was a Mud Clan Navajo called Lizzie Tonale, who had married Ginsberg in Flagstaff, had converted to Judaism, and, it was locally believed, had persuaded Ginsberg to establish his business in such an incredibly isolated locale because it was the hardest possible place for her relatives to reach. It would have been a sensible motive. Otherwise, the trading post would have been bankrupt in a month, since Lizzie Tonale could refuse no kin who needed canned goods, gasoline, or a loan, and maintain her status as a respectable woman. Whatever her motives, the widow Tonale-Ginsberg had run the post for twenty years before her own death, steadfastly closing on the Sabbath. She had left it to their daughter, the only product of their union. Chee had met this daughter only twice. That was enough to understand how she had earned her local name, which was Iron Woman.
Now, as he rolled his patrol car down the final slope and into the rutted yard of Badwater Wash Trading Post, he saw the bulky form of Iron Woman standing on the porch. Chee parked as much of the car as he could in the scanty shade of a tamarisk and waited. It was a courtesy learned from boyhood in a society where modesty is prized, privacy is treasured, and visitors, even at a trading post, are all too rare. "You don't just go run up to somebody's hogan," his mother had taught him. "You might see something you don't want to see."