"What do you want to know?" Cowboy asked.
"From where it is, you can see the windmill," Chee said. "Whoever tends it might have seen something." He shrugged. "Long shot. But I've got nothing else."
"The pahos," Cowboy said. "Some of them new? Like somebody is taking care of it now?"
"I didn't look at them real close," Chee said. "I didn't want to touch anything." He wanted Cowboy to know that. "But I'd say some were old and some were new and somebody is taking care of it."
Cowboy thought. "It wouldn't be one of ours. I mean not Shipaulovi village. That's not our village land. I think that land down there belongs either to Walpi or to one of the kiva societies. I'll have to see what I can find out."
As the Navajos saw it, the land down there was Navajo land, allotted to the family of Patricia Gishi. But this wasn't the time for renewing the old Joint Use arguments.
"Just a long shot," Chee said. "But who knows?"
"I'll ask around," Cowboy repeated. "Did you know they're fixing that windmill again today?" He grinned. "You ready for that?"
Chee was not ready for that. It depressed him. The windmill would be vandalized again—as certain as fate. Chee knew it in his bones, and he knew there was nothing he could do to stop it from happening. Not until he understood what was happening. When the new vandalism happened it would be Cowboy's fault as much as his own, but Cowboy didn't seem to mind. Cowboy wouldn't have to stand in Captain Largo's office, and hear Captain Largo reading the indignant memo from the pertinent bureaucrat in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and have Largo's mild eyes examining him, with the unspoken question in them relative to his competence to keep a windmill safe.
"With the bia doing it, I thought it would be Christmas before they got it done," Chee said. "What the hell happened?"
"Something must have gone wrong," West said.
"The bia got efficient. It happens every eight or ten years," Cowboy said. "Anyway, I saw a truck going in there. They said they had all the parts and they was fixing it today."
"I think you can relax," West said. "They probably got the wrong parts."
"You going to stake it out again?" Cowboy asked.
"I don't think that will work now," Chee said. "The plane crash screwed that up. Whoever it was learned I was out there. They'll make damn sure next time nobody's watching."
"The vandal was out there the night the plane crashed?" West asked.
"Somebody was," Chee said. "I heard somebody climbing out of the wash. And then while I was busy with the crash, somebody screwed up the windmill again."
"I didn't know that," West said. "You mean the vandal was right down there by the wreck? After it happened?"
"That's right," Chee said. "I'm surprised everybody didn't know that by now. They're handing the report around for everybody to read." Chee told West and Cowboy about the lawyer and the sister of the pilot.
"They was in here yesterday morning, asking for directions," West said. "They wanted to find the airplane, and they wanted to find you." West was frowning. "You mean to tell me that fellow had read the police report?"
"That's not so unusual," Cowboy said. "Not if he is the lawyer for somebody involved. Lawyers do that all the time if there's something they want to know."
"So he said he was the pilot's lawyer," West said. "What was his name?"
"Gaines," Chee said.
"What did he want to know?" West asked.
"He wanted to know what happened."
"Hell," West said. "Easy enough to see what happened. Fellow ran his airplane into a rock."
Chee shrugged.
"He wanted to know more than that?" West persisted.
"He wanted to find the car. The one that drove away after the crash."
"He figured it was still out there somewhere, then?"
"Seemed to," Chee said. He wanted to change the subject. "Either one of you heard any gossip about a witch killing a man out in Black Mesa somewhere?"
Cowboy laughed. "Sure," he said. "You remember that body was picked up last July—the one that was far gone?" Cowboy wrinkled his nose at the unpleasant memory.
"John Doe?" Chee asked. "A witch killed him? Where'd that come from?"
"And it was one of your Navajo witches," Dashee said. "Not one of our powaqa."
Chapter Ten
Cowboy dashee didn't know much about why the gossipers believed John Doe had been killed by a witch. But once he got over his surprise that Chee was sincerely interested, that Chee would attach importance to such a tale, he was willing to run the rumor to earth. They took Dashee's patrol car up Third Mesa to Bacobi. There Cowboy talked to the man who had passed the tale along to him. The man sent them over to Second Mesa to see a woman at Mishongovi. Dashee spent a long fifteen minutes in her house and came out smiling.
"Struck gold," Cowboy said. "We go to Shi-paulovi."
"Find where the report started?" Chee asked.
"Better than that," Cowboy said. "We found the man who found the body."
Albert Lomatewa brought three straight-backed chairs out of the kitchen, and set them in a curved row just outside the door of his house. He invited them both to sit, and sat himself. He extracted a pack of cigarets, offered each of them a smoke, and smoked himself. The children who had been playing there (Lomatewa's greatgrandchildren, Chee guessed) moved a respectful distance away and muted their raucous game. Lomatewa smoked, and listened while Deputy Sheriff Dashee talked. Dashee told him who Chee was, and that it was their job to identify the man who had been found on Black Mesa, and to find out who had shot him, and to learn everything they could about it. "There's been a lot of gossip about this man," Dashee said, speaking in English, "but we were told that if we came to Shipaulovi and talked to you about it, you would tell us the facts."
Lomatewa listened. He smoked his cigaret. He tapped the ash off on the ground beside his chair. He said, "It is true that there's nothing but gossip now. Nobody has any respect for anything anymore." Lomatewa reached behind him, his hand groped against the wall, found a walking cane which had been leaning there, and laid it across his legs. Last week he'd gone to Flagstaff with his granddaughter's husband, he told them, and visited another granddaughter there. "They all acted just like bahanas," Lomatewa said. "Drinking beer around the house. Laying in bed in the morning. Just like white people." Lomatewa's fingers played with the stick as he talked of the modernism he had found in his family at Flagstaff, but he was watching Jim Chee, watching Cowboy Dashee. Watching them skeptically. The performance, the attitude, were familiar. Chee had noticed it before, in his own paternal grandfather and in others. It had nothing to do with a Hopi talking of sensitive matters in front of a Navajo. It involved being on the downslope of your years, disappointed, and a little bitter. Lomatewa obviously knew who Cowboy was. Chee knew the deputy well enough to doubt he was a solidly orthodox Hopi. Lomatewa's statement had drifted into a complaint against the Hopi Tribal Council.
"We weren't told to do it that way," Lomatewa said. "The way it was supposed to be, the villages did their own business. The kikmongwi, and the societies, and the kiva. There wasn't any tribal council. That's a bahana idea."
Chee allowed the pause to stretch a respectful few moments. Cowboy leaned forward, raised a hand, opened his mouth.
Chee cut him off. "That's like what my uncle taught me," Chee said. "He said we must always respect the old ways. That we must stay with them."