But only your culture taught you values, and the culture that had formed Janet was blue-blooded, white, Ivy League, chic, irreligious, old-rich Maryland. And that made it just about as opposite as it could get from the traditional values of his people, which made wealth a symbol for selfishness, and had caused a friend of his to deliberately stop winning rodeo competitions because he was getting unhealthily famous and therefore out of harmony.
Well, to hell with that. He got up, refocused the spotting scope, and found the place where the posts had been loosened. That road probably carried no more than a dozen vehicles a week— none at all when the weather was wet. It was empty today, and there was no sign of anything around Mr. Finch’s Zorro trap. Beyond it in the pasture he counted eighteen cows and calves, a mixture of Herefords and Angus, and three horses. He scanned across the Maryboy grassland to the base of Ship Rock and focused on the place where Lucy Sam had told him the climbing parties liked to launch their great adventures. Nothing there now but sage, chamisa, and a redtailed hawk looking for her lunch.
Chee sat down again and picked up the oldest ledger. On his last visit he’d checked the entries on the days following Breedlove’s disappearance but only with a casual glance. This time he’d be thorough.
Lucy Sam came in, washed her hands, and looked at him while she dried them.
“Something wrong?”
“Disappointed,” Chee said. “So many details. This will take forever.”
“He didn’t have anything else to do,” Lucy Sam said, voice apologetic. “After he got that sickness with his nerves, all he could do after that was get himself into his wheelchair. He couldn’t go anyplace, he’d just sit there in the chair and sometimes he would read, or listen to the radio. And then he would watch through his telescope and keep his notes.” And he kept them very well, Chee noticed. Unfortunately they didn’t seem to include what he wanted to find.
The date Hal Breedlove vanished came about midpoint in the old ledger. In Hosteen Sam’s eyes it had been a windy day, cool, crows beginning to gather as they did when summer ended, flying in great, disorganized twilight flocks past Ship Rock to their roosting places in the San Juan River woods. Three oil field service trucks came down the road toward Red Rock and turned toward the Rattlesnake field. Some high clouds appeared but there had been no promise of rain.
The next day’s entry was longer, devoted largely to the antics of four yearling coyotes who seemed to be trying to learn how to hunt in the prairie dog town down the slope. Interesting, but not what Chee was hoping for.
An hour and dozens of pages later, he closed the ledger, rubbed his eyes, and sighed.
“You want some lunch?” Lucy Sam asked, which was just the question Chee had been hoping to hear. Lucy had been there at the stove across the kitchen from him, cutting up onions, stirring, answering his questions about abbreviations he couldn’t read or points he didn’t understand, and the smell of mutton stew had gradually permeated the room and his senses—making this foolish search seem far less important than his hunger.
“Please,” he said. “That smells just like the stew my mother used to make.”
“Probably is the same,” Lucy said. “Everybody has to use the same stuff—mutton, onions, potatoes, can of tomatoes, salt, pepper.” She shrugged.
Like his mother’s stew, it was delicious. He told Lucy what he was looking for—about the disappearance of Hal Breedlove and then his skeleton turning up on the mountain. He was looking for some idea of when Hal Breedlove returned to make his fatal climb.
“You find anything?”
“I think I learned that the man didn’t come right back here after running away from his wife in Canyon de Chelly. At least there was no mention of anybody climbing.”
“There would have been,” she said. “How far did you get?”
“Just through the first eight weeks after he disappeared. It’s going to take forever.”
“You know, they always do it the same way. They start climbing just at dawn, maybe before. That’s because they want to get down before dark, and because there’s some places where that black rock gets terribly hot when the afternoon sun shines on it. So all you got to do is take a look at the first thing written down each day. He would always do the same every morning. He would get up at dawn and roll his wheelchair to the door. Then he would sing the song to Dawn Boy and bless the morning with his pollen. Next he would take a look at his mountain. If there was anything parked there where the climbers always left their cars, it would be the first thing he wrote down.”
“I’ll try that, then,” he said.
On the page at which Chee reopened the ledger the first entry was marked 9/15/85, which was several pages and eight days too early. He glanced at the first line. Something about a kestrel catching a meadowlark. He paged forward, checking Lucy’s advice by 56 of 102
15/03/2008 19:57
TheFallenMan
file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Floop/Local%20Settings/Te...
scanning down the first notes after dates.
Now he was at 9/18/85—halfway down the page. The first line read, “Climbers. Funny looking green van where climbers park.
Three people going up. If Lucy gets back from Albuquerque I will get her to go into Shiprock and tell the police.” Chee checked the date again. September 18, 1985. That would be five days before Hal Breedlove disappeared from the Canyon de Chelly. He scanned quickly down the page, looking for other mentions of the climbers. He found two more on the same day.
The first said: “They are more than half way up now, creeping along under a cliff—like bugs on a wall.” And the second: “The headlights turned on on the fancy green car, and the inside lights. I see them putting away their gear. Gone now, and the police did not come. I told Maryboy he should not let anyone climb Tse´ Bitáí´ but he did not listen to me.” Lucy was washing dishes in a pan of water on the table by the stove, watching him while she worked. He took the ledger to her, pointed to the entry.
“Do you remember this?” Chee asked. “It would have been about eleven years ago. Three people came to climb Ship Rock in some sort of green van. Your father wanted you to go tell the police but you had gone to Albuquerque.” Lucy Sam put on her glasses and read.
“Now why did I take the bus to Albuquerque?” she asked herself. “Yes,” she answered. “Irma was having her baby there. Little Alice. Now she’s eleven. And when I came home he was excited about those climbers. And angry. He wanted me to take him to see Hosteen Maryboy about it. And I took him over there, and they argued about it. I remember that.”
“Did he say anything about the climbers?”
“He said they were a little bit slow. It was after dark when they got back to the car.”
“Anything about the car?”
“The car?” She looked thoughtful. “I remember he hadn’t seen one like it before. He said it was ugly, clumsy looking, square like a box. It was green and it had a ski rack on top.”
Chee closed the ledger and handed it to Lucy, trying to remember how Joe Leaphorn had described the car Hal Breedlove had abandoned after he had abandoned his wife. It was a recreational vehicle, green, something foreign-made. Yes. A Land-Rover. That would fit old man Sam’s description of square and ugly.
“Thank you,” he said to Lucy Sam. “I have to go now and see what Hosteen Maryboy can remember.” 19
THE SUNSET HAD FLARED OUT
behind Beautiful Mountain when Chee’s patrol car bounced over Lucy Sam’s cattle guard and gained the pavement. In the darkening twilight his headlights did little good and Chee almost missed the unmarked turnoff. That put him on the dirt track that led southward toward Rol Hai Rock, Table Mesa, and the infinity of empty country between these massive old buttes and the Chuska range.