Chee must have dozed. He didn’t hear the car coming down the slope, or see the lights. A tapping at the door awakened him, and he found her standing on the step looking up at him.
“It’s freezing,” she said as he ushered her in.
“Hot coffee,” he said. Poured a cup, handed it to her, and offered her the folding chair beside the fold-out table. But she stood a moment, hugging herself and shivering, looking undecided.
“Janet,” he said. “Sit down. Relax.”
“I just need to tell you something,” she said. “I can’t stay. I need to get back to Gallup before the weather gets worse.” But she sat.
“Drink your coffee,” he said. “Warm up.”
She was looking at him over the cup. “You look awful,” she said. “They told me you’d gone up to Mancos. To see the Breedlove widow. You shouldn’t be back at work yet. You should be in bed.”
“I’m all right,” he said. And waited. Would she ask him why he’d gone to Mancos? What he’d learned?
“Why couldn’t somebody else do it?” she said. “Somebody without broken ribs.”
“Just cracked,” Chee said.
She put down her cup. He reached for it. She intercepted his hand, held it.
“Jim,” she said. “I’m going away for a while. I’m taking my accrued leave time, and my vacation, and I’m going home.”
“Home?” Chee said. “For a while. How long is that?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I want to get my head together. Look forward and backwards.” She tried to smile but it didn’t come off well. She shrugged. “And just think.”
It occurred to Chee that he hadn’t poured himself any coffee. Oddly, he didn’t want any. It occurred to him that she wasn’t burning her bridges.
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“Think?” he said. “About us?”
“Of course.” This time the smile worked a little better.
But her hand was cold. He squeezed it. “I thought we were through that phase.”
“No, you didn’t,” she said. “You never really stopped thinking about whether we’d be compatible. Whether we really fit.”
“Don’t we?”
“We did in this fantasy I had,” she said, and waved her hands, mocking herself. “Big, good-looking guy. Sweet and smart and as far as I could tell you really cared about me. Fun on the Big Rez for a while, then a big job for you in someplace interesting.
Washington. San Francisco. New York. Boston. And the big job for me in Justice, or maybe a law firm. You and I together.
Everything perfect.”
Chee said nothing to that.
“Everything perfect,” she repeated. “The best of both worlds.” She looked at him, trying to hold the grin and not quite making it.
“With twin Porsches in the triple garage,” Chee said. “But when you got to know me, I didn’t fit the fantasy.”
“Almost,” she said. “Maybe you do, really.” Suddenly Janet’s eyes went damp. She looked away. “Or maybe I change the fantasy.” He extracted his handkerchief, frowned at it, reached into the storage drawer behind him, extracted paper napkins, and handed them to Janet. She said, “Sorry,” and wiped her eyes.
He wanted to hold her, very close. But he said, “A cold wind does that.”
“So I thought maybe as time goes by everything changes a little. I change and so do you.” He could think of nothing honest to say to that.
“But after the other evening in Gallup, when you were so angry with me, I began to understand,” she said.
“Remember once a long time ago you asked me about a schoolteacher I used to date? Somebody told you about her. From Wisconsin. Just out of college. Blonde, blue eyes, taught second grade at Crownpoint when I was a brand-new cop and stationed there. Well, it wasn’t that there was anything much wrong with me, but for her kids she wanted the good old American dream. She saw no hope for that in Navajo country. So she went away.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Janet said. “She wasn’t a Navajo.”
“But I am,” he said. “So I thought, what’s the difference? I’m darker. Rarely sunburn. Small hips. Wide shoulders. That’s racial, right? Does that matter? I think not much. So what makes me a Navajo?”
“You’re going to say culture,” Janet said. “I studied social anthropology, too.”
“I grew up knowing it’s wrong to have more than you need. It means you’re not taking care of your people. Win three races in a row, you better slow down a little. Let somebody else win. Or somebody gets drunk and runs into your car and tears you all up, you don’t sue him, you want to have a sing for him to cure him of alcoholism.”
“That doesn’t get you admitted into law school,” Janet said. “Or pull you out of poverty.”
“Depends on how you define poverty.”
“It’s defined in the law books,” Janet said. “A family of x members with an annual income of under y.”
“I met a middle-aged man at a Yeibichai sing a few years ago. He ran an accounting firm in Flagstaff and came out to Burnt Water because his mother had a stroke and they were doing the cure for her. I said something about it looking like he was doing very well.
And he said, ‘No, I will be a poor man all my life.’ And I asked him what he meant, and he said, ‘Nobody ever taught me any songs.’”
“Ah, Jim,” she said. She rose, took the two steps required to reach the bunk where he was sitting, put her arms carefully around him and kissed him. Then she pressed the undamaged side of his face against her breast.
“I know having a Navajo dad didn’t make me a Navajo,” she said. “My culture is Stanford sorority girl, Maryland cocktail circuit, Mozart, and tickets to the Met. So maybe I have to learn not to think that being ragged, and not having indoor plumbing, and walking miles to see the dentist means poverty. I’m working on it.” Chee, engulfed in Janet’s sweater, her perfume, her softness, said something like “Ummmm.”
“But I’m not there yet,” she added, and released him.
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“I guess I should work on it from the other end, too,” he said. “I could get used to being a lieutenant, trying to work my way up.
Trying to put some value on things like—” He let that trail off.
“One thing I want you to know,” she said. “I didn’t use you.”
“You mean—”
“I mean deliberately getting information out of you so I could tell John.”
“I guess I always knew that,” he said. “I was just being jealous. I had the wrong idea about that.”
“I did tell him you’d found Breedlove’s body. He invited Claire and me to the concert. Claire and I go all the way back to high school. And we were remembering old times and, you know, it just came out. It was just something interesting to tell him.”
“Sure,” Chee said. “I understand.”
“I have to go now,” she said. “Before you guys close the highway. But I wanted you to know that. Breedlove had been his project when the widow filed to get the death certified. It looked so peculiar. And finally, now, I guess it’s all over.” Her tone made that a question.
She was zipping up her jacket, glancing at him.
“Lieutenant Leaphorn gave Mr. Shaw that photograph of the climber’s ledger,” she said.
“Yeah,” Chee said. The wind buffeted the trailer, made its stormy sounds, moved a cold draft against his neck.
“She must have thought that terribly odd—for him to just leave her at the canyon, and then abandon their car, and go back to Ship Rock to climb it like that.”
Chee nodded.
“Surely she must have had some sort of theory. I know I would have had if you’d done something crazy like that to me.”