Authors: Anne Hillerman
Then she logged into the database to do a quick search on Aaron Torino and, while she was at it, tossed in the name of the mysterious Michael Miller. The system chugged, and then her monitor locked up. She tried every trick she knew with no luck, finally finding Sandra, the closest thing they had to tech services.
She’d go outside to call Darleen again while the computers were down, she decided. She took a deep breath, looked at her phone for a moment, and then pushed in Mama’s number. Sometimes she wished she’d had a big brother instead of a little sister.
Darleen sounded happy. “I wanted to talk to you about going to Santa Fe tomorrow. Remember? Mama wanted to check out the school? I called you at work because I thought you might need to get the day off or something. Hope I didn’t freak you out.”
“I was just in Farmington, and a sheriff’s deputy told me you’re being considered for the alcohol and drug diversion program.”
“That’s cool.”
Bernie had expected Darleen to be embarrassed, or at least surprised. “Cool? So you got arrested for drunken driving? Not just drinking a beer and mouthing off, like you told Mama and me?”
“Well, not really. It’s a long—”
“You lied to us.”
“I didn’t exactly lie. I just—”
“Grow up. I can’t deal with this.”
“You don’t have to deal with anything.” Darleen sounded angry now. “You never listen. You always know what I should do. I didn’t tell you every little thing that happened because I didn’t want another lecture. I felt bad enough without you nagging on me. I made a mistake. Who hasn’t?”
She stopped talking, and Bernie let the silence sit.
When Darleen spoke again, she’d stopped shouting. “Come over to Mama’s tonight so we can talk. It’s not as bad as you think. Seriously.”
Bigman appeared at the station door, waving to Bernie to come in.
“I’ve got to go.”
“When do you think you’ll be here?”
“I don’t know. Before dark. I have to take something to the old man who lives near that burned car.”
“This isn’t as bad as you think,” Darleen said again.
“Yeah, right.” Bernie hung up, furious. She walked inside the building to find Largo looking for her.
“Manuelito, what have you done to the computers?” He sounded more annoyed than usual.
“I was doing a search, seeing what I could find out about Tso’s grandson.”
“Sandra’s having trouble getting things back to working again. We may have to talk to Window Rock.”
Largo seemed to be waiting for her to say something.
“Sir, lunch went well. People seemed to like the talk.”
“Good. I owe you for that.”
It seemed like a good time to ask for the next day off, explaining that she had an unexpected situation to deal with concerning her mother. Largo gave it to her without asking questions, and she
spent an uneventful afternoon placing unreturned calls to Aaron and catching up on paperwork. The highlight was a residential burglary report. The thieves had absconded with the victim’s jewelry, cash, and meat from the freezer. The woman held her brother’s drinking buddies responsible.
After work, Bernie went home to change clothes, then stopped at City Market to buy Mr. Tso a can of coffee and some plums, which she rinsed at the store. When someone hauled water, every drop was precious. She put everything in her backpack, then added Mr. Tso’s thrift-store belt. His house wasn’t that out of the way to the turnoff for Mama’s place. Maybe his view of Ship Rock would offer some inspiration.
She stopped on the way and parked her well-used Toyota close to the burned shell of the Malibu. She wanted another look at the ridge to see if there were any more of those little cacti or any strange tracks she’d missed. She remembered the animal she’d seen in the road the evening she got lost. The thought made her uneasy, but she convinced herself it was a dog, or maybe one of those big wolf hybrids.
An assembly of clouds hung in the late afternoon’s huge, brilliant sky, a hint at the undelivered promise of rain. She stood on the sandy earth and took in the sight of Ship Rock, more rugged than it looked from the angle at which she saw it most often. She had met people who found this landscape unsettling, people from elsewhere who felt uncomfortable without a green canopy of trees overhead. She liked trees well enough, as long as she could still look out and see the sky. She considered the piñons and junipers that lived in coexistence on much of the Navajo Nation’s land to be nature’s best tree creations. It took the piñons a hundred years to grow twelve feet, and they provided tasty nuts. Juniper was used in ceremonies and as medicine. She’d grown up drinking juniper tea when her stomach felt uneasy, and as a girl she had used the little brown seeds
inside its blue berries to make bracelets and necklaces. Good trees, and they didn’t usually block the view.
Her eye caught a flash of motion near the ridgetop. She focused. Saw it a second time. In addition to coyotes and dogs, there were horses out here, although an animal that large seemed unlikely on the rocky slope. She kept her gaze on the ridge, but she didn’t see it again.
The vibration of her phone in the backpack surprised her. She fished it out of the front pocket. Chee!
“Hey, there.” His voice sounded as strong as if he’d been standing beside her. “I talked to Bahe, and I can head back to Shiprock.”
“It seems like you’ve been gone forever.”
“Sounds like you’re standing in a tunnel, sweetheart. Where are you?”
“I’m getting ready to visit
Hosteen
Tso. You know, the man who lives near Ship Rock. When I leave, I’m spending the night at Mama’s. Darleen and Mama and I have a lot to talk about.” She’d save the bad news for when she saw him, after she’d interrogated Darleen. “I can’t wait to see you.”
“I can barely hear you, honey. Call me when you get to Mama’s, OK?”
“Sure thing.”
She ended the call, wondering not for the first time if the aggravation caused by all the times cell phones didn’t work was offset by their convenience when they did. She still voted in favor, but the margin was slim.
She climbed the ridge, wishing the day were cooler and that she’d worn her hiking boots. She saw a lizard nicely camouflaged against the gray rocks, but no cactus plants, or yellow markers for them. No more tracks, either.
The old man was sitting on the same wooden bench where she’d seen him last. He stood when she stopped her car and hobbled out
to her, greeting her in Navajo and adding the word for “friend.” He motioned her to the side of the house. “Put your car there, where you saw my grandson’s truck. Get some shade from that tree by the corral.” She parked, grabbed her backpack, and walked to the porch.
“I like your hair fixed like that, the old way. It keeps the wind from stealing your thoughts. I used to wear my hair like that, too, back when I was young.” She wasn’t surprised; the hairstyle was part of the Navajo tradition.
She showed him the bag with the plums and the coffee. “These are for you, Mr. Tso. I thought you might enjoy them.”
“
Ahéhee
. Thank you.”
Then Bernie gave him the belt. He ran his hands over the fabric. “A nice one. Soft.” He started to hand it back to her, but she shook her head.
“It’s for you. You can wear this when your daughter takes you to that big food corral.”
He looked puzzled. “I don’t know about a place like that.”
“It’s in Gallup. You mentioned that you liked the Jell-O there.”
Mr. Tso shook his head. “Maybe the heat is bothering you. Come and sit with me.”
Bernie didn’t press the point. She took her place in the chair next to Mr. Tso’s bench and shared the view. They watched a pair of ravens soar against the deep blue sky.
“My grandson came earlier today to tell me he has a new job. The people who want to put up those mirrors hired him.” She sensed a grandfather’s pride, but something else in his voice as well. Concern?
“The solar company? That’s wonderful for him. Maybe you will see more of him now.”
But Mr. Tso shook his head. “They are the ones who gave me those lights down there.” He moved his head toward the side of the
house where she had parked. “Go take a look. Then I will tell you more.”
She stepped off the porch and next to a chain saw and the red plastic gas can, she found a row of little lanterns mounted on long metal stakes with pointed ends. Each of the six had a flat dark rectangle on the top of a little box that was glass on all sides. They looked new.
She returned to Mr. Tso. “Those are interesting. Do they work?”
The old man frowned. “The one who wants to put those mirrors out there, he gave them to me. He and my grandson pushed them into the ground. When the sun went down, when the first stars could be seen, they turned themselves on.” He shifted on the bench. “No good. They make light when it should be dark.”
Bernie pictured the scene. She thought solar lights were an excellent idea, especially for a house without electricity.
“When I was a boy, we respected the darkness. We went to sleep when it got dark, got up when the sun rose. In the winter, the long nights gave us stories.”
A coyote yipped in the distance, joined by another. Then came barking dogs. Mr. Tso began talking about a pack of dogs that had killed his goat when he was a boy, a story he had told her the first time she visited. An old shotgun was propped by the bend on the porch. It reminded her of the gun her uncle had kept for creatures who threatened the sheep.
It was not uncommon on the Navajo reservation for feral dogs, perhaps interbred with coyotes, to attack livestock and even children. Perhaps, Bernie thought, even an old man. She understood why Mr. Tso’s daughter and grandson worried about him. “Those lights might help you see if a coyote or a dog pack is bothering your sheep. Maybe you should ask Aaron to put them by the corral.”
“Those are my daughter’s sheep. With the lights, the sheep couldn’t sleep.” Mr. Tso chuckled. “They would have to start counting people. Not enough people out here to make them sleepy.”
Bernie said, “Your daughter worries about you because of that burned car. I think that you know more about the burned car than you have told me. If you helped, maybe the police could find the one who burned the car, and your daughter wouldn’t worry so much.”
Mr. Tso stared out at Ship Rock. Finally he said, “Some evil things the police cannot help us with.”
They sat watching the shadows grow deeper on Ship Rock, and then Mr. Tso spoke. “A man came in that car that burned. I saw him out there on the ridge when I was checking on the fences. It was in T’ąąchił, so the snakes were waking up. It was near dusk.” T’ąąchił was the Navajo calendar’s equivalent of late March and early April, Bernie knew. The sun set early.
“I saw him walking on the ridge. I wondered what he was doing up there, and I thought that I should tell him to beware of the snakes. But when I looked again, the man was gone. An animal, dark and bigger than a dog, was on the ridge in his place. I remembered it for many months. Then when the weather grew warmer, I saw the car again, parked over that way again.”
He stopped talking for so long she thought he might be finished. When he resumed, she heard the fear in his voice.
“I looked toward the ridge. I saw something up there, something alive, big and black. Not a man. Its eyes glowed like fire. Then, the day the car burned, it happened again.”
Mr. Tso turned his face toward the sky. The last of the sun’s rays gave his skin a pinkish glow. He closed his eyes, and then opened them again.
“It came to me that the creature who rode in that car was not afraid of the snakes because they could not hurt him.”
Bernie heard the muffled sound of a distant vehicle. “Is Aaron coming to see you tonight?”
“No. My daughter said they both will come again on Saturday. Tell me about your mother. Is she still weaving?”
“No. My mother’s hands don’t work very well anymore.”
“She misses it, then. My wife would make rugs until she couldn’t see so well. She sold them to those traders in Fruitland, the Hatch Brothers. She would sit where you are now, and we would talk. She had some sadness that we never had more children, but her sister’s children were ours, too.”
As Mr. Tso talked on about the extended family he and his wife raised and other adventures that happened before Bernie was born, she watched the vehicle make the turn from the highway onto Mr. Tso’s dirt road, a rooster tail of dust rising behind it to hang over the route. At that distance, she couldn’t tell if it was a car or a truck.
The monologue over, Bernie rose. “I enjoy your company, but I need to get going now.”
Mr. Tso stood too, and made his way to the side of the porch. “Look down there. You take those things. Give them to your mother. She’s getting old now. She could use them.”
When Bernie stood next to him, she could see that the little glass boxes on the posts had started to glow. Pretty. They reminded her of light in a jar.
“Maybe your daughter would like them,” she said. “They’re new and useful.”
“You take them. See if they can fit in your car.”
“I can’t take them now because I really need to get to Mama’s house. I’ll get them later.”
“That makes me happy. I have another visit with you to look forward to.”
Mr. Tso sat on the bench again. “That one coming might be a friend of my daughter or my grandson. Sometimes those young men come here looking for him. Sometimes my daughter asks her people to check on me. They want to make sure that I’m still keeping an eye on Tsé Bit’a’í.”
Bernie could see now that the vehicle was a white minivan, exactly
the kind of vehicle she’d expect one of Roberta Tso’s middle-aged lady friends to own. If she had left a few minutes sooner, she could have driven off with a wave to whoever was in the car. Now, though, it would be rude not to stay to greet Mr. Tso’s visitor before heading out. A few minutes wouldn’t matter that much. She dreaded the conversation that awaited her with Darleen.
The road stopped at Mr. Tso’s house, except for the rutted track where she’d gotten lost and that Aaron said ultimately led to the highway. There were no occupied homes on the way here. Mr. Tso’s place was not a spot a person came to by accident.