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"Not exactly," Chee said. "It depends. A few years ago a little girl got sick down near Burnt Water. Her dad killed three people with a shotgun. He said they blew corpse powder on his daughter and made her sick."
Wells was watching him. "The kind of crime where you have the insanity plea."
"Sometimes," Chee said. "Whatever you have, witch talk makes you nervous. It happens more when you have a bad year like this. You hear it and you try to find out what's starting it before things get worse."
"So you're not really expecting to find a witch?"
"Usually not," Chee said.
"Usually?"
"Judge for yourself," Chee said. "I'll tell you what I've picked up today. You tell me what to make of it. Have time?"
Wells shrugged. "What I really want to talk about is a guy named Simon Begay." He looked quizzically at Chee. "You heard the name?"
"Yes," Chee said.
"Well, shit," Wells said. "You shouldn't have. What do you know about him?"
"Showed up maybe three months ago. Moved into one of those U. S. Public Health Service houses over by the Kayenta clinic. Stranger. Keeps to himself. From off the reservation somewhere. I figured you federals put him here to keep him out of sight."
Wells frowned. "How long you known about him?"
"Quite a while," Chee said. He'd known about Begay within a week after his arrival.
"He's a witness," Wells said. "They broke a car-theft operation in Los Angeles. Big deal. National co
"And they hide him out here until the trial?"
Something apparently showed in the tone of the question. "If you want to hide an apple, you drop it in with the other apples," Wells said. "What better place?"
Chee had been looking at Wells's shoes, which were glossy with polish. Now he examined his own boots, which were not. But he was thinking of Justice Department stupidity. The appearance of any new human in a country as empty as the Navajo Reservation provoked instant interest. If the stranger was a Navajo, there were instant questions. What was his clan? Who was his mother? What was his father's clan? Who were his relatives? The City Navajo had no answers to any of these crucial questions. He was (as Chee had been repeatedly told) unfriendly. It was quickly guessed that he was a "relocation Navajo," born to one of those hundreds of Navajo families which the federal government had tried to reestablish forty years ago in Chicago, Los Angeles, and other urban centers. He was a stranger. In a year of witches, he would certainly be suspected. Chee sat looking at his boots, wondering if that was the only basis for the charge that City Navajo was a skinwalker. Or had someone seen something? Had someone seen the murder?
"The thing about apples is they don't gossip," Chee said.
"You hear gossip about Begay?" Wells was sitting up now, his feet on the floor.
"Sure," Chee said. "I hear he's a witch."
Wells produced a pro-forma chuckle. "Tell me about it," he said.
Chee knew exactly how he wanted to tell it. Wells would have to wait awhile before he came to the part about Begay. "The Eskimos have nine nouns for snow," Chee began. He told Wells about the variety of witchcraft on the reservations and its environs: about frenzy witchcraft, used for sexual conquests, of witchery distortions, of curing ceremonials, of the exotic two-heart witchcraft of the Hope Fog Clan, of the Zuni Sorcery Fraternity, of the Navajo 'chindi,' which is more like a ghost than a witch, and finally of the Navajo Wolf, the anti'l witchcraft, the werewolves who pervert every taboo of the Navajo Way and use corpse powder to kill their victims.
Wells rattled the ice in his glass and glanced at his watch.
"To get to the part about your Begay," Chee said, "about two months ago we started picking up witch gossip. Nothing much, and you expect it during a drought. Lately it got to be more than usual." He described some of the tales and how uneasiness and dread had spread across the plateau. He described what he had learned today, the Tsossies' naming City Navajo as the witch, his trip to Mexican Water, of learning there that the witch had killed a man.
"They said it happened in the spring-couple of months ago. They told me the ones who knew about it were the Tso outfit." The talk of murder, Chee noticed, had revived Wells's interest. "I went up there," he continued, "and found the old woman who runs the outfit. Emma Tso. She told me her son-in-law had been out looking for some sheep, and smelled something, and found the body under some chamiso brush in a dry wash. A witch had killed him."
"How-"
Chee cut off the question. "I asked her how he knew it was a witch killing. She said the hands were stretched out like this." Chee extended his hands, palms up. "They were flayed. The skin was cut off the palms and fingers."
Wells raised his eyebrows.
"That's what the witch uses to make corpse powder," Chee explained. "They take the skin that has the whorls and ridges of the individual personality-the skin from the palms and the finger pads, and the soles of the feet. They take that, and the skin from the glans of the penis, and the small bones where the neck joins the skull, and they dry it, and pulverize it, and use it as poison."
"You're going to get to Begay any minute now," Wells said. "That right?"
"We got to him," Chee said. "He's the one they think is the witch. He's the City Navajo."
"I thought you were going to say that," Wells said. He rubbed the back of his hand across one blue eye. "City Navajo. Is it that obvious?"
"Yes," Chee said. "And then he's a stranger. People suspect strangers."
"Were they coming around him? Accusing him? Any threats? Anything like that, you think?"
"It wouldn't work that way-not unless somebody had someone in their family killed. The way you deal with a witch is hire a singer and hold a special kind of curing ceremony. That turns the witchcraft around and kills the witch."
Wells made an impatient gesture. "Whatever," he said. "I think something has made this Begay spooky." He stared into his glass, communing with the bourbon. "I don't know."
"Something unusual about the way he's acting?"
"Hell of it is I don't know how he usually acts. This wasn't my case. The agent who worked him retired or some damn thing, so I got stuck with being the delivery man." He shifted his eyes from glass to Chee. "But if it was me, and I was holed up here waiting, and the guy came along who was going to take me home again, then I'd be glad to see him. Happy to have it over with. All that."
"He wasn't?"
Wells shook his head. "Seemed edgy. Maybe that's natural, though. He's going to make trouble for some hard people."
"I'd be nervous," Chee said.
"I guess it doesn't matter much anyway," Wells said. "He's small potatoes. The guy who's handling it now in the U. S. Attorney's Office said it must have been a toss-up whether to fool with him at all. He said the assistant who handled it decided to hide him out just to be on the safe side."
"Begay doesn't know much?"
"I guess not. That, and they've got better witnesses."
"So why worry?"
Wells laughed. "I bring this sucker back and they put him on the witness stand and he answers all the questions with 'I don't know' and it makes the USDA look like a horse's ass. When a U. S. Attorney looks like that, he finds an FBI agent to blame it on." He yawned. "Therefore," he said through the yawn, "I want to ask you what you think. This is your territory. You are the officer in charge. Is it your opinion that someone got to my witness?"