Shadow Play Read online

  David Cole

  Shadow Play

  For Monica Tilley and Theresa May

  who told me to get the man out of the house

  If you’re in combat and your troops are lost

  Beg God come to your rescue if the enemy is Navajo

  Epa nava, ene yo saca Navajo, heyo,

  yayo jene ya heyo yayo heyo heieieieio

  If you go to Navajo land beware of the danger

  Because Death over there is firm and unyielding

  —from a traditional New Mexico coplas,

  a verse song of the Southwest

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Skinwalker

  Suicide

  1

  At sunrise the breeze shivered between the mesquite and palo…

  2

  Georgia Roan held both her palms an inch away from…

  3

  “Lab results are back,” Dr. Wallace announced.

  4

  Green Valley is a seniors residential community, twenty miles south…

  5

  These days, I often question myself.

  6

  I sat sideways, legs outside the Cherokee while I fitted…

  7

  But first, the master bedroom. Nathan removed three crime scene…

  8

  People skills. A running joke between Nathan and me. In…

  9

  Somebody was home. Front door half open, an almost new…

  10

  A giant Kachina stood just inside Patrick Valasnuyouoma’s rusted screen…

  11

  “Anasazi Flamingo Casino.”

  12

  “I don’t know what’s going on there,” the old man…

  13

  Navajo men. Hadn’t thought much about Navajo men, even knowing…

  14

  The monsoon had completely blown over by the time we…

  Gun

  15

  I did something I’d promised Nathan I’d never do again.

  16

  Just a coyote, I kept reminding myself. Just an animal.

  17

  Fighting the morning Tucson traffic on Speedway, Tucson no longer…

  18

  Tastefully lit signs, no blinking neon, no outrageous colors, little…

  19

  “One moment,” the digital female voice said.

  20

  Vincent Basaraba.

  21

  “Georgia?”

  22

  “Hola,” she said, hands fluttering welcome. “Sí, sí, this is…

  23

  The bottom trigram emerged

  24

  He came by at two-thirty, clumping an aluminum walker down…

  25

  “These are my best thoughts on what you ask,” Bob…

  Gary Cooper

  26

  “Why?” I said. Bob didn’t understand. “They’ve got television up…

  27

  Xylophone music rolled out of the casino, swelling every time…

  28

  Rich people move to the Tucson foothills, underneath the southern…

  29

  The thing is, I liked him. Who isn’t fascinated by…

  30

  Once upon a time, a long time ago, I swung…

  31

  “Who was that?” Nathan said when I ran to hug…

  32

  “This is both simple and complicated,” Alex said. “We’ve finished…

  Ruby

  33

  Marvin Katz squeezed a few drops of lemon on the…

  34

  I once loved to drive long, empty miles to nowhere.

  35

  My cell rang just after midnight. I’d crossed the last…

  36

  The gateway, I kept thinking of the gateway all during…

  37

  “We’ve got a database,” Alex shouted. “We’re reformatting it.”

  38

  Outside the casino, we sat in my Cherokee, waiting for…

  Epilogue

  Weeks later, on our way again to the Navajo reservation,…

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by David Cole

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  If you’re in combat and your troops are lost

  Beg God come to your rescue if the enemy is Navajo

  Epa nava, ene yo saca Navajo, heyo,

  yayo jene ya heyo yayo heyo heieieieio

  If you go to Navajo land beware of the danger

  Because Death over there is firm and unyielding

  —from a traditional New Mexico coplas,

  a verse song of the Southwest

  skinwalker

  Children told the first of the skinwalker stories at night, but it took several weeks before the number of these stories accumulated and spread around the Navajo families at Monument Valley.

  Most stories began in the same way.

  “There was a family,” some kid would say. “Sleeping in their hogan, but this girl, she heard something on the roof, uh, some scratching sound up there, and she woke up the family and they all heard the scratching too. So the dad built up the fire, real hot, smokey-hot inside the hogan, and the scratching stopped, so this boy, he went outside and climbed on top of a flat rock and watched the roof of the hogan and pretty soon he saw somebody walking up there, something hairy, hair all over the body and on the feet and hands, and in the hogan, they let the fire down, they thought nobody was bothering them no more, and stuff came down the smokehole. Pollen, but not sacred corn pollen, it was like gray ashes, the dad said it was the ground-up bones of little babies.”

  This story spread, who knows, probably one story led to another, it was a very hot summer and the People just wanted to sleep after a long day in the sun, watching their sheep, because it was time for shearing of the lambs.

  So when the Navajo Tribal Policeman heard about the stories, they were everywhere, every family had another story, and so it spread that a yenaldlooshi was taking babies and cutting off children’s heads. And so he made his rounds at twilight instead of dawn, stopping at hogans through the evening, where one night he visited Martin Yellowhorse and his family of five, and young John, aged eleven, was eager.

  “Okay,” John said. “There was this family.”

  The policeman wanted to hear the family’s name, but being Navajo, couldn’t and wouldn’t interrupt the story, it had to come out from the teller.

  “The two boys, they got together with some other boys and their dogs and they went out to camp one night, up at Thunderbird Mesa. Okay. So one of the dogs got to howling, something was out there, the dog ran away from the boys, ran away chasing something into the dark and next thing, okay, the boys heard a different kind of howling, not dog howling or coyote, some animal they’d never heard before.”

  The policeman waited, but that was the whole story.

  “Yenaldlooshi,” the dad said. Everybody nodded, but nobody said anything more because the mom took the mutton off the stove just then and the policeman had to eat with them, to leave would have been discourteous.

  Over the next few weeks, he heard many skinwalker stories and he made a map, pushing little colored pins into spots where skinwalker incidents occurred, or where the stories seemed to indicate. Gradually, he found a pattern that centered on Right Mitten, one of the most photographed places in Monument Valley, and also the one-time home of the Begay family.

  The policeman made careful inquiries about the Begay family, since he knew one of the brothers, had served in Vietnam with this brother. The father had been murdered decades before. The one brother was in the army Rangers, the other brother was a movie star, so nobody
wanted the old man’s belongings and according to custom they were smashed to pieces, a hole was knocked in the roof of the hogan, and it was a chindi, a ghost house. Over the years, part of the roof fell in, and pieces of the eastern wall, but the People left this hogan alone.

  The skinwalker stories grew and the People around Monument Valley were afraid and watched over each other and their children and their kinship children. Even in those places where skinwalkers weren’t reported, the People watched because ghosts can travel, they get into the body through curly hair and fingerprint spirals and through the mouth and nose and ears.

  Then one night Charlie Sand Castle thought he heard something outside his hogan and his dog took off, howling and yowling. He loaded his 1894 Winchester pump shotgun, a sixteen-gauge old-timer, some of the bluing rubbed clean off and the stock cracked when a horse stomped on it, but Charlie glued it together. Some of the People said that only certain guns could kill a skinwalker, so Charlie passed up his .30-30 lever Winchester for the old shotgun, put several double-ought buck shells inside, ran out of his hogan and saw somebody running and running and Charlie ran after him, he was seventy-nine years old but could still run all day, the running man stumbled in a dry watch and Charlie stood on the rim of the wash and blew the man’s head off, Charlie saying at first he looked down at the head bouncing in the moonlight and the eyes rolling around, as the head rolled the eyes kept turning so they focused on Charlie and he blasted the head just in that instant when he recognized he’d just shot his best friend Nathaniel Yazzie, who was always scared of dogs and ran away from them. Nathaniel had some fry bread his wife Yolanda had made up, he was bringing it to Charlie, but the dog howled and made him run away.

  A manilla envelope arrived at the Tribal Police substation the next morning. Postmarked in Green Valley, Arizona, addressed to Vincent Begay, return address of the Pima County Sheriff Substation. The policeman happened by the mail delivery and so he opened the envelope and read the short note inside, asking that the surviving family of the enclosed named deceased be informed. The policeman knew from the devastating pictures inside that he must now make a choice between the natural harmony of not interfering, not disturbing hozho, the harmony, and the policeman’s way, which was the outsider way no matter how much any policeman wanted to be one with the People, he worked according to different laws and rules of action.

  Since he now had nearly two dozen colored pins on his map, clustered around the old abandoned Begay hogan. He went out one night on his horse, a five-gallon can of coal oil hanging off the saddle. Stopping along the way, resting for minutes at each stop, wary that he might be seen, working over the bad thing he was going to do, but he couldn’t see any other way out of it.

  He studied the stars and those constellations recognized by the People, thirty-seven in all. As always, since he was a child, he marveled at how Black God kept the stars inside a folded blanket, but Coyote came along one night and snapped the blanket open to the night air, scattering the stars.

  Enough of the old ways for tonight, the policeman thought.

  He touched the gasoline can.

  I’m an outsider, he thought. I can’t forget Black God and Changing Woman and Monster Killer and Spider Woman and all the legends, but I’m an outsider.

  With these thoughts, he knew that the flavor, the meaning, the harmony of the legends had died within him. Reaching the old Begay hogan, he wasted no time emptying the gasoline can, dousing first the roof and then the cedar walls, the cedar so dry that the fire sprang full-blown from the single match he threw down, and for some time the brilliance of the flames forced the stars to hide. The hogan burned quickly, within half an hour reduced to just embers.

  Nobody saw him, but he’d crossed a line, his only justification that one man had killed another. The stars came out of hiding, the policeman rode to his trailer, got in his ’97 Dodge RAM pickup, and thought that was the end of things.

  Some time during that night, Yolanda Kaye’s youngest baby, a nine-month-old boy named Slimmer Pete, disappeared and at noon the next day a sheepherder found Slimmer Pete’s headless body on the desert. Firing the Begay hogan touched the community, the clans, the families, the children. In six days, the People discovered six more headless bodies of Begay clan relations of all ages. One a day. Until the only clan relation alive was Frank Everwool, who’d driven over to Gallup for a funeral and hadn’t yet returned.

  This was no yenaldlooshi story about shadows on the roof, this was what skinwalkers did to babies and teenagers and good mothers and aunts and uncles. Good Fellow requested a week’s personal leave from his captain, got back into his pickup and didn’t stop driving until he reached Tuba City for gas and put through a collect call to his old friend Nathan Brittles.

  suicide

  1

  At sunrise the breeze shivered between the mesquite and palo verde trees, gusting in puffs and snorts strong enough to shake my lantana bushes. From the south-southwest, the top edge of another monsoon working up from Mexico. It was the middle of an unusually fierce August monsoon season, so much rain driving north into Tucson that at times the foothills shimmered with green, trees, bushes, even grasses once dead but revived by the water.

  I’d wanted a long run in Sabino Canyon that morning, at least fifteen miles up and down the roads for a serious muscle-burner workout, but when the breeze became a wind with twenty-mile-an-hour spurts, I stayed close to home, running a quiet loop through the Randolph Park section of Tucson around the two golf courses and along the wide sidewalks. Skateboarders wove between and around joggers, runners, and women pushing baby carriages, roller-bladers swooping in and out with their own internal rhythms or whatever popped on their CD player headsets. Nobody really working up a sweat, the breeze cooled us off.

  Dust devils rising on the baseball field and dirt playground.

  Nearing home, the vibrator of my cell whanged against my right hip. Close enough to slow down and read the LCD panel, caller ID showed me it was Nathan.

  “You free later this afternoon?”

  “Free for what?” Playful.

  “I need you,” he said.

  “What did you have in mind?” Both playful and needy, wanting to see him. Instead of spending last night at his place up in Casa Grande, I stayed home because my daughter Spider said we’d catch a movie, but her boyfriend’s lowrider snarled into our driveway before dinner. A black-pearl ’78 Caddy convertible, rigged with all conceivable hydraulics, huge subwoofer audio system, chromed spinner hubcaps, whatever there was to buy, Carlos had it. Spider vaulted the closed passenger door into the leather seat, waved at me while Carlos backed into the street, she five months pregnant and not bothering with the seatbelt.

  “It’s work. Can’t explain now, are you free?”

  “I have a Reiki session, lunch with Spider, a doctor’s appointment.” I didn’t tell him about what kind of doctor. “Maybe, I guess. Later. Why?”

  “You’re a registered PI,” Nathan said. “Also certified to do photographic forensics at crime scenes. Meet me down south, past Green Valley.”

  “This a fresh scene?” I’ve done both murder scene and autopsy photographs, but hated fresh scenes, hated the blood and body parts.

  “No.” He gave me directions.

  “How old?”

  “Week ago. It’s been closed as a murder-suicide. Shotgun. Look, I just don’t have time to tell you much.”

  “Why are we going there?”

  “Two old friends,” he said. “You’ll be there at four?”

  That was a question I’d ask myself many times in the next week. Well, not quite that question. Will I always be there for you? That question, the answer so far a big yes, but. I’ll tell you about that later.

  Two dead friends? I wanted to ask. One murder the other, turned the gun on himself? Herself? “Four o’-clock,” I said instead. “Yes, of course I’ll be there.”

  He’d already disconnected.

  “Alex,” I said. My seventeen-year-old partn
er, computer hacker Alex Emerine. “Stand by this afternoon, okay?”

  “What’s up?” she said.

  “Stress call from Nathan, I have no idea what, but stay at your keyboard, just in case. What are you working on?”

  “The ATM scams. Six-figure pledge to a nonprofit, funds no go.”

  “Is this a new client?”

  “Tohono Chul park. Some guy pledged two hundred and fifty large, gave them a cashier’s draft, guy committed suicide, draft no good.”

  “Work that as priority,” I said. “That’s a good place. Good people. I’ll call you later if I need you.”

  Nathan Brittles is my partner and my lover. These are not the same two things. Our hearts are one with each other, our spirits intensely overlapping and intensely different. To relieve this intensity, we live in separate houses at this time.

  Also, Nathan now struggles to learn more of the traditional Dineh ways. Dinetah people are Navajos to the rest of the world. I can’t connect to my Hopi past. Like, I’ve gone through some desired ethnic change despite the realities of my birth.

  2

  Georgia Roan held both her palms an inch away from my right shoulder.

  “Wait for the heat,” she said. I’m just too impatient, some days I can’t let myself relax into Reiki sessions. “Laura. Unlock your knees.” I’d crossed my ankles, legs straight out on the massage table. “If you don’t bend your knees, the energy just doesn’t circulate, it bounces back up. Locks up the energy.”