Shadow Play Read online

  “What do you mean?” I said. Parking the Cherokee in Leon’s carport.

  “Smashing up the place,” the man said. “I just came back from thirty-six holes, I see Leon’s door open so I stop my cart, he shot himself, you see, and I knew nobody lived there, I wanted to find out who’s in there, see if I should call the sheriff’s office. Or what.”

  “It’s all right,” I said.

  “Up my ass it’s all right,” the man said. “Somebody’s in there smashing up the place. Listen, what are you doing here?”

  “I don’t hear any noise.” Getting out of the Cherokee. “What kind of noise?”

  We both listened, but heard nothing.

  “Chopping wood. Breaking up wood, I don’t know. I’m calling the sheriff.”

  “It’s all right.” I started up the walkway. “When we were here earlier, the man in the house, he’s my partner, we’re here investigating Leon’s death.”

  “Badge me,” the man said. I shook my head, not understanding. “Your badge, what kind of cops are you? You don’t badge me, I’m calling the sheriff.”

  “You want ID,” I said. Opening my purse, I handed him one of a half-dozen different business cards I kept for any occasion like this. “Security,” I said, not explaining what kind of security.

  “Homeowner’s security?”

  “Related, yes. But I can probably tell you about the noise. When we were here, two hours ago during the monsoon, a mesquite branch flew into the back sliding door. Smashed the glass door, did a lot of damage. My partner in there is probably chopping up the wood, so it can be removed.”

  “I’m going out back to look.”

  “It’s all covered up, drapes, not much you’ll be able to see.” Having no idea what Nathan was doing inside, but not wanting anybody seeing it before me.

  “There’s a community walkway in back. Development property. I’ll just walk around there, have a look.”

  At the front door, I paused. “During the monsoon,” I said. “Were you playing golf?”

  “Yeah,” the man said. Matter of fact. Still gripping the Big Bertha, at least he closed his cell. I left him there, went inside, closed the front door.

  Total disaster area.

  “Nathan?”

  Front mirror smashed. Just inside the door, a Mexican painted giraffe statue crunched into fragments. Every single bit of living room furniture crumpled into pieces, no real design to the destruction, just smashed beyond use. Bits of the entertainment center surrounded smashed TV and electronics.

  “Nathan!”

  “Back here.”

  I stopped just outside the computer room, distracted by the broken bed frame and dressers, more destruction in the back bedroom, the drapes now hanging across the broken glass slider. I looked inside the computer room and saw Nathan, both hands clenched on the hickory handle of a sixteen-pound sledgehammer raised over his head in front of the large LCD display monitor, huge veins popping out on both temples and another zigzagging down his forehead, arm muscles rigid, every muscle etched under his skin, so close to the edge of destruction.

  “Nathan, Nathan! What are you doing?”

  “Breaking up his possessions.”

  “Nathan.” Quickly went to raise my hands across his. “You can’t…this is a crime scene, this is…”

  “This is a chindi house,” he said.

  “Put the sledgehammer down.”

  “I’m not done,” he said. Hesitant, almost as though for the very first time he was aware of what he’d been doing. “Just this room, then I’m done.”

  “Put. The. Sledge. Down.”

  “I…I…”

  Gently, carefully, I pulled against the hickory handle, pulled it downward. Reflexively he resisted, but I thrust my face two inches from his, nodding, smiling.

  “It’s all right,” I said. More pressure on the handle. “You’re frightening me, Nathan. I don’t know what you’re doing. I need you to put this sledgehammer down, I need you to do that first and then tell me what you’re doing.”

  “Chindi,” he said finally. Alert to the smashed computer desk and chair, relaxing his grip on the hickory. “Break up his possessions. He’s dead.”

  He let me grip the handle, take the sledge hammer and lower it to the floor. I wrapped an arm around his torso and led him into the hallway, the only place without smashed objects. I pressed both hands on his shoulders, pushing him down, both of us finally sitting on the floor, facing each other across the narrow hallway.

  “Okay,” I said. “Chindi. I know you’re really working at your Navajo roots, or traditions, or…hell, Nathan, I don’t really know what you’re working on. But start by explaining what chindi means.”

  “Ghosts.”

  “Skinwalkers?”

  “Where have you heard that? I haven’t told you that.”

  “Antoinette Claw. I found her, she said something about skinwalkers.”

  “I need to talk to her.”

  “She’s gone,” I said, “she’s driving back to the rez, but she’s going to call Robert Good Fellow.”

  “She’s going to see Bob?”

  “Forget Bob. Forget her. What’s happening in here, what’s real, Nathan. I need to know what’s real in all of this.”

  “You really want to know?”

  I kept myself from sighing, from showing any irritation or displeasure or negative reaction to him, so I kept my smile, I worked at keeping the smile in my eyes and I held his hands until he slumped, nodding his head, gathering thoughts.

  “When somebody is born, they receive the breath of life. When the person dies, that breath, that wind, goes out of the body. And becomes a chindi, a ghost.”

  “A ghost,” I said. Encouragingly, trying to get him to talk, but my never having believed in ghosts. “And?”

  “Well, it’s not like all of that person is a ghost. Some of the People believe that the better nature of the person goes to ciditah. The afterworld, the underworld, no, like inside the Hopi kiva, you know the hole? The place of emergence? Into the next worlds, that’s where the better side goes. The chindi, they wander here, in this world. Skinwalkers, some people call them. Ghosts.”

  “Skinwalkers, like coyotes, like wolves?”

  “Owls are bad, bad things to see. But it could be something as small as a mouse. Or a dust devil on a calm day. Strange fires at night. Or one of the dark spots at night, so dark and black it’s like a hole into…”

  “You’re really spooking me, Nathan. I mean, you’re freaking me out. Do you really believe in this ghost stuff?”

  Wrong question. He pulled his hands out of mine, stood up, went into the living room. I followed quickly, I didn’t want him picking up the sledgehammer again and I especially wanted us to get out of there before the old golfer called the sheriff.

  “Can we just go?” I said.

  “Right,” he said.

  I led him out the door, shutting the door firmly, led him to the Cherokee, opened the passenger door. Didn’t want him driving. The electric lime-green golf cart was still parked in the middle of the road, the old golfer apparently in his house. I got into the driver’s seat, started the engine, and slowly drove out of the development.

  “You think I’m over the edge. Don’t you?”

  “No. It’s just…well, Nathan, why did you smash things up, back there?”

  “Destroying his possessions. That mesquite branch, smashing out the window, it was to the east, making a hole for spirits to leave the death house. I had to complete the destruction so nobody would be harmed, if they went in there.”

  “Harmed?”

  “At night, skinwalkers return to the chindi house. Anybody there, skinwalkers could…could…”

  “I really want to hear more about skinwalkers, Nathan. I really, really want to understand all of this. But right now, it’s not the time. I saw an old man, outside. You know that golf cart? That old man heard you smashing furniture. I tried to tell him it was just you chopping up the mesquite branch
, but I don’t think he believed me and I bet he’s already called the sheriff’s office. So that’s where we’re going. Right now. I know exactly where it is, and we’re going in there.”

  “Why?”

  “First of all, if that old man called, they’re going to want to know what we were doing. It’s probably a good thing,” I said, “if we go to the sheriff’s office right now. Can you handle that? Can you?…”

  “Pull myself together? I’m not over the edge,” he said. “I had permission.”

  “For what?”

  “Leon’s family, Leon’s aunt. She gave permission to destroy Leon’s belongings. I’ve got a letter, I’ve got…you’re right, I need to see the sheriff.” He reached over to touch my nose. “I know I’ve been hard on you, I know…” Starting to smile, some darker thought crossed his mind and he pulled his finger away from my nose and stared straight ahead.

  “Who are these people?” I showed him the picture Antoinette gave me, the three men side by side. He swept over it quickly, stared out the window, did a double take and took the picture into his hands. “Is one of them Leon?” He pointed at the youngest boy, rubbing the old grainy black-and-white photograph, trying to make it sharper. “Older man must be Leon’s father?”

  “And this guy is Vincent. Always handsome, see, his shirt’s tucked in, jean bottoms turned up two inches.”

  “Just like John Wayne,” I said. “He always did that.”

  “So she took this picture from Leon’s house?”

  “Yes. She showed me one other. You, Leon, and Good Fellow. Whatever else she took, she didn’t show me. Just told me, if you knew who these three guys are, I should call Good Fellow and describe each one, from this picture.”

  “Bob’s an honest man. Let’s hope she trusts him. Let’s go see the law. I want to set this right, I want no trouble with the sheriff.”

  13

  Navajo men. Hadn’t thought much about Navajo men, even knowing Nathan a year and eleven days, he remained first and last my man, and until recently when he started building the sweat lodge, almost never a Navajo.

  My first husband, Jonathan Begay. Born to Dibé izhiní, the Black Sheep Clan, and born for Hasht ’ishnii, the Mud Clan. How long ago was that? I wondered. How long ago did I believe so much in Jonathan I thought he’d hung the moon?

  But in the last years with Jonathan, we rarely talked. Both of us said Listen because neither of us did. To communicate anything, we had to force our angry words sideways into the gaps between what the other said.

  “Laura,” Nathan said.

  “What?” Shaking my head.

  “You’ve been silent for nearly ten minutes.”

  I’d actually been thinking about my husband.

  “My husband’s name was Jonathan Begay,” I said. “And your dead friend is Leon Begay.”

  “On the rez, Begay is a common name. Like Jones. Like Smith.”

  “Still,” I said. “I wonder if they were related. If they knew each other.”

  “I don’t have time for this, what are you thinking?”

  “I’ve always wanted to tell you about him. You’ve heard so much about what my father did, but you’ve never really heard about Jonathan. And whatever violence I suffered from men, it was more from Jonathan than my father.”

  “All right. Tell me.”

  “In the beginning, nothing but happy times.”

  “When you say, in the beginning, how many years was that?”

  “Five, seven. We got married after eight years, and the troubles all started then. But in those first years, we thrived as lovers, soul mates, and guerrillas for Red Power, ready at a moment to load our half-ton Jimmy and travel to any Indian nation needing help. We’d had some fantastic times in that old Jimmy. We’d bought it nearly brand-new from a Bittersweet Clan woman who couldn’t make the payments. Jonathan drove and I learned how to do tune-ups, reline brakes, adjust the carburetor, usually because we had to clear out of some place with no money for mechanics and wouldn’t have chanced a regular garage anyway because we skipped out on the bank payments and usually changed license plates depending on what state we were driving through.

  “Did you love him?”

  “In the beginning, I loved the way Jonathan handed me commitment. Straight out, with no fancy dinner plates underneath. We lived with the constant hope of change, of making things better. Our taps wide open, love flowing for all things Indian, always primed to square off against the entire Bahana world. Brights flicked on all the time, no turn signals needed. Roaring arrow straight toward trouble. Hold back the dawn against the whites. Off the BIA, the BLM, the FBI.

  “I once hoped I could freeze dry the best of those moments, storing their essence away for later nourishment. But then we got married, came back here, and the barbed wire went up on Black Mesa, separating Hopi and Dine families by fenced boundaries, forcing some of Jonathan’s clan to give up centuries-old family land and move outside of the fence. Our troubles marinated like spoiling summer meat. Never once believing that troubles on the rez could possibly touch our partnership, we suddenly found ourselves at war because I wouldn’t support armed resistance of the Dine Second Big Walk.

  “Just like the land dispute partitioned off families, Jonathan increasingly partitioned his life into different political activities, shutting me out of most of them. Our only passion was sex, which somehow got more and more violent. Wow. Did you hear that, about how I used those words in the same sentence?”

  “You mean sex and violence? Are those the words you mean?”

  “It was a terrible life. We couldn’t talk to each other because neither of us wanted to listen. Jonathan took to supplying guns all over the country, talking up armed struggle from Montreal to Pyramid Lake, while I took to speaking out in public. Show me a bullet, I’d tell people, that’ll kill drunkenness and unemployment and such on the rez. People got tired of listening to me, I got so preachy and shrill. So I asked him to move out. He did, but only because he had to go to Wyoming, or some place, I never knew where.

  “Two months after we’d separated, Jonathan came back to the house and even when I told him to leave he’d come whenever he pleased. One day I came home to find that he’d sold my pickup, a beautifully reconditioned old Chevy stepside, nineteen years old, only thirty-eight-thousand miles after the engine rebuild. Even though we showed joint ownership on the title, he’d forged my name for the sale and used the money to buy a Blazer four-wheel drive plus a twenty-four-foot power cruiser, fully trailered and now parked defiantly in my driveway.

  “I spent hours with a hacksaw sawing through everything metal I could find on the power cruiser. He threatened me so bad that night I knew that I couldn’t stay in the house any longer. When he went out for some beer and groceries, I packed a bag and left for Flagstaff. Jonathan became so enraged that he put on his second-hand police flak vest and cammie clothing, loaded the shotgun, grabbed two boxes of shotgun shells, his Fairbairn-Sykes commando knife, his .357 with the six-inch barrel and four autoloaders, and the .30-06 10X scoped hunting rifle with the 180 grain handloads, crammed everything into his pickup, and started cruising the streets in Flagstaff looking for me. I was walking from the bus stop and so he saw me before he’d been out not more than a few minutes. I often wondered what would have happened if I’d walked faster, or turned down another street.

  “But he found me. He took me home and did whatever pleased him for hours and hours. The next morning he dared me to complain to the police, boasting that nobody’d much care about what a husband and wife did in their own home. To my astonishment and despair when I went to the police station, he was right.

  “Everything ended abruptly one night when he got sloppy drunk in a Flagstaff bar and savagely beat up a Havasupai who kept pulling me to the dance floor. After serving ten days in jail, furious because this time I wouldn’t go him bail, he walked out of the cell, came home to pick up our daughter, and they both disappeared from my life. I kept hearing about Jonathan getting i
n worse and worse trouble, about how there were both state and federal warrants out for him, how some of those warrants named me, too. Finally, I just drove off into Mexico.”

  He’d stopped driving. We were in the sheriff’s office parking lot. “I’d like to hear more about him,” Nathan said. “Some other time. Let’s go inside.”

  14

  The monsoon had completely blown over by the time we drove up to the Green Valley substation, Pima County sheriff’s department, a small complex of buildings just off La Canada. Sunset beyond the Pima Mine, its striated color lines completely dark now, rim barely lit by the last rays of the sun.

  We parked outside the substation, both of us hesitant to start this ball rolling. A pileated woodpecker worked deep inside the crevices of a huge mesquite, retrieved a grasshopper and carried it away. Mesquite pods lay all over the caliche, some old and blackened, others still green, the seed balls hard against the skin of the pods.

  “Ready?” I said.

  “If I have to stay here,” he said, “if they keep me here, call Bob at my house. Tell him I’m here, ask if Antoinette checked with him.”

  “Why would you have to stay here?”

  “That letter. Authorizing me to destroy Leon’s belongings.”

  “You have it, right? Oh, please, tell me you have it with you.”

  “There’s no letter,” he said.

  “So let’s not go in here.”

  “Call Bob. He’ll arrange a letter, he’ll get it faxed down here.”

  “You don’t have to do this.”

  “Laura,” he said. “If this was Dinetah, we’d be in a different world. The tribal police, they’d understand. Down here, we’re in the system. I have to be true to this.”

  “Then let me handle some of it.” Digging in my handbag for my PI license.