Nightwing by Martin Cruz Smith Page A

man’s clothes, covers hisself in rabbit blood and goes to Jeddito to make medicine.”
    “Did it work?”
    “What do you think? Those pahans see some nut in rags and blood shrieking his head off, you think they’re gonna stick around? Shit, man.”
    Powell cleared his throat.
    “Listen to this in the paper. ‘Although the pahans have drained the Gila River dry, although the pahans have stolen four times their legal share of water from the Colorado River, although they have raped Glen Canyon and the Little Colorado River, although they have stolen wholesale the San Juan River, the water table level under Phoenix is still falling so fast the city may be a ghost town in twenty years.’ ”
    “Asshole,” Cecil yawned. “Before there’s a dry swimming pool in Phoenix, they’ll be up here to drain you for spit.”
    “That’s just the kind of remark I could expect from you.” Powell was the star pupil of his mission school. He talked like a typewriter. “We don’t have any leadership, just old men and the nonpolitical types like you two. That’s why we have to join Chee; at least he’s a leader who knows how to read a contract. That’s why the Navajos have power plants and coal leases. Chee could get this reservation on the move again.”
    “Yeah, he’ll move us right into a toilet an’ slap the lid on if he gets the chance.” Cecil rooted behind the snake sack for a couple of beers. He handed a can to Youngman. “You get anyone dumb enough to bury Abner?”
    “Me.”
    “Oh, oh. Well, you get that shed of his then. But what about his medicine? He was into all kinds of powers no one else could handle.”
    “I don’t believe in that stuff.”
    “No one does. But you better take care of it, or give it back to the Fire Clan. They’re all up in Shongopovi today.”
    Youngman took the road up to the mesa, passing the turnaround area for Cal Gas trucks that couldn’t navigate the road any farther, going by orchards that produced small, wizened peaches, past corn stalks that would grow no higher than a man’s chest, on up to the new plywood-and-cement houses in Shipaulovi pueblo where Cecil lived and around the edge of the mesa for two more miles. Entering Shongopovi pueblo always brought about an immense depression in Youngman. More than almost any other pueblo, Shongopovi was the home of the old “Traditional” people. Retreating from Navajos, retreating from whites, making a last stand on the very rim of the mesa.
    A garbage dump. A hundred forlorn houses of stone and dirt set on rubble. Flanked by slopes of concrete outhouses. Not a blade of grass and not a real street, only flies dozing in alleys, a wrinkled face at a broken window, and shadows chipping at adobe. Inhabited ruins around a dusty plaza suspended over the desert. No one ever took the long fall, of course. At Shongopovi, everyone shuffled into oblivion.
    The sun was blinding. Youngman parked on the plaza in front of the house belonging to Harold Masito, a priest of the Bear Strap Clan, and went through a screen door into the cool, dark interior. Harold was on a sofa bed mending prayer sticks. The walls were decorated with color snapshots of his grandchildren and a needlepoint portrait of John Kennedy.
    At one time, Harold had been one of the strongest men on the reservation. The muscles were gone now, leaving his big frame bent and his face shrunken around a heavy nose and jaw. He was one of the men who’d made Youngman a deputy.
    “Abner is dead.” Youngman sat down respectfully on a folding chair.
    “Huh,” Harold nodded. Carefully, he bound a fluff around the base of the stick.
    “Two nights ago. You were a friend of his, so I thought you ought to know.”
    “That so?”
    Harold went on to a different prayer stick, arthritic fingers straining to be steady.
    “That’s so. I had to bury him alone. He asked you and the other priests to go out to his place before he died.”
    “I’m not Fire Clan.”
    “But you used to be his