Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 02] (12 page)

"What do you mean?"

"I mean you don't make a single mistake. You don't screw up anything. Your records are exactly right. Nothing happens that would let any other scientist in any way cast any doubt on what you've found." Isaacs laughed, a grim, manufactured sound. "Like you don't let a couple of kids hang around your dig site. Like you don't let a girl hang around. You work from daylight until dark seven days a week and you don't let a damn thing distract you."

"I see," Leaphorn said.

"Reynolds let me know he was disappointed when he saw Susie here," Isaacs said. "And he raised bloody hell over the boys."

"So that sort of gives you a choice between Reynolds, who's done you a bunch of favors, and that girl, who needs some help."

"No. That's not it." Isaacs sat on the wheelbarrow rim. He looked away from Leaphorn, out across the valley. The sun had dipped behind the cloudbank now and the breeze was suddenly picking up. It riffled through his hair.

"These rocks I got here mean the rest of my life," he said slowly. "It means I get past the Ph.D. committee with no sweat, and I get the degree. And instead of being one of a hundred new Ph.D.s fighting it out for maybe three or four decent faculty places around the country, I have my pick. I have the reputation, and a book to write, and the status. And when I walk into the American Anthropological Association meetings, instead of being some grubby little pissant of a graduate assistant at some little junior college, why, I'm the man who helped fill in the missing link. It's the kind of thing that lasts you all of your life."

"All I was suggesting that you do," Leaphorn said, "was bring Susanne here and keep an eye on her until this business settles down."

Isaacs still stared out toward the Zuñi Buttes. "I thought about it before. Just to get her away from that place. But here's the way it would work. Reynolds would figure it was the last proof he needed that I wasn't the man for this dig. He'd pull me off and put somebody else on it. He may do it anyway because of those boys being here. And that would blow my dissertation research, and the degree, and the whole ball game."

He swung toward Leaphorn, his anger blazing again. "Look," he said. "I don't know how it was with you. Maybe pretty thin. Well, my folks, such as I had, were all east Tennessee white trash. Never been a one of them went to college. Never a one had a pot to piss in. Just poor trash. My dad had run off somewhere, according to my mother, and I wouldn't even swear she knew who he was. With me it was living with a drunken uncle in a sharecropper shack, and chopping cotton, and every year pleading for him to let me go back to school when fall got there so I could finish high school. And after that being janitor and dishwasher in a frat house at Memphis State, and even trying to get into the army just to get onto the GI Bill and find out what it was like to eat regular." Isaacs fell suddenly silent, thinking about it.

"You know how long I been shoveling out here? Damn near six months. I get out here by the time the light gets good enough. And I'm digging until dark. Reynolds got a three-thousand-dollar grant and he split it among eight sites. This one's sprawled out all up and down this hill so he gave me a little more. He gave me four hundred dollars. And I borrow money here and there and buy that old truck and build the cabin on it and try to keep eating on about fifty dollars a month and hope to God the loan sharks won't figure out where I am and take the truck back. And I don't begrudge a minute of it because this is the first chance an Isaacs had to be anything but dirt." Isaacs stopped. He was still staring at Leaphorn, his jaw muscles working. "And when I get it made, I'm going to take about two thousand dollars or whatever it costs and I'm going to get these beaver teeth pushed back into my face. It's the sort of thing that you get done when you're about twelve years old, if anybody gives a damn, and it's probably too late now to fix 'em, but by God, by God, I'm going to try."

On his way back down the slope Leaphorn noticed that Susanne was no longer waiting in the carryall. It didn't surprise him. Even watching his conversation with Isaacs from a distance, it would have been easy enough for the girl to see that she'd guessed right—that Ted Isaacs wasn't eager to have her move in. So she hadn't waited for the embarrassment of hearing about it. Leaphorn thought about where the girl might have gone and about all the things that go into choices. He thought about how the whiteman mind of Ted Isaacs sorted things out so that Susanne was on one side of the scale and everything else he wanted on the other, and about the weighting of values that would cause Susanne to be rejected. Then he shook his head and changed the theme. He skipped back nine thousand years to a naked hunter squatting on Isaacs' ridge, laboriously chipping out a lance point, breaking it, calmly dropping it, working on another one, breaking it, calmly dropping it. Leaphorn had trouble with the second part of this scene. His imagination insisted on having his Folsom Man shout an angry Stone Age curse and throw the offending flint down the slope. Way down the slope where no anthropologist would find it ninety centuries later.

FATHER INGLES of the Order of Saint Francis was a wiry, tidy, tough-looking little man, his face a background of old pockmarks overlaid with two generations of damage by sun and wind. Leaphorn found him sitting on the low wall surrounding the cemetery behind the Saint Anthony's Mission church. He was talking to a youngish Zuñi. "Be with you in a minute," Father Ingles said. He and the Zuñi finished working down a list of names—members of the Catholic Youth Organization girls' basketball team who would be making the bus trip to Gallup to meet the Navajo Sawmill Jills and the Acoma Bravettes in a holiday tournament. Now, with that job finished and the Zuñi gone, he still sat on the wall, huddled in a castoff navy windbreaker, looking across the graves at nothing in particular and telling Leaphorn in a slow, soft voice what he knew of the Shorty Bowlegs family.

Leaphorn knew Ingles by reputation. He had worked for years out of Saint Michael's Mission near Window Rock and was known among the Window Rock Navajos as Narrowbutt in deference to his bony hindquarters. He spoke Navajo, which was rare among white men, and had mastered its complex tonalities so thoroughly that he could practice the Navajo pastime of spinning off puns and absurdities by pretending to slightly mispronounce his verbs. Now he talked somberly. He had told Leaphorn about the family of Ernesto Cata, and now he told him about Shorty Bowlegs. Much of this Leaphorn already knew. After a while, when enough time had passed to make this conversation absolutely comfortable, Leaphorn would ask the questions he had come to ask. Now he was content to listen. It was something Joe Leaphorn did very well.

"This George, now. He's an aggravating little devil," Ingles was saying. "I don't think I ever saw a kid with a funnier turn of mind. Quick. Quick. Quick. About half genius and half crazy. The kind of a boy that if you can make a Christian out of him will make you a saint. Full of mysticism—most of it nonsense and all muddled up—but something in him driving him to know more than a natural man is supposed to know. He'll probably end up writing poetry, or shooting himself, or being a drunk like his father. Or maybe we'll still bag him and we'll have a Saint Bowlegs of Zuñi."

"Had he been coming to church here?"

"For a while," Ingles said. He laughed. "I guess you'd say he studied us, in competition with witchcraft and sorcery and the Zuñi religion and plain old starve-a-vision mysticism." The priest frowned. "You know, I'm not being fair to the boy, talking about him like this. George was looking for something because he was smart enough to see he didn't have anything. He knew all about what his mother had done and that's a cruel thing for a child. And of course he could see his dad was a drunk, and maybe that's even worse. He was away from his family, so he was denied the Navajo Way, and he didn't have anything to replace it."

"What did he know about his mother?"

"I've heard two variations. They lived over around Coyote Canyon someplace with her outfit. One way, she took to hitching rides into Gallup for drinking bouts with men. Or she moved out on Bowlegs and in with two brothers—and they were supposed to be witches. Take your pick. Or mix 'em up and take what you like of both. Anyway, Bowlegs didn't get along with his wife's people so he came back to his own folks at Ramah and then he got a job over here herding Zuñi sheep."

"Let's skip back just a little. You said the gossip was she moved in with two brothers who were witches. You remember any more about that? Who said it? Anything at all specific?"

"Guess I heard it two or three places. You know how gossip is. All fifth or sixth hand, and who knows where it started?" Ingles peered out across the cemetery, thinking. Moments passed. Ingles had lived among Navajos long enough to let time pass without strain. He fished a cigar out of his inside shirt pocket, offered it wordlessly to Leaphorn, who shook his head, bit off the tip, lit it, and exhaled a thin blue plume of smoke into the evening air. "Can't remember anything specific," he said, "Just that somebody told me the boy's mother was living with a couple of witches. You think it might be important?"

"No," Leaphorn said. "I just make a point not to overlook witch talk like that. We don't have much trouble on the reservation, but that's where a lot of it starts."

"You believe in witches?"

"That's like me asking you if you believe in sin, Father," Leaphorn said. "The point is you gradually learn that witch talk and trouble sort of go together."

"I've noticed that myself," Ingles said. "You think there's a connection here?"

"I don't see how."

Ingles ejected another blue plume into the air. They watched it drift down the wall. "Anyway, by then George's dad was going after the bottle pretty hard and so maybe George's interest in coming around the church was just running away from drinking. Anyway, he didn't stay interested long."

"You didn't get him baptized?"

"No. From what Ernesto told me, George started getting interested in the Zuñi Way instead. Comparing their origin myth with the Navajo and with our Genesis, that sort of thing. Ernesto used to bring him in to talk to me. He'd ask me about the difference between the Zuñi ka-china and our saints. Things like that."

Father Ingles punctuated another silence with more smoke.

"Very similar in a way. As we see it, when a Christian completes the good life his soul joins the community of saints. When the Zuñi completes his path, his spirit joins the village of the kachinas and he becomes one of them."

"What I know of the Zuñi religion is a little bit out of the anthropology books, a little hearsay, and a little from a roommate I used to have. It's not much, and part of it's probably wrong."

"Probably," Ingles said. "The Zuñis found out a long time ago that some outsiders looked on their religion as a sort of side show. And after that, most of them wouldn't talk about it to the anthropologists, and some of those who did were deliberately misleading."

"Right now I wish
I
knew a little more about it," Leaphorn said. "George told his little brother that he was going to find a kachina, or maybe it was
some kachinas
. He didn't seem to know exactly where to find them, but he must have had some idea because he said he'd be gone several days."

Ingles frowned. "Find some kachinas? He couldn't have meant the kachina dolls, I guess?"

"I don't think so. I think he, or he and Ernesto together, had done something to offend the kachinas—or thought they had, or some crazy damn thing like that—and George wanted to do something about it."

Ingles laughed. "That sounds about like George," he said. "That sounds exactly like him." He shook his head. "But where would he go? Did he say anything else?"

"He said if he didn't get his business done, he'd have to come back to Zuñi for Shalako. And he took one of the Bowlegs horses, if that helps any, and their rifle. To kill a deer for eating, I'd guess. And a girl he knew told me he said something about going to a dance hall. Can you make any connection out of all that?"

Ingles made a clucking sound with his tongue against his teeth. "You know what it might be?" he said. "It might be he's trying to find Kothluwalawa." The priest laughed and shook his head. "I don't know whether that makes any sense, but with George sense isn't all that important."

"Kothluwalawa?" Leaphorn asked, "Where's that?" The priest's amusement irritated him. "He was going somewhere you can go on a horse."

Ingles sensed the anger. "It's really not as impossible as it sounds. We tend to think of heaven as being up in the sky. The Zuñis also have a geographical concept for it, because of the nature of their mythology. Do you know that myth?"

"If I did, I don't remember much of it now."

"It's part of the migration mythology. The Zuñis had completed their emergence up through the four underworlds and had started their great journey hunting for the Middle Place of the Universe. Some children of the Wood Fraternity were carried across the Zuñi River by the older people. There was sort of a panic and the children were dropped. As they were washed downstream, instead of drowning they turned into water animals—frogs, snakes, tadpoles, so forth—and they swam downstream to this place we're talking about. According to the mythology, it's a lake. Once they got there, the children changed from water animals and became kachinas, and they formed the Council of the Gods—the Rain God of the North, the Rain God of the South, the Little Fire God, and the rest of them. Originally a hundred or so, I think."

"Sort of like the Holy People of the Navajo," Leaphorn said.

"Not really. Your Holy People—Monster Slayer, Changing Woman, Born of Water, and all that—they're more like a cross between the Greek hero idea and the lesser Greek gods. More human than divine, you know. The kachinas aren't like anything in Navajo or white culture. We don't have a word for this concept, and neither do you. They're not gods. The Zuñi have only one God, Awonawilona, who was the creator. And then they have Shiwanni and Shinwanokia—a man-and-woman team created by God to create the Sun, and Mother Earth, and all living things. But the kachinas are different. Maybe you could call them ancestor spirits. Their attitude toward humans is friendly, fatherly. They bring blessings. They appear as rain clouds."