Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 02] (13 page)

"I'd heard some of that," Leaphorn said. "So this Kothluwalawa where Bowlegs said he was going is a lake somewhere down the Zuñi Wash?"

"It's not that simple," Ingles said. "I have four books about the Zuñis in my office—each one written by an ethnologist or anthropologist who was an authority. They have it located in four different places. One of them has it down near the confluence of Zuñi Wash and the Little Colorado, over in Arizona, not far from Saint Johns. And one of them says it's down south near the old Ojo Caliente village. And another of them puts it up in the Nutria Lake area northeast of here. And I've heard a couple of other places, most often a little natural lake just across the Arizona border. And I know that
some
Zuñis think of it as being located only in metaphysics, beyond time and space."

Leaphorn said nothing.

"What made me think of Kothluwalawa was that business of the dance hall. If you translate that word to English it means something like 'Dance Hall of the Dead,' or maybe 'Dance Ground of the Spirits,' or something like that." Ingles smiled. "Rather a poetic concept. In life, ritual dancing for the Zuñi is sort of a perfect expression of…" He paused, searching for the word. "Call it ecstasy, or joy, or life, or community unity. So what do you do when you're "beyond life, with no labors to perform? You spend your time dancing."

The priest blew another blue cloud of cigar smoke over the cemetery, and they sat there, Navajo policeman and Franciscan missionary, watching the cloud dissipate over the Zuñi graves. In the west the sky had turned garish with sunset. What George Bowlegs was hunting, Leaphorn thought, was a concept so foreign to The People that their language lacked a word for it. There was no heaven in the Navajo cosmos, and no friendly kachina spirit, and no pleasant life after death. If one was lucky, there was oblivion. But for most, there was the unhappy malevolent ghost, the chindi, wailing away the eons in the darkness, spreading sickness and evil. He thought about what Ingles had said. This Kothluwalawa might be the word Cecil remembered that started with a
K
.

"I think what's important is not where this Zuñi heaven is located," Leaphorn said. "What's important is where George thinks it's located."

"Yes," Ingles said. "The same thought occurred to me."

"Where would he think it is?"

Ingles thought about it. "I bet I know. I bet it would be that little lake just across the border. It's used a lot for religious purposes. The religious people make prayer retreats to shrines over there, and they go several times a year to catch frogs and so forth. I think it would be my first guess. If George was asking around about it, that's where he'd most likely be told it was located. And now I have a question for you. Why are you hunting the boy? Do you think he killed Ernesto and his own father, too? If you think that, then I think you're wrong."

Leaphorn thought about the answer. "He could have killed Cata. He must have been somewhere near when it happened. And then he ran. And he
could
have killed Shorty. But there doesn't seem to be any reason. I guess that's the trouble. Nobody seems to have a reason." Leaphorn's tone made a question. He looked at the priest.

"To kill Ernesto? Not that I know anything about," Ingles said. "He was a good kid. Served Mass for me. Had a lot of friends. No enemies that I know of. What kid that age has enemies? They're too young for that."

"Cecil Bowlegs told me that Ernesto and George had stolen something." Leaphorn spoke slowly. This was the sensitive point. It had to be said very carefully. "It was supposed to have been something from that anthropological dig north of Corn Mountain. Ernesto was a Catholic. He was an altar boy. If he stole something he knew he had to give it back before he could make a good confession. Is that right?"

Ingles was grinning at him. "What you are saying is, "You're his confessor. Did he confess anything to you that would explain why somebody killed him?' That's what you are asking me, but you know I can't reveal what I'm told in the confessional."

"But Cata's dead now. Nothing you tell me now is going to hurt that boy. Maybe it would help George Bowlegs."

"I'm thinking about it," Ingles said. "You know, I've been a priest almost forty years and it never came up before. Probably I won't tell you anything, but let's think a minute about the theology we've got ourselves involved in here."

"Just negative information might help. Just knowing that he didn't steal anything important. Cecil Bowlegs told me it was some arrowheads from the dig site, but it wasn't that. They checked and told me they weren't missing any artifacts. In fact, they weren't missing anything."

Ingles sat silently, his teeth worrying his lower lip, his mind worrying the problem. "To be a mortal sin, the offense has to be serious," he said. "What you're describing wouldn't have been more than a very minor imperfection. Something a boy would do. Something a boy with a less scrupulous conscience than Ernesto wouldn't even think of confessing."

"Now he's dead can't you tell me?" Leaphorn said. "A tool? A piece of paper? Can you tell me what?"

"I think I can't," Ingles said. "Probably I shouldn't even tell you that it was inconsequential. Nothing of value. Nothing that would tell you anything at all."

"I wonder why, then, he wanted to confess it. Did
he
think it was important?"

"No. Not really. It was Saturday afternoon. I was hearing confessions. Ernesto wanted to talk to me, very privately, about something else. So he got in line. And then, since he was in the confessional anyway, I heard his confession and gave him absolution. Confession is a sacrament," Ingles explained. "God gives you grace for it, even if there's no sin to be absolved."

"Saturday. Last Saturday? The day before he was killed?"

"Yes," Father Ingles said. "Last Saturday. He was my server Sunday at Mass, but I didn't talk to him. That was the last time Ernesto and I had a talk."

Ingles slid suddenly from the wall. "I'm getting cold," he said. "Let's go in."

Through the heavy wooden door, Ingles bowed in the direction of the altar and pointed Leaphorn toward the back pew.

"I don't know what I've said that's helpful," he said. "That George Bowlegs' dad was a drunk—which I guess you already knew. That Ernesto Cata hadn't done anything bad enough to cause anyone to kill him—or even scold him much, for that matter."

"Would it help any if you told me what Cata wanted to talk to you about? I mean before he confessed his sins?"

Ingles chuckled. "I doubt it," he said. "It was hardly the material for murder."

"But could you tell me what it was?"

"I don't think I'd tell a Zuñi," Ingles said. "But you're a Navajo." He smiled. "Ernesto thought maybe he had violated a Zuñi taboo. But he wasn't sure, and he was nervous about it, and he didn't want to admit anything to anyone in his kiva yet, and he just wanted to talk to a friend about it," Ingles said. "I was that friend."

"What taboo?"

"Children… anyone not yet old enough to be initiated into the Zuñi religion society aren't supposed to be told about the personifiers," Ingles said. "You know about that?"

"Something about it."

"Well, in Zuñi mythology, the Council of the Gods—or whatever you want to call the spirits of those drowned children—would come back to the village each year. They'd bring rain, crops, blessings of all sorts, dance with the people, and teach them the right way of doing things. But it always happened that some of the Zuñis would follow them when they left to return to the Dance Hall of the Dead. And when you followed, you died. This was too bad, and the kachinas didn't want it to keep happening, so they told the Zuñis that they would come no more. Instead the Zuñis should make sacred masks representing them, and valuable men of the kivas and the various fetish societies would be selected to impersonate various spirits. The kachinas would come only in spirit. They would be visible, I've been told, to certain sorcerers. But anyone else who saw them would die. Now, this arrangement between the kachinas and the Zuñis was a secret arrangement. Only those initiated into the religion were to know of it. The children were not to be told."

Leaphorn's attention had been split. He heard Ingles' slow, precise voice, but his eyes were studying the murals that spread down the walls of the mission. Against the blank white plaster were the Dancing Gods of the Zuñis, most of them man-sized and manlike, except for the grotesque masks, which gave them heads like monstrous birds. Only one was smaller, a figure of black spotted with red, and one was much larger—just over their heads by the railing of the choir loft was the giant figure of the Shalako, a nine-foot-high pyramid topped by a tiny head and supported by human legs. This was the "messenger bird" of the gods.

"That's what Ernesto was worried about," Ingles was saying. "He'd told George that he would be the personifier of Shulawitsi and he was worrying about whether that had broken the taboo.

"There." The priest pointed at the small black figure leading the procession of kachinas down the wall. "The little black one in the spotted mask is Shulawitsi, the Little Fire God. He's always impersonated by a boy. It's terribly hard work—exercises, running, physical conditioning, memorizing chants, memorizing dances. It's the highest possible honor a child can receive from his people, but it's an ordeal. They miss a lot of school."

"Telling George about it—
had
that violated the taboo?"

"I don't know, really," Father Ingles said. "George would have been initiated two or three years ago if he was a Zuñi—so he wasn't a child in the way the myth means and he certainly would have already known that kachinas in the Shalako ceremonials are being impersonated by the men who live here. But on the other hand, he hadn't been formally initiated into the cult secrets. The way it's explained in the myth, this Zuñi boy tells the little children deliberately, to spoil the ceremonial for them, because he's angry—and the anger is part of the taboo violation. It is forbidden to harbor any anger in any period of ceremonialism. Anyway, the Council of the Gods send the Salamobia to punish the boy." Ingles pointed to the fourth kachina in the mural—a muscular figure armed with a whip of yucca, its beaked head surmounted by a pointed plume of feathers, its eyes ferocious. Leaphorn's eyes had lingered on it earlier, caught by something familiar. Now he knew what it was. This was the same beaked mask he had seen two nights earlier, reflecting the moonlight behind the hogan at Jason's Fleece.

"What was the punishment?" Leaphorn asked.

"The Salamobia chopped off his head with a machete—right in the plaza out here—and played football with it." Ingles laughed. "Most of the Zuñi mythology is humane and gentle, but that one's as bad as one of the Grimms' fairy tales."

"Do you know how Ernesto was killed?"

Ingles looked surprised. "He bled to death, didn't he? I presumed he'd been knifed."

"Someone chopped him across the neck with a machete," Leaphorn said. "They almost cut his head off."

LEAPHORN HAD BEEN UP since dawn, making his third visit to the Bowlegs hogan. Around the brush corral he had examined the hoofprints of the horse George Bowlegs had taken, memorizing the nature of the horseshoes and every split and crack in the hooves. The body of Shorty Bowlegs was gone now. Buried by one of the Zuñis for whom he had herded, Leaphorn guessed, or taken by O'Malley for whatever post-mortem magic the FBI laboratory technologists might wish to perform in Albuquerque. The livestock was gone, too, but the worldly goods of Shorty Bowlegs remained inside—made untouchable to Navajos by ghost sickness. Their disarray had been increased by a third search, this one by the federals.

Leaphorn stood at the doorway and thoughtfully inspected the jumble. Something held him here—a feeling that he was forgetting something, or overlooking something, leaving something undone. But whatever it was, it eluded him now. He wondered if O'Malley had found anything informative. If the case broke and the Albuquerque FBI office issued a statement explaining how the arrest had been made, Leaphorn wouldn't be told. He'd read about it in the Albuquerque
Journal
or the Gallup
Independent
. Leaphorn considered this fact without rancor as something natural as the turn of the seasons. At the moment six law-enforcement agencies were interested in the affair at Zuñi (if one counted the Bureau of Indian Affairs Law and Order Division, which was watching passively). Each would function as its interests dictated that it must. Leaphorn himself, without conscious thought, would influence his actions to the benefit of the Dinee if Navajo interests were at stake. Orange Naranjo, he knew, would do his work honestly and faithfully with full awareness that his good friend and employer, the sheriff of McKinley County, was seeking reelection. Pasquaanti was responsible first to laws centuries older than the whiteman's written codes. Highsmith, whose real job was traffic safety, would do as little as possible. And O'Malley would make his decisions with that ingrained FBI awareness that the rewards lay in good publicity, and the sensible attitude that other agencies were competitors for that publicity

Leaphorn wasted a few moments considering why the FBI would accept jurisdiction in such a chancy affair. Usually the FBI would move into marginal areas only if someone somewhere was sure his batting average could be helped by a successful prosecution. Or if the case involved whatever held high agency priority of the season—and that these days would be either radical politics or narcotics. The presence of Baker said narcotics figured somewhere, and the attitude of O'Malley seemed to suggest that Baker had leads the federals weren't willing to share. Leaphorn pondered what these leads might be, drew a total blank, climbed back into his carryall, and started the motor. Behind him, in the rear-view mirror, he noticed the plank door of Shorty Bowlegs' hogan move. Shorty's malicious ghost, perhaps, or just the same gusty morning breeze that whipped an eddy of dust around the logs.