Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 02] (14 page)

Following the directions Father Ingles had given him, Leaphorn picked up the gravel road that led to the Zuñi Tribal Sawmill back in the Cibola National Forest, continued on it to the Fence Lake road, turned northward past the prehistoric Yellow House Ruins to N.M. 53. The highway, as usual, was empty. As he approached the Black Rock airstrip a single-engine plane took off, banked above the highway in front of him, and climbed over Corn Mountain, heading eastward. Passing through the old village of Zuñi he slowed, thinking he might make the three-block detour to the Zuñi police station to learn if anything had developed overnight. He suppressed the impulse. If anything important had happened, it would have been known at the communications center at the Ramah chapter house, where he had spent the night. And he wasn't in the mood for talking to O'Malley or to Baker, or to Pasquaanti, or to anyone. O'Malley had told him to find Bowlegs. He would find Bowlegs if he could because his curiosity demanded it. And now for the first time since he'd been here there was something to work on. A direction. George had left his family hogan with the horse Monday night. The distance to the lake would be maybe fifty miles. If George had taken the most direct route he would angle across the Zuñi reservation, probably pick up the Zuñi Wash about at the Arizona state line, and then follow this southwest-ward toward U.S. Highway 666. The country was rough, sloping irregularly away from the Continental Divide, which rose to almost eight thousand feet east of the reservation, toward that great inland depression which the maps called the Painted Desert. But the only barriers were natural ones. No more than two or three fences, Leaphorn guessed, in a day-and-a-half horseback ride.

Leaphorn's plan was simple. He would drive as close as he could get to the location of the lake and then begin looking for Bowlegs' tracks. He felt good about it, anticipating the pleasure of some solid accomplishment after three days of frustrations.

On the radio, a slightly nasal disk jockey was promoting a sky-diving exhibition at the Yah-Ta-Hey Trading Post and playing country-western records. Leaphorn flicked the tuning knob, got a guttural voice speaking alternately in English and Apache. He listened a moment, picking up an occasional word. It was a preacher from the San Carlos Apache reservation, one hundred miles to the south. "The good book says it to us," the man was saying. "The inheritance of the sinner is as the waterless desert." Leaphorn turned down the volume. A good line, he thought, for a year of drought.

The narrow asphalt narrowed even more, its gravel shoulders turning to weeds, and N.M. 53 abruptly became Arizona 61 at the border. Something was nagging at the corner of Leaphorn's consciousness, a vague thought which evaporated when he tried to capture it. It made him uneasy.

At the intersection with U.S. Highway 666, Leaphorn saw Susanne. She was standing north of the junction, a flour sack on the ground beside her, looking small and cold and frail, and pretending—after the first quick glance—not to notice the Navajo Police carryall. Leaphorn hesitated. He didn't want company today. He had looked forward to a day alone to restore the spirit. On the other hand, he was curious. And he found himself remarkably fond of this girl. He didn't want her to simply disappear. He pulled the carryall off the pavement and stopped beside her.

"Where you going?"

"I'm hitchhiking," she said.

"I see that. But where?"

"North. Up to Interstate Forty." She shook her head. "I guess I don't really know exactly. I'm going to decide whether to go east or west after I get to the Interstate."

"I think I know how to find George," Leaphorn said. "That's where I'm going now. To try. If you've got time you could help."

"I couldn't help."

"You're his friend," Leaphorn said. "He's almost certain to see me before I see him. He'll figure I'm after him so he'll hide. But if he sees you, he'll know it's all right."

"I wish I was sure it was all right myself," she said. But when he opened the door, she put the flour sack behind the seat and got into the cab beside him. He did a U-turn and started southward down 666. The sign at the intersection said ST. JOHNS 29 MILES.

"We're going south toward the place where Zuñi Wash goes under the highway," Leaphorn said. "About fifteen or sixteen miles. Before we get there, there's a ranch gate. We're going to pull in there and put this truck out of the way someplace handy, and then do some walking."

Susanne said nothing. The hilltop view stretched twenty miles. The country was mostly undulating hills, but far to the south the great tableland of the Zuñi reservation extended, broken low mesas with scrubby brush timber on top and barren erosion below.

As he had guessed, Susanne had had no breakfast. He pointed to the grocery sack he had picked up at the store in Ramah.

"What happened to you yesterday? When Isaacs came to talk to you, you were gone."

"I went back to the commune. It was just the way I told you, wasn't it? Ted couldn't do anything? And my being there just made it harder for him?"

Leaphorn decided not to comment on that.

"So why did you change your mind about staying at the commune?"

"Halsey changed it for me. He said I was attracting too much police."

He noticed she was eating hungrily. Not just no breakfast, he thought. Probably no supper, either. She had folded up the cuff of her denim shirt and from it the frayed gray sleeve of a wool undershirt extended, covering the back of her narrow, fragile hand. As she ate, rapidly and wordlessly, Leaphorn saw that the skin between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand bore the puckered white of old scar tissue. It was an ugly, disfiguring shape. Whatever had caused it had burned through the skin right into the muscle fiber.

"So Halsey kicked you out?"

"He said to get my stuff together and this morning he gave me a ride out to the highway." She looked out of the window, away from him. "I was right about Ted, wasn't I? There wasn't anything he could do."

"You were right about that situation," he said. "Isaacs explained it the same way you did. He said Reynolds would fire him if anybody stayed there with him."

"There's just no way he could possibly do it," she said. "This is Ted's really big hope. He's going to be famous after this. You know, he's never been nothing but poor. Him and his whole family. And this is Ted's chance. He's never had a thing."

It sounded, Leaphorn thought, as if Susanne was trying to persuade both of them.

"He just couldn't do it," she said. "No way he could do it."

Leaphorn found the ranch gate Father Ingles had described about a mile and a half up the slope from Zuñi Wash. A weather-bleached sign was nailed to the post. The message it had once proclaimed—"Posted, Keep Out" or "Shut the Gate"—had long since been erased by the sandblasting of spring dust storms. Three coyote skins hung beside it, the gray dead hair riffling in the breeze.

"Why do they do that?" Susanne asked. "Stick 'em up on the fence?"

"The coyotes? I guess it's for the same reason white men put an animal's head on their wall. Shows everybody you got the machismo to kill him." The Navajo word for Hosteen Coyote was
ma ii
. He was the trickster, the joker, the subject of a thousand Navajo jokes, children's stories, and myths. He was often man's ally in the struggle to survive, and always the bane of a society which herded sheep. A Navajo would kill a lamb-killer if he could. It was a deed done with proper apology—not something to be flaunted on a roadside fence.

Leaphorn drove very slowly, keeping his wheels off the dirt track to cut the risk of raising dust. Each time the track branched toward another stock-watering windmill or a salt drop, Leaphorn chose the route that led toward the low escarpment of the Zuñi plateau. Father Ingles had said the lake was five or six miles in from the highway and below the mesa. It was a smallish natural playa that filled with draining runoff water in the rainy season and then dried slowly until the snow melt recharged it in the spring. Finding it would be relatively easy in a country where deer, antelope, and cattle trails would lead to any standing water.

. The last dim trail dead-ended at a rusty windmill. Leaphorn pulled the carryall past it into a shallow arroyo and parked it amid a tangle of junipers.

The lake proved to be less than a mile away. Leaphorn stood among the rocks on the ridge above it and examined it carefully through his binoculars. Except for a killdeer hopping on its stiltlike legs in the shallows, nothing moved anywhere around the cracked mud shore. Leaphorn studied the landscape methodically through the glasses, working from near distance first, and then moving toward the horizon, seeing absolutely nothing.

"Are you sure that's it?" Susanne asked. "I mean, for a sacred lake you expect something bigger."

The question irritated Leaphorn.

"Didn't Thomas Aquinas teach you white people that an infinite number of angels can dance on the head of a pin?"

"I don't think I heard about that," Susanne said. "I cut out of school in the tenth grade."

"Umm… well, the point is it doesn't take much water to cover a lot of spirits. But as far as
we're
concerned, it doesn't matter whether this is Kothluwalawa. What matters is whether George thinks it is. And
that
only matters if he came here and we can find him."

"I don't think he'd come here," she said doubtfully. "Why would he? Can you think of any reason?"

"All I know about George is what people tell me," Leaphorn said. "I hear he's sort of a mystic. I hear he's sort of crazy. I hear he's unpredictable. I hear he wants to become a member of the Zuñi tribe, that he wants to be initiated into their religion. O.K. Let's say some of that is true. Now, I
also
hear that Ernesto was his best friend. And that Ernesto was afraid he had broken a taboo by telling George more than you're supposed to tell the uninitiated about the Zuñi religion." Leaphorn paused, thinking about how it might have happened.

"Now. Let's say George left the bicycle where he was supposed to meet Ernesto and he wanders off somewhere. When he gets back, the bicycle is gone and so is Ernesto. That's natural enough. He thinks Ernesto didn't wait and he missed him. But he also notices that great puddle of blood. It would have been fresh then. It would have scared him. The next day he comes to school, looking for Ernesto. And he finds out Ernesto is missing. That's exactly the way it happened. Now, everybody tells me George is sort of crazy. Let's say he decides the kachinas have punished Ernesto for the broken taboo. George would have heard the legend about the boy who violated the secrecy rule and had his head cut off by the warrior kachinas. Maybe he wants to come here to ask the Council of the Gods to absolve him of any of the blame. Or maybe he came because here's where Ernesto's spirit will be coming to join the ancestors." Even as Leaphorn told it, it sounded unlikely.

"Remember," he said, "George asked you about whether the kachinas would absolve guilt. And remember he told Cecil he had to find the kachinas—that he had business with them."

"
Maybe
it's the way George would think," Susanne said. She glanced down at Leaphorn and then down at her hands. She pulled the cuff down over the scar. "He was way out in a lot of ways.

He and Ernesto were always talking about witches and werewolves and sorcery and having visions and that sort of thing. With Ernesto you could tell it was mostly just talk. But with George I think it was real."

"If he plans to be here when Ernesto's spirit arrives, we have a good chance of catching up with him. That would be sometime tomorrow. Maybe at dawn."

"What do you mean?"

"It takes five days' travel after death for the spirit to reach the Dance Hall of the Dead," Leaphorn said. "The Zuñis try to have the burial of one of their people within the same cycle of sun in which he died—so they had the funeral for Ernesto the same day they dug his body out from under that little landslide on the mesa. Had a quick funeral for him at the Catholic church and then after that the priests and the valuable men of his kiva held their graveside ceremonial. But in a way the funeral's not really over. They put five sets of fresh clothing in the burial shroud with the body. And on the fifth day he gets here—if this really is the place—and he passes the guarding spirits on the shore, and he joins the Council of the Gods and becomes a kachina."

"So you think George will be here tomorrow?"

Leaphorn laughed. "I don't know if I really think it, or whether I just can't think of any other possibility."

"Maybe he wants to be here to sort of say goodbye or something. I think Ernesto was the only friend he ever had. Maybe he wants to make some sort of crazy gesture."

"Like suicide?"

Susanne looked at Leaphorn with eyes too old for her face. "He might do something like that, I think. He wanted bad to be a Zuñi and I guess Ernesto was his only hope—if there ever was a hope. But it wasn't just that." Her teeth caught her lower lip, then released it. "He was so lonely. I think it must be bad to be a Navajo if being lonely bothers you."

The thought had never occurred to Leaphorn. He considered it, looking across the broken expanse of grass, brush, and erosion which faded away to empty blue distance across the pond. "Yeah," he said. "Like a mole that hates the dark."

"Were
you
thinking he might come here to kill himself? Or do Navajos do that?"

"Not much. Except with the bottle," Leaphorn said. "It's a little slower than a gun."

Around the lake Leaphorn found antelope tracks, some old moccasin imprints in the dried mud, and the various traces left by coyotes and porcupines and red fox—the myriad species of small mammals that standing water attracts in arid country. The moccasin marks pretty well eliminated any doubt that this playa had some religious significance even if it wasn't the Sacred Lake. Except for ritual events, Zuñis were no more likely to be wearing moccasins than were Navajos or FBI agents. But there were no signs of the hoofprints of George's horse, or of the boots that George would have been wearing. The only tracks of horses he found were old and almost erased, perhaps by the same windstorm that had howled around Shorty Bowlegs' hogan the night he was killed, and they didn't match the hoofprints Leaphorn had memorized there. Pastured horses, he guessed, watering here.