Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 02] (6 page)

"Anyway," Susanne said, "I'm d-d-d-dead sure he didn't do anything to Ernesto. They were like brothers."

"I heard that," Leaphorn said. "Ted Isaacs told me—"

The young man with the shaved head said, "
NO!
"The word was loud, startled, obviously not addressed to anything Leaphorn had been saying. It was the first word Leaphorn had heard the man speak. ("This is Otis," Susanne had said. "He's sick today." And Otis had turned glittering, unfocused eyes toward Leaphorn, staring up from the mattress on the hogan floor, saying nothing. It was not an unfamiliar look. Leaphorn had seen it in jail drunk tanks, in hospital wards, produced by wine and marijuana, by alcohol and peyote buttons, by the delirium of high fever, by LSD, by the venom of a rattlesnake bite.)

"No," Otis said again, more softly this time, simply confirming his rejection of some inner vision.

Susanne put her hand on the pale, bony arch of Otis's bare foot. "It's O.K., Oats," she said. "It's cool now. No problem."

Halsey leaned forward in his rocking chair, his face emerging past the book. He studied Otis and then glanced at Leaphorn, eyes curious. ("This is Halsey," Susanne had said. "He sort of holds this place together." Under his mustache Halsey grinned, challenging and combative, and extended his hand. "I never met a Navajo fuzz before," Halsey had said.) Whatever form Otis's nightmare took, it left his face drawn and bloodless, his eyes shocked.

"Is he on peyote?" Leaphorn asked. "If he is, they're usually all right after a couple of hours. But if it's not peyote, maybe a doctor should take a look at him."

"It couldn't be peyote," Halsey said, grinning again. "That stuff's illegal, isn't it?"

"It depends," Leaphorn said. "The way the Tribe sees it, it's O.K. if it's used for religious purposes. It's part of the ceremonial of the Native American Church and some of The People belong to that. The way it works, we don't notice people using peyote if they're using it in their religion. I'm guessing Otis here is a religious man."

Halsey caught the irony and its implications.

His grin became slightly friendly. Otis's eyes were closed now. Susanne was stroking the arch of his right foot. "It's all right now," she was saying. "Oatsy, it's cool." The sympathy in her face confirmed Leaphorn's guess about this young woman. She would tell him all she knew about George Bowlegs for the same reason she now tried to bring Otis back from his grotesque psychedelic nightmare.

"Isaacs said the same thing you do," Leaphorn said. "That George wouldn't hurt the Zuñi boy. But that's not the point. It looks like somebody did hurt the Zuñi. Maybe killed him. We think George can tell us something about what happened."

Susanne was now stroking Otis's ankle. Her face was blank. "I don't know where he is," she said.

"I talked to George's little brother today," Leaphorn said. "The boy tells me George is running because he is afraid of something.
Really afraid
. The little brother says George isn't afraid of us, of the police, because he didn't do anything wrong. What's George afraid of?"

Susanne was listening carefully, the stubbornness fading.

"I don't know," Leaphorn continued. "I can't guess. But I can remember being afraid when I was a kid. You ever been really scared? Do you remember how it was?"

"Yes," Susanne said. "I remember." Like yesterday, Leaphorn thought. Or maybe today. "You get panicky and maybe you run," he said. "And if you run it's worse, because you feel like the whole world is chasing you and you're afraid to stop."

"Or there's no place to stop," she said. "Like where would George go to get help? Do you know about his daddy? Being drunk all the time? And most of the time George having to worry about what they're going to eat?"

"Yeah," Leaphorn said. "I've been out there."

"Sometimes there isn't any home to go home to." Susanne seemed to say it to Otis, who wasn't listening.

"The trouble with running out here this time of year is the weather. Today it's late autumn and sunny and no problem. Tomorrow maybe it's winter. Overnight snow and maybe five or six below zero and all of a sudden you don't have any food and no way to get any."

"Does it get that cold here? Below zero?"

"You're almost seven thousand feet above sea level here. Practically sitting on the Continental Divide. Last year it got to fifteen below at Ramah and nineteen below at Gallup. We had eleven exposure deaths on the reservation—that we know about."

"But I don't know where he is," she said.

"But just telling me what he said would help me find him," Leaphorn said. "Why did he leave school in the middle of the morning? Why did he come here? What made him run?
Anything
you remember will help. It will help George."

This time Susanne let the silence grow. She might tell me he didn't come here, Leaphorn thought. That was what she had planned. But she wouldn't lie. Not now.

"I don't know exactly," she said. "I know he was afraid of something. He asked if I could give him any food—stuff he could carry that would keep. He wanted to take some of that deer out in the shed. That was George's deer anyway. He brought it to us last week."

"Where was he going?"

"He didn't say."

"But he must have said something. Try to remember everything he said."

"He asked me if I knew anything about the Zuñi religion," Susanne said, "and I said not much. Just a little bit that Ted had told me about it." She paused, putting the memory back together. "And then he asked me if Ted had ever told me anything about the kachinas punishing people." She frowned. "And if I knew anything about kachina forgiveness."

"Forgiveness?"

"He used the word 'absolution.' He said, 'If a Zuñi taboo is broken, is there any way to get absolution?' I told him I didn't know anything about it." She looked at Leaphorn curiously. "Is there?"

"I'm not a Zuñi," Leaphorn said. "A Navajo isn't likely to know any more about the Zuñi religion than a white man will know about Shintoism."

"It seemed important to George. I could tell that. He kept talking about it."

"Forgiveness for him? Did he give you any idea who needed to be forgiven? Was it him? Or Ernesto?"

"I don't know," Susanne said. "I guessed it was for him, himself. But maybe it was for Ernesto."

"Any hint of what the forgiveness would be for? What sort of…" Leaphorn paused, trying for the right word. It wouldn't be crime. Would it be sacrilege? He let the sentence dangle and substituted: "Did he say what had happened to offend the kachinas?"

"No. I wondered, too, but it didn't seem the time to ask. He was all emotional. In a big hurry. I'd never seen George in a hurry before."

"So he took some venison," Leaphorn said. "How much did he take? And what else?"

Susanne flushed. She tugged the long, grimy sleeve of her sweater down over her knuckles.

"He didn't take anything," Halsey said. "He asked for it. He didn't get it. I figured he was running from the law, or something, the way he acted. People who live here do not cooperate with a fugitive; do not aid and abet; do not do a damn thing to give the fuzz any reason to be hassling us." He grinned at Leaphorn. "We are law-abiding."

"So he left here without any food," Leaphorn said.

"I made him take my old jacket," Susanne said. She was staring at Halsey, her expression an odd mixture of defiance and fear. "It was an old quilted blue rayon thing with a hole in the elbow."

"What time did he leave?"

"He got here early in the afternoon and I guess he left about ten minutes later—maybe three or three-fifteen."

"And he didn't say anything about where he was going?"

"No," Susanne said. She hesitated. "Not really, anyway. George was kind of a crazy kid. Full of funny ideas. He said he might be gone for a while because he had to find the kachinas."

Leaphorn stopped at the fence that sealed the Ramah-Ojo Caliente road off from Navajo allotment grazing lands. He turned off the ignition, yawned. In a moment he would climb from the truck, open the barbed-wire gate, and drive on to Ramah. But now he simply sat, slumped, surrendering to fatigue. He had heard of George Bowlegs about noon and now it was after midnight. Bowlegs, you little bastard, where are you? Are you sleeping warm? Leaphorn sighed, climbed from the carryall, walked with stiff legs to the gate, opened it, climbed back into the carryall, drove through the gate, climbed out again, shut the gate, climbed back into the truck, and pulled onto the county road in a shower of dust and gravel. He shivered slightly and turned the heater fan higher. Outside the air was absolutely still, the sky cloudless, the moon almost directly overhead. Tonight there would be a hard freeze. And where were George Bowlegs and Ernesto Cata? Dead? Cata perhaps, but it seemed suddenly unlikely. There was no possible reason for anyone to kill him. The blood might have had other sources. Probably this was a wasted day. There was nothing much except the blood. Two square yards of blood-stiff earth under a piñon and two boys missing. One of them, everybody said, was a crazy kid. What else was there? Something stolen from an anthropologists' camp—some thing so trivial it hadn't been missed. And something which looked like a Zuñi kachina snooping in the moonlight at a hippie commune. What the hell could that have been? He thought again about what his eyes had seen through the binoculars, reshaping the image in his memory. Had his eyes translated something that merely seemed strange under the tricky light into something his imagination suggested? Then what could it have been? A big felt hat oddly creased? No. Leaphorn sighed and yawned. His head was buzzing with his tiredness. He could no longer concentrate. He would sleep at the Ramah chapter house tonight. Tomorrow morning he would check with the Zuñi Police. They would tell him that Cata had come home during the night and confessed to a silly hoax. Leaphorn suddenly knew what the explanation would be. A sheep slaughtered for the Shalako feast. The boys saving its blood, using it for an elaborate joke, unconscious of the cruelty in it.

Where the road crossed the ridge overlooking the Ramah Valley, Leaphorn slowed, flicked on the radio transmitter. The operator at Ramah would be long abed, but Leaphorn raised Window Rock quickly.

There were three messages for him. The captain wanted to know if he was making any progress on the affair of the embezzled payment for the pickup truck. His wife had called to ask that Leaphorn be reminded that he had a dental appointment in Gallup at 2 P.M. And the Zuñi Police Department had called and asked that Leaphorn be informed that Ernesto Cata had been found.

Leaphorn frowned at the radio. "Found? Is that all they said?"

"Let me check," the dispatcher said. "I didn't take the message." The dispatcher sounded sleepy. Leaphorn rubbed his hand across his face, suppressing a yawn.

"Found his body," the dispatcher said.

THE SUN, rising over Oso Ridge, warmed the right side of Joe Leaphorn's face and cast the shadow of his profile horizontally against the raw gray earth exposed by the landslide. He stood with his arms folded over his stomach, his ears aware of the scraping sound of the shovels but his eyes involved with the beauty of the morning. The view from this eroded ridge above Galestina Canyon was impressive. Sunlight struck the east faces of the Zuñi Buttes ten miles to the northwest. It reflected from the yellow water tower that marked the site where the government had built Black Rock to house its Bureau of Indian Affairs people. It flashed now from the wing of a light plane taking off from the Black Rock landing strip. Almost due north, three miles up the valley, it illuminated the early-morning haze of smoke emerging from the chimneys of Zuñi Village. Much nearer, a yard from the toe of Lea phorn's boot, it lit the scuffed sole of a small, low-cut shoe. The shoe protruded from the earth-and-stone rubble of the slide—a black shoe, laces down. It was a track shoe, five spikes under the ball of the foot, none under the heel because a runner's heel does not strike the ground. Part of the runner's heel was visible, and the Achilles tendon, and perhaps an inch of muscular calf. The earth covered the rest. Leaphorn's gaze rested on Zuñi Village. Halona, they called it. Halona Itawana, the Middle Ant Hill of the World. A hillock beside a bend in the now dry bed of the Zuñi River, a hillock of red stone houses jammed together to form the old village and surrounded now by a sprawling cluster of newer houses. Maybe six thousand Zuñis, Leaphorn thought, with something like 6,500 square miles of reservation, and all but a few hundred of them lived like bees in this single busy hive. Up to twenty-five or thirty people in some houses, he had heard. All the daughters of a family still living with their mother, living together with their husbands and their children in a sort of reversal of the Navajos' mother-in-law taboo. It made for the handful of Zuñis a bigger town than the Navajos had made with their 130,000 people. What force caused the Zuñis to collect like this? Was it some polarity of the force that caused his own Dinee to scatter, to search for loneliness, as much as for grass, wood, and water, as an asset for a hogan site? Was this why the Zuñi had survived as a people against five centuries of invasions? Was there some natural law, like the critical mass of nuclear physics, which held that X number of Indians compacted in X number of square yards could resist the White Man's Way by drawing strength from one another?

The plane—silenced by distance—banked toward the north, toward Gallup, or Farmington, or perhaps Shiprock or Chinle, and blinked a quick reflection of sun from a polished surface. Just to Leaphorn's left Ed Pasquaanti pushed at the handle of his shovel, hat off, cropped gray hair bristling. Beyond him, three other Zuñis worked methodically. Their last names were Cata, Bacobi, and Atarque. They were the father and uncles, respectively, of Ernesto Cata. They dug with deliberate speed, wordlessly. The earth pile receded, revealing another inch of Ernesto Cata's calf.

"Where did you find the bicycle?" Leaphorn asked. "If you haven't finished looking there, I could check around some." (He had offered once—five minutes ago, when he had first arrived—to help with the digging. "No, thanks," the uncle named Thomas Atarque had said. "We can handle it all right." The earth was Zuñi earth, the body under it Flesh of the Zuñi Flesh. Leaphorn sensed digging here, at this moment in time, was not for a Navajo. He wouldn't repeat the offer.)