Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 02] (7 page)

"The bike was down there," Pasquaanti said. He pointed. "Pushed under the uphill side of that sandstone outcrop. I just looked around enough to find the tracks leading up this way. It was getting dark then."

The bicycle had been remarkably well hidden considering the circumstances. It had been pushed half under a sandstone overhang and then disguised with a cover of dead grass and weeds. Even with the camouflage gone, it was hard to see. Leaphorn looked at it, thinking first that whoever had hidden it had found this site at night. Only moonlight, and two nights ago it would have been a half-moon. The implications of that were clear enough. Whoever had brought Ernesto Cata's body here to be hidden under a tumbled slide of earth either knew this landscape well or had planned in advance. George Bowlegs would know it and—he thought defensively—a thousand Zuñis would know it. Leaphorn went methodically to work.

The bike had been rolled here up a deer trail. Leaphorn backtracked to a sheep path down the slope. The path angled downhill and northward, toward Zuñi Pueblo. He checked everything, working slowly. By the time he reached the cluster of trees where Cata had bled out his life, it was noon. In this small area he spent another three hours—much of it squatted on his heels studying the dusty ground.

There were five sets of recent tracks. He quickly eliminated the Goodyear rubber heel-marks left by Pasquaanti and the waffle-soled boots of the Cata uncle who had found the blood. That left cowboy boots, presumably George Bowlegs', which had dismounted from the bicycle near the trees, Cata's five-spiked track shoes, and moccasins worn by whoever had pushed the bicycle away with Cata's body as its cargo. Leaphorn sat on a slab of sandstone and considered what these tracks told him. It wasn't much.

He could guess that the killing hadn't been premeditated—at least not completely. One who plans to carry a body a long distance uphill over rough ground does not wear moccasins if he has any respect for his feet. He wears something with sturdy sole and heels. The Man Who Wore Moccasins had waited among the junipers out of sight. He could have struck Cata from this ambush had there been an intention to kill. But he hadn't. The moccasins had stepped out into the open. Moccasins and track shoes had faced one another long enough for several shuffles and shifts of weight. They had stood very close. (Had Moccasins perhaps gripped Cata's arm?) Then Cata had taken three long-stride steps downhill and fallen, and pumped his blood out onto the thirsty earth. Moccasins now wheeled the bike to the bloody place, loaded Cata upon it, and rolled it away. But it seemed highly unlikely he could have known the bicycle would be available. Not unless Moccasins was George Bowlegs. Could the boy have ridden here in cowboy boots, parked the bike, walked over to the rocks, and changed into moccasins? Obviously, he
could
have. Leaphorn could think of no reasons why he would have. He tried to imagine what Cata and Moccasins might have talked about as they stood toe-to-toe. There was not even ground for speculation. Leaphorn lit a cigarette. A piñon jay emerged from the junipers in a flash of blue feathers and disappeared toward Corn Mountain. A thin blue line of smoke corkscrewed upward from Leaphorn's cigarette to ravel away in the cold air. North, a jet drew a white line across the sky. Behind it the sky was gray with a high overcast. Intermittently throughout the dusty autumn, such omens had threatened snow. And all autumn, after a summer of drought, the omens had lied. Leaphorn studied the sky, his face dour. He was finding no order in his thoughts, none of that mild and abstract pleasure which the precise application of logic always brought to him. Instead there was only the discordant clash of improbable against unlikely, effect without cause, action without motive, patternless chaos. Leaphorn's orderly mind found this painful. The roughness of the sandstone pressed into his buttocks now, but he ignored this, as he ignored his hunger, willing his thoughts away from these sensations, frowning across the brushy slopes at Corn Mountain, thinking.

Leaphorn came from the Taadii Dinee, the Slow-Talking People Clan. The father of his mother was Nashibitti, a great singer of the Beautyway and the Mountainway, and other curing rites, and a man so wise that it was said the people of Beautiful Mesa added Hosteen to his name when he was less than thirty—calling him Old Man when he was far too young to be a grandfather. Leaphorn had been raised at the knee of Hosteen Nashibitti when Nashibitti was old in years as well as wisdom. He had grown up among the sheepmen and hunters of Beautiful Mesa, families who descended from families who had elected to die when Kit Carson's horsemen came in 1864. Thus the handed-down tribal memories which surrounded Leaphorn's boyhood were not, like those of most Navajos of his generation, the grandfather tales of being herded into captivity, of the Long Walk away from the sacred mountains to the concentration camp at Fort Stanton, of smallpox, and the insolent Apaches, and of misery, indignity, and finally the Long Walk home. Instead, the tales of Nashibitti were of the redder side of tragedy: of two brothers with bows against a troop of mounted riflemen; of sabered sheep, burning hogans, the sound of axes cutting down the peach orchards, the bodies of children in the snow, the red of the flames sweeping through the cornfields, and, finally, the litany of starving families hunted through the canyons by Kit Carson's cavalry. The boy who would become Hosteen Nashibitti and the grandfather of Leaphorn was delivered of a dying mother in such a hungry canyon. He had been raised with his ears filled with his uncle's accounts of brutal cruelty and sublime bravery; of how Carson had claimed to be a friend of the Navajos, of how Carson, led by the hated Utes, had ridden through the peaceful cornfields like death on horseback. But somehow, Nashibitti had never learned this bitterness. When he was initiated at the Yeibichai on the last night of the Night Way Ceremonial, the secret war name they gave him had been He Who Asks Questions. But to Leaphorn, seventy years later, he had been One Who Answers. It had been Nashibitti who had taught Leaphorn the words and legends of the Blessing Way, taught him what the Holy People had told the Earth Surface People about how to live, taught him the lessons of the Changing Woman—that the only goal for man was beauty, and that beauty was found only in harmony, and that this harmony of nature was a matter of dazzling complexity.

"When the dung beetle moves," Hosteen Nashibitti had told him, "know that something has moved it. And know that its movement affects the flight of the sparrow, and that the raven deflects the eagle from the sky, and that the eagle's stiff wing bends the will of the Wind People, and know that all of this affects you and me, and the flea on the prairie dog and the leaf on the cotton-wood." That had always been the point of the lesson. Interdependency of nature. Every cause has its effect. Every action its reaction. A reason for everything. In all things a pattern, and in this pattern, the beauty of harmony. Thus one learned to live with evil, by understanding it, by reading its cause. And thus one learned, gradually and methodically, if one was lucky, to always "go in beauty," to always look for the pattern, and to find it.

Leaphorn stabbed the cigarette butt against the rock, grinding it out with an angry gesture. There was no pattern here. Cata was dead without reason. George Bowlegs had not run when he should have run and then he had fled when he shouldn't have. Leaphorn stood and brushed off the seat of his khaki trousers, still thinking. What bothered him most, he realized, were not these large and important incongruities. It was smaller ones. Why had Cecil Bowlegs told him that Cata had stolen artifacts from the Early Man dig? There was no reason for Cecil to lie, and no reason for the anthropologists to lie in denying such a loss. Why did Cecil think George was running from a vengeful kachina if George had told Susanne he would be
hunting
a kachina? And what was that strange thing Leaphorn had seen at Jason's Fleece with the body of a man and the head of a bird? Could someone be wearing one of the masks of the Zuñi kachina religion? To do so for a purpose outside the religion would surely be the worst sort of sacrilege. There was no possible answer to any of these questions.

Leaphorn began walking rapidly down the slope toward Zuñi Village. The body would be there by now, the cause of death known. He would find out about that. And when there was time he would learn more about the Zuñi religion. But before he did that, he would get Shorty Bowlegs sober enough to talk—even if he had to lock him up to do it.

THE HEADLIGHTS on Joe Leaphorn's Law and Order Division van lost themselves one moment in a blinding gust of reddish-gray dust and the next in the whiteness of a flurry of dry snowflakes. Driving required catching glimpses between gusts and flurries of the twisting, bumpy wagon track and—when it became abruptly invisible—remembering where the wheels would find it. With one tire already blown yesterday on this chancy trail to Shorty Bowlegs' hogan—and no spare left—Leaphorn was taking it very slowly. He was in no particular hurry. He had no real hope that Shorty Bowlegs, if Shorty Bowlegs was sober enough to talk more coherently now, could tell him anything very useful. It was simply that Bowlegs was the last untapped possibility. After Bowlegs there would be no place left to go. This was the ultimate dead end of the Cata affair and Leaphorn knew himself too well to consider avoiding it. All other possible sources of information had been tapped and the incongruities remained. They would give him no peace. A boy had been killed without reason. Leaphorn's rational mind would not accept this. Not even the grasshopper took wing without reason. His mind would worry at the rough edges of this like a tongue at a broken tooth. It would reject Cata killed without cause, George Bowlegs fleeing the scene of this crime a day later than reason said he should have fled the whole irrational business.

Leaphorn turned the carryall down the last slope toward the Bowlegs place. It slid with a bone-jarring thump into a rut. Leaphorn pronounced an explicit Navajo indecency which took in darkness, weather, himself, the Zuñi tribe in general, and Ed Pasquaanti in particular. He swung the truck across the bare and beaten ground to park.

The headlights lit the Bowlegs brush arbor, flashed for a second on a pole sheep corral down the slope, flicked past the doorway of the Bowlegs hogan and the blue-shirted form in its doorway and stopped finally, as Leaphorn set the hand brake, focused on the gray-green foliage of a juniper. Leaphorn turned off the ignition but not the lights. He was relieved. Bowlegs was not only awake, but sober enough to be standing in the doorway, curious about his visitor.

Leaphorn shook out a cigarette, lit it, and waited. Navajo custom and good manners required the wait. The tradition had been born in the old days so that the ghosts which swarmed the reservation and followed travelers would wander impatiently away and not follow the guest into the host's hogan. Today it survived as much out of the respect for privacy of a scattered rural people as from the waning threat of the chindi. Without thinking of why he did it, Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn would wait in his truck until Shorty Bowlegs had put on his trousers or otherwise prepared to receive a visitor. And when Bowlegs was ready he would stand outside his hogan door so that Leaphorn would know it.

Leaphorn waited now. The wind shook the truck. It spoke in a dozen voices, whistling, hooting, rasping past cracks and corners and bends of metal. The defroster fan had died with the motor and his breath quickly misted the windshield. Outside spots of white showed where the dusting of dry snow drifted against rocks and eddied into the windbreak of the junipers. The flakes were still tiny, but there were more of them now, wind-driven through the headlight beams. When this squall line passed, a real snowstorm might develop. And it was desperately needed. Leaphorn waited, thinking of hungry cattle, dry stock tanks, and the penalties of drought; thinking of the long day behind him, of Cata's body on the table at the Black Rock BIA hospital—the doctor cleaning the sand from that great chopped wound which had almost severed head from body. An ax, perhaps, or a machete, swung with great force. The funeral had been within the hour. First a funeral Mass at the mission church in the village and then the ceremonial of the Badger kiva at the open grave. He had watched it from a distance, feeling that he was an intruder into something sad and private and sacred. Who, he wondered suddenly, would be the Fire God for the Shalako ceremonials now that the Fire God was dead? Leaphorn had no doubt that there would be a new Shulawitsi dancing flawless attendance on the Council of the Gods when the ceremonials began. He thought of that, and of where George Bowlegs might be taking shelter on this miserable night, and then—abruptly—he was thinking that it was taking far too long for Shorty Bowlegs to reappear at his hogan doorway.

Leaphorn pushed the van door open against the pressure of the wind, pulled his windbreaker collar around his face, and stepped out, staring at the hogan. It was totally dark now. Had it been when he drove up? Leaphorn remembered only his headlights flashing past its entrance, the figure frozen in that flicker of light. He had presumed it was Bowlegs looking out to see who was driving up on this bitter night. But now there was no sign of light around the plank door, none around the small uneven window Bowlegs had cut through the logs of his southeast wall. Would Bowlegs have gone back inside, blown out his kerosene lamp, and left his visitor sitting outside in the cold? Leaphorn thought back, remembering the Bowlegs of yesterday as a friendly man—too drunk to understand what Leaphorn was saying, or for coherent answers, but smiling a wide, wet smile, trying to get Leaphorn to sit, to join him in a drink, trying to be helpful.

Leaphorn stopped a moment beside the carryall, staring at the dark humped shape of the hogan, aware of the shrieking curses of the wind, of the evil ghosts of a thousand generations of Dinee who rode the night. And then he reached back inside the cab. He fished a flashlight out of the glove compartment and lifted his 30-30 from the rifle rack across the back window. Ten feet from the hogan door he stopped.