Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 13] (5 page)

IT SEEMED OBVIOUS TO LEAPHORN that the person most likely to tell him
something useful about Catherine Anne Pollard was Richard Krause, her boss and
the biologist in charge of rooting out the cause of the reservation's most
recent plague outbreak. A lifetime spent looking for People in the big
emptiness of the Four Corners and several futile telephone calls had taught
Leaphorn that Krause would probably be off somewhere unreachable. He had tried
to call him as soon as he returned to Window Rock from Santa Fe. He'd tried
again yesterday before driving back from Flagstaff. By now he had the number
memorized as well
as
on the redial button. He picked up the telephone
and punched it.

"Public Health," a male voice said. "Krause." Leaphorn
identified himself. "Mrs. Vanders has asked me—"

"I know," Krause said. "She called me. Maybe she's right. To
start getting worried, I mean."

"Miss Pollard's not back yet, then?"

"No," Krause said. "Miss Pollard still hasn't shown up for work.
Nor has she bothered to call in or communicate in any way. But I have to tell
that's what you learn to expect from Miss Pollard. Rules were made for other
people."

"Any word on the vehicle she was driving?"

"Not to me," Krause said. "And to tell the truth, I'm getting
a little bit concerned myself. At first I was just sore at her. Cathy is a
tough gal to work with. She's very into doing her own thing her own way, if you
know what I'm saying. I just thought she'd seen something that needed doing
worse than what I'd told her to do. Sort of reassigned herself, you know."

"I know," Leaphorn said, thinking back to when Jim Chee had been
his assistant. Still, as much trouble as Chee had been, it had been a pleasure
to see him yesterday. He was a good man and unusually bright.

"You still think that might be a possibility? That Pollard might be off
working on some project of her own and just not bothering to tell anyone about
it?"

"Maybe," Krause said. "It wouldn't bother her to let me stew
awhile, but not this long." He'd be happy to tell Leaphorn what he knew
about Pollard and her work, but not today. Today he was tied up, absolutely
snowed under. With Pollard away, he was doing both their jobs. But tomorrow
morning he could make some time—and the earlier the better.

Which left Leaphorn with nothing to do but wait for Chee's promised call.
But Chee would be driving back to Tuba City from Flag this morning, and then he
wouldn't get into his files until he dealt with whatever problems had piled up
in his absence. If Chee found something interesting in the files, he'd probably
call after noon. Most likely there'd be no reason to call.

Leaphorn had never been good at waiting for the telephone to ring, or for
anything else. He toasted two slices of bread, applied margarine and grape
jelly, and sat in his kitchen, eating and staring at the Indian Country map
mounted on the wall above the table.

The map was freckled with the heads of pins—red, white, blue, black, yellow,
and green, plus a variety of shapes he'd reverted to when the colors available
in pin-, heads had been exhausted. It had been accumulating pins on his office
wall since early in his career. When he retired, the fellow who took over his
office suggested he might want to keep it, and he'd said he couldn't imagine
why. But keep It he had, and almost every pin in it revived a memory.

The first ones (plain steel-headed seamstress pins) he'd stuck in to keep track
of places and dates where people had reported seeing a missing aircraft, the
problem that then had been occupying his thoughts. The red ones had been next,
establishing the delivery pattern of a gasoline tanker truck that was also
hauling narcotics to customers on the Checkerboard Reservation. The most common
ones were black, representing witchcraft reports. Personally, Leaphorn had lost
all faith in the existence of these skinwalkers in his freshman year at Arizona
State, but never in the reality of the problem that belief in them causes.

He'd come home for the semester break, full of new-won college sophistication
and cynicism. He'd talked Jack Greyeyes into joining him to check out a reputed
home base of skinwalkers and thus prove themselves liberated from tradition.
They drove south from Shiprock past Rol-Hay Rock and Table Mesa to the volcanic
outcrop of ugly black basalt where, according to the whispers in their age
group, skinwalkers met in an underground room to perform the hideous initiation
that turned recruits into witches. It was a rainy winter night, which cut the
risk that someone would see them and accuse them of being witches themselves.
Now, more than four decades later, winter rains still produced memorial shivers
along Leaphorn's spine.

That night remained one of Leaphorn's most vivid memories. The darkness, the
cold rain soaking through his jacket, the beginnings of fear. Greyeyes had
decided when they'd reached the outcrop's base that this was a crazy idea.

"I'll tell you what," Greyeyes had said. "Let's not do it,
and say we did."

So Leaphorn had taken custody of the flashlight, watched Greyeyes fade into
the darkness, and waited for his courage to return. It didn't. He had stood
there looking up at the great jumbled hump of rock. Suddenly he had been
confronted with both nerve-racking fear and the sure knowledge that what he did
now would determine the kind of man he would be. He'd torn his pant leg and
bruised his knee on the way up. He'd found the gaping hole the whispers had
described, shone his flash into it without locating a bottom, and then climbed
down far enough to see where it led. The rumors had described a carpeted room
littered with the fragments of corpses. He had found a drifted collection of
blown sand and last summer's tumbleweeds.

That had confirmed his skepticism about skin-walker mythology, just as his
career in the Navajo Tribal Police had confirmed his belief in what the evil
skin-walkers symbolized. He'd lost any lingering doubts about that in his
rookie year. He had laughed off a warning that a Navajo oil-field pumper
believed two neighbors had witched his daughter, thus causing her fatal
illness.

As soon as the four-day mourning period tradition decrees had ended, the
pumper had killed the witches with his shotgun.

He thought about that now as he chewed his toast. Eight black pins formed a
cluster in the general vicinity of that north-reaching outcrop of Black Mesa
that included Yells Back Butte. Why so many there? Probably because that area
had twice been the source of bubonic plague cases and once of the deadly
hantavirus. Witches offer an easy explanation for unexplained illnesses. To the
north, Short Mountain and the Short Mountain Wash country had attracted another
cluster of black pins. Leaphorn was pretty sure that was due to John McGinnis,
operator of the Short Mountain Trading Post. Not that the pins meant more witch
problems around Short Mountain. They represented McGinnis's remarkable talent
as a collector and broadcaster of gossip. The old man had a special love for
skinwalker tales, and his Navajo customers, knowing his weakness, brought him
all the skinwalker sightings and witching reports they could collect. But any
sort of gossip was good enough for the old man. Thinking that, Leaphorn reached
for his new edition of the Navajo Communications Company telephone directory.

The Short Mountain Trading Post number was not listed. He dialed the Short
Mountain Chapter House. Was the trading post still operating? The woman lad
picked up the telephone chuckled. "Well," she said, "I'd guess you'd
say more or less."

"Is John McGinnis still there? Still alive?"

The chuckle became a laugh. "Oh, yes indeed," she said. "He's
still going strong. Don't the
bilagaana
have a saying that only the
good die young?"

Joe Leaphorn finished his toast, put a message on his ring machine for Chee
in case he did call, and drove his pickup out of Shiprock heading northwest
across the Navaho Nation. He was feeling much more cheerful.

The years that had passed since he'd visited Short Mountain hadn't changed
it much—certainly not for the better. The parking area in front was still
hard-packed clay, too dry and dense to encourage weeds. The old GMC truck he'd
parked next to years ago still rested wheelless on blocks, slowly rusting away.
The 1968 Chevy parked in the shade of a juniper at the corner of the sheep pens
looked like the one McGinnis had always driven, and a faded sign nailed to the
hay barn still proclaimed THIS STORE FOR SALE, INQUIRE WITHIN. But today the
benches on the shady porch were empty, with drifts of trash under them. The
windows looked even dustier than Leaphorn remembered. In fact, the trading post
looked deserted, and the gusty breeze chasing tumbleweeds and dust past the
porch added to the sense of desolation. Leaphorn had an uneasy feeling, tinged
with sadness, that the woman at the chapter house was wrong. That even tough
old John McGinnis had proved vulnerable to too much time and too many
disappointments.

The breeze was the product of a cloud Leaphorn had been watching build up
over Black Mesa for the last twenty miles. It was too early in the summer to
make a serious rain likely but—as bad as the road back to the highway was—even
a shower could present a problem down in Short Mountain Wash. Leaphorn climbed
out of his pickup to the rumble of thunder and hurried toward the store.

John McGinnis appeared in the doorway, holding the screen door open, staring
out at him with his shock of white hair blowing across his forehead and looking
twenty pounds too thin for the overalls that engulfed him.

"Be damned," McGinnis said. "Guess it's true what I heard
about them finally getting you off the police force. Thought I had me a
customer for a while. Didn't they let you keep the uniform?"

"
Ya'eeh te'h
," Leaphorn said. "It's good to see
you." And he meant it. That surprised him a little. Maybe, like McGinnis,
the loneliness was beginning to get to him.

"Well, dammit, come on in so I can get this door closed and keep the
dirt from blowing in," McGinnis said. "And let me get you something
to wet your whistle. You Navajos act like you're born in a barn."

Leaphorn followed the old man through the musty darkness of the store,
noticing that McGinnis was more stooped than he had remembered him, that he
walked with a limp, that many of the shelves lining the walls were half-empty,
that behind the dusty glass where McGinnis kept pawned jewelry very little was
being offered, that the racks that once had displayed an array of the slightly
gaudy rugs and saddle blankets that the Short Mountain weavers produced were
now empty. Which will die first, Leaphorn wondered, the trading post or the
trader?

McGinnis ushered him into the back room—his living room, bedroom and
kitchen—and waved him into a recliner upholstered with worn red velour. He
transferred ice cubes from his refrigerator into a Coca-Cola glass, filled it
from a two-liter Pepsi bottle, and handed it to Leaphorn. Then he collected a
bourbon bottle and a plastic measuring cup from his kitchen table, seated
himself on a rocking chair across from Leaphorn, and began carefully pouring
himself a drink.

"As I remember it," he said while he dribbled in the bourbon,
"you don't drink hard liquor. If I'm wrong about that, you tell me and
I'll get you something better than soda pop."

"This is fine," Leaphorn said.

McGinnis held the measuring cup up, examined it against the light from the
dusty window, shook his head, and poured a few drops carefully back into the
bottle. He inspected the level again, seemed satisfied, and took a sip.

"You want to do a little visiting first?" McGinnis asked. "Or
do you want to get right down to what you came here for?"

"Either way," Leaphorn said. "I'm in no hurry. I'm retired
now. Just a civilian. But you know that."

"I heard it," McGinnis said. "I'd retire myself if I could
find somebody stupid enough to buy this hellhole."

"Is it keeping you pretty busy?" Leaphorn asked, trying to imagine
anyone offering to buy the place. Even tougher trying to imagine McGinnis
selling it if someone did. Where would the old man go? What would he do when he
got there?

McGinnis ignored the question. "Well," he said, "if you came
by to get some gasoline, you're out of luck. The dealers charge me extra for
hauling it way out here and I have to tack a little bit on to the price to pay
for that. Just offered gasoline anyway to convenience these hard cases that
still live around here. But they took to getting their tanks filled up when
they get to Tuba or Page, so the gas I got hauled out to make it handy for 'em
just sat there and evaporated. So to hell with 'em. I don't fool with it
anymore."

McGinnis had rattled that off in his scratchy whiskey voice—an explanation
he'd given often enough to have it memorized. He looked at Leaphorn, seeking
understanding.

"Can't say I blame you," Leaphorn said.

"Well, you oughtn't to. When the bastards would forget and let the
gauge get down to empty, they'd come in, air up their tires, fill the radiator
with my water, wash their windshield with my rags, and buy two gallons. Just
enough to get 'em into one of them discount stations." Leaphorn shook his
head, expressing disapproval.

"And want credit for the gas," McGinnis said, and took another
long, thirsty sip.

"But I noticed driving in that you still have a tank up on your loading
rack. With a hand pump on it. You keep that just for your own pickup?"

McGinnis rocked a little while, considering the question. And probably
wondering, Leaphorn thought, if Leaphorn had noticed that the old man's pickup
was double-tanked, like most empty-country vehicles, and wouldn't need many
refills.

"Well, hell," McGinnis said. "You know how folks are. Come in
here with a dry tank and seventy miles to a station, you got to have something
for 'em."