Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 14] (12 page)

“No signature,” Chee said.

“It was left on Jorie’s computer screen,” Leaphorn said. “This is a
printout.”

Yes, Chee could imagine Leaphorn doing that. Did the FBI know he’d
done it? Highly unlikely. He read through it.

“Wow,” Chee said. “This requires some new thinking." He glanced at
Professor Bourebonette, who was watching him. Checking his reaction,
Chee guessed. She’d read the note, too. Well, why shouldn’t she?

“Some things are puzzling,” Leaphorn said. “From what Dashee found -
just two sets of footprints - Jorie seems to have gotten away from the
two somewhere else. Near enough to his home to walk there? But if you
look at the map, you see their escape route wouldn’t take them there.
It would be out of the way. He says in his note they were planning to
kill him. That he slipped away. That suggests they stopped somewhere
else. But where? And why?”

“Good questions,” Chee said.

“I tried to re-create the situation from what little I knew,”
Leaphorn said. “Jorie, a sort of intellectual. Political idealogue.
Fanatic. Doing a robbery to finance his cause. Then it goes sour on
him. Unplanned killings. At least unplanned by him. Awareness that his
recruits are going to take the loot. There must have been an argument.
Or at least an angry quarrel. It must have occurred to Jorie that
letting him split off represented a threat to them. How did he manage
it?”

“No idea,” Chee said.

“Let’s say he was still with them when they left the truck. Do you
think Dashee might have missed his tracks?”

“They’d stopped in a big flatfish place. Mostly covered with old
blow dirt. Dashee’s good at his job, and it would be hard to miss fresh
track in that.”

“How about cover? A place to hide?”

“No,” Chee said. “A cluster of junipers sort of screened the truck
itself from the road. But I didn’t see a good place to hide anywhere
near. There wasn’t one. Certainly not if they were looking for him.”

“I presume he was armed,” Leaphorn said. “Maybe he warned them away.
You know: 'I’m out of here. Let me go or I’m shooting you.'”

“Could have been that,” Chee said.

The waitress returned. Leaphorn moved the map to make space for the
plates. He looked at Chee. “You had something you wanted to tell me.”

“Uh, oh, yeah, I did. About Ironhand. How much do you know about
him?”

“Very little.”

Chee waited, hoping he’d add to that. From what Dashee had told him
Leaphorn knew enough about George Ironhand to have him on the list of
names he asked Potts about. But Leaphorn obviously wasn’t going to
explain that.

“They say a Ute by that same name, about ninety or so years ago,
used to lead a little band of raiders down across the San Juan into our
territory. Steal horses, sheep, whatever they could find, kill people,
so forth. The Navajos would chase them, but they’d disappear in that
rough country along the Nokaito Bench. Maybe into Chinle Wash or Gothic
Creek. It started a legend that Ironhand was some sort of Ute witch. He
could fly. Our people would see him down in the canyon bottom, and then
they’d see him up on the rimrock, with no way to get there. Or
sometimes the other way around. Top to bottom. Anyway, Ironhand was
never caught.”

Leaphorn took a small bite of the hamburger steak he’d ordered, and
looked thoughtful.

“Louisa,” he said, "have you ever picked up anything like that in
your legend collecting?”

“I’ve read something sort of similar,” Professor Bourebonette said.
“A man they called Dobby used to raid across the San Juan about the
same time. But that was farther west. Down into the Monument Valley
area. I think that’s more or less on the record. A Navajo named
Littleman finally ambushed them in the San Juan Canyon. The way the
story goes, he killed Dobby and two of the others. But they were
Paiutes, and that happened earlier—in the eighteen nineties, I think it
was.”

Leaphorn nodded. “I’ve heard the old folks in my family talk about
that. Littleman was Red Forehead
Dine‘
,
in my mother’s clan.”

“It produced a sort of witch story, too,” Louisa said. “Dobby could
make his men invisible.”

Leaphorn put down his fork. “That old Ute you’re interviewing at
Towaoc tomorrow. Why not see what she remembers about the legendary
Ironhand?”

“Why not,” Professor Bourebonette said. “It’s right down my
scholarly alley. And the man you’re after is probably Ironhand Junior.
Or Ironhand the Second or Third.”

She smiled at Chee. “Nothing changes. A century later and you have
the same problem in the same canyons.”

Chee nodded and returned the smile, but he was thinking there was
one big difference. In the 1890s, or 1910s, or whenever it was, the
local posse didn’t have the FBI city boys telling them how to run their
hunt.

From where Joe Leaphorn sat, he could see the odd shape of Sleeping
Ute Mountain out one window, and the Ute Casino about a mile down the
slope out of another. If he looked straight ahead, he could watch
Louisa and Conrad Becenti, her interpreter. They sat at a card table
putting a new tape in their recording machine. Beyond them, on a sofa
of bright blue plastic against the wall, sat an immensely old and
frail-looking Ute woman named Bashe Lady, her plump and middle-aged
granddaughter and a girl about twelve who Leaphorn presumed was a
great-granddaughter. Leaphorn himself was perched upon a
straight-backed kitchen chair, perched far too long with no end in
sight.

Only Bashe Lady and Louisa seemed to be enjoying this session—the
old woman obviously glorying in the attention, and Louisa in the role
of myth hunter happy with what she was collecting. Leaphorn was
fighting off sleep, and the occupants of the sofa had the look of those
who had heard all this before, and far too often.

They’d been hearing that Bashe Lady had been born into the Mogche
band of the Southern Utes but had married into the Kapot band. With
that out of the way, she had used the next hour or so enthusiastically
giving Louisa the origin story of both bands. Leaphorn had been
interested for thirty minutes or so, but mostly in Professor
Bourebonette’s technical skills—the questions she chose to direct the
interview and the way she made sure she understood what Becenti was
telling her. Becenti was part-Ute, part-Navajo and probably part
something else. He had studied mythology with Louisa at Northern
Arizona and seemed to still maintain that awe-stricken
student-to-teacher attitude.

Leaphorn squirmed into a slightly less uncomfortable position. He
watched a truck towing a multi-sized horse trailer pulling into the Ute
Casino parking lot, watched its human occupants climb out and head for
the gaming tables, noticed a long column of vehicles creeping south on
U.S. 666, the cork in this traffic bottle being an overloaded flatbed
hauling what seemed to be a well-drilling rig. He found himself
wondering if the campaign by Biblical fundamentalists to have the
highway number changed from ‘the mark of the Beast’ to something less
terrible (turning the signs upside down to make it 999 had been
suggested) had any effect on patronage of the casino. Probably not. He
shifted from that to trying to decide how the casino management dealt
with the problem of chips that surely must have been snatched from
roulette tables when the lights went off during the robbery. Probably
they had borrowed a different set from another casino. But the
discomfort inflicted by the wooden chair seat drove that thought away.
He shifted into getting-up position and reached for his empty
glass—intending to sneak into the kitchen with it without being rude.

No such luck. The great-granddaughter had been watching him, and
apparently watching for her own excuse to escape. She leaped to her
feet and confronted him.

“I’ll get you some more iced tea,” she said, snatched the glass and
was gone.

Leaphorn settled himself again, and as he did, the interview got
interesting.

“… and then she said that in those days when the Bloody Knives were
coming in all the time and stealing everything and killing people, the
Mogches had a young man named Ouraynad, but people called him Ironhand,
or sometimes The Badger. And he was very good at killing the Bloody
Knives. He would lead our young men down across the San Juan and they
would steal back the cattle the Bloody Knives had stolen from us.”

“OK, Conrad,” Louisa said. “Ask her if Ouraynad was related to
Ouray?”

Becenti asked. Bashe Lady responded with a discourse
incomprehensible to Leaphorn, except for references to Bloody Knives,
which was the Ute nickname for the hated Navajos. Leaphorn hadn’t been
bothered by that at first. After all, the Navajo curing ceremonial used
the Utes to symbolize enemies of the people and the Hopi phrase for
Navajos meant ‘head breakers,” with the implication his forefathers
killed people with rocks. But now Leaphorn had been hearing the
translator rattle off uncomplimentary remarks about the
dine’
for about two hours. He was beginning to resent it.

Bashe Lady stopped talking, gave Leaphorn an inscrutable look, and
threw out her hands.

“A lot of stuff about the heroism and bravery of the Great Chief
Ouray,” Becenti said, ”but nothing that’s not already published. Bottom
line was she thought this Ironhand was related to Ouray in some way,
but she wasn’t sure.”

Leaphorn leaned forward and interrupted. “Could you ask her if this
Ironhand had any descendants with the same name?”

Becenti looked at Louisa. Louisa looked at Leaphorn, frowning.
“Later,” she said. “I don’t want to break up her line of thought.” And
to Becenti: "Ask her if this hero Ironhand had any magical powers. Was
he a witch? Anything mystical?”

Becenti asked, with Bashe Lady grinning at him.

The grin turned into a cackling laugh, which turned into a
discourse, punctuated by more laughter and hand gestures.

“She says they heard the Navajos [Becenti had stopped translating
that into Bloody Knives in deference to Leaphorn sitting behind him]
were fooled so often by Ironhand that they began believing he was like
one of their witches — like a Skinwalker who could change himself into
an owl and fly, or a dog and run under the bushes. She said they would
hear stories the Navajos told about how he could jump from the bottom
of the canyon up to the rim, and then jump down again. But she said the
Mogche people knew he was just a man. Just a lot smarter than the
Navajos who hunted him. About then they started calling him Badger.
Because of the way he fooled the Navajos.”

Leaphorn leaned forward, into the silence which followed that, and
began: "Ask her if this guy had a son.”

Louisa looked over her shoulder at him, and said, “Patience. We’ll
get to that.” But then she shrugged and turned back to Becenti.

“Ask her if Ironhand had any children?”

He had several, both sons and daughters, Bashe Lady said. Two wives,
one a Kapot Ute and the other a Paiute woman. While Becenti was
translating that, she burst into enthusiastic discourse again, with
more laughter and gestures. Becenti listened, and translated.

“She said he took this Paiute woman when he was old, after his first
wife died, and she was the daughter of a Paiute they called Dobby. And
Dobby was like Ironhand himself. He killed many Navajos, and they
couldn’t catch him either. And Ironhand, even when he was an old, old
man, had a son by this Paiute woman, and this son became a hero, too.”

Louisa glanced back at Leaphorn, looked at Becenti, said, “Ask her
what he did to become a hero.”

Bashe Lady talked. Becenti listened, inserted a brief question,
listened again.

“He was in the war. He was one of the soldiers who wore the green
hats. She said he shot a lot of men and got shot twice himself, and
they gave him medals and ribbons,” Becenti said. “I asked which war.
She said she didn’t know, but he came home about when they were
drilling the new oil wells in the Aneth field. So it must have been
Vietnam.”

During all this, Great-Granddaughter emerged from the kitchen and
handed Leaphorn his renewed glass of iced tea — devoid now of ice
cubes. What Bashe Lady had been saying had brought Granddaughter out of
lethargy. She listened intently to Becenti’s translation, leaned
forward. “He was in the army,” she said. “In the Special Services, and
they put him on the Cambodian border with the hill tribes. The
Montegnards. And then they sent him over into Cambodia.” She laughed.
“He said he wasn’t supposed to talk about that.”

She paused, looking embarrassed by her interruption. Leaphorn took
advantage of the silence. Granddaughter obviously knew a lot about this
younger version of Ironhand. He put aside his manners and interjected
himself into the program.

“What did he do in the army? Was he some sort of specialist?”

“He was a sniper,” she told Leaphorn. “They gave him the Silver Star
decoration for shooting fifty-three of the enemy soldiers, and then he
was shot, so he got the Purple Heart, too.”

“Fifty-three,” Leaphorn said, thinking this had to be George
Ironhand of the casino robbery, thinking he would hate to be prowling
the canyons looking for him.

“Do you know where he lives?”

Granddaughter’s expression suggested she didn’t like this question.
She studied Leaphorn, shook her head.

Becenti glanced back at him, said something to Bashe Lady. She
responded with a few words and a couple of hand gestures. In brief she
said Ironhand raised cattle at a place north of Montezuma Creek -
approximately the same location Leaphorn had been given by Potts and
had seen in Jorie’s suicide note.

Leaphorn interrupted again.

“Louisa, could you ask her if anyone knows how the first Ironhand
got away from the Navajos?”

Becenti was getting caught up in this, too. He didn’t wait for
approval. He asked. Bashe Lady laughed, answered, and laughed again.
Becenti shrugged.