Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 05 - The Dark Wind

by The Dark Wind(lit)

  Chee jumped to his feet, snubbed out his cigaret, and hurried down the slope toward the arroyo. He trotted along the sandy bottom, following the path the moccasins of the shrine's guardian had made. The shrine looked just as he had left it. He crouched under the shale overhang, careful not to disturb the pahos. When he had been here before, there had been a film of water on the granite under the shale, so shallow that it was not much more than a pattern of wetness. Chee studied the rock surface. The dampness had spread. Not much, but it had spread. The spring had been barely alive when he had seen it before. It was still barely alive. But the spring was no longer dying.

  Chee walked back to his pickup truck, climbed in, and drove away without a backward glance. He was finished with the windmill. It offered no more mysteries. He'd stop at the Burnt Water store and call Cowboy Dashee. He'd tell Cowboy he had to talk to the keeper of the shrine. Cowboy wouldn't like it. But Cowboy would find him.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Cowboy had arranged to meet him at the junction of Arizona Highway 87 and Navajo Route 3. "We're going to have to go to Piutki," Cowboy had told him. "That's where he lives. But I don't want to have you floundering around up there by yourself, getting lost. So meet me, and I'll take you up."

  "About when?"

  "About seven," Cowboy said.

  So Chee had arrived about seven. Five minutes before, to be exact. He stood beside his pickup truck, stretching his muscles. The early evening sun lit the slopes of Second Mesa behind him, making a glittering reflection off the hot asphalt of Navajo 3 where it zigzagged upward. Just to the north, the cliff of First Mesa was dappled with shadow. Chee himself stood in the shadow. A cloud which had been building slowly all afternoon over the San Francisco Peaks had broken free of the mountain's updrafts and was drifting eastward. It was still at least twenty miles to the west, but its crest had built high enough now to block out the slanting light of the sun. The heat of the day had produced other such thunderheads. Three, in an irregular row, were sailing across the Painted Desert between Chee and Winslow. One, Chee noticed with pleasure, was actually dragging a small tail of rain across Tovar Mesa. But none of the smaller clouds promised much. With sundown they would quickly evaporate in the arid sky. The cloud spawned by the San Francisco Peaks was another matter. It was huge, its top pushed up into the stratospheric cold by its internal winds, and its lower levels blue-black with the promise of rain. As Chee appraised it, he heard the mutter of thunder. The clouds would be visible for a hundred miles in every direction, from Navajo Mountain across the Utah border, as far east as the Chuska Range in New Mexico. One cloud wouldn't break a drought, but it takes one cloud to start the process. For a thousand Navajo sheepmen across this immense dry tableland the cloud meant hope that rain, running arroyos, and new grass would again be part of the hozro of their lives. To the Hopis, rain would mean more than that. It would mean the endorsement of the supernatural. The Hopis had called for the clouds, and the clouds had come. It would mean that after a year of blighted dust, things were right again between the Peaceful People of the Hopi Mesas and their kachina spirits.

  Chee leaned against the truck, enjoying the cool, damp breeze which the cloud was now producing, enjoying the contrast between the dappled browns and tans of the First Mesa cliffs and the dark-blue sky over them. Above him the rim of the cliff was not cliff at all, but the stone walls of the houses of Walpi. From here it was hard to believe that. The tiny windows seemed to be holes in the living rock of the mesa.

  Chee glanced at his watch. Cowboy was late. He retrieved his notebook from the front seat, and turned to a clean page. Across the top he wrote: "Questions and Answers." Then he wrote: "Where is J. Musket? Did Musket kill John Doe? Witch? Crazy? Tied up with the narcotics heist?" He drew a line down the center of the page, separating the Answers section. Here he wrote: "Evidence he was away from work day Doe killed. Musket connected with narcotics. Likely came to Burnt Water to set up delivery. How else? Would have known the country well enough to hide the gmc." Chee studied the entries. He tapped a front tooth with the butt of the ballpoint pen. He wrote under Questions: "Why the burglary? To provide a logical reason for disappearing from the trading post?" Chee frowned at that, and wrote: "What happened to the stolen jewelry?"

  He drew a line under that all the way across the page. Under it he wrote:

  "Who is John Doe? Somebody from the narcotics business? Working with Musket? Did Musket kill him because Doe smelled the double cross? Did Musket make it look like a witch killing to confuse things?" No answers here. Just questions. He drew another horizontal line and wrote under it:

  "Where's Palanzer's body? Why hide it in the gmc? To confuse those looking for dope? Why take it out of the gmc? Because someone knew I'd found it? Who knew? The man who walked up the arroyo in the dark? Musket? Dashee?" He stared at the name, feeling disloyal. But Dashee knew. He'd told Dashee where to find the truck. And Dashee could have been at the windmill site when the crash happened. He wondered if he could learn where Dashee had been the night John Doe's body had been hidden. And then he shook his head and drew a line through "Dashee," and then another line. Under that he wrote a single word: "Witch."

  Under that he wrote: "Any reason to connect witch killing with dope?" He stared at the question, worrying his lower lip between his teeth. Then he wrote: "Coincidence of time and place." He paused a moment, then jotted beside it: "Doe died July 10, West died July 6." He was still thinking about that when Dashee drove up.

  "Right on the money," Cowboy said.

  "You're late," Chee said.

  "Operating on Navajo time," Cowboy said. "Seven means sometime tonight. Let's take my car."

  Chee got in.

  "You ever been to Piutki?"

  "I don't think so," Chee said. "Where is it?"

  "Up on First Mesa," Cowboy said. "Back behind Hano on the ridge." Cowboy was driving more sedately than usual. He rolled the patrol car down Navajo Route 3 and did a left turn onto the narrower asphalt which made the steep, winding climb up the face of the mesa. His face was still, thoughtful.

  Worried, Chee thought. We're getting involved in something religious.

  "There's not much left of Piutki," Cowboy said. "It's pretty well abandoned. Used to be the village of the Fog Clan with some Bow Clan, and the Fog Clan is just about extinct. Not many Bow left either."

  Fog Clan touched a memory. Chee tried to recall what he'd learned about Hopi ethnology in his anthro classes at the University of New Mexico, and what he'd read since, and what he'd picked up from gossip. The Fog Clan had brought to the Hopis the gift of sorcery. That had been its ceremonial contribution to Hopi society. And of course, the sorcerers were the powaqas, the "two-hearts," the Hopi culture's peculiar version of what witches were like. There was something about the Bow Clan, too. What? Chee's reliable memory served up the answer. He'd read it in some treatise on Hopi clan history. When the Bow Clan had completed its great migrations and arrived at the Hopi Mesas, it had accumulated such a reputation for creating trouble that the Bear Clan elders had repeatedly refused its request for lands and a village home. And after it had finally been allowed to join the other clans, the Bows had been involved in the single bloody incident in the history of the Peaceful People. When the Arrowshaft Clan at Awatovi had allowed Spanish priests to move into the village, the Bows had suggested a punitive attack. The Arrowshaft males had been slaughtered in their kivas, and the women and children had been scattered among the other villages. The Arrowshaft clan had not survived.

  "This man we're going to see," Chee said. "What's his clan?"

  Cowboy eyed him. "Why you ask that?"

  "You said it was the Fog Clan village. I heard somewhere that the Fog Clan had died out."

  "More or less," Cowboy said. "But the Hopis use a sort of linked clan system, and the Fog is linked to the Cloud Clan and the Water Clan and." Cowboy let it trail away. He shifted into second gear for the steep climb along the mesa cliff.

  The road reached the sadd
le of the narrow ridge. It climbed straight ahead to Walpi. Cow boy jerked the patrol car into the narrow turn up the other side of the saddle toward Sichomovi and Hano. The rear wheels skidded. Cowboy muttered something under his breath.

  Chee had been watching him. "Had a bad day?"

  Cowboy said nothing. Clearly Cowboy had had a bad day.

  "What's bothering you?" Chee asked.

  Cowboy laughed. But he didn't sound amused. "Nothing," he said.

  "You'd just as soon not be doing this?"

  Cowboy shrugged.

  The patrol car edged past the ancient stone walls of Sichomovi. or was it Hano now? Chee wasn't sure yet where one of the villages ended and the other began. It seemed inconceivable to Chee that the Hopis had chosen to live like this-collecting right on top of each other in these tight little towns without privacy or breathing room. His own people had done exactly the opposite. Laws of nature, he thought. Hopis collect, Navajos scatter. But what was bothering Cowboy? He thought about it.

  "Who is this guy we're going to see?"

  "His name is Taylor Sawkatewa," Cowboy said. "And I think we're wasting our time."

  "Don't think he'll tell us anything?"

  "Why should he?" Cowboy said. The tone was curt, and Cowboy seemed to realize it. When he continued, there was a hint of apology in his tone. "He's about a million years old. More traditional than the worst traditional. On top of that, I hear he's sort of crazy."

  And, Chee thought, you hear he's a powaqa. And that's what's making you a little edgy. Chee thought about what he'd heard about powaqas. It made him a little edgy, too.

  "Not much use appealing to his duty as a law-abiding citizen, I guess," Chee said.

  Cowboy laughed. "I don't think so. Be like trying to explain to a Brahma bull why he should hold still while you're putting a surcingle around him."

  They were clear of Hano now, jolting down a stony track which followed the mesa rim. The cloud loomed in the southwest. The sun on the horizon lit the underface of its great anvil top a glittering white, but at its lower level its color varied. A thousand gradations of gray from almost white to almost black, and-from the dying sun-shades of rose and pink and red. To Cowboy Dashee's people such a cloud would have sacred symbolism. To Chee's people, it was simply beautiful, and thus valuable just for itself.

  "Another thing," Cowboy said. "Old Sawkatewa don't speak English. That's what they tell me anyway. So I'll have to interpret."

  "Anything else I need to know about him?"

  Cowboy shrugged.

  "You didn't tell me what his clan is."

  Cowboy slowed the patrol car, eased it past a jagged rock and over a rut. "He's Fog," he said.

  "So the Fog Clan isn't extinct?"

  "Really, it is," Cowboy said. "Hardly any left. All their ceremonial duties-what's left-they're owned by the Water Clan now, or Cloud Clan. It was that way even when I was a boy. Long before that, I guess. My daddy said the last time the Ya Ya Society did anything was when he was a little boy-and I don't think that was a full ceremony. Walpi kicked them out a long time ago."

  "Kicked them out?"

  "The Ya Ya Society," Cowboy said. He didn't offer to expand. From what Chee could remember hearing about the society, it controlled initiation into the various levels of sorcery. In other words, it was a sensitive subject and Cowboy didn't want to talk about it to a non-Hopi.

  "Why did they kick 'em out?" Chee asked.

  "Caused trouble," Cowboy said.

  "Isn't that the society that used to initiate people who wanted to become two-hearts?"

  "Yeah," Cowboy said.

  "I remember somebody telling me something about it," Chee said. "Somebody told me the deal where they saw a pine tree trunk on the ground and the sorcerer caused it to move up and down in the air."

  Cowboy said nothing.

  "That's right?" Chee asked. "A lot of magic at a Ya Ya ceremony."

  "But if you have power, and you use it for the wrong reasons, then you lose the power," Cowboy said. "That's what we're told."

  "This man we're going to see," Chee said. "He was a member of the Ya Ya Society. That right?"

  Cowboy eased the patrol car over another rough spot. The sun was down now, the horizon a streak of fire. The cloud was closer and beginning to drop a screen of rain. It evaporated at least a thousand feet above ground level, but it provided a translucent screen which filtered the reddish light.

  "I heard he was a member of the Ya Ya," Cowboy said. "You can hear just about anything."

  The village of Piutki had never had the size or importance of such places as Oraibi, or Walpi, or even Shongopovi. At its peak it had housed only part of the small Bow Clan, and the even smaller Fog Clan. That peak had passed long ago, probably in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. Now many of its houses had been abandoned. Their roofs had fallen in and their walls had been quarried for stone to maintain houses still occupied. The great cloud now dominated the sky, and illuminated the old place with a red twilight. The breeze followed the patrol car with outriders of dust. Cowboy flicked on the headlights.

  "Place looks empty," Chee said.

  "It almost is," Cowboy agreed.

  The plaza was small, houses on two sides of it in ruins. Chee noticed that the kiva, too, was in disrepair. The steps that led to its roof were rotted and broken, and the ladder that should have protruded from its rooftop entrance was missing. It was a small kiva, and low, its walls rising only some five feet above the dusty plaza earth. It seemed as dead as the men who had built it so long ago.

  "Well," Cowboy said. "Here we are." He stopped the car beside the kiva. Beyond it, one of the houses that still walled two sides of the plaza was occupied. The breeze blew smoke from its chimney toward them, and a small pile of coal stood beside its doorway. The door opened. A boy-perhaps ten or twelve-looked out at them. The boy was an albino.

  Cowboy left the car unlocked and walked through the blowing dust without waiting for Chee. He spoke to the boy at the door in Hopi, listened to his answer, thought about it, and spoke again. The boy disappeared inside.

  "He said Sawkatewa is working. He'd tell him he had visitors," Cowboy said.

  Chee nodded. He heard a thumping of thunder and glanced up at the cloud. Only its upper levels were red with sunset now. Below that, its color shaded from blue to almost black. While he looked at it, the black flashed with yellow, and flashed again. Internal lightning was illuminating it. They waited. Dust eddied in the plaza. The air was much cooler now. It smelled of rain. The sound of thunder reached them. This time it boomed, and boomed again.

  The boy reappeared. He looked at Chee through thick-lensed glasses and then at Cowboy, and spoke in Hopi.

  "In we go," Cowboy said.

  Taylor Sawkatewa was sitting on a small metal chair, winding yarn onto a spindle. He was looking at them, his bright black eyes curious. But his hands never stopped their quick, agile work. He spoke to Cowboy, and motioned toward a green plastic sofa which stood against the entrance wall, and then he examined Chee. He smiled and nodded.

  "He says sit down," Cowboy said.

  They sat on the green plastic. It was a small room, a little off square, the walls flaking whitewash. A kerosene lamp, its glass chimney sooty, cast a wavering yellow light.

  Sawkatewa spoke to both of them, smiling at Chee again. Chee smiled back.

  Then Cowboy spoke at length. The old man listened. His hands worked steadily, moving the gray-white wool from a skein in a cardboard beer carton beside his chair onto the long wooden spindle. His eyes left Cowboy and settled on Chee's face. He was a very old man, far beyond the point where curiosity can be interpreted as rudeness. Navajos, too, sometimes live to be very old and Chee's Slow Talking Dinee had its share of them.

  Cowboy completed his statement, paused, added a brief postscript, then turned to Chee.

  "I told him I would now tell you what I'd told him," Cowboy said. "And what I told him was who you are and that we are here because we are trying to
find out something about the plane crash out in Wepo Wash."

  "I think you should tell him what happened in a lot of detail," Chee said. "Tell him that two men were killed in the airplane, and that two other men have been killed because of what the airplane carried. And tell him that it would help us a lot if someone had been there and had seen what happened and could tell us what he saw." Chee kept his eyes on Sawkatewa as he said this. The old man was listening intently, smiling slightly. He understands a little English, Chee decided. Maybe he understands more than a little.