Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 07 - Skinwalkers

by Skinwalkers(lit)

  "You think I'm a witch," he said. "Why do you think that?"

  "Because you are an adan'ti," she said. "You shot a bone into me before my baby was born, or you shot a bead into my baby, and now it is dying."

  That told him just a little. In the Navajo world, where witchcraft is important, where daily behavior is patterned to avoid it, prevent it, and cure it, there are as many words for its various forms as there are words for various kinds of snow among the Eskimos. If the woman thought he was adan'ti, she thought he had the power of sorcery-to convert himself into animal form, to fly, perhaps to become invisible. Very specific ideas. Where had she gotten them?

  "You think that if I confess that I witched your baby, then the baby will get well and pretty soon I will die," Chee said. "Is that right? Or if you kill me, then the witching will go away."

  "You should confess," the woman said. "You should say you did it. Otherwise, I will kill you."

  He had to keep her here. Had to keep her talking until he could make his mind work. Until he could learn from her what he had to learn to save his life. Maybe that was impossible. Maybe he was already dying. Maybe his life wind was already blowing out of him-out into the rain. Maybe there was nothing he could learn that would help him. But Chee's conditioning was to endure. He thought, frowning with concentration, willing away the pain and the dreadful consciousness of the blood running down his flanks and puddling under his buttocks. Meanwhile he had to keep her talking.

  "It won't help your baby if I confess, because I am not the witch. Can you tell me who told you I was the witch?"

  Silence.

  "If I were a witch. if I had the power of sorcery, did someone teach you what I could do?"

  "Yes, I was taught." The voice was hesitant.

  "Then you know that if I was a witch, I could turn myself into something else. Into a burrowing owl. I could fly out the smoke hole and go away into the night."

  Silence.

  "But I am not a witch. I am just a man. I am a singer. A yataalii. I have learned the ways to cure. Some of them. I know the songs to protect you against a witching. But I am not a witch."

  "They say you are," the woman said.

  "Who are they? They who say this?" But he already knew the answer.

  Silence.

  The back of Chee's head was on fire, and beneath the fire the shattering pain in the skull was beginning to localize itself into a dozen spots of pain-the places where shotgun pellets had lodged in the bone. But he had to think. This woman had been given him as her witch just as Roosevelt Bistie must have been given Endocheeney as his scapegoat. Bistie had been dying of a liver disease. And this woman was watching her infant die. A conclusion took its shape in Chee's mind.

  "Where was your baby born?" Chee asked. "And when it got sick, did you take it to the Bad-water Clinic?"

  He had decided she wouldn't answer before the answer came. "Yes."

  "And Dr. Yellowhorse told you he was a crystal gazer, and that he could tell you what caused your baby to be sick, is that right? And Dr. Yellowhorse told you I had witched your child."

  It was no longer a question. Chee knew it was true. And he thought he might know how to stay alive. How he might talk this woman into putting down her shotgun, and coming in to help stop his bleeding and to take him to Pi¤on or someplace where there would be help. He would use what little life he had left telling this woman who the witch really was. Chee believed in witchcraft in an abstract way. Perhaps they did have the power, as the legends claimed and the rumors insisted, to become were-animals, to fly, to run faster than any car. On that score, Chee was a skeptic willing to accept any proof. But he knew witchcraft in its basic form stalked the Dinee. He saw it in people who had turned deliberately and with malice from the beauty of the Navajo Way and embraced the evil that was its opposite. He saw it every day he worked as a policeman-in those who sold whiskey to children, in those who bought videocassette recorders while their relatives were hungry, in the knife fights in a Gallup alley, in beaten wives and abandoned children.

  "I am going to tell you who the witch is," Chee said. "First I am going to throw out the keys to my truck. You take 'em and unlock the glove box in the truck, and you will find my pistol there. I said I had it in here with me because I was afraid. Now I am not afraid any more. Go and check, and see that I don't have my pistol with me. Then I want you to come in here where it is warm, and out of the rain, and where you can look at my face while I tell you. That way you can tell whether I speak the truth. And then I will tell you again that I am not a witch who harmed your child. And I will tell you who the witch is that put this curse on you."

  Silence. The sound of gusting rain. And then a metallic clack. The woman doing something with the shotgun.

  Chee's right arm was numb again. With his left hand he extracted his truck keys, slid back the latch, and eased the door toward him. As he tossed the keys through the opening, he waited for the shotgun. The shotgun didn't fire. He heard the sound of the woman walking in the mud.

  Chee exhaled a gust of breath. Now he had to hold off the pain and the faintness long enough to organize his thoughts. He had to know exactly what to say.

  Chapter 21

  the patrol car of Officer Leonard Skeet, born to the Ears Sticking Up Clan, the man in charge of law and order in the rugged vacant places surrounding Pi¤on, was parked in the rain outside the subagency police station. The station, a double-width mobile home, stood on the bank of Wepo Wash. It also served as home for Leonard Skeet and Aileen Beno, his wife. Leaphorn pulled off the asphalt of Navajo Route 4 and into the mud of Skeet's yard, tapped on Skeet's door, and collected him.

  Skeet had seen no sign of Chee's pickup. His house was located with a view of both Navajo 4 and the road that wandered northwestward toward the Forest Lake Chapter House and, eventually, to the Goldtooth place. "He was probably already past here long before I got home," Skeet said. "But he hasn't come back through. I would have seen his truck."

  At Emma's car, Skeet hesitated. "This isn't good for mud, and maybe I oughta drive," he said, looking at Leaphorn's cast. "You probably oughta give that arm some rest."

  Under the cast, the arm arched from wrist to elbow. Leaphorn stood in the rain, common sense wrestling with his conditioned instinct to be in control. Common sense won. Skeet knew the road. They switched to Skeet's patrol car, left the tiny scattering of buildings that was Pi¤on behind, left asphalt for gravel, and soon, gravel for graded dirt. It was slick now and Skeet drove with the polished skill of an athletic man who drives the bad back roads every working day. Leaphorn found himself thinking of Emma and turned away from that. Skeet had asked no questions and Leaphorn's policy for years had been to tell people no more than they needed to know. Skeet needed to know a little.

  "We may be wasting our time," Leaphorn said. He didn't have to tell Skeet anything about the attempt on Chee's life-everyone in NTP knew everything about that and everyone, Leaphorn guessed, had a theory about it. He told Skeet about Chee being invited to the Goldtooth place to talk about doing a sing.

  "Uh huh," Skeet said. "Interesting. Maybe there's some explanation for it." He concentrated on correcting a rear-end skid on the muddy surface. "He didn't know nobody lives there," Skeet said. "No way he could have, I guess. Still, if somebody was shooting at me." He let the statement trail off.

  Leaphorn was riding in the back, where he could lean against the driver-side door and keep the cast propped along the top of the backrest. Despite the cushioning, the jolts and jarring of the bumpy road communicated themselves to the bone. He didn't feel like talking, or like defending Chee. "No IQ test required for the job," he said. "But maybe I'm just overnervous. Maybe there's an explanation for having the meeting there."

  "Maybe so," Skeet said. His tone was skeptical.

  Skeet slowed at an oddly shaped outcrop of volcanic basalt. "If I remember right, the turn-offs here," he said.

  Leaphorn retrieved his arm from the backrest. "Let's take a look," he said.
>
  On a clear evening, this lonely landscape would still have been lit by a red afterglow. In steady rain, the dark was almost complete. They used their flashlights.

  "Some traffic," Skeet said. "One out pretty recently."

  The rain had blurred the track of the tires without erasing them. And the depth of the rut in the softer earth at the juncture showed the vehicle had passed after the moisture had soaked in. And these fresher tracks had partly overlapped earlier, shallower tracks which the rain had almost smoothed away.

  "So maybe he's come and gone," Skeet said. But as he said it he doubted it. At least two vehicles had gone in. One had come out since the rain became heavy.

  Their headlights reflected first from the rain-slick roof of a truck, then they picked up the windows of the Goldtooth house. No lights visible anywhere. Skeet parked fifty yards away. "Leave 'em on?" he said. "What do you think?"

  "Turn 'em off for now," Leaphorn said. "Until we make sure that's Chee's truck. And find out who's here."

  They found a wealth of half-erased, rain-washed tracks but no sign of anyone outside. "Check the truck," Leaphorn said. "I'll take the house."

  Leaphorn pointed his light at the building, holding it gingerly in his left hand, as far from his body as was practical. "Kicked once, double careful," his mother would have told him. And in this case, they might be dealing with a shotgun. Leaphorn thought, wryly, that he should have a telescoping arm, like Inspector Gadget in the television cartoon.

  The house door was open. The beam of Leaphorn's light shined through it into emptiness. In front of the door, on the wet, packed earth, it lit a small red cylinder. Leaphorn picked it up, an empty shotgun shell. He switched off the light, sniffed the open end of the cartridge, inhaled the acrid smell of freshly burned powder. "Shit," Leaphorn said. He felt bleak, defeated, conscious of the cold rainwater against his ribs.

  Skeet splashed up behind him.

  "Truck unlocked," Skeet said. "Glove box open. This was on the seat." He showed Leaphorn a.38 caliber revolver. "That his?"

  "Probably," Leaphorn said. He checked the cylinder, sniffed the barrel. It hadn't been fired. He shook his head, showed Skeet the empty shotgun shell. They would find Jim Chee's body and they would call it a homicide. Maybe they should call it suicide. Or death by stupidity.

  The house was empty. Absolutely empty. Of people, of furniture, of anything except a scattered residue of trash. They found small footprints around the door, damp but not muddy. Whoever had been here had come before the rain turned heavy. Had left. Hadn't returned.

  From the front door, Leaphorn shined his flash on the hogan. Its door was half open.

  "I'll check it," Skeet said.

  "We will," Leaphorn said.

  They found Jim Chee just inside the door, slumped against the wall just south of the entrance-the correct place for a proper Navajo to be if he had entered the hogan properly "sunwise"-which was from east to south to west to north. In the light of the two flashes, the back of his head and his side seemed clotted with grease. In the reflected light, Skeet's long face was pinched and stricken.

  Grief? Or was he conscious that he was standing in a ghost hogan, being infected with the virulent ghost of Officer Jim Chee? Leaphorn, who had long since come to terms with ghosts, stared at Skeet's face, trying to separate out the sorrow and find the fear. "I think he may be alive," Skeet said.

  Chapter 22

  as it usually does on the Colorado Plateau, night defeated the storm. It drifted northeastward, robbed of the solar power that had fed it, and exhausted its energy in the thin, cold air over the Utah canyons and the mountains of northern New Mexico. By midnight there was no more thunder; the cloud formation had sagged into itself, flattening to a vast general rain-the sort Navajos call female rain-which gently drenched an area from the Painted Desert northward to Sleeping Ute Mountain.

  From the fifth-floor windows of the Indian Health Service hospital in Gallup, Joe Leaphorn saw the deep blue of the newly washed morning sky-cloudless except for scraps of fog over the Zuni Mountains to the southeast, and the red cliffs stretching eastward toward Borego Pass. By afternoon, if moisture was still moving in from the Pacific, the towering thunderheads would be building again, bombarding earth with lightning, wind, and rain. But now the world outside the glass where Leaphorn stood was brilliant with sun-clean and calm.

  He was hardly aware of it. His mind was full of what the neurologist had told him. Emma did not have Alzheimer's disease. Emma's illness was caused by a tumor pressing against the right front lobe of her brain. The doctor, a young woman named Vigil, had told Leaphorn a great deal more, but what was important was simple enough. If the tumor was cancerous, Emma would probably die, and die rather soon. If the tumor was benign, Emma would be cured by its removal through surgery. "What are the odds?" Dr. Vigil didn't want to guess. This afternoon she would call a doctor she knew in Baltimore. A doctor she had studied with. Cases like this were his field. He would know.

  "I want to discuss it with him before I do any guessing." Dr. Vigil was in her early thirties, Leaphorn guessed. One of those who went to medical school with a government grant and worked it off in the Indian Health Service. She stood, hands on desk, waiting for Leaphorn to leave. "Leave word where I can get in touch with you," she said.

  "Call now," Leaphorn said. "I want to know."

  "He does his surgery in the mornings," she said. "He won't be in."

  "Try it," Leaphorn said. "Just try." Dr. Vigil said, "Well, now, I don't think."

  Then her eyes met Leaphorn's. "No harm trying," she said.

  He'd waited in the hall, just outside the doctor's door, staring out at the morning, digesting this new data. The news was good. But it left him off balance, trying to live again with hope. It was a luxury he had given up weeks before. The exact moment, he thought, was when he sat at his desk reading the literature the Alzheimer's organization had sent him and seeing Emma's awful confusion described in print. It had been a terrible morning-the worst pain he'd ever endured. Now all his instincts cried out against enduring it again-against reentering that door which hope held open for him. But there was the ultimate fact: Emma might be well again. He wanted to celebrate. He wanted to shout for joy. But he was afraid.

  So he waited. To avoid the trap of hope, he thought of Jim Chee. Specifically he thought of what Jim Chee had told them when the ambulance unloaded him at the Badwater Clinic. Just a few words, but a lot of information in them if only Leaphorn knew how to read it.

  "Woman," Chee had said, in a voice so weak that Leaphorn had heard it only because he was leaning with his face just inches from Chee's lips.

  "Who shot you?" Leaphorn had asked while attendants shifted the stretcher onto the hospital cart. Chee had moved his head. "Do you know?" Chee had moved his head again, a negative motion. And then he had said: "Woman."

  "Young?" Leaphorn had asked, and got no response.

  "We'll find her," Leaphorn had said, and that had provoked the rest of the information Chee had provided.

  "Baby dying," Chee said. He said it clearly, in English. And then he repeated it in mumbled Navajo, his voice fading away.

  So it would seem that the person who had shot Chee at the Goldtooth place was a woman with a fatally ill infant. Probably the same person had fired the three shotgun blasts through Chee's trailer wall. When Chee came out of surgery it would be easy enough to find her. He would be able to identify the vehicle she was driving, probably even give them the license number if he had been halfway alert before the shooting. And if he knew she had a sick child, he had to have talked to her face to face. They would also have a physical description. But even if Chee didn't survive to describe her, they could find her. A young woman with a critically ill child who knew about the Goldtooth place, about it being abandoned. That would give them all the narrowing they needed.

  They would find the woman. She would tell them why she wanted Jim Chee dead. Then all this insane killing would make sense.

  Below
Leaphorn, a flock of crows moved toward the center of Gallup, their cawing muted by the glass. Far beyond, an endless line of tank cars moved eastward down the Santa Fe mainline.

  Or, Leaphorn thought, they wouldn't find the woman. Or they would find her dead. Or she, like Bistie, would tell them absolutely nothing. And he would be exactly where he was now. And where was that?

  The crows disappeared out of his line of vision. The freight crawled inexorably eastward. Leaphorn considered why he was nagged with the feeling that these homicides made perfect sense, that Chee had somehow, in those three words, put the key in the lock and turned it.

  "Woman," Chee had said. A woman Chee didn't know. How did that help? Of the victims, only Irma Onesalt was female. She had been killed with a rifle shot, not a shotgun. No apparent connection there. "Baby dying," Chee had said. Presumably the baby of the woman who had shot him. Presumably she had told Chee about it. Why?