"I'm going to tell you exactly what was in that letter," Leaphorn said. He leaned forward in his chair, eyes intent on McGinnis's face. "I want you to listen. It said, `My Grandson. I have ghost sickness. Nobody is here to get me a singer and do the things necessary so I can go again in beauty. I need you to come here and hire the right singer and see about things. If you don't come I will die soon. Come. There are valuable things I must give you before I die."
McGinnis stared into the bourbon, full of thought. "Go on," he said. "I'm listening."
"That's it," Leaphorn said. "I memorized it."
"Funny," McGinnis said.
"I'm going to ask you if that's about the same as the letter he was telling you he wanted written."
"I figured that's what you were going to ask," McGinnis said. "Let me see the letter."
"I don't have it," Leaphorn said. "This Benjamin Tso let me read it."
"You got a hell of a memory, then," McGinnis said.
"Nothing much wrong with it," Leaphorn said. "How about yours? You, remember what he wanted you to write?"
McGinnis pursed his lips. "Well, now," he said. "It's kind of like I told you. I got a reputation around here for not gossiping about what people want put in their letters."
"I want you to hear something else, then," Leaphorn said. "This is a tape of an FBI agent named Feeney talking to Margaret Cigaret about what Hosteen Tso told her that afternoon just before he got killed." Leaphorn picked up the recorder and pushed the play button.
"... say anything just before you left him and went over by the cliff?" the voice of Feeney asked.
And then the voice of the Listening Woman. "I don't remember much. I told him he ought to get somebody to take him to Gallup and get his chest x-rayed because maybe he had one of those sicknesses that white people cure. And he said he'd get somebody to write to his grandson to take care of everything, and then I said I'd go and listen-"
Leaphorn stopped the tape, his eyes still on McGinnis's.
"Well, well," McGinnis said. He started the rocking chair in motion. "Well, now," he said. "If I heard what I think I heard... He paused. "That was her talking about just before old Tso got hit on the head?'
"Right," Leaphorn said.
"And he was saying he still hadn't got the letter written. So nobody could have written it-except Anna Atcitty, and that's damned unlikely. And even if she wrote it, which I bet my ass she didn't, the guy that hit 'em on the head would've had to gone and mailed it." He glanced at Leaphorn. "You believe that?"
"No," Leaphorn said.
McGinnis abruptly stopped the rocking chair. In the Coca-Cola glass the oscillation of the bourbon turned abruptly into splashing waves.
"By God," McGinnis said, his voice enthusiastic. "This gets mysterious."
"Yeah," Leaphorn said.
"That was a short letter," McGinnis said. "What he told me would make a long one. Maybe a page and a half. And I write small."
McGinnis pushed himself out of the rocker and reached for the bourbon. "You know," he said, uncapping the bottle, "I'm known for keeping secrets as well as for talking. And I'm known as an Indian trader. By profession, in fact, that's what I am. And you're an Indian. So let's trade."
"For what?" Leaphorn asked.
"Tit for tat," McGinnis said. "I tell you what I know. You tell me what you know."
"Fair enough," Leaphorn said. "Except right now there's damned little I know."
"Then you'll owe me," McGinnis said. "When you get this thing figured out you tell me. That means I gotta trust you. Got any problems with that?"
"No," Leaphorn said.
"Well, then," McGinnis said. "You know anything about somebody named Jimmy?" Leaphorn shook his head.
"Old Man Tso come in here and he sat down over there." McGinnis waved the glass in the direction of an overstuffed chair. "He said to write a letter telling his grandson that he was sick, and to tell the grandson to come right away and get a singer to cure him. And to tell him that Jimmy was acting bad, acting like he didn't have any relatives."
McGinnis paused, sipped, and thought. "Let's see now," he said. "He said to tell the grandson that Jimmy was acting like a damned white man. That maybe Jimmy had become a witch. Jimmy had stirred up the ghost. He said to tell his grandson to hurry up and come right away because there was something that he had to tell him. He said he couldn't die until he told him." McGinnis had been staring into the glass as he spoke. Now he looked up at Leaphorn, his shrunken old face expressionless but his eyes searching for an answer. "Hosteen Tso told me he wanted to put that down twice. That he couldn't die until he told that grandson something. And that after he told him, then it would be time to die. Looks like somebody hurried it up." He was motionless in the chair a long moment. "I'd like to know who did that," he said.
"I'd like to know who Jimmy is," Leaphorn said.
"I don't know," McGinnis said. "I asked the old fart, and all he'd say was that Jimmy was a son-of-a-bitch, and maybe a skinwalking witch. But he wouldn't say who he was. Sounds like he figured the grandson would know."
"He say anything about wanting to give the grandson something valuable?"
McGinnis shook his head. "Hell," he said. "What'd he have? A few sheep. Forty, fifty dollars' worth of jewelry in pawn here. Change of clothes. He didn't have nothing valuable." McGinnis pondered this, the only sound in the room the slow, rhythmic creaking of his rocker.
"That girl," he said finally. "Let me see if I guessed right about the way that is. She's after that priest. He's running and she's chasing and now she's got him." He glanced at Leaphorn for confirmation. "That about it? You left her out there with him?"
"Yeah," Leaphorn said. "You got it figured right."
They thought about it awhile. The old mantel clock on the shelf behind Leaphorn's chair became suddenly noisy in the silence. McGinnis smiled faintly over his Coca-Cola glass. But McGinnis hadn't seen it happen, hadn't seen the defeat of Father Benjamin Tso as Leaphorn had. Leaphorn had asked the priest a few more questions about the letter, and had established that Father Tso had seen nothing of Goldrims, and no sign of the dog. And then Theodora Adams had opened the back door of the carryall, and taken out her small duffel bag, and put it on the ground beside the vehicle. Benjamin Tso had looked at it, and at her, and had taken a long, deep breath and said, "Theodora, you can't stay." And Theodora had stood silently, looking first at him and then down at her hands, and her shoulders had slumped just a fraction, and Leaphorn had become aware from the tortured expression on the face of Father Tso that Theodora Adams must be crying, and Leaphorn had said he would "look around a little" and had walked away from this struggle of two souls, which was, as Miss Adams had told him, not the business of the Navajo Tribal Police. The struggle had been brief. When Leaphorn had completed his idle, fruitless examination of the ground behind the hogan, Father Tso was holding the girl against him, saying something into her hair.
"That's some woman," McGinnis said, mostly to himself. His watery old eyes were almost closed. Leaphorn had nothing to add to that. He was thinking of the expression on Father Tso's face when Tso had told him to leave the girl. The God Tso had worshipped was no more than a distant abstraction then. The girl stood against his side, warm and alive, though at this stage of the Fall of Father Tso lust hadn't been the enemy. Tso's enemy, Leaphorn thought, would be a complicated mixture. It would include pity, however sadly misplaced, and affection, and loneliness and vanity. Lust would come later, when Theodora Adams wanted it to come-and Tso would learn then how he had overestimated himself.
"Certain kind of woman likes what she can't have," McGinnis said. "They hate to see a man keep a promise. Some of 'em go after married men. But you take a real tiger like that Adams-she goes gets herself a priest." He sipped the bourbon, glanced sidewise at Leaphorn. "You know how that works with a Catholic priest?" he asked. "Before they're ordained, they get some time to think about the promises they're going to make-giving up the world, and women, and all that. And th
en when the time comes, they go up to the altar and they stretch out on the floor, flat on their face, and they make the promise in front of the bishop. Psychologically it makes it mean as hell to change your mind. Just one step short of getting your balls cut off if you break a promise like that." McGinnis sipped again. "Makes it a hell of a challenge for a woman," he added.
Leaphorn was thinking of another challenge. It was obsessing him. Somewhere in this jumble of contradictions, oddities, coincidences and unlikely events there must be a pattern, a reason, something that linked a cause and an effect, which the laws of natural harmony and reason would dictate. It had to be there.
"McGinnis," he said. He tried to keep his voice from sounding plaintive. "Is there anything you're not telling me that would help make sense out of this? This secret the old man was keeping-what could it have been? Could it have been worth killing for?"
McGinnis snorted. "There ain't nothing around here worth killing for," he said. "Put it all together and this whole Short Mountain country ain't worth hitting a man with a stick for."
"What do you think, then?" Leaphorn asked. "Anything that would help."
The old man communed with the inch of amber left in the Coca-Cola glass. "I can tell you a story," he said finally. "If you don't mind having your time wasted."
"I'd like to hear it," Leaphorn said.
"Part of it's true," McGinnis said. "And some of it's probably Navajo bullshit. It starts off about a hundred twenty years ago when Standing Medicine was headman of the Bitter Water Dinee and a man noted for his wisdom." McGinnis rocked back in his chair, slowly telling how, in 1863, the territorial governor of New Mexico decided to destroy the Navajos, how Standing Medicine had joined Narbona and fought Kit Carson's army until, after the bitter starvation winter of 1864, what was left of the group surrendered and was taken to join other Navajos being held at Bosque Redondo.
"That much is the true part," McGinnis said. "Anyhow, Standing Medicine shows up on the army records as being brought in 1864, and he died at Bosque Redondo in 1865. And that gets us to the funny story." McGinnis tipped his head back and drained the last trickle of bourbon onto his tongue. He put the glass down, carefully refilled it to the copyright symbol, capped the bottle, and raised the glass to Leaphorn. "Way they told it when I was a young man, this Standing Medicine was known all around this part of the reservation for his curing. Maybe I told you about that already. But he knew every bit of the Blessing Way,' and he could do the Wind Way, and the Mountain Way Chant and parts of some of the others. But they say he also knew a ceremonial that nobody at all knows anymore. I heard it called the Sun Way, and the Calling Back Chant. Anyway, it's supposed to be the ceremonial that Changing Woman and the Talking God taught the people to use when the Fourth World ends."
McGinnis paused to tap the Coca-Cola glass-just a few drops on the tongue. "Now, you may have another version in your clan," he said. "The way we have it around Short Mountain, the Fourth World isn't supposed to end like the Third World did, with Water Monster making a flood. This time the evil is supposed to cause the Sun Father to make it cold, and the Dinee are supposed to hole up somewhere over in the Chuska range. I think Beautiful Mountain opens up for them. Then when the time is just right, they do this Sun Way and call back the light and warmth, and they start the Fifth World."
"I never heard a version quite like that," Leaphorn said.
"Like I said, maybe it's bullshit. But there's a point. There is a point. The way the old story goes, Standing Medicine figured this Way was the most important ceremonial of all. And he figured Kit Carson and the soldiers were going to catch him, and he was afraid the ritual would be forgotten, so... McGinnis sipped again, watching Leaphorn, timing his account. "So he found a place and somehow or other in some magic way he preserved it all. And he just told his oldest son, so that Kit Carson and the Belacani soldiers wouldn't find it and so the Utes wouldn't find it and spoil it."
"Interesting," Leaphorn said.
"Hold on. We ain't got to the interesting part yet," McGinnis said. "What's interesting is that Standing Medicine's son came back from the Long Walk, and married a woman in the Mud clan, and this feller's oldest son was a man named Mustache Tsossie, and he married back into the Salt Cedar clan, and his oldest boy turned out to be the one we called Hosteen Tso."
"So maybe that's the secret," Leaphorn said.
"Maybe so. Or like I said, maybe it's all Navajo bullshit." McGinnis's expression was carefully neutral.
"And part of the secret would be where this place was where Standing Medicine preserved the Sun Way," Leaphorn said. "Any guesses?'
"My God," McGinnis said. "It's magic. And magic could be up in the sky, or under the earth. Out in that canyon country it could be anywhere."
"It's been my experience," Leaphorn said, "that secrets are hard to keep. If fathers know and sons know, pretty soon other people know."
"You're forgetting something," McGinnis said. "Lot of these people around here are Utes, or half Utes. Lot of intermarrying. You got to think about how a die-hard old-timer like Hosteen Tso, and his folks before him, would feel about that. That sort of makes people close-mouthed about secrets."
Leaphorn thought about it. "Yeah," he said. "I see what you mean." The Utes had always raided this corner of the reservation. And when Kit Carson and the army had come, Ute scouts had led them-betraying hiding places, revealing food caches, helping hunt down the starving Dinee. Standing Medicine would have been guarding his secret as much from the Utes as from the whites-and now the Utes had married into the clans.
"Even if we knew what it was and where it is, it wouldn't help anyway," McGinnis said. "You probably got an old medicine bundle and some Yei masks and amulets hidden away somewhere. It's not the kind of stuff anybody kills you for."
"Not even if it's the way to stop the world from ending?" Leaphorn asked.
McGinnis looked at him, saw he was smiling. "That's what you birds got to do, you know," McGinnis said. "If you're going to solve that Tso killing, you got to figure the reason for it." McGinnis stared into the glass. "It's a damn funny thing to think about," he said. "You can just see it. Somebody walking up that wagon track, and the old man and that Atcitty girl standing there watching him coming, and probably saying `Ya-ta-hey' whether it was friend or stranger, and then this feller taking a gun barrel or something, and clouting the old man with it and then running the girl down and clubbing her, and then... McGinnis shook his head in disbelief. "And then just turning right around and walking right up that wagon track away from there." McGinnis stared over the glass at Leaphorn. "You just plain know a feller would have to have a real reason to do something like that. Just think about it."
Joe Leaphorn thought about it.
Outside there was the sound of hammering, of laughter, of a pickup engine starting. Leaphorn was oblivious to it. He was thinking. He was again recreating the crime in his mind. The reason for what had happened at the Tso hogan. must have been real-desperate and urgent-even if it had been done by the sort of person who laughed as he ran over a strange policeman beside a lonely road. Leaphorn sighed. He would have to find out about that reason. And that meant he would have to speak with Margaret Cigaret.
"You were right about Mrs. Cigaret not being home," Leaphorn said. "I went by there to check. Nobody there and the truck's gone. You got any ideas where she is?"
"No telling," McGinnis said. "She could be anyplace. I'd guess visiting kin, like I told you."
"How did you know she wasn't home?"
McGinnis frowned at him. "That don't take any great brains," he said. "She come through here three or four days ago. Had one of Old Lady Nakai's girls driving her truck. And she ain't been back." He stared belligerently at Leaphorn. "And I knew she didn't come home because the only way to get to her place from the outside is right past my place here."
"Three or four days ago? Can you remember which day?"
McGinnis thought about it. It took only a moment. "Wednesday. Little after I ate.
About 2 P.M."
Wednesday. The Kinaalda where Leaphorn had arrested young Emerson Begay would have been starting about then. Begay was a member of the Mud clan. His niece was being initiated into womanhood at the ceremony.
"What's Mrs. Cigaret's clan?" Leaphorn asked. "Is she a Mud Dinee?"
"She's a born-to Mud," McGinnis said.
So Leaphorn knew where he could find Mrs. Cigaret. For a hundred miles around, every member of the Mud People healthy enough to stir would be drawn to the ritual reunion to share its blessing and reinforce its power.
"There's not many Mud Dinee around Short Mountain," McGinnis said. "Mrs. Cigaret's bunch, and the Nakai family, and the Endischee outfit, and Alice Frank Pino, and a few Begays, and I think that's all of them."
Leaphorn got up and stretched. He thanked McGinnis for the hospitality and said he would go to the sing. He used the Navajo verb hodeeshtal, which means "to take part in a ritual chant." By slightly changing the guttural inflection, the word becomes the verb "to be kicked." As Leaphorn pronounced it, a listener with an ear alert to the endless Navajo punning could have understood Leaphorn to mean either that he was going to get himself cured or get himself kicked. It was among the oldest of old Navajo word plays, and McGinnis-grinning slightly-replied with the expected pun response.
Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 03 - Listening Woman Page 8
