Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 06 - The Ghostway

by The Ghostway(lit)

  He'd done his talking to Margaret Sosi when Littleben finished the segment that recounted how Monster Slayer and Born for Water had returned to the Earth Surface World with the weapons they had stolen from their father, the Sun. Littleben had come out of the hogan, wiping perspiration from his forehead, under the red headband, and looking curiously around him as people do who've been indoors too long. Then the others who were sharing in the blessing of the ceremony came out, and with them was Margaret Sosi, with her face covered with the blackening that made her invisible to ghosts. Margaret Sosi seemed exhausted and thin, but the eyes that looked out through the layer of soot were alive and excited. Margaret Sosi is being cured, Chee thought. Someday, perhaps, he could be.

  Margaret Sosi was delighted to see him. She asked him about his head and told him he shouldn't be out of the hospital.

  "I want to thank you for getting me there," Chee said. "How in the world did you do it?"

  "When you hit him, he dropped his gun. I just picked it up and told him to take us to the hospital."

  "As easy as that?"

  Margaret Sosi shivered. "I was scared," she said. "I was scared to death."

  "Before anything like that happens again," Chee said, "I need to ask you some questions. Did Hosteen Begay send you a postcard he'd gotten from Albert Gorman? A picture-"

  "Yes," Margaret said.

  "I'd like to see it."

  "Sure," Margaret said. "But it's in my room. At St. Catherine. We went back there before we came here for the sing."

  Of course, Chee thought. It wouldn't be here. He would never, ever actually see that postcard. Never.

  "What did it say on it?"

  Margaret Sosi frowned. "It just said, 'Don't trust nobody.' That's all. There was Mr. Gorman's name, and an address in Los Angeles, and that 'Don't trust nobody.' That's all there was. And at the bottom 'Leroy.'"

  Chee didn't know what to say, so he said, "No return address?"

  "No," Margaret said, "and not even a stamp. The postman had put that 'Postage Due' stamp on it."

  "Well," Chee said. "Hell."

  "Have you found my grandfather yet?"

  Chee knew the question would be coming. He had prepared himself for it. He had decided that the best thing for all concerned was simply to tell Margaret that her grandfather was dead. Straight out. Get it over with. He drew a deep breath. "Margaret," he said. "Uh, well."

  "He's dead, isn't he," Margaret Billy Sosi said. "I guess I knew it all along and just couldn't face it. I knew he would never abandon his hogan like that. Not and just go away with no word to anyone."

  "Yes," Chee said. "He's dead."

  Tears were streaking the soot on her face, a line of wetness that reflected the cold moonlight, but her voice didn't change. "Of course he was," she said. "Of course. He was killed, wasn't he? I guess I really knew it."

  "And I don't think it was really a ghost hogan you were in," Chee added. "I think Gorman died outside. It was just made to look like Hosteen Begay had buried him, and broke the hogan wall, and abandoned it. So nobody would be looking around for him."

  "But why?"

  "I don't know," Chee said. "I don't know why." But he knew there must be a reason. Had to be. If he could just be smart enough to figure it out. And that brought him back to the picture.

  "Was the address on that picture." he began, but Margaret Sosi was talking.

  "It doesn't matter now," she said. "Whether it was a ghost hogan or not. In just a few hours I'll be cured of that. Mr. Littleben will finish just when the sun comes up. And I feel cured already."

  Chee did not feel cured. The ghost sickness clung to him as heavy as a rain-soaked saddle blanket. He felt dizzy with it. Sick.

  "The address on that picture," he continued. "Was it the same place you went when you went to Los Angeles?"

  "Yes. That's how I knew to go there. I wanted to find the family, and that woman there told me what bus to catch to get to the place of Bentwoman and Bentwoman's Daughter."

  "And all it said on the picture was 'Don't trust anybody'?"

  "'Don't trust nobody'," Margaret corrected. "That was all, and 'Leroy' down at the bottom."

  That was exactly all he had learned. He told Margaret Sosi that when this was over he would drive her back to Santa Fe and pick up the picture card. But even as he said it, his instinct told him that even if he held the card in his hand it would tell him nothing he didn't already know. The final piece of the puzzle found; the puzzle unresolved.

  They had eaten then, about thirty altogether, from two pots of mutton stew and a basket of fry bread. They ate bakery-made oatmeal cookies for dessert, and drank Pepsi-Cola and coffee. Hosteen Littleben came over and agreed to purify the Begay Four Mountains Bundle, a rite that involved rinsing it with some of the emetic made for the patient to drink when the ceremonial ended.

  "Frank Sam, he tells me you're going to be a yataalii. Said you already know most of the Blessing Way and you're learning some of the others. That's a good thing." Hosteen Littleben was short and fat, and when he walked he tilted a little because of a stiff leg. His two pigtails were black, but his mustache was almost gray and his face was a map of deep-cut lines. If Frank Sam Nakai was right, if Hosteen Littleben was the youngest medicine man left who knew the Ghostway, then the People would be losing another piece of their inheritance from the Holy People.

  "Yes," Chee said. "Learning the songs is a good thing." Was a good thing, he thought. The verb is "was."

  And then it was time for the final segment of the Ghostway chant. The very last glow of twilight was gone, the moon climbing, the mesa dark, and the lights of Albuquerque glowing against Sandia Mountain forty miles (and a world) away. Hosteen Littleben would twice cover the earthen floor of the hogan with the ceremonial's elaborate dry paintings, illustrating episodes in the mythic adventures by which the Holy People resolved the problem caused by death's disruptive residue. Margaret Sosi would sit surrounded by this abstract imagery, and by the love and care of this ragtag remnant of the Turkey Clan, and be returned to beauty and hozro, cleansed of the ghost. Chee didn't follow the participants back into the hogan. To do that properly, one's mind must be right-free of wrong thoughts, anger, and disappointment and all things negative. Chee stayed out in the cold, his mind full of wrong thoughts.

  Leroy Gorman arrived a little later, parking a white Chevy among the cluster of vehicles in the yard of the Yellow place. Chee watched him walk up the slope to the hogan, the moonlight reflecting from the crown of his Stetson and the blue and white plaid of his mackinaw.

  "Hell of a place to find," he said. "The police station was closed, but they had your map pinned there on the door. But even with a map, I've been all over the landscape. Taking the wrong turns. How do they make a living out here?"

  "They don't make much of one," Chee said.

  Gorman was staring at the hogan, from which the sound of Littleben's chant was issuing again, and then back down the slope at the shabby cluster of shacks and outbuildings that housed the families of the Yellow outfit. He shook his head. "My kinfolks," he said.

  "What did you mean when you wrote 'Don't trust nobody' on that picture?"

  Gorman was staring at the hogan again. For a moment, the question didn't seem to register. "What?" he said.

  "The picture you mailed to Albert, back in Los Angeles. Why did you write that on it?"

  "I didn't," Leroy Gorman said. "I don't know what the hell you're talking about."

  "You said you'd written to your brother back in L.A. Just good wishes. That sort of stuff. We find this card. It's addressed to Albert, and it says 'Don't trust nobody.'"

  "Not me," Leroy Gorman said.

  Chee studied him, trying to see his face in the moon shadow under the broad felt brim. He could see only the glint of reflection from the lens of his glasses.

  "I wrote right after I got to Shiprock. I sent Albert a letter and I told him I was all right. And I asked him to call somebody for me and tell 'em I'd be away for a while,
and not to worry."

  "Who?"

  Leroy Gorman didn't say anything for a while. Then he shrugged. "Friend of mine. A woman." He shrugged again. "Didn't want her worried and all pissed off. Had her phone number but I wasn't sure of her address, so I sent Al the number and asked him to tell her."

  "So how did Albert get this photograph of you standing there by your trailer, with the note on the back?"

  "Part of that's easy," Leroy said. "I sent him the photograph. Put it in the letter. But I didn't write nothing on it."

  "You mailed him the Polaroid photo then?"

  "Yeah. Set the camera over on the hood of my car, and set the timer and stood over by the trailer while it took the picture. But I didn't write on the back of it. I think if you do that it spoils the picture. The ink works through."

  Chee digested that. The final piece dropped into the puzzle and created a new puzzle. Who had written Don't Trust Nobody on the back of that damned photograph? And when? And how had they gotten it. And why? Why? Why?

  "Somebody sent it," Chee said. "In the mail. It had a 'Postage Due' thing stamped on it. And somebody signed it 'Leroy.'"

  "Said 'Don't trust anybody'? Nothing else?"

  "Right," Chee said.

  "Who could it have been?" Gorman asked. He pushed his hat brim back, and the moonlight lit his lined face and reflected from his glasses. "And why?"

  Those were exactly the questions in Chee's mind.

  They hung in his mind, unanswered. He and Gorman had poked at the questions for a while, adding nothing to their understanding. And Chee had explained to Gorman that it wouldn't be proper for Gorman, a stranger, to enter the hogan at this stage of the ceremony. If he'd arrived an hour earlier, he could have met his niece and his other kinsmen at their supper. Now he would have to wait until dawn, when the ritual ended. Gorman wandered over to the fire, where spectators who weren't joining in the hogan ceremonial were visiting. Chee heard him introducing himself and, a little later, the sound of laughter. Leroy Gorman had found at least the fringes of his family.

  Chee went back to his pickup and turned on the engine. No place left to look now. He'd drive Margaret Sosi to Santa Fe, get the picture and look at it, and see what had already been described to him. That would be the end of that. There were no loose ends, nothing. Just a sequence of murderous incidents which seemed to violate reason. They certainly violated Frank Sam Nakai's basic rules for the universe-which had become Jim Chee's rules. Everything is connected. Cause and effect is the universal rule. Nothing happens without motive or without effect. The wing of the corn beetle affects the direction of the wind, the way the sand drifts, the way the light reflects into the eye of man beholding his reality. All is part of totality, and in this totality man finds his hozro, his way of walking in harmony, with beauty all around him.

  "Don't trust nobody," Chee said aloud. He turned on the heater, confirmed that the engine was still too cold to help, and switched it off again. People were sleeping in the cars and trucks around Yellow's house, and in bedrolls on the ground, waiting for dawn, when Margaret Sosi would emerge from the hogan with the soot washed from her face. She would drink the bitter emetic Hosteen Littleben would have prepared for her, vomit up the last traces of her ghost sickness, and be happily returned to the beauty of her way.

  Chee's mind wouldn't leave it alone. Why the warning against trust? he thought. Who wasn't to be trusted? Should he take the advice himself? Just who was he trusting in this affair?

  There was Shaw. The cop motivated by love for a friend and desire for justice. Was that credible? Chee thought about Shaw for a while and came up with nothing helpful. There was Sharkey. Chee could think of no reason not to trust what he'd learned from the fbi agent-which was nothing much. There was even Upchurch. Had he done something untrustworthy before he died? Who else was Chee depending on? Leroy Gorman. He'd learned nothing much from Leroy, except for Leroy's denial that he'd written the warning on the picture. Chee considered that a moment. Did he trust Gorman? Of course not, no more than he trusted Albert Gorman's landlady. He simply trusted them to behave in the way they were conditioned to behave. Just as you trusted the mailman to deliver mail. Chee remembered Albert Gorman's mailbox, shielding it with his body so Gorman's landlady couldn't see that he was checking its contents. Abruptly a whole new line of thought opened. The letter Leroy Gorman had mailed would have been delivered to that mailbox, visible to Mrs. Day-the landlady who was being paid to keep McNair informed. But the picture, mailed as a postcard with an address, but no stamp and no return address, would have been delivered just a little differently. The mailman would have tapped at the door and collected the postage due. Mrs. Day would have had no chance to intercept that. Was that important? Chee could see how it might be. He considered. "Ah," he said. If he was thinking correctly, the McNair people would have known Leroy Gorman was hidden at Shiprock very soon after he got there. Mrs. Day would have seen the letter Leroy Gorman had mailed in Albert's mailbox, and noted the return address, and made her $100 call. And in such a small community they could have found a stranger. Not quickly, perhaps, because Albert obviously had the photograph and they didn't. But they could have found him. Apparently they didn't try. Why not?

  Chee sighed. What about the card? Leroy Gorman said he'd mailed the Polaroid photograph in an envelope and hadn't written the warning on it. But the photograph had "Postage Due" stamped on it, and an address. What explained that? Two photographs? Hardly possible with a Polaroid print. Albert Gorman had told old man Berger he received the photograph from his brother, that he was worried. The "Wish you were here" note Leroy said he'd written would hardly provoke worry. The "Don't trust nobody" message would.

  Chee closed his eyes, shutting out the moonlight and the sound of Mr. Littleben's chanting as best he could to better reproduce the scene on the Silver Threads lawn. There was Mr. Berger, using his hands to tell the story of the blond man coming, of Albert Gorman slamming the door on the blond man's hand. Gorman had told Berger that he wasn't supposed to go to Shiprock, but he was going anyway. Berger believed the blond man had come to prevent that. That hadn't made sense to Chee then, and it made no sense now. If they hadn't found Leroy, they would have wanted Al to go find him for them. What if they had found him. Would it matter then? Perhaps.

  Abruptly Chee sat bolt upright, eyes open. It would matter a lot if the man Albert Gorman found when he found the trailer was not his brother. What if the McNair people had found Leroy in his trailer, and removed him, and replaced him? But that couldn't possibly work. Chee did a quick scan of his memory for reasons it couldn't work.

  There were none. Upchurch, who would have recognized the switch instantly, was dead. Farmer, the only man in the u.s.d.a's office Upchurch had trusted with his witnesses, was far away working for a private law firm in San Francisco. Who did that leave who would know Leroy Gorman? Sharkey? Not likely. Sharkey would know he had one under his wing, would be in telephone contact, would be alert. But he would also stay away to avoid drawing any attention to the man.

  Looking back on it, Chee could never say exactly when enlightenment came. First he finally really understood how the postcard had originated. Leroy Gorman must have realized he had been found. They must have sent Vaggan to dispose of him. Perhaps he'd seen Vaggan first. He would have known instantly that the Witness Protection Program had failed. He had been trying to talk his brother into cooperating with the Feds. Now he knew that was a fatal mistake. He'd be desperate to warn his brother. He'd managed to jot the address and the warning on the only thing he had with him that would drop through a mailbox slot-the Polaroid print. "Don't trust nobody" included the fbi, the McNair bunch, and everyone else.

  After that breakthrough, the rest of it became clear and simple. The death of Upchurch must have triggered it, and it didn't matter whether Shaw was right, or the coroner. Probably the death had been natural. What mattered was that McNair knew of it quickly, and recognized the chance it offered. Upchurch's secrecy had been the downfa
ll of Clan McNair, but now it presented McNair a way out, a witness switch. It made what had happened at the Begay hogan totally logical. Everything had to be done to avoid raising any question, drawing any attention to the man in the aluminum trailer at Shiprock. Once again Frank Sam Nakai's immutable law of cause and motivation was confirmed.