Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 01 - The Blessing Way

by The Blessing Way(lit)

  "Your cop really thinks it wasn't a natural death?"

  "I don't think he knows," McKee said. "But he guessed right about Horseman coming back in here to hide."

  Canfield let the pickup idle along the hard-packed sand of the canyon floor, turning occasionally to side canyons to check his map and his memory of where cliff ruins he would inspect were located. The sun was low as they penetrated the upper canyon. Here the cliffs closed in, rising in sheer, almost smooth walls nearly four hundred feet to a narrow slit of sky above. Here in this slot of eroded stone darkness came early. Canfield had switched on his headlights before he found a likely camp-a hillock of rocky debris which had collected enough soil to support an expanse of grass and even a growth of young cottonwoods and willows.

  By the time they had Canfield's working tent pitched and supper cooked, the first stars were visible over the canyon walls. A nighthawk flashed past them, hunting. Up canyon a rasping hoot touched off a dull pattern of echoes.

  "Saw-whet owl," Canfield said. He grinned at McKee. "If Leaphorn was right, maybe that's Horseman's ghost enjoying the night out."

  They ate and then sat in the silent darkness, watching the light of the early moon light the top of the canyon walls. From some infinite distance came the faint sound of barking.

  "Take your pick," McKee said. "A coyote, some sheepherder's lost dog, or one of my witches turned into a wolf for the evening."

  Canfield took the turquoise frog from his pocket and rubbed it, chuckling.

  "I'll say it's a witch," he said, "because this keeps me safe from witches."

  Actually, McKee remembered, the turquoise shape wasn't a Navajo charm. It was a much older Anasazi fertility totem with nothing at all to do with witches.

  Of course it didn't really matter.

  Chapter 8

  McKee left the campsite before dawn, called Leaphorn's office from the Gulf station on the highway at Chinle, and then ate a leisurely breakfast at Bishbito's Diner while he waited for the policeman to make the sixty-mile drive from Window Rock. Leaphorn arrived while he was finishing his third cup of coffee. He handed McKee a sheet of paper and sat down.

  "Take a look at that," he said. "And then let's go and find that boy who went to warn Horseman."

  The paper was a carbon of an autopsy report form:

  SUBJECT: Luis Horseman (war name unknown).

  AGE: 23.

  ADDRESS: 27 miles southwest of Klagetoh.

  NEXT OF KIN: Wife, Agnes (Tso) Horseman, Many Goats Clan.

  TIME OF DEATH: Between 6 P.M. and 12 midnight, June 11 (estimated).

  CAUSE OF DEATH: Suffocation. Substantial accumulation of fine granular material in lung tissue, windpipe, throat and nostrils.

  There was more information, negative reports on blood alcohol and on abrasions and concussions, and an analysis indicating the "fine granular material" was common silica-based sand.

  "The medical examiner said it looked like he got caught in a cave-in," Leaphorn said. "Like he had been buried in sand."

  "You think so?"

  "And somebody dug him out? And laid him out there at Teastah Wash with the bottle of whiskey he hadn't drunk?" Leaphorn thought about his own questions. "I don't know. Maybe. But there wasn't any sand in his cuffs, or in his pockets, or anywhere else."

  "It wouldn't make any sense anyway," McKee said.

  Leaphorn was looking out the window. "I think I know a lot about witches," he said. "You think you know a lot about witches. How do you kill a witch?"

  The question surprised McKee. He thought about it. "You mean do you smother them?"

  "Remember that case over at Fruitland?" Leaphorn asked. "That guy whose daughter died of t.b.? He shot four of them. And then there was that old Singer up near Teec Nos Pas a couple of years ago. He was beaten to death."

  "There's no special way that I know of," McKee said. "There was supposed to be a hanging back in the 1930's but there wasn't any proof and they think it was just gossip. Usually, though, it's heat-of-passion stuff-beating, shooting, or knifing. Something like that. Why? You think somebody thought Horseman was a witch?"

  "Makes a certain amount of sense," Leaphorn said. "But I don't know." He was still staring out the window. "Why kill somebody like Horseman? Just another poor soul who didn't quite know how to be a Navajo and couldn't learn to act like a white. No good for anything."

  McKee could think of nothing to say. Out the window there was the highway, the asphalt strip of Navajo Route 9, and across it to the east, the blue-gray mass of the Lukachukai Range. He wondered what Leaphorn was seeing out there.

  "I was in charge of the Shiprock subagency when that Fruitland thing happened," Leaphorn said. "That one was mine. I heard that Navajo Wolf talk and I didn't pay much attention to it and so we had five bodies to bury."

  "Four," McKee said.

  "No. It was five." Leaphorn turned, smiling grimly. "This isn't Salem," he said. "We don't recognize witchcraft legally and the guy shot an old Hand Trembler and his wife, and a schoolteacher and her husband, and then he shot himself. Didn't want to stand trial for murder."

  "What are you trying to do?" McKee asked. "Figure out a way to blame yourself for Horseman?"

  "I could have gone in and looked for him."

  "But not found him," McKee said. "Besides, Horseman wasn't a stranger. The old woman said the Wolf is a stranger."

  "Yeah," Leaphorn said. "That's what she said. Maybe she had a reason to lie. Let's go find that boy who went out to warn Horseman." He looked at his notes. "Billy Nez. Let's go find Billy and see what he knows."

  But finding Billy Nez was not possible.

  They found his family's hogans east of Chinle, not far from Shoemaker's, but not Billy. His uncle was sore about it.

  "Kid took a horse and took off after breakfast," he said. "He's gone all the time. Screwing around back up in the mountains somewhere, when he's supposed to be helping out."

  Would he be back tonight? The uncle couldn't guess. Sometimes he was gone for days. He and Leaphorn talked a moment and then the lieutenant returned to the carryall, and turned it back toward Chinle.

  "Found out a little," Leaphorn said. "The boy knew where Horseman was hiding-somewhere back up in those canyons. But when he went to tell him he hadn't killed anybody, Horseman was gone." Leaphorn paused. "Or at least the kid said he was gone."

  "You don't think he was?"

  "Probably," Leaphorn said. "The uncle also told me something else. Billy Nez is Horseman's younger brother."

  "His brother?" McKee said. "How about the different name?"

  "Family broke up," Leaphorn said. "Billy was living with his uncle so he used Nez instead of Horseman. You know how it is with the Dinee. The only name that really counts is the war name you get when you're little. And that one's a secret inside your family and it's only used in your Blessing Way ceremonial or if you get somebody to sing you a cure."

  It was noon when they reached the Chinle sub agency office and the man Leaphorn wanted to see was at lunch. They found him at the diner, and Leaphorn introduced him as Sam George Takes. He was a round-faced, barrel-chested young man, wearing the uniform of a Law and Order sergeant. McKee ordered chicken-fried steak, more lunch than he usually allowed himself.

  "Hell, you know how it is, Joe," Takes was saying. "It's summer, school's out. He's probably chasing some girl and no telling when he gets back."

  "That's right," Leaphorn said. "That's what you do when you're sixteen or so. Hanging around some girl's hogan. Or, if your brother is missing, maybe looking for your brother."

  Takes put down his fork. "And he don't find him and he comes home and his uncle sends him in here like he said he would and we find out whatever he knows, which is probably nothing, and that's the end of it. Why are you worrying?"

  "It could work out like that," Leaphorn said. "But you know how news travels on this reservation. It could be by now he knows his brother is dead. So maybe he connects it to this witching gossip. Then he collects some
cousins and uncles and goes looking for the Wolf."

  McKee's lunch arrived, with the gravy poured over the French fries.

  "Al's cook quit again," Takes said. "Son of a bitch is trying to do his own cooking."

  "The problem is where to start looking," Leaphorn said. "It's your territory, Sam. Where do you think?"

  Takes looked glum. "Son of a bitch could be anywhere. You remember when we had that bootlegger in there working a still right after the Korean War. We never did find him." Takes looked as though the thought still irritated him. "We knew he had to be close to water and at least have a horse to haul the grain in, but booze came out of there for four years and we never found nothing."

  "It wouldn't take that Nez outfit four years to find itself a witch," Leaphorn said.

  Takes laughed. "If you're worrying about that," he said, "they're going to have an Enemy Way. That ought to take care of the witch."

  "Who's having it?" Leaphorn asked. "Somebody in the Nez family?"

  "I heard it was Charley Tsosie," Takes said. "But they're Nez kinfolks-part of the same outfit."

  McKee was interested. Old Lady Gray Rocks had mentioned Tsosie being bothered by the witch. But the Prostitution Way was the curing ceremonial held for those exposed to witchcraft-to turn the evil around and direct it back against the Wolf who started it. Why an Enemy Way? McKee thought about the rite. It had grown out of the fighting between the Dinee and the Utes, and the only times he had heard of its being used was when members of The People came home after being off the Reservation, people like discharged servicemen, people who had been in contact with foreign influences-white men, or Pueblo Indians, or Mexicans. He remembered again what the old woman had said about the witch being a stranger. Leaphorn was looking at him.

  "If they're having an Enemy Way, that old woman must have told you right," Leaphorn said. "They think it's an outsider, and if they think that, they didn't think it was Horseman and that wasn't why he was killed."

  "Wonder why he was," Takes said. "Usually there's a feud, or fighting over a woman, or somebody bad-mouthing somebody."

  "Maybe he found that whiskey still you were looking for," McKee said.

  "Hasn't been any bootleg whiskey turning up in years," Takes said.

  "How about that rocket the military lost three, four years ago?" Leaphorn said. "Is that ten-thousand-dollar reward still out for anyone finding that thing?"

  "I don't know," Takes said. "I don't think they ever found it."

  "I'll call the people up at the Tonepah Range and find out if they're still offering ten thousand dollars," Leaphorn said. He explained to McKee that missiles fired from the Tonepah test site in Utah to the impact area at White Sands Proving Grounds in New Mexico passed over the empty eastern expanse of the Reservation.

  "They used to lose one now and then when a second stage misfired, and then they'd have a hell of a time finding it," Leaphorn said. "But now they have a radar station over on Tall Poles Butte and they track 'em all the way to the ground.

  "You think maybe Horseman and somebody else both found the old rocket and fought over who'd get the reward?" McKee asked.

  Leaphorn shrugged. He asked Bishbito if he could use his office telephone for a long-distance call.

  McKee finished his meal, eating dutifully, feeling simultaneously disappointed and ashamed of that disappointment. He had once again, as he had for years, fallen victim to his optimism. Expecting something when there was always nothing. Anticipating some romantic mystery in what Takes and Leaphorn must already see as a sordid, routine little homicide. It was this flaw, he knew, that had cost him these last eight years of anguish, turned to misery, turned to what now was simply numbness. He could still see the note, blue ink on blue paper in Sara's easy script:

  "Berg. I am meeting Scotty in Las Vegas tonight. I won't contest the divorce."

  Simply that, and her signature. It was not Sara's style to add the unnecessary explanation, to say that he was a dull, nondescript man in a dull, dead-end job, and that Scotty was exciting, in an exciting world of money and executive jets and Caribbean weekends. He cursed himself as he always did when he thought of it, cursed the flaw that made him ignore the fact that he was a clumsy, unbrilliant, average man, grotesquely misfit in the circle of slim, cool Saras and reckless, witty Scotts.

  He turned away from the memory and thought of Horseman, another failure as a man, wondering why he had let himself expect anything exotic in his death. And then he turned away from that thought, too. Horseman was none of his business. He would get back to his research, now. The Charley Tsosie family would be busy, taking ritual sweat baths and preparing for their curing ceremonial. But there was still Ben Yazzie to be interviewed and Afraid of His Horse to be found.

  He flipped through his notebook. Old Lady Gray Rocks had said Ben Yazzie grazed his sheep back on the Lukachukai plateau in the summer. He would go to the subagency office and find out where Yazzie and Afraid of His Horse had their hogans. And then he would get on with his interviewing. He reread the notes he had accumulated at Shoemaker's and from talking to the old woman. Nothing much on Afraid of His Horse, but the Yazzie gossip followed the usual pattern. A man at the trading post had said Yazzie had noticed a coyote following him, and since the coyote was the messenger of the Holy People, Yazzie had accepted this as a sign of danger. And then there had been the usual sounds in the night, interpreted as the witch trying to put corpse powder down the smoke hole in the hogan roof, and the usual dead lambs, and the usual third-hand account in which Yazzie had seen a dog hanging around the flock and, when the dog ran away, it turned into a man.

  Leaphorn was returning from his telephone call; McKee returned the notebook to his pocket. He would start with Yazzie this afternoon.

  "Well," Leaphorn said, "there went our motive." He sat down. "The colonel said the reward expired two years ago. Their lost bird is obsolete now." He laughed. "In fact, I think he's hoping it stays lost. Sort of embarrassing to lose one like that and then have it turn up after everybody's forgotten about it."

  "So we're right back noplace," Takes said.

  "I had an idea," McKee said. "Let's say somebody else was hiding out back in that area and they didn't want the Navajo police coming in with a search party. Let's say they decided the way to keep that from happening was to get Horseman out where he would be found."

  As he said it, McKee realized it sounded hopelessly farfetched, but Leaphorn's face was grim.

  "I thought of that, too," he said. "The autopsy showed he was killed between six and midnight the day I was at Shoemaker's telling everybody we were going in after him if he didn't come out. If we figure it that way, I'm the one who got him killed."

  Chapter 9

  Bergen McKee honked the horn of his pickup when he crossed the final eroded ridge and saw the hogan of Ben Yazzie on the slope below. It was an unnecessary gesture-since the engine could have been heard long before the horn-but a courteous one. It gave official notice to the hogan that a visitor was coming and McKee guessed it was a universal custom among rural people. His father, he remembered, would never approach another's farmhouse without pausing at the gate to holler, "Hello," until properly acknowledged. Among people who depended more upon distance from neighbors than window blinds to preserve their privacy it was a practical habit.

  The place consisted of two octagonal hogans of unpeeled ponderosa logs, a small plank storage shack, and two brush arbors, all built in a cluster of cedar at the edge of a small arroyo. Just over the lip of the arroyo, two sheep pens had been built of cedar poles, with the arroyo bank furnishing one wall. The pens were empty now, and as McKee coasted his truck slowly past them he saw that the hogans were equally deserted.

  No cooking pots hung under the brush shelter, no clothing hung out to air, none of the accumulated odds and ends of Navajo living cluttered the area. He climbed out of the truck and sat in the scanty shade, feeling tired and disappointed.

  McKee lit a cigarette and considered his next step. In t
ime, he could relocate the Yazzie family through Shoemaker. They traded there and some of Ben Yazzie's silver concho belts were in pawn there. But it might be weeks before any of the Yazzie family, or anyone who knew where he had moved, showed up at the store. That left just two possible sources in the Many Ruins area; Afraid of His Horse, whose sheep camp was supposed to be somewhere north of the canyon, and Charley Tsosie. Tsosie would be occupied at the Enemy Way for at least two days. Sheep camp tended to move with the grazing and would be hard to find. But he would look for Afraid of His Horse.

  It was easy to see why Yazzie had built his hogan here. Behind the habitations, the sandstone cliffs of a butte rose abruptly to the north and west-a hundred centuries of talus at its base, then two hundred feet of sheer, smooth reddish stone, with streaks of dark discoloration from seepage, then a softer gray layer of perlite, pocked and carved with blowholes and caves, and above this the overhanging cap of hard, black igneous rock. It gave the hogans shelter from the southwest winds and shade from the late-afternoon sun. To the north and east, the country was a fantastic jumble of colossal erosion dominated by another towering flat-topped butte. All the colors of the spectrum are there, McKee thought. Everything but pure green. What little grass there was was out of sight, hidden in the pockets where soil could collect to hold roots and where runoff from the immensity of rocks could be held and absorbed. He had passed several such grassy places following the wagon trail here. Some, he had noticed, had been heavily grazed by sheep. Most had not. Yazzie must have been badly frightened to move his flock away from grass.