Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 01 - The Blessing Way

by The Blessing Way(lit)

  The first sign of paleness was showing at the eastern edge of the night. Soon Charley Tsosie and his wife and sons would come out of the ceremonial hogan. Sandoval would sing the four First Songs and the Coyote Song, and the Tsosies would inhale the required four deep breaths of the air of the Dawn People. Then Charley Tsosie and his people would be cured and the witch who drove the gray Land-Rover and who might, or might not, have maimed two horses with an ax would have his witchcraft turned against him. The Origin Myth gave him one year to live. One year, if the Tsosies or Billy Nez didn't find him first.

  Chapter 13

  It was a little more than an hour after daylight when McKee heard the car puttering up the canyon, its exhaust leaving a faint wake of echoes from the cliffs. Canfield had said Miss Leon would be driving a Volkswagen and this sounded like one. It certainly didn't have the throaty roar of whatever it was the man who had stalked him had driven away in the night before.

  McKee moved out of the thicket of willows where he had been lying, and prepared himself for a moment he had been dreading. If the car which would soon round the corner ahead was a Volkswagen he would wave it to a stop. If the driver was Miss Leon, she would be confronted with the startling spectacle of a large man with a badly torn shirt, a bruised and swollen face, and an injured hand, who would tell her a wild, irrational story of being spooked out of his bed by a werewolf, and who would order her to turn around and flee with him out of the canyon. McKee had thought of this impending confrontation for hours, ever since it had occurred to him that he couldn't simply escape from this canyon-and whatever crazy danger it held-and go for help to find Canfield. To do so would be to leave Miss Leon to face whatever he was running from.

  The car which came around the cliff into view was a baby-blue Volkswagen sedan, driven by a young woman with dark hair. McKee trotted down the slope onto the hard-packed sand, signaling it to stop.

  The Volkswagen slowed. McKee saw the woman staring at him, her eyes very large. And then, suddenly, she spun the wheel, the rear wheels spurted sand, and the car roared past him.

  "Miss Leon," McKee screamed. "Stop."

  The Volkswagen stopped.

  McKee ran to it and pulled at the door. It was locked. He looked through the window. The girl sat huddled against the door on the driver's side, frightened eyes in a pale face.

  McKee cursed inwardly, tried to pull his gaping shirt together, and tapped on the window.

  "Miss Leon," he said. "I'm Bergen McKee. I was supposed to meet you here. Dr. Canfield and I."

  The girl, obviously, couldn't understand him. McKee repeated it all, shouting this time, conscious that the man with the machine pistol must have heard the Volkswagen and might now be taking aim.

  The girl leaned across the front seat and pulled up the lock button; McKee was inside in an instant.

  "Start turning the car around," McKee ordered. "Head it out of here."

  "What's wrong?" Miss Leon said. "Where's Dr. Canfield?"

  "Drive," McKee ordered. 'Turn it around and drive and I'll explain."

  Miss Leon backed the car across the sand, cut the wheel sharply, and pulled the Volks back on the track. McKee opened his door and leaned out, staring back up the canyon. Nothing moved. He looked at Miss Leon, trying to decide how to start.

  "What's wrong?" she asked again. "What are we doing?"

  She looked less frightened, but now as he turned toward her she saw the bruised side of his face, with the dried blood. Her expression became a mixture of shock and pity.

  "I'm Bergen McKee," McKee repeated. He felt immensely foolish. "I'm not sure exactly what's wrong, but I want you to get out of this canyon until I can find out."

  Miss Leon looked at him wordlessly, and McKee felt himself flushing.

  "I'm sorry I had to give you a scare like that," he said.

  "But what in the world is happening? Where's Dr. Canfield? And what happened to your face?"

  "I don't know," McKee said. "I mean I don't know where Dr. Canfield is. It's going to be hard to explain it."

  He had spent much of his time since daylight planning how he would explain it all, and thinking how ridiculous he must inevitably seem while he tried.

  During the night he had worked his way steadily down the canyon, keeping to the rocks close to the canyon wall. When the moon rose directly overhead, flooding the north side of the cliffs with light, he had lain under a growth of brush, resting and listening. And in this silence he had heard the sound of something moving on the rimrock, across the canyon and high above him. Whatever it was-and McKee had no doubt at all that it was the man with the wolf skin-its movements were stealthy. There was not the steady sound of unguarded footsteps on the rock. Only an occasional and very slight noise, with long pauses when there was no sound at all. In those pauses, McKee sensed the man was looking down from the rim, searching the canyon floor and listening for the sound of movement. The feeling was familiar, and less frightening because he had felt it before. Years before, when his company of the First Cavalry had been rearguard in the long, leapfrog retreat down the Korean Peninsula from Seoul toward the Pusan beachhead, he had learned how it felt to be hunted. And, he thought grimly, he had learned how to survive.

  The sound had finally moved away from the rim. McKee allowed thirty minutes of silence, and then sprinted across the sand to the south wall. Here the moon's shadow would now fall and here he would be less visible from the rim. He had kept as high on the talus as he could, trading the easier going along the bottom for the invisibility offered by the rocks and brush. He moved steadily, but with infinite caution. His plan was simple. He would travel as far as he could until daylight and then he would find a place from which he could watch the bottom. There he would wait to intercept the car of Miss Leon. He would warn her, get her out of the canyon, send her back to Shoemaker's to get help, and then he would come back to look for Canfield. He no longer had even the faintest hope that the morning would bring Canfield driving up the canyon, safely back from a mercy trip with a snake-bitten Navajo. The sounds on the rimrock had killed that hope. If the motives of the man hunting him were less than sinister he would have been calling for him, not stalking him in silence. And that man, the man with the wolf skin and the pistol, must have stood beside Jeremy as he wrote the note and signed it "John."

  He knew my name, McKee had thought. He must have read it in my papers in the tent. He could have learned Canfield's name the same way, but only his initials. And Canfield must have told him the J. was for John and tried, thus, to leave a warning. It occurred to McKee that if the Wolf had taken this trouble to learn who was living in the tent, he would also know of Ellen Leon. Her letter announcing her arrival time was on the table. The Wolf would only have to wait for her.

  It had all seemed very obvious in darkness. The man who had stalked him must be insane. There seemed to be no other rational explanation. And this, too, might explain the puzzle of Horseman's murder.

  An hour before dawn, when the moon was down and the canyon was almost totally dark, McKee had fallen. A stone shifted under his weight and he had plunged, off balance, eight feet against a slab of rock below. The impact had stunned him for a moment but he was back on his feet before he realized that the little finger on his right hand was pulled from its socket. He noticed its odd immobility before he felt the pain, saw that it was bent grotesquely backward and, when he tried to straighten it, felt the agony of the injured joint. He had sat on the stone then, frightened, trying to listen, to determine if his clumsy fall had alerted the man, but there was a roaring in his ears from the pain. Finally he had gone on, carrying his injured hand inside his shirt. It was then he heard the sound of the motor starting. There was the quick whine of the starter, the sound of a heavy motor, and gears shifting, and then the noise of wheels crunching over a stony surface. The sound came from above, and some distance down canyon. It moved away from him and in a few minutes there was silence again. The man who had stalked him had driven away. He had no way of guessing how
far.

  McKee had climbed down to the canyon bottom then. Walking was easy on the sand and soon it was dawn. He stopped at a pool where runoff had been trapped in a pocket of rocks. He drank thirstily of the sandy water and then used his left hand to wash as much blood as he could from his face. The skin had been scraped from the right side of his cheek and the bone felt bruised. He rested on a rock and gingerly examined his finger. It seemed to be broken in the knuckle and the tendon pulled loose in his palm. The sky overhead was lightening now and the rocks and trees across the canyon were clearly visible. Night had given way to dawn.

  McKee pulled off his left boot and shook out the gravel it had picked up somehow during the night. And then he examined his left hand again. It was a broad hand with strong blunt fingers, two of them crooked. He wiggled the bent knuckle of his first finger and tried to remember how it had felt when he stuck it into that line drive when he was seventeen. He could only remember that it had been swollen for days and that the error had let in two unearned runs.

  The distorted knuckle on the second finger was the souvenir of a less serious mishap. He had picked it up in practice where the errors didn't go into the record books. Funny thing about his fielding, McKee thought. Never could learn it. He could hit anybody who ever pitched to him. Bunt and hit to either field, and he had had the power for a kid his age, but finally the coach had used him as a pinch hitter. "Damnit, Berg," the coach had said, "if I leave you out there, you're going to get hit on the head and killed." That had ended his ambitions to be a baseball player, but it still seemed odd to him that the simple skill of timing a grounder and sensing the trajectory of a fly ball had been beyond him. McKee carefully replaced the injured hand in his shirt front. It was throbbing now, but the pain was tolerable. He stood up, surprised at how quickly his leg muscles had stiffened. A mockingbird flew out of a young cotton-wood tree, whistling raucously. It was then McKee was suddenly struck with the dismaying thought of Miss Ellen Leon.

  Almost certainly in a very few hours he would meet her and, when he did, he would have to make her believe an absolutely incredible story. He walked slowly down the canyon, thinking of how he would tell it. As he thought, the incident seemed first wildly ridiculous and then entirely unreal. The canyon was filled with the cool, gray light of full dawn now. All that had happened under the moonlight was utterly absurd, like something out of a bad melodrama, and his own role in it had been thoroughly unheroic. Yet Miss Leon had to be told-to get her out of the canyon. There simply was no way to explain it all without sounding like a complete fool. McKee wished fervently that the visitor were a man.

  He trudged steadily down the canyon, turning in his mind the problem of confronting the woman. He had skipped shaving yesterday in his haste to get to Chinle and call Leaphorn. Now the face which confronted him each morning in his bathroom mirror would be worse by two days' growth of bristles. And the torn and dirty shirt and the scraped cheekbone certainly wouldn't inspire confidence in a female. Neither, he thought glumly, would the improbable tale he had to tell.

  When he heard the sound of the motor again, it came almost as a relief. He was crossing the point where a large tributary canyon drained into Many Ruins and where centuries of turbulent runoff had carved the cliffs into a series of horseshoe bends. The motor sound and its confusion of echoes seemed first to come from upstream, and then from downstream. Before it died abruptly away he decided the vehicle might be somewhere up the tributary. Talking Rock Canyon, he thought it was, but he wasn't sure. In the morning sunlight the sound of the truck seemed natural and sane, reassuring him that all that had happened in the darkness had not been merely nightmare.

  And now he was sitting beside Miss Leon and she was saying that she wanted very badly to see Dr. Canfield this morning.

  McKee converted his embarrassment to irritation.

  "Listen," he said. "There's a man somewhere up this canyon who isn't acting rationally. I think he may have done something to Dr. Canfield. I don't know where the hell Canfield is and I can't start looking for him until I get you out of here."

  Miss Leon said, "Oh," in a small voice and looked at McKee. He noticed again that she was a very pretty woman.

  She thinks I'm a nut, he thought.

  "Canfield was gone when I got back to the camp yesterday," McKee went on. "Left me a note and signed it 'John.' His name's Jeremy." Even as he said it, the explanation sounded ridiculous. Miss Leon glanced at him.

  "What did the note say?"

  "It said a Navajo had come by with a snakebite and he was taking him to Teec Nos Pas." The text of the note now seemed completely reasonable. "But why would he sign it with a phony name?"

  "Maybe it was a joke," Miss Leon said.

  Maybe it was a joke, McKee thought. If it is, I'll kill the smirking bastard.

  "I thought of that, too," McKee said, "But last night, sometime after midnight, I saw a man sneaking up on our tent. Had a wolf skin over his head." He had planned not to mention the wolf skin, thinking it might frighten her, or merely make the entire episode seem more ludicrous. But he blurted it out.

  "Is that how you got that awful bruise? Did he hit you?"

  The sympathy in her voice made McKee feel about seven years old.

  "No. No," he said, impatiently. "I fell on a rock."

  Miss Leon slowed the Volks and shifted into low gear to make her way across a bed of rocks.

  "Your hand's hurt, too," Miss Leon said.

  "I'd like you to drive back to Shoemaker's," McKee said. "When you get there, tell Shoemaker that something happened to Canfield and ask him to call Chinle and get the Law and Order boys to send someone in here to help look."

  McKee made a wry face.

  "Or, if you meet Canfield on your way to Shoemaker's, just forget the whole thing." He laughed. Tell Canfield you met some kind of nut up the canyon named Bergen McKee."

  "All right," Miss Leon said. She glanced at the right hand held rigidly inside his shirt front. "How badly."

  Immediately ahead of them around an abrupt bend of the canyon, there was the whining sound of a motor running at a high speed.

  "Stop a minute," McKee said, but Miss Leon was already braking the car.

  As he reached across with his left hand for the door handle, he brushed the injured finger and felt suddenly sick and weak as a fresh wave of pain engulfed his brain. He swung his legs out of the Volks and sat for a moment, head down, while the dizziness passed. He heard Miss Leon opening her door.

  "I'll go see what's going on," he said. "You wait here." He realized, with self-disgust, that the words came slowly and his voice was thick. When he got to his feet she was already out of the car. Let it go, he thought. He didn't feel like arguing.

  It was less than fifty yards to the canyon bend but McKee had identified the sound before they reached it. He was almost certain it was a winch working. His first glance around the rocky point confirmed this guess. Some five hundred yards downstream the canyon bent sharply to the north through a narrow defile. Here a section of the undercut cliff had collapsed, tumbling huge blocks of rimrock to the canyon floor. Just beyond this pile of talus, McKee saw a gray Land-Rover parked. A cable from the winch reel on its front bumper was attached to a ponderosa pine carried into the canyon by the landslide. The massive trunk of the long-dead tree was being swung slowly across the canyon.

  "Looks like we walk out," McKee said softly.

  "What in the world is he doing?"

  "He's blocking us in with that tree."

  "He is, isn't he?" She said it in a very small voice.

  McKee couldn't see the man in the Land-Rover very well. He was wearing a black hat and there was something which might be a rifle barrel jutting at an angle out of the side window. The high whining noise of the winching operation had apparently covered the sound of their approach.

  "Let's go," McKee said. "We'll drive back up the canyon and find one of those run-in washes, and climb out of here."

  The sound of the winch stopped ju
st as they reached the car. There was a long moment of silence as they climbed into the Volkswagen, and then the sound began again. McKee motioned for Miss Leon to start the motor.

  "Quietly as you can," he said. "Don't race the motor and get it into second quick as possible."

  She said nothing, driving competently and, McKee noticed out of the side of his eye, occasionally biting her lower lip.

  "But why would that man want to block the road?" she asked suddenly. "Do you think we should just drive down there and ask him to let us through?"

  "I don't think so," McKee said. He felt very, very tired.