Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 01 - The Blessing Way

by The Blessing Way(lit)

  He looked at his hand, tightly wrapped now in bandage, and then glanced quickly around the room. The enclosure was much too large for living quarters. It had been built either as a communal meeting place for one of the pueblo's warrior secret societies or as a storeroom for grain-three stone walls built out from the face of the cliff and, like the cliff, sloping slightly inward at the top.. The only way out was the way they had come in-through a crawl hole in the roof where the wall joined the cliff. And there was no way to reach the hole without the ladder-the ladder which the Big Navajo had carefully withdrawn after leaving them here.

  Outside, a raven cawed again and then there was silence. McKee leaned against the wall and tried to sort it out.

  Whatever was happening here was the product of meticulous planning. That was clear. Behind the brush at the foot of the cliff there had been four sections of aluminum-alloy ladder. The man called Eddie had fit them quickly together, fastened them with bolts and wing nuts, and they reached exactly from a massive sandstone block at the top of the talus slope to this shelf. If the ladder was not custom-built for the purpose, at least the bolt holes had been drilled with this cliff dwelling in mind.

  And, when they had reached the top, Eddie had pulled up the ladder, and laid it carefully out of sight. The action obviously had long since become habit. It would leave anyone passing below no hint that this cleft was occupied. It was equally obvious that the peculiar hide-out had been occupied for weeks. Behind a screen of bushes which grew back from the ledge under the overhanging cliff there was all the equipment for a permanent camp-a two-burner kerosene stove, a half-dozen five-gallon cans and a tarp stretched low to the ground protecting cartons and boxes. And there had been two bedrolls. Whoever else was involved must sleep somewhere else, perhaps directing this operation from somewhere outside. From what Eddie had said, others would tell them when they could leave.

  And whoever they were, they had a radio transmitter. After Eddie had fished cans of meat and beans from under the tarp and fed them and started him soaking his hand in a pot of steaming water, the Big Navajo had climbed back down the ladder. He had sat for a long time in the Land-Rover and when he returned he had news.

  McKee rubbed his knuckles across his forehead, remembering exactly. The big man had been grinning when he walked up to where Eddie was sitting-grinning broadly.

  "Girlie says maybe tomorrow afternoon will do it," the Navajo had said. Eddie had looked pleased, but he had said something noncommittal. Something like Girlie's been wrong before. No. It was Girlie's been wrong three times, because the Indian had laughed then and said, "Fourth time's the charm for us. It had occurred to McKee then that if these men were leaving tomorrow they would no longer need a letter written by him: Once they had finished what they had come to do and had left this canyon why would it matter if someone came looking for Canfield and Miss Leon and himself? It would only matter that no one be left alive to describe them. Thinking that, he had decided to throw the water pot at the Big Navajo and jump Eddie, trying for Eddie's pistol. He hadn't thought he would get the pistol, but there would be nothing to lose in trying. And then the Navajo had baffled him again.

  "Dr. McKee," he had said, "I think we'd better try to get that knuckle of yours back into joint, and tie it up with a splint. I'm going to be busy tomorrow, but by tomorrow night I'll want to get that writing done."

  Thinking about it now, McKee was still puzzled. Eddie had carried a section of the ladder to the cliff ruin and they had climbed against the overhang to the top of this wall. and then down into the pitch darkness of this room. The Navajo had told him to sit on the floor and hold out his hand. He had argued with the Indian that the joint was broken, not just dislocated.

  The Navajo had laughed. "They feel like that when they're pulled out, but we can get it back in the socket."

  The big man had squatted beside him, with Eddie holding the flashlight from above, and had taken McKee's swollen right hand in both of his own, and suddenly there had been pain beyond endurance. When he had returned to awareness, Miss Leon was holding his head and his hand was tightly wrapped. He had been sick then, violently sick, and then they had talked.

  "Where did they go?" McKee had asked. It was almost totally dark in the windowless room, with only a small spot of moonlight reflecting through the roof hole relieving the blackness.

  "I heard them a little while ago," Miss Leon had said. "I think they were both out there where their sleeping rolls are. And then I heard what sounded like the ladder being moved."

  "I guess they climbed down," McKee said.

  There was a long silence. McKee felt her shoe against his leg. The touch seemed somehow personal, and intimate, and comforting.

  "Dr. McKee." Her voice was very small. "I didn't hear all of what you and that Navajo said when we were at Dr. Canfield's camper. Dr. Canfield's body was in there, wasn't it? He killed Dr. Canfield?"

  "Yes," McKee said. There was no use trying to lie to her. "I guess he did."

  "Then he'll kill us, too," she said.

  "No," McKee said. "We'll find a way out." He could think of no possible way.

  "There isn't any way out," Miss Leon said. "It would take a magician to get out of this."

  McKee was glad it was dark. Judging from the sound of her voice, she was on the ragged edge of tears.

  "I didn't have a chance to tell you," he said. "We think maybe that electrical engineer you were looking for may be working somewhere way up the canyon."

  "Jim? Did you find him?"

  "Some Indians saw a van truck driving up in here. Do you know if he was pulling a generator?"

  "There was a little trailer behind his truck," she said. "Would that be a generator?"

  "Probably," McKee said. He searched his mind for some way to keep this conversation going, to keep her from thinking of sudden death.

  "I noticed your ring, Miss Leon. Is this Dr. Hall-er, Jim-the one you're engaged to?" i

  "Why don't you call me Ellen?" she said. There was a pause. "Yes, I was going to marry him."

  McKee noticed the past tense instantly. And then it occurred to him why she used it. She thought she would soon be dead.

  "What's he like?" McKee asked. "Tell me about him."

  "He's tall," she said. "And rather slim. Blond hair, blue eyes. He's very handsome really. And he's-he's, well-sometimes moody. And sometimes very happy. And always very smart."

  The voice stopped. I match none of that, McKee thought, except the mood part.

  "He graduated magna cum laude." The voice paused, then continued, "And our society doesn't have the proper respect for magna cum laude."

  "I guess not," McKee said.

  Ellen laughed. "I was quoting Jim," she said. "Jim is-well, Jim is very ambitious. He wants things. He wants a lot of things, and he's very, very smart-and-and so he'll get them."

  "I don't know why," McKee said. "But I guess I never was very ambitious." He wished instantly that he hadn't said it. It sounded self-pitying.

  "What else about him?" McKee asked. He didn't enjoy hearing her talk about the man. But it was better for her to talk, better than having her sitting silent in the dark-dreading tomorrow. She talked rapidly now, sounding sometimes as if she had waited a long time for someone to listen, and sometimes as if she was talking only to herself, trying to understand the tale she was telling.

  She had met Jim at Pennsylvania State on the first day of a Shakespeare's Tragedies class. He had taken the chair to her left and she had hardly noticed him until the professor called the roll. But the professor's voice had risen slightly in a question as he read "Jimmy Willie Hall" off the class card. The professor had intended no rudeness and he made this clear by nodding in acknowledgment to Jim's "Heah," but someone in the back of the room had sniggered and this churlishness to a stranger had embarrassed Ellen, embarrassed her all the more because she, too, had smiled at the ludicrous sound. She had glanced at the young man with the outlandish name and noticed he wore cowboy boots and had a wide-b
rimmed gray felt hat pushed under his chair. On a campus where styles were set by the casual, careless conformity of young men from Philadelphia one was as out of place as the other. And, when she had looked at him again, she had seen that while his face, neck, and hands were incredibly sunburned his forearms about the wrists were as white as the shirt he was wearing.

  "He looked very strange and out of place," Ellen said. And suddenly she laughed. "I thought he would be lonely," she said, sounding incredulous.

  She had spoken to this Jimmy Willie Hall in the lecture building hallway. Jim had said, in reply to her comment that he wasn't from the East, that he was from Hall, New Mexico, and when she had asked where that was, he had said he wasn't really from Hall, exactly, because their place was twenty one miles northwest of there, in the foothills of the Oscura Mountains. It was just that they picked up their mail at Hall. He guessed he should say he was from Corona, which was larger and slightly closer.

  The conversation had been inane and pointless, Ellen recalled, as exploratory chats with strangers tend to be. She asked why, if Corona was larger and nearer, they picked up their mail at Hall, and he had explained that there was no road from the Hall ranch to Corona. To get there you had to go through the Oscura Range and Jicarilla Apache Reservation or over the malpais-across seven miles of broken lava country. You can't even get a horse over that, he had explained. The only time he had tried, his horse had broken a leg and he had been bitten by a rattlesnake.

  "That sounds like he was trying to impress me," she said. "But he wasn't. A girl can tell about that. He was just telling me about a silly mistake he had made." Ellen's voice stopped. "I guess I knew right then he wasn't lonely," she continued, thoughtfully, "and that I had never seen anyone like him."

  He had seemed, she remembered, like someone visiting from the far side of the globe her father kept in the office of his pharmacy-someone completely foreign to all she knew. As different from the men she had dated as his empty Oscura foothills were from her family's elm-shaded residential street in a Philadelphia suburb.

  "You remember Othello"?" Ellen asked suddenly.

  "Othello?" McKee said, surprised.

  "Yes. The Moor of Venice. We studied it that semester, after Hamlet. You remember how Desdemona was fascinated by Othello?"

  "I remember," McKee said, trying to remember.

  "That was us," Ellen said. "That was our private joke."

  "Remember how it goes?" She paused a moment.

  "A maiden never bold;

  Of spirit so still and quiet that her motion

  Blush'd at herself; and she-in spite of nature,

  Of years, of country, credit, everything-

  To fall in love with what she fear'd to look on!

  It is a judgment maim'd and most imperfect."

  "Yes," said McKee, "I remember it." He felt immensely sad.

  "I would say that," Ellen said, "and Jim would say Othello's lines:

  "It was my hint to speak-such was the process;

  And of the Cannibals that each other eat.

  The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads

  Do grow beneath their shoulders. This to hear

  Would Desdemona seriously incline.'"

  Ellen stopped again. And when she continued the voice was shaky.

  "I loved him for the dangers he had passed.

  And he loved me that I did pity them."

  McKee reached across the darkness and found her hand. "It's going to be all right," he said. "We'll get out of here and find him."

  "Can't you understand?" she asked, and her voice sounded angry now. "Why should I pity someone like Jim Hall? Why should anyone pity anybody who has everything?"

  McKee couldn't think of an answer.

  "Because he doesn't know he has everything?" Ellen suggested. "Because he isn't happy?

  "Sometimes he is, but mostly he isn't. He's angry. He says he's caught in a system which keeps you on the treadmill. Forty years on the treadmill, he says. He talks about it a lot, about how it takes a million dollars to beat the system, to pay your own ransom, to buy back your own life."

  She laughed again, a bitter sound. "I guess he. Well, I guess Jim will make a million dollars," she said.

  "Not teaching on an engineering faculty," McKee said.

  "Oh, he's not going to do that," she said. "He's going with one of the electronic communications products companies and he's bringing along one of his patents, so it's a very good job."

  "Is that what he's working on out here?" McKee asked. "Trying it out."

  "Oh, no. This is another one, I think. I-well, I wish I understood it better. Something to do with very narrow-range sound transmission. He explained it to me-quite often-but I don't really understand it."

  McKee started to ask her why she was looking for Dr. Hall and bit back the question. The answer was obvious, and none of his business. A woman who loves a man would simply want to see him.

  "Dr. Canfield was nice, he was nice, a nice man," Ellen said. "But he was too polite to ask why I was chasing after Jim. And you've been nice, too. But would you like to know?"

  "It's your private business," McKee said. "No, I don't want to know."

  "I want to tell you. I have to tell someone," she said. "I came because I wanted to tell Jim-to tell him that I think he's wrong, and he's going to have to make a choice. He's got to quit wanting a million dollars. He has to. I've come all the way out here. He has to understand."

  It sounded utterly feminine to McKee, the reverse side of Sara's logic, and a simpler assignment. A brilliant, ambitious man could easily enough fail to make a fortune. But how could a Bergen McKee, a natural on the treadmill, make himself rich?

  And, thinking that, McKee, after forty hours without rest, was suddenly asleep.

  Now he was fully awake again. He pushed himself to his feet and surveyed the room. The floor was covered with a heavy deposit of dust. He could feel it, flourlike, under the soles of his shoes. But the condition of the room was surprising. It was virtually intact. The roof sagged only at one corner, where the ceiling beams had snapped with rot, and plaster still clung to most of the lower portion of the walls.

  McKee flaked off a section of plaster with his thumbnail, broke it and examined it. Inside it was almost black-a mixture of animal blood and caliche clay used by the pueblo-building people.

  It was stone-hard and would last for centuries, and so would the cedar poles in the roof when protected from weather under a cliff. But not for this many centuries. Left alone, the roof would have crumbled long ago and the top of the walls would have fallen inward. This ruin must have been partially rebuilt-restored by one of the later pueblo people who used the canyon before the Navajos arrived and drove them out.

  It was then he saw the face. He stood for a moment staring at it, putting together what it meant, feeling a sense of excitement building within him. The face was drawn on the plaster in something yellow-probably ocher. It was faded now and partly missing where chips of plaster had fallen away. A roundish outline with a topknot, long ears, and a collar. The figure was unquestionably a Hopi Kachina-either the Dung Carrier or the Mud Head Clown. And below it to the right were two more stylized outlines.

  From the Hopi mythology McKee recognized Chowilawu, the spirit of Terrible Power, with four black-tipped feathers rising vertically from his squarish head and a horizontal band of red bunding his eyes. The third head had been almost erased by flaking. Only the dim outline of a protruding ear and the double vertical cheek stripes signifying a warrior spirit remained. Down the wall there were other markings-the zigzag of lightning, bird tracks, the stair-stepped triangles of clouds, and a row of phallic symbols. Undoubtedly, one of the Hopi clans had used this as a ceremonial kiva.

  He stood absolutely silent a moment, thinking, and then squatted beside Miss Leon and put his hand on her shoulder.

  Time to wake up."

  She rubbed her arm across her eyes.

  "Very domestic," McKee said.

  She
looked up at him and then pushed herself up against the wall, trying to straighten her tousled hair with her fingers. "Oh. What time is it?"

  "About four forty-five," McKee said. "We shouldn't have wasted all that time. We need to get out of here."

  "Out of here? But I don't see how we can." Miss Leon looked up at the exit hole in the roof and then at McKee. "What do you mean? How can we?"

  "The Hopis lived in this. They rebuilt it. Have you read anything about how the Hopis build their pueblos?" It occurred to McKee as he said it that he was showing off and the thought embarrassed him. Ellen looked puzzled.