"Is he on peyote?" Leaphorn asked. "If he is, they're usually all right after a couple of hours. But if it's not peyote, maybe a doctor should take a look at him."
"It couldn't be peyote," Halsey said, grinning again. "That stuff's illegal, isn't it?"
"It depends," Leaphorn said. "The way the Tribe sees it, it's O.K. if it's used for religious purposes. It's part of the ceremonial of the Native American Church and some of The People belong to that. The way it works, we don't notice people using peyote if they're using it in their religion. I'm guessing Otis here is a religious man."
Halsey caught the irony and its implications.
His grin became slightly friendly. Otis's eyes were closed now. Susanne was stroking the arch of his right foot. "It's all right now," she was saying. "Oatsy, it's cool." The sympathy in her face confirmed Leaphorn's guess about this young woman. She would tell him all she knew about George Bowlegs for the same reason she now tried to bring Otis back from his grotesque psychedelic nightmare.
"Isaacs said the same thing you do," Leaphorn said. "That George wouldn't hurt the Zu¤i boy. But that's not the point. It looks like somebody did hurt the Zu¤i. Maybe killed him. We think George can tell us something about what happened."
Susanne was now stroking Otis's ankle. Her face was blank. "I don't know where he is," she said.
"I talked to George's little brother today," Leaphorn said. "The boy tells me George is running because he is afraid of something. Really afraid. The little brother says George isn't afraid of us, of the police, because he didn't do anything wrong. What's George afraid of?"
Susanne was listening carefully, the stubbornness fading.
"I don't know," Leaphorn continued. "I can't guess. But I can remember being afraid when I was a kid. You ever been really scared? Do you remember how it was?"
"Yes," Susanne said. "I remember." Like yesterday, Leaphorn thought. Or maybe today. "You get panicky and maybe you run," he said. "And if you run it's worse, because you feel like the whole world is chasing you and you're afraid to stop."
"Or there's no place to stop," she said. "Like where would George go to get help? Do you know about his daddy? Being drunk all the time? And most of the time George having to worry about what they're going to eat?"
"Yeah," Leaphorn said. "I've been out there."
"Sometimes there isn't any home to go home to." Susanne seemed to say it to Otis, who wasn't listening.
"The trouble with running out here this time of year is the weather. Today it's late autumn and sunny and no problem. Tomorrow maybe it's winter. Overnight snow and maybe five or six below zero and all of a sudden you don't have any food and no way to get any."
"Does it get that cold here? Below zero?"
"You're almost seven thousand feet above sea level here. Practically sitting on the Continental Divide. Last year it got to fifteen below at Ramah and nineteen below at Gallup. We had eleven exposure deaths on the reservation-that we know about."
"But I don't know where he is," she said.
"But just telling me what he said would help me find him," Leaphorn said. "Why did he leave school in the middle of the morning? Why did he come here? What made him run? Anything you remember will help. It will help George."
This time Susanne let the silence grow. She might tell me he didn't come here, Leaphorn thought. That was what she had planned. But she wouldn't lie. Not now.
"I don't know exactly," she said. "I know he was afraid of something. He asked if I could give him any food-stuff he could carry that would keep. He wanted to take some of that deer out in the shed. That was George's deer anyway. He brought it to us last week."
"Where was he going?"
"He didn't say."
"But he must have said something. Try to remember everything he said."
"He asked me if I knew anything about the Zu¤i religion," Susanne said, "and I said not much. Just a little bit that Ted had told me about it." She paused, putting the memory back together. "And then he asked me if Ted had ever told me anything about the kachinas punishing people." She frowned. "And if I knew anything about kachina forgiveness."
"Forgiveness?"
"He used the word 'absolution.' He said, 'If a Zu¤i taboo is broken, is there any way to get absolution?' I told him I didn't know anything about it." She looked at Leaphorn curiously. "Is there?"
"I'm not a Zu¤i," Leaphorn said. "A Navajo isn't likely to know any more about the Zu¤i religion than a white man will know about Shintoism."
"It seemed important to George. I could tell that. He kept talking about it."
"Forgiveness for him? Did he give you any idea who needed to be forgiven? Was it him? Or Ernesto?"
"I don't know," Susanne said. "I guessed it was for him, himself. But maybe it was for Ernesto."
"Any hint of what the forgiveness would be for? What sort of." Leaphorn paused, trying for the right word. It wouldn't be crime. Would it be sacrilege? He let the sentence dangle and substituted: "Did he say what had happened to offend the kachinas?"
"No. I wondered, too, but it didn't seem the time to ask. He was all emotional. In a big hurry. I'd never seen George in a hurry before."
"So he took some venison," Leaphorn said. "How much did he take? And what else?"
Susanne flushed. She tugged the long, grimy sleeve of her sweater down over her knuckles.
"He didn't take anything," Halsey said. "He asked for it. He didn't get it. I figured he was running from the law, or something, the way he acted. People who live here do not cooperate with a fugitive; do not aid and abet; do not do a damn thing to give the fuzz any reason to be hassling us." He grinned at Leaphorn. "We are law-abiding."
"So he left here without any food," Leaphorn said.
"I made him take my old jacket," Susanne said. She was staring at Halsey, her expression an odd mixture of defiance and fear. "It was an old quilted blue rayon thing with a hole in the elbow."
"What time did he leave?"
"He got here early in the afternoon and I guess he left about ten minutes later-maybe three or three-fifteen."
"And he didn't say anything about where he was going?"
"No," Susanne said. She hesitated. "Not really, anyway. George was kind of a crazy kid. Full of funny ideas. He said he might be gone for a while because he had to find the kachinas."
* * *
Leaphorn stopped at the fence that sealed the Ramah-Ojo Caliente road off from Navajo allotment grazing lands. He turned off the ignition, yawned. In a moment he would climb from the truck, open the barbed-wire gate, and drive on to Ramah. But now he simply sat, slumped, surrendering to fatigue. He had heard of George Bowlegs about noon and now it was after midnight. Bowlegs, you little bastard, where are you? Are you sleeping warm? Leaphorn sighed, climbed from the carryall, walked with stiff legs to the gate, opened it, climbed back into the carryall, drove through the gate, climbed out again, shut the gate, climbed back into the truck, and pulled onto the county road in a shower of dust and gravel. He shivered slightly and turned the heater fan higher. Outside the air was absolutely still, the sky cloudless, the moon almost directly overhead. Tonight there would be a hard freeze. And where were George Bowlegs and Ernesto Cata? Dead? Cata perhaps, but it seemed suddenly unlikely. There was no possible reason for anyone to kill him. The blood might have had other sources. Probably this was a wasted day. There was nothing much except the blood. Two square yards of blood-stiff earth under a pi¤on and two boys missing. One of them, everybody said, was a crazy kid. What else was there? Something stolen from an anthropologists' camp-some thing so trivial it hadn't been missed. And something which looked like a Zu¤i kachina snooping in the moonlight at a hippie commune. What the hell could that have been? He thought again about what his eyes had seen through the binoculars, reshaping the image in his memory. Had his eyes translated something that merely seemed strange under the tricky light into something his imagination suggested? Then what could it have been? A big felt hat oddly creased? No. Leaphorn sighed an
d yawned. His head was buzzing with his tiredness. He could no longer concentrate. He would sleep at the Ramah chapter house tonight. Tomorrow morning he would check with the Zu¤i Police. They would tell him that Cata had come home during the night and confessed to a silly hoax. Leaphorn suddenly knew what the explanation would be. A sheep slaughtered for the Shalako feast. The boys saving its blood, using it for an elaborate joke, unconscious of the cruelty in it.
Where the road crossed the ridge overlooking the Ramah Valley, Leaphorn slowed, flicked on the radio transmitter. The operator at Ramah would be long abed, but Leaphorn raised Window Rock quickly.
There were three messages for him. The captain wanted to know if he was making any progress on the affair of the embezzled payment for the pickup truck. His wife had called to ask that Leaphorn be reminded that he had a dental appointment in Gallup at 2 P.M. And the Zu¤i Police Department had called and asked that Leaphorn be informed that Ernesto Cata had been found.
Leaphorn frowned at the radio. "Found? Is that all they said?"
"Let me check," the dispatcher said. "I didn't take the message." The dispatcher sounded sleepy. Leaphorn rubbed his hand across his face, suppressing a yawn.
"Found his body," the dispatcher said.
Chapter Seven
Tuesday, December 2, 7:22 AM.
THE SUN, rising over Oso Ridge, warmed the right side of Joe Leaphorn's face and cast the shadow of his profile horizontally against the raw gray earth exposed by the landslide. He stood with his arms folded over his stomach, his ears aware of the scraping sound of the shovels but his eyes involved with the beauty of the morning. The view from this eroded ridge above Galestina Canyon was impressive. Sunlight struck the east faces of the Zu¤i Buttes ten miles to the northwest. It reflected from the yellow water tower that marked the site where the government had built Black Rock to house its Bureau of Indian Affairs people. It flashed now from the wing of a light plane taking off from the Black Rock landing strip. Almost due north, three miles up the valley, it illuminated the early-morning haze of smoke emerging from the chimneys of Zu¤i Village. Much nearer, a yard from the toe of Lea phorn's boot, it lit the scuffed sole of a small, low-cut shoe. The shoe protruded from the earth-and-stone rubble of the slide-a black shoe, laces down. It was a track shoe, five spikes under the ball of the foot, none under the heel because a runner's heel does not strike the ground. Part of the runner's heel was visible, and the Achilles tendon, and perhaps an inch of muscular calf. The earth covered the rest. Leaphorn's gaze rested on Zu¤i Village. Halona, they called it. Halona Itawana, the Middle Ant Hill of the World. A hillock beside a bend in the now dry bed of the Zu¤i River, a hillock of red stone houses jammed together to form the old village and surrounded now by a sprawling cluster of newer houses. Maybe six thousand Zu¤is, Leaphorn thought, with something like 6,500 square miles of reservation, and all but a few hundred of them lived like bees in this single busy hive. Up to twenty-five or thirty people in some houses, he had heard. All the daughters of a family still living with their mother, living together with their husbands and their children in a sort of reversal of the Navajos' mother-in-law taboo. It made for the handful of Zu¤is a bigger town than the Navajos had made with their 130,000 people. What force caused the Zu¤is to collect like this? Was it some polarity of the force that caused his own Dinee to scatter, to search for loneliness, as much as for grass, wood, and water, as an asset for a hogan site? Was this why the Zu¤i had survived as a people against five centuries of invasions? Was there some natural law, like the critical mass of nuclear physics, which held that X number of Indians compacted in X number of square yards could resist the White Man's Way by drawing strength from one another?
The plane-silenced by distance-banked toward the north, toward Gallup, or Farmington, or perhaps Shiprock or Chinle, and blinked a quick reflection of sun from a polished surface. Just to Leaphorn's left Ed Pasquaanti pushed at the handle of his shovel, hat off, cropped gray hair bristling. Beyond him, three other Zu¤is worked methodically. Their last names were Cata, Bacobi, and Atarque. They were the father and uncles, respectively, of Ernesto Cata. They dug with deliberate speed, wordlessly. The earth pile receded, revealing another inch of Ernesto Cata's calf.
"Where did you find the bicycle?" Leaphorn asked. "If you haven't finished looking there, I could check around some." (He had offered once-five minutes ago, when he had first arrived-to help with the digging. "No, thanks," the uncle named Thomas Atarque had said. "We can handle it all right." The earth was Zu¤i earth, the body under it Flesh of the Zu¤i Flesh. Leaphorn sensed digging here, at this moment in time, was not for a Navajo. He wouldn't repeat the offer.)
"The bike was down there," Pasquaanti said. He pointed. "Pushed under the uphill side of that sandstone outcrop. I just looked around enough to find the tracks leading up this way. It was getting dark then."
The bicycle had been remarkably well hidden considering the circumstances. It had been pushed half under a sandstone overhang and then disguised with a cover of dead grass and weeds. Even with the camouflage gone, it was hard to see. Leaphorn looked at it, thinking first that whoever had hidden it had found this site at night. Only moonlight, and two nights ago it would have been a half-moon. The implications of that were clear enough. Whoever had brought Ernesto Cata's body here to be hidden under a tumbled slide of earth either knew this landscape well or had planned in advance. George Bowlegs would know it and-he thought defensively-a thousand Zu¤is would know it. Leaphorn went methodically to work.
The bike had been rolled here up a deer trail. Leaphorn backtracked to a sheep path down the slope. The path angled downhill and northward, toward Zu¤i Pueblo. He checked everything, working slowly. By the time he reached the cluster of trees where Cata had bled out his life, it was noon. In this small area he spent another three hours-much of it squatted on his heels studying the dusty ground.
There were five sets of recent tracks. He quickly eliminated the Goodyear rubber heel-marks left by Pasquaanti and the waffle-soled boots of the Cata uncle who had found the blood. That left cowboy boots, presumably George Bowlegs', which had dismounted from the bicycle near the trees, Cata's five-spiked track shoes, and moccasins worn by whoever had pushed the bicycle away with Cata's body as its cargo. Leaphorn sat on a slab of sandstone and considered what these tracks told him. It wasn't much.
He could guess that the killing hadn't been premeditated-at least not completely. One who plans to carry a body a long distance uphill over rough ground does not wear moccasins if he has any respect for his feet. He wears something with sturdy sole and heels. The Man Who Wore Moccasins had waited among the junipers out of sight. He could have struck Cata from this ambush had there been an intention to kill. But he hadn't. The moccasins had stepped out into the open. Moccasins and track shoes had faced one another long enough for several shuffles and shifts of weight. They had stood very close. (Had Moccasins perhaps gripped Cata's arm?) Then Cata had taken three long-stride steps downhill and fallen, and pumped his blood out onto the thirsty earth. Moccasins now wheeled the bike to the bloody place, loaded Cata upon it, and rolled it away. But it seemed highly unlikely he could have known the bicycle would be available. Not unless Moccasins was George Bowlegs. Could the boy have ridden here in cowboy boots, parked the bike, walked over to the rocks, and changed into moccasins? Obviously, he could have. Leaphorn could think of no reasons why he would have. He tried to imagine what Cata and Moccasins might have talked about as they stood toe-to-toe. There was not even ground for speculation. Leaphorn lit a cigarette. A pi¤on jay emerged from the junipers in a flash of blue feathers and disappeared toward Corn Mountain. A thin blue line of smoke corkscrewed upward from Leaphorn's cigarette to ravel away in the cold air. North, a jet drew a white line across the sky. Behind it the sky was gray with a high overcast. Intermittently throughout the dusty autumn, such omens had threatened snow. And all autumn, after a summer of drought, the omens had lied. Leaphorn studied the sky, his face dour. He was finding no ord
er in his thoughts, none of that mild and abstract pleasure which the precise application of logic always brought to him. Instead there was only the discordant clash of improbable against unlikely, effect without cause, action without motive, patternless chaos. Leaphorn's orderly mind found this painful. The roughness of the sandstone pressed into his buttocks now, but he ignored this, as he ignored his hunger, willing his thoughts away from these sensations, frowning across the brushy slopes at Corn Mountain, thinking.
Leaphorn came from the Taadii Dinee, the Slow-Talking People Clan. The father of his mother was Nashibitti, a great singer of the Beautyway and the Mountainway, and other curing rites, and a man so wise that it was said the people of Beautiful Mesa added Hosteen to his name when he was less than thirty-calling him Old Man when he was far too young to be a grandfather. Leaphorn had been raised at the knee of Hosteen Nashibitti when Nashibitti was old in years as well as wisdom. He had grown up among the sheepmen and hunters of Beautiful Mesa, families who descended from families who had elected to die when Kit Carson's horsemen came in 1864. Thus the handed-down tribal memories which surrounded Leaphorn's boyhood were not, like those of most Navajos of his generation, the grandfather tales of being herded into captivity, of the Long Walk away from the sacred mountains to the concentration camp at Fort Stanton, of smallpox, and the insolent Apaches, and of misery, indignity, and finally the Long Walk home. Instead, the tales of Nashibitti were of the redder side of tragedy: of two brothers with bows against a troop of mounted riflemen; of sabered sheep, burning hogans, the sound of axes cutting down the peach orchards, the bodies of children in the snow, the red of the flames sweeping through the cornfields, and, finally, the litany of starving families hunted through the canyons by Kit Carson's cavalry. The boy who would become Hosteen Nashibitti and the grandfather of Leaphorn was delivered of a dying mother in such a hungry canyon. He had been raised with his ears filled with his uncle's accounts of brutal cruelty and sublime bravery; of how Carson had claimed to be a friend of the Navajos, of how Carson, led by the hated Utes, had ridden through the peaceful cornfields like death on horseback. But somehow, Nashibitti had never learned this bitterness. When he was initiated at the Yeibichai on the last night of the Night Way Ceremonial, the secret war name they gave him had been He Who Asks Questions. But to Leaphorn, seventy years later, he had been One Who Answers. It had been Nashibitti who had taught Leaphorn the words and legends of the Blessing Way, taught him what the Holy People had told the Earth Surface People about how to live, taught him the lessons of the Changing Woman-that the only goal for man was beauty, and that beauty was found only in harmony, and that this harmony of nature was a matter of dazzling complexity.
Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 02 - Dance Hall of the Dead Page 5
