Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 02 - Dance Hall of the Dead

by Dance Hall of the Dead(lit)

  On his way back down the slope Leaphorn noticed that Susanne was no longer waiting in the carryall. It didn't surprise him. Even watching his conversation with Isaacs from a distance, it would have been easy enough for the girl to see that she'd guessed right-that Ted Isaacs wasn't eager to have her move in. So she hadn't waited for the embarrassment of hearing about it. Leaphorn thought about where the girl might have gone and about all the things that go into choices. He thought about how the whiteman mind of Ted Isaacs sorted things out so that Susanne was on one side of the scale and everything else he wanted on the other, and about the weighting of values that would cause Susanne to be rejected. Then he shook his head and changed the theme. He skipped back nine thousand years to a naked hunter squatting on Isaacs' ridge, laboriously chipping out a lance point, breaking it, calmly dropping it, working on another one, breaking it, calmly dropping it. Leaphorn had trouble with the second part of this scene. His imagination insisted on having his Folsom Man shout an angry Stone Age curse and throw the offending flint down the slope. Way down the slope where no anthropologist would find it ninety centuries later.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Wednesday, December 3, 5 P.M.

  FATHER INGLES of the Order of Saint Francis was a wiry, tidy, tough-looking little man, his face a background of old pockmarks overlaid with two generations of damage by sun and wind. Leaphorn found him sitting on the low wall surrounding the cemetery behind the Saint Anthony's Mission church. He was talking to a youngish Zu¤i. "Be with you in a minute," Father Ingles said. He and the Zu¤i finished working down a list of names-members of the Catholic Youth Organization girls' basketball team who would be making the bus trip to Gallup to meet the Navajo Sawmill Jills and the Acoma Bravettes in a holiday tournament. Now, with that job finished and the Zu¤i gone, he still sat on the wall, huddled in a castoff navy windbreaker, looking across the graves at nothing in particular and telling Leaphorn in a slow, soft voice what he knew of the Shorty Bowlegs family.

  Leaphorn knew Ingles by reputation. He had worked for years out of Saint Michael's Mission near Window Rock and was known among the Window Rock Navajos as Narrowbutt in deference to his bony hindquarters. He spoke Navajo, which was rare among white men, and had mastered its complex tonalities so thoroughly that he could practice the Navajo pastime of spinning off puns and absurdities by pretending to slightly mispronounce his verbs. Now he talked somberly. He had told Leaphorn about the family of Ernesto Cata, and now he told him about Shorty Bowlegs. Much of this Leaphorn already knew. After a while, when enough time had passed to make this conversation absolutely comfortable, Leaphorn would ask the questions he had come to ask. Now he was content to listen. It was something Joe Leaphorn did very well.

  "This George, now. He's an aggravating little devil," Ingles was saying. "I don't think I ever saw a kid with a funnier turn of mind. Quick. Quick. Quick. About half genius and half crazy. The kind of a boy that if you can make a Christian out of him will make you a saint. Full of mysticism-most of it nonsense and all muddled up-but something in him driving him to know more than a natural man is supposed to know. He'll probably end up writing poetry, or shooting himself, or being a drunk like his father. Or maybe we'll still bag him and we'll have a Saint Bowlegs of Zu¤i."

  "Had he been coming to church here?"

  "For a while," Ingles said. He laughed. "I guess you'd say he studied us, in competition with witchcraft and sorcery and the Zu¤i religion and plain old starve-a-vision mysticism." The priest frowned. "You know, I'm not being fair to the boy, talking about him like this. George was looking for something because he was smart enough to see he didn't have anything. He knew all about what his mother had done and that's a cruel thing for a child. And of course he could see his dad was a drunk, and maybe that's even worse. He was away from his family, so he was denied the Navajo Way, and he didn't have anything to replace it."

  "What did he know about his mother?"

  "I've heard two variations. They lived over around Coyote Canyon someplace with her outfit. One way, she took to hitching rides into Gallup for drinking bouts with men. Or she moved out on Bowlegs and in with two brothers-and they were supposed to be witches. Take your pick. Or mix 'em up and take what you like of both. Anyway, Bowlegs didn't get along with his wife's people so he came back to his own folks at Ramah and then he got a job over here herding Zu¤i sheep."

  "Let's skip back just a little. You said the gossip was she moved in with two brothers who were witches. You remember any more about that? Who said it? Anything at all specific?"

  "Guess I heard it two or three places. You know how gossip is. All fifth or sixth hand, and who knows where it started?" Ingles peered out across the cemetery, thinking. Moments passed. Ingles had lived among Navajos long enough to let time pass without strain. He fished a cigar out of his inside shirt pocket, offered it wordlessly to Leaphorn, who shook his head, bit off the tip, lit it, and exhaled a thin blue plume of smoke into the evening air. "Can't remember anything specific," he said, "Just that somebody told me the boy's mother was living with a couple of witches. You think it might be important?"

  "No," Leaphorn said. "I just make a point not to overlook witch talk like that. We don't have much trouble on the reservation, but that's where a lot of it starts."

  "You believe in witches?"

  "That's like me asking you if you believe in sin, Father," Leaphorn said. "The point is you gradually learn that witch talk and trouble sort of go together."

  "I've noticed that myself," Ingles said. "You think there's a connection here?"

  "I don't see how."

  Ingles ejected another blue plume into the air. They watched it drift down the wall. "Anyway, by then George's dad was going after the bottle pretty hard and so maybe George's interest in coming around the church was just running away from drinking. Anyway, he didn't stay interested long."

  "You didn't get him baptized?"

  "No. From what Ernesto told me, George started getting interested in the Zu¤i Way instead. Comparing their origin myth with the Navajo and with our Genesis, that sort of thing. Ernesto used to bring him in to talk to me. He'd ask me about the difference between the Zu¤i ka-china and our saints. Things like that."

  Father Ingles punctuated another silence with more smoke.

  "Very similar in a way. As we see it, when a Christian completes the good life his soul joins the community of saints. When the Zu¤i completes his path, his spirit joins the village of the kachinas and he becomes one of them."

  "What I know of the Zu¤i religion is a little bit out of the anthropology books, a little hearsay, and a little from a roommate I used to have. It's not much, and part of it's probably wrong."

  "Probably," Ingles said. "The Zu¤is found out a long time ago that some outsiders looked on their religion as a sort of side show. And after that, most of them wouldn't talk about it to the anthropologists, and some of those who did were deliberately misleading."

  "Right now I wish I knew a little more about it," Leaphorn said. "George told his little brother that he was going to find a kachina, or maybe it was some kachinas. He didn't seem to know exactly where to find them, but he must have had some idea because he said he'd be gone several days."

  Ingles frowned. "Find some kachinas? He couldn't have meant the kachina dolls, I guess?"

  "I don't think so. I think he, or he and Ernesto together, had done something to offend the kachinas-or thought they had, or some crazy damn thing like that-and George wanted to do something about it."

  Ingles laughed. "That sounds about like George," he said. "That sounds exactly like him." He shook his head. "But where would he go? Did he say anything else?"

  "He said if he didn't get his business done, he'd have to come back to Zu¤i for Shalako. And he took one of the Bowlegs horses, if that helps any, and their rifle. To kill a deer for eating, I'd guess. And a girl he knew told me he said something about going to a dance hall. Can you make any connection out of all that?"

  Ingles made
a clucking sound with his tongue against his teeth. "You know what it might be?" he said. "It might be he's trying to find Kothluwalawa." The priest laughed and shook his head. "I don't know whether that makes any sense, but with George sense isn't all that important."

  "Kothluwalawa?" Leaphorn asked, "Where's that?" The priest's amusement irritated him. "He was going somewhere you can go on a horse."

  Ingles sensed the anger. "It's really not as impossible as it sounds. We tend to think of heaven as being up in the sky. The Zu¤is also have a geographical concept for it, because of the nature of their mythology. Do you know that myth?"

  "If I did, I don't remember much of it now."

  "It's part of the migration mythology. The Zu¤is had completed their emergence up through the four underworlds and had started their great journey hunting for the Middle Place of the Universe. Some children of the Wood Fraternity were carried across the Zu¤i River by the older people. There was sort of a panic and the children were dropped. As they were washed downstream, instead of drowning they turned into water animals-frogs, snakes, tadpoles, so forth-and they swam downstream to this place we're talking about. According to the mythology, it's a lake. Once they got there, the children changed from water animals and became kachinas, and they formed the Council of the Gods-the Rain God of the North, the Rain God of the South, the Little Fire God, and the rest of them. Originally a hundred or so, I think."

  "Sort of like the Holy People of the Navajo," Leaphorn said.

  "Not really. Your Holy People-Monster Slayer, Changing Woman, Born of Water, and all that-they're more like a cross between the Greek hero idea and the lesser Greek gods. More human than divine, you know. The kachinas aren't like anything in Navajo or white culture. We don't have a word for this concept, and neither do you. They're not gods. The Zu¤i have only one God, Awonawilona, who was the creator. And then they have Shiwanni and Shinwanokia-a man-and-woman team created by God to create the Sun, and Mother Earth, and all living things. But the kachinas are different. Maybe you could call them ancestor spirits. Their attitude toward humans is friendly, fatherly. They bring blessings. They appear as rain clouds."

  "I'd heard some of that," Leaphorn said. "So this Kothluwalawa where Bowlegs said he was going is a lake somewhere down the Zu¤i Wash?"

  "It's not that simple," Ingles said. "I have four books about the Zu¤is in my office-each one written by an ethnologist or anthropologist who was an authority. They have it located in four different places. One of them has it down near the confluence of Zu¤i Wash and the Little Colorado, over in Arizona, not far from Saint Johns. And one of them says it's down south near the old Ojo Caliente village. And another of them puts it up in the Nutria Lake area northeast of here. And I've heard a couple of other places, most often a little natural lake just across the Arizona border. And I know that some Zu¤is think of it as being located only in metaphysics, beyond time and space."

  Leaphorn said nothing.

  "What made me think of Kothluwalawa was that business of the dance hall. If you translate that word to English it means something like 'Dance Hall of the Dead,' or maybe 'Dance Ground of the Spirits,' or something like that." Ingles smiled. "Rather a poetic concept. In life, ritual dancing for the Zu¤i is sort of a perfect expression of." He paused, searching for the word. "Call it ecstasy, or joy, or life, or community unity. So what do you do when you're "beyond life, with no labors to perform? You spend your time dancing."

  The priest blew another blue cloud of cigar smoke over the cemetery, and they sat there, Navajo policeman and Franciscan missionary, watching the cloud dissipate over the Zu¤i graves. In the west the sky had turned garish with sunset. What George Bowlegs was hunting, Leaphorn thought, was a concept so foreign to The People that their language lacked a word for it. There was no heaven in the Navajo cosmos, and no friendly kachina spirit, and no pleasant life after death. If one was lucky, there was oblivion. But for most, there was the unhappy malevolent ghost, the chindi, wailing away the eons in the darkness, spreading sickness and evil. He thought about what Ingles had said. This Kothluwalawa might be the word Cecil remembered that started with a K.

  "I think what's important is not where this Zu¤i heaven is located," Leaphorn said. "What's important is where George thinks it's located."

  "Yes," Ingles said. "The same thought occurred to me."

  "Where would he think it is?"

  Ingles thought about it. "I bet I know. I bet it would be that little lake just across the border. It's used a lot for religious purposes. The religious people make prayer retreats to shrines over there, and they go several times a year to catch frogs and so forth. I think it would be my first guess. If George was asking around about it, that's where he'd most likely be told it was located. And now I have a question for you. Why are you hunting the boy? Do you think he killed Ernesto and his own father, too? If you think that, then I think you're wrong."

  Leaphorn thought about the answer. "He could have killed Cata. He must have been somewhere near when it happened. And then he ran. And he could have killed Shorty. But there doesn't seem to be any reason. I guess that's the trouble. Nobody seems to have a reason." Leaphorn's tone made a question. He looked at the priest.

  "To kill Ernesto? Not that I know anything about," Ingles said. "He was a good kid. Served Mass for me. Had a lot of friends. No enemies that I know of. What kid that age has enemies? They're too young for that."

  "Cecil Bowlegs told me that Ernesto and George had stolen something." Leaphorn spoke slowly. This was the sensitive point. It had to be said very carefully. "It was supposed to have been something from that anthropological dig north of Corn Mountain. Ernesto was a Catholic. He was an altar boy. If he stole something he knew he had to give it back before he could make a good confession. Is that right?"

  Ingles was grinning at him. "What you are saying is, "You're his confessor. Did he confess anything to you that would explain why somebody killed him?' That's what you are asking me, but you know I can't reveal what I'm told in the confessional."

  "But Cata's dead now. Nothing you tell me now is going to hurt that boy. Maybe it would help George Bowlegs."

  "I'm thinking about it," Ingles said. "You know, I've been a priest almost forty years and it never came up before. Probably I won't tell you anything, but let's think a minute about the theology we've got ourselves involved in here."

  "Just negative information might help. Just knowing that he didn't steal anything important. Cecil Bowlegs told me it was some arrowheads from the dig site, but it wasn't that. They checked and told me they weren't missing any artifacts. In fact, they weren't missing anything."

  Ingles sat silently, his teeth worrying his lower lip, his mind worrying the problem. "To be a mortal sin, the offense has to be serious," he said. "What you're describing wouldn't have been more than a very minor imperfection. Something a boy would do. Something a boy with a less scrupulous conscience than Ernesto wouldn't even think of confessing."

  "Now he's dead can't you tell me?" Leaphorn said. "A tool? A piece of paper? Can you tell me what?"

  "I think I can't," Ingles said. "Probably I shouldn't even tell you that it was inconsequential. Nothing of value. Nothing that would tell you anything at all."

  "I wonder why, then, he wanted to confess it. Did he think it was important?"

  "No. Not really. It was Saturday afternoon. I was hearing confessions. Ernesto wanted to talk to me, very privately, about something else. So he got in line. And then, since he was in the confessional anyway, I heard his confession and gave him absolution. Confession is a sacrament," Ingles explained. "God gives you grace for it, even if there's no sin to be absolved."

  "Saturday. Last Saturday? The day before he was killed?"

  "Yes," Father Ingles said. "Last Saturday. He was my server Sunday at Mass, but I didn't talk to him. That was the last time Ernesto and I had a talk."

  Ingles slid suddenly from the wall. "I'm getting cold," he said. "Let's go in."

  Through the heavy w
ooden door, Ingles bowed in the direction of the altar and pointed Leaphorn toward the back pew.

  "I don't know what I've said that's helpful," he said. "That George Bowlegs' dad was a drunk-which I guess you already knew. That Ernesto Cata hadn't done anything bad enough to cause anyone to kill him-or even scold him much, for that matter."

  "Would it help any if you told me what Cata wanted to talk to you about? I mean before he confessed his sins?"