Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 02] (5 page)

"Which grid?" Reynolds asked.

Isaacs touched three fingers to the map. "These."

"Washed down. Old erosion. See any of them in place?"

"Got 'em off the sifter screen," Isaacs said.

"You noticed they're silicated. Same stuff as the parallel-flaked?"

"Right."

"You're not missing anything?"

"I never do."

"I know you don't." Reynolds favored Isaacs with a glance that included fondness, warmth, and approval. It developed in a second into a smile that transformed Reynolds' leathery face into a statement of intense affection, and from that, in the same second, into sheer, undiluted delight.

"By God," he said. "By God, it really looks good. Right?"

"Very good, I think," Isaacs said. "I think this is going to be it."

"Yes," Reynolds said. "I think so." He was staring at Isaacs. "Nothing's going wrong with this dig. You understand that? It is going to be done exactly right." Reynolds spaced the words, spitting each one out.

A good hater, Leaphorn thought. Maybe a little crazy. Or maybe just a genius.

Reynolds' gaze now included Leaphorn, the bright blue eyes checking their memory. "Mr. Isaacs is one of the three or four best field men in the United States," he said. The smile clicked on and off, the leather turned hard. "What Mr. Isaacs is doing here is going to make some stubborn people face the truth."

"I wish you luck," Leaphorn said.

Isaacs' face had done something Leaphorn wouldn't have believed possible. It had assumed an expression of embarrassed pleasure and managed to flush red through the sunburn. It made Isaacs look about ten years old.

"Mr. Leaphorn is looking for a couple of boys," he said. "He stopped by to ask if I'd seen them."

"Was one of them that Zuñi kid that was screwing around my truck?" Reynolds asked. "The one that ran off when I yelled at him?"

"That's the one," Leaphorn said. "I'd heard they stole something here."

Reynolds' bright eyes flicked instantly to Isaacs. "Did they steal something?"

"No," Isaacs said. "I told him that. Nothing's missing."

Reynolds was still staring at Isaacs. "Were you letting two of them hang around here? I only saw one."

"The Zuñi boy and a Navajo named George Bowlegs," Leaphorn said. "They're friends and they're both gone. Did they steal something from you, Dr. Reynolds?"

"That Zuñi boy was poking around my truck. But nothing was missing. I don't think he stole anything. Frankly, I ran him off because it was beginning to look like this is a critically important site." Reynolds glanced at Isaacs. "It's damn sure no place to have unauthorized persons underfoot—especially not children."

"Was there anything in the pickup they might have stolen? Anything valuable?"

Reynolds thought about it. Impatience flashed across his face and was gone. "Is it important?"

"Those boys are missing. We think one of them was hurt. We need to know why they disappeared. Might help figure out where they are."

"Let's look, then," Reynolds said.

Outside the red sky was fading into darkness, and the early stars were out. Reynolds fished a flashlight out of the glovebox of a green GMC pickup. He checked the remaining contents—a hodgepodge of maps, small tools, and notebooks. "Nothing missing here," he said.

It took a little longer to check the toolbox welded behind the cab. Reynolds sorted carefully through the clutter—pliers, wire cutters, geologist's pick, hand ax, a folding trenching shovel, and a dozen other odds and ends. "There's a hammer missing, I think. No. Here it is." He closed the box. "All accounted for."

"On the day you ran the boys off, did you have any artifacts in the truck?"

"Artifacts?" Reynolds was facing the sunset. It gave his skin a redness. The blue eyes memorized Leaphorn again.

"Arrowheads, lance points, anything like that?"

Reynolds thought about the question. "By God, I did. Had my box with me. But why would they want to steal a piece of rock?"

"I heard one of the boys stole an arrowhead," Leaphorn said. "Was anything missing from the box?"

Reynolds' laugh was more a snort. "You can be damned sure there wasn't. That box had stuff in it from all eight of the digs I'm watching. Nothing very important, but stuff we're working on. If a single flake was taken out of there, I'd know it. It's all there." He frowned. "Who told you he'd stolen some artifacts?"

"It's thirdhand," Leaphorn said. "The Navajo boy has a little brother. He told me."

"That's funny," Reynolds said.

Leaphorn said nothing. But he thought, Yes, that's very funny.

THE MOON NOW HUNG halfway up the sky, the yellow of its rising gone and its face turned to scarred white ice. It was a winter moon. Under it, Leaphorn was cold. He sat in the shadow of the rimrock watching the commune which called itself Jason's Fleece. The cold seeped through Leaphorn's uniform jacket, through his shirt and undershirt, and touched the skin along his ribs. It touched his calves above his boottops, and his thighs where the cloth of his trouser legs stretched taut against the muscles, and the backs of his hands, which gripped the metal of his binoculars. In a moment, Leaphorn intended to deal with the cold. He would get up and climb briskly down to the commune below him and learn there whatever it was possible for him to learn. But now he ignored the discomfort, concentrating in his orderly fashion on this minor phase of the job of finding George Bowlegs.

A less precise man by now would have written off as wasted effort the mile walk from the point where he had parked his carryall and the climb to this high point overlooking the commune. It didn't occur to Leaphorn to do so. He had come here because his hunt for George Bowlegs logically led him to the commune. And before he entered it, he would study it. The chance that Bowlegs was hiding there seemed to Leaphorn extremely slight. But the chance existed and the operating procedure of Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn in such cases was to minimize the risk. Better spend whatever effort was required to examine the ground than chance losing the boy again by carelessness.

At the moment Leaphorn was examining, through the magnification of the binocular lenses, a denim jacket. The jacket hung on the corner post of a brush arbor beside a hogan some two hundred yards below where Leaphorn sat. The hogan was a neat octagon of logs built as the Navajo Way instructed, its single entrance facing the point of sunrise and a smoke hole in the center of the roof. Behind it Leaphorn could see a plank shed and behind the shed a pole corral that contained huddled sheep—probably about twenty. Leaphorn presumed the sheep belonged to the occupants of the commune, who currently numbered four men and three women. The allotment of land on which the sheep grazed belonged to Frank Bob Madman and the hogan, from which a thin plume of smoke now rose into the cold moonlight, belonged by Navajo tradition to the ghost of Alice Madman.

Leaphorn had learned this, and considerably more, by stopping at a hogan about four miles up the wagon track. With the young Navajo couple who lived there he had discussed the weather, the sagging market for wool, a Tribal Council proposal to invest Navajo funds in the construction of livestock ponds, the couple's newborn son, and—finally—the group of Belacani who lived in the hogan down the wagon track. He had been told that Frank Bob Madman had abandoned the hogan almost three years before. Madman had gone to Gallup to buy salt and had returned to find that his wife of many years had died in his absence. ("She'd had a little stroke before," Young Wife said. "Probably had a big one this time.") There had been no one there to move Alice Madman out of the hogan so that her ghost—at the moment of death—might escape for its eternity of wandering. Therefore the chindi had been caught in the hogan. Madman had got a Belacani rancher over near Ramah to bury the body under rocks. He had knocked a hole in one wall and boarded up the smoke hole and the entrance, as was customary with a death hogan, to keep the ghost from bothering people. These duties performed, Madman had taken his wagon and his sheep, and left. Young Wife believed he had gone back to his own clan, the Red Foreheads, somewhere around Chinle. And then, a year ago last spring, the Belacani had arrived. There had been sixteen of them in a school bus and a Volkswagen van. They had moved into the Madman place, living in the death hogan and in two big tents. And then more had arrived until, by the end of summer, thirty-five or forty had lived there.

The number had declined during the winter, and in the coldest part of the year, in the very middle of the Season When the Thunder Sleeps, there had been another death in the hogan of the ghost of Alice Madman. The population had stabilized during the spring and declined sharply again with the present autumn, until only four men and three women were left.

"The death?" Leaphorn asked. "Who was it? How did it happen?"

It had been a young woman, a very fat girl, a very quiet girl, sort of ugly. Somebody had said Ugly Girl had something wrong with her heart. Young Wife, however, thought it was too much heroin, or maybe the ghost of Alice Madman.

"Some of them were on horse then," Young Husband said. "Probably she got an overdose of the stuff. That's what we heard." Young Husband shrugged. He had spent twelve months with the First Cav in Vietnam. Neither heroin nor death impressed him. He discussed these whites with an impersonal interest tinged with amusement, but with the detailed knowledge of neighbors common to those who live where fellow humans are scarce. In general, Young Husband rated the residents of Jason's Fleece as generous, ignorant, friendly, bad mannered but well intentioned. On the positive side of the balance, they provided a source of free rides into Ramah, Gallup, and once even to Albuquerque. On the negative, they had contaminated the spring above the Madman place with careless defecation last summer, and had started a fire which burned off maybe fifty acres of pretty good sheep graze, and didn't know how to take care of their sheep, which meant they might let scabies, or some disease, get started in the flock. Yes, the visitors had included a Navajo boy who sometimes came by himself and sometimes came with a Zuñi boy.

The other visitors were Belacani, mostly young, mostly long-haired. Young Wife was both amused and curious. What were they after? What were any of them after?

"They call their place Jason's Fleece," Leaphorn said. "Do you know the story about that? It's a hero story, like our story of the Monster Slayer and Born of Water, the twins who go to find the Sun. In the whiteman story Jason was a hero who hunted across the world for a golden fleece. Maybe it stood for money. I think it was supposed to stand for whatever it is people have to find to live happy."

"I heard of it," Young Husband said. "Supposed to be a sheepskin covered up with gold." He laughed. "I think you're more likely to find scabies on the sheep they're raising."

Leaphorn smiled slightly at the recollection, stared at the denim jacket, and decided the jacket looked too large to be the one Bowlegs was wearing when he left school. He shifted his field of vision slowly, past the thin plume of vapor rising from the smoke hole of the hogan, past the plank shed, past the brush arbor, then back again. There was a table under the arbor, partly in darkness. On it, cooking utensils reflected spots of moonlight. Beyond it something in the darkness which might be a saddle and something hanging which could only be a deer carcass. Leaphorn examined it. Something at the corner of his vision tugged at his attention. The shape of a shadow contradicting his memory of the way the shadows had been formed under this arbor. He shifted the binoculars slightly. Projected onto the hard bare earth behind the hogan by the slanting light from the moon was the shadow of the pole which held up this corner of the shelter, and the shadow of part of the table, and beside that the shadow of a pair of legs. Someone was standing under the arbor. The shadow of the legs was motionless. Leaphorn frowned at it. The young neighbors had said only seven Belacani lived here now. He had seen two men and two women drive away in the school bus. He had seen one man and one woman—Susanne, judging from the description he had of her from Isaacs—go into the hogan. He had presumed the remaining man was also inside. Was this him standing so silently under the arbor? But why would he stand there in the icy moonlight? And how had he got there without Leaphorn seeing him? As he considered this, the figure moved. With birdlike swiftness it darted out of the arbor to the side of the hogan, disappearing into the shadow. It crouched, pressed against the logs. What the devil was it doing? Listening? It seemed to be. And then the figure straightened, its head moving upward into the slanting moonlight. Leaphorn sucked in his breath. The head was a bird's. Round, jaylike feather plumes thrusting backward, a long, narrow sandpiper's beak, a bristling ruff of feathers where the human neck would be. The head was round. As it turned away from profile, Leaphorn saw round eyes ringed with yellow against the black. He was seeing the staring, expressionless face of a kachina. Leaphorn felt the hairs bristling at the back of his neck. What was it his roommate had said of these spirits of the Zuñi dead? That they danced forever under a lake in Arizona; he remembered that. The man-bird was moving again, away from the hogan to disappear through the darkness among the piñons. "The way it's told," he heard the roommate's voice saying, "they're invisible. But you can see them if you're about to die."

THE GIRL NAMED SUSANNE spoke with a slight stammer. It caused her to pause before each sentence—her oval, freckled face assuming a split second of earnest concentration before she shaped the first word. At the moment she was saying that maybe George Bowlegs was simply ditching school, that George sometimes played hooky to go deer hunting, that probably he was doing this now.

"Maybe that's so," Leaphorn said. He felt an amused attraction to this girl. She would be better at it someday, perhaps, but she would never be one of those who developed a skill at deception. He let the silence stretch. The blanket hanging against the log wall of the hogan opposite him was a good Two Gray Hills weave worth maybe three hundred dollars. Had Frank Bob Madman left it behind when this hogan was abandoned to its malevolent ghost? Or had these young Belacani bought it somewhere and brought it with them? The man called Halsey moved very slightly in his rocking chair, back and forth, his face hidden, except for the forehead, behind the black binding of a book. Halsey's boots were dirty, but they were very good boots. Halsey interested Leaphorn. Where had he come from? And what did he hope to find here where the whiteman had never before found anything?