Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 02] (8 page)

"Ya-ta-hey," he shouted. "Shorty Bowlegs, ya-ta-hey."

The wind whipped a mixture of dust and snow around the hogan, around Leaphorn's feet. The plank door moved, tapping at its crude casement. He stared at the door. In the dim reflection from the headlights he could barely detect the motion.

He flicked on the flashlight. The door was formed of five vertical planks, braced with one-by-four-inch board. Under the yellow light it hung motionless. The wind gusted again, hooting through the hogan's stovepipe smoke hole and speaking in a quarrelsome chorus of voices around the cracks and crevices of its logs. Now the door moved. Outward, then inward, tapping against its latch.

"Hello," Leaphorn shouted. "Shorty?" The wind voices of the hogan sank abruptly in pitch and volume, answering him with silence. Leaphorn moved beside the hogan wall. He pumped a shell into the 30-30 chamber, held the rifle on his right arm. With his left hand he pulled up the doorlatch and jerked outward. The wind helped, sucking the door open and banging it back against the log wall opposite Leaphorn.

Inside nothing moved. The flashlight beam reflected from the galvanized tin of a washtub against the back wall, lit a scattered jumble of cooking pots and food supplies, and lingered on clothing (boy-sized bluejeans, three shirts, a nondescript blue cloth, assorted underwear) which hung from the hogan's blanket rope. Behind the clothing, shadows moved on the rough log wall. Anything there? Nothing visible. Leaphorn moved the light clockwise through the hogan. It passed three empty bedrolls, all in disarray, passed a battered metal chest with its drawers hanging open, passed a rope-tied bundle of sheep hides, and stopped finally on the arm of a man. The arm extended limply on the packed earthen floor, the dark wrist thrust out of a sleeve that was khaki (not dark blue), the fingers relaxed, their tips touching the earth.

A stinging flurry of dry snowflakes whipped past Leaphorn's face. Again the wind spoke loud around the hogan, raising an obbligato mixture of hoots and shrieks. The flashlight now lit black hair—neatly parted, a braid tied with a string, a cloth headband which had been a faded pink but now was dyed—like the hair beneath it—a fresh bloody crimson.

Without knowing it, Leaphorn had been holding his breath. Now that he had found Shorty Bowlegs, he released it with a sound something like a sigh. He stood for a moment looking carefully past the hogan, studying the dim, wind-twisted shapes of the piñons and junipers which surrounded it, examining the shape of the outbuildings. Listening. But the wind made listening useless.

He stepped into the hogan and squatted on his heels. He stared first at the face that had been Bowlegs' and then examined the hogan. Shorty Bowlegs had been killed with a blow struck from behind with something heavy and sharp. The same weapon that had killed Cata? Swung by the figure in the blue shirt (a man, he thought, without knowing why he thought it) he had seen at the doorway. And where was that man now? Not more than five minutes away, but with wind, snow, dust, and darkness making both ears and eyes useless, he might as well be on another planet. Leaphorn cursed himself. He had seen this killer, and he had sat daydreaming in his truck while the man walked away.

Leaphorn tested the blood on Bowlegs' hair with a tentative fingertip. Sticky. Bowlegs had been struck at least thirty minutes before Leaphorn's arrival. The killer had apparently killed Bowlegs first and then ransacked the hogan. Had he come to kill Bowlegs and, with that done, searched the family's belongings? Or had he come to make the search and killed Bowlegs to make it possible? To search for what? Everything that Bowlegs had accumulated in perhaps forty years of living was littered on the hogan floor. Add it together—the clothing, the supplies, the sheepherder's tools—and it might have cost five hundred dollars, new, at inflated trading post prices. Now it was worn, used. By whiteman's standards, Leaphorn thought, Bowlegs had a net worth of maybe one hundred dollars. The white world's measure of his life. And what would the Navajo measure be? The Dinee made a harder demand—that man find his place in the harmony of things. There, too, Shorty Bowlegs had failed.

Outside the hogan, Leaphorn snapped off the carryall headlights and began a search in gradually widening circles. He worked slowly, conscious that the killer—unlikely as it seemed—might still be near. He looked for tracks—human, horse, or vehicle—using his flashlight sparingly in places where they might be preserved from the wind. He found nothing very conclusive. His own van's tires showed up in several places where the gusts had not erased them, but no other vehicle had apparently come near the hogan recently. Having established that, he made a careful inspection of the pen in a shallow arroyo below the hogans which had served as the Bowlegs stables. Two horses had been kept there. The tracks of one—poorly shod—were only a few hours old. The other had apparently not been around for perhaps a day. Leaphorn squatted on the loamy earth, hunched against the icy wind, thinking about what that might mean.

The wind rose and fell, now whipping the limbs of the junipers into frantic thrashing, now dying into an almost silent lull. Leaphorn snapped off the light and crouched motionless. The wind had carried an incongruous sound. He listened. It was buried now under the thousand sounds of the storm. And then he heard it again.

A bell. And then another, slightly lower in pitch. And a third with a tinny tinkle. Leaphorn moved swiftly toward a gnarled juniper barely visible in the darkness, toward the sound. He stood behind the tree, waiting. The bells approached, and with them the sound of a horse. The dim shape of a white goat tinkled past the tree, followed by a straggling stream of goats and then an almost solid mass of sheep. Finally, there came the horse, and on it a small shape, huddled against the cold.

Leaphorn stepped from behind the juniper.

"Ya-ta-hey," he shouted. "Cecil?"

IT WAS ALMOST two hours later when Leaphorn reached Zuñi and left Cecil with a young Franciscan brother at Saint Anthony's school. He had told Cecil as gently as he could that someone had struck his father on the back of the head and that Shorty Bowlegs was dead. He had radioed New Mexico State Police at Gallup to make this homicide a matter of record and the dispatcher had promised to notify Zuñi Police and the McKinley County sheriffs office. That would assure that the routine would be properly followed, although Leaphorn was sure that whoever had killed Shorty Bowlegs would not be stupid enough to be captured at a roadblock. With these official duties done, Leaphorn had helped Cecil unsaddle the horse and secure the sheep in the brush corral. He had left Cecil in the cab of the truck then, with the motor running and the heater on high, while he recovered the boy's bedroll and odds and ends of spare clothing from the hogan. He put these—a single shirt, three pairs of cheap socks, and underwear—in an empty grocery sack. He handed the sack through the truck window.

"I didn't find any pants."

"Just got these I got on," Cecil said.

"Anything else you want out of there?"

Cecil stared over his shoulder at the hogan. Leaphorn wondered what he was thinking. Two hours ago when he had left to bring in the sheep that humped shape had been home. Warm. Occupied by a man who, drunk or not, was his father. Now the hogan was cold, hostile to him, occupied not by Shorty Bowlegs but by Shorty's ghost—a ghost which would in Navajo fashion embody only those things in his father's nature which were weak, evil, angry.

"Ought to get George's stuff out of there, I guess," Cecil said. He paused. "What do you think—would they have ghost sickness on them yet? And I've got a lunchbox. You think we should leave that stuff?"

"I'll get 'em. And tomorrow we'll get somebody to come out here and take care of the body and fix up the hogan. There won't be any ghost sickness."

"Just the lunchbox for me," Cecil said. "That's all I got."

It occurred to Leaphorn, back inside the hogan, that this would be an unusually complicated death. No relatives around to arrange for disposal of the body, and to break a hole through a hogan wall to release Shorty's ghost for its infinite wandering, and to nail shut the door as a warning to all that here stood a hogan contaminated by death, and—finally—to find the proper Singer, and arrange the proper Sing, to cure any of those who might have been somehow touched and endangered by this death. More important, there was no surrounding family to absorb the survivors—to engulf a child with the love of uncles and aunts and cousins, to give Cecil the security of a new hogan and a new family. The family to do this must be somewhere on the Ramah reservation. It would be part of Shorty's family. Since Cecil's mother was no good, it would be better to return him to the outfit of his father's mother. The people at the Ramah chapter house would know where to find them. And for Leaphorn there then remained the matter of finding Cecil's big brother.

In the hogan, he found surprisingly little trace of George. A spare shirt, too ragged even for George to wear, and a few odds and ends similarly rejected. Nothing else. Leaphorn added this lack of George's belongings to the absence of the second Bowlegs horse from the corral and came to the obvious conclusion. George had come back to this hogan the day that horse had left its latest tracks at the corral. That was yesterday, the day after Cata had died. George had picked up his spare clothing and the horse. He must have been here not long after Leaphorn had made his fruitless first call on Shorty.

On his way out of the hogan, Leaphorn saw what must be Cecil's lunchbox. It was one of those tin affairs sold in the dime stores. Its yellow paint was decorated with a picture of Snoopy atop his doghouse. It lay open now beside the hogan wall. Leaphorn picked it up.

Inside the box were a dozen or so papers, once neatly folded but now pawed through and left in disarray. The top one was filled with penciled subtraction problems and bore the notation "GOOD!" in red ink. The paper under it was titled "Paragraphs" in the upper left corner. Above the title a gold star was pasted.

Leaphorn refolded the papers. Under them were a small blue ball with a broken bit of rubber band attached, a spark plug, a small horseshoe magnet, a ball of copper wire wound neatly on a stick, an aspirin bottle half filled with what looked like dirty iron filings, the wheel off a toy car, and a stone figure a little larger than Leaphorn's thumb. It was the elongated shape of a mole carved from a piece of antler. Two thin buckskin thongs secured a tiny chipped-flint arrowhead to its top. It was obviously a fetish figure, probably from one of the Zuñi medicine fraternities. It certainly wasn't Navajo.

In the van, Cecil was looking through the windshield. He took the box without a word and put it on his lap. They jolted past the hogan with Cecil still staring straight ahead.

"I'm going to leave you at Saint Anthony's Mission tonight," Leaphorn said. "Then I'm going to find George and get both of you boys away from here. I'm going to get you to your father's family unless you feel there's somewhere else that would be better."

"No," Cecil said. "There's no place else."

"Where'd you get that fetish?"

"Fetish?"

"That little bone mole."

"George gave it to me."

"What does your other horse look like?"

"The other horse? It's a bay. Big, with white stockings."

"When George came and got the horse, what else did he take?"

Cecil said nothing. His hands gripped the lunchbox. Between the boy's fingers Leaphorn could make out the inscription: "Happiness is a strong kite string."

"Look," Leaphorn said. "If he didn't take the horse, who did? And who took his things? Don't you think we should find him now? Don't you think he'd be safer? For God's sake, think about it for a minute."

The carryall tilted up the slope above the hogan, grinding in second gear. A fresh assault of wind howled past its windows. The snow had stopped now and the vehicle was submerged in a sea of swirling dust. Cecil suddenly began shaking. Leaphorn put his hand on the boy's shoulder. He was overcome with a wild surge of anger.

"He got the horse yesterday evening," Cecil said. His voice was very small. "It was about dark, after I talked to you. My father, he was asleep, and I went out to see about the sheep and when I got back the rifle was gone and I found the note." Cecil was still staring straight ahead, his hands gripping the tin box so hard that his knuckles whitened. "And I guess he took his knife, and the stuff he kept in a leather pouch he made, and a part of a loaf of bread." Cecil fell silent, the catalog completed.

"Where'd he say he was going?"

"The note's in here with my stuff," Cecil said. He unlatched the box and sorted through the papers. "I thought I put it in here," he said. He shut the box. "Anyway, I remember most of it. He said he couldn't explain it to me exactly, but he was going to find some kachinas. He said he had to talk to them. He couldn't pronounce the name of the place. He tried to say it, but all I remember was it started with a 'K.' And when he was riding off he said he'd be gone several days to where this kachina was, taking care of the business he had. And if he couldn't get it done there, then he'd have to go to Shalako over at Zuñi and then he'd be home. And he said not to worry about him."

"Did he say anything about Ernesto Cata?"

"No."

"Or give any hint where he was looking for this kachina?"

"No."

"Was that all he said?"

Cecil didn't answer. Leaphorn glanced at him. The boy's eyes were wet.

"No," Cecil said. "He said to take care of Dad."

JOE LEAPHORN was having trouble concentrating. It seemed to him that a single homicide (as the death of Cata) could be thought of as a unit—as something in which an act of violence contained beginning and end, cause and result. But two homicides linked by time, place, participants, and, most important, motivation presented something more complex. The unit became a sequence, the dot became a line, and lines tended to extend, to lead places, to move in directions. One-two became one-two-three-four—unless, of course, the deaths of the Zuñi boy and the drunken Navajo were the sum of some totality. Could this be?