Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 01] (8 page)

Outside the air was cool, almost cold after the closeness of the hogan. The eastern horizon was turning from red to yellow and Sandoval saw it was about the right time. He pulled back the curtains and called to Tsosie.

"Go out there behind the brush shelter," he ordered, "and remember that to make it right you want to vomit out the witching just as you can see the top rim of the sun coming up." When Tsosie came past the curtain, Sandoval handed him a chicken feather.

"Just when the sun is first coming up," Sandoval reminded him. "If the medicine isn't working, stick that feather down your throat."

Sandoval sat on the ground and leaned back on the wall of the hogan, relishing the coolness. He would have about thirty minutes before the vomiting was finished and then one more chant to sing while Tsosie and his family were rubbing the juniper stew on their bodies. Then it would be time for the people from the Stick Receivers to arrive. Sandoval yawned and stretched and looked out across the brush flats where the visitors were camping. Probably four or five hundred, he thought, and there would be more arriving today, mostly women bringing their girls to look for husbands at the Girl Dance tonight, and young men looking for girls, and gambling, and drinking, and trouble. Sandoval had meant to think about the ceremonial, to think just good thoughts and keep in harmony with the event. But he couldn't help thinking how times were changing. Mostly they came in their pickups and cars now. There were dozens of them parked out there and just a few wagons. And that was part of it. The white man's machines made it easy to travel about and people came just to visit and fool around. In the old days there wouldn't have been any drinking and gambling at a ceremonial like this. Sandoval watched a white carryall with the humped buffalo insignia of Law and Order drive up across the flat, and a man in blue jeans and a checked shirt get out of it and talk to a woman starting a cook fire near one of the pickups. The woman pointed in Sandoval's direction and the man came walking toward him.

He was short, with heavy shoulders and a Roman nose, and when he stopped in front of Sandoval and said, "My grandfather, I hope all is well with you," his voice was very clear and distinct. Sandoval, who had noticed lately that most young people mumbled, liked this. He invited the young man to sit beside him.

"I am called Joe Leaphorn," the young man said, "and I work for Law and Order," but after that he talked about other things—about the rains starting early this year, which was good, and about drinking and gambling at the ceremonials, which was bad. Sandoval approved of this, knowing that the policeman would get around to his business in good time and appreciating that here was a young one who knew the old and patient ways.

"There has not been an Enemy Way in this country in a long time," the policeman said, and from the way he said it, Sandoval thought that the time had come for business.

"I guess," the policeman added, "that they had a Star Gazer, or a Hand Trembler come." It was not a question, exactly, but the tone confirmed Sandoval's guess. The policeman was talking business now.

"Hand Tremble," Sandoval said. "They got Jimmy Hudson to come out here and hold his hand over Charley Tsosie and Hudson found out he had been witched. Hudson said the witch blew something on him."

"There was a man lived out here who they called Luis Horseman," the policeman said. "I wonder if he was a witch?"

"I don't know about him."

"I guess the Enemy Way will work even if you don't know who the witch is. But, my grandfather, I am an ignorant man about many things. There were no Singers in my family and I don't know how the Scalp Shooter gets the scalp if you don't know who the witch is."

"They know something about him," Sandoval said. He was enjoying this. Enjoying the young man's finesse and the sparring with words.

"I knew a Hand Trembler once who was wrong. He said a ghost had got at my uncle's brother's son and they had a Shooting Way Sing for that. Turned out he had tuberculosis."

"Hand trembling's not much good usually," Sandoval agreed. "But this time he got it right. They said this Navajo Wolf came down and bothered Tsosie's sheep in the night and Tsosie saw him. Looked like a big coyote but it was a man. And then after Hudson came and hand trembled, they got one of the outfit who knew some of the chants and they did a blackening on Tsosie and after that he felt better for a little while." Sandoval hadn't liked the remark about tuberculosis. He wondered sourly if the young man believed in witches. The policeman had a white haircut. Not the way the Changing Woman had taught. He was looking out across the sagebrush flat now, thinking. Sandoval guessed the next question would tell him something.

"My grandfather, I am using too much of your time today, but I keep wondering about this. I know you have never listened to gossip but I will tell you something you might need to know for your Sing. This man Horseman is dead now, and if he was the witch, you might need to know about it for the way you hold the Sing."

Sandoval wondered why the policeman thought a man named Horseman was the witch. The question would come now. Maybe it would tell him.

"As I said, I am ignorant about many things. I know it would be easier to cure Tsosie if the witch was already dead. But how would be the best way to kill the witch?"

Sandoval turned the question over carefully.

"The best way is with clubs."

The policeman was looking at him closely now. "Would it be a good thing to smother him? To pour sand over his head?"

"I never heard that. Sometimes with clubs and sometimes they shoot them." Sandoval was puzzled. He had never heard of Horseman and he had never heard of a man being killed like that. He saw Tsosie was coming back now from behind the brush shelter and he got to his feet. His bones felt stiff and he was irritated. He suspected the young man had left the Navajo Way and was on the Jesus Road.

"My grandson, I must go back into the hogan now. But now I have a question for you to answer. Tell me if you believe in witching."

"My father taught me about it," the policeman said. "When the water rose in the Fourth World and the Holy People emerged through the hollow reed, First Man and First Woman came up, too. But they forgot witchcraft and so they sent Diving Heron back for it. They told him to bring out 'the way to get rich' so the Holy People wouldn't know what he was getting. And Heron brought it out and gave it to First Man and First Woman and they gave some of it to Snake. But Snake couldn't swallow it so he had to hold it in his mouth. And that's why it kills you when a snake strikes you."

The words were right, Sandoval thought, but he recited them like a lesson.

"You didn't tell me whether you believe it."

The man named Leaphorn smiled very slightly.

"My grandfather," he said, "I have learned to believe in evil."

Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn had returned to his carryall intending to get some sleep. He had left Window Rock a little after midnight to drive to the Tsosie place. But the track over the slick rock country had been even worse than he remembered and the two hours' rest he had hoped to have when he arrived had been used in low-gear driving over the great waste of eroded slopes west of the Lukachukais. Now he had time. He had learned nothing positive from Sandoval. He had asked around and learned that Billy Nez was not yet here. There was nothing to do but wait. The sun, now rising, would have to be halfway up the sky before it was time for the Encounter Between the Camps and then there would be the exchange of gifts and other ritual before the scalp shooting could be held. He leaned back against the seat, feeling exhausted but wide awake. He found himself again retracing all he knew of Luis Horseman, again examining each assorted fact for some semblance of pattern.

The file on Luis Horseman at Window Rock had been typical of those for the relatively few young men who gave Law and Order the bulk of its business. A few scattered years of schooling on the Reservation, arrests at Gallup and Farmington and Tuba City for drunk and disorderly, beginning when he was seventeen. Short-term jobs on the Santa Fe railroad maintenance crews and at the strip mine. A marriage into the Minnie Tso family, a fight, a six-month term in the tribal jail for aggravated assault, and then the knifing at Gallup and the stolen car. All that was familiar enough. Too familiar.

"He acted like he had no relatives," Leaphorn thought and grinned wryly at the old-fashioned expression. When he was a boy, it was the worst thing his mother could say about anyone. But then the Navajo Way made the relatives totally responsible for anything one of the family did. Now that was changing and there were more young men like Horseman. Souls lost somewhere between the values of The People and the values of the whites. No good even at crime.

"Not worth killing," Leaphorn thought. But someone had killed him, and gone to considerable trouble in doing it. Why so much trouble? Why had Horseman's body been moved? Why had it been left beside the road when it could so easily have been lost forever, buried under the bank of a thousand arroyos or left for the ravens anywhere in twenty-five thousand empty square miles? And
why
had Horseman been killed? Above all, why had he been killed in that peculiar manner?

The question always brought him back to witchcraft. But all of yesterday afternoon and evening, hours of driving from place to place and hours of frustrating questioning of Hand Tremblers, Listeners, and Singers—all the practitioners who knew the most about magic—had told him nothing. Only that the Hand Trembler who examined Tsosie had learned in his trance that the witch was a stranger and that the cure must be an Enemy Way. It was not, Leaphorn knew, a ceremonial lightly undertaken. It required two Singers, one for the patient and one at the Stick Receiver's camp, and the Scalp Shooter. In some cases there would also be a team of Tail Singers for the coyote songs, and the seven Black Dancers. Even without the special performers, the Singers and the Scalp Shooter would cost the Tsosie family at least $200 in fees. Dozens of sheep would have to be killed to feed the crowds at both camps, and several hundred dollars more would go for the gift exchanges. Leaphorn thought the Tsosie uncles and cousins who would have to help bear this heavy cost would approve the Sing only if they were sure there had been a witching. And how the devil could they be sure if they hadn't identified the witch?

Leaphorn saw smoke rising from the smoke hole of the ceremonial hogan. Sandoval, who had been burning pine and willow bark by the brush shelter, had collected his ashes and gone into the log building. The fire inside would be to burn sweet-grass, dodgeweed, rock sage, and grama mixed with crow and buzzard feathers, producing a sooty substance to be mixed with the bark ashes and used to blacken the patient for his attack on the enemy scalp. Over the fire, Sandoval would be singing the old chants, the old songs to the Holy People—not prayers of humility or supplication, and not pleas for forgiveness, but songs which sought nothing but to restore man's harmony with all that was elemental.

The sagebrush flats were stirring with activity now. A horse race was being organized behind an array of parked pickups. There will be gambling on that, Leaphorn thought, and maybe a fight. Cook fires were burning everywhere. By the hogans, the women of the family were preparing the ceremonial food which two girls would soon take out to provide the ritual meal for those coming from the other camp. Leaphorn felt a sudden fierce pride in The People. He remembered the Blessing Way held when he and his cousins had left after their last furlough for Camp Pendleton and then for Saigon and Okinawa.

He remembered the sweat bath and the Singer, even older than Sandoval, sprinkling his shoulders with the sacred pollen, and the old, cracked voice rising over the rhythm of the pot drum.

Leaphorn was sleepy now. The horse race had been run and won by a boy on a pinto, amid much loud laughter. A small bare-bottomed boy had walked by the carryall, smiled shyly at Leaphorn, and relieved himself in the sage nearby. A dozen or more women, with their families fed for the morning, were gossiping raucously around an old and rusty sedan. Three teen-aged girls had led a string of wagon horses down to the spring, watered them, and put them back on the picket rope. The sky was cloudless now but light blue and hazy on the horizons. Later the thunderclouds would be building up and there would be showers—at least over the mountains. Leaphorn saw the two messenger girls lope away carrying the ritual food baskets tied to their saddles. A moment later to the north he heard a flurry of rifle shots and a swarm of horsemen appeared over the rim of the flat, whooping and trailing plumes of dust. Leaphorn climbed stiffly out of the carryall to watch the Encounter Between the Camps. He glanced at his watch. It was 10:12 A.M.

It was late afternoon before the second serenade had been finished and the gifts exchanged. They had been thrown out to the crowd of visitors—first the sacrificial sack of tobacco thrown through the smoke hole of the hogan and caught by a little girl so skinny that it seemed to Leaphorn that she might blow away if the now-gusty breeze caught in her voluminous skirts. The child had run to her mother and been rewarded with a hug, and then three men of Tsosie's family began tossing out the gifts stacked under the brush shelter. There were much scrambling and laughing and some sort of practical joke played on a tall man with a mustache and two long braids hanging down his back. The joke caused an uproar of laughter and knee slapping and even the victim was grinning.

Leaphorn had been talking to a young woman from over near Toadlena and had missed the point of the fun, but he gathered from the shouted remarks that it was bawdy. He had, by now, been talking for almost six hours and had lost all count of the number of people he had questioned. Most of them, like this young Salt Water woman from Toadlena, seemed to know nothing at all about subjects which interested Leaphorn. But he had been able to confirm again beyond any shade of doubt that Horseman had returned to this country after the affair in Gallup and to learn that Billy Nez was at the Stick Carrier's camp. The plump young man with the horn-rimmed glasses had told him that. And Horn Rims had been out looking for a stray mule and had seen Horseman walking along a sheep trail back toward the Lukachukais. Horseman was his second cousin and he had stopped to talk and had given Horseman some tobacco.