Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 02] (11 page)

"I will," Leaphorn said. "I'm telling you, too. Get away from here."

"I can't," Susanne said. "But he could. There's no reason he can't."

"You can, too," Leaphorn said. "Go. What keeps you here?"

She moved her shoulders, opened her hands, a gesture of helplessness. "I don't have anyplace to go."

"Go back to your family."

"No. There isn't any family."

"Everybody's got a family. You said you had a parent. There must be grandparents, uncles." Leaphorn's Navajo mind struggled with the concept of a child with no family, found it incredible, and rejected it.

"No family," Susanne said. "My dad doesn't want me back." She said it without emotion, a comment on the weather of the human heart. "And the only grandmother I know about lives somewhere back east and doesn't speak to my dad and I've never seen her. And if I've got uncles I don't know about them."

Leaphorn digested this in silence.

"I guess
here's
my family," she said with a shaky laugh. "Halsey, and Grace and Bad Dude Arnett, and Lord Ben, and Pots, and Oats, until Oats left. That and the rest of them, that's my family."

"You sleep with Halsey?"

"Sure," she said, defiant. "You earn your keep. Do some of the washing, and some of the cooking, and sleep with Halsey."

"He has the money, I guess. Made the deal with Frank Bob Madman for the allotment, and started this place, and buys the groceries."

"I think so. I don't know for sure. Anyway, I don't have any. I have these clothes I've got on, and a dress with a stain on the skirt, and another pair of jeans, and some underwear and a ballpoint pen. But I don't have any money."

"No money at all? Not enough for a bus ticket someplace?"

"I don't have a penny."

Leaphorn pushed himself away from the arroyo wall and looked downstream. No one was in sight.

"How about Ted Isaacs?" he said. "You like him. He likes you. You could sort of look after one another until I can find George."

"No."

"Why not?"

"I don't know why I talk to you like this," Susanne said. "I never talk to anyone like this. No, because Ted is going to marry me. Someday."

"Why not now?"

"He can't marry me now," Susanne said. "He's got to finish that project and when he does he'll be just about famous, and he'll get a good faculty appointment, and he'll have everything he's never had before. No more being dirt poor and no more being nobody anybody ever heard of."

"O.K. Then why can't you just go over there and stay at his camper? I bet you don't eat much and you could help him dig."

"Dr. Reynolds wouldn't let him." She paused. "I used to work over there a lot, but Dr. Reynolds talked to Ted about it." Her expression said she hoped Leaphorn would understand this. "I'm not a professional, and I don't know anything about excavation really. It looks simple, but it's actually extremely complicated. And this is going to be a really important dig. It's going to make them rewrite all their books about Stone Age man, and I might mess something up. My just being there, an amateur who doesn't know anything, might make people wonder about how well it was done. And anyway, the establishment will be looking for things to criticize. So really, it's better if I stay away until it's finished." It came out with the sound of something memorized.

"Isaacs told you all that before we had two killings," Leaphorn said. "That sort of changes things. We'll go get your stuff and we don't need to tell Halsey anything except that I'm taking you with me."

"Halsey won't like it," Susanne said. But she followed him down the path.

IN ANOTHER two or three minutes the lower edge of the red sun would sink behind the strata of clouds hanging over western Arizona. Now the oblique angle of its late afternoon rays were almost parallel to the slope of the hillside toward Zuñi Wash. They projected the moving shadow of Ted Isaacs almost a thousand feet down the hillside, and beside it stretched the motionless shadow of Lieutenant Joseph Leaphorn. Every juniper, every bushy yellow chamiso, every outcrop of stone streaked the yellow-gray of the autumn grass with a stripe of dark blue shadow. And beyond the hillside, beyond the gridwork of twine that marked the Isaacs dig, two miles across the valley, the great bulk of Corn Mountain loomed, its broken cliffs sharply outlined in the reds and pinks of reflected sunlight and the blacks of shadows. It was one of those moments of startling beauty which as a matter of habit Joe Leaphorn took time to examine and savor. But he was preoccupied.

"Oh, God damn it," Isaacs said. "God damn it to hell." He threw another shovelful of earth onto the sifter frame, slammed the shovel against the wheelbarrow, and wiped his forehead against the back of his hairy forearm. He began working the dirt furiously through the wire, then threw down the trowel; sat on the edge of the sifter and looked at Leaphorn, his expression belligerent.

"I don't see how she could really be in any danger," he said. "That's just sheer damned guesswork." Isaacs' voice was angry. "Not even hardly guesswork. Just a sort of crazy intuition."

"I guess that's about right. Just a guess," Leaphorn said. He squatted now, sinking to his heels. A pair of golden eagles coasted down the air currents over the Zuñi River, hunting any rodent that moved. Leaphorn noted this without enjoying it. He found Isaacs' reaction interesting. Not what he expected.

Isaacs pinched the skin over the bridge of his nose between a grimy thumb and finger, shook his head. "George's dad got killed the same way Ernesto did, you say? Hit over the head." He shook his head again and then looked up at Leaphorn. "It does sound like somebody's crazy unless you can figure some reason for it." Across the slope toward Zuñi, smoke of supper cooking was beginning to make its evening haze over the hill that was Halona, the Middle Place of the World. "Maybe it's those goddamned Indians," Isaacs said. "Some kind of feud between the Zuñis and the Navajos, maybe. Could it be something like that?" His tone said he knew too much anthropology to believe it.

"No. Not likely," Leaphorn said. But he thought about it, as he had before. Would Ernesto's family strike out in revenge, presuming young Bowlegs had killed their son and nephew? From what Leaphorn knew of the Zuñi Way, such an act would be utterly unlikely. There hadn't been a homicide at Zuñi in modern times and damned few, Leaphorn suspected, in the history of these people. As far as he could remember, everything in their religion and philosophy militated against violence. Even internal, unexpressed anger was a taboo during their ceremonial periods, for it would destroy the effectiveness of rituals and weaken the tribal link with the supernatural. And when there had been some sort of killing, way back somewhere in the dimness of time, the Zuñis had settled the affair by arranging for gifts to be given the family that lost a member and having the guilty party initiated into the proper medicine society to cure him.

"I don't think there's any chance at all there's any revenge mixed up in this," he said. Still, if he didn't find George, if nothing cleared up this affair, then someday in the future he would try to learn if there had been a new initiation into whatever Zuñi cult would be responsible for curing the sickness of homicide. He probably wouldn't learn anything, but he would try.

"You really think maybe there's some danger for Susie?" Isaacs asked. "Look," he said. "I can't keep her here. Can't you put a guard out there, or something? Or put her someplace where she's safe? You're the law. You're supposed to keep people from getting hurt."

"I'm Navajo law and that gal's white, and I don't even know for sure whether those hogans are on Navajo land. And even if I did know for sure, all I've got is an uneasy feeling. The way it works out, Susanne's just not my baby."

Isaacs stared at Leaphorn. "I think she'll be all right," he said. His face said he was trying hard to believe it.

"There's another thing, too. Just between us, it wouldn't surprise me any if there were some arrests out there one of these days soon. If she's out there, she's going to get herself locked up."

"Narcotics?"

"Probably."

"Those damned crazy bastards!"

"I thought maybe you wouldn't want her pulled in on that," Leaphorn said.

"I don't want her out there at all," Isaacs said. "But right now I can't do a goddamn thing…" He stopped.

"Well," Leaphorn said. "I didn't mean to take up so much of your time. I just had the wrong impression." He got up, started to walk away. Isaacs' hand caught his elbow.

"Aren't you going to do anything about her? Look…"

"Yeah," Leaphorn said. "I'm going to go try to find George Bowlegs and try to get these killings cleared up. When that gets done you won't have to worry about her getting hit on the head. There's nothing I can do about getting her clear of a narcotics raid. In fact, I can think of a couple of people who'd be pissed off if they knew I was talking to anybody about it."

"I
wish
I could do something…" Isaacs' voice trailed off. His expression was tortured.

"I sort of got the impression that she'd be willing to marry you," Leaphorn said. "That part of it's no business of mine, but then you could—"

The expression on Isaacs' face stopped him. Leaphorn shrugged. "O.K., forget it. I forget sometimes that white men got a different way of thinking about things than us Induns. One more thing: you're another one who might be in line for a hit on the head. You should—"

"Damn you," Isaacs said. His voice was barely under control. "What do you think? You think I don't care? You think I don't love her?" His voice was rising to a yell. "Let me tell you something, you self-righteous son of a bitch. I never had anything until Susie came by here last summer. I never had a girl, clothes, no money, no car, nor no time for women, and none of them would look at me twice anyway. And then here was Susie, ragged and all, and living at the commune, but you can tell what she is underneath all that. She's quality, that's what she is… quality. And you know what? Right from the first, we liked one another. She was fascinated by what we're doing here, and by God, she was fascinated by me." His tone suggested he couldn't believe this himself. "She couldn't stay away and I couldn't stand it if she did."

"But she did quit coming by here," Leaphorn said. "She hasn't been here in more than a week. You told me that, didn't you?"

Isaacs sat down again on the wheelbarrow, slumped, looking utterly tired and utterly defeated.

"That's something else you don't understand." He indicated the string-gridded dig site with a half-hearted wave. "About what this dig here is. We're proving the Reynolds theory here. I already told you that. But yesterday and today, I've been getting everything we dreamed we'd ever get. Not just the Folsom workshop chips mixed in with the parallel-flaked stuff. That was about as much as we'd ever dared hope for and I've been getting that all day. But we got the hard evidence, too." He pulled a handful of envelopes from his bulging shirt pocket. "I'm finding Folsom artifacts and parallel-flaked stuff coming out of the same blanks. It's more of that petrified marsh bamboo. Miocene stuff. Out of those formations south of Santa Fe." He spilled the contents of one of the envelopes onto his palm and extended it.

Three large pieces of flint and a score of chips and flakes, all pink or salmon-colored. Leaphorn leaned forward to examine it, noticing between the heavily callused ridges on Isaacs' palm an angry red blister, and noticing that the hand was shaking.

"Pick it up and take a close look," Isaacs said. "See that grain? Now look at this piece here. He was making something like what we've been calling a Yuma point out of this one." Isaacs' cracked, dirty fingernail indicated the series of ridges where the flint had been flaked away. "But he pressed too hard, or something, and his blank broke. So…" Isaacs fished another pinkish stone from his palm. "He started making this one. Notice the leaf shape? He had a rough-out Folsom point, but when he punched out the fluting, this one snapped, too."

"Having a bad day," Leaphorn said.

"But look," Isaacs said. "Damn it. Use your eyes. Look at the grain in this petrified wood. It's the same. Notice the discoloration in this piece." He indicated with his fingernail a streak of dark red. "Notice how that same streak picks up in this one where he was trying to make the Folsom point. It's the very same damned piece of flint."

"It sure as hell looks like it. Can you prove it?"

"I'm sure a minerologist with a microscope can prove it."

"You found them right together?"

"Right in the same grid," Isaacs said. He pointed to it. "Seventeen W, right there on the top of the ridge, right where a guy might be sitting watching for game down at the river while he chipped himself out some tools. And there was more of the same stuff in two of the adjoining grids. The guy must have broken one, dropped it right where he was sittin' there, and went to work on the other one."

"And broke it, and dropped it, too," Leaphorn said.

"And because he did, we blow the hell out of a tired old theory of Early Man and make anthropology admit the traditional disappearing man story won't hold water anymore."

"Has Reynolds got the good news yet?"

"Not until he comes back from Tucson this weekend," Isaacs said. "And that's what I was starting to explain to you. Reynolds is probably the one guy in the world who would give a graduate student a break like this. You probably know how it works. The professor who finds the site, and scares up the digging money, and plans the strategy—it's his dig. The graduate students do the shovel work and the sorting, but the professor makes all the decisions and he publishes the report under his name, and if his students are lucky, maybe he puts their names in a footnote, or maybe he doesn't. But with Reynolds, it's the other way around. He tells you how to do it and what to look for and he turns you loose. And then whatever you find you publish yourself. There's a dozen people around the country who have made their reputations that way because of him. He gives away the glory and all he expects in return is that you do him a scientific job." He looked at Leaphorn, his face bleak. "By that I mean a perfect job. Perfect."