Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 02] (19 page)

Leaphorn reached into his pocket and extracted the turquoise bead, the abalone shell, and the broken flint lance tip. All were items to which both Navajo and Zuñi would attach ritual significance. Changing Woman had taught the Navajos the use of the gemstone and the shell in their curing ceremonies. They were appropriate fetish items for George to have offered to the spirit of the deer. And so was the flint tip. Leaphorn wasn't sure how the Zuñis valued such relics from older cultures, but Navajos rated anything used by the Old People as potent medicine. As a boy, he used to hunt for these relics. He'd find them turned up amid the gravel in arroyo bottoms, uncovered on hillsides when the Male Rain pounded away the centuries of dust, and exposed among the clumps of buffalo grass when the Wind People carved potholes in the dry earth. He would give them to his grandfather and his grandfather would teach him another song from the Night Way, or a story of the Holy Ones. Perhaps George had found this lance point in like manner. Or perhaps he and Cata had stolen it from the dig site and it had—despite the certainty of Reynolds and Isaacs—somehow not been missed. That seemed unlikely, however. It was too fine a sample of Stone Age workmanship. Or perhaps…

The fragment of flint in Leaphorn's palm became a sort of keystone. Around it the pieces of the puzzle of why Ernesto Cata had to die fell exactly into place. Suddenly Leaphorn knew why the trap set for George Bowlegs had not been a lethal trap, and what had happened in the hogan of Shorty Bowlegs, and why what George Bowlegs had told his brother about petty theft had been contradicted by Reynolds and Isaacs. He sat stock-still, sorting it very precisely in chronological order, checking for flaws, assigning to each of those deeds which had seemed so irrational a logical cause. He knew now why two murders had been committed. And he knew he couldn't prove it—could probably never prove it.

From below the hill came the noise of drum and rattle and a hooting sound. The Shalako emerged—the couriers of the Zuñi gods. The six huge ceremonial attendants. Leaphorn had forgotten how large they were. Ten feet tall, he guessed, to the ray of eagle feathers cresting their birdlike heads, so tall that the human legs supporting them under the great hooped skirts seemed grotesquely out of proportion. These immense birds would cross Zuñi Wash at sundown and be escorted to the houses that had been prepared for them. The sacred dancing and ceremonial feasting would continue until the following afternoon.

Leaphorn pushed himself to his feet, brushed the sand from his uniform, and began walking down the slope toward Zuñi Village. In that dim margin between day and night, the snow had begun. Heavy, wet, life-giving snow. Once again the Shalako had called the clouds and brought the water blessing to their people. One corner of Leaphorn's mind appreciated the harmony of this. Another urged him to hurry. Yesterday the killer had needed George Bowlegs alive. But if George Bowlegs came to Shalako, George Bowlegs would have to die.

BY 1 A.M., Leaphorn had decided he wasn't likely to find George Bowlegs. He had prowled the village tirelessly, elbowing his way through the crowds jamming each of the ceremonial houses, watching, and studying faces. The very nature of the ritual magnified the difficulty. By tradition, not more than two of the Shalako could be entertained in a single house. Separate houses had to be prepared for Saiyatasha and his Council of the Gods, and for the ten Koyemshi, the sacred clowns. Three of these houses were in the oldest part of the village, on the crowded hill overlooking Zuñi Wash. Two were across the highway, where a newer portion of the village clustered around the Catholic school. Not only was the crowd thus fragmented, but it ebbed and flowed between these houses. Leaphorn had moved with it, watching the dark streets, checking the clusters of people around vehicles, pushing through the jam-packed viewing galleries and through the throngs eating lamb stew, canned peaches, and bakery cookies in the Zuñi kitchens, always looking for the face he had memorized from the Zuñi school yearbook.

Once he had seen Pasquaanti, who seemed to have some ceremonial role at the Shalako house near Saint Anthony's school. Leaphorn had caught the Zuñi's attention, called him out into the darkness, and told him quickly and briefly his conclusions about who had killed Ernesto Cata. Pasquaanti had listened silently, commenting only with a nod. Later Leaphorn had noticed Baker, huddled in a bulky fur-collared coat, leaning against a post on the porch of the house where the Council of the Gods was dancing. Baker glanced at Leaphorn—a glance totally without recognition—and then had looked away. He obviously did not want to be seen talking to a man in the uniform of the Navajo Police. Leaphorn stood for a few moments well down the porch, curious. Beyond the porch, the yard was crowded with an assortment of vehicles. Baker looked either drunk or sleepy, perhaps both. He was watching a young man who stood in the back door of a camper talking to a young woman in a heavy mackinaw. Leaphorn felt a sudden impulse to walk up to Baker, grab him by the lapels, and tell him about Bowlegs, asking him to forget about this manhunt for an hour and help find the Navajo boy. Baker would be good at it, smart, fast, always thinking. But the impulse died aborning. Baker would simply smile that silly smile and refuse to be distracted from whomever he was stalking. Leaphorn thought he would not like to be hunted by Baker.

At 1 A.M., when Leaphorn decided he wouldn't find Bowlegs, he was in the left gallery room of one of the Shalako houses on the hill. The bruise on his stomach ached with a steady throb. His eyes burned with tobacco smoke, incense, and stale air. He had finally worked his way up to the long window that looked down into the spectators jamming the benches and chairs in the dirt-floored room below him. He had scanned carefully every face visible through the opposite gallery. Now he leaned heavily on the sill and let mind and muscles relax. He was very tired. Almost directly below him and to his left, a wooden altar stood, its base bristling with rows of feathered prayer plumes. Next to it the drummers and flutists produced an intricate counterpointed rhythm which never seemed to repeat its complicated pattern. And on the floor, sunken four feet or more below ground level solely to permit this, the giant Shalako danced.

From where Leaphorn stood by the gallery window on the floor above, he was almost at eye level with the great bird. Its beak snapped suddenly—a half-dozen sharp clacking sounds in perfect time with the drum. It hooted and its strange white-rimmed eyes stared for a moment directly into Leaphorn's. The policeman saw it with double vision. He saw it as a mask of tremendous technical ingenuity, a device of leather, embroidered cotton, carved wood, feathers, and paint held aloft on a pole, its beak and its movements manipulated by the dancer within it. But he also saw Shalako, the courier between the gods and men, who brought fertility to the seeds and rain to the desert when the people of Zuñi called, and who came on this great day to be fed and blessed by his people. Now it danced, swooping down the earthen floor, its great horns glittering with reflected light, its fan of topknot feathers bristling, its voice the hooting call of the night birds.

There was a sudden shift in the cadence of the music. The voices of the chanters rose in pitch. The Koyemshi had joined the Shalako on the floor. Mudheads, they were called. Their bodies were coated with a pinkish clay and their masks gave them heads distorted in shape, hairless, knobbed, with tiny rimmed eyes and puckered mouths. They represented the idiotic and deformed fruits of incest—that ultimate tribal taboo. The first Koyemshi, as Leaphorn remembered the mythology, were the offspring of a son and daughter of Shiwanni, the Sun Father. He had sent his children to help the Zuñi in their search for the Middle Place, but the boy had had intercourse with his sister. And the same night ten children were born. The first was normal and was to be the ancestor of the makers of rain. But the next nine were deformed and insane. Leaphorn considered this, his head buzzing with fatigue. The Mudheads represented evil and yet they were perhaps the most prestigious fraternity of this people. The men who represented the ten offspring were chosen to play this role for a year. They helped build the ceremonial houses and were involved in a year-long series of retreats, fastings, and ritual dancing. The assignment was so demanding of time that it wasn't unusual for a Mudhead to have to quit his job for a year and depend on the support of the villagers.

Leaphorn watched them dance. Despite the snow falling outside, they were nude except for black breechcloth and neck scarf, moccasins and mask. Their dance was intricate, a fast and exact placement of foot, their deerskin seed pouches slapping against sweat-damp ribs, their hands shaking feathered wands, their voices rising now in yells of triumph, and falling into the rhythmic recitation of the saga of their people.

Leaphorn scanned the crowd again. Below him there were mostly women—Zuñis in their ceremonial best, a scattering of Navajos, a blond girl, her face ashen with fatigue but her eyes bright with interest. To his right, two young Navajo men had edged their way near the window. They were discussing a young white man, who wore his hair in braids, had a red headband around his forehead and a heavy silver concho belt.

"I think he's an albino Indian," one said. "Ask him if he can say something in Navajo." The voice was loud enough for the white man to hear. "I think he's an Apache," the other Navajo said. "He looks too much like an Indian to be a Navajo."

They were drinking, Leaphorn saw. Not quite drunk, but drunk enough to slip over the boundary between humor and rudeness. If he weren't so tired, and otherwise occupied, he would move them out into the cold sobering air. Instead he would himself move from here, where George Bowlegs obviously wasn't, back to the Longhorn House for another check there. As he decided this, he saw George Bowlegs.

The boy was across the dance room, in the opposite gallery. He seemed to be standing on something, perhaps a chair, looking over the heads of those pressed against the windowsill—staring almost directly toward Leaphorn at the Shalako swooping down the dance floor. Leaphorn recognized him instantly. The generous mouth, the large expressive eyes, and the short-cropped hair. More than that. Even in that crowded gallery there was something about the boy that suggested the strange and the lonely. George stared at the dancing gods with eyes that were fixed and fascinated and a little crazy. He was no farther away than the width of the dance room. Perhaps a dozen yards.

Leaphorn began pushing his way back from the window, struggling through the packed humanity toward the passageway that ran behind the dance room to connect the two galleries. He moved as fast as he could, leaving a wake of jostled spectators, bruised feet, and curses. The passageway, too, was blocked with watchers. It took him two full minutes to fight his way through to the doorway. It was blocked as well. Finally he was in the right gallery. A Navajo woman was standing on the chair Bowlegs had used. He pushed his way through the crowd, looking frantically. The boy was nowhere.

Outside, Leaphorn thought. He must have gone out.

Outside the snow was falling heavily. Leaphorn pulled up his collar, gave his eyes a second to adjust, and peered into the darkness. A party of Anglos, loud and drunk, came around the corner toward the door where Leaphorn stood. And something—no more than a glimpse of movement—disappeared in the alleyway between the Shalako house and another of the cut stone houses of old Zuñi. Leaphorn followed at a trot. The alley was cut off from all light—utterly dark. Leaphorn ran down it and stopped at its mouth.

The alley opened into the unlit plaza just above the mission church. A small figure was now moving across it at a slow walk. Leaphorn stopped, peered through the sifting snow. Was it George? At that moment began a series of events which Leaphorn never quite straightened out in his memory. First, from the blackness of another alleyway, there came a wavering, hooting call. The walking figure stopped, turned, shouted something joyful which might have been the Navajo word for "yes!" And Leaphorn stood for some small measure of time, undecided. Whatever time he wasted—two ticks of his watch, or five—became time enough for George Bowlegs to die.

Leaphorn moved just as the boy's figure disappeared into the mouth of darkness. He moved frantically. His boots skidded on the wet snow and he fell heavily on his hands. And when he had scrambled again to his feet, he had lost another two or three seconds. It was then that he heard the sound. Actually, a double sound. Thump-crack. Loud but muffled. He pulled his pistol from his holster as he ran. At the alley opening he stopped, knowing he was too late. He was. George Bowlegs lay on his side just inside the alley. Leaphorn crouched beside him. And then there was another sound. This one a thump, followed by a muffled yell, followed by a scuffling, followed by silence. Leaphorn moved cautiously down the alley, hearing nothing now, seeing nothing. He pulled his flashlight from his coat pocket. The heavy snow ahead of him bore a single set of boot prints and then, at the empty doorway of an abandoned home, a jumble of footprints, and on the snow a plume of feathers. Leaphorn thought he recognized the plume. It was the decoration that had topped the fierce mask of the Salamobia.

Leaphorn flashed his light down the alley. The boot prints stopped here. Whoever had made them must have gone, or been taken, into the empty building. Leaphorn flashed his light through the doorway. There was fresh snow on the earthen floor. Part of it had sifted in through the broken roof and part had come from the feet of men. He flashed the light around, saw nothing, and ran back up the alley to where George Bowlegs lay. He knelt in the snow, his face against the boy's, hoping to feel a breath. The sacred wind of your life I breathe, Leaphorn thought. But the sacred wind was gone.

Snowflakes sifted through the beam of the flashlight, dusting the boy's tangled hair with white, clinging to an eyelash, melting on the still-warm face. Leaphorn gently turned the body and felt through the pockets of the ragged jacket. In the side pocket he found a case knife, a dime, some piñon nuts, a stub of pencil, a folding magnifying glass, the tiny figure of a bear carved from turquoise. He had seen the magnifying glass before, among the odds and ends in the ransacked hogan of Shorty Bowlegs. George must have stopped at the hogan on his way here from the mesa and found it abandoned. He would have seen the hole knocked in its wall, recognized the mark of the death hogan, and known that now he was even more alone than he had been.