Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 14] (13 page)

“She said the Navajos thought he got away like a bird, but he got
away like a badger.”

About then Granddaughter said something in rapid Ute to Bashe Lady,
and Bashe Lady looked angry, and then abashed, and decided she knew
absolutely nothing more about Ironhand.

When the interview was over and they were heading back toward
Shiprock, Louisa wanted to talk about Ironhand Junior, as she had begun
calling him. The session had gone well, she said. A lot of it was what
had already been collected about Ute mythology, religion and customs.
But some of it, as she put it, “cast some light on how the myths of
preliterate cultures evolve with generational changes.” And the
information about Ironhand was interesting.

Having said that, she glanced at Leaphorn and caught him grinning.

“What?” she said, sounding suspicious.

The grin evolved into a chuckle. “No offense, but when you talk like
that it takes me right back to Tempe, Arizona, and sleepy afternoons in
the poorly air-conditioned classrooms of Arizona State, and the voices
of my professors of anthropology.”

“Well,” she said, ”that’s what I am." But she laughed, too. “I guess
it gets to be a habit. And it’s getting even worse. Postmodernism is in
the saddle now, with its own jargon. Anyway, Bashe Lady was a good
source. If nothing else, it shows that hostility toward you Bloody
Knives still lingers on like Serb versus Croat.”

“Except these days we’re far too civilized to be killing one
another. We marry back and forth, buy each other’s used cars, and the
only time we invade them it’s to try to beat their slot machines.”

“OK, I surrender.”

But Leaphorn was still a bit chafed from a long day listening to his
people described as brutal invaders. “And as you know very well,
Professor, the Utes were the aggressors. They’re Shoshoneans. Warriors
off the Great Plains moving in on us peaceful Athabascan farmers and
shepherds.”

“Peaceful shepherds who stole their sheep from who?” Louisa said.
“Or is it whom? Anyway, I’m trying to calculate the chronology of this
second Ironhand. Wouldn’t he be too old now to be the bandit everyone
is looking for?”

“Maybe not,” Leaphorn said. “The first one would have been operating
as late as 1910, which is when we started getting some fairly serious
law and order out here. She said the current Ironhand was a child of
his old age. Let’s say Junior was born in the early forties. That’s
biologically possible, and that would have him the right age to be in
the Vietnam War.”

“I guess so. From what she said about him, if I was one of those
guys out there trying to find him, I’d be hoping that I wouldn’t.”

Leaphorn nodded. He wondered how much the FBI knew about Ironhand.
And if they did know, how much they had passed along to the locals. He
thought about what Bashe Lady had said about how the original Ironhand
had eluded the Navajos hunting him. Not like a bird, but like a badger.
Badgers escaped when they didn’t just stand and fight by diving into
their tunnel. Badger tunnels had an exit as well as an entrance. When
the hunting ground was canyon country and coal-mining country, that was
an interesting thought.

On the maps drawn by geographers it’s labeled the Colorado Plateau,
with its eighty-five million acres sprawling across Arizona, Colorado,
New Mexico and Utah. It is larger than any of those states; mostly high
and dry and cut by countless canyons eroded eons ago when the glaciers
were melting and the rain didn’t stop for many thousand years. The few
people who live on it call it the Four Corners, the High Dry, Canyon
Land, Slick Rock Country, the Big Empty. Once a writer in more poetic
times called it the Land of Room Enough and Time.

This hot afternoon, Sergeant Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police
had other names for it, all uncomplimentary and some, after he’d slid
into a growth of thistles, downright obscene. He’d spent the day with
Officer Jackson Nez, prowling cautiously along the bottom of one of
those canyons, perspiring profusely under FBI-issued body armor,
carrying an electronic satellite location finder and an infrared
body-heat-detecting device and a scoped rifle. What weighed Chee down
even more than all that was the confident knowledge that he and Officer
Nez were wasting their time.

“It’s not a total waste of time,” Officer Nez said, ”because when
the federals can mark off enough of these canyons as searched, they can
declare those guys dead and call this off.”

“Don’t count on it,” Chee said.

“Or the perps see us coming and shoot us, and the feds watch for the
buzzards, and when they find our bodies, they get their forensic teams
in here, and do the match to decide where the shots came from, and then
they find the bad guys.”

“That makes me feel a little better,” Chee said. “Nice to be working
with an optimist.”

Nez was sitting on a shaded sandstone slab with his body armor
serving as a seat cushion while he was saying this. He was grinning,
enjoying his own humor. Chee was standing on the sandy bottom of Gothic
Creek, body armor on, tinkering with the location finder. Here, away
from the cliffs, it was supposed to be in direct contact with the
satellite and its exact longitude/latitude numbers would appear on its
tiny screen.

Sometimes, including now, they did. Chee pushed the send switch,
read the numbers into the built-in mike, shut the gadget off and looked
at his watch.

“Let’s go home,” he said. “Unless you enjoy piling on a lot more
overtime.”

“I could use the money,” Nez said.

Chee laughed. “Maybe they’ll add it to your retirement check. We’re
still trying to collect our overtime for the Great Canyon Climbing
Marathon of ‘98. Let’s get out of here before it gets dark.”

They managed that, but by the time Chee reached Bluff and his room
at the Recapture Lodge, the stars were out. He was tired and dirty. He
took off his boots, socks, shirt and trousers, flopped onto the bed,
and unwrapped the ham-and-cheese sandwich he’d bought at the filling
station across the highway. He’d rest a little, he’d take a shower,
he’d hit the sack and sleep, sleep, sleep. He would not think about
this manhunt, nor about Janet Pete, nor about anything else. He
wouldn’t think about Bernie Manuelito, either. He would set the alarm
clock for 6 A.M. and sleep. He took a bite of the sandwich. Delicious.
He had another sandwich in the sack. Should have bought a couple more
for breakfast. He finished chewing, swallowed, yawned hugely, prepared
for a second bite.

From the door the sound:
tap,
tap, tap, tap.

Chee lay still, sandwich raised, staring at the door.
Maybe a
mistake
, he thought.
Maybe
they will go away.

Tap, tap, tap
, followed by:
"Jim. You home?”

The voice of the Legendary Lieutenant.

Chee rewrapped the sandwich, put it on the bedside table, sighed,
limped over and opened the door.

Leaphorn stood there, looking apologetic, and beside him was the
Woman Professor. She was smiling at him.

“Oops,” Chee said, stepping out of her line of vision and reaching
for his pants. “Sorry. Let me get some clothes on.”

While he was doing that, Leaphorn was apologizing, saying they’d
only be a minute. Chee waved them toward the room’s two chairs, and sat
on the bed.

“You look exhausted,” the professor said. “The policewoman at your
roadblock said you’d probably been searching in one of the canyons all
day. But Joe learned something he felt you needed to know." She gave
Chee a wry smile. “I told him you probably already knew it.”

“Better safe than sorry,” Chee said, and looked at Leaphorn, who was
sitting uneasily on the edge of his chair.

“Just a couple of things about this George Ironhand,” Leaphorn said.
“I guess you knew he was a Vietnam veteran, but we heard today he was a
Green Beret. Heard he was a sniper, won a Silver Star. Supposed to have
shot fifty-three North Viet soldiers over in Cambodia.”

Leaphorn stopped.

Chee thought about that for a moment.

“Fifty-three,” he said finally. “I appreciate your telling me. I
think if the FBI had let us in on that little secret, Officer Nez would
have kept his body armor on in the canyon.”

“I imagine the FBI would know this man was a veteran,” Leaphorn
said. “They’re pretty thorough in checking records. But they might not
know about the rest of it. To know that, they’d have to turn up the
business about him getting decorated.”

“Or pass it along if they did,” Chee said, his voice now sounding
more angry than tired. “We might leak it to the press; the feds
wouldn’t want the public to know we’re chasing a certified official war
hero.”

“Well,” Leaphorn said, "they probably didn’t pick up the sniper bit.
Army records would just show he received the decoration for something
general. Risking his life beyond the call of duty. Something like that.”

“OK,” Chee said. “I guess I wasn’t being fair.”

“At least, though,” said the professor, "I’d think they should have
told you he was a combat veteran.”

“Me, too,” Chee said. “But I guess nobody’s perfect. I know we
weren’t today. All we got was a lot of exercise.”

“No tracks?”

Chee waved his hands.

“Lots of tracks. Coyotes, goats, rabbits, lizards, snakes, variety
of birds every place there was a seep,” Chee said. “But no sign of
humans. We even picked up what might have been puma tracks. Either that
or an oversize big-footed bobcat. One sign of porcupine, rodents
galore, from kangaroo rats, to deer mice, to prairie dogs.”

“Could you rule out humans?”

“Not really,” Chee said. “Too much slick rock. We didn’t find a
single place in maybe five miles we covered where anybody careful
couldn’t find rocks to walk on.”

“So the hunt goes nowhere,” Leaphorn said. “I guess until someone
comes up with a better reason for leaving that escape vehicle where it
was left.”

“You mean better than running down into Gothic Creek to hide?” Chee
laughed. “Well, I guess that was better than the first idea. Thinking
they trotted over to the Timms place to fly away in that old airplane
of his." Chee paused. “Wait a minute. You said you had two things to
tell me, Lieutenant. What’s the second one. Do you have a better idea?”

Leaphorn looked a bit embarrassed, shook his head.

“Not really,” he said. “Just more stuff about George Ironhand. Maybe
it might mean something." He glanced at Louisa. “Where do I start?”

“At the beginning,” Louisa said. “First tell him about the original
Ironhand.”

So he recounted the deeds of the legendary Ute hero/bandit, the
futile efforts of the Navajos to hunt him down, describing Bashe Lady’s
account of how those hunting him thought he might be a witch because he
seemed able to disappear from a canyon bottom and reappear magically on
its rim.

“She said the Navajos thought he escaped like a bird, but actually
he escaped like a badger." Leaphorn paused with that, watching for
Chee’s reaction.

Chee was rubbing his chin, thinking.

“Like a badger,” Chee said. “Or a prairie dog. In one hole and out
another. Did she give you any hint of where this was happening? Name a
canyon, anything like that?”

“None,” Leaphorn said.

“Do you think she knows?”

“Probably. At very least, I think she has a pretty good general
idea. She knew a lot more than she was willing to tell us about that.”

Professor Bourebonette was smiling. “She didn’t show any signs of
affection for you Navajos. You 'Bloody Knives.' I think that after
about four hours of that, she was getting under Joe’s skin a little.
Right, Joe? Arousing your competitive, nationalistic macho instincts,
maybe?”

Leaphorn produced a reluctant chuckle. “OK,” he said. “I plead
guilty. I was imagining Bashe Lady in one of those John-Wayne-type
movies. Tepees everywhere, paint ponies standing around, dogs, cooking
fires, young guys with Italian faces and Cheyenne war paint running
around yipping and thumping drums, and there’s Bashe Lady with a bloody
knife in her hand torturing some tied-up prisoners. And I’m thinking of
how it actually was in 1863, when these Utes teamed up with the U.S.
Army, and the Hispanos and the Pueblo tribes and came howling down on
us and -"

Professor Bourebonette held up her hand.

Leaphorn cut that off, made a wry face and a dismissing gesture.
“Sorry,” he said. “The old lady got on my nerves. And I’ll have to
admit I’d love to see the Navajo Tribal Police catch this new version
of Ironhand and lock him up.”

“The point of all this is that the George Ironhand you’re looking
for is probably the son of the original version,” Professor
Bourebonette said. “The first one took a new wife when he was old. The
right time span for this guy. Right age to be in the Vietnam War.”

Chee nodded. “So the man we’re looking for would likely know how his
daddy did the badger escape trick. And where he did it.” He looked at
Leaphorn. “Do you have any ideas about that?”

“Well, I was going to ask you if you had found any mine shafts down
in Gothic Creek Canyon.”

“We saw several little coal digs. What they call dog holes. None of
them went in more than a few yards. Just people digging out a few sacks
to get them through the winter. That creek cuts through coal seams in a
lot of places, some of them pretty thick. But we didn’t see anything
that looked like commercial mining.”

“Maybe Ironhand has himself a hidden route up some narrow side
gulch,” Leaphorn said. “From the way the old woman told the story there
just had to be a quick way to get up and down the canyon wall. Did you
see any little narrow cuts like that? Maybe even a crack a man could
climb?”

“Not in the section we covered,” Chee said. “Maybe we’ll find one
farther down toward the San Juan Canyon.”