Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 07 - Skinwalkers

by Skinwalkers(lit)

  Chapter 6

  the wind blew out of the southwest, hot and dry, whipping sand across the rutted track in front of Jim Chee's patrol car. Chee had backed the car a hundred yards up the gravel road that led to Badwater Wash Trading Post. He'd parked it under the gnarled limbs of a one-seed juniper-a place that gave him a little shade and a long view back down the road he had traveled. Now he simply sat, waiting and watching. If anyone was following, Chee intended to know it.

  "I'm going to go along with the lieutenant," Captain Largo had told him. "Leaphorn wants me to rearrange things and let you work on our killings." As usual when he talked, Captain Largo's hands were living their separate life, sorting through papers on the captain's desk, rearranging whatever the captain kept in the top drawer, trying to reshape a crease in the captain's hat. "I think he's wrong," Largo said. "I think we ought to leave those cases to the FBI. The FBI's not going to break them, and neither are we, but the FBI's getting paid for it, and nobody's going to do any good on them until we have some luck-and taking you off your regular work isn't going to make us lucky. Is it?"

  "No, sir," Chee had said. He wasn't sure Largo expected an answer, or wanted one, but being agreeable seemed a good policy. He didn't want the captain to change his mind.

  "I think that Leaphorn thinks you getting shot is connected with one or the other of those killings, or maybe both of them. He didn't say so, but that's what I think he thinks. I can't see any connection. How about it?"

  Chee shrugged. "I don't see how there could be."

  "No," Largo agreed. His expression, as he looked at Chee, was skeptical. "Unless you're not telling me something." The tone of the statement included a question mark.

  "I'm not not telling you anything," Chee said.

  "Sometimes you haven't," Largo said. But he didn't pursue it. "Real reason I'm going along with this is I want you to stay alive. Just getting shot at is bad enough." Largo pointed to the folder on his desk. "Look at that, and it's not finished yet. If somebody kills you, think how it would be." Largo threw out his arms in a gesture encompassing mountains of forms. "When we had that man killed over in the Crownpoint sub-agency back in the sixties, they were doing reports on that for two years."

  "Okay," Chee said. "That's okay with me."

  "What I mean is, poke around on Endocheeney and Wilson Sam and see what you can hear, but mostly I want you out where it would be hard for anybody to get a shot at you. In case they're still trying. Let 'em cool off. Be careful."

  "Good," Chee had said, meaning it.

  And while he was out there, Largo had added, he might as well get some useful work done. For instance, the people at the refinery over at Montezuma Creek were sore because somebody was stealing drip gasoline out of the collector pipeline. And somebody seemed to be hanging out around the tourist parking places at the Goosenecks, and other such places, and stealing stuff out of the cars. And so forth. The litany had been fairly long, indicating that the decline of human nature on the Utah part of the reservation was about the same as it was in Chee's usual New Mexico jurisdiction. "I'll get you the paperwork," Largo said, shuffling papers out of various files into a single folder. "Xerox copies. I wish we could put a stop to this getting into people's cars," he added. "People raise hell about it, and it gets to the chairman's office and then he raises hell. Be careful. And get some work done."

  And now, parked here out of sight watching his back trail, Chee was being careful, exactly as instructed. If the man (or the woman) with the shotgun was following, it would have to be down this road. The only other way to get to the trading post at Badwater Wash was to float down the San Juan River, and then take one of the tracks that connected it to the hogans scattered where terrain allowed along the river. Badwater wasn't a place one passed through by accident en route to anywhere else.

  And now the only dust on the Badwater road was wind dust. The afternoon clouds had formed over Black Mesa, far to the south, producing lightning and air turbulence. As far as Chee could estimate from thirty miles away, no rain was falling. He studied the cloud, enjoying the range of blues and grays, its shapes and its movement. But he was thinking of more somber things. The hours of thinking he had done about who would want to kill him had depressing effects. His imagination had produced an image in his mind-himself standing at the face of a great cliff of smooth stone, as blank as a mirror, feeling hopelessly for fingerholds that didn't exist. There was a second unpleasant effect. This persistent hunt for malice, for ill will, for hatred-examining relationships with friends and associates with cynical skepticism-had left him gloomy. And then there was Lieutenant Leaphorn. He'd gotten what he wanted from the man-more than he'd expected. But the lieutenant hadn't trusted him when they'd met, and he hadn't trusted him when they'd parted. Leaphorn hadn't liked the bone bead. When Chee had handed it to him, the lieutenant's face had changed, expressing distaste and what might have been contempt. In the small universe of the Navajo Police, total membership perhaps less than 120 sworn officers, Lieutenant Leaphorn was a Fairly Important Person, and somewhat of a legend. Everybody knew he hated bootleggers. Chee shared that sentiment. Everybody also knew Leaphorn had no tolerance for witchcraft or anything about it-for those who believed in witches, or for stories about skinwalkers, corpse sickness, the cures for same, and everything connected with the Navajo Wolves. There were two stories about how Leaphorn had acquired this obsession. It was said that when he was new on the force in the older days he had guessed wrong about some skinwalker rumors on the Checkerboard. He hadn't acted on what he'd heard, and a fellow had killed three witches and got a life term for murder and then committed suicide. That was supposed to be why the lieutenant didn't like witchcraft, which was a good enough reason. The other story was that he was a descendant of the great Chee Dodge and had inherited Dodge's determination that belief in skinwalkers had no part in the Navajo culture, that the tribe had been infected with the notion while it was held captive down at Fort Sumner. Chee suspected both stories were true.

  Still, Leaphorn had kept the bone bead.

  "I'll see about it," he'd said. "Send it to the lab. Find out if it is bone, and what kind of bone." He'd torn a page from his notebook, wrapped the bead in it, and placed it in the coin compartment of his billfold. Then he'd looked at Chee for a moment in silence. "Any idea how it got in here?"

  "Sounds strange," Chee had said. "But you know you could pry out the end of a shotgun shell and pull out the wadding and stick a bead like this in with the pellets."

  Leaphorn's expression became almost a smile. Was it contempt? "Like a witch shooting in the bone?" he asked. "They're supposed to do that through a little tube." He made a puffing shape with his lips.

  Chee had nodded, flushing just a little.

  Now, remembering it, he was angry again. Well, to hell with Leaphorn. Let him believe whatever he wanted to believe. The origin story of the Navajos explained witchcraft clearly enough, and it was a logical part of the philosophy on which the Dinee had founded their culture. If there was good, and harmony, and beauty on the east side of reality, then there must be evil, chaos, and ugliness to the west. Like a nonfundamentalist Christian, Chee believed in the poetic metaphor of the Navajo story of human genesis. Without believing in the specific Adam's rib, or the size of the reed through which the Holy People emerged to the Earth Surface World, he believed in the lessons such imagery was intended to teach. To hell with Leaphorn and what he didn't believe. Chee started the engine and jolted back down the slope to the road. He wanted to get to Badwater Wash before noon.

  But he couldn't quite get Leaphorn out of his mind. Leaphorn posed a problem. "One more thing," the lieutenant had said. "We've got a complaint about you." And he'd told Chee what the doctor at the Badwater Clinic had said about him. "Yellowhorse claims you've been interfering with his practice of his religion," Leaphorn said. And while the lieutenant's expression said he didn't take the complaint as anything critically important, the very fact that he'd mentioned it implied that Chee sh
ould desist.

  "I have been telling people that Yellowhorse is a fake," Chee said stiffly. "I have told people every chance I get that the doctor pretends to be a crystal gazer just to get them into his clinic."

  "I hope you're not doing that on company time," Leaphorn said. "Not while you're on duty."

  "I probably have," Chee said. "Why not?"

  "Because it violates regulations," Leaphorn said, his expression no longer even mildly amused.

  "How?"

  "I think you can see how," Leaphorn had said. "We don't have any way to license our shamans, no more than the federal government can license preachers. If Yellowhorse says he's a medicine man, or a hand trembler, or a road chief of the Native American Church, or the Pope, it is no business of the Navajo Tribal Police. No rule against it. No law."

  "I'm a Navajo," Chee said. "I see somebody cynically using our religion. somebody who doesn't believe in our religion using it in that cynical way."

  "What harm is he doing?" Leaphorn asked. "The way I understand it, he recommends they go to a yataalii if they need a ceremonial sing. And he points them at the white man's hospital only if they have a white man's problem. Diabetes, for example."

  Chee had made no response to that. If Leaphorn couldn't see the problem, the sacrilege involved, then Leaphorn was blind. But that wasn't the trouble. Leaphorn was as cynical as Yellowhorse.

  "You, yourself, have declared yourself to be a yataalii, I hear," Leaphorn said. "I heard you performed a Blessing Way."

  Chee had nodded. He said nothing.

  Leaphorn had looked at him a moment, and sighed. "I'll talk to Largo about it," he said.

  And that meant that one of these days Chee would have an argument with the captain about it and if he wasn't lucky, Largo would give him a flat, unequivocal order to say nothing more about Yellowhorse as shaman. When that happened, he would cope as best he could. Now the road to Badwater had changed from bad to worse. Chee concentrated on driving.

  It was the policy of the Navajo Tribal Police, as a matter of convenience, to consider Badwater to be in the Arizona portion of the Big Reservation. Local wisdom held that the store itself was actually in Utah, about thirty feet north of the imaginary line that marked the boundary. One of the local jokes was that Old Man Isaac Ginsberg, who built the place, used to move out of his room behind the trading post and into a stone hogan across the road one hundred yards to the south because he couldn't stand the cold Utah winters. Nobody seemed to know exactly where the place was, mapwise. Its location, in a narrow slot surrounded by the fantastic, thousand-foot, red-black-blue-tan cliffs, made pinpointing it on surveys mostly guesswork. And nobody cared enough to do more than guess.

  Historically, it had been a watering place for herdsmen. In the immense dry badlands of Casa del Eco Mesa, it was a rare place where a reliable spring produced pools of drinkable water. Good water is a magnet anywhere in desert country. In a landscape like Caso del Eco, where gypsum and an arsenal of other soluble minerals tainted rainwater almost as fast as it fell, the stuff that seeped under the sandy arroyo bottoms was such a compound of chemicals that it would kill even tumbleweeds and salt cedar. Thus, the springs in Badwater Wash were a magnet for all living things. They attracted those tough little mammals and reptiles which endure in such hostile places. Eventually it attracted goats that strayed from the herds the Navajos had stolen from the Pueblo Indians. Then came the goatherders. Next came sheepherders. Finally, geologists discovered the shallow but persistent Aneth oil deposit, which brought a brief, dusty boom to the plateau. The drilling boom left behind a little refinery at Montezuma Creek, a scattering of robot pumps, and a worn-out spiderweb of truck trails connecting them with the world. Sometime in this period between boom and dust, it had attracted Isaac Ginsberg, who built the trading post of slabs of red sandstone, earned the Navajo name Afraid of His Wife, and died. The wife to whom Ginsberg owed his title was a Mud Clan Navajo called Lizzie Tonale, who had married Ginsberg in Flagstaff, had converted to Judaism, and, it was locally believed, had persuaded Ginsberg to establish his business in such an incredibly isolated locale because it was the hardest possible place for her relatives to reach. It would have been a sensible motive. Otherwise, the trading post would have been bankrupt in a month, since Lizzie Tonale could refuse no kin who needed canned goods, gasoline, or a loan, and maintain her status as a respectable woman. Whatever her motives, the widow Tonale-Ginsberg had run the post for twenty years before her own death, steadfastly closing on the Sabbath. She had left it to their daughter, the only product of their union. Chee had met this daughter only twice. That was enough to understand how she had earned her local name, which was Iron Woman.

  Now, as he rolled his patrol car down the final slope and into the rutted yard of Badwater Wash Trading Post, he saw the bulky form of Iron Woman standing on the porch. Chee parked as much of the car as he could in the scanty shade of a tamarisk and waited. It was a courtesy learned from boyhood in a society where modesty is prized, privacy is treasured, and visitors, even at a trading post, are all too rare. "You don't just go run up to somebody's hogan," his mother had taught him. "You might see something you don't want to see."

  So Chee sat, without giving it a thought, to allow the residents of Badwater Wash to get in harmony with the idea of a visit from a tribal policeman, to button up and tidy up, or to do whatever was required by Navajo good manners. While he sat, perspiring freely, he looked in his rearview mirror at the people on the porch. Iron Woman had been joined by another woman, as thin and bent as Iron Woman was stout and ramrod rigid. Then two young men appeared in the front door, seeming, in the dusty rearview glass, to be dressed exactly alike. Each wore a red sweatband around the forehead, a faded red plaid shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots. Iron Woman was saying something to the bent woman, who nodded and looked amused. The two young men, standing side by side, stared with implacable rudeness at Chee's car. An old Ford sedan was parked at the corner of the building, a cinder block supporting the right rear axle. Beside it, perched high on its backcountry suspension, was a new GMC four-by-four. It was black with yellow pinstripes. Chee had priced a similar model in Farmington and couldn't come close to affording it. He admired it now. A vehicle that would go anywhere. But richer than anything you expected to see parked at Badwater Wash.

  Through his windshield, beyond the thin screen of Russian olive leaves, the red mass of the cliff rose to the sky, reflecting the sun. The patrol car was filled with dry heat. Chee felt uneasiness stirring. He was getting used to it, finding the anxiety familiar but not learning to like it. He got out of the car and walked toward the porch, keeping his eyes on the men, who kept their eyes on him.

  "Ya-tah-hey," he said to Iron Woman.

  "Ya-tah," she said. "I remember you. You're the new policeman from Shiprock."

  Chee nodded.

  "Out here the other day with the government officer seeing about the Endocheeney business."

  "Right," Chee said.

  "This man is born to the Slow Talking People and born for the Salts," Iron Woman told the bent woman. She named Chee's mother, and his maternal aunt, and his maternal grandmother, and then recited his father's side of the family.

  Bent Woman looked pleased. She faced Chee with her head back and her eyes almost closed, looking at him under her lids, a technique the descending blindness of glaucoma and cataracts taught its victims. "He is my nephew," Bent Woman said. "I am born to the Bitter Water People, born for the Deer Spring Clan. My mother was Gray Woman Nez."

  Chee smiled, acknowledging the relationship. It was vague-the Bitter Waters being linked to the Salt Clan and thereby to his father's family. The system meant that Chee, and all other Navajos, had wholesale numbers of relatives.

  "On business?" Iron Woman asked.

  "Just out poking around," Chee said. "Seeing what I can see."

  Iron Woman looked skeptical. "You don't get out here much," she said. "Nobody gets out here except on purpose."

  Chee was aware
of the two men watching him. Barely men. Late teens, he guessed. Obviously brothers, but not twins. The one nearest him had a thinner face, and a half-moon of white scar tissue beside his left eye socket. Under the old rules of Navajo courtesy, they would have identified themselves first, since he was the stranger in their territory. They didn't seem to care about the old rules.

  "My clan is Slow Talking People," Chee said to them. "Born for the Salt Dinee."

  "Leaf People," the thinner one said. "Born for Mud." His face was sullen.

  Chee's efficient nose picked up a whiff of alcohol. Beer. The Leaf Clan man let his eyes drift from Chee to study the police car. He gestured vaguely toward the other man. "My brother," he said.

  "What's happening over your way?" Iron Woman asked. "I heard on the radio they had a knifing at a wedding over at Teec Nos Pos. One of the Gorman outfit got cut. Anything to that?"

  Chee knew very little about that one-just what he'd overheard before the morning patrol meeting. Normally he worked east and south out of Shiprock-not this mostly empty northwestern area. He put the beer (possession illegal on the reservation) out of his mind and tried to remember what he had heard.