Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 07 - Skinwalkers

by Skinwalkers(lit)

  Leaphorn shook his head. Now he would think of something else. Of business. Of whatever it was that was killing the people he was paid to protect.

  He had the cast propped against the steering wheel, letting the pain drain away, sorting what he hoped to learn from this visit to Old Man McGinnis. Witchcraft, he guessed. Much as he hated to admit it, he was probably involved again in the sick and unreal business of the skinwalker superstition. The bits of bone seemed to link Jim Chee, and Roosevelt Bistie, and Dugai Endocheeney. Dilly Streib's call had confirmed that.

  "Jim Chee's gossip had it right," Streib had said. "They found a little bead down in one of the knife wounds. Thread, little dirt, and a bead. I've got it. I'll have it checked to see if it matches the first one." And then Streib had asked Leaphorn what it meant, beyond the obvious connection it made between the Endocheeney and Bistie killings and the attempt on Chee. Leaphorn had said he really didn't know.

  And he didn't. He knew what it might mean. It might mean that the killer thought Endocheeney was a witch. He might have thought that Endocheeney, the skinwalker, had given him corpse sickness by shooting the prescribed bit of bone into him. Then, instead of relying on an Enemy Way ritual to reverse the witchcraft, he had reversed it himself by putting the lethal bone back into the witch. Or it might mean that the killer in some crazy way thought himself to be a witch and was witching Endocheeney, putting the bone into him at the very moment he killed him with the knife. That seemed farfetched, but then everything about Navajo witchcraft seemed farfetched to Leaphorn. Or it might mean that the killer inserted the notion of witchcraft into this peculiar crime simply to cause confusion. If that had been the goal, the project had succeeded. Leaphorn was thoroughly confused. If only Chee had wormed it out of Bistie. If only Bistie had told them why he was carrying the bone bead in his wallet, what he planned to do with it, why he wanted to kill Endocheeney.

  The pain in his arm had subsided. He climbed out of the Chevy, and walked across the hard-packed earth toward the sign that proclaimed the willingness of McGinnis to leave Short Mountain Wash for a better world, and stepped through McGinnis's doorway-out of the glare and heat and into the cool darkness.

  "Well, now," the voice of McGinnis said from somewhere. "I wondered who it was parked out there. Who sold you that car?"

  McGinnis was sitting on a wooden kitchen chair, its back tilted against the counter beside his old black-and-chrome cash register. He was wearing the only uniform Leaphorn had ever seen him wear, a pair of blue-and-white-striped overalls faded by years of washings, and under them a blue work shirt like those that convicts wear.

  "It's Emma's car," Leaphorn said.

  "'Cause it's got automatic shift and you got your arm hurt," McGinnis said, looking at Leap horn's cast. "Old John Manymules was in here with his boys a little while ago and said a cop had got shot over in the Chuskas, but I didn't know it was you."

  "Unfortunately it was," Leaphorn said.

  "The way Manymules was telling it, old fella got killed up there at his hogan and when the police came to see about it, one of the policemen got shot right in the middle."

  "Just the arm." Leaphorn was no longer surprised by the dazzling speed with which McGinnis accumulated information, but he was still impressed.

  "What brings you out here to the wrong side of the reservation?" McGinnis said. "Broke arm and all."

  "Just visiting," Leaphorn said.

  McGinnis eyed him through his wire-rimmed bifocals, expression skeptical. He rubbed his hand across the gray stubble on his chin. Leaphorn remembered him as a smallish man, short but with a barrel-chested strength. Now he seemed smaller, shrunken into his overalls, the sturdiness missing. The face, too, had lost the remembered roundness, and in the dimness of the trading post, his blue eyes seemed faded.

  "Well, now," McGinnis said. "That's nice. I guess I ought to offer you a drink. Be hospitable. That is, if my customers can spare me."

  There were no customers. The tall woman was gone and the only vehicle in the yard was Emma's Chevy. McGinnis walked to the door, limping a little and more stooped than Leaphorn remembered. He closed it, slipped the bolt lock. "Got to lock her up, then," he said, half to Leaphorn. "Goddam Navajos they'll steal the panes outta the windows if they need it." He limped toward the doorway into his living quarters, motioning Leaphorn to follow. "But only if they need it. White man, now, he'll steal just for the hell of it. I've known 'em to steal something and then just throw it away. You Navajos, now, if you steal a sack of my meal I know somebody's hungry. Screwdriver's missing, I know somebody lost his screwdriver and has a screw that needs driving. I think it was your granddaddy that first explained that to me, when I was new out here."

  "Yeah," Leaphorn said. "I think you told me that."

  "Get so I repeat myself," McGinnis said, with no sound of repentance in his voice. "Hosteen Klee, they called him before he died. Your mother's father. I knew him when they was still calling him Horse Kicker." McGinnis had opened the door of a huge old refrigerator. "I ain't offering you a drink because you don't drink whiskey, or at least you never did, and whiskey's all I got," he said into the refrigerator. "Unless you want a drink of water."

  "No, thanks," Leaphorn said.

  McGinnis emerged, holding a bourbon bottle and a Coca Cola glass. He carried these to a rocking chair, sat, poured bourbon into the glass, examined it, then, with the glass close to his eyes, dripped in more until the level reached the bottom of the trademark. That done, he set the bottle on the floor and motioned Leaphorn to sit. The only place open was a sofa upholstered with some sort of green plastic. Leaphorn sat. The stiff plastic crackled under his weight and a puff of dust arose around him.

  "You're here on business," McGinnis declared.

  Leaphorn nodded.

  McGinnis sipped. "You're here because you think old McGinnis knows something about Wilson Sam. He'll tell you, and you'll put it with what you already know and figure out who killed him."

  Leaphorn nodded.

  "Outta luck," McGinnis said. "I've known that young fella since he was a buck Indian and I don't know anything about him that's going to help."

  "You've been thinking about it," Leaphorn said.

  "Sure," McGinnis said. "Fella you've known gets killed, you think about it." He sipped again. "Lost a customer," he said.

  "Anything in that?" Leaphorn said. "Unusual, I mean. Like him coming in with money to pay off his pawn. Or buying anything unusual. People coming to ask where to find him."

  "Nothing," McGinnis said.

  "He make any trips? Go anyplace? Been sick? Any ceremonials for him?"

  "Nothing like that," McGinnis said. "He used to come in now and then to do his buying. Sell me his wool. Things like that. Get his mail. I remember he cut his hand bad way back last winter and he went into that clinic that Sioux Indian opened there at Badwater Wash and they sewed it up for him and gave him a tetanus shot. But no sickness. No sings for him. No trips anyplace, except he told me couple of months ago he went into Farmington with his daughter to get himself some clothes." McGinnis took another sip of bourbon. "Too damn fashionable to buy his clothes from me anymore. Everybody's wearing designer jeans."

  "How about his mail? Do you write his letters for him? He get anything unusual?"

  "He could read and write," McGinnis said. "But he ain't bought no stamps this year. Not from me, anyway. Or mailed any letters. Or got any unusual mail. Only thing unusual, couple of months ago he got a letter in the middle of the month." He didn't explain that, or need to. On the far reaches of the reservation, mail consists primarily of subsistence checks, from the tribal offices in Window Rock or some federal agency. They arrive on the second day of the month, in brown stacks.

  "In June was it?" That was when Chee had said Endocheeney received his letter from Irma Onesalt's office. "About the second week?"

  "That's what I said," McGinnis said. "Two months ago."

  Leaphorn had managed to find a way to be fairly comfortable on the
sofa. He had been watching McGinnis, who in turn had kept his watery eyes focused on the bourbon while he talked. And while he talked, he rocked, slowly and steadily, coordinating a motion in his forearm with the motion of his chair. The net result of this was that while the bourbon glass seemed to move, the liquid in it remained level and motionless. Leaphorn had noticed this lesson in hydraulic motion before, but it still intrigued him. But what McGinnis had said about the letter regained his full attention. He leaned forward.

  "Don't get excited," McGinnis said. "You gonna expect me to tell you that inside that envelope there was a letter from somebody telling Wilson Sam to hold still because he was coming to kill him. Something like that." McGinnis chuckled. "You got your hopes up too high. It wasn't from anybody. It was from Window Rock."

  Leaphorn wasn't surprised McGinnis had noticed this, or that he remembered it. A midmonth letter would have been an oddity.

  "What was it about?"

  McGinnis's placid expression soured. "I don't read folks' mail."

  "All right then, who was it from?"

  "One of them bureaus there in Window Rock," McGinnis said. "Like I said."

  "You remember which one?"

  "Why would I remember something like that?" McGinnis said. "None of my business."

  Because everything out here is your business, Leaphorn thought. Because the letter would have lain around somewhere for days while you waited for Wilson Sam to come in, or for some relative to come in who could take it to him, and every day you would look at it and wonder what was in it. And because you remember everything.

  "I just thought you might," Leaphorn said, overcoming a temptation to tell McGinnis the letter was from Social Services.

  "Social Services," McGinnis said.

  Social Services. Exactly. He wished he had found time to check. If the letter wasn't in the file, if no one there remembered writing to Endocheeney, or to Wilson Sam, it would be fair circumstantial evidence that Onesalt had done the writing, and that the letters were in some way unofficial. Why would Social Services be writing to either man?

  "Did it have a name on it? I mean on the return address. Or just the office?"

  "Come to think of it, yeah." McGinnis sipped again and inspected the bourbon level with watery eyes. "That might be of some interest to you," he said, without taking his eyes off the glass. "Because that woman who had her name on the return address, she was the one that got shot a little later over there in your part of the reservation. Same name, anyway."

  "Irma Onesalt," Leaphorn said. "Yessir," McGinnis said. "Irma Onesalt." The circle was thus complete. The bone beads linked Wilson Sam and Endocheeney and Jim Chee and Roosevelt Bistie. The letters linked Onesalt into the pattern. Now he had what he needed to solve this puzzle. He had no idea how. But he knew himself. He knew he would solve it.

  Chapter 18

  it was a day off for Chee, and in a little while it would be time to leave for the long drive to the place of Hildegarde Goldtooth, to meet with Alice Yazzie. Ninety miles or so, some of it on bad roads, and he intended to leave early. He planned to detour past the Badwater Clinic to see if he could learn anything there. And he didn't want to keep Alice Yazzie waiting. He wanted to do her Blessing Way. Now Chee was passing the time in what Captain Largo called his "laboratory." Largo had laughed about it. "Laboratory, or maybe it's your studio," Largo had said when he found Chee working there. In fact, it was nothing but a flat, hard-packed earthen surface up the slope from Chee's trailer. Chee had chosen it because a gnarled old cottonwood shaded the place. He had prepared it carefully, digging it up, leveling it, raking out bits of gravel and weed roots, making it an approximation of the size and shape of a hogan floor. He used it to practice dry painting the images used in the ceremonials he was learning.

  At the moment, Chee was squatting at the edge of this floor. He was finishing the picture of Sun's Creation, an episode from the origin story used in the second night of the Blessing Way. Chee was humming, mouthing the words of the poetry that recounted this episode, letting a controlled trickle of blue sand sift between his fingers to form the tip of the feather that was hung from Sun's left horn.

  Sun will be created-they say it is planned to happen.

  Sun will be created-they say he has planned it all.

  Its face will be blue-they say he has planned it all.

  Its eyes will be yellow-they say he planned it all.

  Its forehead will be white-they say he planned it all.

  Feather finished, Chee rocked back on his heels, poured the surplus blue sand from his palm into the coffee can that held it, wiped his hand on the leg of his jeans, and surveyed his work. It was good. He had left off one of the three plumes that should have extended eastward from the headdress of Pollen Boy, standing against Sun's face-thus not completing the power of the holy image at this inappropriate time and place. Otherwise, the dry painting looked perfect. The lines of sand-black, blue, yellow, red, and white-were neatly denned. The symbols were correct. The red sand was a bit too coarse, but he would fix that by running a can of it through the coffee grinder again. He was ready. He knew this version of the Blessing Way precisely and exactly-every word of every song, every symbol of the dry paintings. It would cure for him. He squatted, memorizing again the complicated formula of symbols he had created on the earth before him, feeling its beauty. Soon he would be performing this old and holy act as it had been intended, to return one of his people to beauty and harmony. Chee felt the joy of that rising in him, and turned away the thought. All things in moderation.

  The cat was watching him from the hillside above its juniper. It had been in sight much of the morning, vanishing down the bank of the San Juan for a while but returning after less than an hour to lie in the juniper's shade. Chee had put the shipping case under the tree the previous evening-fitting it beneath the limbs as near to the cat's sleeping place as he could force it. In it he'd put an old denim jacket, which the cat sometimes sat on when it came into the trailer. He had added, as lure, a hamburger patty from his refrigerator. He'd been saving the patty for some future lunch, but the edges had curled and turned dark. This morning he noticed the meat was missing and he presumed the cat had gone into the case to retrieve it. But he could see no sign that the cat had slept there. No problem. Chee was patient.

  The case was really a cage with a carrying handle and had cost Chee almost forty dollars with taxes. It had been Janet Pete's idea. He had brought up the problem of cat and coyote as they left the Turquoise Cafe, trying to extend the conversation-to think of something to say that would prevent Miss Pete from getting into her clean white official Chevy sedan and leaving him standing there on the sidewalk.

  "I don't guess you'd know anything about cats?" Chee had said, and she'd said, "Not much, but what's the problem?" And he'd told her about the cat and the coyote. Then he'd waited a moment while she thought about it. While he waited (Janet Pete leaning, gracefully, against her Chevy, frowning, lower lip caught between her teeth, taking the problem seriously), he thought about what Mary Landon would have said. Mary would have asked who owned the cat. Mary would have said, Well, silly, just bring the cat in, and keep it in your trailer until the coyote goes away and hunts something else. Perfectly good solutions for a belagana cat in a belagana world, but they overlooked the nature of Jim Chee, a Navajo, and the role of animals in Dine' Bike'yah, where Corn Beetle and Bluebird and Badger received equal billing when the Holy People emerged into this Earth Surface World.

  "I don't guess you'd want a cat," Janet Pete said, looking at Chee.

  Chee grinned.

  "Can you fix up something out there? So the coyote can't get to it?"

  "You know coyotes," Chee said.

  Janet Pete smiled, looked wry, brightened. "I know," she said. "Get one of those airline shipping cages." She described one, cat-sized, with her hands. "They're tough. A coyote couldn't get her in that."

  "I don't know," Chee said, doubting the cat would get into such a thing. Doubting it w
ould foil a coyote. "I don't think I've ever seen one. Where can you get 'em? Airport?"

  "Pet store," Janet Pete said. And she'd driven him to the one in Farmington. The shipping cage Chee eventually bought had been designed for a small dog. It was made of stiff steel wire that looked coyote-proof. And it was large enough, in Chee's opinion, to seem hospitable to the cat. Janet Pete had remembered an appointment and hurried him back to his car at the courthouse.

  Even as he was driving to Shiprock with the cage on the seat beside him it was seeming less and less of a good idea. He'd have to narrow the doorway to make it just big enough for the cat and too small for the coyote's head. That looked simple enough In fact, it had been merely a matter of using some hay baling wire. But there was still the question of whether the cat would accept it as a bedroom, and whether she would be smart enough to recognize the safety it offered when the coyote was stalking her.