The First Eagle jlajc-13

by Tony Hillerman

  "Joe," Louisa said. "This is Mike Perez, who'll tell us both more about molecular biology than we want to know."

  They shook hands.

  "Or about bacteria, or virology," Perez said, grinning. "We don't understand the virus end of it yet, but that doesn't keep us from pretending we do."

  Louisa had presumed that Leaphorn, being Navajo, enjoyed mutton so the entree was lamb chops. Having been raised a sheep-camp Navajo, Leaphorn was both thoroughly tired of mutton and far too polite to say so. He ate his lamb chop with green mint jelly and listened to Professor Perez discuss Woody's work with rodents. Two or three questions early in the meal had established that Perez seemed to know absolutely nothing that would connect him to Catherine Pollard. But he knew an awful lot about the career and personality of Dr. Albert Woody.

  "Mike thinks Woody's going to be one of the great ones," Louisa said. "Nobel Prize winner, books written about him. The Man Who Saved Humanity. A giant of medical science. That sort of thing."

  Perez looked embarrassed by that. "Louisa tends to exaggerate. It's an occupational hazard of mythologists, you know," he said. "Hercules wasn't really any stronger than Gorgeous George, and Medusa just had her hair done in cornrows, and Paul Bunyan's blue ox was really brown. But I do think that Woody has a shot at it. Maybe one chance in a hundred. But that's better odds than Speed Ball lottery."

  Louisa offered Leaphorn another chop. "Everyone in the hard sciences is making the headlines these days," she said. "It's 'breakthrough of the month' season. If it isn't a new way to clone toe-jam fungus, it's rediscovering life on Mars."

  "I saw something about that life on Mars business," Leaphorn said. "It sounded like that molecules-in-the-asteroid discovery back in the sixties. Didn't the geologists discredit that?"

  Perez nodded. "This one is a NASA publicity ploy. They'd been having their usual run of fiascoes and blunders, so they dug out an asteroid with the proper minerals in it and conned the reporters again. New generation of science writers, nobody remembered the old story, and it looked better on TV than the footage of astronauts demonstrating their bigger bubblegum bubbles, and that other sophomoric stuff they're always bragging about."

  Louisa laughed. "Mike resents NASA because it siphons federal research money away from his microbiology research. It must have some purpose."

  Perez looked slightly offended. "I don't resent our Clowns in Space program. It provides entertainment, what Woody's working on is dead serious."

  "Like recording the blood pressure of prairie dogs," Louisa said.

  Leaphorn watched her pass Perez the bowl of boiled new potatoes. He had decided to drop out of this conversation and be a spectator.

  Perez took a small potato. Looked at Louisa thoughtfully. Took another one.

  "I just read a paper this morning from one of the microbiologists at NIH," Perez said, pausing to sample the potato. "NIH." He grinned at Louisa. "For you mythologists, that's the National Institutes of Health."

  Louisa tried to let that pass but didn't manage it. "Not affiliated with the UN then," she said. "For you biologists, that's United Period Nations."

  Perez laughed. "Okay," he said. "Peace be with us all. My point is, this guy was reporting dreadful stuff. For example, remember cholera? Virtually wiped out back in the sixties. Well, there were almost a hundred thousand new cases in South America alone in the past two years. And TB, the old 'white plague,' which we finally eliminated about 1970. Well, now the world death rate from that is up to three million per annum again—and the pathogen is a DR mycobacterium."

  Louisa gave Leaphorn a wry look. "I listen to this guy a lot and learn his jargon. He's trying to say the TB germ has become drug-resistant."

  "What we'd call the perpetrator," Leaphorn said. "Great subject for dinner conversation," Louisa said. "Cholera and TB."

  "More cheerful, though, than telling you about the summer-session papers I've been grading," Perez said. "But I'd like to hear from Mr. Leaphorn about this vanished biologist he's looking for."

  "There's not much to tell," Leaphorn said. "She's a vector control person for the Indian Health Service, or maybe it's the Arizona Health Department. They sort of operate together. She's been working out of Tuba City. About two weeks ago she drove out in the morning to check on rodent burrows and didn't come back."

  He stopped, waiting for Perez to ask the standard questions about boyfriend, stalker, nervous breakdown, job stress, et cetera.

  "I'd guess that's why Louisa wanted me to find out whether the Hammar boy was teaching his lab on July eighth," Perez said. "Was that the day?"

  Leaphorn nodded.

  "Mike Devente handles those lab programs," Perez said. "He said Hammar was sick. Had food poisoning or something."

  "Sick," Leaphorn said.

  Perez laughed. "Or called in sick, anyway. With teaching assistants, sometimes there's a difference."

  Perez sampled his second potato, said: "Is he a suspect?"

  "He might be if we had a crime," Leaphorn said. "All we have is a woman who drove off in an Indian Health Service vehicle and didn't come back."

  "Louisa said this Pollard lady was checking sources for this latest Yersinia pestis outbreak. Is that why you are interested in Woody?" THE FIRST EAGLE

  Leaphorn shook his head. "I never heard of him before today. But they're both interested in prairie dogs, pack rats and so forth and in the same territory. Not many people are, so maybe their paths crossed. Maybe he saw her somewhere. Maybe she told him where she was going."

  Perez looked thoughtful. "Yeah," he said.

  "They're working in the same field, so he'd probably know about her," Leaphorn said. "But in such a big country it's not likely they'd meet, and if they did, why is she going to tell a virtual stranger that she's going to run off with a government vehicle?"

  "Mutual interests, though," Perez said. "They cut pretty deep. How often do you find someone who wants to talk to you about fleas on prairie dogs? And Woody is a downright fanatic about his work. Run him into another human with any knowledge of infectious diseases, immunology, any of that, and he's going to tell 'em a lot more about it than they'll want to know. He's obsessed by it. He thinks the bacteria are going to eliminate mammals unless we do something about it. And if they don't get us, the viruses will. He feels this need to warn everybody about it. Jeremiah complex."

  "I can sympathize with that," Leaphorn said. "I'm always talking about what's wrong with the War on Drugs. Until I notice everybody is yawning."

  "Same problem with me," Perez said. "I'll bet you're not very interested in discussing molecular mineral transmission through cell walls."

  "Only if you explained it so I could understand it." Leaphorn said. He wished he hadn't mentioned Woody to Louisa, wished she hadn't invited Perez, wished they could just be having a relaxing evening together. "And first I guess you'd have to explain why I should care about it."

  It was the wrong thing to say, inspiring Dr. Perez to defend pure science and orate on the need to collect knowledge merely for the sake of knowledge. Leaphorn nibbled at the second chop. He down-rated his character for lacking the courage to refuse it. He examined his semihostile reaction to Perez. It had begun when he saw the Saab parked where he liked to park in Louisa's driveway and worsened when he saw the man standing beside her in the doorway, grinning at him. And it clicked up another notch when he noticed that Perez seemed to be looking upon him as a rival. Perez was jealous, he concluded. But then what about Joe Leaphorn? Was Joe Leaphorn jealous? It was an unsettling thought, and he took another bite of the lamb chop to drive it away.

  Perez had completed his account of how pure science had led to the discovery of penicillin and the whole arsenal of antibiotics, which had pretty well wiped out infectious diseases. Now he digressed into how stupid misuse of those drugs had turned victory into defeat and how the killer bugs were mutating furiously into all sorts of new forms.

  "Mom brings her kid in with a runny nose. The doc knows a virus is causing i
t, and antibiotics won't touch the virus, but the kid is crying, and Mom wants a prescription, so he gives her his pet antibiotic and tells Mama to give it to the kid for eight days. And then two days later, the immune system deals with the virus, and she stops the medicine. But two days of the antibiotic"—Perez paused, took a long sip from his wineglass, wiped his mustache—"has slaughtered all the bacteria in the kid's bloodstream except—" Perez paused again, waved his hand. "Except the few freaks who happened to be resistant to the drug. So, with the competition wiped out, these freaks multiply like crazy, and the kid is full of drug-resistant bacteria. And then—"

  "And then it's time for dessert," Louisa said. "How about some ice cream? Or brownies?"

  "Or maybe both," Perez said. "Anyway, just a few years ago about ninety-nine-point-nine percent of Staphylococcus aureus was killed by penicillin. Now it's down to about four percent. Only one of the other antibiotics works on the stuff now, and sometimes it doesn't work."

  Louisa's voice came from the kitchen. "Enough! Enough! No more doomsday talk." She emerged, carrying dessert. "And now thirty percent of the people who die in hospitals die of something they didn't have when they came in." She laughed. "Or is it forty percent? I've heard this lecture before, but mythologists aren't good with numbers."

  "It's about thirty percent," Perez said, looking miffed. A bowl of ice cream and two brownies later, Perez pleaded the need to finish grading papers and rolled his Saab out of Leaphorn's place in the driveway.

  "An interesting man," Leaphorn said, stacking saucers on plates, and cutlery atop that, and heading for the kitchen.

  "Have a seat," Louisa said. "I can take care of the cleanup."

  "Widowers get awfully good at this. I want to demonstrate my skills." Which he did, until he noticed Louisa rearranging the plates he'd put into the washer.

  "Wrong way?" he asked.

  "Well," she said, "if you put them in with the food side facing inward, then the hot water spray hits that. It gets 'em cleaner."

  So Leaphorn sat and wondered if Perez had actually been jealous of him and what that might imply, and tried to think of a way to bring up the subject. He drew a blank. A few moments later the clattering in the kitchen stopped. Louisa emerged and sat on the sofa across from him.

  "Wonderful dinner," Leaphorn said. "Thank you."

  She nodded. "Michael really is an interesting man," she said. "He was way too talky tonight, but that was because I told him you were interested in what Professor Woody was doing." She shrugged. "He was just trying to be helpful."

  "I sort of got the feeling he didn't care too much for me."

  "That was jealousy. He was showing off a little bit. The male territorial imperative at work."

  Leaphorn had not the slightest idea how to react to that. He opened his mouth, took a breath, said "Aah," and closed it.

  "We go way back. Old friends."

  "Aah," Leaphorn said again. "Friends." He had left the question off the sound of that, but it didn't fool Louisa.

  "He wanted to marry me once, long ago," Louisa said. "I told him I'd tried getting married once when I was young and I hadn't cared much for it."

  Leaphorn considered this. Now was one of those times when you wished you hadn't quit smoking. Lighting up a cigarette gave you time for thought. "You never told me you'd been married," he said.

  "There really wasn't any reason to," she said. "I guess not," he said. "But I'm interested." She laughed. "I really ought to tell you it's none of your business. But I think I'll put on a pot of coffee and decide what I'm going to say."

  When she came back with two steaming cups, she handed one to Leaphorn with a broad smile.

  "I decided I'm glad you asked," she said, sat down, and told him about it. They had both been graduate students, and he was big, handsome, and sort of out of it and always needed help with his classes. She'd thought that was charming at the time, and the charm had lasted about a year.

  "It took me that long to understand that he'd been looking for a second mother. You know, somebody to take care of him."

  "Lots of men like that," Leaphorn said, and since he couldn't think of anything to add to that, he switched the subject over to Catherine Pollard and his meeting with Mrs. Vanders. "I wondered why you decided to take that on," she said. "It sounds hopeless to me."

  "It probably is," Leaphorn said. "I'm going to give it a couple more days and if it still looks hopeless, I'll call the lady and tell her I failed." He finished his coffee and stood. "It's eighty miles back to Tuba City—actually eighty-two to my motel—and I've got to get going."

  "You're too tired to make that drive," she said. "Stay here. Get some sleep. Drive it in the morning."

  "Um," Leaphorn said. "Well, I wanted to try to find this Woody and see if he can tell me anything."

  "He'll keep," Louisa said. "It won't take any longer to drive it in the morning."

  "Stay here?"

  "Why not? Use the guest bedroom. I have a nine-thirty lecture. But if you want a real early start there's an alarm clock on the desk in there."

  "Well," Leaphorn said, digesting this, and recognizing how tired he was, and the nature of friendship. "Yes. Well, thank you."

  "There's some sleeping stuff in the chest. Nightgowns and so forth in the top drawer and pajamas in the bottom one."

  "Men's?"

  "Men's, women's, what have you. Guests can't be too Particular about borrowed pajamas."

  Louisa, taking their empty cups into the kitchen, stopped in the doorway.

  "I'm still wondering why you took the job," she said. "It surprises me."

  "Me, too," Leaphorn said. "But I'd been thinking about that Navajo policeman killed up near Yells Back Butte, and it turns out Catherine Pollard disappeared the same day, and she was supposed to be going to check on rodent burrows about the same place."

  "Ah," Louisa said, smiling. "And if I remember what you've told me, Joe Leaphorn never could believe in coincidence."

  She stood holding the cups, studying him. "You know, Joe, if I didn't have to work tomorrow I'd invite myself along. I'd like to meet this Woody fellow."

  "You'd be welcome," Leaphorn said.

  And more than welcome. He'd been dreading tomorrow, doing his duty, keeping a promise he'd made for no particular reason to an old woman he didn't even know without any real hope of learning anything useful.

  Louisa still hadn't moved from the doorway.

  "Would I be?"

  "It would make my day," Leaphorn said.

  Chapter Eleven

  A HIGH-PITCHED METHODICAL whimpering sound intruded into Joe Leaphorn's dream and jerked him abruptly awake. It came from a strange-looking white alarm clock on a desk beside his bed, which was also strange—soft and warm and smelling of soap and sunshine. His eyes finally focused and he saw a ceiling as white as his own, but lacking the pattern of plaster cracks he had memorized through untold hours of insomnia.

  Leaphorn pushed himself into a sitting position, fully awake, with his short-term memories flooding back. He .was in Louisa Bourebonette's guest bedroom. He fumbled with the alarm clock, hoping to shut off the whimpering before it awakened her. But obviously it was too late for that. He smelled coffee brewing and bacon frying—the almost forgotten aromas of contentment. He stretched, yawned, settled back against the pillow. The crisp, fresh sheets reminded him of Emma. Everything did. The morning breeze ruffled the curtains beside his head. Emma, too, always left their windows open to the outside air until Window Rock's bitter winter made it impractical. The curtains, too. He had teased her about that. "I didn't see window curtains in your mother's hogan, Emma," he'd said. And she rewarded him with her tolerant smile and reminded him he'd moved her out of the hogan, and Navajos must remain in harmony with houses that needed curtains. That was one of the things he loved about her. One of the many. As numerous as the stars of a high country midnight.

  He'd persuaded Emma that she should marry him two days before he was to take the Graduate General Examination
for his degree at Arizona State. The degree was in anthropology, but the dreaded GGE covered the spectrum of the humanities and he'd been brushing up on his weak points—which had led him into a quick scan of Shakespeare's "most likely to be asked about on GGE" plays and hence to Othello's discourse about Desdemona. He still remembered the passage, although he wasn't sure he had it quite right: "She loved me for the dangers I had passed, and I loved her that she did pity them."

  "Leaphorn, are you up? If you're not, your eggs are going to be overhard."

  "I'm up," Leaphorn said, and got up, grabbed his clothes and hurried into the bathroom. The point Othello was trying to make, he thought, was that he loved Desdemona because she loved him. Which sounded simple enough, but actually was a very complicated concept.

  Louisa's guest bathroom was equipped with a guest toothbrush, and Leaphorn, being blessed with the Indian's sparse and slow-growing beard, didn't miss a razor. ("No whiskers is proof," his grandfather had told him, "that Navajos are evolved further from the apes than those hairy white men.")

  Despite the threat, Louisa had actually delayed cracking the breakfast eggs until he appeared in the kitchen doorway.

  "I hope you meant it when you said you'd be happy to have me along today," she said as they started breakfast. "If you did, I can come."

  Leaphorn was buttering his toast. He'd already noticed that Professor Bourebonette was not wearing the formal skirt and blouse that were her teaching attire. She was clad in jeans and a long-sleeved denim shirt.

  "I meant it," he said. "But it'll be boring, like about ninety-nine percent of this kind of work. I was just going to see if I could find this Woody, find out if he'd seen Catherine Pollard and if he could tell me anything helpful. Then I was going to drive back to Window Rock and call Mrs. Vanders, report no progress and—"

  "Sounds all right," she said.

  Leaphorn put down his fork. "How about your class?" THE FIRST EAGLE

  It wasn't really the question he wanted to ask. He wanted to know what her plans were when the day's duties were done. Did she expect him to bring her back to Flagstaff? Did she intend to stay in Tuba City? Or accompany him home to Window Rock? And if so, what then?