Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 17 - Skeleton Man

by Skeleton Man(lit)

  Bernie held out her hand. "I am Bernadette Manuelito," she said. "But why is it dangerous?"

  "People who don't know Hopi talk, they call me Mary," the woman said. "But you are a Navajo, I think. Not just a tourist. I saw you near the Salt Woman Shrine by the blue pool. That is a place for the Hopi holy people. Not for.Not for people not initiated into a kiva."

  Bernie was embarrassed. "But I came there with a Hopi. A Hopi who belongs to one of the kivas that come down the trail to collect salt and colored clay for its ceremonials. He said it was all right."

  The woman considered that, her expression stern, but her eyes were on Bernie's injured hand.

  "It bleeds," she said. "Where did you cut it?"

  "I slipped climbing down," Bernie said. "I tried to catch myself. Cut it on a rock."

  "I have a salve for that at home," the woman said. "I sold it where I worked at Peach Springs and it heals cuts very quickly." She smiled a wry smile. "Long time ago. I got tired of talking to tourists all the time."

  Bernie opened her backpack and took out her half-empty water bottle. "You think I should wash it off?" she asked. "Get the dirt out of it?"

  "Is that all the drinking water you have?"

  Bernie nodded. "I've been walking a lot. I guess I should have saved more."

  "Up that little canyon there"-the woman pointed-"is a little spring where the water seeps out. It is bitter with what it washes out of the rock. It makes you sick if you drink it. But it would be good for washing that cut."

  "I'll do that," Bernie said.

  The woman pointed at the bottle. "That's all you have to drink? For how long is that?"

  "I'm not sure. Someone is supposed to come and meet me up there near the Salt Woman Shrine. I hope pretty soon."

  "Was he a man? He's already there."

  Jim had come back! Bernie felt a wave of relief. Followed immediately by apprehension. "A handsome young Navajo policeman? But not wearing his uniform?"

  The old woman laughed. "Not any Navajo policeman," she said. "Not unless you have big white-haired Navajo men with blue eyes. But he had a gun like a policeman."

  "You saw a gun?"

  "A pistol. He was looking at it. Then putting it back under his belt."

  "Oh," Bernie said. She looked at the old woman, and the old woman looked at her. Nodded.

  "Some sort of trouble?" the woman said. "Maybe man trouble. That's usually it. So you don't want to go up there right now, is that right? Until the right man comes to meet you."

  "Something like that," Bernie said.

  The woman smiled. "Then I should give you some more drinking water, daughter. Give you some more time to wait before you dry up. But you should go back down to the big river to wait for your Navajo policeman. Up here it is dangerous."

  Bernie nodded.

  The woman swung the bag off her shoulder. It was one of those canvas canteens that dry-country cowboys and sheep herders hang from their saddles. She pointed to Bernie's bottle, said, "I will share with you."

  "Thank you, Mary," Bernie said. "Do you have enough?"

  The woman laughed. "I'm not waiting for a man," she said. "I'm going home. You should be doing that. Not staying so close to where the danger is."

  Bernie held out her bottle. Thinking while the woman filled it about the pistol she had seen, and about what she, Bernie, seemed to be getting into here.

  "This danger," Bernie said. "Could you tell me what it is?"

  Mary considered this. "Have you heard about the Hopi? How we came to be on this Earth Surface World? About our kachinas? Any of that?"

  "Some of it," Bernie said. "My mother's father told me something, and my uncle knew something about it. He's a hatalii. A singer."

  Mary looked skeptical.

  "I guess it was just what they had heard from friends," Bernie said. "Nothing secret."

  "You know about Masaw? The one some people call the Skeleton Man?"

  "I heard he was the Guardian Spirit of the Hopis on this Earth Surface World."

  Mary nodded. "This Glittering World," she said.

  "Wasn't he the spirit who greeted the Hopi people when they emerged out of the dark worlds into this one? The one who told you to make migrations to the four directions and then you would find the Center Place of the World? And you should live there? Up on the Hopi Mesas?"

  Mary was smiling. "Well," she said. "I guess that's a version of a little bit of it. The way people in the Bear Clan tell it, anyway. What else have you heard?"

  "I read in the book Frank Waters wrote that when Masaw met the people emerging from the underworld, his face was all bloody. That he was a fearsome-looking kachina. And that he taught you not to be afraid to die. I think you called him the Death Kachina."

  Mary nodded. "Or sometimes the Skeleton Man. And some of the old people tell us that in another way," she said. "In those dark first three worlds we were forced out because of horrible crowding. People kept making babies but nobody ever died. We were jammed in together so tight, they say, that you couldn't spit without spitting on somebody else. Could hardly move. People just kept creating more people. Twin brothers were leaders of the people then. They found a way to grow a reed through the roof of the first dark world for us to the second one, and then, when it got too crowded, on into the third one, and finally into this one. But still nobody ever died until Masaw taught people not to be afraid of death."

  Bernie had heard something like this in one of her anthropology classes, but not this version.

  "How did he do that?" she asked.

  "One of the clan leaders had a beautiful daughter who was killed by another little girl. Out of jealousy. And that caused trouble between families. So Masaw opened the earth so the clan leader could see his daughter in the world beyond this one. She was laughing, happy, playing, singing her prayers."

  "That sounds like the Christian heaven," Bernie said. "Our Navajo beliefs-most of them, anyway-aren't so specific. But you were going to tell me why it's dangerous for me here."

  "Because up there." She paused, shook her head, pointed up the canyon. "Up there, they say, is where the Skeleton Man lives. Up there in the biggest canyon that runs into this one. Comes in from the left. They say he painted a symbol on the cliff where it enters. The symbol for the Skeleton Man." Mary knelt, drew in the sand with her finger. The shape she formed meant nothing to Bernie.

  "Is the danger because that place is where Masaw, or the Skeleton Man, is living?" Bernie asked, feeling uneasy. "Is that spirit dangerous to people like me?"

  Mary shook her head, looking troubled. "Everything gets so mixed up," she said. "The Supai people have their ideas, and the Paiutes come in here with different ideas, and the priests and the preachers and even the Peyote People tell us things. But I've been hearing that it might be some man, even older than me now. Nobody knew who his parents were. He used to come to Peach Springs and kept telling stories about how Masaw was the one who caused all those bodies to come falling down here into the canyon. Said Masaw made those planes run together. And this man was trying to get people to change their religions around and believe like him. I think he's the one who started calling Masaw the Skeleton Man."

  Mary stopped, shook her head, laughed. "When I was just a young woman, he came around to the village and showed us tricks. He had this little deer-skin pollen bag he'd hold up in the sunlight. Like this." She held her right hand high above her head and pinched her thumb and fingers together. "He told us to notice how ugly and brown the pollen pouch looked. That's how this life is, he'd say, but look what you get if you're willing to get rid of this life. To get out of it. And then the pollen sack would turn into this glittering thing sitting on the end of his fingers."

  She stared at Bernie, her expression questioning, looking for Bernie's reaction.

  "Amazing," Bernie said. She was thinking how the trick might have been done-the thumb and forefinger squeezing the diamond out of the pouch, the pouch disappearing into the palm.

  "I saw it myself
," Mary said. "That sack just glittered and glittered as he turned it in the sunlight."

  "Then what happened?"

  "I don't remember exactly. But in a little while, he was holding the pollen pouch again, and it didn't glitter anymore."

  "Fascinating," Bernie said.

  "My uncle told me he thought it was some sort of trick, but this man said the Skeleton Man gave it to him to prove to people they should be willing to die. The ugly brown pollen pouch was like the life they were living now. After they died, it would be bright and shiny."

  "Where did this man come from? Does what he was telling you fit in with what they teach in your kiva?"

  "I don't remember as much about the old times as I should," Mary said, looking sad. "I know I was taught them when I was little, but all those years up at Peach Springs talking with all kinds of other people, I forget them. And they got mixed in with other stuff. But I know that even though Masaw looked horrible-they say his face was all covered with blood-he was a friend of the people in some ways."

  "Like teaching them not to be afraid to die?"

  "Like that," Mary said, smiling. "I remember my mother used to tell that to me. That just two things we know for certain. That we're born and in a little while we die. It's what we do in the time between that matters. That's what the One Who Made Us thinks about when he decides what happens to us next."

  Bernie considered that. Nodded. "I think all of us are pretty much alike, whatever our tribe and whatever color we are," she said.

  "Everybody also has sense enough to stay away from places that are dangerous," Mary said, staring at Bernie. "Like not poking at a coiled snake with your hand."

  Bernie nodded.

  "Like not trying to go up where the Skeleton Man lives," Mary added.

  "Unless you really need to go. To see if you can save a man who will get locked up in prison if you don't find something there," Bernie said.

  Mary took a very deep breath, exhaled it. "So you'll go up that canyon anyway?"

  "I have to."

  Mary pointed up the canyon. "There's a narrow slot in the cliff wall to your left around that corner. Then on the right, farther up, you'll find another slot, a little wider, and a trickle of water sometimes is flowing out of it. But it's blocked with rocks where part of the cliff fell down, and around those rocks there's the thick brush of the cat's claw bushes. You can't get through that without getting all bloody."

  Bernie nodded.

  "Girl," Mary said. "You should not go. But be very careful. If you need help, no one would ever find you."

  17

  Joanna Craig sat on a shelf of some sort of smooth, pale pink stone about two thousand feet above what she guessed must be the Colorado River. It was putty-colored, not the clear blue she had always imagined, and the cliffs across it (and behind her, and everywhere else) soared upward to a dark blue sky, partly crowded with towering clouds-dark on the bottom. Joanna's mood was also at its bottom at the moment, and like the clouds, dark blue.

  Joanna was admitting to herself that she had screwed up. She was facing the fact that Billy Tuve, while brain-damaged, had outwitted her. He was gone. She was alone. Worse, due to her own foolishness, she seemed to be walking into a trap. She was leaning forward, elbows on knees, head down, resting everything but her mind, ticking off the mistakes she had been making and looking for solutions.

  Maybe the first mistake had been even coming here. But that was no mistake. It was something she had to do. Something, call it her destiny, had caused that damned diamond to appear out of the distant past. Maybe her prayers had caused it. Too many years of praying for a way to get revenge. To see justice done. And finally the diamond had appeared, had been given to a childlike Hopi, had set off a chain of events, led to her lawyer, and had drawn her here, two thousand miles from home, to sit, exhausted, two thousand feet above a dirty river, not knowing what to do.

  Of course, she should have kept pressing Tuve about the man who came to talk to him in jail just an hour or two before she had arrived and bonded him out. Who was he? Lawyer, Tuve said. Said his name was Jim Belshaw. Said he would represent Billy, get him out of jail, but Billy had to tell him where he had gotten the diamond. What had he looked like? Big white man, hair almost white, face sort of reddish. Eyes blue. And what had he told this Jim Belshaw about where the diamond had come from? That he didn't know. That this diamond man had just walked a little ways down the river from the blue pool near the Salt Woman Shrine and came back with it. What else? Tuve had just shaken his head. He was finished talking about it. And she had allowed him to get away with that.

  Then the narrow little trail bent around a corner of the cliff, and Tuve had pointed downward. Through the binoculars she had seen where the clearer stream from the Little Colorado Canyon poured into the muddy Colorado, and beyond that the blue oblong shape of a pool, which must have been supplied with water by a spring. Down there, she thought, must be the site of the Salt Woman Shrine.

  Tuve had been standing behind her. "Ah," he said, and something else. And pointed. She noticed motion. A figure walking along the bank of the pool, disappearing behind the brush trees, reappearing, bending to examine something on the ground. It was a man, apparently, but he was too far below them to tell much else.

  "Is that this lawyer?" she had asked. "Is this the Belshaw who came to see you?"

  Tuve didn't answer.

  "It could be him," Joanna had said. "It's a big man, like you said he was. Right?" She stared through the binoculars, shifted her position as the man moved to where a tamarisk partly shielded him from her view. "Tall," she said. "Looks like he's well dressed for hiking. But with his hat on I can't tell from here if he's blond. Does he look like-"

  But Billy Tuve was no longer with her. Not standing behind her on the track. Not anywhere that she could see. Perhaps he had gone back up the trail, around that bend up twenty yards or so. Maybe ducking back into the brush to relieve himself. Joanna stopped thinking and started running.

  "Billy!" she shouted. "Mr. Tuve!" But he wasn't at the bend in the trail, or around it. Not as far as she could see. She hadn't realized how tired her legs had become on the long and tricky walk down. She stopped, catching her breath, shaking, trying to see a place up the trail where he might be hiding. There were several. More than she had the energy left to check. But why would he be hiding? Why leave her like this?

  Then Joanna had slumped against the cliff wall, sliding down the rough stone, and sitting, back against it, legs drawn up, forehead resting between her knees. The warm, dusty fabric of her jeans reminding her of how thirsty she was. Of how little water was left in her bottle. Trying to fend off despair. Trying to think.

  Had Billy Tuve betrayed her? Well, why shouldn't he? He seemed slow and innocent, but he had been smart enough to see she was using him. Yet he had been willing enough to help her-and help her to help him. So why had he abandoned her now? He'd been cooperative, even sympathetic, until he had seen that man down below. Perhaps he had recognized him as the man who had come to the jail. Probably he had. Perhaps he and the blond man had made some sort of deal. Perhaps the man was waiting at the bottom of the trail just to meet Tuve. For Tuve to lead him to the diamonds. This blond would be Plymale's lieutenant. This man she shot was working for him, had called him Bradford Chandler, said he was working for some lawyer named Plymale.

  But if Tuve had made a deal with this Chandler, why hadn't he gone on down the trail to meet him? Why had he gone the other way? Was Tuve afraid of the man? If he worked for Plymale, she had a better reason herself to be afraid.

  And then she noticed Tuve's canteen.

  It was propped neatly on a narrow shelf jutting from the cliff, almost as if she was supposed to notice it. As if Billy Tuve had left it for her to use. She pushed herself up, painfully stiff from the brief rest, and got the canteen. It was heavy and the leather cover was soaked and cool.

  She sat again, leaning against the stone, unscrewed the cap, touched liquid with the tip of h
er tongue. The taste was stale, but it was water. She took a sip, holding it, enjoying it. Modifying the grim and depressing thought that Tuve, whom she had come to like, had abandoned her to die of dehydration with the knowledge that he'd left her enough water to get herself to safety. She had heard that the Hopis, and others, left hidden caches of water containers along some of the trails for emergencies. Tuve would have known where to find such a cache if he needed water. Still, even if this didn't represent a life-endangering sacrifice for him, it was a kind thing to do-curing her despair as well as her thirst.

  It also brought her to a decision. She would climb down the Salt Trail to the bottom. She would keep out of sight. Tuve had probably told his jail visitor as much as he'd told her. Maybe he had told him more. If this jail visitor had abandoned his wait for Tuve, perhaps he would begin his hunt for the diamond dispenser on his own. She would follow him wherever it took her.