Listening Woman jlajc-3

by Tony Hillerman

  Don’t you?

  Neither do you, McGinnis said. Not if you’ve got as much sense as I hear you do. You Navajos will steal if you think you can get off with something, but I never heard of one going out to kill somebody. He flourished the glass to emphasize the point.

  That’s one kind of white mans meanness the Navajos never took to. Any killings you have, there’s either getting drunk and doing it, or getting mad and fighting. You don’t have this planning in advance and going out to kill somebody like white folks. That right?

  Leaphorn let his silence speak for him. McGinnis had been around Navajos long enough for that. What the trader had said was true. Among the traditional Dinee, the death of a fellow human being was the ultimate evil. He recognized no life after death. That which was natural in him, and therefore good, simply ceased. That which was unnatural, and therefore evil, wandered through the darkness as a ghost, disturbing nature and causing sickness. The Navajo didn’t share the concept of his Hopi-Zuni-Pueblo Indian neighbors that the human spirit transcended death in the fulfillment of an eternal kachina, nor the Plains Indian belief in joining with a personal God. In the old tradition, death was unrelieved horror. Even the death of an enemy in battle was something the warrior cleansed himself of with an Enemy Way ritual. Unless, of course, a Navajo Wolf was involved. Witchcraft was a reversal of the Navajo Way.

  Except maybe if somebody thought he was a Navajo Wolf, McGinnis said. They’d kill him if they thought he was a witch.

  You hear of anyone who thought that?

  That’s the trouble, McGinnis said cheerfully. Nobody had nothing but good words to say about old Hosteen Tso. The cluttered room was silent again while McGinnis considered this oddity. He stirred his drink with a pencil from his shirt pocket.

  What do you know about his family? Leaphorn asked.

  He had a boy, Tso did. Just one kid. That boy wasn’t no good. They called him Ford.

  Married some girl over at Teec Nos Pos, a Salt Cedar I think she was, and moved over with her people and got to drinking and whoring around at Farmington until her folks run him off. Ford was always fighting and stealing and raising hell. McGinnis sipped at his bourbon, his face disapproving. You could understand it if somebody hit that Navajo on the head, he said.

  He ever come back? Leaphorn asked.

  Never did, McGinnis said. Died years ago. In Gallup I heard it was. Probably too much booze and his liver got him. He toasted this frailty with a sip of bourbon.

  You know anything about a grandson? Leaphorn asked.

  McGinnis shrugged. You know how it is with Navajos, he said. The man moves in with his wife’s outfit and if there’s any kids they’re born into their mothers clan. If you want to know anything about Tsos grandson, you’re going to have to drive to Teec Nos Pos and start asking around among them Salt Cedar people. I never even heard Ford had any children until old Hosteen Tso come in here a while before he got killed and told me he wanted to write this letter to his grandson. McGinnis’s face creased with remembered amusement. I told him I didn’t know he had a grandson, and he said that made two things I don’t know about him and of course I asked him what the other one was and he said it was which hand he used to wipe himself. McGinnis chuckled and sipped his bourbon. Witty old fart, he said.

  What did he say in the letter?

  I didn’t write it, McGinnis said. But lets see what I can remember about it. He come in one day. It was colder'n a wedge. Musta been early in March. He asked me what I charged to write a letter and I told him it was free for regular customers. And he started-telling me what he wanted to tell this grandson and would I send the letter to him and of course I asked him where this boy lived and he said it was way off east somewhere with nothing but white people. And I told him he’d have to know more than that for me to know what to write on the front of the envelope.

  Yeah, Leaphorn said. When a marriage broke up in the matriarchal Navajo system, it wouldn’t be unusual for paternal grandparents to lose track of children. They would be members of their mothers family. Ever hear anything about Fords wife?

  McGinnis rubbed his bushy white eyebrow with a thumb, stimulating his memory. I think I heard she was a drunk, too. Another no-good. Works that way a lot. Birds of a feather.

  McGinnis interrupted himself suddenly by slapping the arm of the rocker. By God, he said.

  I just thought of something. Way back, must have been almost twenty years ago, there was a kid staying with Hosteen Tso. Stayed there a year or so. Helped with the sheep and all. I bet that was the grandbaby.

  Maybe, Leaphorn said. If his mother really was a drunk.

  Hard to keep track of Navajo kids, McGinnis said. But I remember hearing that one went off to boarding school at St. Anthony’s. Maybe that’d explain what Hosteen Tso said about him going on the Jesus Road. Maybe them Franciscan priests there turned him Catholic.

  There’s something else I want to know about, Leaphorn said. Tso went to a sing not very long before he was killed. You know about that?

  McGinnis frowned. There wasn’t no sing. About last March or so? We had all that sorry weather then. Remember? Blowing snow. Wasn’t no sings anywhere on the plateau.

  How about a little earlier? Leaphorn asked. January or February?

  McGinnis frowned again. There was one a little after Christmas. Girl got sick at Yazzie Springs. Nakai girl. Would have been early in January.

  What was it?

  They did the Wind Way, McGinnis said. Had to get a singer from all the way over at Many Farms. Expensive as hell.

  Any others? Leaphorn asked. The Wind Way was the wrong ritual. The sand painting made for it would include the Corn Beetle, but none of the other Holy People mentioned by Hosteen Tso.

  Bad spring for sings, McGinnis said. Everybody’s either getting healthy, or they’re too damn poor to pay for em.

  Leaphorn grunted. There was something he needed to connect. They sat. McGinnis moved the glass in small, slow circles which spun the bourbon to within a centimeter of its rim. Leaphorn let his eyes drift. It was a big room, two high windows facing east and two facing west. Someone, years ago, had curtained them with a cotton print of roses on a blue background. Big as the room was, its furniture crowded it. In the corner, a double bed covered with quilts; beside it a worn 1940-modern sofa; beyond that, a recliner upholstered in shiny blue vinyl; two other nondescript overstuffed chairs; and three assorted chests and cabinets. Every flat surface was cluttered with the odds and ends accumulated in a long lifetime Indian pottery, kachina dolls, a plastic radio, a shelf of books, and even-on one of the window sills-an assortment of flint lance points, artifacts which had interested Leaphorn since his days as an anthropology student at Arizona State. Outside, through the dusty glass window, he saw two young men talking beside one of the trading posts outbuildings. The building was of stone, originally erected, Leaphorn had been told, by a Church of Christ missionary early in McGinnis’s tenure as trader and postmaster. It had been abandoned after the preachers optimism had been eroded by his inability to cause the Dinee to accept the idea that God had a personal and special interest in humans. McGinnis then had partitioned the chapel into three tourist cabins. But, as one of his customers had put it, it was as hard to get white-man tourists to go over that Short Mountain road as it was to get Navajos to go to heaven. The cabins, like the church, had been mostly empty.

  Leaphorn glanced at McGinnis. The trader sat swirling his drink, his face lined and compressed by age. Leaphorn understood the old mans distaste for Noni. McGinnis didn’t want a buyer. Short Mountain had trapped him in his own stubbornness, and held him here all his life, and the for sale sign had been no more than a gesture a declaration that he was smart enough to know he’d been screwed. And the asking price, Leaphorn had always heard, had been grotesquely high.

  No, McGinnis said finally. There just wasn’t any sings close around here at all.

  Okay, Leaphorn said. So if there wasn’t any sings, and Hosteen Tso told you he’d seen somebo
dy step on two or three sand paintings last March, where would you figure that could have happened?

  McGinnis shifted his gaze from the bourbon to Leaphorn, peering at him quizzically. No place, he said. Shit. What kind of a question is that?

  Hosteen Tso was there when it happened.

  No damned place, McGinnis said. He looked puzzled. What the hell you going to have two or three sand paintings for at once?

  It wouldn’t be that Wind Way Chant, Leaphorn said. Wrong painting.

  And the wrong clan. The Nakais are Red Foreheads. Wouldn’t be no reason for Old Man Tso to go down there for the Wind Way. He took another sip of his bourbon.

  Where’d you hear that crap?

  Margaret Cigarette passed it on to the FBI when they were questioning her. When I leave here I’m going to go out to her place and find out more about it.

  She probably ain’t home, McGinnis said. Somebody said she was off somewhere. Visiting kin, I think. Somewhere up east of Mexican Water.

  Maybe she’s back by now.

  Maybe, McGinnis said. His tone said he doubted it.

  I guess Ill go find out, Leaphorn said. He probably wouldn’t find her at home, but up east of Mexican Water meant just about anywhere in a thousand square miles along the Arizona-Utah border. Leaphorn decided it was time to move the conversation toward what had really brought him here the man in the gold-rimmed glasses. He moved obliquely.

  Those your lance points? Leaphorn asked, nodding toward the window sill.

  McGinnis pushed himself laboriously out of the chair and waddled to the window, brought back three of the flint points. He handed them to Leaphorn and lowered himself into the rocker again.

  Came out of that dig up Short Mountain Wash, he said. Anthropologists say they’re early Anasazi but they look kind of big to me for that. They must a found a hundred of em.

  The points had been chipped out of a shiny black basaltic schist. They were thick, and crude, with only slight fluting where the butt of the point would be fastened into the lance shaft. Leaphorn wondered how McGinnis had got his hands on them. But he didn’t ask.

  Obviously the anthropologists would guard such artifacts zealously, and obviously the way McGinnis had got them wouldn’t stand scrutiny. Leaphorn changed the subject, angling toward his main interest.

  Anybody come in and tell you they found an old helicopter?

  McGinnis laughed. That son-of-a-bitch is long gone, he said. If it ever flew into this country in the first place. He sipped again. Maybe it did come in here. The feds seemed to have that pinned down pretty good. But if it crashed, Ida had some of those Begay boys, or the Tsossies, or somebody in here long ago nosing around to see if there was a reward, or trying to pawn it to me, or selling spare parts, or something.

  Another thing, Leaphorn said. Mrs. Cigarette said Tso was worried about getting a sickness from his great-grandfathers ghost. That mean anything to you?

  Well, now, McGinnis said. Now, that’s interesting. You know who his great-grandfather was? He came from quite a line, Tso did.

  Who was it?

  Course he had four great-grandfathers, McGinnis said. But the one they talk about around here was a big man before the Long Walk. Lots of stories about him. They called him Standing Medicine. He was one of them that wouldn’t surrender when Kit Carson came through. One of that bunch with Chief Narbona and Ganado Mucho who fought it out with the army. Supposed to been a big medicine man. They claim he knew the whole Blessing Way, all seven days of it, and the Mountain Way, and several other sings.

  McGinnis poured another dollop of bourbon into his glass-raising the level carefully to the bottom of the Coca-Cola trademark. But I never heard anything about his ghost being any particular place or bothering people. He sampled the freshened drink, grimaced. God knows, though, he might be causing ghost sickness all over that country out there. It was time now, Leaphorn thought, for the crucial question.

  Last day or two you hear anything about a stranger with a big dog? A great big dog?

  A stranger?

  Or a Navajo, either.

  McGinnis shook his head. No. He laughed. Heard a Navajo Wolf story this morning, though. Feller from back on the plateau said a skinwalker killed his nephews sheepdogs at the Falling Rock water hole way out there on the plateau. But you’re talking about a real dog, ain’t you?

  A real one, Leaphorn said. But did this nephew see the witch?

  Not the way I heard it, McGinnis said. The dogs didn’t come back with the sheep. So the next day the boy went to see about it. He found em dead and the werewolf tracks where they’d been killed. McGinnis shrugged. You know how it goes. Pretty much the same old skinwalker story.

  Nothing about a stranger, then, Leaphorn said.

  McGinnis eyed Leaphorn carefully, watching his reaction. Well, now. We got us a stranger right here at Short Mountain. Got in early this morning. He paused with the storyteller mans talent for increasing the impact. A woman, he said.

  Leaphorn said nothing.

  Pretty young woman, McGinnis said, still watching Leaphorn. Big sports car. From Washington.

  You mean Theodora Adams? Leaphorn asked.

  McGinnis didn’t show his disappointment.

  You know all about her, then?

  A little bit, Leaphorn said. She’s the daughter of a doctor in the Public Health Service. I don’t know what the hell she’s doing here. Or care, for that matter. Whats she after? One of those anthropologists up the wash?

  McGinnis examined the level of bourbon in his glass, sloshed it gently, and examined Leaphorn out of the corner of his eye.

  She’s trying to find someone who can take her up to Hosteen Tsos hogan, McGinnis said.

  He grinned then. He’d finally gotten a reaction out of Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn.

  » 6 «

  Looking for Theodora Adams proved to be unnecessary. Joe Leaphorn emerged from the front door of the Short Mountain Trading Post and found Theodora Adams hurrying up, looking for him.

  You’re the policeman who drives that car, she told him. The smile was brilliant, a flashing white arch of perfect teeth in a very tanned perfect face. There’s something you could do for me again the smile if you would.

  Like what? Leaphorn asked.

  I have to get to the hogan of a man named Hosteen Tso, Theodora Adams said. I’ve found a man who knows how to get there, but my car wont go over that road. She glanced ruefully at the Corvette Stingray parked in the shade of the barn. Two young men were tinkering with it now. And then the full force of her eyes was again on Leaphorn. Its too low, she explained. The rocks hit the bottom.

  You want me to take you to the Tso hogan?

  Yes, she said. Her smile said please for her.

  Why do you want to go?

  The smile faded slightly. I have some business there.

  With Hosteen Tso?

  The smile left. Hosteen Tso is dead she said. You know that. You’re a policeman. Her eyes studied Leaphorns face, slightly hostile but mostly with frank, unabashed curiosity.

  Leaphorn remembered suddenly when he had first seen blue eyes like that. He bad gone to the boarding school at Kayenta with his uncle and cousin and there had been a white woman there with blue eyes who had stared at him. He had thought, at first, that eyes as odd as that must be blind. That woman, too, had stared at him as if he were an interesting object. On that same day, he remembered, he had seen his first bearded man something to a Navajo boy as curious as a winged snake but somehow the unaccustomed rudeness of those pale eyes had affected him more. He had always remembered it. And the memory, now, affected his response.

  Who’s your business with?

  That’s none of your business, Theodora Adams said. She took a half step away from him, stopped, turned back. I’m sorry, she said. Of course its your business. You’re a policeman. She made a deprecating face, and shrugged. Its just that its something very private. Nothing to do with the law and I simply cant talk about it. She smiled again, plaintively. I’m s
orry, she said.

  Her expression told Leaphorn that the regret was genuine. She was a remarkably handsome girl, high-breasted, slender, dressed in white pants and a blue shirt which exactly matched the color of her eyes. She looked expensive, Leaphorn thought, and competent and assured. She also looked utterly out of place at Short Mountain Trading Post.

  Do you know how to get to Tsos place?

  That man was going to show me. She pointed to the two young men at her car, one under it now apparently inspecting front-end damage-and the other squatted beside him. But we couldn’t get that damned Stingray over the rocks. She paused, her eyes intent on Leaphorns. I was going to pay him twenty-five dollars, she said. The statement hung there, not an offer, not a bribe, simply a statement for Leaphorn to consider and make what he wanted of. He considered it, and found it neatly done. The girl was smart.

  One thing I’ve got. Plenty of money, she said.

  The Navajo Tribal Police have a regulation against picking up hitchhikers, Leaphorn said.

  He turned it over in his mind. He would tell Largo his Theodora Adams was here and healthy. He would tell Largo where she wanted to go. He was almost sure Largo would tell him to take her to the Tso place, simply to find out what she wanted there. But maybe not.

  By asking Largo to find out about the welfare of Theodora Adams, Window Rock had, in an unofficial, unspoken way, made him responsible for it. Under the circumstances, Largo might not want her taken into that back country.

  Look, he said. How much do you know about Hosteen Tso?

  I know somebody killed him, if that’s what you mean. Last spring.

  And we don’t know who did it, Leaphorn said. So were interested in anybody who has business out there.

  My business doesn’t have anything to do with crime, Theodora Adams said. She looked amused. It doesn’t have anything to do with the law, or with the police. Its just personal business. And if you’re not willing to help me, Ill find somebody who will. And with that, she walked across the yard and disappeared into the trading post.