“Got to go,” she said, and turned, then turned back again. “Jim,” she said, “tired or not, you look fine.”
“You, too,” Chee said. She did. The classic, perfect beauty you see on the cover of Vogue, or on any of the fashion magazines.
Chee leaned against the wall and watched her walk down the hail, around the corner and out of sight, wishing he had thought of something more romantic to say than “You, too.” Wishing he knew what to do about her. About them. Wishing he knew whether he could trust her. Wishing life wasn’t so damned complicated.
It seemed obvious to Leaphorn that the person most likely to tell him something useful about Catherine Anne Pollard was Richard Krause, her boss and the biologist in charge of rooting out the cause of the reservation’s most recent plague outbreak. A lifetime spent looking for people in the big emptiness of the Four Corners and several futile telephone calls had taught Leaphorn that Krause would probably be off somewhere unreachable. He had tried to call him as soon as he returned to Window Rock from Santa Fe. He’d tried again yesterday before driving back from Flagstaff. By now he had the number memorized as well as on the redial button. He picked up the telephone and punched it.
“Public Health,” a male voice said. “Krause.”
Leaphorn identified himself. “Mrs. Vanders has asked me—”
“I know,” Krause said. “She called me. Maybe she’s right. To start getting worried, I mean.”
“Miss Pollard’s not back yet, then?”
“No,” Krause said. “Miss Pollard still hasn’t shown up for work. Nor has she bothered to call in or communicate in any way. But I have to tell you that’s what you learn to expect from Miss Pollard. Rules were made for other people.”
“Any word on the vehide she was driving?”
“Not to me,” Krause said. “And to tell the truth, I’m getting a little bit concerned myself. At first I was just sore at her. Cathy is a tough gal to work with. She’s very into doing her own thing her own way, if you know what I’m saying. I just thought she’d seen something that needed doing worse than what I’d told her to do. Sort of reassigned herself, you know.”
“I know,” Leaphorn said, thinking back to when Jim Chee had been his assistant. Still, as much trouble as Chee had been, it had been a pleasure to see him yesterday. He was a good man and unusually bright.
“You still think that might be a possibility? That Pollard might be off working on some project of her own and just not bothering to tell anyone about it?”
“Maybe,” Krause said. “It wouldn’t bother
her to let me stew awhile, but not this long.” He’d be happy to tell Leaphorn what he knew about Pollard and her work, but not today. Today he was tied up, absolutely snowed under. With Pollard away, he was doing both their jobs. But tomorrow morning he could make some time—and the earlier the better.
Which left Leaphorn with nothing to do but wait for Chee’s promised call. But Chee would be driving back to Tuba City from Flag this morning, and then he wouldn’t get into his files until he dealt with whatever problems had piled up in his absence. If Chee found something interesting in the files, he’d probably call after noon. Most likely there’d be no reason to call.
Leaphorn had never been good at waiting for the telephone to ring, or for anything else. He toasted two slices of bread, applied margarine and grape jelly, and sat in his kitchen, eating and staring at the Indian Country map mounted on the wall above the table.
The map was freckled with the heads of pins— red, white, blue, black, yellow, and green, plus a variety of shapes he’d reverted to when the colors available in pinheads had been exhausted. It had been accumulating pins on his office wall since early in his career. When he retired, the fellow who took over his office suggested he might want to keep it, and he’d said he couldn’t imagine why. But keep it he had, and almost every pin in it revived a memory.
The first ones (plain steel-headed seamstress pins) he’d stuck in to keep track of places and dates where people had reported seeing a missing aircraft, the problem that then had been occupying his thoughts. The red ones had been next, establishing the delivery pattern of a gasoline tanker truck that was also hauling narcotics to customers on the Checkerboard Reservation. The most common ones were black, representing witchcraft reports. Personally, Leaphom had lost all faith in the existence of these skinwalkers in his freshman year at Arizona State, but never in the reality of the problem that belief in them causes.
He’d come home for the semester break, full of new-won college sophistication and cynicism. He’d talked Jack Greyeyes into joining him to check out a reputed home base of skinwalkers and thus prove themselves liberated from tradition. They drove south from Shiprock past Rol-Hay Rock and Table Mesa to the volcanic outcrop of ugly black basalt where, according to the whispers in their age group, skinwalkers met in an underground room to perform the hideous initiation that turned recruits into witches. It was a rainy winter night, which cut the risk that someone would see them and accuse them of being witches themselves. Now, more than four decades later, winter rains still produced memorial shivers along Leaphorn’s spine.
That night remained one of Leaphorn’s most vivid memories. The darkness, the cold rain soaking through his jacket, the beginnings of fear. Greyeyes had decided when they’d reached the outcrop’s base that this was a crazy idea.
“I’ll tell you what,” Greyeyes had said. “Let’s not do it, and say we did.”
So Leaphorn had taken custody of the flash-light, watched Greyeyes fade into the darkness, and waited for his courage to return. It didn’t. He had stood there looking up at the great jumbled hump of rock. Suddenly he had been confronted with both nerve-racking fear and the sure knowledge that what he did now would determine the kind of man he would be. He’d torn his pant leg and bruised his knee on the way up. He’d found the gaping hole the whispers had described, shone his flash into it without locating a bottom, and then climbed down far enough to see where it led. The rumors had described a carpeted room littered with the fragments of corpses. He had found a drifted collection of blown sand and last summer’s turnbleweeds.
That had confirmed his skepticism about skin-walker mythology, just as his career in the Navajo Tribal Police had confirmed his belief in what the evil skinwalkers symbolized. He’d lost any lingering doubts about that in his rookie year. He had laughed off a warning that a Navajo oil-field pumper believed two neighbors had witched his daughter, thus causing her fatal illness.
As soon as the four-day mourning period tradition decrees had ended, the pumper had killed the witches with his shotgun.
He thought about that now as he chewed his toast. Eight black pins formed a cluster in the general vicinity of that north-reaching outcrop of Black Mesa that included Yells Back Butte. Why so many there? Probably because that area had twice been the source of bubonic plague cases and once of the deadly hantavirus. Witches offer an easy explanation for unexplained illnesses. To the north, Short Mountain and the Short Mountain Wash country had attracted another cluster of black pins. Leaphorn was pretty sure that was due to John McGinnis, operator of the Short Mountain Trading Post. Not that the pins meant more witch problems around Short Mountain. They represented McGinnis’s remarkable talent as a collector and broadcaster of gossip. The old man had a special love for skinwalker tales, and his Navajo customers, knowing his weakness, brought him all the skinwalker sightings and witching reports they could collect. But any sort of gossip was good enough for the old man. Thinking that, Leaphorn reached for his new edition of the Navajo Communications Company telephone directory.
The Short Mountain Trading Post number was no longer listed. He dialed the Short Mountain Chapter House. Was the trading post still operating? The woman who had picked up the telephone chuckled. “Well,” she said, “I’d guess you’d say more or less.”
“Is John McGinnis still there? Still alive?”
The chuckle became a laugh. “Oh, yes indeed,” she said. “He’s still
going strong. Don’t the bilagaana have a saying that only the good die young?”
Joe Leaphorn finished his toast, put a message on his answering machine for Chee in case he did call, and drove his pickup out of Shiprock heading northwest across the Navajo Nation. He was feeling much more cheerful.
The years that had passed since he’d visited Short Mountain hadn’t changed it much—certainly not for the better. The parking area in front was still hard-packed clay, too dry and dense to encourage weeds. The old GMC truck he’d parked next to years ago still rested wheel-less on blocks, slowly rusting away. The 1968 Chevy pickup parked in the shade of a juniper at the corner of the sheep pens looked like the one McGinnis had always driven, and a faded sign nailed to the hay barn still proclaimed THIS STORE FOR SALE, INQUIRE WITHIN. But today the benches on the shady porch were empty, with drifts of trash under them. The windows looked even dustier than Leaphorn remembered. In fact, the trading post looked deserted, and the gusty breeze chasing tumbleweeds and dust past the porch added to the sense of desolation.
Leaphorn had an uneasy feeling, tinged with sadness, that the woman at the chapter house was wrong. That even tough old John McGinrns had proved vulnerable to too much time and too many disappointments.
The breeze was the product of a cloud Leaphorn had been watching build up over Black Mesa for the last twenty miles. It was too early in the summer to make a serious rain likely but—as bad as the road back to the highway was—even a shower could present a problem down in Short Mountain Wash. Leaphorn climbed out of his pickup to the rumble of thunder and hurried toward the store.
John McGinnis appeared in the doorway, holding the screen door open, staring out at him with his shock of white hair blowing across his forehead and looking twenty pounds too thin for the overalls that engulfed him.
“Be damned,” McGinnis said. “Guess it’s true what I heard about them finally getting you off the police force. Thought I had me a customer for a while. Didn’t they let you keep the uniform?”
“Ya’eeh te’h,” Leaphorn said. “It’s good to see you.” And he meant it. That surprised him a little. Maybe, like McGinnis, the loneliness was beginning to get to him.
“Well, damnit, come on in so I can get this door closed and keep the dirt from blowing in,”
McGinnis said. “And let me get you something to wet your whistle. You Navajos act like you’re born in a barn.”
Leaphorn followed the old man through the musty darkness of the store, noticing that McGinnis was more stooped than he had remembered him, that he walked with a limp, that many of the shelves lining the walls were half-empty, that behind the dusty glass where McGinnis kept pawned jewelry very little was being offered, that the racks that once had displayed an array of the slightly gaudy rugs and saddle blankets that the Short Mountain weavers produced were now empty. Which will die first, Leaphorn wondered, the trading post or the trader?
McGinnis ushered him into the back room— his living room, bedroom and kitchen—and waved him into a recliner upholstered with worn red velour. He transferred ice cubes from his refrigerator into a Coca-Cola glass, filled it from a two-liter Pepsi bottle, and handed it to Leaphorn. Then he collected a bourbon bottle and a plastic measuring cup from his kitchen table, seated himself on a rocking chair across from Leaphorn, and began carefully pouring himself a drink.
“As I remember it,” he said while he dribbled in the bourbon, “you don’t drink hard liquor. If I’m wrong about that, you tell me and I’ll get you something better than soda pop.”
“This is fine,” Leaphorn said.
McGinnis held the measuring cup up, exam-
ined it against the light from the dusty window, shook his head, and poured a few drops carefully back into the bottle. He inspected the level again, seemed satisfied, and took a sip.
“You want to do a little visiting first?” McGinnis asked. “Or do you want to get right down to what you came here for?”
“Either way,” Leaphorn said. “I’m in no hurry. I’m retired now. Just a civilian. But you know that.”
“I heard it,” McGinrns said. “I’d retire myself if I could find somebody stupid enough to buy this hellhole.”
“Is it keeping you pretty busy?” Leaphorn asked, trying to imagine anyone offering to buy the place. Even tougher trying to imagine McGinnis selling it if someone did. Where would the old man go? What would he do when he got there?
McGinnis ignored the question. “Well,” he said, “if you came by to get some gasoline, you’re out of luck. The dealers charge me extra for hauling it way out here and I have to tack a little bit on to the price to pay for that. Just offered gasoline anyway to convenience these hard cases that still live around here. But they took to getting their tanks filled up when they get to Tuba or Page, so the gas I got hauled out to make it handy for ’em just sat there and evaporated. So to hell with ’em. I don’t fool with it anymore.”
McGinnis had rattled that off in his scratchy whiskey voice—an explanation he’d given often enough to have it memorized. He looked at Leaphorn, seeking understanding.
“Can’t say I blame you,” Leaphorn said.
“Well, you oughtn’t to. When the bastards would forget and let the gauge get down to empty, they’d come in, air up their tires, fill the radiator with my water, wash their windshield with my rags, and buy two gallons. Just enough to get ’em into one of them discount stations.”
Leaphorn shook his head, expressing disapproval.
“And want credit for the gas,” McGinnis said, and took another long, thirsty sip.
“But I noticed driving in that you still have a tank up on your loading rack. With a hand pump on it. You keep that just for your own pickup?”
McGinnis rocked a little while, considering the question. And probably wondering, Leaphorn thought, if Leaphorn had-noticed that the old man’s pickup was double-tanked, like most empty-country vehicles, and wouldn’t need many refills.
“Well, hell,” McGinnis said. “You know how folks are. Come in here with a dry tank and seventy miles to a station, you got to have something for ’em.”
“I guess so,” Leaphorn said.
“If you haven’t got any gas to give ’em, then they just hang around and waste your time gossiping. Then they want to use your telephone to get some kinfolks to come and bring ’em a can.” He glowered at Leaphorn, took another sip of bourbon. “You ever know a Navajo to be in a hurry? You got ’em underfoot for hours. Drinking up your water and running you out of ice cubes.”
McGinnis’s face was slightly pink—embarrassment caused by his admission of humanity. “So finally I just quit paying the bills and the telephone company cut me off. I figured keeping a little gasoline was cheaper.”
“Probably,” Leaphorn said.
McGinnis was glowering at him again, making sure that Leaphorn wouldn’t suspect some socially responsible purpose in this decision.
“What’d you come out here for anyway? You just got a lot of time to waste now you’re not a cop?”
“I wondered if you ever had any customers named Tijinney?”
“Tijinney?” McGinrns looked thoughtful.
“They had a place over in what used to be the Joint Use Reservation. Over by the northwest corner of Black Mesa. Right on the Navajo—Hopi border.”
“I didn’t know there was any of that outfit left,” McGinnis said. “Sickly bunch, as I remember it. Somebody always coming in here for me to take ’em to the doctor over at Tuba or the clinic at Many Farms. And they did a lot of business with old Margaret Cigaret and some of the other shamans, getting curing ceremonials done. They was always coming in here trying to get me to donate a sheep to help feed folks at the sings.”
“You remember that map I used to keep?” Leaphorn asked. “Where I’d record things I needed to remember? I looked at it this morning and I noticed I’d marked down a lot of skin-walker gossip over there where they lived. You think all that sickness would account for that?”
“Sure
,” McGinnis said. “But I got a feeling I know what this is leading up to. That Kinsman boy the Hopi killed, wasn’t that over there on the old Tijmnney grazing lease?”
“I think so,” Leaphorn said.
McGinnis was holding his measuring cup up to the light, squinting at the level. He poured in another ounce or two of bourbon. “Just ‘think so’?” he said. “I heard the federals had that business all locked up. Didn’t that young cop that used to work with you catch the man right when he did it? Caught him right in the act, the way I heard it.”
“You mean Jim Chee? Yeah, he caught a Hopi named Jano.”
“So what are you working on out here?” McGinnis asked. “I know you ain’t just visiting. Aren’t you supposed to be retired? What’re you up to? Working the other side?”
Leaphorn shrugged. “I’m just trying to understand some things.”
“Well, now, is that a fact?” McGinnis said. “I was guessing you were trying to find some way to prove that Hopi boy didn’t do the killing.”
“Why would you think that?”
“Cowboy Dashee was in here just the other day. You remember Cowboy? Deputy with the sheriff’s office?”
“Sure.”
“Well, Cowboy says the Jano boy didn’t do it. He says Chee got the wrong fda.”
Leaphorn shrugged, thinking that Jano was probably kinfoiks with Dashee, or a member of his kiva. The Hopis lived in a much smaller world than the Navajos. “Did Cowboy tell you who was the right fda?”
McGinrns had stopped rocking. He was staring at Leaphorn, looking puzzled.
“I was guessing wrong, wasn’t I? Are you going to tell me what you’re up to?”
“I am seeing if I can find out what happened to a young woman who worked for the Indian Health Service. She was checking on plague cases. Drove out of Tuba City more than a week ago and she still hasn’t come back.”
McGinnis had been rocking, holding his measuring cup in his left hand, left elbow on the rocker’s arm, his forearm moving just enough to compensate for the motion—keeping the bourbon from splashing, keeping the surface level. But he wasn’t watching his drink. He was staring out the dusty window. Not out of it, Leaphorn realized. McGinnis was watching a medium-sized spider working on a web between the window frame and a high shelf. He stopped rocking, pushed himself creakily out of the chair. “Look at that,” he said. “The sonsabitches are slow learners.”
The First Eagle Page 7