"When the dung beetle moves," Hosteen Nashibitti had told him, "know that something has moved it. And know that its movement affects the flight of the sparrow, and that the raven deflects the eagle from the sky, and that the eagle's stiff wing bends the will of the Wind People, and know that all of this affects you and me, and the flea on the prairie dog and the leaf on the cotton-wood." That had always been the point of the lesson. Interdependency of nature. Every cause has its effect. Every action its reaction. A reason for everything. In all things a pattern, and in this pattern, the beauty of harmony. Thus one learned to live with evil, by understanding it, by reading its cause. And thus one learned, gradually and methodically, if one was lucky, to always "go in beauty," to always look for the pattern, and to find it.
Leaphorn stabbed the cigarette butt against the rock, grinding it out with an angry gesture. There was no pattern here. Cata was dead without reason. George Bowlegs had not run when he should have run and then he had fled when he shouldn't have. Leaphorn stood and brushed off the seat of his khaki trousers, still thinking. What bothered him most, he realized, were not these large and important incongruities. It was smaller ones. Why had Cecil Bowlegs told him that Cata had stolen artifacts from the Early Man dig? There was no reason for Cecil to lie, and no reason for the anthropologists to lie in denying such a loss. Why did Cecil think George was running from a vengeful kachina if George had told Susanne he would be hunting a kachina? And what was that strange thing Leaphorn had seen at Jason's Fleece with the body of a man and the head of a bird? Could someone be wearing one of the masks of the Zu¤i kachina religion? To do so for a purpose outside the religion would surely be the worst sort of sacrilege. There was no possible answer to any of these questions.
Leaphorn began walking rapidly down the slope toward Zu¤i Village. The body would be there by now, the cause of death known. He would find out about that. And when there was time he would learn more about the Zu¤i religion. But before he did that, he would get Shorty Bowlegs sober enough to talk-even if he had to lock him up to do it.
Chapter Eight
Tuesday, December 2, 6:11 P.M.
THE HEADLIGHTS on Joe Leaphorn's Law and Order Division van lost themselves one moment in a blinding gust of reddish-gray dust and the next in the whiteness of a flurry of dry snowflakes. Driving required catching glimpses between gusts and flurries of the twisting, bumpy wagon track and-when it became abruptly invisible-remembering where the wheels would find it. With one tire already blown yesterday on this chancy trail to Shorty Bowlegs' hogan-and no spare left-Leaphorn was taking it very slowly. He was in no particular hurry. He had no real hope that Shorty Bowlegs, if Shorty Bowlegs was sober enough to talk more coherently now, could tell him anything very useful. It was simply that Bowlegs was the last untapped possibility. After Bowlegs there would be no place left to go. This was the ultimate dead end of the Cata affair and Leaphorn knew himself too well to consider avoiding it. All other possible sources of information had been tapped and the incongruities remained. They would give him no peace. A boy had been killed without reason. Leaphorn's rational mind would not accept this. Not even the grasshopper took wing without reason. His mind would worry at the rough edges of this like a tongue at a broken tooth. It would reject Cata killed without cause, George Bowlegs fleeing the scene of this crime a day later than reason said he should have fled the whole irrational business.
Leaphorn turned the carryall down the last slope toward the Bowlegs place. It slid with a bone-jarring thump into a rut. Leaphorn pronounced an explicit Navajo indecency which took in darkness, weather, himself, the Zu¤i tribe in general, and Ed Pasquaanti in particular. He swung the truck across the bare and beaten ground to park.
The headlights lit the Bowlegs brush arbor, flashed for a second on a pole sheep corral down the slope, flicked past the doorway of the Bowlegs hogan and the blue-shirted form in its doorway and stopped finally, as Leaphorn set the hand brake, focused on the gray-green foliage of a juniper. Leaphorn turned off the ignition but not the lights. He was relieved. Bowlegs was not only awake, but sober enough to be standing in the doorway, curious about his visitor.
Leaphorn shook out a cigarette, lit it, and waited. Navajo custom and good manners required the wait. The tradition had been born in the old days so that the ghosts which swarmed the reservation and followed travelers would wander impatiently away and not follow the guest into the host's hogan. Today it survived as much out of the respect for privacy of a scattered rural people as from the waning threat of the chindi. Without thinking of why he did it, Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn would wait in his truck until Shorty Bowlegs had put on his trousers or otherwise prepared to receive a visitor. And when Bowlegs was ready he would stand outside his hogan door so that Leaphorn would know it.
Leaphorn waited now. The wind shook the truck. It spoke in a dozen voices, whistling, hooting, rasping past cracks and corners and bends of metal. The defroster fan had died with the motor and his breath quickly misted the windshield. Outside spots of white showed where the dusting of dry snow drifted against rocks and eddied into the windbreak of the junipers. The flakes were still tiny, but there were more of them now, wind-driven through the headlight beams. When this squall line passed, a real snowstorm might develop. And it was desperately needed. Leaphorn waited, thinking of hungry cattle, dry stock tanks, and the penalties of drought; thinking of the long day behind him, of Cata's body on the table at the Black Rock BIA hospital-the doctor cleaning the sand from that great chopped wound which had almost severed head from body. An ax, perhaps, or a machete, swung with great force. The funeral had been within the hour. First a funeral Mass at the mission church in the village and then the ceremonial of the Badger kiva at the open grave. He had watched it from a distance, feeling that he was an intruder into something sad and private and sacred. Who, he wondered suddenly, would be the Fire God for the Shalako ceremonials now that the Fire God was dead? Leaphorn had no doubt that there would be a new Shulawitsi dancing flawless attendance on the Council of the Gods when the ceremonials began. He thought of that, and of where George Bowlegs might be taking shelter on this miserable night, and then-abruptly-he was thinking that it was taking far too long for Shorty Bowlegs to reappear at his hogan doorway.
Leaphorn pushed the van door open against the pressure of the wind, pulled his windbreaker collar around his face, and stepped out, staring at the hogan. It was totally dark now. Had it been when he drove up? Leaphorn remembered only his headlights flashing past its entrance, the figure frozen in that flicker of light. He had presumed it was Bowlegs looking out to see who was driving up on this bitter night. But now there was no sign of light around the plank door, none around the small uneven window Bowlegs had cut through the logs of his southeast wall. Would Bowlegs have gone back inside, blown out his kerosene lamp, and left his visitor sitting outside in the cold? Leaphorn thought back, remembering the Bowlegs of yesterday as a friendly man-too drunk to understand what Leaphorn was saying, or for coherent answers, but smiling a wide, wet smile, trying to get Leaphorn to sit, to join him in a drink, trying to be helpful.
Leaphorn stopped a moment beside the carryall, staring at the dark humped shape of the hogan, aware of the shrieking curses of the wind, of the evil ghosts of a thousand generations of Dinee who rode the night. And then he reached back inside the cab. He fished a flashlight out of the glove compartment and lifted his 30-30 from the rifle rack across the back window. Ten feet from the hogan door he stopped.
"Ya-ta-hey," he shouted. "Shorty Bowlegs, ya-ta-hey."
The wind whipped a mixture of dust and snow around the hogan, around Leaphorn's feet. The plank door moved, tapping at its crude casement. He stared at the door. In the dim reflection from the headlights he could barely detect the motion.
He flicked on the flashlight. The door was formed of five vertical planks, braced with one-by-four-inch board. Under the yellow light it hung motionless. The wind gusted again, hooting through the hogan's stovepipe smoke hole and speaking i
n a quarrelsome chorus of voices around the cracks and crevices of its logs. Now the door moved. Outward, then inward, tapping against its latch.
"Hello," Leaphorn shouted. "Shorty?" The wind voices of the hogan sank abruptly in pitch and volume, answering him with silence. Leaphorn moved beside the hogan wall. He pumped a shell into the 30-30 chamber, held the rifle on his right arm. With his left hand he pulled up the doorlatch and jerked outward. The wind helped, sucking the door open and banging it back against the log wall opposite Leaphorn.
Inside nothing moved. The flashlight beam reflected from the galvanized tin of a washtub against the back wall, lit a scattered jumble of cooking pots and food supplies, and lingered on clothing (boy-sized bluejeans, three shirts, a nondescript blue cloth, assorted underwear) which hung from the hogan's blanket rope. Behind the clothing, shadows moved on the rough log wall. Anything there? Nothing visible. Leaphorn moved the light clockwise through the hogan. It passed three empty bedrolls, all in disarray, passed a battered metal chest with its drawers hanging open, passed a rope-tied bundle of sheep hides, and stopped finally on the arm of a man. The arm extended limply on the packed earthen floor, the dark wrist thrust out of a sleeve that was khaki (not dark blue), the fingers relaxed, their tips touching the earth.
A stinging flurry of dry snowflakes whipped past Leaphorn's face. Again the wind spoke loud around the hogan, raising an obbligato mixture of hoots and shrieks. The flashlight now lit black hair-neatly parted, a braid tied with a string, a cloth headband which had been a faded pink but now was dyed-like the hair beneath it-a fresh bloody crimson.
Without knowing it, Leaphorn had been holding his breath. Now that he had found Shorty Bowlegs, he released it with a sound something like a sigh. He stood for a moment looking carefully past the hogan, studying the dim, wind-twisted shapes of the pi¤ons and junipers which surrounded it, examining the shape of the outbuildings. Listening. But the wind made listening useless.
He stepped into the hogan and squatted on his heels. He stared first at the face that had been Bowlegs' and then examined the hogan. Shorty Bowlegs had been killed with a blow struck from behind with something heavy and sharp. The same weapon that had killed Cata? Swung by the figure in the blue shirt (a man, he thought, without knowing why he thought it) he had seen at the doorway. And where was that man now? Not more than five minutes away, but with wind, snow, dust, and darkness making both ears and eyes useless, he might as well be on another planet. Leaphorn cursed himself. He had seen this killer, and he had sat daydreaming in his truck while the man walked away.
Leaphorn tested the blood on Bowlegs' hair with a tentative fingertip. Sticky. Bowlegs had been struck at least thirty minutes before Leaphorn's arrival. The killer had apparently killed Bowlegs first and then ransacked the hogan. Had he come to kill Bowlegs and, with that done, searched the family's belongings? Or had he come to make the search and killed Bowlegs to make it possible? To search for what? Everything that Bowlegs had accumulated in perhaps forty years of living was littered on the hogan floor. Add it together-the clothing, the supplies, the sheepherder's tools-and it might have cost five hundred dollars, new, at inflated trading post prices. Now it was worn, used. By whiteman's standards, Leaphorn thought, Bowlegs had a net worth of maybe one hundred dollars. The white world's measure of his life. And what would the Navajo measure be? The Dinee made a harder demand-that man find his place in the harmony of things. There, too, Shorty Bowlegs had failed.
Outside the hogan, Leaphorn snapped off the carryall headlights and began a search in gradually widening circles. He worked slowly, conscious that the killer-unlikely as it seemed-might still be near. He looked for tracks-human, horse, or vehicle-using his flashlight sparingly in places where they might be preserved from the wind. He found nothing very conclusive. His own van's tires showed up in several places where the gusts had not erased them, but no other vehicle had apparently come near the hogan recently. Having established that, he made a careful inspection of the pen in a shallow arroyo below the hogans which had served as the Bowlegs stables. Two horses had been kept there. The tracks of one-poorly shod-were only a few hours old. The other had apparently not been around for perhaps a day. Leaphorn squatted on the loamy earth, hunched against the icy wind, thinking about what that might mean.
The wind rose and fell, now whipping the limbs of the junipers into frantic thrashing, now dying into an almost silent lull. Leaphorn snapped off the light and crouched motionless. The wind had carried an incongruous sound. He listened. It was buried now under the thousand sounds of the storm. And then he heard it again.
A bell. And then another, slightly lower in pitch. And a third with a tinny tinkle. Leaphorn moved swiftly toward a gnarled juniper barely visible in the darkness, toward the sound. He stood behind the tree, waiting. The bells approached, and with them the sound of a horse. The dim shape of a white goat tinkled past the tree, followed by a straggling stream of goats and then an almost solid mass of sheep. Finally, there came the horse, and on it a small shape, huddled against the cold.
Leaphorn stepped from behind the juniper.
"Ya-ta-hey," he shouted. "Cecil?"
Chapter Nine
Tuesday, December 2, 10:15 P.M.
IT WAS ALMOST two hours later when Leaphorn reached Zu¤i and left Cecil with a young Franciscan brother at Saint Anthony's school. He had told Cecil as gently as he could that someone had struck his father on the back of the head and that Shorty Bowlegs was dead. He had radioed New Mexico State Police at Gallup to make this homicide a matter of record and the dispatcher had promised to notify Zu¤i Police and the McKinley County sheriffs office. That would assure that the routine would be properly followed, although Leaphorn was sure that whoever had killed Shorty Bowlegs would not be stupid enough to be captured at a roadblock. With these official duties done, Leaphorn had helped Cecil unsaddle the horse and secure the sheep in the brush corral. He had left Cecil in the cab of the truck then, with the motor running and the heater on high, while he recovered the boy's bedroll and odds and ends of spare clothing from the hogan. He put these-a single shirt, three pairs of cheap socks, and underwear-in an empty grocery sack. He handed the sack through the truck window.
"I didn't find any pants."
"Just got these I got on," Cecil said.
"Anything else you want out of there?"
Cecil stared over his shoulder at the hogan. Leaphorn wondered what he was thinking. Two hours ago when he had left to bring in the sheep that humped shape had been home. Warm. Occupied by a man who, drunk or not, was his father. Now the hogan was cold, hostile to him, occupied not by Shorty Bowlegs but by Shorty's ghost-a ghost which would in Navajo fashion embody only those things in his father's nature which were weak, evil, angry.
"Ought to get George's stuff out of there, I guess," Cecil said. He paused. "What do you think-would they have ghost sickness on them yet? And I've got a lunchbox. You think we should leave that stuff?"
"I'll get 'em. And tomorrow we'll get somebody to come out here and take care of the body and fix up the hogan. There won't be any ghost sickness."
"Just the lunchbox for me," Cecil said. "That's all I got."
It occurred to Leaphorn, back inside the hogan, that this would be an unusually complicated death. No relatives around to arrange for disposal of the body, and to break a hole through a hogan wall to release Shorty's ghost for its infinite wandering, and to nail shut the door as a warning to all that here stood a hogan contaminated by death, and-finally-to find the proper Singer, and arrange the proper Sing, to cure any of those who might have been somehow touched and endangered by this death. More important, there was no surrounding family to absorb the survivors-to engulf a child with the love of uncles and aunts and cousins, to give Cecil the security of a new hogan and a new family. The family to do this must be somewhere on the Ramah reservation. It would be part of Shorty's family. Since Cecil's mother was no good, it would be better to return him to the outfit of his father's mother. The people at th
e Ramah chapter house would know where to find them. And for Leaphorn there then remained the matter of finding Cecil's big brother.
Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 02 - Dance Hall of the Dead Page 6