Ingles chuckled. "I doubt it," he said. "It was hardly the material for murder."
"But could you tell me what it was?"
"I don't think I'd tell a Zu¤i," Ingles said. "But you're a Navajo." He smiled. "Ernesto thought maybe he had violated a Zu¤i taboo. But he wasn't sure, and he was nervous about it, and he didn't want to admit anything to anyone in his kiva yet, and he just wanted to talk to a friend about it," Ingles said. "I was that friend."
"What taboo?"
"Children. anyone not yet old enough to be initiated into the Zu¤i religion society aren't supposed to be told about the personifiers," Ingles said. "You know about that?"
"Something about it."
"Well, in Zu¤i mythology, the Council of the Gods-or whatever you want to call the spirits of those drowned children-would come back to the village each year. They'd bring rain, crops, blessings of all sorts, dance with the people, and teach them the right way of doing things. But it always happened that some of the Zu¤is would follow them when they left to return to the Dance Hall of the Dead. And when you followed, you died. This was too bad, and the kachinas didn't want it to keep happening, so they told the Zu¤is that they would come no more. Instead the Zu¤is should make sacred masks representing them, and valuable men of the kivas and the various fetish societies would be selected to impersonate various spirits. The kachinas would come only in spirit. They would be visible, I've been told, to certain sorcerers. But anyone else who saw them would die. Now, this arrangement between the kachinas and the Zu¤is was a secret arrangement. Only those initiated into the religion were to know of it. The children were not to be told."
Leaphorn's attention had been split. He heard Ingles' slow, precise voice, but his eyes were studying the murals that spread down the walls of the mission. Against the blank white plaster were the Dancing Gods of the Zu¤is, most of them man-sized and manlike, except for the grotesque masks, which gave them heads like monstrous birds. Only one was smaller, a figure of black spotted with red, and one was much larger-just over their heads by the railing of the choir loft was the giant figure of the Shalako, a nine-foot-high pyramid topped by a tiny head and supported by human legs. This was the "messenger bird" of the gods.
"That's what Ernesto was worried about," Ingles was saying. "He'd told George that he would be the personifier of Shulawitsi and he was worrying about whether that had broken the taboo.
"There." The priest pointed at the small black figure leading the procession of kachinas down the wall. "The little black one in the spotted mask is Shulawitsi, the Little Fire God. He's always impersonated by a boy. It's terribly hard work-exercises, running, physical conditioning, memorizing chants, memorizing dances. It's the highest possible honor a child can receive from his people, but it's an ordeal. They miss a lot of school."
"Telling George about it-had that violated the taboo?"
"I don't know, really," Father Ingles said. "George would have been initiated two or three years ago if he was a Zu¤i-so he wasn't a child in the way the myth means and he certainly would have already known that kachinas in the Shalako ceremonials are being impersonated by the men who live here. But on the other hand, he hadn't been formally initiated into the cult secrets. The way it's explained in the myth, this Zu¤i boy tells the little children deliberately, to spoil the ceremonial for them, because he's angry-and the anger is part of the taboo violation. It is forbidden to harbor any anger in any period of ceremonialism. Anyway, the Council of the Gods send the Salamobia to punish the boy." Ingles pointed to the fourth kachina in the mural-a muscular figure armed with a whip of yucca, its beaked head surmounted by a pointed plume of feathers, its eyes ferocious. Leaphorn's eyes had lingered on it earlier, caught by something familiar. Now he knew what it was. This was the same beaked mask he had seen two nights earlier, reflecting the moonlight behind the hogan at Jason's Fleece.
"What was the punishment?" Leaphorn asked.
"The Salamobia chopped off his head with a machete-right in the plaza out here-and played football with it." Ingles laughed. "Most of the Zu¤i mythology is humane and gentle, but that one's as bad as one of the Grimms' fairy tales."
"Do you know how Ernesto was killed?"
Ingles looked surprised. "He bled to death, didn't he? I presumed he'd been knifed."
"Someone chopped him across the neck with a machete," Leaphorn said. "They almost cut his head off."
Chapter Fourteen
Thursday, December 4, 10:30 AM.
LEAPHORN HAD BEEN UP since dawn, making his third visit to the Bowlegs hogan. Around the brush corral he had examined the hoofprints of the horse George Bowlegs had taken, memorizing the nature of the horseshoes and every split and crack in the hooves. The body of Shorty Bowlegs was gone now. Buried by one of the Zu¤is for whom he had herded, Leaphorn guessed, or taken by O'Malley for whatever post-mortem magic the FBI laboratory technologists might wish to perform in Albuquerque. The livestock was gone, too, but the worldly goods of Shorty Bowlegs remained inside-made untouchable to Navajos by ghost sickness. Their disarray had been increased by a third search, this one by the federals.
Leaphorn stood at the doorway and thoughtfully inspected the jumble. Something held him here-a feeling that he was forgetting something, or overlooking something, leaving something undone. But whatever it was, it eluded him now. He wondered if O'Malley had found anything informative. If the case broke and the Albuquerque FBI office issued a statement explaining how the arrest had been made, Leaphorn wouldn't be told. He'd read about it in the Albuquerque Journal or the Gallup Independent. Leaphorn considered this fact without rancor as something natural as the turn of the seasons. At the moment six law-enforcement agencies were interested in the affair at Zu¤i (if one counted the Bureau of Indian Affairs Law and Order Division, which was watching passively). Each would function as its interests dictated that it must. Leaphorn himself, without conscious thought, would influence his actions to the benefit of the Dinee if Navajo interests were at stake. Orange Naranjo, he knew, would do his work honestly and faithfully with full awareness that his good friend and employer, the sheriff of McKinley County, was seeking reelection. Pasquaanti was responsible first to laws centuries older than the whiteman's written codes. Highsmith, whose real job was traffic safety, would do as little as possible. And O'Malley would make his decisions with that ingrained FBI awareness that the rewards lay in good publicity, and the sensible attitude that other agencies were competitors for that publicity
Leaphorn wasted a few moments considering why the FBI would accept jurisdiction in such a chancy affair. Usually the FBI would move into marginal areas only if someone somewhere was sure his batting average could be helped by a successful prosecution. Or if the case involved whatever held high agency priority of the season-and that these days would be either radical politics or narcotics. The presence of Baker said narcotics figured somewhere, and the attitude of O'Malley seemed to suggest that Baker had leads the federals weren't willing to share. Leaphorn pondered what these leads might be, drew a total blank, climbed back into his carryall, and started the motor. Behind him, in the rear-view mirror, he noticed the plank door of Shorty Bowlegs' hogan move. Shorty's malicious ghost, perhaps, or just the same gusty morning breeze that whipped an eddy of dust around the logs.
Following the directions Father Ingles had given him, Leaphorn picked up the gravel road that led to the Zu¤i Tribal Sawmill back in the Cibola National Forest, continued on it to the Fence Lake road, turned northward past the prehistoric Yellow House Ruins to N.M. 53. The highway, as usual, was empty. As he approached the Black Rock airstrip a single-engine plane took off, banked above the highway in front of him, and climbed over Corn Mountain, heading eastward. Passing through the old village of Zu¤i he slowed, thinking he might make the three-block detour to the Zu¤i police station to learn if anything had developed overnight. He suppressed the impulse. If anything important had happened, it would have been known at the communications center at the Ramah chapter house, where h
e had spent the night. And he wasn't in the mood for talking to O'Malley or to Baker, or to Pasquaanti, or to anyone. O'Malley had told him to find Bowlegs. He would find Bowlegs if he could because his curiosity demanded it. And now for the first time since he'd been here there was something to work on. A direction. George had left his family hogan with the horse Monday night. The distance to the lake would be maybe fifty miles. If George had taken the most direct route he would angle across the Zu¤i reservation, probably pick up the Zu¤i Wash about at the Arizona state line, and then follow this southwest-ward toward U.S. Highway 666. The country was rough, sloping irregularly away from the Continental Divide, which rose to almost eight thousand feet east of the reservation, toward that great inland depression which the maps called the Painted Desert. But the only barriers were natural ones. No more than two or three fences, Leaphorn guessed, in a day-and-a-half horseback ride.
Leaphorn's plan was simple. He would drive as close as he could get to the location of the lake and then begin looking for Bowlegs' tracks. He felt good about it, anticipating the pleasure of some solid accomplishment after three days of frustrations.
On the radio, a slightly nasal disk jockey was promoting a sky-diving exhibition at the Yah-Ta-Hey Trading Post and playing country-western records. Leaphorn flicked the tuning knob, got a guttural voice speaking alternately in English and Apache. He listened a moment, picking up an occasional word. It was a preacher from the San Carlos Apache reservation, one hundred miles to the south. "The good book says it to us," the man was saying. "The inheritance of the sinner is as the waterless desert." Leaphorn turned down the volume. A good line, he thought, for a year of drought.
The narrow asphalt narrowed even more, its gravel shoulders turning to weeds, and N.M. 53 abruptly became Arizona 61 at the border. Something was nagging at the corner of Leaphorn's consciousness, a vague thought which evaporated when he tried to capture it. It made him uneasy.
At the intersection with U.S. Highway 666, Leaphorn saw Susanne. She was standing north of the junction, a flour sack on the ground beside her, looking small and cold and frail, and pretending-after the first quick glance-not to notice the Navajo Police carryall. Leaphorn hesitated. He didn't want company today. He had looked forward to a day alone to restore the spirit. On the other hand, he was curious. And he found himself remarkably fond of this girl. He didn't want her to simply disappear. He pulled the carryall off the pavement and stopped beside her.
"Where you going?"
"I'm hitchhiking," she said.
"I see that. But where?"
"North. Up to Interstate Forty." She shook her head. "I guess I don't really know exactly. I'm going to decide whether to go east or west after I get to the Interstate."
"I think I know how to find George," Leaphorn said. "That's where I'm going now. To try. If you've got time you could help."
"I couldn't help."
"You're his friend," Leaphorn said. "He's almost certain to see me before I see him. He'll figure I'm after him so he'll hide. But if he sees you, he'll know it's all right."
"I wish I was sure it was all right myself," she said. But when he opened the door, she put the flour sack behind the seat and got into the cab beside him. He did a U-turn and started southward down 666. The sign at the intersection said ST. JOHNS 29 MILES.
"We're going south toward the place where Zu¤i Wash goes under the highway," Leaphorn said. "About fifteen or sixteen miles. Before we get there, there's a ranch gate. We're going to pull in there and put this truck out of the way someplace handy, and then do some walking."
Susanne said nothing. The hilltop view stretched twenty miles. The country was mostly undulating hills, but far to the south the great tableland of the Zu¤i reservation extended, broken low mesas with scrubby brush timber on top and barren erosion below.
As he had guessed, Susanne had had no breakfast. He pointed to the grocery sack he had picked up at the store in Ramah.
"What happened to you yesterday? When Isaacs came to talk to you, you were gone."
"I went back to the commune. It was just the way I told you, wasn't it? Ted couldn't do anything? And my being there just made it harder for him?"
Leaphorn decided not to comment on that.
"So why did you change your mind about staying at the commune?"
"Halsey changed it for me. He said I was attracting too much police."
He noticed she was eating hungrily. Not just no breakfast, he thought. Probably no supper, either. She had folded up the cuff of her denim shirt and from it the frayed gray sleeve of a wool undershirt extended, covering the back of her narrow, fragile hand. As she ate, rapidly and wordlessly, Leaphorn saw that the skin between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand bore the puckered white of old scar tissue. It was an ugly, disfiguring shape. Whatever had caused it had burned through the skin right into the muscle fiber.
"So Halsey kicked you out?"
"He said to get my stuff together and this morning he gave me a ride out to the highway." She looked out of the window, away from him. "I was right about Ted, wasn't I? There wasn't anything he could do."
"You were right about that situation," he said. "Isaacs explained it the same way you did. He said Reynolds would fire him if anybody stayed there with him."
"There's just no way he could possibly do it," she said. "This is Ted's really big hope. He's going to be famous after this. You know, he's never been nothing but poor. Him and his whole family. And this is Ted's chance. He's never had a thing."
It sounded, Leaphorn thought, as if Susanne was trying to persuade both of them.
"He just couldn't do it," she said. "No way he could do it."
Leaphorn found the ranch gate Father Ingles had described about a mile and a half up the slope from Zu¤i Wash. A weather-bleached sign was nailed to the post. The message it had once proclaimed-"Posted, Keep Out" or "Shut the Gate"-had long since been erased by the sandblasting of spring dust storms. Three coyote skins hung beside it, the gray dead hair riffling in the breeze.
"Why do they do that?" Susanne asked. "Stick 'em up on the fence?"
"The coyotes? I guess it's for the same reason white men put an animal's head on their wall. Shows everybody you got the machismo to kill him." The Navajo word for Hosteen Coyote was ma ii. He was the trickster, the joker, the subject of a thousand Navajo jokes, children's stories, and myths. He was often man's ally in the struggle to survive, and always the bane of a society which herded sheep. A Navajo would kill a lamb-killer if he could. It was a deed done with proper apology-not something to be flaunted on a roadside fence.
Leaphorn drove very slowly, keeping his wheels off the dirt track to cut the risk of raising dust. Each time the track branched toward another stock-watering windmill or a salt drop, Leaphorn chose the route that led toward the low escarpment of the Zu¤i plateau. Father Ingles had said the lake was five or six miles in from the highway and below the mesa. It was a smallish natural playa that filled with draining runoff water in the rainy season and then dried slowly until the snow melt recharged it in the spring. Finding it would be relatively easy in a country where deer, antelope, and cattle trails would lead to any standing water.
. The last dim trail dead-ended at a rusty windmill. Leaphorn pulled the carryall past it into a shallow arroyo and parked it amid a tangle of junipers.
The lake proved to be less than a mile away. Leaphorn stood among the rocks on the ridge above it and examined it carefully through his binoculars. Except for a killdeer hopping on its stiltlike legs in the shallows, nothing moved anywhere around the cracked mud shore. Leaphorn studied the landscape methodically through the glasses, working from near distance first, and then moving toward the horizon, seeing absolutely nothing.
"Are you sure that's it?" Susanne asked. "I mean, for a sacred lake you expect something bigger."
The question irritated Leaphorn.
"Didn't Thomas Aquinas teach you white people that an infinite number of angels can dance on the head of a pin?"<
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"I don't think I heard about that," Susanne said. "I cut out of school in the tenth grade."
"Umm. well, the point is it doesn't take much water to cover a lot of spirits. But as far as we're concerned, it doesn't matter whether this is Kothluwalawa. What matters is whether George thinks it is. And that only matters if he came here and we can find him."
"I don't think he'd come here," she said doubtfully. "Why would he? Can you think of any reason?"
"All I know about George is what people tell me," Leaphorn said. "I hear he's sort of a mystic. I hear he's sort of crazy. I hear he's unpredictable. I hear he wants to become a member of the Zu¤i tribe, that he wants to be initiated into their religion. O.K. Let's say some of that is true. Now, I also hear that Ernesto was his best friend. And that Ernesto was afraid he had broken a taboo by telling George more than you're supposed to tell the uninitiated about the Zu¤i religion." Leaphorn paused, thinking about how it might have happened.
"Now. Let's say George left the bicycle where he was supposed to meet Ernesto and he wanders off somewhere. When he gets back, the bicycle is gone and so is Ernesto. That's natural enough. He thinks Ernesto didn't wait and he missed him. But he also notices that great puddle of blood. It would have been fresh then. It would have scared him. The next day he comes to school, looking for Ernesto. And he finds out Ernesto is missing. That's exactly the way it happened. Now, everybody tells me George is sort of crazy. Let's say he decides the kachinas have punished Ernesto for the broken taboo. George would have heard the legend about the boy who violated the secrecy rule and had his head cut off by the warrior kachinas. Maybe he wants to come here to ask the Council of the Gods to absolve him of any of the blame. Or maybe he came because here's where Ernesto's spirit will be coming to join the ancestors." Even as Leaphorn told it, it sounded unlikely.
Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 02 - Dance Hall of the Dead Page 11