"One more thing," Leaphorn said. "I think George Bowlegs is wild to become a Zu¤i. Maybe that's not possible, but he thinks it is. I think he went to your sacred lake because he wanted to talk to your Council of the Gods. And from what he told his little brother, I think he will come to Shalako and maybe he will do something. I think it would be good if your people watched for him."
"We will."
"And the man who wore the mask. He was smart enough to figure out where to look for George. He will be smart enough to figure it out again."
"We will watch for that man," Pasquaanti said. His voice was grim. It caused Leaphorn to remember something that Rounder had told him years ago: in Zu¤i mythology, the penalty for sacrilege is death.
Chapter Eighteen
Saturday, December 6, 4:19 P.M.
LIEUTENANT JOSEPH LEAPHORN spent the afternoon on the ridge that overlooks the village of Zu¤i from the south. He had picked the place carefully. It was a relatively comfortable spot, with soft earth under his buttocks and a sandstone slab for a backrest. A growth of chamiso and a gnarled pi¤on made it unlikely that anyone would see him and wonder what the devil he was doing there. And the view was ideal for his purpose. To his left his binoculars covered the old wagon trail that wandered up the Zu¤i Wash from the southwest. To his right he looked down on a newly graded reservation road that angled under Greasy Hill at the edge of the village, swerved past the Zu¤i cemetery, and ran southward. One or the other of these two roads would provide the most direct route from the mesa where George Bowlegs had killed his deer to the Shalako ceremonials in Zu¤i Village. There were countless other ways Bowlegs might come-if come he did-including leaving his horse, walking to the paved highway, and hitchhiking. But Leaphorn could think of no other activity that offered better odds than did sitting here. And intercepting Bowlegs was only one of the reasons he was here. There was also the chance it offered him to think. He had a lot of thinking to do.
The swollen bruise on his abdomen reminded him of the first puzzle. Why had the trap been set to catch George Bowlegs but not to kill him? Cata and Shorty Bowlegs had been cut down without qualm or hesitation. Why not George?
Leaphorn leaned back against the rock, squirmed into an easier position. Above him the sky was turning gray. The overcast had been building since noon. First it was nothing more than high-altitude humidity-a thin layer of stratospheric ice crystals which hung a glittering halo around the sun. Then a semiopaque grayness had crept in from north-northwest and the day gradually lost its light.
Why not George? Leaphorn felt the faintest trace of breeze on his cheek. Cold. It had been dead calm. The orgy of baking which caught up the women of Zu¤i each Shalako season had reached its climax during the morning. Now most of the outdoor ovens were cooling. But a thin layer of blue smoke still hung in the air over the pueblo. It made a faint smear as far northwest as the Zu¤i Buttes and eastward to the gaudy water tower at Black Rock. Even here, high over the valley and a half mile away, Leaphorn's nose caught the vague scent of baking bread and the perfume of burned pi¤on resin.
Already the wide shoulders of state road 53 were cluttered with cars and campers and pickups. The Zu¤i people had come home from wherever they had wandered-college campuses, jobs in California and Washington. Those who called themselves the Flesh of the Flesh were drawn back to their birthplace for this great Coming Home of their ancestor spirits.
And with them came the curious, the tourists, dilettante Indian lovers, anthropologists, students, hippies, other Indians. Among the crowd would be the Zu¤is' Brothers of the Pueblos: people from Acoma, Laguna, Zia, Hopi, Isleta, Santo Domingo, men who were priests of their own kivas, themselves connoisseurs of the metaphysics of nature, men with their own Dancing Gods who came to share in the ancient magic of their cousins. And, of course, the Navajos. In from the lonely hogans, with wives and children. Taller, rawboned, wearing their Levi's-looking on with a mixture of awe for great medicine made by these Callers of the Clouds, and the countryman's contempt for the dweller of towns.
Leaphorn sighed. Normally Zu¤i Village held perhaps 3,500 of the 4,500 Zunis. Tonight seven or eight thousand people would be crowded here. It would be, as O'Malley had said, the one time a stranger come to pay money or collect heroin would be least likely to be noticed. Leaphorn's anger at O'Malley had gone now, the victim of Leaphorn's habit of relating actions to causes. O'Malley would not be an agent of the FBI if his mind did not operate in a manner which conformed to FBI standards. Obviously someone in the agency had been interested in Halsey, or in Halsey's commune, before the killings. That would color O'Malley's thinking. And if O'Malley had no respect for Leaphorn as a policeman, Leaphorn must admit, in fairness, that he had no respect for O'Malley. He would think of other things. Why hadn't a shotgun been rigged into that trap set for Bowlegs? Or why hadn't the syringe been loaded with cyanide? Leaphorn considered the question, found no way to reach a conclusion, and skipped back to the beginning-back to Monday, when he had first arrived at Pasquaanti's office. From there he worked forward, examining each of the oddities that puzzled him.
There was a stir of activity in the village now-people gathering on the street that fronted along Zu¤i Wash on the Old Village side. Leaphorn watched. Through his powerful navy-surplus binoculars he saw the figure of a boy, naked except for loincloth, crossing the footbridge behind a man in white buckskin. The boy wore a hood surmounted by a single feather. Mask and body were black, spotted with dots of red, blue, yellow, and white. The Little Fire God, Leaphorn knew-Shulawitsi entering the Old Village to make his ceremonial inspection of the sacred place before the entry of the Council of the Gods. Ernesto Cata was dead but the Little Fire God lived. The Badger Clan had provided another of its sons to personify this eternal spirit.
The afternoon wore on. Leaphorn watched the roads and pursued his thoughts. More activity in the village now. The sound of drums and flutes barely audible on the cold air. This would be the arrival of the Council of the Gods. They came dancing down Greasy Hill, past the white-painted village water tank. Some he could see through the magnifying lenses. The Fire God with a smoking cedar branch. Then Saiyatasha, the Rain God of the North, called Longhorn because of the great curved horn which jutted from the right side of his black-and-white mask. He was a burly man in white deerskin shirt and a blue-and-white kirtle, a bow in one hand and a deer-bone rattle in the other. And behind him Hu-tu-tu, who brought the rains from the south, his mask lacking the great horn. With Hu-tu-tu, the two Yamuhaktos, their round eye and mouth holes giving their masks an expression of silly, childlike surprise. And dancing attendance, two Salamobias-the same fierce beaked faces that Leaphorn remembered from his nightmare. In each hand they carried a heavy pointed whip wand of yucca blades. The crowd kept a respectful distance.
The procession disappeared into the village. The sun was lost now as the cloud cover steadily thickened. It was growing much colder. Below, two station wagons and a pickup truck pulled off the cemetery road and disgorged more than a dozen men and a load of paraphernalia. Several wore ceremonial kirtles and skullcaps of white doeskin. They would be the personifiers of the Shalako and their attendants. The group vanished beneath the slope.
Leaphorn reached into his pocket and extracted the turquoise bead, the abalone shell, and the broken flint lance tip. All were items to which both Navajo and Zu¤i would attach ritual significance. Changing Woman had taught the Navajos the use of the gemstone and the shell in their curing ceremonies. They were appropriate fetish items for George to have offered to the spirit of the deer. And so was the flint tip. Leaphorn wasn't sure how the Zu¤is valued such relics from older cultures, but Navajos rated anything used by the Old People as potent medicine. As a boy, he used to hunt for these relics. He'd find them turned up amid the gravel in arroyo bottoms, uncovered on hillsides when the Male Rain pounded away the centuries of dust, and exposed among the clumps of buffalo grass when the Wind People carved potholes in the dry earth. He would give them to his grandfather a
nd his grandfather would teach him another song from the Night Way, or a story of the Holy Ones. Perhaps George had found this lance point in like manner. Or perhaps he and Cata had stolen it from the dig site and it had-despite the certainty of Reynolds and Isaacs-somehow not been missed. That seemed unlikely, however. It was too fine a sample of Stone Age workmanship. Or perhaps.
The fragment of flint in Leaphorn's palm became a sort of keystone. Around it the pieces of the puzzle of why Ernesto Cata had to die fell exactly into place. Suddenly Leaphorn knew why the trap set for George Bowlegs had not been a lethal trap, and what had happened in the hogan of Shorty Bowlegs, and why what George Bowlegs had told his brother about petty theft had been contradicted by Reynolds and Isaacs. He sat stock-still, sorting it very precisely in chronological order, checking for flaws, assigning to each of those deeds which had seemed so irrational a logical cause. He knew now why two murders had been committed. And he knew he couldn't prove it-could probably never prove it.
From below the hill came the noise of drum and rattle and a hooting sound. The Shalako emerged-the couriers of the Zu¤i gods. The six huge ceremonial attendants. Leaphorn had forgotten how large they were. Ten feet tall, he guessed, to the ray of eagle feathers cresting their birdlike heads, so tall that the human legs supporting them under the great hooped skirts seemed grotesquely out of proportion. These immense birds would cross Zu¤i Wash at sundown and be escorted to the houses that had been prepared for them. The sacred dancing and ceremonial feasting would continue until the following afternoon.
Leaphorn pushed himself to his feet, brushed the sand from his uniform, and began walking down the slope toward Zu¤i Village. In that dim margin between day and night, the snow had begun. Heavy, wet, life-giving snow. Once again the Shalako had called the clouds and brought the water blessing to their people. One corner of Leaphorn's mind appreciated the harmony of this. Another urged him to hurry. Yesterday the killer had needed George Bowlegs alive. But if George Bowlegs came to Shalako, George Bowlegs would have to die.
Chapter Nineteen
Sunday, December 7, 2:07 AM.
BY 1 A.M., Leaphorn had decided he wasn't likely to find George Bowlegs. He had prowled the village tirelessly, elbowing his way through the crowds jamming each of the ceremonial houses, watching, and studying faces. The very nature of the ritual magnified the difficulty. By tradition, not more than two of the Shalako could be entertained in a single house. Separate houses had to be prepared for Saiyatasha and his Council of the Gods, and for the ten Koyemshi, the sacred clowns. Three of these houses were in the oldest part of the village, on the crowded hill overlooking Zu¤i Wash. Two were across the highway, where a newer portion of the village clustered around the Catholic school. Not only was the crowd thus fragmented, but it ebbed and flowed between these houses. Leaphorn had moved with it, watching the dark streets, checking the clusters of people around vehicles, pushing through the jam-packed viewing galleries and through the throngs eating lamb stew, canned peaches, and bakery cookies in the Zu¤i kitchens, always looking for the face he had memorized from the Zu¤i school yearbook.
Once he had seen Pasquaanti, who seemed to have some ceremonial role at the Shalako house near Saint Anthony's school. Leaphorn had caught the Zu¤i's attention, called him out into the darkness, and told him quickly and briefly his conclusions about who had killed Ernesto Cata. Pasquaanti had listened silently, commenting only with a nod. Later Leaphorn had noticed Baker, huddled in a bulky fur-collared coat, leaning against a post on the porch of the house where the Council of the Gods was dancing. Baker glanced at Leaphorn-a glance totally without recognition-and then had looked away. He obviously did not want to be seen talking to a man in the uniform of the Navajo Police. Leaphorn stood for a few moments well down the porch, curious. Beyond the porch, the yard was crowded with an assortment of vehicles. Baker looked either drunk or sleepy, perhaps both. He was watching a young man who stood in the back door of a camper talking to a young woman in a heavy mackinaw. Leaphorn felt a sudden impulse to walk up to Baker, grab him by the lapels, and tell him about Bowlegs, asking him to forget about this manhunt for an hour and help find the Navajo boy. Baker would be good at it, smart, fast, always thinking. But the impulse died aborning. Baker would simply smile that silly smile and refuse to be distracted from whomever he was stalking. Leaphorn thought he would not like to be hunted by Baker.
At 1 A.M., when Leaphorn decided he wouldn't find Bowlegs, he was in the left gallery room of one of the Shalako houses on the hill. The bruise on his stomach ached with a steady throb. His eyes burned with tobacco smoke, incense, and stale air. He had finally worked his way up to the long window that looked down into the spectators jamming the benches and chairs in the dirt-floored room below him. He had scanned carefully every face visible through the opposite gallery. Now he leaned heavily on the sill and let mind and muscles relax. He was very tired. Almost directly below him and to his left, a wooden altar stood, its base bristling with rows of feathered prayer plumes. Next to it the drummers and flutists produced an intricate counterpointed rhythm which never seemed to repeat its complicated pattern. And on the floor, sunken four feet or more below ground level solely to permit this, the giant Shalako danced.
From where Leaphorn stood by the gallery window on the floor above, he was almost at eye level with the great bird. Its beak snapped suddenly-a half-dozen sharp clacking sounds in perfect time with the drum. It hooted and its strange white-rimmed eyes stared for a moment directly into Leaphorn's. The policeman saw it with double vision. He saw it as a mask of tremendous technical ingenuity, a device of leather, embroidered cotton, carved wood, feathers, and paint held aloft on a pole, its beak and its movements manipulated by the dancer within it. But he also saw Shalako, the courier between the gods and men, who brought fertility to the seeds and rain to the desert when the people of Zu¤i called, and who came on this great day to be fed and blessed by his people. Now it danced, swooping down the earthen floor, its great horns glittering with reflected light, its fan of topknot feathers bristling, its voice the hooting call of the night birds.
There was a sudden shift in the cadence of the music. The voices of the chanters rose in pitch. The Koyemshi had joined the Shalako on the floor. Mudheads, they were called. Their bodies were coated with a pinkish clay and their masks gave them heads distorted in shape, hairless, knobbed, with tiny rimmed eyes and puckered mouths. They represented the idiotic and deformed fruits of incest-that ultimate tribal taboo. The first Koyemshi, as Leaphorn remembered the mythology, were the offspring of a son and daughter of Shiwanni, the Sun Father. He had sent his children to help the Zu¤i in their search for the Middle Place, but the boy had had intercourse with his sister. And the same night ten children were born. The first was normal and was to be the ancestor of the makers of rain. But the next nine were deformed and insane. Leaphorn considered this, his head buzzing with fatigue. The Mudheads represented evil and yet they were perhaps the most prestigious fraternity of this people. The men who represented the ten offspring were chosen to play this role for a year. They helped build the ceremonial houses and were involved in a year-long series of retreats, fastings, and ritual dancing. The assignment was so demanding of time that it wasn't unusual for a Mudhead to have to quit his job for a year and depend on the support of the villagers.
Leaphorn watched them dance. Despite the snow falling outside, they were nude except for black breechcloth and neck scarf, moccasins and mask. Their dance was intricate, a fast and exact placement of foot, their deerskin seed pouches slapping against sweat-damp ribs, their hands shaking feathered wands, their voices rising now in yells of triumph, and falling into the rhythmic recitation of the saga of their people.
Leaphorn scanned the crowd again. Below him there were mostly women-Zu¤is in their ceremonial best, a scattering of Navajos, a blond girl, her face ashen with fatigue but her eyes bright with interest. To his right, two young Navajo men had edged their way near the window. They were discussing a young whit
e man, who wore his hair in braids, had a red headband around his forehead and a heavy silver concho belt.
"I think he's an albino Indian," one said. "Ask him if he can say something in Navajo." The voice was loud enough for the white man to hear. "I think he's an Apache," the other Navajo said. "He looks too much like an Indian to be a Navajo."
They were drinking, Leaphorn saw. Not quite drunk, but drunk enough to slip over the boundary between humor and rudeness. If he weren't so tired, and otherwise occupied, he would move them out into the cold sobering air. Instead he would himself move from here, where George Bowlegs obviously wasn't, back to the Longhorn House for another check there. As he decided this, he saw George Bowlegs.
The boy was across the dance room, in the opposite gallery. He seemed to be standing on something, perhaps a chair, looking over the heads of those pressed against the windowsill-staring almost directly toward Leaphorn at the Shalako swooping down the dance floor. Leaphorn recognized him instantly. The generous mouth, the large expressive eyes, and the short-cropped hair. More than that. Even in that crowded gallery there was something about the boy that suggested the strange and the lonely. George stared at the dancing gods with eyes that were fixed and fascinated and a little crazy. He was no farther away than the width of the dance room. Perhaps a dozen yards.
Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 02 - Dance Hall of the Dead Page 15