The Blessing Way jlajc-1

by Tony Hillerman

  "I was in charge of the Shiprock subagency when that Fruitland thing happened," Leaphorn said. "That one was mine. I heard that Navajo Wolf talk and I didn't pay much attention to it and so we had five bodies to bury."

  "Four," McKee said.

  "No. It was five." Leaphorn turned, smiling grimly. "This isn't Salem," he said. "We don't recognize witchcraft legally and the guy shot an old Hand Trembler and his wife, and a schoolteacher and her husband, and then he shot himself. Didn't want to stand trial for murder."

  "What are you trying to do?" McKee asked. "Figure out a way to blame yourself for Horseman?"

  "I could have gone in and looked for him."

  "But not found him," McKee said. "Besides, Horseman wasn't a stranger. The old woman said the Wolf is a stranger."

  "Yeah," Leaphorn said. "That's what she said. Maybe she had a reason to lie. Let's go find that boy who went out to warn Horseman." He looked at his notes. "Billy Nez. Let's go find Billy and see what he knows."

  But finding Billy Nez was not possible.

  They found his family's hogans east of Chinle, not far from Shoemaker's, but not Billy. His uncle was sore about it.

  "Kid took a horse and took off after breakfast," he said. "He's gone all the time. Screwing around back up in the mountains somewhere, when he's supposed to be helping out."

  Would he be back tonight? The uncle couldn't guess. Sometimes he was gone for days. He and Leaphorn talked a moment and then the lieutenant returned to the carryall, and turned it back toward Chinle.

  "Found out a little," Leaphorn said. "The boy knew where Horseman was hiding-somewhere back up in those canyons. But when he went to tell him he hadn't killed anybody, Horseman was gone." Leaphorn paused. "Or at least the kid said he was gone."

  "You don't think he was?"

  "Probably," Leaphorn said. "The uncle also told me something else. Billy Nez is Horseman's younger brother."

  "His brother?" McKee said. "How about the different name?"

  "Family broke up," Leaphorn said. "Billy was living with his uncle so he used Nez instead of Horseman. You know how it is with the Dinee. The only name that really counts is the war name you get when you're little. And that one's a secret inside your family and it's only used in your Blessing Way ceremonial or if you get somebody to sing you a cure."

  It was noon when they reached the Chinle sub agency office and the man Leaphorn wanted to see was at lunch. They found him at the diner, and Leaphorn introduced him as Sam George Takes. He was a round-faced, barrel-chested young man, wearing the uniform of a Law and Order sergeant. McKee ordered chicken-fried steak, more lunch than he usually allowed himself.

  "Hell, you know how it is, Joe," Takes was saying. "It's summer, school's out. He's probably chasing some girl and no telling when he gets back."

  "That's right," Leaphorn said. "That's what you do when you're sixteen or so. Hanging around some girl's hogan. Or, if your brother is missing, maybe looking for your brother."

  Takes put down his fork. "And he don't find him and he comes home and his uncle sends him in here like he said he would and we find out whatever he knows, which is probably nothing, and that's the end of it. Why are you worrying?"

  "It could work out like that," Leaphorn said. "But you know how news travels on this reservation. It could be by now he knows his brother is dead. So maybe he connects it to this witching gossip. Then he collects some cousins and uncles and goes looking for the Wolf."

  McKee's lunch arrived, with the gravy poured over the French fries.

  "Al's cook quit again," Takes said. "Son of a bitch is trying to do his own cooking."

  "The problem is where to start looking," Leaphorn said. "It's your territory, Sam. Where do you think?"

  Takes looked glum. "Son of a bitch could be anywhere. You remember when we had that bootlegger in there working a still right after the Korean War. We never did find him." Takes looked as though the thought still irritated him. "We knew he had to be close to water and at least have a horse to haul the grain in, but booze came out of there for four years and we never found nothing."

  "It wouldn't take that Nez outfit four years to find itself a witch," Leaphorn said.

  Takes laughed. "If you're worrying about that," he said, "they're going to have an Enemy Way. That ought to take care of the witch."

  "Who's having it?" Leaphorn asked. "Somebody in the Nez family?"

  "I heard it was Charley Tsosie," Takes said. "But they're Nez kinfolks-part of the same outfit."

  McKee was interested. Old Lady Gray Rocks had mentioned Tsosie being bothered by the witch. But the Prostitution Way was the curing ceremonial held for those exposed to witchcraft-to turn the evil around and direct it back against the Wolf who started it. Why an Enemy Way? McKee thought about the rite. It had grown out of the fighting between the Dinee and the Utes, and the only times he had heard of its being used was when members of The People came home after being off the Reservation, people like discharged servicemen, people who had been in contact with foreign influences-white men, or Pueblo Indians, or Mexicans. He remembered again what the old woman had said about the witch being a stranger. Leaphorn was looking at him.

  "If they're having an Enemy Way, that old woman must have told you right," Leaphorn said. "They think it's an outsider, and if they think that, they didn't think it was Horseman and that wasn't why he was killed."

  "Wonder why he was," Takes said. "Usually there's a feud, or fighting over a woman, or somebody bad-mouthing somebody."

  "Maybe he found that whiskey still you were looking for," McKee said.

  "Hasn't been any bootleg whiskey turning up in years," Takes said.

  "How about that rocket the military lost three, four years ago?" Leaphorn said. "Is that ten-thousand-dollar reward still out for anyone finding that thing?"

  "I don't know," Takes said. "I don't think they ever found it."

  "I'll call the people up at the Tonepah Range and find out if they're still offering ten thousand dollars," Leaphorn said. He explained to McKee that missiles fired from the Tonepah test site in Utah to the impact area at White Sands Proving Grounds in New Mexico passed over the empty eastern expanse of the Reservation.

  "They used to lose one now and then when a second stage misfired, and then they'd have a hell of a time finding it," Leaphorn said. "But now they have a radar station over on Tall Poles Butte and they track 'em all the way to the ground.

  "You think maybe Horseman and somebody else both found the old rocket and fought over who'd get the reward?" McKee asked.

  Leaphorn shrugged. He asked Bishbito if he could use his office telephone for a long-distance call.

  McKee finished his meal, eating dutifully, feeling simultaneously disappointed and ashamed of that disappointment. He had once again, as he had for years, fallen victim to his optimism. Expecting something when there was always nothing. Anticipating some romantic mystery in what Takes and Leaphorn must already see as a sordid, routine little homicide. It was this flaw, he knew, that had cost him these last eight years of anguish, turned to misery, turned to what now was simply numbness. He could still see the note, blue ink on blue paper in Sara's easy script:

  "Berg. I am meeting Scotty in Las Vegas tonight. I won't contest the divorce."

  Simply that, and her signature. It was not Sara's style to add the unnecessary explanation, to say that he was a dull, nondescript man in a dull, dead-end job, and that Scotty was exciting, in an exciting world of money and executive jets and Caribbean weekends. He cursed himself as he always did when he thought of it, cursed the flaw that made him ignore the fact that he was a clumsy, unbrilliant, average man, grotesquely misfit in the circle of slim, cool Saras and reckless, witty Scotts.

  He turned away from the memory and thought of Horseman, another failure as a man, wondering why he had let himself expect anything exotic in his death. And then he turned away from that thought, too. Horseman was none of his business. He would get back to his research, now. The Charley Tsosie family
would be busy, taking ritual sweat baths and preparing for their curing ceremonial. But there was still Ben Yazzie to be interviewed and Afraid of His Horse to be found.

  He flipped through his notebook. Old Lady Gray Rocks had said Ben Yazzie grazed his sheep back on the Lukachukai plateau in the summer. He would go to the subagency office and find out where Yazzie and Afraid of His Horse had their hogans. And then he would get on with his interviewing. He reread the notes he had accumulated at Shoemaker's and from talking to the old woman. Nothing much on Afraid of His Horse, but the Yazzie gossip followed the usual pattern. A man at the trading post had said Yazzie had noticed a coyote following him, and since the coyote was the messenger of the Holy People, Yazzie had accepted this as a sign of danger. And then there had been the usual sounds in the night, interpreted as the witch trying to put corpse powder down the smoke hole in the hogan roof, and the usual dead lambs, and the usual third-hand account in which Yazzie had seen a dog hanging around the flock and, when the dog ran away, it turned into a man.

  Leaphorn was returning from his telephone call; McKee returned the notebook to his pocket. He would start with Yazzie this afternoon.

  "Well," Leaphorn said, "there went our motive." He sat down. "The colonel said the reward expired two years ago. Their lost bird is obsolete now." He laughed. "In fact, I think he's hoping it stays lost. Sort of embarrassing to lose one like that and then have it turn up after everybody's forgotten about it."

  "So we're right back noplace," Takes said.

  "I had an idea," McKee said. "Let's say somebody else was hiding out back in that area and they didn't want the Navajo police coming in with a search party. Let's say they decided the way to keep that from happening was to get Horseman out where he would be found."

  As he said it, McKee realized it sounded hopelessly farfetched, but Leaphorn's face was grim.

  "I thought of that, too," he said. "The autopsy showed he was killed between six and midnight the day I was at Shoemaker's telling everybody we were going in after him if he didn't come out. If we figure it that way, I'm the one who got him killed."

  Chapter 9

  Bergen McKee honked the horn of his pickup when he crossed the final eroded ridge and saw the hogan of Ben Yazzie on the slope below. It was an unnecessary gesture-since the engine could have been heard long before the horn-but a courteous one. It gave official notice to the hogan that a visitor was coming and McKee guessed it was a universal custom among rural people. His father, he remembered, would never approach another's farmhouse without pausing at the gate to holler, "Hello," until properly acknowledged. Among people who depended more upon distance from neighbors than window blinds to preserve their privacy it was a practical habit.

  The place consisted of two octagonal hogans of unpeeled ponderosa logs, a small plank storage shack, and two brush arbors, all built in a cluster of cedar at the edge of a small arroyo. Just over the lip of the arroyo, two sheep pens had been built of cedar poles, with the arroyo bank furnishing one wall. The pens were empty now, and as McKee coasted his truck slowly past them he saw that the hogans were equally deserted.

  No cooking pots hung under the brush shelter, no clothing hung out to air, none of the accumulated odds and ends of Navajo living cluttered the area. He climbed out of the truck and sat in the scanty shade, feeling tired and disappointed.

  McKee lit a cigarette and considered his next step. In time, he could relocate the Yazzie family through Shoemaker. They traded there and some of Ben Yazzie's silver concho belts were in pawn there. But it might be weeks before any of the Yazzie family, or anyone who knew where he had moved, showed up at the store. That left just two possible sources in the Many Ruins area; Afraid of His Horse, whose sheep camp was supposed to be somewhere north of the canyon, and Charley Tsosie. Tsosie would be occupied at the Enemy Way for at least two days. Sheep camp tended to move with the grazing and would be hard to find. But he would look for Afraid of His Horse.

  It was easy to see why Yazzie had built his hogan here. Behind the habitations, the sandstone cliffs of a butte rose abruptly to the north and west-a hundred centuries of talus at its base, then two hundred feet of sheer, smooth reddish stone, with streaks of dark discoloration from seepage, then a softer gray layer of perlite, pocked and carved with blowholes and caves, and above this the overhanging cap of hard, black igneous rock. It gave the hogans shelter from the southwest winds and shade from the late-afternoon sun. To the north and east, the country was a fantastic jumble of colossal erosion dominated by another towering flat-topped butte. All the colors of the spectrum are there, McKee thought. Everything but pure green. What little grass there was was out of sight, hidden in the pockets where soil could collect to hold roots and where runoff from the immensity of rocks could be held and absorbed. He had passed several such grassy places following the wagon trail here. Some, he had noticed, had been heavily grazed by sheep. Most had not. Yazzie must have been badly frightened to move his flock away from grass.

  The clouds were building now above the Lukachukai peaks and McKee thought there might be a thunder shower over Many Ruins Canyon by sundown. He and Canfield had camped well up off the floor of the canyon, safe from flash floods, but he had left most of his gear outside the tent. Canfield might be there to take care of things, or he might be out digging into the burial site at one of the ruins; when he was working, Canfield could not be depended upon to notice it was raining.

  McKee butted out his cigarette and pushed himself to his feet, noticing the stiffness of his muscles and thinking ruefully that sitting behind a desk was poor conditioning for a field trip. It was then he noticed the smell.

  It was a faint smell, borne on a sudden light breeze which had fanned up the arroyo past the hogans. McKee recognized it instantly. The smell of death and decaying flesh. He stood stockstill beside the truck, studying the silent hogans. If the odor had come from them, he would have noticed it earlier. He walked slowly down the slope. Beyond the brush arbor he stopped and stood silently again, listening. Behind the hogans, the arroyo curved sharply around a high outcropping of rock topped by a growth of juniper and piñon. Something behind this ridge was making a sound, a tuneless symphony of low notes which would not have been audible except for the otherwise eerie silence of the place. He walked slowly toward the trees, listening, feeling the tenseness of irrational nervousness. Then the sound explained itself.

  A raven flapped out of one of the piñons with a raucous caw. A second later a cloud of the black scavenger birds erupted from the arroyo in an explosion of flapping. McKee stood a moment feeling simultaneously weak from the sudden start and foolish at his skittishness. He trotted to the top of the ridge to see what had attracted the scavengers.

  In the arroyo bend, against the perpendicular wall of eroded sandstone, Ben Yazzie had built a third pole sheep corral. In it were bodies of five rams with the heavy dark wool of Merinos. Looking directly down into the pen, McKee could see its floor was blackened in several places where blood had soaked into the sand. He could also see that the ravens, now raising a noisy clamor from the trees fifty yards down the arroyo, had been at work on the throats of the animals. That meant, McKee thought, they had been killed by a wolf, or coyotes, or perhaps by dogs.

  It took almost exactly an hour for McKee to cover the nine miles of wagon road from the Yazzie hogans to the mouth of Many Ruins Canyon. Even before he left the place he had concluded that the dead rams, and the cause of their death, probably explained the origin of at least some of the witchcraft gossip. When he found Yazzie he would learn that Yazzie had lost many sheep to this "witch" and that he had decided to abandon his traditional grazing grounds and his hogan because a witch is, after all, more than a man can be expected to cope with. Yazzie would not be likely to admit, even to himself, that he could not deal with coyotes, or even with an unusually bold wolf of the natural, four-legged variety. When McKee found Afraid of His Horse, he would learn the coyotes were also active this season north of Many Ruins. Taken together, he t
hought, the two linked incidents would provide the first of the specific examples he needed to support his scapegoat thesis. He felt suddenly optimistic.

  It was not until he had turned the truck up the sandy bottom of Many Ruins Canyon that McKee realized that he wasn't sure exactly how a coyote could have gotten into the rams' pen. The pen was built in a rough half-circle extending from the arroyo wall. McKee remembered he had not been able to look over the pen from the arroyo bed. That meant the pole wall was about six feet high-too high for a coyote, or even a wolf, to jump. It occurred to him then that Yazzie must surely have built the corral with coyotes or wolves much in mind and designed it to keep them out. The poles were wired together, top and bottom, and the bases had been buried in the sandy soil. The gate, a narrow door of poles held together by horizontal braces, had also been wired securely shut. McKee remembered this clearly because of the time it had taken him to unfasten the wires. If Yazzie had carelessly left the gate insecurely fastened the night the wolf got in, why would he have bothered to fasten it so securely after the damage was done?

  McKee drove slowly along the hard-packed canyon floor. The cloud he had noticed earlier had built higher now and there had been a shower somewhere. The breeze was cool and smelled of wet pine. In places the going was slow and rocky. Here the canyon walls closed in, sheer smooth cliffs which funneled the water of the occasional flash floods into a narrow torrent. But generally the road was smooth and the canyon bottom broadened to a hundred yards or more. The runoff stream here required only a small portion of the canyon floor. Its bed wandered between tumbled hills of rocky debris and there were grass and even a few cottonwoods. Here the sandstone had been softer and more readily destroyed by wind and water. It was in places like these that the Anasazis had built on the talus slopes and high under the overhanging shelter of the canyon walls the cliff houses which gave the canyon its name. McKee passed three of these stone ruins on his way to the campsite without giving them more than a glance. He was, by then, thoroughly disgusted with himself for his oversight at the sheep pens-carelessness which meant he would have to return to the Yazzie hogans and find out exactly how the coyotes had gotten in. He was so immersed in this problem that it was not until he turned his truck up the slope to the campsite that he noticed Canfield's camper truck was gone.