A Thief of Time

'Drinking water or root beer,' Houk said. 'I guess you knew I'm Latter-day Saints.'

Everybody took water.

'Irene,' Houk said. 'You want to meet these fellas. This is Mr. Thatcher here. The one from the BLM who comes out here now and then worrying us about our grazing rights. And this fella here is the one I've told you about. The one that found Brigham's hat. The one that kept those goddam state policemen from shooting up into that alcove. This is Irene Musket.'

Irene put down the tray and held her hand out to Thatcher. 'How do you do,' she said. She spoke in Navajo to Leaphorn, using the traditional words, naming her mother's clan, the Towering House People, and her father's, the Paiute Dineh. She didn't hold out her hand. He wouldn't expect it. This touching of strangers was a white man's custom that some traditional Navajos found difficult to adopt.

'You remember what day it was that anthropology woman was out here?' Houk asked her. 'Almost a month ago, I think.'

Irene considered. 'On a Friday,' she said. 'Four weeks ago last Friday.' She picked up the tray and left.

'Great friend of my wife, Irene was. After Alice passed on, Irene stayed on and looked after things,' Houk said.

They sipped the cold water. Behind Houk's gray head, the wall was lined with photographs. Houk and his wife and their children clustered on the front porch. Brigham, the youngest, standing in front. The brother and sister he was destined to kill standing behind him, smiling over his shoulders. Brigham's mouth looked slightly twisted, as if he had been ordered to smile. Houk's face was happy, boyish. His wife looked tired, strain showing in the lines around her mouth. A wedding picture, the bride with the veil raised above her face, Houk with the mustache much smaller, older couples flanking them, A picture of Brigham on a horse, his smile strained and lopsided. A picture of the sister in a cheerleader's uniform. Of the brother in a Montezuma Creek High School football jacket. Of Brigham holding up a dead bobcat by its back legs, his eyes intense. Of Houk in an army uniform. Of the Houks and another couple. But mostly the pictures were of the three children. Dozens of them, at all ages. In most of them, Brigham stood alone, rarely smiling. In three of them, he stood over a deer. In one, over a bear. Leaphorn remembered Houk talking endlessly on the porch the day Brigham had drowned.

'Always outdoors,' Houk had said. 'From the very littlest. Shy as a Navajo. Wasn't happy around people. We shouldn't have made him go to school there. We should have gotten him some help.'

Now Houk put down his glass. Thatcher asked, 'When she left here, was she going to see the Navajo? The one who found the pot?'

'I reckon,' Houk said. 'That was her intention. She wanted to know where he got it. All I knew is what he told me. That he didn't break any law getting it.' Houk was talking directly to Thatcher. 'Didn't get it off public domain land, or off the reservation. Got to be off private land or I won't have nothing to do with it.'

'What was his name?' Thatcher asked.

'Fella named Jimmy Etcitty,' Houk said.

'Live around here?'

'South, I think,' Houk said. 'Across the border in Arizona. Between Tes Nez lah and Din-nehotso, I think he said.' Houk stopped. It seemed to Leaphorn that it was to decide whether he had told them enough. And this time Thatcher didn't interrupt the silence. Houk thought. They waited. Leaphorn studied the room. Everything was dusty except the piano. It glowed with wax. Like most of the bookshelves, a shelf above the piano was lined with pots.

'I think I told her she should stop at the Dinnehotso Chapter House and ask how to get to the Mildred Roanhorse outfit,' Houk added. 'Etcitty's her son-in-law.'

'I noticed in the Nelson catalog that they give the customer some sort of documentation on their artifacts,' Leaphorn said. He left the question implied, and Houk let it hang a moment while he thought about how to answer it.

'They do,' Houk said. 'If I happen to find something myself--or sometimes when I have personal knowledge where it came from--then I fill out this sort of statement, time and place and all that, and I sign it and send it along. Case like this, I just give the documentation form to the finder--whoever I'm buying it from. I have them fill it in and sign it.'

'You show that paper to the lady?' Leaphorn asked.

'Didn't have it,' Houk said. 'Usually I just have the finder send the letter directly to whoever is buying from me. This case, I gave Etcitty the Nelson form and told him to take care of it.'

They sat and considered this.

'Cuts out the middleman on that,' Houk said.

And, Leaphorn thought, insulates Harrison Houk from any charge of fraud.

'Might as well get it from the horse's mouth,' Houk added, somberly. But he winked at Leaphorn.

There was still plenty of the day left to drive south to the Dinnehotso Chapter House and get directions to the Mildred Roanhorse outfit and find Jimmy Etcitty. On the porch Houk touched Leaphorn's sleeve.

'Always wanted to say something to you about what you did,' he said. 'That evening I wasn't in any condition to think about it. But it was a kindly thing. And brave too.'

'It was just my job,' Leaphorn said. 'That highway patrolman was a traffic man. Green about that kind of work. And scared too, I guess. Somebody needed to keep it cool.'

'Turned out it didn't matter,' Houk said. 'Brigham wasn't hiding up there anyway. I guess he was already drowned by then. But I thank you.'

Thatcher was standing at the foot of the steps, waiting and hearing all this. Embarrassing. But he didn't bring it up until they were out of Bluff driving toward Mexican Water into the blinding noontime sun.

'Didn't know you were involved in that Houk case,' he said. He shook his head. 'Hell of a thing. The boy was crazy, wasn't he?'

'That's what they said. Schizophrenia. Heard voices. Unhappy around anyone but his dad. A loner. But Houk told me he was great at music.

That piano in there, that was the boy's. Houk said he was good at it and played the guitar and the clarinet.'

'But dangerous,' Thatcher said. 'Ought to been put in a hospital. Locked up until he was safe.'

'I remember that's what Houk said they should've done. He said his wife wanted to, but he wouldn't do it. Said he thought it would kill the boy. Locking him up. Said he wasn't happy except when he was outdoors.'

'What'd you do to make such an impression on Houk?'

'Found the boy's hat,' Leaphorn said. 'Washed up on the reservation side of the river. It was already pretty clear he'd tried to swim across.'

Thatcher drove for a while. Turned on the radio. 'Catch the noon news,' he said. 'See what they got to say about those pot hunters getting^ shot.'

'Good,' Leaphorn said.

'There was more to it than that,' Thatcher said. 'More than finding his goddamned hat.'

Might as well get it over with. The memories had been flooding back anyway -- another of those many things a policeman accumulates in the mind and cannot erase. 'You remember the case,' Leaphorn said. 'Houk and one of his hired hands came home that night, and found the bodies, and the youngest boy, Brigham, missing, with some of his stuff. And the shotgun he'd done it with was missing too. Big excitement. Houk was even more important then than he is now -- legislator and all that. Bunches of men out everywhere looking. This Utah highway patrol officer -- a captain or lieutenant or something -- he and a bunch he was handling thought they had the boy cornered in a sort of alcove-cave up in a box canyon. Saw something or heard something, and I guess the kid had used the place before as a sort of hangout. Anyway, they'd called for him to come out, and no answer, so this dumb captain is going to have everybody shoot into there, and I said first I'd get a little closer and see what I could see, and turned out nobody was in there.'

Thatcher looked at him.

'No big deal,' Leaphorn said. 'Nobody was there.'

'So you didn't get shot with a shotgun.'