“What did you expect her to say?”
“I don’t know,” Moon said. “I just thought she’d be-you know, amazed that I actually got the job done.”
Osa put her hand on his hand. “Why? Ricky wouldn’t have been surprised either. Ricky’s friends wouldn’t have been surprised. I had just heard about you from other people, but I wasn’t surprised. Remember, I came to you with my trouble because I had heard about the kind of man you are.”
Moon felt himself flushing. “Oh, sure,” he said. “All that brotherly stuff from Ricky.”
“You think your brother didn’t know you? Your mother certainly knew you.”
“She knows me all too well. That’s why I thought she’d be amazed.”
Osa removed her hand from his hand. “Why do you say that?” she said. “Why do you always have bad things to say about yourself?”
Time to change the subject. “Since we’re getting personal,” Moon said, “I have a question for you. In fact, two questions.”
“Answer mine first. And then I have another one. Does what you told me at the hotel just now about Caloocan City mean you are going to run the business?”
“I’m going to try,” Moon said. “But there’s been too much talking about me already. Listen carefully.
Question one: Mr. Lee told me that when he called you this morning to say good-bye you seemed very sad. He thought it was because of Damon. And you said it was another loss.”
Moon stopped, swallowed. There was no way to say it that wasn’t rude, intrusive, presumptuous. Osa was looking at him, attentive, waiting, lips slightly parted, amusement fading into something very serious. Beautiful. Waiting. For what, the Moon of Durance to chicken out or the super-Moon of Ricky’s legend to demand a solution to this little oddity?
“I remember,” Osa said.
“He asked me if I understood what you meant. I said I didn’t.” He hesitated again. But to hell with it. Otherwise he was losing her anyway. “But I hoped I did understand. I hoped you meant me.”
Osa looked at him, biting her lip. Looked away.
“I have that hope because when we were in the delta you seemed so sure he was dead. You didn’t want to go into Cambodia. When I said I had to go anyway, you insisted you’d go along. But when we got there and found he was actually dead, you were genuinely surprised. Shocked.”
Moon stopped. Osa walked three steps away from him and stood at the streetside railing staring out into the yacht harbor. The mast lights were making their colored patterns on the water.
“I think all along you really believed Damon was alive. Probably getting him out alive was hopeless, but you still believed you should try.”
“Yes,” she said. “I did.”
“So now I’m going to guess at why you didn’t want me to go into Cambodia to bring him out. And if I guess wrong, you have to tell me I’m wrong. Even though it means I’ve made myself look like a damned fool.”
“You don’t have to guess. I’ll tell you.”
“I guess you didn’t want me to get killed. I guess you knew I’d fallen in love with you, and I guess you’d begun caring some about me yourself.”
Moon joined her at the railing. He took her hand.
“Anyway, you didn’t want me to get killed.”
“Oh, Moon,” Osa said. Her eyes were wet but she was smiling. “Do you want me to answer the first question?”
“Only if it’s the right answer. Only if you feel sad because you think you are losing Moon Mathias. But Mathias is not getting lost. As soon as I get little Lila back in the States and settled in, I’m coming back here. I’ll chase you down wherever I can find you and I’ll talk you into marrying me. Or try to. So what’s the answer to that question?”
“The answer is Moon,” she said. And put her cheek against his shoulder, her arms around his waist, and squeezed. “M-O-O-N,” she said. “Moon.”
He took her in his arms then, engulfed her, surprised at how small she seemed, conscious of the perfume of her hair, of her smooth skin beneath the silk, that when he tilted up her chin she was returning his kiss.
“It shouldn’t take me more than eight or ten days,” he said. “Where will you be in eight or ten days?”
“You’re going to fly back with Lila? You’ll try to take care of her on the plane?”
“Why not?” Moon said. “I can change diapers. Feed her. She can say ‘Moon’ now. I’m learning.”
“Not very fast. I watched you on the aircraft carrier. You weren’t designed to be a nanny. And that Baby in Space game you play with her is dreadful. You will break her neck. It scares her.”
“It just scares people who’re watching it. She likes it. Makes her giggle. She knows I won’t drop her.”
Osa was shaking her head. “And feeding her. Keeping her clean and comfortable. Getting her to sleep.”
He hugged her to him. “Can you think of an alternative?”
“Yes,” she said.
“So can I,” Moon said. “With a Dutch passport you don’t need a visa. So I postponed my flight a day and made reservations for Osa van Winjgaarden.”
“No Mrs.?”
“No Mrs.,” Moon said. “Until we can make it legal.”
Leaphorn, Chee, and the Navajo Way
I thought you might like to know the roots of my two favorite characters – Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn (now retired) and Sgt. Jim Chee, both of the Navajo Tribal Police.
Leaphorn emerged from a young Hutchinson County, Texas, sheriff who I met and came to admire in 1948 when I was a very green “crime and violence” reporter for a paper in the high plains of the Panhandle. He was smart, he was honest, he was wise and humane in his use of police powers – my idealistic young idea of what every cop should be but sometimes isn’t.
When I needed such a cop for what I intended to be a very minor character in The Blessing Way (1970), this sheriff came to mind. I added on Navajo cultural and religious characteristics, and he became Leaphorn in fledgling form. Luckily for me and Leaphorn and all of us, the late Joan Kahn, then mystery editor of what was then Harper amp; Row, required some substantial rewriting of that manuscript to bring it up to standards and I – having begun to see the possibilities of Leaphorn – gave him a much better role in the rewrite and made him more Navajo.
Jim Chee emerged several books later. I like to claim he was born from an artistic need for a younger, less sophisticated fellow to make the plot of People of Darkness (1980) make sense – and that is mostly true. Chee is a mixture of a couple of hundred of those idealistic, romantic, reckless youngsters I had been lecturing to at the University of New Mexico, with their yearnings for Miniver Cheevy’s “days of old” modified into his wish to keep the Navajo Value System healthy in a universe of consumerism.
I’ll confess here that Leaphorn is the fellow I’d prefer to have living next door and that we share an awful lot of ideas and attitudes. I’ll admit that Chee would sometimes test my patience, as did those students upon whom I modeled him. But both of them in their ways, represent the aspects of the Navajo Way, which I respect and admire. And I will also confess that I never start one of these books in which they appear without being motivated by a desire to give those who read them at least some insight into the culture of a people who deserve to be much better understood.
– Tony Hillerman
About the Author
TONY HILLERMAN is past president of the Mystery Writers of America and has received its Edgar and Grand Master Awards. His other honors include the Center for the American Indian’s Ambassador Award, the Silver Spur Award for the best novel set in the West, and the Navajo Tribe’s Special Friend Award. He lives with his wife, Marie, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
