“Let’s do it,” Louisa said.
“I’m thinking that a couple of the men on that list are supposed to live up there in that border country. One of ’em’s Casa Del Eco Mesa. That couldn’t be too far from the chapter house.”
Louisa laughed. “Mixing business with pleasure. Or I should say your business with my business. Or maybe my business with something that really isn’t your business.”
“The one who has a place up there—according to the notes on that paper anyway—is Everett Jorie. I can’t place him, but the name’s familiar. Probably something out of the distant past. I thought we could ask around.”
Louisa was smiling at him. “You’ve forgotten you’re retired,” she said. “For a minute there, I thought you were going along for the pleasure of my company.”
Leaphorn drove the first lap—the 110 miles from his house to the Mexican Water Trading Post. They stopped there for a sandwich and to learn if anyone there knew how to find Dalton Cayodito. The teenage Navajo handling the cash register did.
“An old, old man,” she said. “Did he used to be a singer? If that’s him, he did the Yeibichai sing for my grandmother. Is that the one you’re looking for?”
Louisa said it was. “We heard he lived up by the Red Mesa Chapter House.”
“He lives with his daughter,” the girl said. “That’s Madeleine Horsekeeper, I think they call her. Her place is -" She paused, thought, made a gesture of frustration with her hands, penciled a map on a grocery sack and handed it to Louisa.
“How about a man named Everett Jorie?” Leap-horn said. “You know where to find him? Or Buddy Baker? Or George Ironhand.”
She didn’t, but the man who had been stacking Spam cans on shelves along the back wall thought he could help.
“Hey,” he said. “Joe Leaphorn. I thought you’d retired. What you want Jorie for? If you got a law against being a damned nuisance, you oughta had him locked up long ago.”
They left the trading post a quarter hour later armed with explicit instructions on how to find the two places Jorie might be located, an addendum to the grocery-sack map outlining which turns to take from which roads to find Ironhand, and a vague notion that Baker might have moved into Blanding. Along with that they took a wealth of speculative gossip about Utah-Arizona borderland political ambitions, social activities, speculation about who might have robbed the Ute Casino, an account of the most recent outrages committed by the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, Park Service, and other federal, state and county agencies against the well-being of various folks who lived their hardscrabble lives along the Utah border canyon country.
“No wonder the militia nuts can sign people up,” Louisa said, as they drove away. “Is it as bad as that?”
“They’re mostly just trying to enforce unpopular laws,” Leaphorn said. “Mostly fine people. Now and then somebody gets arrogant.”
“OK, now,” Louisa said. “These guys you mentioned in there—Jorie and Ironhand and so forth. I guess they’re the three who robbed the casino?”
“Or maybe robbed it,” Leaphorn said. “If we believe Gershwin.”
Louisa was driving and spent a few moments looking thoughtful.
“You know,” she said, "as long as I’ve been out here I still can’t get used to how everybody knows everybody.”
“You mean that guy at the store recognizing me? I was a cop out here for years.”
“But living where? About a hundred and fifty miles away. But I didn’t mean just you. The cashier knew all about Everett Jorie. And people know about Baker and Ironhand living"—she waved an expressive hand at the window—"living way the hell out there someplace. Where I came from people didn’t even know who lived three houses down the block.”
“Lot more people in Baltimore,” Leaphorn said.
“Not a lot more people on our block.”
“More people in your block, I’ll bet, than in a twenty-mile circle around here,” Leaphorn said. He was remembering the times he’d spent in Washington, in New York, in Los Angeles, when he’d considered this difference between urban and rural social attitudes.
“I have a theory not yet endorsed by any sociologist,” he said. “You city folks have so many people crowding you they’re a bother. So you try to avoid them. We rural people don’t have enough, so we’re interested. We sort of collect them.”
“You’ll have to make it a lot more complicated than that to get the sociologists to adopt it,” Louisa said. “But I know what you’re driving at.”
“Out here, everybody looks at you,” he said. “You’re somebody different. Hey, here’s another human, and I don’t even know him yet. In the city, nobody wants to make eye contact. They have built themselves a little privacy bubble—hard to get any privacy in crowded places—and if you look at them, or speak on the street, then you’re an intruder.”
Louisa looked away from the road to give him a sidewise grin.
“I take it you don’t care for the busy, exciting, stimulating city life,” she said. “I’ve also heard it put another way. Like “rural folks tend to be nosy busy-bodies.”’
They were still discussing that when they turned off the pavement of U.S. 160 onto the dirt road that climbed over the Utah border onto the empty, broken highlands of the Casa Del Eco Mesa. She slowed while Leaphorn checked the map against the landscape. The clouds were climbing on the western horizon, and the outriders of the front were speckling the landscape spreading away to the west with a crazy-quilt pattern of shadows.
“If my memory’s good, we hit an intersection up here about seven miles,” he said. “Take the bad road to the right, and it takes you to the Red Mesa Chapter House. Take the worse road to the left, and it gets you to Highway 191 and on to Bluff.”
“There’s the junction up ahead,” she said. “We do a left? Right?”
“Left is right,” Leaphorn said. “And after the turn, we’re looking for a track off to our right.”
They found it, and a dusty, bumpy mile later, they came to the place of Madeleine Horsekeeper, which was a fairly new double-wide mobile home, with an attendant hogan of stacked stones, sheep pens, outhouse, brush arbor and two parked vehicles -an old pickup truck and a new blue Buick Regal. Madeleine Horsekeeper was standing in the doorway greeting them, with a stern-looking fortyish woman standing beside her. She proved to be Horsekeeper’s daughter, who taught social studies at Grey Hills High in Tuba City. She would sit in on the interview with Hosteen Cayodito, her maternal grandfather, and would make sure the interpreting was accurate. Or do it herself.
Which was fine with Joe Leaphorn. He had thought of a way to spend the rest of this day that would be much more interesting than listening for modifications and evolutions in the legends he’d grown up with. That talk with Louisa about how folks in lonely country knew everything about their neighbors had reminded him of Undersheriff Oliver Potts, now retired. If anyone knew the three on Gershwin’s list, it would be Oliver.
Chapter Seven
Oliver Potts’s modest stone residence was shaded by a grove of cottonwoods beside Recapture Creek, maybe five miles northeast of Bluff and a mile down a rocky road even worse than described at the Chevron station where Leaphorn had topped off his gas tank.
“Yes,” said the middle-aged Navajo woman who answered his knock, "Ollie’s in there resting his eyes." She laughed. “Or he’s supposed to be, anyway. Actually he’s probably reading, or studying one of his soap operas." She ushered Leaphorn into the living room, said, "Ollie, here’s company,” and disappeared.
Potts looked up from the television, examined Leaphorn through thick-lensed glasses. “Be damned. You look like Joe Leaphorn, but if it is, you’re out of uniform.”
“I’ve been out of uniform almost as long as you have,” Leaphorn said, "but not long enough to watch the soap operas.”