Even if we knew what it was and where it is, it wouldn’t help anyway, McGinnis said. You probably got an old medicine bundle and some Yei masks and amulets hidden away somewhere. Its not the kind of stuff anybody kills you for.
Not even if its the way to stop the world from ending? Leaphorn asked.
McGinnis looked at him, saw he was smiling. That’s what you birds got to do, you know, McGinnis said. If you’re going to solve that Tso killing, you got to figure the reason for it.
McGinnis stared into the glass. Its a damn funny thing to think about, he said. You can just see it. Somebody walking up that wagon track, and the old man and that Atcitty girl standing there watching him coming, and probably saying Ya-ta-hey whether it was friend or stranger, and then this feller taking a gun barrel or something, and clouting the old man with it and then running the girl down and clubbing her, and then . . . McGinnis shook his head in disbelief. And then just turning right around and walking right up that wagon track away from there. McGinnis stared over the glass at Leaphorn. You just plain know a feller would have to have a real reason to do something like that. Just think about it.
Joe Leaphorn thought about it.
Outside there was the sound of hammering, of laughter, of a pickup engine starting.
Leaphorn was oblivious to it. He was thinking. He was again recreating the crime in his mind. The reason for what had happened at the Tso hogan. must have been real desperate and urgent even if it had been done by the sort of person who laughed as he ran over a strange policeman beside a lonely road. Leaphorn sighed. He would have to find out about that reason. And that meant he would have to speak with Margaret Cigarette.
You were right about Mrs. Cigarette not being home, Leaphorn said. I went by there to check. Nobody there and the trucks gone. You got any ideas where she is?
No telling, McGinnis said. She could be anyplace. Id guess visiting kin, like I told you.
How did you know she wasn’t home?
McGinnis frowned at him. That don’t take any great brains, he said. She come through here three or four days ago. Had one of Old Lady Nakais girls driving her truck. And she ain’t been back. He stared belligerently at Leaphorn. And I knew she didn’t come home because the only way to get to her place from the outside is right past my place here.
Three or four days ago? Can you remember which day?
McGinnis thought about it. It took only a moment. Wednesday. Little after I ate. About 2
P.M.
Wednesday. The Kinaalda where Leaphorn had arrested young Emerson Begay would have been starting about then. Begay was a member of the Mud clan. His niece was being initiated into womanhood at the ceremony.
Whats Mrs. Cigarettes clan? Leaphorn asked. Is she a Mud Dinee?
She’s a born-to Mud, McGinnis said.
So Leaphorn knew where he could find Mrs. Cigarette. For a hundred miles around, every member of the Mud People healthy enough to stir would be drawn to the ritual reunion to share its blessing and reinforce its power.
There’s not many Mud Dinee around Short Mountain, McGinnis said. Mrs. Cigarettes bunch, and the Nakai family, and the Endischee outfit, and Alice Frank Pino, and a few Begays, and I think that’s all of them.
Leaphorn got up and stretched. He thanked McGinnis for the hospitality and said he would go to the sing. He used the Navajo verb headstall, which means to take part in a ritual chant. By slightly changing the guttural inflection, the word becomes the verb to be kicked. As Leaphorn pronounced it, a listener with an ear alert to the endless Navajo punning could have understood Leaphorn to mean either that he was going to get himself cured or get himself kicked. It was among the oldest of old Navajo word plays, and McGinnis grinning slightly replied with the expected pun response.
Good for a sore butt, he said.
» 10 «
T
he wind followed Leaphorns carryall half the way across the Nokaito Bench, enveloping the jolting vehicle in its own gritty dust and filling the policemans nostrils with exhaust fumes. It was hot. The promise of rain had faded as the west wind raveled away the thunderheads. Now the sky was blank blue. The road angled toward the crest of the ridge, growing rockier as it neared the top. Leaphorn down-shifted to ease the vehicle over a corrugation of stone and the following wind gusted past him. He drove across the ridge line, blind for a moment. Then, with a shift in the wind, the dust cleared and he saw the place of Alice Endischee.
The land sloped northward now into Utah, vast, empty and treeless. In Leaphorn the Navajo sensitivity to land and landscape was fine-tuned. Normally he saw beauty in such blue-haze distances, but today he saw only poverty, a sparse stony grassland ruined by overgrazing and now gray with drought.
He shifted the carryall back into third gear as the track tilted slightly downward, and inspected the place of Alice Endischee far down the slope. There was the square plank summer hogan with its tar-paper roof, providing a spot of red in the landscape, and beyond it a winter hogan of stone, and a pole arbor roofed with sage and creosote brush, and two corrals, and an older hogan built carefully to the prescription of the Holy People and used for all things sacred and ceremonial. Scattered among the buildings Leaphorn counted seven pickups, a battered green Mustang, a flatbed truck and two wagons. The scene hadn’t changed since he had come there to find Emerson Begay, when the Kinaalda had only started and the Endischee girl had been having her hair washed in yucca suds by her aunts as the first step of the great ritual blessing. Now the ceremonial would be in the climactic day.
People were coming out of the medicine hogan, some of them watching his approaching vehicle, but most standing in a milling cluster around the doorway. Then, from the cluster, a girl abruptly emerged running.
She ran, pursued by the wind and a half-dozen younger children, across an expanse of sagebrush. She set the easy pace of those who know that they have a great distance to go. She wore the long skirt, the long-sleeved blouse and the heavy silver jewelry of a traditional Navajo woman but she ran with the easy grace of a child who has not yet forgotten how to race her shadow.
Leaphorn stopped the carryall and watched, remembering his own initiation out of childhood, until the racers disappeared down the slope. For the Endischee girl, this would be the third race of the day, and the third day of such racing. Changing Woman taught that the longer a girl runs at her Kinaalda, the longer she lives a healthy life. But by .the third day, muscles would be sore and the return would be early. Leaphorn shifted back into gear. While the girl was gone, the family would re-enter the hogan to sing the Racing Songs, the same prayers the Holy People had chanted at the menstruation ceremony when White Shell Girl became Changing Woman. Then there would be a pause, while the women baked the great ceremonial cake to be eaten tonight. The pause would give Leaphorn his chance to approach and cross-examine Listening Woman.
He touched the woman’s sleeve as she emerged from the hogan, and told her who he was, and why he wanted to talk to her.
Its like I told that white policeman, Margaret Cigarette said. The old man who was to die told me some dry paintings had been spoiled, and the man who was to die had been there. And maybe that was why he was sick.
I listened to the tape recording of you talking to the white policeman, Leaphorn said. But I noticed, my mother, that the white man didn’t really let you tell about it. He interrupted you.
Margaret Cigarette thought about that. She stood, arms folded across the purple velvet of her blouse, her blind eyes looking through Leaphorn.
Yes, she said. That’s the way it was.