"You pull a limb off this for anything?"
Roanhorse shook his head.
There was a raw wound on the lower trunk where a limb had been broken away. Leaphorn put his thumb against the exposed cambium layer and showed it to McKee. It was sticky with fresh sap.
"What do you think of that?"
"Nothing," McKee said. "How about you?"
"I don't know. Probably nothing."
He started walking back toward the body, through the creosote bush, searching. Bitsi, McKee noticed, had climbed back into the carryall.
"Look around across the road there," Leaphorn said, "and see if you can find that juniper branch."
But he found it himself. The frail needles were dirty and broken. McKee guessed it had been used as a broom even before Leaphorn told him.
"That looked pretty smart, Joe," McKee said. "Where does it take you?"
"I don't know." Leaphorn was looking intently at the body. "Notice how his legs are stretched out straight. He could have pushed 'em out that way after he fell down, but if you do that laying on the ground, looks like it would push your pants cuffs away from your ankles." He stood silently, surveying the body. "Maybe that's all right though. It could happen." He looked at McKee. "That wrist couldn't happen, though."
He squatted beside the body, looking up.
"Ever try to pick up an unconscious man? He's limp. Absolutely limp. After he's dead two-three hours, he starts getting stiff."
That's why I noticed the arm, McKee thought. It doesn't look natural.
"You think he was dead, and somebody put him here?"
"Maybe," Leaphorn said. "And whoever did it didn't know it was going to rain so they brushed out their tracks."
"But why?" McKee asked. He looked around. Here the body was sure to be found and down in the wash it could have been buried, probably forever.
"I've got better questions than that," Leaphorn said. "Like how did he die? We can find that out. And then maybe it will be who did it, and why. Why would anyone want to kill the poor bastard?"
Chapter 7
Old Woman Gray Rocks leaned back against the cedar pole supporting one corner of the brush hogan and took a long pull on the cigarette McKee had lit for her. She blew the smoke out her nostrils. Behind her, the foothills of the Lukachukais shimmered under the blinding sun—gray mesquite and creosote bush, gray-green scrub cedar, and the paler gray of the eroded gullies, and above the grayness the blue-green of the higher slopes shaded now by an embryo early-afternoon thundercloud. By sundown, McKee thought, the cloud would be producing lightning and those frail curtains of rain which would, in arid-country fashion, evaporate high above the ground. He wondered idly if Leaphorn had been right—if Horseman had been hiding back in that broken canyon country.
He refocused his eyes to the dimmer light under the brush and saw that Old Woman Gray Rocks was smiling at him.
"The way they do it," she said, "is catch the Wolf and tie him down. Not give him anything to eat or any water and not let him take his pants down for anything until he tells that he's the one that's doing the witching. Once they tell it, it's all right after that. Then the witching turns around and the man he did it to gets all right and the witch gets sick and dies."
Old Woman Gray Rocks removed the cigarette and held it between thumb and first finger. It occurred to McKee that every Navajo he had ever seen smoking—including children—used the same unorthodox grip.
"I don't think they're going to catch this one," she said.
"Why do you say that?" McKee was feeling good that his command of Navajo had returned. Two days ago he would only have said "Why?" which required a single monosyllabic guttural. He had only had time for one afternoon in the language lab listening to tapes and his pronunciation had been rough at first. Now he was almost as fluent as he had been at twenty-seven. "Kintahgoo' bil i noolhtah?" he said, repeating the question and relishing the sound.
They don't think he lives around here. He's a stranger."
McKee was suddenly mildly interested. He had been feeling drowsy, the effect of an unusually heavy meal (lamb stew, floating in fat, boiled corn, fried cornbread, and canned peaches) and of a certainty, established not long after Canfield had dropped him off at the hogan, that the woman would tell him nothing useful. He had hoped he would learn something of the motivation behind the witchcraft gossip, detect the sickness, or the intra-family tensions; or the jealousies, or whatever trouble had produced a need for a scapegoat witch. This hope had grown when Old Woman Gray Rocks had proved friendly and welcomed him warmly. All morning long it had faded. But there was nothing to do now but wait for Canfield to stop on his way back from buying supplies to pick him up. If there was serious trouble in the clan, natural or human, Old Woman Gray Rocks seemed genuinely unaware of it. She gossiped cheerfully about minor affairs. The nephew of an uncle by marriage had left his wife and taken up with a woman in the Peach Tree Clan at Moenkopi. He had stolen one of his wife's horses. One of the sons of Hosteen Tom had gone to Farmington to join the Marine Corps but they said now that he was working at the place where they mined the coal near Four Corners. They said the Marines didn't take him because he didn't do right on the papers.
There had been much other information. The winter had been wet and early grazing was pretty good. The price of wool was down a little but the price of mutton was up. Some of the nephews had found jobs at the new sawmill the Tribal Council had opened. George Charley had seen trucks way over by Los Gigantes Buttes and the men told him they belonged to an oil company and that Hosteen Charley had better move his sheep out of there because they would be shooting off dynamite. Old Woman Gray Rocks thought this was strange and McKee had not felt his Navajo good enough to undertake an explanation of how seismograph crews record shock waves in searching for petroleum deposits.
Until now, only two of her remarks had been worth remembering. She had mentioned that a man driving a truck had stopped her sister's husband and asked him about a road. McKee had asked her about that, thinking of Miss Leon's misplaced electrical engineer. The road had been the one which leads into Many Ruins Canyon. Old Woman Gray Rocks said the driver had been a Belacani like McKee and the truck had been pulling a little two-wheel trailer, and it was like those they haul bread in, with a door in the back—which meant it might be a van, like Dr. Hall's van. She didn't know what color it was but her grandson had seen it parked in Hard Goods Canyon three or four weeks ago when he was trapping rabbits. Hard Goods was the wash that runs into Many Ruins Canyon about nine miles up from the mouth, she said.
And then Old Woman Gray Rocks had returned to the subject of the decline of the younger generation, and mentioned a cousin of her nephews had cut up a Nakai in Gallup and stolen a car and run away.
"I heard about that at Window Rock," McKee said. "I heard his name was Luis Horseman." He checked an impulse to tell her that Horseman was dead and to ask her if the cousin of her nephews had come home to hide. It was better to let her talk.
"That's his name," Old Woman Gray Rocks said. She spit on the ground. "He always acted like he didn't have any relatives. Got drunk all the time and fought people. His mother wasn't any good either. Run off from her children." She lit another cigarette.
McKee wondered how far Leaphorn's news had spread. "Did he kill that man in Gallup?"
"They say he got well," she said. "A policeman came to Shoemaker's and said that, and said he should come in to talk to Law and Order. It would be better if he did that."