“Well, I was pretty forgetful.”
“Glad to hear that,” Nez said. “I thought you figured I was maybe lying to you a little bit and if you asked me often enough I’d forget and tell the truth.”
This notion didn’t seem to bother Nez. He motioned Leaphorn to sit on the boulder beside his chair.
“Now you want to talk to me about who’d want to shoot me. I tell you one thing right now. It wasn’t no car burglars. That’s a lot of lies they’re saying about me.”
Leaphorn nodded. “That’s right,” he said. “The police at Chinle told me you weren’t helping them catch those people.” Nez seemed pleased at that. He nodded.
“But you know, maybe the car burglars don’t know that,” Leaphorn said. “Maybe they think you’re telling on ’em.” Nez shook his head. “No,” he said. “They know better. They’re my kinfolks.”
“You picked a good place to get some sunshine here,” Leaphorn said. “Lots of heat off the cliff. Out of the wind. And—” Nez laughed. “And nobody can get a shot at me here. Not from the rim anyway.”
“I noticed that,” Leaphorn said.
“I figured you had.”
“I read the police report,” Leaphorn said, and recited it to Nez. “That about right?”
“That’s it,” Nez said. “The son of a bitch just kept shooting. After I sort of crawled under the horse, he hit the horse twice more.” Nez whacked his hand against the cast. “Thump. Thump.”
“Sounds like he wanted to kill you,” Leaphorn said.
“I thought maybe he just didn’t like my horse,” Nez said. “He was a pretty sorry horse. Liked to bite people.”
“The last time I came to see you it was also bad news,” Leaphorn said. “You think there could be any connection?”
“Connection?” Nez said. He looked genuinely surprised. “No. I didn’t think of that.” But he thought now, staring at Leaphorn, frowning. “Connection,” he repeated. “How could there be? What for?” Leaphorn shrugged. “I don’t know. It was just a thought. Did anybody tell you our missing man from way back then has turned up?”
“No,” Nez said, looking delighted. “I didn’t know that. After a month or so I figured he must be dead. Didn’t make any sense to leave that pretty woman that way.”
“You were right. He was dead. We just found his bones,” Leaphorn said, and watched Nez, waiting for the question. But no question came.
“I thought so,” Nez said. “Been dead a long time, too, I bet.”
“Probably more than ten years,” Leaphorn said.
“Yeah,” Nez said. He shook his head, said, “Crazy bastard,” and looked sad.
Leaphorn waited.
“I liked him,” Nez said. “He was a good man. Funny. Lots of jokes.”
“Are you going to play games with me like you did eleven years ago, or you going to tell me what you know about this? Like why you think he was crazy and why you thought he’d been dead all this time.” 20 of 102
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“I don’t tell on people,” Nez said. “There’s already plenty of trouble without that.”
“There won’t be any more trouble for Harold Breedlove,” Leaphorn said. “But from the look of all those bandages, there’s been some trouble for you.”
Nez considered that. Then he considered Leaphorn.
“Tell me if you found him on Ship Rock,” Nez said. “Was he climbing Tse´ Bitáí´?” Absolutely nothing Amos Nez could have said would have surprised Leaphorn more than that. He spent a few moments re-collecting his wits.
“That’s right,” he said finally. “Somebody spotted his skeleton down below the peak. How the hell did you know?” Nez shrugged.
“Did Breedlove tell you he was going there?”
“He told me.”
“When?”
Nez hesitated again. “He’s dead?”
“Dead.”
“When I was guiding them,” Nez said. “We were way up Canyon del Muerto. His woman, Mrs. Breedlove, she’d gone up a little ways around the corner. To urinate, I guess it was. Breedlove, he’d been talking about climbing the cliff there.” He gestured upward.
“You been up there. It’s straight up. Worse than that. Some places the top hangs over. I said nobody could do it. He said he could.
He told me some places he’d climbed up in Colorado. He started talking then about all the things he wanted to do while he was still young and now he was already thirty years old and he hadn’t done them. And then he said—” Nez cut it off, looking at Leaphorn.
“I’m not a policeman anymore,” he said. “I’m retired, like you. I just want to know what the hell happened to the man.”
“Maybe I should have told you then,” Nez said.
“Yeah. Maybe you should have,” Leaphorn said. “Why didn’t you?”
“Wasn’t any reason to,” Nez said. “He said he wasn’t going to do it until spring came. Said now it was too close to winter. He said not to talk about it because his wife wanted him to stop climbing.”
“Did Mrs. Breedlove hear him?”
“She was off taking a leak,” Nez said. “He said he thought maybe he’d do it all by himself. Said nobody had ever done that.”
“Did you think he meant it? Did he sound serious?”
“Sounded serious, yes. But I thought he was just bragging. White men do that a lot.”
“He didn’t say where he was going?”
“His wife came back then. He shut up about it.”
“No, I mean did he say anything about where he was going to go that evening? After you came in out of the canyon.”
“I remember they had some friends coming to see them. They were going to eat together.”
“Not drinking, was he?”
“Not drinking,” Nez said. “I don’t let my tourists drink. It’s against the law.”
“So he said he was going to climb Tse´ Bitáí´ the following spring,” Leaphorn said. “Is that the way you remember it?”
“That’s what he said.”
They sat a while, engulfed by sunlight, cool air, and silence. A raven planed down from the rim, circled around a cottonwood, landed on a Russian olive across the canyon floor, and perched, waiting for them to die.
Nez extracted a pack of cigarettes from his shirt, offered one to Leaphorn, and lit one for himself.
“Like to smoke while I’m thinking,” he said.
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“I used to do that, too,” Leaphorn said. “But my wife talked me into quitting.”
“They’ll do that if you’re not careful,” Nez said.
“Thinking about what?”
“Thinking about why he told me that. You know, maybe he figured I’d say something and his woman would hear it and stop him.” Nez exhaled a cloud of blue smoke. “And he wanted somebody to stop him. Or when spring came and he slipped off to climb it by himself, he thought maybe he’d fall off and get killed and if nobody knew where he was nobody would find his body. And he didn’t want to be up there dead and all alone.”
“And you think he figured you’d hear about him disappearing and you’d tell people where to find him?” Leaphorn asked.
“Maybe,” Nez said, and shrugged.
“It didn’t work.”
“Because he was already missing,” Nez said. “Where was he all those months between when he goes away from his wife here, and when he climbed our Rock with Wings?”
Leaphorn grinned. “That’s what I was hoping you’d know something about. Did he say anything that gave you ideas about where he was going after he left here? Who he was meeting?”
Nez shook his head. “That’s a long time to stay away from that good woman,” Nez said. “Way too long, I think. I guess you policemen haven’t found out where he was?”
“No,” Leaphorn said. “We don’t have the slightest idea.”
8
A MILD PRELUDE TO WINTER