“You have any questions?” Leaphorn asked.
“Oh, yes,” Vang said. “You climbed up to here—” Vang indicated “here” with a wave of his hand at the landscape.
“Climbed up a hollow reed?”
“Well, as I understand it, we weren’t really humans yet. But they had human characteristics. The same tendency to push and shove, try to get on top, try to get out in front, and they still had to get revenge, for example, if someone hurt them. The habits that always got them into trouble. I guess you could just call it selfishness. Being greedy.”
Vang considered this. Nodded. “All the bad things that were the reason the Creating Spirit punished them for. The reasons the Creator made the flood. To destroy all that. That’s what it means?”
“I think so,” Leaphorn said. “That’s all that seems to make any sense, anyway. In any of these various religions, the Creator seems to have started mankind, to have given humans a bunch of lessons on how to live the good life, be happy, stay happy by loving your neighbors, feeding the poor, not being selfish. Not chasing after fame, fortune, three car garages, all that. But he didn’t make us slaves.
He gave us a way to tell good from evil, but he also gave us free will. You know. Do you want to get rich, or do you want have a good life. It’s our choice.” THE SHAPE SHIFTER
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“I think our people got created a lot like that, too. But I never really had much chance to hear our stories. And I don’t think the Hmong ever had much chance to get rich.” He sighed. “Didn’t even have any chance to teach their children about all that.”
Vang’s voice faded into a sort of sadness when he said that, and he looked down at his hands.
Something like me, Leaphorn was thinking. Tommy Vang sitting there beside him was another product of childhood interrupted. Vang’s by war. Joe Leaphorn’s by that old assimilation policy of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. By the school buses that hauled Indian kids away to boarding schools. Away from our hogans where the old people would have been teaching us all the ancestor stories—of the first, second, and third worlds. The buses brought them home when summer came, of course, to help with the herding, and their other duties, but the summer was the time tradition allowed for another set of stories, about hunting, relations with the animal worlds.
The origin stories could be told only in the cold times, during the season when the thunder sleeps, when it was quiet, and the snow kept them in the hogans, and there was nothing to distract them, nothing to keep the children from listening, and thinking, and understanding.
And thus, Leaphorn was thinking, the assimilation program had cost much of this generation the heart and soul of the Navajo system of values. And this led him to another thought. Why younger, much more modern Officer Jim Chee, who had been born late enough to escape assimilation, was much better tuned to the Navajo Way than he was. Why Jim Chee still believed he could be both a policeman enforcing most belagaana laws and a 188
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shaman conducting the ceremonies that cured people who violated Navajo cultural rules and restored them to harmony.
“Why don’t you tell me what you remember,” Leaphorn said. “When I was a lot younger and a student, I studied anthropology at the university. I learned just a little, very, very little, about the cultures of your part of the world. Didn’t your Creator have an emissary, sort of an am-bassador, who he sent down to sort of govern humanity?”
“Ah, yes,” Vang said, looking delighted. “How you know about that?”
“Mostly just from books,” Leaphorn said. “We used one called”—Leaphorn paused, probing his memory—“I think it was Hmong, A History of a People.”
“Did it tell about Hua Tai?”
“I have to think,” Leaphorn said, noticing that Vang’s attitude had changed abruptly. His patient, enduring leth-argy had converted into enthusiasm.
“As I remember it,” Leaphorn said, “Hua Tai was the God who created the world and the people. But most of the little bit we learned was about his lieutenant. I think
‘Harshoes,’ or something like that. I sort of thought of him as being like Mohammed. You know, the prophet who represented God to the Arabian world.”
“You say his name ‘Yer Shua,’” Vang said, pronouncing the syllables very slowly and repeating them. “I have heard about Mohammed. They talk about him some on the television news. About the war in Iraq. But Yer Shua was different, I think. He was part God and part man, I think. I remember they told about him being a farmer like the rest of the Hmong people, and raising pigs and having a whole lot of wives. And he was the one who tried THE SHAPE SHIFTER
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to take care of the Hmong people. I mean he tried to protect them.”
“We Navajos have what we call yei, ” Leaphorn said.
“Powerful, like spirits, but good. And the belagaana—
white people—they have . . . well it depends on whether they’re Christian, or Jewish, or what. Anyway, their bad supernatural beings are devils, or witches, or some other names. Good ones are angels.”
They crossed the Continental Divide on Navajo Route 9 as Leaphorn was covering this side of theology, and now the Torreon ridge rose about six miles ahead, and beyond it Torreon arroyo and Torreon itself, with its chapter house and maybe, Leaphorn guessed, something like 150 residents scattered around the valley. Above it all, rising like a great sunlit thumb against a background of scattered clouds some thirty miles to the southeast, was Cabezon Peak. The thoughts Leaphorn had been forming jelled into a sudden decision. He slowed, pulled the vehicle off to the side where a ranch entry road had widened the shoulder.
“There’s Torreon,” he told Vang, pointing at the scattered buildings far ahead. “Before we get there, let’s talk about what we’re doing there.” He released his seat belt and opened the car door.
“Talk?” Vang said. “What we talk about?”
“I want to hear some more about what you’ve been telling me about the Hmong, for one thing,” Leaphorn said. “And if you’re interested, I’ll tell you more about the Dineh and about our traditional relationship with God and the spirits. And then we ought to plan what we’re going to do about finding Mr. Delonie. And we should stretch our legs a little. I’m getting old, and I get stiff.” 190
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“Sure,” Vang said.
Leaphorn got out, stretched, leaned against the fender, admired the view, planning his tactics. Vang joined him, glanced at Leaphorn inquiringly, and leaned against the car door.
“Not many people,” Leaphorn said. “A few down below, then miles and miles and miles in every direction, no sign of people.” He pointed down the road toward the village. “ ‘Torreon’ means tower, and when that little valley was first occupied by people, they built one out of stones because enemies kept attacking them.” Vang considered that. “Like what they say about Hmong. Everywhere we went people attacked us.” He glanced at Leaphorn, a wry smile. “We even had a god like that. His name was Nau Yong, and they called him
‘the Savage One’ because what he liked to do was capture lots of Hmong people, and tear them apart and drink their blood.” Vang grimaced. “Like he was a great tiger in the forest. They said he was the chief of all the bad spirits.
Sort of like their king.”
Leaphorn considered this. “Did he live on top of a mountain?” Leaphorn asked.
Vang looked surprised. “How did you know?”
“Maybe I read it somewhere,” Leaphorn said. “But that’s usually how it worked.”
He pointed toward the south, where Mount Taylor’s crest was visible against the horizon. “That’s our Sacred Mountain of the South, our boundary marker. According to my clan’s traditions, it was the home of a supernatural named ‘Ye-iitsoh.’ He was our version of your, ah, Nau Yong. Sort of in charge of all the vestiges of greed, hatred, malice, selfishness, cruelty, and so forth. The way THE SHAPE SHIFTER