Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 02 - Dance Hall of the Dead Read online

  Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 02 - Dance Hall of the Dead

  For Alex Atcitty and Old Man Madman and all the others who agree that Custer had it coming

  Author's Note

  In this book, the setting is genuine. The Village of Zu¤¡ and the landscape of the Zu¤¡ reservation and the adjoining Ramah Navajo reservation are accurately depicted to the best of my ability. The characters are purely fictional. The view the reader receives of the Shalako religion is as it might be seen by a Navajo with an interest in ethnology. It does not pretend to be more than that

  Chapter One

  Sunday, November 30, 5:18 P.M.

  SHULAWITSI, the Little Fire God, member of the Council of the Gods and Deputy to the Sun, had taped his track shoes to his feet. He had wound the tape as Coach taught him, tight over the arch of the foot. And now the spikes biting into the packed earth of the sheep trail seemed a part of him. He ran with perfectly conditioned grace, his body a machine in motion, his mind detached, attending other things. Just ahead where the trail shifted down the slope of the mesa he would stop-as he always did-and check his time and allow himself four minutes of rest. He knew now with an exultant certainty that he would be ready. His lungs had expanded, his leg muscles hardened. In two days when he led Longhorn and the Council from the ancestral village to Zu¤i, fatigue would not cause him to forget the words of the great chant, or make any missteps in the ritual dance. And when Shalako came he would be ready to dance all the night without an error. The Salamobia would never have to punish him. He remembered the year when he was nine, and Hu-tu-tu had stumbled on the causeway over Zu¤¡ Wash, and the Salamobia had struck him with their yucca wands and everyone had laughed. Even the Navajos had laughed, and they laughed very little at Shalako. They would not laugh at him.

  The Fire God half fell onto the outcropping of rock that was his regular resting place. He glanced quickly at his watch. He had used eleven minutes and fourteen seconds on this lap-cutting eleven seconds off his time of yesterday. The thought gave him satisfaction, but it faded quickly. He sat on the outcrop, a slender boy with black hair falling damp across his forehead, massaging his legs through the cotton of his sweat pants. The memory of the laughing Navajos had turned his thoughts to George Bowlegs. He approached these thoughts gingerly, careful to avoid any anger. It was always to be avoided, but now it was strictly taboo. The Koyemshi had appeared in the village two days ago, announcing in each of the four plazas of Zu¤i that eight days hence the Shalako would come from the Dance Hall of the Dead to visit their people and bless them. This was no time for angry thoughts. Bowlegs was his friend, but Bowlegs was crazy. And he had reason to be angry with him if the season did not forbid it. George had asked too many questions, and since George was a friend he had given more answers than he should have given. No matter how badly he wanted to be a Zu¤i, to join the Fire God's own Badger Clan, George was still a Navajo. He had not been initiated, had not felt the darkness of the mask slip over his head, and seen through the eyes of the kachina spirit. And therefore there were things that George was not allowed to know and some of those things, the Fire God thought glumly, he might have told George. Father Ingles didn't think so, but Father Ingles was a white man.

  Behind him, above the red sandstone wall of the mesa, a skyscape of feathery cirrus clouds stretched southward toward Mexico. To the west over the Painted Desert, they were flushed with the afterglow of sunset. To the north this reflected light colored the cliffs of the Zu¤i Buttes a delicate rose. Far below him in the shadow of the mesa, a light went on in the camper near the site of the anthropologist's dig. Ted Isaacs cooking supper, the Fire God thought. And that was another thing not to think about, to avoid being angry with George. It had been George's idea to see if they could find some of the things made by the Old People in the Doctor's box of chips and beads and arrowheads. He would make use of it on a hunting fetish, George had said. Maybe make one for both of them. And the Doctor had been furious, and now Isaacs would not let anyone come anymore to watch him work. Crazy George.

  The Fire God rubbed his legs, feeling a tightening in the thigh muscles as breeze dried the sweat. In seventeen more seconds he would run again, cover the last mile down the mesa slope to where George would be waiting with his bicycle. Then he would go home and finish his homework.

  He ran again, moving first at a slow jog and then faster as the stiffness left. Sweat again dampened the back of his sweat shirt, darkening the stenciled letters that said "Property of Zu¤i Consolidated Schools." Under the angry red sky he ran, into the thickening darkness, thinking of crazy George, his oldest and best friend. He thought of George collecting cactus buttons for the doper at the hippie commune, and eating them himself in search of visions, of George going to the old man at the edge of Zu¤i to learn how to become a sorcerer, and how angry the old man had been, of George wanting to quit being a Navajo so he could be a Zu¤i. George was certainly crazy, but George was his friend, and here now was his bicycle and George would be waiting.

  The figure which stepped from behind the boulders in the red darkness was not George. It was a Salamobia, its round yellow-circled eyes staring at him. The Fire God stopped, opened his mouth, and found nothing to say. This was the Salamobia of the Mole kiva, its mask painted the color of darkness. And yet it was not. The Fire God stared at the figure, the muscular body in the dark shirt, the bristling ruff of turkey feathers surrounding the neck, the black and empty eyes, the fierce beak, the plumed feathered topknot. Black was the color of the Mole Salamobia, but this was not the mask. He knew that mask. His mother's uncle was the personifier of the Mole Salamobia and the mask lived at a shrine in his mother's uncle's home. But if it was not the mask.

  The Fire God saw then that the wand rising in the hand of this Salamobia was not of woven yucca. It glittered in the red light of the twilight. And he remembered that Salamobia, like all of the ancestor spirits which lived at the Zu¤i masks, were visible only to members of the Sorcery Fraternity, and to those about to die.

  Chapter Two

  Monday, December 1, 12:20 P.M.

  LIEUTENANT JOE LEAPHORN was watching the fly. He should have been listening to Ed Pasquaanti, who, perched on a swivel chair behind the desk marked "Chief of Police, Zu¤i" was talking steadily in a quick, precise voice. But Pasquaanti was discussing the jurisdictional problem and Leaphorn already understood both the problem and why Pasquaanti was talking about it. Pasquaanti wanted to make sure that Leaphorn and McKinley County Deputy Sheriff Cipriano ("Orange") Naranjo and State Policeman J. D. Highsmith understood that on the Zu¤i reservation the Zu¤i police would be running the investigation. And that was fine with Leaphorn. The sooner he got away from here, the happier he'd be. The fly had distracted him a moment or two earlier by landing on his notebook. It walked now, with the sluggishness of all winter-doomed insects, up the margin of the paper toward his finger. Would a Zu¤i fly deign to tread upon Navajo skin? Leaphorn instantly regretted the thought. It represented a slip back into the illogical hostility he had been struggling against all morning-ever since he had been handed, at the Ramah chapter house, the message which had sent him over here.

  Typical of the radio messages Leaphorn received from Shiprock, it said a little too little. Leaphorn was to drive over to Zu¤i without delay to help find George Bowlegs, fourteen, a Navajo. Other details would be available from Zu¤i police, with whom Leaphorn was instructed to cooperate.

  The radioman at the Raman communications center grinned when he handed it over. "Before you ask," he said, "yes, this is all they said. And no, I don't know a
damn thing about it."

  "Well, hell," Leaphorn said. He could see how it would work. A thirty-mile drive over to Zu¤i to find out that the kid had stolen something or other and had disappeared. But the Zu¤is wouldn't know a damn thing about the boy. So then there would be the thirty-mile drive back to the Ramah reservation to find out where to look for him. And then. "You know anything about this George Bowlegs?" he asked.

  The radioman knew about what Leaphorn had expected he would. He wasn't sure, but maybe the boy was the son of a guy named Shorty Bowlegs. Shorty had moved back from the Big Reservation after something went wrong with a woman he'd married over there around Coyote Canyon. This Shorty Bowlegs was a member of the High Standing House clan, and one of the boys of Old Woman Running. And once, after he had come back from Coyote Canyon, he had applied for a land use allocation with the grazing committee here. But then he had moved off somewhere. And maybe this was the wrong man, anyway.

  "O.K., then," Leaphorn said. "If anybody wants me, I'll be at the police station in Zu¤i."

  "Don't look so sour," the radioman said, still grinning. "I don't think the Zu¤is' been initiating anybody into the Bow Society lately."

  Leaphorn had laughed at that. Once, or so Navajos believed, initiates into the Zu¤i Bow priesthood had been required to bring a Navajo scalp. He laughed, but his mood remained sour. He drove down N.M. 53 toward Zu¤i a little faster than he should, the mood bothering him because he could find no logical reason to explain it. Why resent this assignment? The job that had taken him to Ramah had been onerous enough to make an interruption welcome. An old Singer had complained that he had given a neighbor woman eight hundred dollars to take into Gallup and make a down payment on a pickup truck, and the woman had spent his money. Some of the facts had been easy enough to establish. The woman had retrieved almost eight hundred dollars of her pawn from a Gallup shop on the day in question and she hadn't given any money to the car-lot owner. So it should have been simple, but it wasn't. The woman said the Singer owed her the money, and that the Singer was a witch, a Navajo Wolf. And then there was the question of which side of the boundary fence they'd been standing on when the money changed hands. If she was standing where she said she had been, they were on Navajo reservation land and under tribal-federal jurisdiction. But if they stood where the Singer claimed, they were over on nonreservation allocation land and the case would probably be tried under the New Mexico embezzlement law. Leaphorn could think of no way to resolve that problem and ordinarily he would have welcomed even a temporary escape from it. But he found himself resenting this job-hunting a fellow Navajo at the behest of Zu¤is.

  Pasquaanti's voice rattled on. The fly took a tentative step toward Leaphorn's hard brown knuckle, then stopped. Leaphorn suddenly understood his mood. It was because he felt that Zu¤is felt superior to Navajos. And he felt this because he, Joe Leaphorn, had once-a long time ago-had a Zuni roommate during his freshman year at Arizona State about whom he had developed a silly inferiority complex. Therefore his present mood wasn't at all logical, and Leaphorn disliked illogic in others and detested it in himself. The fly walked around his finger and disappeared, upside down, under the notebook. Pasquaanti stopped talking.

  "I don't think we're going to have any jurisdictional problems," Leaphorn said impatiently. "So why don't you fill us in on what we're working on?" It would have been more polite to let Pasquaanti set his own pace. Leaphorn knew it, and he saw in Pasquaanti's face that the Zu¤i knew he knew it.

  "Here's what we know so far," Pasquaanti said. He shuffled a Xeroxed page to each of them. "Two boys missing and a pretty good bet that one of them got cut."

  Two boys? Leaphorn scanned the page quickly and then, abruptly interested, went back over every sentence carefully. Two boys missing. Bowlegs and a Zu¤i named Ernesto Cata, and the Cata boy's bicycle, and a "large" expanse of blood soaked into the ground where the bicycle had been left.

  "It says here they're classmates," Leaphorn said. "But Bowlegs is fourteen and Cata is listed as twelve. Were they in the same grade?" Leap horn wished instantly he'd not asked the question. Pasquaanti would simply remind them all that Bowlegs was a Navajo-thereby explaining the gap in academic performance.

  "Both in the seventh grade," Pasquaanti said. "The Cata boy'd be thirteen in a day or two. They'd been close friends two, three years. Good friends. Everybody says it."

  "No trace of a weapon?" Naranjo asked.

  "Nothing," Pasquaanti said. "Just blood. The weapon could have been anything that will let the blood out of you. You never saw so much blood. But I'd guess it wasn't a gun. Nobody remembers hearing anything that sounded like a shot and it happened close enough to the village so somebody would have heard." Pasquaanti paused. "I'd guess it was something that chopped. There was blood sprayed on the needles of pi¤on there as well as all that soaked into the ground, so maybe something cut a major artery while he was standing there. Anyway, whoever it was must have taken the weapon with him."

  "Whoever?" Leaphorn said. "Then you're not all that sure Bowlegs is the one?"

  Pasquaanti looked at him, studying his face. "We're not sure of nothing," he said. "All we know is down there. The Cata boy didn't come home last night. They went out looking for him when it got daylight and they found the blood where he left his bicycle. The Bowlegs kid had borrowed the bike and he was supposed to bring it back there to that meeting place they had. O.K.? So the Bowlegs boy shows up at school this morning, but when we find out about the borrowed bike and all and send a man over there to talk to him, he's gone. Turns out he got up during his social studies class and said something to the teacher about feeling sick and cut out."

  "If he did the killing," Naranjo said, "you'd think he'd have run right after he did it."

  "Course we don't know there was a killing yet," Pasquaanti said. "That could be animal blood. Lot of butchering going on now. People getting ready for all that cooking for Shalako."

  "Unless maybe Bowlegs was smart enough to figure no one would suspect him unless he did run," Naranjo said. "So he came to school and i then he lost his nerve and ran anyway."

  "I don't think it got typed up there in the report, but the kids said Bowlegs was looking for Cata when he got to school, asking where he was and all," Pasquaanti said.

  "That could have been part of the act," Leaphorn said. He was glad to find he was thinking like a cop again.

  "I guess so," Pasquaanti said. "But remember he's just fourteen years old." Leaphorn tapped the page. "It says here that Cata had gone out to run. What was it? Track team or something?"

  The silence lasted maybe three seconds-long enough to tell Leaphorn the answer wouldn't be the track team. It would be something to do with the Zu¤i religion. Pasquaanti was deciding exactly how much he wanted them to know before he opened his mouth.

  "This Cata boy had been selected to have a part in the religious ceremonials this year," Pasquaanti said. "Some of those ceremonials last for hours, the dancing is hard, and you have to be in condition. He was running every evening to keep in condition."

  Leaphorn was remembering the Shalako ceremonial he'd attended a long time ago-back when he'd had a freshman Zu¤i roommate. "Was Cata the one they call the Fire God? " he asked. "The one who is painted black and wears the spotted mask and carries the firebrand?"

  "Yeah," Pasquaanti said. "Cata was Shulawitsi." He looked uncomfortable. "I don't imagine that has anything to do with this, though."

  Leaphorn thought about it. Probably not, he decided. He wished he knew more about the Zu¤i religion. But that wouldn't be his problem anyway. His problem would be finding George Bowlegs.

  Pasquaanti was fumbling through a folder. "The only picture we have of the boys so far is the one in the school yearbook." He handed each of them a page of photos, two of the faces circled with red ink. "If we don't find them quick, we'll get the photographer to make us some big blowups off the negatives," he said. "We'll get copies of the pictures sent over to the sheriff's office and the state police, an
d over to the Arizona state police, too. And if we find out anything we'll get the word to you right away so you won't be wasting your time." Pasquaanti got up. "I'm going to ask Lieutenant Leaphorn to sort of concentrate on trying to find out where George Bowlegs got to. We'll be working on trying to find Ernesto and the bicycle, and anything else we can find out."

  It occurred to Leaphorn that Pasquaanti, with his jurisdiction properly established, was not offering any advice about how to find Bowlegs. He was presuming that Naranjo and Highsmith and Leaphorn understood their jobs and knew how to do them.

  "I'll need to know where Bowlegs lived, and if anybody's been there to see if he went home."

  "It's about four miles out to where Shorty Bowlegs has his hogan and I'm going to have to draw you a little map," Pasquaanti said. "We went out, but we didn't learn anything."

  Leaphorn's expression asked the question for him.

  Pasquaanti looked slightly embarrassed. "Shorty was there. But he was too drunk to talk."

  "O.K.," Leaphorn said. "Did you find any tracks around where you found the blood?"

  "Lot of bicycle tracks. He'd been going there for months to start running. And then there was a place where somebody wearing moccasins or some sort of heelless shoes had been standing around. Looks like he waited quite a while. Found a place where he sat under the pi¤on there. Crushed down some weeds. And then there was the tracks of Ernesto's track shoes. It's mostly rock in that place. Hard to read anything."