Okay, Feeney said. What was the promise?
Taking care of some sort of secret, Mrs. Cigarette said. Keeping something safe.
Like what?
A secret, Mrs. Cigarette said. He didn’t tell me the secret. Her tone suggested that she wouldn’t have been improper enough to ask.
Did he say anything about getting any threats from anyone? Have any quarrels? Did he Leaphorn grimaced, and pushed the fast forward button. Why hadn’t Feeney pursued this line of questioning? Because, obviously, the FBI agent didn’t want to waste time on the talk of great-grandfather ghosts during. a murder investigation. But it was equally obvious, at least to Leaphorn, that Mrs. Cigarette considered it worth talking about. The tape rushed squawking through ten minutes of questions and answers probing into what Mrs.
Cigarette had been told about Tsos relationship with neighbors and relatives. Leaphorn stopped it again at a point near the end of the interview. He pushed the play button.
. . . said it hurt him here in the chest a lot, Mrs. Cigarette was saying. And sometimes it hurt him in the side. And his eyes, they hurt him, too. Back in the head behind the eyes. It started hurting him right after he found out that somebody had walked across some sand paintings and they stepped right on Corn Beetle, and Talking God, and Gila Monster, and Water Monster. And that same day, he was climbing and he knocked a bunch of rocks down and they killed a frog. And the frog was why his eyes Feeneys voice cut in. But you’re sure he didn’t say anything about anybody doing anything to hurt him? You’re sure of that? He didn’t blame it on any witch out there?
No, Mrs. Cigarette said. Was there a hesitation? Leaphorn ran it past again. Yes. A hesitation.
Okay, Feeney said. Now, did he say anything just before you left him and went over by the cliff?
I don’t remember much, Mrs. Cigarette said. I told him he ought to get somebody to take him to Gallup and get his chest x-rayed because maybe he had one of those sicknesses that white people cure. And he said he’d get somebody to write to his grandson to take care of everything, and then I said Id go and listen and find out what was making his eyes hurt and what else was wrong with him and
Here the voice of Feeney cut in again, its tone tinged slightly with impatience. Did he say anything about anyone stealing anything from him? Anything about fighting with relatives or
Leaphorn punched the off button, and guided the carryall around an outcrop of stone and over the edge of the steep switchback that dropped into Manki Canyon. He wished, as he had wished before, that Feeney hadn’t been so quick to interrupt Mrs. Cigarette. What promise had Hosteen Tso made to his father? Taking care of a secret, Mrs. Cigarette had said. Keeping something safe. Tso hadn’t told her the secret, but he might have told her much more than Feeney had let her report. And the sand paintings. Plural? More than one? Leaphorn had played that part over and over and she had clearly said somebody had walked across some sand paintings. But there would be only a single sand painting existing at any one time at any curing ceremonial. The singer prepared the hogan floor with a background of fine sand, then produced his sacred painting with colored sands, and placed the patient properly upon it, conducted the chants and rituals, and then destroyed the painting; erased it, wiped away the magic. Yet she had said some sand paintings. And the list of Holy People desecrated had been strange. Sand paintings recreated incidents from the mythic history of the Navajo People. Leaphorn could conceive of no incident which would have included both Gila Monster and Water Monster in its action. Water Monster had figured only once in the mythology of the Dinee causing the flood that destroyed the Third World after his babies had been stolen by Coyote. Neither Gila Monster nor Talking God had a role in that episode. Leaphorn shook his head, wishing he had been there for the interrogation. But even as he thought it, he recognized he was being unfair to the FBI man. There would be no reason at all to connect incongruity in a curing sing with cold-blooded killing. And when he had talked to Listening Woman, Feeney had no way of knowing that all the more logical approaches to the case would dead-end.
By the time Leaphorn pulled the carryall onto the bare packed earth that served as the yard of the Short Mountain Trading Post, he had decided that his own fascination with the oddities in Mrs. Cigarettes story was based more on his obsession with explaining the unexplained than with the murder investigation. Still, he would find Mrs. Cigarette and ask the questions Feeney hadn’t asked. He would find out what curing ceremonial Hosteen Tso had attended before his death, and who had desecrated its sand paintings, and what else had happened there.
He parked beside a rusty GMC stake truck and sat for a moment, looking. The for sale sign which had been a permanent part of the front porch was still there. A midnight-blue Stingray, looking out of place, sat beside the sheep barn, its front end jacked up. Two pickups and an aging Plymouth sedan were parked in front. In the shade of the porch a white-haired matriarch was perched on a bale of sheep pelts, talking to a fat middle-aged man who sat, legs folded, on the stone floor beside her. Leaphorn knew exactly who they were talking about. They were talking about the Navajo policeman who had driven up, speculating on who Leaphorn was and what he was doing at Short Mountain. The old woman said something to the man, who laughed a flash of white teeth in a dark shadowed face. A joke had just been made about Leaphorn. He smiled, and completed his quick survey. All was as he remembered it. The late-afternoon sun baked a collection of tired buildings clustered on a shadeless expanse of worn earth on the rim of Short Mountain Wash. Leaphorn wondered why this inhospitable spot had been chosen for a trading center. Legend had it that the Moab Mormon who founded the store about 1910 had picked the place because it was a long way from competition. It was also a long way from customers. Short Mountain Wash drained one of the most barren and empty landscapes in the Western Hemisphere. Legend also had it that after more than twenty hard years the Mormon became involved in a theological dispute concerning plural wives. He had picked up his own two and emigrated to a dissident colony in Mexico. McGinnis, then young and relatively foolish, had become the new owner. He had promptly realized his mistake.
According to the legend, about thirty days after the purchase, he had hung out the this establishment for sale inquire within sign that decorated his front porch for more than forty years. If anyone else had outsmarted John McGinnis, the event had not been recorded by reservation folklore.
Leaphorn climbed from the carryall, sorting out the questions he would ask McGinnis. The trader would know not only where Margaret Cigarette lived, but where she could be found this week an important difference among people who follow sheep herds. And McGinnis would know if anything new had been heard about the mission helicopter, or about the reliability of those who brought in old reports, and everything about the lives and fortunes of the impoverished clans that occupied this empty end of the Rainbow Plateau. He would know why the Adams woman was here. Most important of all, he would know if a strange man wearing gold-rimmed glasses had been seen in the canyon country.
At this moment the screen door opened and John McGinnis emerged. He stood for a moment, blinking at Leaphorn through the fierce outside light, a stumpy, stooped, white-haired man swallowed up in new, and oversized, blue overalls. Then he squatted on the floor between the old woman and the man. Whatever he said produced a cackle of laughter from the woman and a chuckle from the man. Once again, Leaphorn guessed, he had been the subject of humor. He didn’t mind. McGinnis would save him a lot of effort.
I remember you, McGinnis said. You’re that Slow Talking Dinee boy who used to patrol out of Tuba City. Six; seven years ago. He had invited Leaphorn into his room at the rear of the store and gestured him to a chair. Now he poured a Coca-Cola glass half full from a bottle of Jack Daniels, sloshed it around, and eyed Leaphorn. The Dinee say you wont drink whiskey, so I ain’t going to offer you any.
