You’ll tell me what your business is. Ill decide whether we go on from there.
Look, she said. I’m sorry if I was rude back there. But you were rude, too. Why don’t we
. . . She paused. Whats your name?
Joe Leaphorn.
Joe, she said, my name is Judy Simons, and my friends all call me Judy, and I don’t see why we cant be friends.
Reach into your purse, Miss Simons, and let me see your drivers license, Leaphorn said.
He pushed the handbag toward her.
I don’t have it with me, she said.
Leaphorns right hand fished deftly into the handbag, extracted a fat blue leather wallet.
Put that back. Her voice was icy. You don’t have any right to do that.
The drivers license was in the first plastic cardholder. The face that stared from the square was the face of the woman beside him, the smile appealing even when directed at the license bureau camera. The name was Theodora Adams. Leaphorn flipped the wallet shut and pushed it back into the handbag.
Okay, she said. Its none of your business, but Ill tell you why I’m going to the Tso place.
The carryall tilted over the sloping stone. She clutched the door to keep from sliding down the seat against him. But you’ll have to promise to take me there.
She waited for an answer, staring at him expectantly. Leaphorn said nothing.
I have a friend. A Navajo. He’s been having a lot of trouble. Leaphorn glanced at her. Her smile disparaged her good Samaritan role. You know. Getting his head together. So he decided to come home. And I decided I would come out and help him.
The voice stopped, the silence inviting comment. Leaphorn shifted again to cope with another steep slope.
Whats his name?
Tso. He’s Hosteen Tsos grandson. The old man wanted him to come to see him.
Ah, Leaphorn said. But was this grandson also Frederick Lynch? Was he Goldrims?
Leaphorn was almost certain he was.
Joe, she said. Her fingertip touched his leg. You could drop me off at the Tso place and talk to Mrs. Cigarette on the way home. It wont take any longer.
Ill think about it, Leaphorn said. Mrs. Cigarette probably wasn’t home. And what ever Margaret Cigarette could tell him seemed trivial against the thought of confronting Goldrims of taking the man who had tried, so gleefully, to kill him. Is he expecting you?
Look, she said. You’re not going to take me there first. You’re not going to do anything for me. Why should I tell you anything about my business?
Well go there first, Leaphorn said. But whats the hurry? Does he know you’re coming?
She laughed. There was genuine merriment in the sound, causing Leaphorn to take his eyes off the track he was following to look at her. It was a hearty laugh, a sound full of happy memories. Yes and no, she said. Or just yes. He knows. She glanced at Leaphorn, her eyes still amused. That’s like asking somebody if they know the suns going to come up. Of course its going to come up. If it doesn’t, the world ends.
She is a formidable young woman, Leaphorn thought. He didn’t want her with him when he first approached Hosteen Tsos place. Whether she liked it or not, shed wait in the carryall while he determined who, or what, waited at the hogan.
» 8 «
H
ad Leaphorns timing been perfect, he would have arrived on the mesa rim overlooking the Tso hogan at dawn. In fact, he arrived perhaps an hour early, the moon almost down on the western horizon and the starlight just bright enough to confirm the dim shape of the buildings below. Leaphorn sat and waited. He sat far enough back from the mesa edge so that the down drift of cooling air would not carry his scent. If the dog was there, Leaphorn didn’t want it alerted. The dog had been very much on his mind as he found his way down the dark wagon track toward the hogan and up the back slope of this small mesa.
Leaphorn doubted that it would be out hunting, but anything seemed possible in this peculiar affair. The thought of the dog had increased his caution and tightened his nerves.
Now, sitting motionless with his back protected by a slab of stone, he relaxed. If the animal was prowling, he would hear it in time to react to an attack. The danger if indeed there had been danger was gone now.
Silence. In the dim, still, predawn universe, scent dominated sight and hearing. Leaphorn could smell the acrid perfume of the junipers just behind him, the aroma of dust and other scents so faint they defied identification. From somewhere far behind him there came a single, almost inaudible snapping sound. Perhaps a stone cooling and contracting from yesterdays heat, perhaps a predator moving suddenly and breaking a stick, perhaps the earth growing one tick older. The sound turned Leaphorns thoughts back to the dog, to the eyes staring at him out of the car, to what had happened to the sheepdogs at the water hole, and to witch dogs, the Navajo Wolves, of his peoples ancient traditions. The Navajo Wolves were men and women who turned from harmony to chaos and gained the power to change themselves into coyotes, dogs, wolves or even bears, and to fly through the air, and to spread sickness among the Dinee. As a boy he had believed, fervently and fearfully, in this concept of evil. Two miles from his grandmothers hogan was a weathered volcanic up thrust which the People avoided. In a cave there the witches supposedly gathered to initiate new members into their Clan of Wolves. As a sophomore at Arizona State, he had come just as fervently to disbelieve in the ancient ways. He had visited his grandmother, and gone alone to the old volcano core. Climbing the crumbling basalt crags, feeling brave and liberated, he had found two caves one of which seemed to lead downward into the black heart of the earth. There had been no witches, nor any sign that anything used these caves except, perhaps, a den of coyotes. But he hadn’t climbed down into the darkness.
