“No. Not even an old idea. How about you?”
“I have an old idea,” Leaphorn said. “I’m thinking that when we get to that rock formation Nez’s vandal was painting, maybe it will turn out to be the same formation Ji, or Ji’s boy, was photographing.”
Bourebonette thought about this. “Why?”
Leaphorn chuckled. “I was afraid you’d ask me that,” he said. “I think it’s because since my wife died I’ve started watching television. That’s the way the plot ought to work out.”
Bourebonette didn’t comment for a while. And then she said: “Well, there had to be some reason for somebody to shoot Colonel Ji. He was up around where the painter was working the night Mr. Nez was killed. At least his car was. And he took pictures of the rocks. So maybe there’s a connection.”
Leaphorn glanced at her, caught her looking at him. She shrugged. “Sounds silly, but the same rocks?” she said,”?that would be some connection.”
Leaphorn made a left turn off the asphalt onto a dirt road which hadn’t been on this year’s road grading schedule. They bumped down it, raising dust. “Well,” he said. “We’ll soon know.”
Leaphorn parked at the place the car of Officer Nez had burned. It had been hauled away?an unusual fate for a derelict vehicle on a reservation where they commonly rusted away where they died?but the place was marked by the skeletons of partially burned junipers and scorched cactus.
“There it is,” Bourebonette said, pointing. “See the painted places?”
The formation rose to the southeast, one of many old volcanic extrusions scattered along the flanks of the great upthrusts that form the multitude of mountain ridges of the southern Rockies. “Where?” Leaphorn asked and, as he said it, saw a stripe of white, and another, and another, where no white should be.
“Ah,” he said, and reached behind the seat of his car for his binoculars. But before he used them, he studied the formation, looking for the same pattern of shapes he memorized from the photographs. He didn’t see it.
The formation seemed to have been produced by a series of eruptions. In some places the basalt had been worn smooth by eons of time and softened by growths of lichens?its cracks sprouting buffalo and bunch grass, cactus, and even scraggly junipers. Elsewhere it was newer, still ragged and black. A couple of miles long, Leaphorn guessed, with a smaller formation beyond it extending perhaps another quarter of a mile.
Through the binoculars the formation seemed even rougher and more complex. In places the upthrust seemed to have forced overlying sandstone upward, producing broken walls and leaning slabs in a chaotic labyrinth. There, in the highest part of the ridge, the painting had been done.
Done carefully. Despite what Chee had told him, that surprised Leaphorn. At the point where the binoculars were focused, the black of the basaltic surface and the white of the paint formed a slight curve, not perfect but generally clean-cut. He shifted his vision to the next spot. The shape seemed irregular. Perhaps that was because of his perspective. But here, too, the margin was clean. He could see too little of the other painted surfaces to form a judgment.
He handed the binoculars to Professor Bourebonette. “Notice the edges. Notice how carefully done,” he said. While she looked, he thought about what she was seeing. As he did he understood exactly where the photographs had been taken.
His uncle had been right. Things seem random only because we see them from the wrong perspective.
He told Bourebonette about it as they drove down the bumpy road toward the Dineyahze place.
“It still sounds crazy as hell,” he said, “but I think either Ji or the boy took all those photographs and blew them up to plan where to put the paint.”
Professor Bourebonette looked suitably surprised. She considered. Leaphorn slowed, let the car roll across the borrow ditch and onto a road, which quickly became simply two parallel tracks through the bunch grass and snakeweed.
“Okay,” Bourebonette said finally. “If you wanted to paint something regular on a totally irregular surface, I guess that’s how you could do it.”
“I think so,” Leaphorn said. “You’d pick the spot you wanted to see it from, and take the photographs, mark out the places where the paint had to go. Little bit here on this corner of this slab, and then back here, and up there and so forth.”
“That leaves the really big question, though,” she said. “The big question is why anybody sane would want to paint something out here. And what it would be.” She looked at him. “You have that part of it figured out?”
“Afraid not,” Leaphorn said.
“I think that would take some real genius.”
The patrol car eased up a long slope, jolting over rocky places. The windshield was coated with dust, but the sun was low in the southwest now, out of their faces. Leaphorn shifted down, and up, and down again. And suddenly he found another answer. Or maybe he did.
“I have another thought,” he said. “About ‘what.’ Or more about ‘why.’”
Bourebonette looked at him, waiting.
Leaphorn considered whether he would look stupid if he was wrong. It occurred to him that he was showing off. And enjoying it. He considered that. Why would he be showing off? Why enjoying this?
“Are you going to tell me?” Bourebonette asked.
Leaphorn shifted up again as the tracks leveled off. “When we get to the top of this ridge here, we’re going to be able to see that formation again. From a different perspective now. “I think we’re going to see those painted spaces coming together. Forming a unity.”
“Oh? Like what?”
“Something to do with this little girl we’re going out to visit.” And as he said it, realized that it sounded absurd. It would be wrong. The painting would remain, forever, a crazy jumble.
