leaving out unpleasant parts about witches and skinwalkers? He was remembering he’d decided yesterday to hear Hosteen Pinto’s story in Hosteen Pinto’s very own words. This business of selecting a jury would take hours. Chee got up and moved quietly out the door.
Finding a parking place near the Federal Building downtown was child’s play compared to finding a place to park anywhere near the university library. Finally Chee left his pickup in a POLICE VEHICLES ONLY space behind the campus police station. He identified himself to the duty sergeant, explained his business, and got reluctant approval to leave it there.
By the time he climbed the stairs to the Reserve Room in Zimmerman Library, checked out the tapes and transcripts, and went to work, it was almost noon. He was hungry. He should have stopped for lunch.
He started with the horse thief tape. He’d listened to some of it already, with a lot of skipping around, and he’d read a copy of the transcript in Tagert’s office. Now as he listened to Pinto’s voice droning the same story into his earphones his sleepiness returned. But he fought it off, checking what he was hearing with the library’s copy of the transcript. When he came to a discrepancy, he stopped the tape and replayed it. The revisions tended to be minor corner-cuttings or sometimes eliminations of repetition. By one P.M. he’d found nothing that changed the meaning or left out anything significant.
Sleepiness was almost overpowering. His stomach grumbled with hunger. He put down the transcript, took off the earphones, yawned and stretched. The air around him had the deadness common to rooms without open windows, common to rooms where old things are stored. The silence was absolute, the place empty except for himself and the young woman who sat behind the desk at the entrance, working on files.
He would walk across the mall to the Union and get something to eat. No, he would walk across Central Avenue to the Frontier and have a green chile enchilada. But first he would skip ahead and see if the translator had cheated when the subject became witchcraft. When he’d read the transcript before, it had seemed that Pinto had said remarkably little about why the Ghostway cure had been needed for Delbito Willie. Perhaps he’d actually said more.
He ran the tape fast forward, listening to Pinto’s old voice quacking in his ears until he found the proper place.
“
And then the two white men rode their horses out into a place where there was a lava flow. It is dangerous to ride a horse in there, even in daylight, because, you know, he might get his hoof in one of those cracks?just a little slip, you know, and break his leg and throw you onto the rocks.”
Chee stopped the tape and checked the translation. Just as he remembered, the copy he’d read omitted the digression about the horse breaking its leg. He started the tape again.
“
The Yucca Fruit Clan men followed very slowly. The lava was rough there and they kept way back anyway because of the man with the yellow mustache. They say he was a very good shot even riding on a horse. Finally they found where the white men had tied up their horses and went up into the rocks. Right there, Delbito Willie and the Yucca Fruit Clan men they stopped, too, because they knew Yellow Mustache would be protecting his horses with his rifle and because they saw then where it was the white men had gone. It was up there in the place where the witches gather. It was up there in the cave where the evil ones come to make somebody into a skinwalker. Some of those Yucca Fruit Clan men knew about it. They lived over on the other side of the Carrizo Mountains, but they had heard about this place. And you could tell it was this place because of the way the rocks were formed there. They say it looked like the ears of a mule sticking up. If you looked at it from the west, that’s the way it looked. Two sharp spires with a low saddle between them. They say it looked like a saddle, like one of those McClellan saddles, with the steep rise up the back side and the horn sticking up on the other side. Reminded people of a saddle.”
Chee stopped the tape. None of this, not a word of it, was in the transcript he’d read at Tagert’s office. He turned the pages of the library copy. None of it was here, either. Two pages were missing, cut out with a very sharp knife or a razor blade.
He ran the tape again, hearing how Delbito Willie wanted to go in after the white men, to see if they were dead. If they were he would take the rifle of Yellow Mustache?a very fine rifle. The argument had lasted two days, with all of the Yucca Fruit men against it until finally, when they all agreed the white men must be dead by now, one of the Yucca Fruit Clan agreed to go partway with Willie?but not as far as the witches’ cave. And Willie had gone in and had come out with the rifle of Yellow Mustache, and the word that both men were indeed dead.
He checked the tape and transcript in at the desk.
“Is there a way to find out who did the translating? Any record kept of that?”
“Just a minute,” the woman said. “I think so.”
She disappeared into a door marked STAFF ONLY.
Chee waited, rechecking his reasoning. He thought he knew who the translator would be.
He was right.
The woman reappeared, holding a file card.
“Someone named William Redd,” she said. Chapter 19
LEAPHORN WAS HAVING one of those frustrating mornings which cause all bureaucrats to wish the telephone had never been invented.
At first, he got nothing but a no answer at the number of Mr. Doan Van Ha, the Albuquerque uncle to whom Taka Ji had been sent for safekeeping. Finally, when someone did pick up the phone it proved to be an elderly woman who identified herself as Khanh Ha. Her command of English was barely rudimentary. After a few minutes of total failure to communicate, Khanh Ha said: “You stay. I get boy.”
Leaphorn stayed, telephone receiver held to his ear, listening to the silence in the home of the Ha family. Minutes ticked away. He noticed his windows were dusty. Through them he noticed that one of the that used the cottonwoods across the road from the Justice Building had lost some wing feathers and flew out of balance. He noticed that the high clouds he had seen when he came to work had thickened and spread from the northern horizon across most of the sky. Maybe it would snow. They needed it. It was late. He thought of Emma, of how she gloried in these days when time hung stalled between the seasons, urging winter on, then cheering for spring, then happily announcing that tomorrow it would be summer and thunderstorm season. Then pleased to see the summer die, anxious for the peaceful gold of autumn. Emma. Happiness was always on her side of the horizon, safely in
