“Well, the burglary in which Shorty claimed the thing was stolen was twelve years ago, but Shorty said he couldn’t remember how many years he’d had the diamond before that. I think he said ‘several.’ I guess it would be about the same with Billy Tuve.”
“Except with Tuve, I guess we could find out the year he went down that Hopi Salt Trail for his Bear Clan initiation rite.”
“Good idea,” Leaphorn said. Why hadn’t he thought of that? Probably because he was retired. It was none of his business. “But why is the timing important?”
“Well, it probably isn’t,” Louisa said. “But it helps me understand what I’ve been hearing down here in the canyon. Both of these old people I’ve been trying to collect origin stories from are full of tales of some huge airplane disaster that happened when they were young. Bodies falling out of the sky. Fires in the canyons. All sort of stuff raining down. Clothing. Suitcases. Dishes. Everything. The Park Service people here tell me it happened in 1956, two airlines collided over the canyon. Everybody killed.”
“Does seem to be the sort of thing that might produce some new legends,” Leaphorn said.
“Or get mixed in with the original ones,” Louisa said. “That’s my worry. I’m already noticing a mixing of the stories of the various Yuman tribes you have around here with what must have been seen in that disaster. Mixing was already a problem. The Hualapai, the Supai, and some Mohave branches, and even Paiutes—even the Utes and the Piautes are borrowing bits and pieces of legends from each other. Now we find them mixing in stories about stuff being found.”
Leaphorn’s interest abruptly sharpened. “Are you hearing things about diamonds?”
“Not specifically, but lots about the stuff found when people were out helping the rescue crews locate missing parts of bodies and airplane parts. And there’s one about a Hualapai man from Peach Springs who came down to the river to see what was going on and saw something that might be diamond-connected. The way the most common version of that story goes, he saw some clothing items, or something, caught in a drift of debris, and in this pile of jetsam he saw a human arm.” Louisa paused a moment for Leaphorn’s reaction to that. Got none. “Is there some reason that doesn’t surprise you?”
“Couple of reasons,” Leaphorn said. “Body parts were scattered all over in that crash—across the mesa top, down the canyon walls, down into the river itself. Rescue crews were collecting body bits in bags. And besides, I heard the arm story before.”
“Did the arm you’re hearing about have some sort of attache case connected to it? Maybe with a chain and a handcuff?”
“Yep,” Leaphorn said. “That’s the one. But the man who spotted it in my story couldn’t reach it without drowning. When he got back with some helpers, the river had swept it away. Long ago, of course. I would have thought it would be pretty well forgotten by now.”
Louisa laughed. “Joe! Who’s going to forget seeing an arm sticking out of debris in their river? That’s good enough to make a Greek myth. It’s one of the problems for us seekers of undiluted, genuine legends, ancient and uninfected by our unromantic modern times.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Besides, if that arm with the case chained to it had been forgotten, somebody has stirred it up again.”
“How?” Leaphorn asked. “And who? And why would they?”
“They printed a sheet offering a ten-thousand-dollar reward for just such a set of arm bones. Someone distributed them at the Grand Canyon Hotel, the private one, and at the National Park Service hotel, and visitor centers, and got them spread around among the professional guide and float trip outfits, and at Peach Springs. There’s a number to call—I think it’s in Flagstaff—if you find the arm and want to collect.” Louisa laughed. “I should have saved one for you.”
“Get one for me if you can, Louisa. What did it say?”
“Well, a big headline across the top said ‘Ten-Thousand-Dollar Reward.’ And under that—in smaller type—it said something like ‘Family of 1956 airline crash victim seeks bones of the left arm of John Clarke, so that they can be placed with his body in the family’s burial crypt.’ And then it went on to explain the arm had been torn from his body when those two airlines collided over the Canyon and had never been recovered. It said the bones could be identified because the forearm had been broken previously and repaired with a surgical pin when this Clarke was young, or the forearm might still be attached by a metal and cuff to which a leather case was secured.”
“I’d really like to have a couple of those flyers,” Leaphorn said. “One for Jim Chee. I think he and Dashee are going to take Tuve down in the Canyon and try to find the man he got the diamond from.”
That produced a long pause.
“After God knows how many years?” Louisa said. “How in the world are they going to find him? No name or anything. That sounds impossible.”
“Yeah,” Leaphorn said. “All they know is where the swap was made and that the old fellow with the diamonds was an Indian, but not a Hopi or Navajo, and after the swap deal was agreed on, he had to go down the canyon maybe a half-mile to get the stone. Their guess is he must have been some sort of hermit—maybe a Havasupai shaman—who had the diamonds cached in a cave.”
“What’s your guess?”
“My guess is they won’t find anyone, but you know them both. Jim will feel better because he did what he could to help his old friend, and Cowboy will rest easier because he did his duty to his family and his fellow Bear Clan member.”
Louisa sighed. “Sure,” she said. “You’d do the same thing, wouldn’t you?”
Before he could think of an honest answer to that, Louisa had something to add.
“Hermit, you said. That old woman I talked to yesterday was telling about the last shaman they had—he died back in the 1960s, I think it was—and how a man from the Kaibab Paiute Reservation was a friend of the shaman and was always hanging around Peach Springs. From what she told me, he was living on a sort of part-time basis with a Havasupai woman. She said he was a ‘far-looking man,’ the Supai name for people who can see into the future, find things, all that. Sort of like your Navajo crystal-gazer shaman. Anyway, he got into some sort of trouble and left Peach Springs and went away somewhere and disappeared. Supposed to have made himself some sort of nest in one of those undercut places up a side canyon and was living off crawdads, frogs, and stuff he could get off
